A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  The voyage south had been brisk, pleasant, uneventful. It was a sort of honeymoon for Wavey and her latest husband, who had both been busy since their wedding working on the immense task of mobilizing London. They had stopped at Cape Bretagne to see the famous Petrified Car-Park, and touched at Nowhere and Evora too. They had retired to their cabins the previous night with the lights of Mayda twinkling in the south, looking forward to going ashore next day and finding Fever. But before sunrise Wavey had been woken by the Supercollider’s captain, who reported a war-galley flying the colours of the Oktopous Cartel at anchor off the Ragged Isles.

  She had gone up on to the quarterdeck in that pearl-pink dawn to see it for herself. A red ship upon a pastel sea. What was the Oktopous doing there? she wondered. And then, as she watched, she saw that white wing rise from one of the islands, and she knew. So the Thursday machine was really flying, and the naughty Oktopous had stretched out a tentacle to try and steal its secrets!

  “Full ahead,” she told the captain, and sent a sailor below to rouse her husband. They stood together on the ship’s prow in the blown-back spray and watched the new machine sweep eastward, dip and fall, and never guessed that it was Fever flying it.

  “Take us to where it came down,” Wavey ordered the captain. “We must not let that galley reach it first.”

  It wasn’t until the galley was sunk and the sailors brought Fever aboard – sodden, lifeless-looking, that red weal across her face still welling blood – that she realized who the pilot of the machine had been.

  “What about the kite, lady?” they asked her, as she knelt down on the deck to take her daughter in her arms. “What about that old-fangled flying contraption?”

  “Sink it,” said Wavey quickly.

  She did not even bother to stay and watch as the boatmen smashed and weighted it and let the sea take it.

  Fever knew none of that, and there was no time to ask, no time to wonder. This ship, her mother, it all felt like a mystery she could never hope to fathom, like the torus, something unreasonable that she would simply have to accept.

  She looked down at herself. Someone had taken off her wet clothes while she slept and replaced them with a sailor’s too-big trousers and smock. She touched her face and there was a soft pad of lint across her gashed cheek.

  “Don’t worry,” said her mother. “You’re healing remarkably fast. I don’t think you’ll have a scar.”

  Fever didn’t care whether she had a scar or not. She was thinking about Arlo, left alone on that island again. “How long have I been sleeping?”

  “Not long,” said her mother. “You haven’t missed much. We’ve been searching the place where that galley went down, picking up survivors – it was dreadfully boring, but apparently it’s a Rule of the Sea – the captain was most insistent. At present we’re off Mayda-at-the-World’s-End, negotiating with the authorities there to let us moor in their harbour. They have some silly prejudice against motor vessels, but I expect they’ll come round. Now, where is Arlo Thursday, I wonder?”

  “Arlo is still on the island,” said Fever. “So is Master Hazell. And Dr Teal…” She looked sideways at her mother. Her beautiful, brilliant, dangerous mother. “How do you know about Arlo? And the machine? Dr Teal said he reported only to Quercus and the Chief Engineer…”

  Wavey laughed. “Oh, Fever! You are out of touch! Did Dr Teal not tell you? He must have wanted to let me surprise you. He’s such a sweet man! You see, I am the Chief Engineer! Dr Stayling kept raising stuffy objections to all Quercus’s plans, so Quercus fired him and gave me his job. Oh, Fever, you simply must come back to London and see how well things are going…”

  “He was going to kill Arlo!” said Fever, pushing herself upright.

  “Well, he had good reason,” said Wavey. “That flying machine was most impressive. We can’t have things like that flapping around, they would ruin everything. We’ll send a boat to the island and deal with Senhor Thursday.”

  “You mean kill him?” said Fever.

  “Well, if you will insist on being crude about it, yes…” Wavey looked curiously at her. “Does he mean something to you, this Thursday boy?” She reached out and stroked Fever’s hair. “Poor Fever! He’s only a common-or-garden Homo sapiens, you know. There are loads more where he came from.”

