Lightspeed Magazine Issue 2
Page 6
“Other side effects are phrenological. Skin tightens around the skull. Patient has noticeable growth in those parts of the head dedicated to Concentrativeness, Combativeness, Locality, and Constructiveness. The areas of Amativeness, Form, and Cautiousness are smaller than normal, though it is hard to say if these personality defects are the work of prolonged wearing of conductor’s masks or the temperament of the patient. I suspect that in this case time will have to reveal what is yet unknown.
“The Zeppelin is without doubt Man’s greatest invention, and the brave men who labor in its depths are indispensable, but it behooves us to remember the story of Icarus and Daedalus; he should proceed wisely, who would proceed well.”
—from Doctor Jonathan Grant’s address to the Health Council, April 1895
The Captains’ Union set up the first Society for us, in London, and a year later in Paris.
They weren’t much more comfortable than the hospital rooms where they used to keep us landside, for safety, but of course it was more dignified. Soon we managed to organize ourselves and put together the Zeppelin Conductors’ Society, and we tithed our own wages for the dues to fix the buildings up a bit.
Now you can fly to any city with an airdock and know there’s a place for you to sleep where no one will look at you sidelong. You can get a private room, even, with a bath in the middle big enough to hold you; it’s horrid how long your limbs get when you’re in helium nine days in ten, and there’s not much dignity in trying to wash with your legs sticking two feet out of the bath.
And it’s good sense to have a place you can go straight away; regulars don’t like to see you wandering about, sometimes. Most times. I understand.
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU SEE A CONDUCTOR
1. Do not panic; he is probably as wary of you as you are of him. He will pose no threat if not provoked.
2. Do not stare; scrutiny is vulgar.
3. Offer a small nod when you pass, as you would to another gentlemen; it pleases them.
4. Avoid smaller streets between airship docks and the local Conductor’s Society. The conductor is, in general, a docile creature, but one can never be sure what effects the helium has had on his temperament.
—Public Safety Poster, 1886
January 1, 1900
PARIS—Polaris was eclipsed last night: not by any cosmic rival, but by a man-made beauty. The Laconia, a Phoenix-class feat of British engineering that has become the envy of the world, never looked more beautiful than on its evening flight to Paris as we began a momentous New Year.
Captain Richard Marks, looking every inch the matinee hero, guided the ship safely through the night as the passengers within lit up the sky with conversation and music, accompanied by a champagne buffet. Miss Marie Dawlish, the English Lark, honored the company with a song which it is suspected struck the heart of a certain airship Captain who stepped away from the bridge in time for the performance. Though we at the Daily are not prognosticators, we believe that the coming year may be one of high romance for Captain Marks, who touched down back in London with a gentle landing, and no doubt a song in his heart.
The Societies have the Balls each year for New Year’s, which is great fun. It’s ripping good food, and sometimes someone comes in a full evening suit and we can all have a laugh at them; it’s an expensive round of tailoring to wear just once a year. You know just by looking that they who dressed up had wanted to be Captains and fallen short. Poor boys. I wouldn’t be a Captain for all the gold in Araby, though perhaps when you’re young you don’t realize how proud and empty the Captains end up.
You don’t meet a lot of ladies in the air, of course, and it’s what all the lads miss most. For the London Ball they always manage to find some with the money from the dues—sweet girls who don’t mind a chat. They have to be all right with sitting and talking. The Annual Gentlemen’s Ball isn’t much of a dance. The new conductors, the ones who have only stretched the first few inches, try a dance or two early on to give the musicians something to do. The rest of us have given in to gravity when we’re trapped on the ground. We catch up with old mates and wait for a chance to ask a girl upstairs, if we’re brave enough.
Sometimes we even get conductors in from other places—Russia, sometimes, or once from China. God, that was a night! What strange ideas they have about navigation! But he was built like an airship man, and from the red skin round his eyes we could tell he’d paid his dues in the helium, so we poured him some Scotch and made him welcome. If we aren’t kind to each other, who will be kind to us?
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Soar with confidence among the stars—aim always for ORION.
—Orion Airship Supply Catalog, 1893
We were airside the last night of 1899, the night of the Gentlemen’s Ball.
We had been through a bad wind that day, and all of us were spread out tightening rivets on the ribs, signaling quietly back and forth. I don’t know what made Anderson agree to sign us on for the evening flight—he must have wanted the Ball as much as the rest of us—and I was in a bit of a sulk, feeling like Cinderella. It was a cold night, cold even in the balloon, and I was wishing for nothing but a long bath and a long sleep.
Then Captain Marks shoved the woman into the balloon.
She was wearing a worn-out orange dress, and a worn-out shawl that fell away from her at once, and even as the captain clipped her to the line she hung limp, worn-out all over. He’d been at her for a while.
I still don’t know where he found her, what they did to her, what she thought in the first moments as they carried her towards the balloon.
