Asimov's SF, April/May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I'd like to test one at altitude,” Arabella said.

  "What?"

  Arabella looked up at the tethered display balloon. “Pay me out, and let's see how the light works."

  The woman narrowed her eyes, but whatever was making her help them was pretty strong. She finally shrugged.

  "Go ahead, then. Check it out.” She gave one sharp shake of her head as Andrew tried to step forward. “Only one of you. And I'm not giving rides here. Check out the operation and purchase what's appropriate. Now, excuse me. There's something I need to take care of."

  The woman paid out the line and Arabella floated up along the crumbling plaster of the back wall. She glanced up, hoping to see more of the glass roof, but of course her entire view was of the patched fabric of the utility balloon. It was only now that she realized that when lufters flew, they saw everything but the sky.

  But she did get high enough to catch a view of the black stone of Carcery through the high windows at the ballroom's far end. No trace of the old telpher station that had caused all the trouble remained, but she could see the open stairs leading to the top of the tower, five or six stories above the mass of the prison, where Dulcie's experimental light had shone down, and where Gibbon's hanger cable had been attached. At its base were the cells where Gibbon had found the corpse that had allowed him to escape the enraged Greensward workers.

  The entire scene that night would have been visible through the mist from up here, if anyone could have spared the attention from the ball. If Dulcie had indeed been here that night, Arabella couldn't imagine her not keeping track of what was going on over there.

  But she was supposed to be testing their potential purchase. She found the pegs that controlled the light. It took her a few tries to figure out, and it wiggled back and forth. She imagined the woman below, rolling her eyes at this incompetence. Arabella finally got it right, and lowered the light smoothly.

  Okay, so, that night, Gibbon had pedaled his hanger to the top of that tower, run down the stairs, and started his sabotage of the station . . . that all seemed to work. When he was detected by the Greensward guards, he could easily run back up, get back on the hanger, and make his escape.

  But that wasn't what had happened, at least according Andrew's story. Gibbon had taken a body and hauled it up those flights of stairs to the top, tied it to the hanger, and then sent it off. Then he had descended the tower again, to be knocked out by a falling strut in the station's collapse.

  That corpse-decoy story made some sense, but not quite enough to satisfy Arabella. Something was missing.

  She glanced down. Hidden from everyone on floor level by piles of gear, the lighting booth proprietor was kissing a man. She had one beringed hand on the back of his head, while the other tugged at his dark jacket. Arabella couldn't see his face, but that was a telpherman's jacket. His bucket stood amid some oddly shaped mooring weights.

  Outside the booth, Andrew stood pretending to examine some lighting accessories, completely unaware of what was going on a few feet from him. Arabella indulged herself by feeling smarter than him, because of what she could see.

  The proprietor's hand brushed the telpherman's shoulder . . . and came away with a pigeon feather. She stared at it for a second, her black-rimmed eyes almost comically wide, and then turned away from him. Accidentally or on purpose, her heel kicked the bucket and knocked it over. The telpherman scrambled to right it. Arabella had time for one last look around, and then she was pulled down by the mooring cable.

  Despite how ridiculous the light was, Arabella rather thought Father would like one. It was better suited for peering down dark crevasses on some windswept glacier, or supporting a rescue mission for a downed balloon in some midnight-black taiga, than for reading the newspaper. But, of course, that was the point.

  There was an argument going on when she got down.

  "But it's perfect,” Andrew said.

  "Too perfect for you,” the woman said. “I have some commercial customers who are going to be needing those lights. I was just notified."

  "But we were here first."

  "You were here. I wouldn't say first."

  "What happened?” Arabella asked.

  "I got a rush order for the full set is what happened,” the woman said. “Regular customers, with real work to do. I should have more of these in in a month or so. You can check back then."

  The telpherman must have put in a good word or something, and gotten the light seller to at least pay attention to them, Arabella realized. Maybe he'd even promised to kiss her to seal the deal. But now his influence was at an end. He'd disgraced himself—by revealing his devotion to some pigeon eggs. There was no way they were leaving with any of these lights.

