"Anyway, you've had adventures,” I told him. “That's important. Women like that, I think."
He smiled and said, “If you grow up fast enough maybe you can catch her."
The next day was gray with sprinkles of rain and the day after it rained even more. It was a classic northeaster, my uncle said, and he went on to explain why New England weather was the way it was. Next morning the air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, just as my uncle had predicted. The meadow was soggy from all the rain and the ground seemed to cling to our wheels, letting go just before we reached the scrub brush at the edge of the field. We skimmed over the tree tops, sailed up and up, then leveled into a straight flight toward the faded hills and low mountains on the horizon. Eventually we passed over the hills and approached the gently rounded blue mountains. We went up one lonely valley and then another and another and at last I spied the solitary cloud lingering against a green mountain wall. We flew over the cloud, then turned in a wide arc and came back to glide slower and slower, following the slope of the falling land and, at the last moment, slipping into the cloud and a bumpy halt.
Uncle Vincenzo unbuckled me from my cockpit and hurried me along the white hallway to the room where we had visited Lucia, but she wasn't there. He strode into the next room, pulling me along with his good hand while cursing softly to himself, then boosted me onto something like a stepladder, shoving me up through an open hatch and, hauling himself up, hustled me down another white hallway and into a room with windows on three sides, and there was Lucia with her hand on the ship's wheel, a wheel so big it came up to her chest. “I heard you come on board,” she said, rising from a big wicker chair that was bolted to the floor. “Sorry I couldn't greet you."
"Where is everybody?” Vincenzo's voice was tense.
"They've gone,” she said simply, as if it were a matter of indifference to her. “Gone forever. They're somewhere in flatland. And they've got all the certificates and documents to prove they've always been down there."
Lucia was as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale and I wanted to keep looking at her, but at the same time I was enchanted by the multitude of dazzling gauges and dials, some as big around as a schoolroom clock, and all ringed with gleaming brass.
"You're a reckless fool,” Uncle Vincenzo told her.
"Blame it on the company I keep.” She laughed, but it was a short laugh. “I've spent too much time with you."
"Be serious, Lucia! You can't control this thing by yourself. No one can do it alone. And the ridiculous windmills you call propellers are falling apart. You'll get yourself killed in this thing."
"This thing, as you call it, is the last hectare of the independent republic of Venice. I was born here. It's my home. It's where I want to be."
"You want to be here? You want to be in this wrinkled balloon, hugging the side of some god-forsaken valley until a breeze blows the contraption to pieces? Is that what you want?"
"Not at all. I plan to take it up to where it belongs."
"Oh? And where, oh where, might that be?"
"Four thousand meters. And don't bore me with stories about radar. It's all Antonio could talk about."
"Radar is going to be everywhere. You can stay in these valleys and get swatted against a mountain like a fly, or you can go up to four thousand meters and be seen on radar."
"That's more than thirteen thousand feet,” I announced.
They looked at me as if I had materialized out of thin air.
"Four thousand meters, that's more than thirteen thousand feet,” I repeated. “I can convert meters to feet."
"This pack of balloons will be torn apart at thirteen thousand feet,” Vincenzo said, turning back to Lucia.
They went on arguing. I counted fifteen dials and one clock, a big mariner's compass (with a winged lion in the middle and fancy curlicues painted around the letters N, E, S, W), five pressure gauges, three temperature gauges, and—overhead—two curved brass things that looked like sextants with pendulums. In the middle of the room there was a table with a big map under a thick sheet of glass; it showed New England and part of New York, and when you looked closely you could read little notes in tiny handwriting all up and down the Connecticut River and the Hudson River, and even along part of the St. Lawrence. I sat in one of the big wicker chairs. I don't know how much time passed, but it passed slowly.
"What's this?” I asked them. I had just then found a brass funnel attached to a hose.
"That's a speaking tube,” my uncle said. “Lucia can use it to give orders to a non-existent crew."
