Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  “One!” came the cry.

  Gradually the falling coin began to gain in downward speed, still turning lazily over. It was now at the level of Arabella’s eyes.

  “Two!” the men chorused.

  Still faster the coin fell.

  “Three!” the men all cried, just at the moment the coin struck the deck. The sound of its impact was lost in a loud hurrah, and Arabella felt a hard shove between her shoulder blades.

  “Get it get it get it!” came the cry from all around her, and Arabella and the rest of the “new fish” scrambled to catch the coin as it rebounded into the air. But though the sovereign rose as lazily as it had fallen, she found it nearly impossible to lay a hand on it, for her feet skidded without purchase across the deck and whenever she reached for the flying coin she found her hand passing half a foot or more away from it.

  Great was the mirth of the assembled crew as Arabella and the other new men scrambled about after the coin, grunting and scuffling, colliding with each other. Despite the apparent ease of the task, the lot of them seemed incapable of the simple action of catching a falling coin.

  It was the gravity, she realized. The ship had risen far enough from the Earth that her attraction was substantially reduced; indeed, the gravitational attraction of Earth was now even less than the Martian gravity she had grown up with. She stopped and held herself still, observing the coin as it flew.

  Every thing about the coin’s movement was wrong. It moved too slowly, bounced too high after each impact with the deck. But if she placed her hand just there …

  The spinning coin was just about to strike her open palm when another hand, the wildly flailing hairy-knuckled paw of a massive red-bearded Scotsman, happened to snatch it away. The Scotsman held the coin aloft to a general huzzah, and a golden mantle was placed upon his shoulders.

  “Now, as to the rest of you,” came Kerrigan’s voice—and it had a nasty edge to it—“you line up along the larboard rail.”

  Arabella and the others were driven into line at the rail, where two of the burliest topmen waited with broad grins.

  Just as Arabella realized she had been shoved to the front of the line by the other new men, the two brawny airmen grabbed her by her shoulders and hips and lifted her over their heads …

  … then hurled her over the rail!

  Arabella screamed. She could not have prevented herself from doing so any more than she could prevent her heart from beating. The scream was pulled from her lungs as though it were attached to the ship by a stout rope.

  She tumbled end over end, sun and clouds and Earth and rail spinning dizzily all around her. What had been her crime, to deserve such a death?

  And then the breath was driven out of her as she was caught up again by the same hands that had just released her. The two topmen hauled her back aboard, dumping her without ceremony onto the deck, and grabbed the man in line behind her. Despite his forewarning, he screamed nearly as high as Arabella herself as he was tossed over the rail. But so slowly did he fall that the topmen had no difficulty catching him again before he had descended more than two feet.

  As she drew herself, trembling, to her feet, Taylor came over and thrust a cup of grog into her hand. “That weren’t so bad, now, were it?”

  She merely gave him a withering look.

  He laughed and clapped her on the back. “Well, you’re a real airman now in any event.” He took a great draught of his own grog. “And the coin struck the deck just at the count of three.”

  Arabella sipped her drink, noting that the shaking in her knees was beginning to subside. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a good omen, innit? Any less than three means the captain’s too eager, wants to sway out before it’s safe. Much more and he’s being too cautious. But our Captain Singh always catches it right on the dot.”

  Again the bosun’s pipe sounded. “All hands prepare to sway out!”

  Taylor shrugged and drained his grog. Arabella took one last sip of hers and offered the remainder to him. “Much obliged,” he said with a grin, and drained it as well.

  * * *

  Arabella and Taylor joined the other waisters at the starboard rail, where at Faunt’s command they busied themselves untying a spare mast from where it was lashed at the ship’s side. Why this should be needed she had no idea, as there was no sign of any problem with the ship’s one standing mast.

  “Clap on, lads!” Faunt cried as the mast, now fully released, began to roll downward, and they all bent down and held it against the ship with their hands. Though the force of gravity was greatly reduced, the mast was more than a hundred feet long and still pulled heavily against the men’s grip. Arabella, with her spindly arms, felt as though she was barely contributing.