  And that was it. Despite the oddness of the place, Arabella had felt a kind of acceptance. But now, as they walked between the dangling cables, it seemed that everyone had turned their backs on them. They'd violated some unspoken rule, and were no longer to be tolerated. Even the desert girl had vanished, off on her mysterious mission, and when Andrew stopped at a sandwich stand near the entrance, it was some effort to even get the counterman to look at him.

  Out on the platform it was moving on to afternoon, and despite the cool breeze, the sun was warm on their faces. Arabella found herself delighted to be out for the day with her cranky and often uncooperative brother, whom she loved. It would be the last such day for a long time. She thought about taking his arm. No. That would be going a bit too far.

  "Andrew,” Arabella said. “I have a question for you."

  He unwrapped the tomato-egg sandwich he'd finally squeezed out of the reluctant sandwich maker and sighed at its skimpiness. “It's about the story, isn't it? Well, you might as well. Better than having you keep looking at me all knowing and pitying."

  He wasn't going to stop her like that. “How did Gibbon get that body out of its cell and all the way up to the top of the tower?"

  Andrew took her question seriously and looked up at the tower, that odd bit of Gothic decoration on an otherwise grim block of black stone. He frowned, and she could see him running through the possibilities.

  "Okay,” he said. “It would have been a physical challenge. Not impossible, but hard. What's your alternative?"

  "I'm just having trouble believing that Dulcie deliberately allowed Gibbon to destroy Carcery Station. Even if she was head over heels in love with him, she would have tried to find another way to show it."

  "But she did get him up there. Why would she have done that?"

  "Well . . . maybe she needed Gibbon to go up to Carcery and rescue someone for her. Bust her real lover out of prison. Then it makes sense. She hired Gibbon, persuaded him, whatever. He went up there, and he did it. That was why he was carrying that bar breaker, to pry out the cell bars. He did it, and got her guy out, and off on the hanger. Then, looking around . . ."

  "He realized that he was up there in an undefended telpher station just ripe for being taken down. Not too bright of your girl, is it? Giving a known telpher saboteur access to her father's most important station like that."

  "Maybe not,” she said. “But she was keeping an eye on things."

  "What? How?"

  Arabella told him about the timing of the ball. “I don't think it's coincidence that it happened on the very night she was up here, with a good view across the square. Do you?"

  Andrew just opened the engraving and pointed to the misty vignette of Gibbon clutching his head and falling backward as a strut hit him. “I guess that explains where this thing came from, then. I just took it for granted."

  She looked where he pointed. What she had interpreted as a strut from somewhere in the station's complex structure was, on second glance, actually a tool, the bar breaker that Gibbon had brought up with him to free the prisoner, according to Arabella's theory, or to damage the station, according to Andrew's. But it wasn't falling from anything, it was—

  "Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Who—?"

  The effec
t was quite astonishing. The swirling mist in front of Gibbon snapped into clarity: it was a figure, cloaked in white, who held the bar breaker like a club, and had just deliberately struck Gibbon down.

  But if you got distracted, by, say, the details of the stone wall behind, or the heavy bolts that connected the station to the wall, the figure became mist again, as if you'd been seeing faces in the clouds.

  "Well,” Andrew said, oddly satisfied. “You know who would have been anxious to give our Gibbon one across the skull."

  "Who?"

  "Our old buddy Pardo! Who else? Gibbon humiliated him, at Clepsydra. Gibbon couldn't have known who Dulcie was sending him to rescue, not until it was too late. Think she did that on purpose?"

  Despite the fact that she had thought of him as an innocent victim of Gibbon's cruel practical joke, Arabella had trouble seeing Pardo as Dulcie's secret lover. An accountant in her father's offices? But then, that might explain why her father, Hann, punished him so severely for the loss of the telpher car. He might just have been putting an end to an inappropriate relationship.

