“I’m sure she also misses her family. How can she not? That’s the way we all are, as far as I can see: we want that closeness from piling in all together and knowing everything about everyone and talking all in one breath, but we also want to run away by ourselves and be alone. Sometimes we want both at the same time. My mom wasn’t much of a mom, and I haven’t been home since I was sixteen. But even I can’t say that I don’t miss her sometimes.
“I give her space. If there’s one thing the Chinese don’t have, it’s space. Yeling lived in a hut so full of people that she never even had her own blanket, and she couldn’t remember a single hour when she was alone. Now we see each other for a few minutes every six hours, and she’s learned how to fill up that space, all that free time, by herself. She’s grown to like it. It’s what she never had, growing up.”
There is a lot of space in a zeppelin, I thought, idly. That space, filled with lighter-than-air helium, keeps the zeppelin afloat. A marriage also has a lot of space. What fills it to keep it afloat?
We watched the display of the aurora borealis outside the window in the northern skies as the ship raced towards Alaska.
* * *
I don’t know how much time passed before I was jolted awake by a violent jerk. Before I knew what was going on, another sudden tilt of the ship threw me out of my bunk onto the floor. I rolled over, stumbled up, and made my way forward into the control cab by holding onto the walls.
“It’s common to have storms in spring over the Bering Sea,” Icke, who was supposed to be off shift and sleeping, was standing and holding onto the back of the pilot’s chair. Yeling didn’t bother to acknowledge me. Her knuckles were white from gripping the controls.
It was daytime, but other than the fact that there was some faint and murky light coming through the windows, it might as well have been the middle of the night. The wind, slamming freezing rain into the windows, made it impossible to see even the bottom of the hull as it curved up from the control cab to the nose cone. Billowing fog and cloud roiled around the ship, whipping past us faster than cars on the autobahns.
A sudden gust slammed into the side of the ship, and I was thrown onto the floor of the cab. Icke didn’t even look over as he shouted at me, “Tie yourself down or get back to the bunk.”
I got up and stood in the back right corner of the control cab, and used the webbing I found there to lash myself in place and out of the way.
Smoothly, as though they had practiced it, Yeling slipped out of the pilot chair and Icke slipped in. Yeling strapped herself into the passenger stool on the right. The line on one of the electronic screens that showed the ship’s course by GPS indicated that we had been zigzagging around crazily. In fact, it was clear that although the throttle was on full and we were burning fuel as fast as an airplane, the wind was pushing us backwards relative to the ground.
It was all Icke could do to keep us pointed into the wind and minimize the cross-section we presented to the front of the storm. If we were pointed slightly at an angle to the wind, the wind would have grabbed us around the ship’s peripatetic pivot point and spun us like an egg on its side, yawing out of control. The pivot point, the center of momentum around which a ship would move when an external force is applied, shifts and moves about an airship depending on the ship’s configuration, mass, hull shape, speed, acceleration, wind direction, and angular momentum, among other factors, and a pilot kept a zeppelin straight in a storm like this by feel and instinct more than anything else.
Lightning flashed close by, so close that I was blinded for a moment. The thunder rumbled the ship and made my teeth rattle, as though the floor of the ship was the diaphragm of a subwoofer.
“She feels heavy,” Icke said. “Ice must be building up on the hull. It actually doesn’t feel nearly as heavy as I would have expected. The hull ought to be covered by a solid layer of ice now if the outside thermometer reading is right. But we are still losing altitude, and we can’t go any lower. The waves are going to hit the ship. We can’t duck under this storm. We’ll have to climb over it.”
Icke dropped more water ballast to lighten the ship, and tilted the elevators up. We shot straight up like a rocket. The American Dragon’s elongated teardrop shape acted as a crude airfoil, and as the brutal Arctic wind rushed at us, we flew like an experimental model wing design in a wind tunnel.
Another bolt of lightning flashed, even closer and brighter than before. The rumble from the thunder hurt my ear drums, and for a while I could hear nothing.
Icke and Yeling shouted at each other, and Yeling shook her head and yelled again. Icke looked at her for a moment, nodded, and lifted his hands off the controls for a second. The ship jerked itself and twisted to the side as the wind took hold of it and began to turn it. Icke reached back to grab the controls as another bolt of lightning flashed. The interior lights went out as the lightning erased all shadows and lines and perspective, and the sound of the thunder knocked me off my feet and punched me hard in the ears. And I passed into complete darkness.
* * *
By the time I came to, I had missed the entire Alaskan leg of the journey.
Yeling, who had the helm, was playing a Chinese song through the speakers. It was dark outside, and a round, golden moon, almost full and as big as the moon I remember from my childhood, floated over the dark and invisible sea. I sat down next to Yeling and stared at it.