  A cry came from above: “Ahoy the deck!” Arabella looked up to see a weighted line snaking down from the mast high above, where several topmen clung to the rigging. Faunt caught the end of the rope before it struck the deck, and proceeded to make it fast to the end of the spare mast. A second line shortly followed, and was affixed to the other end.

  The entire crew, officers and men alike, now wrestled the mast away from the ship’s side, tugging and hauling on the mast itself and the lines attached to it until it projected horizontally away from the ship, its thick end closest to the rail. “Lower away,” Kerrigan cried.

  Arabella now found herself one of a long line of men from every division, all hauling on a line that ran through a block at the masthead to the head of the spare mast, while another gang of men did the same for the mast’s foot. Gently, inch by inch, they lowered the mast until it was well out of sight below the rail. Kerrigan, leaning over the rail and carefully observing the mast’s progress, directed the two gangs with commands and hand signals. “Handsomely now,” he said. “Steady … steady … ease up on the head a bit … that’s well! Make all fast!”

  While several of the men busied themselves fastening the two lines to the rail, Kerrigan peered about the deck, looking for Arabella knew not what. Then his eye fell on Arabella. “You’re a scraggy little thing, you are. You’ll do.” He turned to the officer beside him. “Put this one in harness.”

  Another weighted line came hurtling down from the mast, and several men converged on Arabella. Before she knew what was happening, Arabella found herself with a loop of rope around each leg and another around her waist, hanging just above the deck. She’d been too busy keeping her softer parts away from their hands to wonder why.

  Faunt pressed a wooden peg, the size of her arm, into her hands. “All ye need do is guide the mast-foot into the keelson-plate, then peg it in place with this fid.” He clapped her shoulder. “Hoist away!”

  Thoroughly baffled, Arabella felt herself hauled up into the air, then pushed sideways, past the rail, until she hung dizzily over nothing at all. The Earth gleamed far, far below, like a great glass marble floating serenely in the blue sky that lay all about.

  Desperately she clung to the rope, which ran taut from the great knot at her navel to her collarbone, while trying not to lose the peg. “Lower away!” came the distant cry.

  A moment later she saw what she was to do. The mast hung beside the ship, projecting downward at an angle, with its large end near a round, black hole in the lower curve of the hull. Barnacles and weed clung to the planks, and a few drops of river water still dripped from the hole’s lower rim.

  She was gently lowered until she was just next to the hole. “Is the mast in position?” came a faint voice from above.

  “Two inches aft!” she called back as loudly as she could. Then, as the mast shifted, “One inch up! Not so much! Back a little! That’s it!”

  After a series of indistinct cries from the deck, the mast moved slowly toward the hole. At the last moment, though, she saw that it would need a little help, and gave it a shove with her foot.

  It slipped right in. And kept going. Fully ten feet of the hundred-foot mast disappeared into the ship’s hull before, with a deep wooden thunk, it b
ottomed out.

  She looked up, grinning, to see Kerrigan cupping his hands to his mouth and calling down to her. “Belay the mast!”

  Belatedly she remembered the peg still clutched in her arms. Swallowing with a mouth gone completely dry, she reached out with one foot and drew herself close to the seated mast.

  A hole the size of her arm—the very size of the peg—had been drilled through the hull at an angle, where it met up quite tidily with a matching hole in the mast.

  Clinging with her left hand to the rope, using her feet to steady herself, she shifted the peg to her right arm and began to guide the narrow end to the hole.

  But just as it was about to slip in, a drop of water from the hull above fell splat into her eye. She gasped in surprise.

  The peg slipped from her grasp!

  Without thinking she reached for it. But the motion overbalanced her, and she turned topsy-turvy, swinging head-down over a thousand miles of empty air.

  Spinning about its axis, the peg began to fall … slowly, but rapidly gaining speed.

