by Martha Wells
Once everyone had strapped in, Dr Marlende put his hands flat on the control board and closed his eyes. Emilie knew he must be invoking the protective spell, and looked out the port in time to see it shimmer into existence, rising up like a crystalline curtain being gently draped over the airship. It was necessary to protect the craft from the pressures of the aether current, and to keep the air inside once they had gone up so far that there would be hardly any outside.
Dr Marlende took hold of the wheel. Miss Marlende, her eyes on one of the dials on the panel, said, “On my mark… Mark.”
Dr Marlende turned the wheel and the airship twisted. Or at least Emilie’s stomach twisted.
The deck underfoot trembled, then the ship started to move upward, faster than it had before.
Emilie sat back in her seat and felt her heart thump nervously. Miss Marlende and Lord Engal checked their straps, and Emilie tightened hers. Dr Marlende’s expression was rapt with concentration. Miss Marlende adjusted the controls carefully. The light outside dimmed and shimmered, and the push of the deck against Emilie’s feet grew harder until her whole body squished down with the force of it.
The ship jerked, wrenched sideways as if a giant hand had snatched it out of the air. The straps bit into Emilie’s chest and waist as she jerked forward. Everything rumbled and shook. Emilie’s ears popped and she gasped in a breath, and wriggled back to ease the pressure of the straps against her waist. From across the cabin, Lord Engal grunted in pain and muttered, “I’ve always hated that part.”
Emilie was rather glad she hadn’t known about it; tensing up in anticipation would have made it far worse. The deck still pressed up against her feet and she knew the ship was being carried along in the powerful aetheric current. Cautiously, she stretched up and looked out the port.
Through the misty surface of the spell bubble, she could see blue sky stream past, streaked with white that might be clouds. She blinked and squinted. No, it wasn’t sky, or not exactly. Or not the right sky. In the distance, there was purple-tinted indigo darkness, like a thunderstorm rising on the horizon. Except it wasn’t the horizon, because she couldn’t see land below them anywhere. “Is it always like this?” She hadn’t realized she had spoken aloud until she heard the words.
“Like what?” Miss Marlende asked, starting to unbuckle her straps. “Oh, you mean the colors? Yes, this is perfectly normal. And you can get up now. We should be stable for the next three hours.”
Emilie unbuckled herself and carefully eased to her feet. The feel of the deck pushing upward was disconcerting, and not at all like the way it had felt aboard the Sovereign, when the steamship had been traveling through the sea-bottom aether current. “What should I do? Is there any work you need help with?”
“Not right now.” Miss Marlende stretched and yawned. She looked at the professor, who was still writing in her notebook as if nothing had happened, and shook her head wryly. “Just get some rest.”
Emilie’s first impulse was to go see if Efrain was all right, and she grimaced at herself. After a moment of struggling with her conscience, she went to look for him.
She found him in the back compartments with Seth and Cobbier, listening to a detailed explanation of how the engines worked, and apparently, infuriatingly, no worse the wear for the startling experience of entering an aether current for the first time. Emilie would have liked to listen to the explanation too but didn’t want to look as if she was waiting on Efrain’s convenience, so she left the compartment.
Emilie walked around a little and found Daniel and Mikel on the second level making sure their various telescopes and aetheric observers had made it through the bumpy transition all right. Mikel was another student, but an older one, and like Seth he was also an engineer. He was lean and rawboned, with brown skin and lighter Northern Menaen hair. His face was weathered from spending a great deal of time at sea when he was younger, and it made him look older than he was. He told her, “Take a look at the view; it’s best from up here.”
She paused to look out at the aether current through the big observation windows. There were mists and eddies of other colors in the darkness, violet with a hint of red, swirls of silver trickling over them like whitecaps on waves. It was like watching clouds; you could make fanciful shapes out of them if you… Emilie stared, blinked hard, and stared again. That wasn’t just a shape. She pointed. “Uh, Daniel, Mikel…”
Lifting over a bank of violet streaked darkness was a wing, a giant wing, curving and pointed at the end, made of the same darkness as everything else but Emilie could see the etched lines of scales. Daniel stepped up beside her, leaned forward so his nose almost touched the glass. From behind them, Mikel said, “It’s an aether ghost. You see them occasionally in the air currents. We saw some on Dr Marlende’s last trip up here.”
“How do you know…” Emilie began, meaning to ask how one knew this was a ghost and not an actual enormous flying creature. But the wing dissolved into mist, fading away into the darkness. “Oh.”
“I suppose they’re in the sea aether currents, too,” Daniel said, staring intently after the wing. “We just can’t see them.”
“But what are they? Where do they come from? Are they really ghosts?” Emilie scanned the moving colors, hoping for another glimpse.
“We don’t know, really,” Mikel said. “The theory is that the current passes things and carries their images along with it for a while.”