After the chorus, the singer, a woman with a mellow and smooth voice, began the next verse in English:
But why is the moon always fullest when we take leave of one another?
For us, there is sorrow, joy, parting, and meeting.
For the moon, there is shade, shine, waxing and waning.
It has never been possible to have it all.
All we can wish for is that we endure,
Though we are thousands of miles apart,
Yet we shall gaze upon the same moon, always lovely.
Yeling turned off the music and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“She found a way out of the storm,” she said. There was no need to ask who she meant. “She dodged that lightning at the last minute and found herself a hole in the storm to slip through. Sharp eyes. I knew it was a good idea to repaint the left eye, the one watching the sky, before we took off.”
I watched the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean pass beneath us.
“In the storm, she shed her scales to make herself lighter.”
I imagined the tung oil lines drawn on the ship’s hull by Yeling, the lines etching the ice into dragon scales, which fell in large chunks into the frozen sea below.
“When I first married Barry, I did everything his way and nothing my way. When he was asleep, and I was flying the ship, I had a lot of time to think. I would think about my parents getting old and me not being there. I’d think about some recipe I wanted to ask my mother about, and she wasn’t there. I asked myself all the time, what have I done?
“But even though I did everything his way, we used to argue all the time. Arguments that neither of us could understand and that went nowhere. And then I decided that I had to do something.
“I rearranged the way the pots were hung up in the galley and the way the dishes were stacked in the cabinets and the way the pictures were arranged in the bedroom and the way we stored life vests and shoes and blankets. I gave everything a better flow of qi, energy, and smoother fengshui. It might seem like a cramped and shabby place to some, but the ship now feels like our palace in the skies.
“Barry didn’t even notice it. But, because of the fengshui, we didn’t argue any more. Even during the storm, when things were so tense, we worked well together.”
“Were you scared at all during the storm?” I asked.
Yeling bit her bottom lip, thinking about my question.
“When I first rode with Barry, when I didn’t yet know him, I used to wake up and say, in Chinese, who is this man with me in the sky? That was the most I’ve ever been scared.
> “But last night, when I was struggling with the ship and Barry came to help me, I wasn’t scared at all. I thought, it’s okay if we die now. I know this man. I know what I’ve done. I’m home.”
* * *
“There was never any real danger from lightning,” Icke said. “You knew that, right? The American Dragon is a giant Faraday cage. Even if the lightning had struck us, the charge would have stayed on the outside of the metal frame. We were in the safest place over that whole sea in that storm.”
I brought up what Yeling had said, that the ship seemed to know where to go in the storm.
Icke shrugged. “Aerodynamics is a complex thing, and the ship moved the way physics told it to.”
“But when you get your Aurora, you’ll let her paint eyes on it?”
Icke nodded, as though I had asked a very stupid question.
* * *
Las Vegas, the diadem of the desert, spread out beneath, around, and above us.
Pleasure ships and mass-transit passenger zeppelins covered in flashing neon and gaudy giant flickering screens dotted the air over the Strip. Cargo carriers like us were constricted to a narrow lane parallel to the Strip with specific points where we were allowed to depart to land at the individual casinos.
“That’s Laputa,” Icke pointed above us, to a giant, puffy, baroque airship that seemed as big as the Venetian, which we were passing below and to the left. Lit from within, this newest and flashiest floating casino glowed like a giant red Chinese lantern in the sky. Air taxis rose from the Strip and floated towards it like fireflies.
We had dropped off the shipment of turbine blades with the wind farm owned by Caesars Palace outside the city, and now we were headed for Caesars itself. Comp rooms were one of the benefits of hauling cargo for a customer like that.
I saw, coming up behind the Mirage, the tall spire and blinking lights of the mooring mast in front of the Forum Shops. It was usually where the great luxury personal yachts of the high-stakes rollers moored, but tonight it was empty, and a transpacific long-haul Dongfeng Feimaotui, a Flying Chinaman named the American Dragon, was going to take it for its own.
“We’ll play some games, and then go to our room,” Icke said. He was talking to Yeling, who smiled back at him. This would be the first chance they had of sleeping on the same bed in a week. They had a full 24 hours, and then they’d take off for Kalispell, Montana, where they would pick up a shipment of buffalo bones for the long haul back to China.
I lay in bed in my Downtown hotel room thinking about the way the furniture in my bedroom was arranged, and imagined the flow of qi around the bed, the nightstands, the dresser. I missed the faint hum of the zeppelin’s engines, so quiet that you had to listen hard to hear them.
I turned on the light and called my wife. “I’m not home yet. Soon.”
* * *
Author’s Note: This story was inspired in many ways by John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers.
Some liberty has been taken with the physical geography of our world: a great circle flight path from Lanzhou to Las Vegas would not actually cross the city of Ordos.
