She came out on deck to find the ship embedded in bright, thrashing cloud. All around the tempest roiled, white and gray and black with not a trace of blue, here and there shot with occasional bursts of lightning. The sound of thunder was lost in the constant rush of wind and groan of the ship’s embattled structure.
“Ashby!” came a shout from the quarterdeck. It took Arabella a moment to register the name as her own, and when she finally did she saw it was Kerrigan who had called. He was waving pointedly at her and looking very cross in the harsh and shifting light.
Arabella checked that her safety line was well attached at both ends before working her way hand by hand along the rail to the aft end of the waist. All around her, more experienced airmen leapt from deck to mast to yard with hardly a care; many of them did not even wear safety lines like hers. Some day, she vowed, she’d be as brave as they.
“Yes, sir?” she called from the foot of the ladder when she reached it.
“The captain requests you bring him his tea!”
Tea? In this weather? But “Aye, aye, sir,” was what she said.
She made her way down to the galley, where two of the other waisters were working the bellows that kept the stove alight. For some reason, the lack of weight made the fire go out. “The captain wants his tea,” she told the cook, expecting a snide remark or possibly even a thrashing, but without a word of complaint the cook set to work, squeezing water from a huge skin—apparently made from a whole cowhide—into a stout iron kettle, which he twisted firmly into a fitting atop the stove to keep it from floating away. In minutes the kettle was boiling, the rumbling sound incongruously homely against the rush of wind and moan of timbers.
“Watch out, boys,” the cook said to Arabella and the other two waisters. “This’s hot.” He twisted off the kettle’s lid, then used a pair of wooden paddles to shepherd a seething, roiling glob of boiling water out of the kettle and into a plain white china teapot.
Arabella gaped in astonishment at the floating blob of water. For the cook to manage this dangerous, unpredictable fluid in a state of free descent, in the middle of a turbulent storm, was an amazing performance, and Arabella’s respect for the one-legged old man suddenly grew tenfold.
The lid of the teapot also fastened with a twist, and the spout was plugged with a cork. “Get this up to the old man straight away,” the cook said, thrusting the pot at Arabella. “He don’t like it if’n it’s too strong.”
She drew in a sharp breath at the pot’s heat, and juggled it from hand to hand. Were the cook’s palms made of leather?
As she came up on deck with the teapot, Arabella held it to her chest with one arm—bunching up her shirt to keep the pot from burning her arm and side—so as to keep the other hand free. And she was most glad of that free hand as the wind assailed her, threatening to whip her away immediately; she clung to the guide ropes and shuffled along, not letting either foot leave the deck, for fear of being swept overboard.
Though there was no rain as such, the rapidly moving air was filled with stinging tiny drops of water, which half-blinded her eyes and made the footing treacherous. At least it was fresh, not salt.
At last she reached the quarterdeck, requested and received permission to ascend, and approached the captain with her steaming burden. But just as the captain was turning to face her, she felt a jerk on her ankle and fell forward.
The teapot flew from her hands, bounced once upon the deck, and sailed away into the roiling heavens. In moments it was lost to sight.
Furious and ashamed, Arabella looked behind herself to see what had tripped her. The young officer who’d led the crew that rowed her and the captain across from the dock to Diana—Binion, that was his name—stood nonchalantly by the rail, with his foot several inches from where her safety line snaked across the deck. But the line, she noted, extended dead straight from her to Binion, then curved away from his position, as though it had a moment ago been drawn taut by some force in his vicinity.
“Ashby,” the captain said, and she snapped her attention back to him.
“Sir?”
“I requested you bring my tea to me,” he remarked mildly, “not fling it over the side.” But his face was very serious.
Arabella took a breath to explain herself, but the captain interrupted her before she could speak.
“On this ship, Ashby, we do not lay blame or make excuses. Each man must perform his duty. Upon occasion, circumstances intervene; in such a situation, we are judged by our ability to do what is required despite any obstacles. Do you understand, Ashby?”
Arabella swallowed her excuse and her pride. “Yes, sir.”
“I am still waiting for my tea, Ashby.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” She turned, with as much dignity as she could muster in a state of free descent buffeted by winds from every direction, and hurried back to the galley.
As she passed Binion, he gave her a nasty, knowing smirk. “Captain’s boy, eh?” he muttered, so low that no one else could have heard it. “Captain’s bum-boy, more like it. It’s clear you’re no airman.”
She glared hard at him, but though he was her junior by several years, he did outrank her and she dared not raise her voice to him.
He met her gaze with a nasty, knowing smirk. “Don’t get above your station, bum-boy,” he whispered. “You’ll be smacked down, and don’t think you won’t. And don’t go running to the captain neither.”
She glanced quickly at the captain, who stood in conference with the other senior officers just as though they were not all floating in a near-weightless state. The captain’s eyes met hers, and he flicked one finger in a clear gesture: Go.
She went.
And she’d show that snotty little Binion that she was too good to rise to his bait.
* * *
Days passed. As Diana drew further round the Horn, the constant buffeting of the winds grew stronger and even more capricious. The captain kept the topmen busy watch after watch, constantly raising and striking and adjusting the sails to catch the favorable winds and coast through the unfavorable ones.