  A knock at the cabin door interrupted her. It opened, and a young sailor leaned in and said, “Captain’s compliments, ma’am. A small boat is approaching from the islands.”

  “Is Dr Teal aboard?” asked Wavey sharply.

  “No, ma’am. Two gentlemen, ma’am; strangers both.”

  “Arlo and Master Hazell,” said Fever. Wavey glanced quickly at her, and Fever could see that the news had worried her. If the Suppression Office was as secret as Dr Teal had said, the chances were that no one else aboard this massive ship knew what she had planned for Arlo Thursday. If he had stayed on the island she might have been able to have him killed and claim it was an accident, but she could hardly have him assassinated aboard the Supercollider with her whole crew looking on…

  Wavey, being Wavey, recovered almost instantly. “Come,” she said pleasantly, offering Fever her hand to help her off the bunk. “Let’s go and meet your friends.” To the sailor she added, “We shall have to send a boat to the island to collect Dr Teal. And will you please tell Dr Crumb that his daughter is awake?”

  Fever, who had been thinking frantically of ways to keep Arlo safe, thought she had misheard at first. “Dr Crumb is here too?” she asked.

  Wavey looked at her with that expression of mischievous delight which meant that she knew something startling which Fever didn’t. “Of course he’s here! It would have looked most peculiar if I’d left him at home. He is my husband!”

  They met Dr Crumb on the way to the quarterdeck. He had got Wavey’s message and he was running to find them, but as soon as he saw them he stopped running and tried to look as if he had not been hurrying at all, because although he had a wife and a daughter he was still an Engineer, and displaying emotion was difficult for him.

  Difficult for Fever too. It had been such a long time since she had seen him, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about her discovery of two years earlier that he really was her father, not just her guardian. She had no idea what she should make of his marriage to Wavey, but she didn’t think she liked it; she thought she wanted him all to herself. She wanted him the way he had always been; bald and indoors-y and white-coated.

  But he had changed as much as she had. He looked better-fed and better dressed and he had let his grey hair grow until it was about a half inch long and stood upright all over his scalp like an experiment with magnets and iron filings.

  She started to run to him, and slowed, and stopped an arm’s length away and gave him a neat little Engineerish bow. “Hello, Dr Crumb.”

  “Fever!” he said, fidgeting uneasily with a small telescope which he had brought with him from the quarterdeck… “This is – I mean – oh, that we’ve found you – that is – it is – most satisfactory.”

  He couldn’t stop looking at her. Her hair, her clothes, her long, tanned hands, the dressing that she wore like a mask. “Your face… You are hurt…”

  “It’s not bad,” lied Fever. “Wavey says…”

  Wavey took her hand, took Dr Crumb’s. It was the first time that their strange little family had ever been all together in the same place, and it silenced them. They stood there together on the swaying deck, while sailors hurried past them and the sun slid into their eyes. The Supercollider was turning, spray from her paddle wheels drifting like a cool mist across her upperworks. Fever saw that the cliffs of Mayda and the harbour mouth were quite close on her left-hand side, and that a small boat was sailing up on her right.

  “Dr Crumb,” she asked, “might I borrow your telescope?”

  He gave it to her, very glad to find that she still needed him for something. She extended the telescope and trained it on the boat. After a moment’s trouble focusing she saw
Jonathan Hazell at the helm, and Arlo sitting in the front, leaning against the mast.

  Her father had turned to look at the boat, too. Marines were running to the Supercollider’s rail to aim muskets at it and shout at the merchant to lower his sail, but the boat was already slowing, the sail already rattling down. Jonathan Hazell had stood up uncertainly in the stern and was shouting something, his words lost in the slap of the waves against the Supercollider’s side.

  “Who are those people?” Dr Crumb was asking.

  “The young man is Arlo Thursday,” said Fever.

  “The inventor of that remarkable flying machine!” Her father looked pleased, and she knew that at least he did not know about Wavey’s plans. “He must be a very talented Engineer! I was most vexed when our clumsy sailors let his machine sink. I shall look forward to making his acquaintance!”