The lyrics of the song that Yeling plays come from a poem by the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi (1037–1101 A.D). It has remained a popular poem to set to music through the centuries since its composition.
Shadow Flock
GREG EGAN
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new hard science writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various Best of the Year series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His novel Quarantine appeared in 1992; Permutation City won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, Zendegi, and Schild’s Ladder, and six collections of short fiction, Axiomatic, Our Lady of Chernobyl, Luminous, Crystal Nights and Other Stories, Dark Integers and Other Stories, and Oceanic. His most recent books are part of the Orthogonal trilogy, consisting of The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows of Time. He has a Web site at www.gregegan.net.
Here he spins an ingenious and suspenseful story about an intricately timed caper pulled off using fly-sized remote-controlled drones, one with a sting in the tail at the very end which should make us all a bit uneasy.
1
Natalie pointed down along the riverbank to a pair of sturdy-looking trees, a Bald Cypress and a Southern Live Oak, about fifty meters away. “They might be worth checking out.” She set off through the scrub, her six students following.
When they reached the trees, Natalie had Céline run a structural check, using the hand-held ground-penetrating radar to map the roots and the surrounding soil. The trees bore gray cobwebs of Spanish moss, but most of it was on the higher branches, out of harm’s way. Natalie had chosen the pair three months before, when she was planning the course; it was cheating, but the students wouldn’t have thanked her if they’d ended up spending a whole humid, mosquito-ridden day hunting for suitable pillars. In a real disaster you’d take whatever delays and hardship fate served up, but nobody was interested in that much verisimilitude in a training exercise.
“Perfect,” Céline declared, smiling slightly, probably guessing that the result was due to something more than just a shrewd judgment made from a distance.
Natalie asked Mike to send a drone with a surveying module across to the opposite bank. The quadrocopter required no supervision for such a simple task, but it was up to Mike to tell it which trees to target first, and the two best candidates—a pair of sturdy oaks—were impossible to miss. The way things were going they stood a good chance of being back in New Orleans before sunset.
With their four pillars chosen, it was time to settle on a construction strategy. They had three quads to work with, and more than enough cable, but the Tchefuncte River was about a hundred and thirty meters wide here. A single spool of cable held a hundred meters, and that was as much weight as each backpack-sized quad could carry.
Josh raised his notepad to seek software advice, but Natalie stopped him. “Would it kill you to spend five minutes thinking?”
“We’re going to need to do some kind of mid-air splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”
“Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.
He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”
Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”
Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”
“Not if we pre-form the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any mid-air splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”
Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”
They assembled the steps from a library of maneuvers, then prepared the cable for the first crossing. The heat was becoming enervating, and Natalie had to fight the urge to sit in the shade and bark orders. Down in Haiti she’d never cared about being comfortable, but it was harder to stay motivated when all that was at stake were a few kids’ grades in one
minor elective.
“I think we’re ready,” Céline declared, a little nervous, a little excited.
Natalie said, “Be my guest.”
Céline tapped the screen of her notepad and the first quad whirred into life, rising up from the riverbank and tilting a little as it moved toward the cypress.
With cable dangling, the drone made three vertical loops around the tree’s lowest branch, wrapping it in a short helix. Then it circumnavigated the trunk twice, once close-in, then a second time in a long ellipse that left cable hanging slackly from the branch. It circled back, dropped beneath the branch and flew straight through the loop. It repeated the maneuver then headed away, keeping the spool clamped until it had pulled the knot tight.
As the first drone moved out over the glistening water, the second one was already ahead of it, and the third was drawing close to the matching tree on the far side of the river. Natalie glanced at the students, gratified by the tension on their faces: success here was not a fait accompli. Céline’s hand hovered above her notepad; if the drones struck an unforeseen problem—and failed to recover gracefully on their own—it would be her job to intervene manually.
When the second drone had traveled some forty meters from the riverbank it began ascending, unwinding cable as it went to leave a hanging streamer marking its trail. From this distance the shiny blue line of polymer was indistinguishable from the kind its companion was dispensing, but then the drone suddenly stopped climbing, clamped the spool, and accelerated downwards. The single blue line revealed its double-stranded nature, spreading out into a heart-shaped loop. The first drone shot through the heart then doubled back, hooking the two cables together, then the second one pulled out of its dive and continued across the river. The pierced heart always struck Natalie as surreal—the kind of thing that serenading cartoon birds would form with streamers for Snow White in the woods.
Harriet, usually the quietest of the group, uttered an involuntary, admiring expletive.
The third drone had finished hitching itself to the tree on the opposite bank, and was flying across the water for its own rendezvous. Natalie strained her eyes as the second drone went into reverse, again separating the paired cables so its companion could slip through and form the link. Then the second drone released the loop completely and headed back to the riverbank, its job done. The third went off to mimic the first, tying its loose end to the tree where it had started.
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 90