Lucia turned to me and said, “Your old uncle is a cruel man. He's never believed me, he's only pretended."
"I believe you'll die if you stay here."
"You've never seen this villa high among the cumulus, drifting with the clouds,” she said. “You've never seen this the way it was, the outside dazzling white with pale blue shadows in the silk, the rooms inside like jewel boxes, all floating. You don't know what it was like when I was a little girl and saw the city all together—oh, yes, it was only splendid remnants, but all those clouds drifting together, sometimes so close we could carry on conversations from one ship to another, some of them with grand terraces and ramparts and cloud towers, all white, all floating. You don't know what it's like to be free. You just don't know."
For a long moment my uncle didn't say anything. “I know you're in some Jules Verne dream and I can't wake you up,"he told her. “Come on, Jason. It's time for us to go.” And that's what we did.
* * * *
7
By the end of the week my sister was recovering so well from her appendectomy that my parents came to Vincenzo's and collected me and my dirty clothes. On the drive home I told them how Uncle Vincenzo had taken me up in his airplane twice and both times we had visited Lucia who lived in a cloud. My parents, side by side in the front seat of the automobile, remained silent for a long moment after I had finished my story, so I knew there was something wrong. “He took you up in that yellow box kite?” my father asked. I said yes. “Good God!” he muttered. Then he sighed and added, “At least you're here in one piece."
"I don't remember any Lucia,” my mother said.
"Vincenzo doesn't report everything in his love life. It only seems that way,” my father told her. “The important thing is we have Jason back."
"The cloud wasn't really a cloud,” I explained. “It's really made of balloons."
"It's really just a foggy field in the Berkshires,” my father informed me. “He's flown there before."
"I don't think he should introduce Jason to his women,” my mother said.
"No, Dad, it wasn't a field. It was like a sailing ship. I was in the control room."
"Especially the kind of women he doesn't tell us about,” she added.
I learned that talking about those flights made my mother and father angry at my uncle, so I stopped. Besides, the whole story was too fantastic to be believed and I had other things to keep me busy.
* * * *
8
The three account books preserved at Ca’ Foscari University extend the story of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli's proposal “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The ledger pages demonstrate, as well as any document can, that Nino Pauli actually constructed lighter-than-air vessels, the airborne villas of legend. According to the so-called Montreal affidavit, sworn to by Santalucia Dolfino, Pauli designed and tested lighter-than-air ships starting in 1797. In 1810, seventeen “cloud-ships” bearing a total of six hundred souls gathered over the Adriatic and—like the men in the year 466 on those shallow islands off the Italian coast—they declared themselves the Republic of Venice. The airborne Republic was presided over by Nino Pauli until his death in 1837; he was succeeded by his nephew, Cosimo Grimani, who retired from leadership in 1879 and was followed first by Alessandro Dolfino and later by Cosimo Dolfino. The community dwindled over the years; there were few births and many people simply left. Cosimo di
ed in 1940, at which time the vessels had become scattered and, in fact, most of the Venetians had abandoned the drifting and increasingly decrepit Republic and had slipped quietly into other communities on solid ground.
Unfortunately, beyond these meager documents there is little but speculation and myth. Legends have Pauli building only five balloon-borne ships or maybe a hundred. A flaming cloud-ship is said to have fallen like a meteor into the waters off the Dalmatian cost, drowning everyone on board, and another is supposed to have crashed in the Italian Alps, burying a treasure of art and gold under falling snow. The most frivolous fable has a cloud-villa coming to rest in Paris where it's somehow transformed into a maisonclose, an elegant brothel, complete with nude paintings by Titian, as well as the big mirrors and exquisite baubles produced by the Venetian glassworks at Murano.
Of course, there are the two artifacts collected by my Uncle Vincenzo—an old painting, and a seaman's brass telescope, or spyglass. Vincenzo found these pieces of evidence, if that's what they are, after Lucia disappeared.