The world was a stranger place than Emilie had realized. After a time, Daniel and Mikel went back down to the main cabin to get some sleep, but she stared for a long time, looking for more ghosts. Then her eyes started to hurt and she realized she was drifting off. She managed to use the waterless WC without incident, and took the opportunity to find her bag and change out of her skirt and into the clean but somewhat battered pair of bloomers that had survived her trip to the Hollow World. Both Miss Marlende and Professor Abindon were also wearing bloomers, much more practical for climbing around the airship. Then she went back to the control cabin again so she could sit and look out the big port. She fell asleep still watching for more aether ghosts.
They had to strap in again to exit the aether current. Miss Marlende said it wasn’t usually as rough as entering it, but they had never come this far up before, so they had better be cautious. Emilie completely agreed with that sentiment. With the others, she took her seat and got her straps tightened. Lord Engal was the last to get situated, muttering to himself as he buckled in.
“Are you ready?” Dr Marlende asked irritably. “The aether current won’t wait for us.”
“Yes, yes, go ahead, I’m ready.” Lord Engal yanked on the last strap.
Emilie thought it was nervousness on both their parts. Everyone was on edge, watching the controls with worried concentration. Miss Marlende made some careful adjustments to the dials, then nodded to Dr Marlende. He flicked a switch, then turned the wheel slightly.
For a moment there was nothing, except the sky outside the port began to darken. The sensation of rushing movement and constant pressure began to ease and then stopped altogether; Emilie had gotten used enough to it that it felt odd to be without. The cessation of it was so gentle, it came as a complete shock when the airship shuddered violently and jerked sideways.
Emilie clutched the arms of her chair, glad she hadn’t been expecting that one, either. The airship shook once, hard, and then went still.
“There we are,” Dr Marlende said, sounding satisfied. “A successful journey.” Emilie was glad he was so much better at traveling through aether currents than Dr Barshion and Lord Engal.
The others began to unbuckle their straps and stand. Daniel poked his head in through the doorway, and Emilie heard movement and Cobbier’s voice from the main cabin. She looked out the side port and saw the colors had changed to a very deep blue that shaded to black as she craned her neck to look up. She couldn’t see clouds, or stars, or anything below them. That was disconcerting. The spell bubble was just a faint shimmer now
, nearly transparent, and it felt like little protection between the airship and all that immensity of sky and empty space.
Lord Engal stared through the front port and said, “And there it is.”
Emilie hastily unstrapped and climbed out of her seat. She stepped up beside Miss Marlende and the professor to see the shape of the strange craft was just becoming visible in the upper portion of the forward port. At first it looked small, then she realized those little round dots along the hull must be windows. She blinked and suddenly saw it in the right perspective: the strange craft was huge.
It had three long cylindrical hulls, all of dull but silvery metal, like pewter. One hull was in the center, with the two others attached on either side. Above them were three enormous sails, square but curved on top, like shovels slanted backward, which gave the whole craft a sense of forward motion, even though Emilie thought it must be standing still. It was like a very odd sailing ship. There were no open decks or promenades, and the little windows seemed to be the only way to see in or out.
Beside her, Daniel gasped in amazement. Professor Abindon lifted a small telescope to study it more closely.
Lord Engal whistled in appreciation. “That is a fine sight.”
“The sails are fascinating,” the Professor said softly. “Can it possibly use them to sail the aether current?”
“It must,” Dr Marlende murmured, his expression rapt. “Surely they aren’t decorative.”
“How does it land?” Emilie asked. She didn’t see any sort of landing apparatus, though she supposed the rounded hulls could float in water. “Or is it meant to stay in the air?”
“Or something far stranger.” Miss Marlende’s expression was simultaneously intrigued and fascinated and worried. “We don’t know anything about the place where it comes from. It could be… completely different.”
“How different?” Emilie asked, then realized it was a question without any sensible answer. If the ship had never been meant to land, and the sails looked so delicate… “Like a world that might be made all out of aether? But what would the people be like?”
“A good question,” Dr Marlende said, his voice turning grim.
Emilie felt a chill settle in her stomach. Looking at the beautifully strange vessel, she had forgotten for a moment that it would be piloted by somebody. Hopefully, they would be like the Cirathi, friendly explorers not so different from themselves. Hopefully.
“I don’t see any lights,” Miss Marlende said, “Can any of you?”
“Lights in the portholes, you mean? No.” Professor Abindon adjusted her telescope. “Its position hasn’t changed since we launched, either.”
“Really?” Dr Marlende turned to her. “But your record of its earlier progress showed that it was moving at a steady rate.”
“It was, but it’s stopped. It hasn’t moved at all since our last observation, late last night.” She lowered her telescope. “Perhaps it somehow detected when we entered the current and paused to wait?”
Dr Marlende’s brow furrowed. “Hmm.”
Lord Engal absently scratched his beard. “How odd. If they had stopped to wait for our arrival, you would think they would have spotted us by now and tried to signal.”
Emilie glanced at Daniel. Keeping her voice low, because she wasn’t certain if it was a silly observation or not, she said, “Maybe they’re so different, they don’t have signals.”
“If they’re that different, I don’t know how we’re going to talk to them,” he murmured back.