  “I imagine that Wavey will want to hand him over to the Suppression Office,” said Fever, looking at her mother.

  Wavey flushed a little.

  “The Suppression Office?” asked Dr Crumb. “What is that?”

  “Nothing,” said Wavey. “A misunderstanding, nothing more…”

  The boat was close now, and sailors were throwing down lines, advising Jonathan Hazell to “Hook on, mate!” Dr Crumb went hurrying along the Supercollider’s deck towards the place where the newcomers would climb aboard, and Wavey would have gone with him, but Fever caught her by a sleeve and held her back. She knew that there was no point in trying to persuade her mother that the Suppression Office was irrational, but maybe she could meet its madness halfway; suggest some compromise that could keep Arlo safe.

  As quickly and as calmly as she could, she said, “You can’t hope to stamp out flying machines in this piecemeal way. Murdering inventors won’t work in the long term. Someone else will always have the same idea. Even if you… Even if you deal with Arlo, there must be dozens of people all over the world working towards the conquest of the air. What about me? I’ve flown. I helped build the Goshawk. Are you going to kill me?”

  “Of course not, Fever,” said Wavey irritably. “You’re one of us. Now be sensible.”

  “I am being sensible!” said Fever. “If you were sensible you’d see that it can’t work. If you really want to stop people thinking, you don’t use guns or bombs. You use religion.”

  She waved one hand towards Mayda and hurried on, not sure where her words were coming from or where this idea was going, but blurting it out anyway. “Look at this place! They don’t even use engines! Why not? Because they think their goddess has forbidden it. Out there to westward somewhere, beyond the sea, there’s a whole continent waiting to be re-explored, but no one goes there, because the gods have cursed it. Down south, in Zagwa, they destroy every scrap of old-technology they find because they say it offends their god. All over the world, all sorts of good things are banned and forbidden in the name of one religion or another. You don’t have to hurt Arlo. Please don’t. You can stop his ideas being used. Just bribe a few priests. It’s the job of priests to control knowledge and stand in the way of progress: it’s what they’re for. Let them spread the word that the gods never meant us to fly.”

  Wavey watched her with those Scriven eyes of hers, those grey and golden eyes which seemed both more and less than human. “You are a clever girl, Fever,” she said.

  Fever went rushing on. “I’ll go and talk to the Maydan’s high priestess myself as soon as we dock. I think I know how to make her listen. But you have to promise me that Arlo will not be harmed.” She knew what Arlo would have said if he had been able to hear her; that he would not want to live if he could not fly. But she did not care. All she cared about was that he be spared.

  Wavey looked away from her towards the rail. Jonathan Hazell must have succeeded in tethering his boat alongside, for his nervous face had just appeared over the Supercollider’s gunwale. The rest of him followed, hauled aboard by helpful sailors, and after a moment Arlo came after him. Wavey watched the young man; watched the sea-wind tousling his dark hair, the uncertain, winning smile that spread on his face when he saw Fever waiting there.

  “Oh, he is rather lovely,” she admitted, and looked round smiling at her daughter. “Very well. As long as he gives up his work, I shall tell Dr Teal that he is not to come to any harm.”

  29

  WORD FROM THE GREAT DEEP

  y the time the Supercollider had docked in Mayda’s outer basin the sun was already past its zenith and the cool blue shadow of the western wall lay across the Quadrado Del Mar. The great driftwood temple of the Sea Goddess looked like a wreck on the floor of the ocean, with blue-robed priests darting in and out of its ever-open doors like inquisitive fish.

  Quite a crowd followed Fever as she walked towards it: her mother and father, a squad of marines from the Supercollider and a whole shoal of Maydans, shopkeepers and gentry, dockers and children and harbourside riff-raff, who had been drawn to the quay to watch the strange new ship come in and were eager now to see what happened when its passengers met Orca Mo.

  The priestess had been warned of their coming. Indeed, she had watched the fall of the Goshawk and the arrival of the Supercollider that morning from the temple’s precincts, through a vast old telescope cased in mother-of-pearl. She had objected at first when the steam-ram asked permission to dock, reminding the council that the Goddess abhorred motorized ships. But when its captain sent word that he would like to make a large donation to the temple funds, she prayed for a while and came to understand that the Goddess would not mind making an exception for the Supercollider, just this once.