About three years after we left the cloud-villa for the last time, my uncle made an automobile trip up along the Connecticut River. He was working as a weather forecaster for a radio station and he was convinced the Venetian airship had been torn apart in a storm. He believed Lucia had continued the usual flight pattern—northward up the Hudson River, then east along the Saint Lawrence, southward down the Connecticut River and west to the Hudson again. Sometimes the ship had gone around the other way, but no matter which way Lucia had gone my uncle was certain that sooner or later high winds would have smashed her against the mountains that frame those rivers.
Powerful love can turn a man's life into a desperate romantic fantasy, especially an adventurous man. Vincenzo filled his silver hip flask with brandy and set off in the crazy hope he'd find his Lucia walking down the street in some little town on the Connecticut or, he said in his saner moments, at least he'd find evidence showing where the balloon had crashed. He didn't find anything along the Connecticut. So he drove across Vermont to the Hudson, parked in Burlington for lunch and, as he got out of his car, he saw the spyglass shining like gold in the window of an antique shop. The shop owner said she had bought the telescope about a year ago from a man who had ridden off on a motorcycle.
It's a simple brass telescope without an inscription or mark of any kind to show it was used in the Venetian airship. The tube has a few dents here and there, but most important to Vincenzo was the eyepiece. The original eyepiece of the telescope he had used on the airship had been damaged in the nineteenth century and a new eyepiece had replaced it. On the spyglass he brought back from the antique shop, he was able to point to little mismatches between the eyepiece and the telescope tube. Those minor imperfections were enough to convince my uncle that the spyglass had come from the airship which, he was now certain, had been ripped to shreds by winds somewhere along the Hudson.
The next summer Vincenzo made a desperate trip up the Hudson, scouring every antique shop along the way. He didn't find anything from the airship and he ended up at the source of the Hudson, a little lake called Tear of the Clouds, where he wept and drank the last of his brandy. The next day he drove north along Lake Champlain, following as closely as he could the route Lucia's airship used to take. Before getting to the Saint Lawrence he stopped at a tavern in Plattsburgh to refill his hip flask and saw above the bar a darkish banner, a painting of a bearded man with grape leaves in his hair, stretching out his arm to offer a crystal goblet of wine to a receptive woman with dusky rose breasts. Vincenzo was sure he had seen that painting aboard the Venetian villa.
The owner said the banner had been hanging over the bar when he bought the tavern six months ago from the previous owner's daughter; she had flown in from California to sell the place soon after her father died. Vincenzo drove back to Boston with the seven-foot-long painting draped over the front passenger seat and into the back of the car. According to a conservator at the Worcester museum, the paint and cloth suggested that it survived from the late eighteenth century; the torn edges indicated that the painting had been scissored from a larger work. The cloth was silk, a rarity. The figures may have been copied, the conservator suggested, from a Giorgione or Titian or Bellini or, more likely, from one of their inferior imitators. Vincenzo was convinced that the airship had been torn apart by winds over Plattsburgh and the pieces had gone down, most of them, in the deep waters of Lake Champlain.
* * * *
9
In fact, the airship went down over Lake Champlain, not at Plattsburgh, New York, but on the other side, close by Burlington, Vermont. And it didn't get torn apart. It was a calm night in late March with a soft wet heavy snowfall, so soft that Lucia didn't wake up until the ship was collapsing with great groans onto the jumbled jigsaw of ice on Champlain. It was the drifting ice that did it—ground everything to bits—and by morning there wasn't a stick or a shred of cloth left to see.
A year after finding the painting in the tavern, Vincenzo drove back to Plattsburgh and followed Lake Champlain into Canada. Champlain flows north and empties into the Richelieu River, which continues northward to join the St. Lawrence below Montreal. Lucia was singing at the Blue Angel, a cramped and smoky downstairs blues club in Montreal, and that's where he found her. He stumbled against a chair at one of the small tables at the back of the room and sat down to watch Lucia sing, hoping that his thumping old heart would not explode in his chest. When she finished the set he abruptly stood up, accidently knocking over the table. Lucia looked at him. She quickly shook off what she saw as a trick of her eyes, but then she began to walk slowly toward him just to make sure. She saw it was her Vincenzo, broken nose and all, but at the same time she didn't believe it.