“Got some leftovers for you,” the Captain shouted through his mask, “a little Gentlemen’s Ball for you brave boys. Enjoy!”
Then he was gone, spinning the lock shut behind him, closing us in with her.
I could feel the others hooking onto a rib or a spine, pushing off, hurrying over. The men in the aft might not have even seen it happen. I never asked them. Didn’t want to know.
I was closest to her, fifty feet, maybe. Through the mask I could see the buttons missing on the front of her dress, the little cuts in her fisted hands.
She wore a mask, too. Her hair was tangled in it.
She was terrified—shaking so hard that I worried her mask would come loose—but she didn’t scrabble at her belt: too clever for that, I suppose. I was worried for her—if you weren’t used to the helium it was painful to breathe for very long, she needed to get back Underneath. God only knew how long that second-rate mask would hold.
Even as Anderson hooked onto a spine to get to her she was shoving off—not to the locked porthole (there was no hope for her there), but straight out to the ribs, clawing at the stiff silk of the balloon.
We all scrambled for her.
I don’t know how she cut the silk—Bristol said it must have been a knife, but I can’t imagine they would have let her keep one. I think she must have used the hook of her little earring, which is the worst of it, somehow.
The balloon shuddered as the first rush of helium was sucked into the sky outside; she clenched one fist around the raw edge of the silk as she unhooked herself from the tether. The air caught her, dragging at her feet, and she grasped for purchase against the fabric. She cried out, but the mask swallowed the noise.
I was the closest; I pushed off.
The other conductors were shouting for her not to be foolish; they shouted that it was a misunderstanding, that she would be all ri
ght with us.
As I came closer I held out my hands to her so she could take hold, but she shrank back, kicking at me with one foot, the boot half-fastened.
My reflection was distorted in the round eyes of her mask—a spindly monster enveloping her in the half-dark, my endless arms struggling to pull her back in.
What else could she do?
She let go.
My sight lit up from the rush of oxygen, and in my view she was a flaming June in a bottle-green night, falling with her arms outstretched like a bird until she was too small to be seen, until every bright trace of her was gone.
For a moment no one moved, then the rails shuddered under us as the gills fanned out, and we slowed.
Anderson said, “We’re coming up on Paris.”
“Someone should tell them about the tear,” said Bristol.
“Patch it from here,” Anderson said. “We’ll wait until Vienna.”
In Vienna they assumed all conductors were lunatics, and they would ask no questions about a tear that only human hands could make.
I heard the first clangs of the anchor-hooks latching onto the outer hull of the Underneath before the church bells rang in the New Year. Beneath us, the passengers shouted “Hip, hip, hurrah! Hip, hip, hurrah!”
That was a sad year.
Once I was land-bound in Dover. The Conductor’s Society there is so small I don’t think ten men could fit in it. It wasn’t a bad city (I had no trouble with the regulars on my way from the dock), but it was so horribly hot and cramped that I went outside just to have enough room to stretch out my arms, even heavy as they were with the Earth pulling at them.
A Falcon-class passed overhead, and I looked up just as it crossed the harvest moon; for a moment the balloon was illuminated orange, and I could see the conductors skittering about inside of it like spiders or shadow puppets, like moths in a lamp.
I watched it until it had passed the moon and fallen dark again, the lamp extinguished.
It’s a glorious life, they say.
Genevieve Valentine‘s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from: Running with the Pack, Federations, The Living Dead II, The Way of the Wizard, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and more. In addition to writing fiction, she is a columnist for Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine.
Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine
Author of “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball”
Zeppelins are often associated with the Steampunk genre, and your story certainly has a Steampunk feel to it. What do you think Steampunk’s relationship is to science fiction? Is it a subgenre, or a close cousin? Do you think science fiction in general—both the canon and the community—is inclusive of things like Steampunk, or does it need to broaden further?
I think steampunk tends to live in the space between science fiction and fantasy, depending on how it’s utilized in each particular piece. I think that both the science fiction canon and the science fiction community have accepted steampunk elements for a long time; I think that as steampunk earns its permanent place in the canon, it will do so via the examination of some of the tropes on which previous steampunk has been built, which will both broaden and strengthen the collective canon.
In “Zeppelin Conductors’ Society” you structure your story and even tell parts of it through the use of ephemera—advertisements, promotional posters, and news clippings. Do you have a fascination with ephemera in general? What went into your decision to use that technique to tell this story?
I love ephemera, and always have; I think that introducing outside artifacts, from ads to half-finished letters to propaganda radio ads, is a fantastic way to enhance a traditional narrative and introduce the reader to a wider world, allowing them to reframe the narrative in a different context.
“Zeppelin Conductor’s Society” is a story about how societal structures and technological demands can trap the individual (often with the individual’s consent). The ephemera help to present a society to the reader that the narrator is unable to present himself, because for a large portion of the story he is unaware of the forces marshaled against him, and even after he is made aware, he can’t quite face what he now knows he’s up against.