  She was waiting for its passengers at the top of the temple steps, dressed in all her regalia, with the tentacles of her squid-hat waving on the breeze.

  Fever, striding towards her across the cobbled square, felt a quick, nervous fluttering in her stomach. “Stage-fright”, the actors on the Lyceum called it. She stopped at the foot of the temple steps, looking up at Orca Mo.

  “Why have you come here?” asked the priestess sternly.

  “I have come—” said Fever, but her voice was just a hoarse little whisper so she had to start again. “I have come to ask for forgiveness.”

  She wasn’t an actress, and she’d always hated lies. But she thought of Arlo, and the look that Arlo had given her as they parted at the foot of the Supercollider’s gangway, of disappointment and betrayal and despair, and she said, “I’ve come to ask the Sea Goddess to forgive me,” and it sounded sincere.

  Orca Mo smiled at her. Not a smile of triumph; quite a kindly smile. “Then come in, child,” she said, holding out one hand to Fever, and the other to stop all Fever’s friends and followers who would otherwise have come with her up the steps.

  Shafts of dim blue daylight lanced through skylights into the temple’s dim interior, slanting down between barnacled wooden columns. All sounds seemed muffled. The distant voices of chanting priests were as vague and echoey as whale song. A water-organ was playing softly somewhere. If you could let yourself forget how dotty it all was, thought Fever, it would be quite beautiful.

  Orca Mo sat Fever down on a driftwood pew close to the altar and settled beside her. She studied the wound on Fever’s face, the purpling bruises. “You are already forgiven, child,” she said. “The Goddess has already forgiven you. I saw it all. You flew with the birds, and fell into the sea, and our Mother Below chose not to let you drown.”

  Fever wondered how she knew all that. She couldn’t possibly have been able to see through her telescope who the Goshawk’s pilot had been. But probably part of the job of being a priestess was making people believe you knew everything, so she did not ask how the woman came by her knowledge.

  “When you were under the waves,” said Orca Mo softly, “did the Goddess come to you? Did you see Her? She has been known to appear to those who fall into Her realm. Even to unbelievers.”

  Fever looked down for a moment at her hands, folded in her lap, then up again at the priestess. Don’t do this, Arlo h
ad shouted at her, when he learned what Fever was planning. You mustn’t!

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw her.”

  She could feel herself blushing, her ears warming up like twin electric elements. She felt sure that Orca Mo would know she was just making this up. But when she looked into the woman’s eyes she saw only a wistful yearning. Orca Mo longed to believe, and that made her easy to lie to, even for a novice liar like Fever.

  “What did She look like?” urged the priestess. “How could you be sure it was Her?”

  Fever glanced up at the altar, where the statue of the goddess smiled down insipidly from its aquarium. It was the same age-old, sacred statue that she had watched being carried on its litter across the lock-gates at the Festival of the Summer Tides. Now it was back beneath the water, surrounded by bright shoals of darting fish, and on the white sand at its feet were the Mãe Abaixo’s three sacred symbols: the bubbling clamshell, the treasure chest and the skull.

  “She looked just like her statue,” said Fever. “Those blue and white clothes. The circle of gold above her head, exactly like that. But her eyes were green and her hair was dark and she had freckles.”

  “Freckles?”

  “Freckles.”

  “And did She speak to you? Did She ask you to carry any message to us out of the Great Deep?”

  “Yes,” said Fever.

  You mustn’t! Arlo had screamed at her. She had gone to see him in the Supercollider’s medical bay, where Wavey’s surgeon was tending to his wounded arm, but when she told him what she planned to do he had driven her away. If people start believing flight is wrong we’ll be barred from the sky for centuries! he had shouted. Flight is possible! We’ve done it! The Goshawk flew! You can’t murder the truth!

  But Fever thought she would rather murder the truth than let the Suppression Office murder Arlo.