  She imagined Dulcie, in her gown at the ball, watching as her lover emerged from his cell and knocked Gibbon over the head with the same tool Gibbon had used to rescue him. That wasn't what Arabella had expected at all.

  "But that doesn't make sense,” she said. “Once Gibbon was knocked out, and Pardo . . . whoever . . . had stolen his hanger and escaped, how would the Spider Monkeys have found out about it?” She pictured the appalled Dulcie running out into the streets in her ball gown, catching her heel on loose cobbles, trying to find those men who had struggled against her father's interests for so long. . . .

  "Your version may be wrong, but not for that reason. You didn't look carefully enough at the fight scene here.” In the vignette next to the scene of the mysterious figure hitting Gibbon over the head, men in evening wear fought on the struts of the station. Evening wear? No. She saw one, swinging a crowbar, who wore a white apron. Another wore a sommelier's tasting cup around his neck. . . .

  "Telphermen often earned extra money working parties,” Andrew said. “Waiters, servers, ushers. If that party was as big as you say, it probably had half the telphermen in the city working it. Certainly the Spider Monkeys, who were always short of money. If they saw someone take Gibbon out like this, they would have abandoned their duties and been right over there. And, let me tell you, this looks like almost every telpherman in the city. No wonder the place went down."

  A telpher car emerged around the building's corner, pulled by their own telpherman, pigeon droppings now cleaned from his shoulders. He hooked it onto the static cable. Arabella imagined him formally dressed and wearing a white apron.

  Of course. She made her way toward him. When he saw her, he stepped away from the telpher car, as if caught doing something he shouldn't.

  "I've seen you before,” she said. “At our house. Last winter. A party. Big one, my mother's. Mother hates parties, so when she has one, it has too many people at it. I'm getting better at the names, but I still don't know half of who's there. When I was little, I would peek down from the top of the stairs, until they chased me up."

  "Drinks table,” he said. “Soda water. The occasional ice cube."

  "You'll get more responsibility someday, I'm sure."

  "I live on hope."

  Was she remembering the right night? They all blended together in her head. There was always the surf of voices with the occasional louder crash of laughter, the smoke from the big fireplace they usually didn't use because it drew so badly, the feel of the fur collars, sheepskin, velvet on the heavy coats on the beds. Once she'd fallen asleep in them, and been found by a drunken and self-amused man who kept trying to put the little girl on around his neck until she cried and ran to her room.

  But she hadn't seen their telpherman by the drinks table. She'd caught just a glimpse of him in the upper hall, as he headed for the back stairs. She'd assumed that the wait staff had stored something up there, but now that she thought about it, that made no sense at all. It was a lot of narrow, steep stairs down to the party from there. What could he have been serving that required that kind of secrecy?

  "No.” She was sure. “Not at the drinks table. Not downstairs."

  "You startled me,” he said. “You came out of the dark like a ghost."

  She'd been wearing her good nightgown, she remembered with a sense of relief, the one with the embroidery on the hem. Still, she wished she could have been better prepared. . . .

  "Shouldn't you have said ‘like an angel'?” she said.

  His smile looked tired. “I don't think you and I have time for that. But I will say that you did seem . . . weightless."

  "Are you trying to decide?” She took the plunge. “Which of your girlfriends to stay with when the wires go down?"

  "No. I've already decided. I knew long ago. But I pretended I didn't. But if I hadn't already decided . . . “

  "Yes?"

  He looked at her. No one had ever looked at her so thoroughly before. Or, maybe, it was just that no one had ever seen her the way she was now, because this particular Arabella had never existed before. Would this Arabella still be around after tomorrow, when she got on the train to her school in the mountains and vanished into whatever experience waited for her up there? Her telpherman might be the only one who ever got to see this particular person.

  "If I hadn't already decided, I might be reconsidering."

  She turned away, afraid of showing a blush. He must know exactly what he could do to her, which was a bit annoying. “That's just another way of saying ‘angel,’ while meaning ‘ghost.’ You've got those eggs, and that's all you care about."