"What are you doing here?” she whispered, much as she might question a ghost.
"I came looking for you,” he said. “What are you doing here, underground?"
"I belong here."
"No,” he said. “You belong in the sky. And I can make that happen."
She half smiled. “Ah, Vincenzo, who's the dreamer now?"
"Come on,” he said. He was already heading for the door as he threw his arm around her. “Let's get out of here."
They did get out of there. They left the Blue Angel, ducked into his car and drove from Montreal south out of Canada through the night, not stopping until they reached St. Albans, Vermont.
Vincenzo and Lucia lived happily—not forever after, it's true, but for a good long time. They had a house on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, a rural area, where Vincenzo built her a balloon airship they called The Winged Lion, an emblem of Venice. The craft was a single airy room, surrounded and supported by puffy white silk clouds.
Lucia survived Vincenzo by some fifteen years. She was never able to say for sure whether the old brass spyglass that he had found in an antique shop came from her airship. But she was certain the seven-foot-long scrap of painted silk had been torn from the ceiling of one of the larger rooms. Furthermore, she insisted that the painting was by Titian. “Who else could have painted it?” she'd say, as if daring anyone to dispute her. “He was the greatest of all the Venetian painters. Of course it's by Titian."
And if I dared to say, “Titian died in 1576. The experts say the cloth it's painted on was woven around 1750 at the earliest."
She'd reply, “Clearly the experts are wrong!” Then she'd laugh and open her arms, all her bracelets jingling. “Now, who are you going to believe? Me or the experts who don't know a Titian when they see it? You've got to have faith.—Now cast off the hawser and we'll go up. Vincenzo always loved going up at this time of day."
So I'd unhook the hawser or tether and we'd float up into the twilight sky, dark blue to the east, pale blue overhead, and red gold to the west. “Your uncle was a great man,” she'd say. Then we'd drift over the darkling expanse of the lake, its margin defined by the twinkling of hundreds and hundreds of house lights on the shore, while she told me about her escapades wit
h Vincenzo or about the great fleet of air castles riding high and white in the sky when she was a girl.
Copyright © 2010 Eugene Mirabelli
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Poetry: THE NOW WE ALMOST INHABIT by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier
* * * *
* * * *
go ask Alice they say
ask her how data morphs
how reality changes so easy
how revision eats away at
the now we almost inhabit
and when it corrupts
it corrupts absolutely
and you won't notice
until Alice is ten feet tall
or fits beneath your thumb
as her every mutation brings
new iteration to seeming life
go ride the noise they say
ride the raging funnels
of nano-formula and tsunami code
how they reveal a Cheshire smile
across the noir cityscapes
of Calcutta, Baghdad, Tokyo, Beirut
how the statue of Christ above Rio
beams an immense virtual aurora
over the hilltop favelas and cold sea
stretching out his arms
to gather in all who have
become the true belief
Copyright © Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier
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Novelette: WHEAT RUST by Benjamin Crowell
Through some mysterious and unexpected process, the author, like the protagonist of this story, finds himself entering middle age. Since he's not traveling on a generation starship, Ben is coping with the situation by doing lots of backpacking in the Sierras.
The men picked an inconvenient time to fall out of the air. I wasn't being paid to play my fiddle that day, and I'd intended to spend it philandering. Well, a bad impulse thwarted is twice as bad, because then you're left with all the guilt but none of the fun to make up for it. I don't mean guilt in a prudish way, but, even to someone with my underdeveloped capacity for remorse, it was clear that Anuradha wasn't the type to keep the right sense of perspective about a love affair.
Asimov's SF, September 2010 Page 8