  Still hanging upside down, Arabella clung to the rope with her left hand and reached out her right to snatch the falling peg. But her initial motion had set her swinging, and it was now well out of reach.

  Heart pounding, she tightened her grip on the rope. She was already beginning to swing back. She would have one chance to grab it before it fell away forever, probably to knock senseless some innocent on the planet below.

  Slowly, slowly, she swung toward the falling peg, even as it tumbled Earthward.

  As she reached the bottom of her swing, she reached for the peg and missed. “D—n it!” she cried, astonishing herself.

  But the peg was not yet completely out of reach. Not quite.

  She reached out her hand … she stretched her entire body as far as she possibly could … she extended her fingers to the utmost …

  … and she caught it!

  Here above the falling-line, even a spindly-shanked landsman such as herself had enough strength to pull herself vertical with one arm.

  By the time she righted herself, she had swung back to the mast, which she caught between her feet. From here it was a simple matter to jam the peg firmly in place.

  She looked up to see more than two dozen heads peering over the rail at her, gazing down in astonishment.

  “Will that be all, sir?” she called up to Kerrigan.

  * * *

  Once hauled back on deck and untied from the harness, Arabella received a clap on the shoulder from Faunt and a grudging nod of acknowledgement from Kerrigan. She and the other waisters were then put to work on the other side, swaying out the larboard mast. This time she had no difficulty with the fid.

  When Arabella returned to the deck the second time, she found it a hive of activity, with men and ropes and lengths of wood and huge swaths of Venusian silk running every which way. Arabella was immediately thrown into the maelstrom, helping to drag and haul and carry whatever was needed to wherever it was needed.

  The topmen and riggers busied themselves like spiders, leaping over the rail and scrambling out to the end of each new mast with hundreds of feet of line—called “stays” fore and aft, “shrouds” to either side—to hold each mast firmly in place. They then rigged yards and booms, timbers set at a right angle to each mast, and attached sails to each. Hundreds more feet of ropes of various thicknesses, lines and sheets and halyards, were added to keep the sails taut and control their position and attitude.

  “What’s the great rush?” Arabella asked her messmate Hornsby as they lay gasping together during a brief lull. They’d been laboring without pause for hours and hours, though the sun had not budged in the sky.

  In response Hornsby raised one weary arm and pointed silently forward.

  Ahead and above lay a great curving bank of gray roiling cloud shot with lightning. Arabella had been so busy she’d failed to notice it before, but the ship was plainly heading directly toward it.

  “She needs must be full rigged afore we round the Horn,” Hornsby said.

  Arabella swallowed, then roused her aching body to haul yet more rope and sailcloth.

  9

  ROUNDING THE HORN

  “Ye’ll be wanting this,” Faunt said, handing her a loop of line. The end of the line trailed away behind him.

  Arabella made fast the line she’d been hauling on and took the loop, but then stared blankly at Faunt. In his other hand he held the loop ends of several more lines, and he moved with the high bounding lope of one whose weight has been reduced to no more than a few pounds. “It’s a safety line,” he said, annoyed. “Cinch it tight round yer ankle when yer on deck. And remember: one hand for the ship, one for yerself. Never let go with both hands when we’re rounding the Horn.” He waved ahead at the surging gray maelstrom of cloud that now loomed above, below, and far to either side. Only behind the ship could pure blue sky be seen, and a bit of the Earth so very far below.

  She raised one foot, bouncing lightly off the deck as she did so, and began fitting the loop around her foot. “But I have a question,” she said before he could move away.

  Faunt glared at her from beneath his profuse gray eyebrows.

  “Why don’t we just go around that storm?”

  “’Cause we’d never get to Mars without it, would we?” he thundered. But at her stricken expression, his voice softened a bit. “Look, ye need a good hard kick to get on yer way. The trick is to catch the right wind with all sails set, then strike ’em all down afore it changes. Else ye’ll just blunder about like a lubber, and take a year and a day to get to Mars.”