“Yes, communicating may be a significant problem,” Lord Engal agreed, though Emilie had thought he was too distracted to listen to them. “It’s too bad the sea-kingdom people were too involved in their own hostile interactions for any meaningful exchanges of ideas. The translation spells they used might have come in quite handy now.”
Miss Marlende eyed Lord Engal. “I thought our goal as decided by the Society was only to observe the object up close and ascertain whether it was really a foreign craft.”
“We’ve done that,” Lord Engal pointed out. “Our next goal as decided by the Society would obviously be to attempt to contact it and ask it what it wants. There’s no point in returning to report when we’ll only have to turn around and come back.”
“Yes.” Miss Marlende looked toward the silent craft again. “I’d rather hoped to see some sort of friendly crew waving at us, which would have rendered the whole point moot.”
“As did I.” Dr Marlende turned to Daniel. “We’ll try signaling them. Daniel, tell Cobbier to ready the signal lamp.”
Professor Abindon snorted. “I don’t suppose they’ll know International Lamp Code.”
Dr Marlende said, rather tightly, “No, Professor, but I hope they’ll see it blinking at them and interpret it as an attempt to greet them.”
Professor Abindon sighed. “I wasn’t criticizing you. It’s the only course open to us at the moment.”
Emilie followed Daniel back through the main cabin. She wondered if signaling was a good idea. What if the strange vessel thought they were attacking it? She pushed the thought away, recognizing it as another symptom of panic. The others were right; all they could do was try to contact the strangers the way they would anyone else, and hope for the best.
They were in a situation where anything they might do, any choice they made, could turn out to be horribly wrong. She should be used to that from the trip to the Hollow World, but apparently it was a sensation that one couldn’t get accustomed to.
They found Cobbier with Seth and Mikel and Efrain in the room adjacent to the engine and air-processing room. It was lined with cabinets and had two more padded chairs with safety straps. They were all glued to the large port, Efrain as well. As they stepped in, Efrain turned to stare at her, his eyes huge. “It’s really a ship from another world!”
“We know,” Emilie snapped, conveniently forgetting her own awe of a few moments ago. “We’re going to try to signal it.”
“With the lamp?” Cobbier asked. Then added, “That’s our only choice, I guess. It’s not as if we can use the flags up here.” He crossed the room to one of the storage cabinets and started to rummage in it.
“But…” Efrain stared at the ship again. “What if it does something?”
“It has to know we’re here,” Daniel said, before Emilie could snap again. “The way these aether currents work, it would have seen us coming from a long distance. Just like we could see it. If it was going to… do something, it would have done it by now.”
Efrain didn’t look much reassured. Cobbier lifted out the lamp, a big metal cylinder with glass slats on both ends and a hand crank. As he carried it to the port, Seth unrolled a cable from the engine room doorway. Emilie knew the lamp ran on electricity, and that to make it blink you used the crank to open and close the slats. They attached the lamp to a half-circle metal brace that was set up in front of the port, fastened it down, and connected it to the generator with the cable. The cylinder hummed and crackled as the bulbs inside it warmed. Daniel used the speaking tube in the wall to call the control room. “We’re ready, Dr Marlende.”
The tinny reply came over the tube. “Very good. Signal at will.”
Cobbier looked at Daniel. “What should we say?”
“Uh…” Daniel bit his lip. Emilie thought it was rather a big responsibility to have, to be the one to decide what their first message would be to this potential new friend that they all hoped very much did not become a new enemy. She was rather glad she wasn’t the one deciding it. Finally, he said, “Just the standard greeting to an unknown ship.” He glanced worriedly at Seth and Mikel. “Does that sound right to you?”
Mikel shrugged. Seth admitted, “I don’t know what else we’d say.”
Cobbier moved the crank and the cylinder clacked as he sent the coded signal. With the others, Emilie watched the strange ship, her heart thumping in anticipation.
But the ship just floated there silently.
“Keep trying,” Daniel said
softly.
There was a quiet step behind them. Emilie looked back as Miss Marlende stepped into the compartment. Emilie said, “It doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Maybe they aren’t looking at us,” Efrain said.
Emilie gave him a withering look. “There’s a strange airship in the same aether current. What else would they be looking at?”
Efrain glared back at her, but didn’t argue. As the light clacked and hissed with heat, Miss Marlende folded her arms, regarding the ship. She said, “I’m beginning to wonder if something’s happened to them.”
Emilie had to admit that the ship’s lack of activity did make you consider that possibility. Several different scenarios came to mind, mostly from the Lord Rohiro novels and from histories of exploration she had read. “There could have been illness aboard, or food that went bad, or pirates… No, I suppose not pirates.”
“We hope not pirates,” Daniel said. “I don’t want to see what sort of pirates would be traveling aether currents from another world.” Cobbier nodded fervently.
Emilie found the idea intriguing, but she would much rather read it in a book or watch it in a play, and not experience it in real life.
“But some sort of disaster befalling the crew doesn’t explain why the ship is still here.” Miss Marlende shook her head. “Without anyone to guide it, it should have started to drift by now. It would eventually fall out of the current and be destroyed. Something must be holding it in place.”