  "Not all.” He was suddenly brisk. “This car heads north. Only way the line is running now, but there are connections you can make at Fire Tower, at least until sunset. Which way will you head?"

  "It depends.” Andrew had come up behind Arabella. “Any lights available that way?"

  The telpherman reached up and put something on a cornice above the platform. “Something might well turn up. But maybe you should wait here. . . ."

  "For what?” Andrew said.

  The telpherman shook his head. “Nothing. But this car has to go.” He raised his voice. “All aboard!"

  After sitting down, Arabella unwrapped the sandwich Andrew handed her, and the rich smell of prosciutto and herbs filled the car. If this was what the sandwich seller produced in a hostile mood, those balloonists were lucky indeed. But she was getting distracted by the food. She leaned out just as the car swung away from the platform and looked back to see what the telpherman had left behind.

  Balanced delicately on the cornice was a single blue-green egg.

  * * * *

  As they rose up the wire they got one last look at the black bulk of Carcery, and then they were sliding past the gasometers and wharves on the back side of the river. Glittering coal lay in sinuous piles. Smoke and steam rose from pipes and smokestacks.

  Arabella and Andrew sat quietly together for a while. An old man and an only slightly less old woman dozed across from them, matching flowered bags at their feet. Where would they sleep now, when the comforting rocking telpher cars were gone?

  The telpherman again slowed and stopped in the middle of the route, against the side of another building. Arabella could see him peering across the flat rooftops, with one long row of chimneys and another of stairway bulkheads. Five or six building widths away, a woman came out of a stairway door, accompanied by a girl wearing an out-of-fashion bonnet. They climbed over the parapets and got a building closer. Visiting nurses and other social workers often made their way from one building to another this way, Arabella knew, because their poor clients lived in the upper floors. They indeed each carried a small black bag.

  They finally clambered aboard as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Arabella and Andrew slid over to give them room, and the car moved smoothly away from the building.

  The woman tur
ned, looking as if she was about to say something to the telpherman—but then caught sight of the bucket of pigeon's eggs. She frowned, shifted position as if she'd sat on something, and balanced her black bag on the bucket's edge as she adjusted her dress.

  The girl gasped and reached for it, but she was too late. The car bumped over a support pylon and pulled around a pulley into a turn. The bag fell into the bucket.

  She yanked it out. Yolk dripped from a corner. She glanced up at the telpherman in horror. He was either busy with the approach to the next station, or just accepting of fate, and said nothing.

  "How clumsy of me,” the mother said. “I didn't see those eggs. But could you check my lens?"

  Arabella thought that the girl had never seen this part of her mother before. Arabella realized she might easily be sitting in the back of this girl's memories someday, as a boot, a hand on a window edge, a vague head, while the focus was on a worn black bag with a gleam of broken egg on its corner, and a mother who had suddenly revealed needs and angers far beyond whatever was allowed out at home.

  A few snaps, and the girl had opened the bag and pulled out what looked like a brass miner's lamp, with a big round lens. She turned it over, then glanced at her mother, who now sat with her eyes half closed, as if ready to join the older couple in a nap.

  "Excuse me,” Andrew said. “But if you don't mind my asking, where did you get that lantern?"

  Arabella wanted to look into the bucket to see how many eggs were left, but couldn't find a way to do it without being obvious.

  "I . . .” The girl glanced at her mother, who nodded permission without opening her eyes. “Lots of times the stairs are dark. There are supposed to be lights, but they're broken, or no one pays to put them on. He, um, heard us.” She jerked a thumb at the telpherman, who shifted his boots in a modest way. “One day when we were trying to figure out what to do about it. He found these somewhere up in the mountains, in a mine. He gave us them. They're miner lights. You put rocks in them, and they burn in the water. You get gunk left that you have to throw away."

  "They work by a chemical reaction,” the woman explained. “That makes it easy to have the fuel with you when you need it."