  “That doesn’t sound easy.” How would she ever manage to understand all of this?

  “Don’t be afeared. The cap’n’s the best.” Then his expression returned to its usual severity. “But every man jack must do his job. Now shake a leg.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  * * *

  Arabella shivered miserably in her hammock while the ship twitched and shuddered in every direction around her. Despite her exhaustion after an endless day of labor—a literally endless day, in which the sun never budged in the sky—and despite the dark and humid warmth of the belowdecks space, she found herself unable to sleep: the motion of the ship, the snores of the airmen close-packed all around, and the strange sensations brought on by lack of gravity were all too distracting.

  Though the state of free descent was not completely foreign to her, as she had experienced it once before on the trip from Mars to Earth, it was still disquieting: her head felt stuffy, as though she’d caught a cold, and there was a dizzy sensation of falling at all times. At least she was not afflicted by aerial nausea, as some of the other “new fish” were.

  There must have been a time when the gravity had fallen away to the point that it was equal to that of Mars. She must have been shoveling coal at that moment, she supposed, and she was sorry to have missed it, because it would have been a moment of familiarity in between the uncomfortable heaviness of Earth and the different discomforts of shipboard floating.

  But at the moment, she felt unimaginably distant from any familiar thing, any comfortable place, any person who cared about her.

  How she wished she had managed to send a letter to her mother! Though the two of them had often been at odds, she still felt tenderly toward her, and after Arabella’s sudden and unexplained departure—and what story had Beatrice concocted to explain her absence?—Mother must be completely overcome with anxiety. And poor Fanny and Chloë would be entirely bereft.

  Another gust, feeling like a hard shove on the end of her bed, made Arabella’s hammock thrum like a low harpsichord string between the hooks on either end. They’d begun rounding the Horn some hours ago, and since then the ship had been nudged and jerked by capricious winds from every direction. Winds that had been steadily growing in strength.

  The Horn, she had learned, was the airmen’s term for the place where the daily-rotating atmosphere of Earth met the yearly-rotating interplanet
ary atmosphere, the two great masses of air grinding against each other like a pair of millstones. It was a place of constant turbulence, but as Faunt had explained, an experienced crew could make good use of the ever-shifting winds to send the ship rapidly in any desired direction. This pummeling wind was a good thing.

  Then a sudden massive jolt hammered the ship, accompanied by a loud protesting groan of wood, and Arabella shrieked aloud.

  “Shut yer yap!” cried a nearby airman. Arabella clapped both hands across her mouth, but the sensation of being pushed hard from one side and the creak of stressed timbers went on and on. A low whimper escaped from behind her hands.

  Dear Lord, she prayed, preserve me.

  With another loud and sudden jerk, the ship slewed upward, then was slammed down. Each motion was accompanied by unexplained creaks, groans, and rattles from every direction. The creaks and groans, she told herself, were nothing more worrisome than the sounds of Marlowe Hall as the ancient house shifted in a strong wind; Diana had made this passage many times and was surely well built for it. As for the rattles, she supposed that a few beans or nails might have slipped from a cask and were now rattling about the hold.

  Then the ship jerked again, and Arabella stifled another scream as a large dark rat scuttled along an overhead beam not two feet from her face, its claws rattling on the khoresh-wood. The rat ran nimbly along the beam’s lower surface, apparently untroubled by the lack of gravity.

  Arabella squeezed her eyes tight and prayed harder, feeling like a die in a cup being shaken by God in some enormous game of backgammon.

  Suddenly the hatch was thrown open, letting in a gust of wind and throwing harsh and shifting light directly into her face. Her eyes blinked open and then squeezed shut against the glare. “Rise and shine, lads!” came the cry, which was greeted by groans from the men. Had it really been four hours? She hadn’t slept a wink.

  * * *

  Breakfast was a quick, cold bite of hard ship’s biscuit, but Arabella was glad of it—any thing hot or more substantial would have been dangerous in the constantly shifting ship.