What can you tell us about the science in your story? Did you do much research? Is Heliosis strictly the product of your imagination, or is there science behind it?
Heliosis is largely a metaphor for any other ailment that would have plagued a laborer struggling to produce a small element of the aristocratic lifestyle the Victorian rich enjoyed. Working in cotton mills you caught byssinosis, steel mills deafened you, coal mining gave you black lung; it stands to reason that, had zeppelins been available to the Victorians, they wouldn’t have hesitated to put working-class men into the dangerous positions, and then start a class-stratification propaganda campaign when things went sideways on them.
That said, I did do some research into the general effects of exposure to helium gas, which has several of the physicoligcal effects mentioned in the story, and contributes in a general way to the sort of physical ailments that would come of exerting oneself in a low-oxygen environment with less-than-perfect filtration.
Do you find yourself revisiting certain themes in your work? What other works—of your own or others—would you recommend to readers who enjoyed this story?
I’m not sure this is a question the author can ever objectively answer (unless it’s something really handy like, “Cake has appeared in all my works”), but I would say that the struggle of the individual against an immovable and intangible force of some kind or another is a theme to which I return.
This story is also one of the stories in which I try to examine a base trope that’s often applied without examination. In this case, every time a heroic steampunk-airship captain takes to the skies, there is a culture of invisible workers and a particular celebrity culture that are working in his favor, but neither one is designed to turn him into a particularly nice guy; and, as often happens, others will suffer from it far more than he ever will.
A Very Brief History of Airships by Gregory K. H. Bryant
From the Hindenburg to the Goodyear Blimp, airships have for centuries captured our collective imagination and, in recent years, given lift to the popularity of the steampunk genre. But how much do we know, really, about their history and evolution? How did steerable, lighter-than-air craft progress from some crackpot inventor’s dream to the elegant, Victorian technology of literature?
Well, it certainly didn’t happen overnight.
The “Golden Age” airships, in all their silvery, romantic glory, were, in fact, the culmination of nearly a hundred and fifty years of development in many disparate fields. That’s a long history to sort through, so perhaps we should start with the precursor to the airship: the balloon.
As early as 1783, the Montgolfier brothers caused a huge sensation throughout the civilized world when, before a crowd including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, they heated the air inside an envelope of alum-varnished taffeta and launched a sheep, a duck and a rooster on an eight minute, two mile flight across the royal palace of Versailles, the first flight ever to carry a living creature. The Montgolfiers, subsequently, were rewarded for their efforts with elevation to the nobility, and standard hot air balloons are to this day known as Montgolfiers.
Now, at the same time the brothers were busy flying farm animals across the French countryside, Jacques Charles and his buddies Les Frères Robert were in Paris doing nearly the same thing before a large, paying crowd that included then-American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin. Instead of hot air, however, Charles was using hydrogen to obtain buoyancy. (And instead of the sheep, Charles himself and Nicolas-Louis Robert were the flight crew—a slightly more dignified pair of attendants.)
The flight of la charliere lasted a whopping two hours five minutes and featured such advanced controls as a hydro
gen release valve and sand bag ballasts. Thereafter, the use of hydrogen as a lift element superseded hot air. (Helium, eventually, would come into play as the best alternative for lift, being both more buoyant than hot air and less volatile than hydrogen, but it was not produced in sufficient quantities for use with airships until after the First World War.)
Despite a great deal of creativity and novel invention, however, the real holy grail of LTA travel remained, for quite some time, completely out of reach: steerability.
In 1849, a newspaper editor rather shortsightedly wrote: “Now, a flying machine can never be steered. Yet…there will be dolts to believe in it, we suppose, to the end of time.” Probably a good thing no one mentioned space exploration to this guy.
He was, however, correct in one thing: there will be dolts to believe in it. And, in the great tradition of human endeavor, to try and achieve it.
A significant hurdle to making the balloons navigable was the spherical shape itself. With neither a fore nor aft end, the balloons were at the mercy of the breezes. Of course, that didn’t stop various attempts to control the craft with flaps, wings, wheels and oars. But all those efforts merely spun the balloon helplessly around without providing the needed forward propulsion. A change in the shape of the craft was the order of the day, and that lead to some, well…interesting configurations.
In 1852, Ernest Petin proposed a vessel of multiple balloons strung to a long, horizontal scaffolding. Solomon Andrews, in 1860, built his Aereon airship of three cylindrically shaped gas bags side by side. And in 1884, Alfred Boult planned to mount two balloons to a long, wooden cabin—one at either end—which was to be steered by oars protruding from the sides and pushed forward by a propeller at the aft.
But before all that nonsense, there was Jean Baptiste Meusnier. In 1784—right around the same time the Mongolfiers and Jacques Charles were floating around France—Meusnier was the first to propose the familiar long cigar shape still used today, and for this he is now known as the father of the modern dirigible.