When the wind was in Diana’s favor and all sails were set, life was calm; the ship seemed to simply drift along, the sails billowing gently and a mild breeze blowing across the deck from astern. But this seeming tranquility belied the ship’s actual velocity, for she was embedded in a mass of moving air whose speed might exceed eight thousand knots.
But when the wind blew contrary, the captain struck all sails and Diana flew with bare poles, doing her best to glide through with the speed and heading she’d built up during the last favorable wind. Winds might come whipping in from any side, above, or below, and could shift dramatically at any moment. Even seasoned hands wore safety lines, and the men of the watch on duty scrubbed the deck or polished the brass with one eye on the weather. For at any moment a favorable breeze might pick up and the captain call all men aloft to set sail, or equally likely a new and even more inimical wind might suddenly begin to blow from another quarter, tumbling men set too firmly against the old wind over the side.
* * *
And then came the times when no wind blew at all.
These times were rare at the Horn. But when they did occur, Diana must needs move quickly and nimbly, lest she find herself becalmed in an atmospheric eddy, losing all the momentum she hoped to build up at the Horn for the long swing to Mars. Without that momentum, the voyage to Mars might take not just two months, but over a year.… a year for which the ship’s stores of food and water would be sadly inadequate.
Arabella was filling and winding the lamps in the captain’s cabin—a fascinating small clockwork mechanism advanced the wick and provided a draught to keep the flame alive—when the bosun’s pipe sounded, followed by a chorus of voices: “Idlers and waisters to the pedals!” Sighing, she carefully capped and stowed the oil canister before reporting to her duty station.
As she arrived at her station belowdecks, pulling herself through the air hand over hand along the g
uideline, the other waisters had already cleared away most of the cargo from the ship’s central line and opened the panels in the floor, exposing fifty or sixty wooden seats. Each “seat” was a hard, narrow, massively uncomfortable saddle, really nothing more than a board whose hard edges had been softened by years of pedaling thighs, and as Arabella raised her seat and locked it into place with a peg her legs and bottom began to ache preemptively. She could not imagine how men, whose natural equipment occupied the same space between their legs as the wooden seat, could possibly pedal without doing themselves serious injury, but somehow they managed.
Arabella positioned herself on her seat, tied herself into place with a stout cord across her lap, then slipped her feet into the pedals’ leather straps and awaited the command to begin. All around her the other waisters and idlers—any one else who was not currently occupied in the handling of the ship—grumbled and sighed as they did the same. “Step lively, now!” Binion called from his station near the bow. “Time’s a-wasting!”
Finally all the men were settled. “By the right,” Binion shouted, “pedal!” The command was accompanied by a thud from the drum fastened to the deck before him, which he struck with a large wooden mallet.
Arabella grunted as she pressed hard with her right foot on the wooden pedal, the strain transmitting itself through her body to the stout horizontal rod she grasped in her hands. Most of the other pedalers grunted as well, but the sound was lost behind the groaning creak of wood and leather as the whole complicated system of cogged wheels and perforated leather belts beneath the deck moved complainingly into action.
A long, creaking moment later Binion called, “By the left!” and struck the drum again. Arabella and all the others leaned to the right as they pressed with their left feet, the awkward protesting pedals moving slowly in a circle beneath each man, returning to the point where they’d started. “Right!” and another drumbeat began the cycle again.
Before the pedals had gone around ten times Arabella was already streaming with sweat—sweat that in the close warm dark of belowdecks refused to evaporate, and which in a state of free descent did not even have the decency to run down her face. Instead, it clung to her forehead and temples and cheeks, stinging and blinding her eyes no matter how much she blinked and shook it away. Not that there was any thing to see here in any case. Grimly she set her jaw and pedaled, pedaled, pedaled to the incessant beat of the drum.
Beneath the deck, she knew, a series of creaking shafts and belts transmitted the force of the men’s pedaling feet to the propulsive sails, or “pulsers,” at the ship’s extreme aft. These five triangular sails, unlike any others on the ship, turned in a circle like a windmill’s blades, and somehow—Arabella didn’t quite grasp the philosophical principle—rather than catching the wind that usually pushed the ship forward, they actually created a wind where no natural wind existed.
But the pulsers’ wind, the product of mere human effort, was but a pale imitation of God’s own wind, and for all the men’s labor it pushed the ship at a comparative snail’s pace. But still, from what Arabella had learned, it was better than drifting hopelessly, and after some hours or days of work might serve to move the ship from an area of calm into a favorable wind.
At least, that was the men’s hope. Arabella had heard tales of ships thoroughly becalmed, crews pedaling day upon day for weeks, men dying of thirst and of cramp while fruitlessly praying for the faintest breath of breeze.
On and on the drum pounded, the men grunted, the pedals creaked, the belts wailed like tortured cats. The carpenter and his men were kept busy anointing the many moving parts with grease, and from time to time a halt was called so that a broken or misaligned part could be repaired. The complex mechanism that transmitted the men’s effort to the pulsers was balky and unreliable but, again, better than drifting hopelessly. Arabella gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the burning in her upper thighs.
And then—oh, God be praised!—a new sound intruded upon the dark and groaning space between decks, a faint whispering rush, and Arabella felt the ship shift with a new and tentative life that issued from a source other than her and the other men’s pedaling efforts. A weak cheer sprang up at that, and a few men slacked off their labors, but Binion cursed them and pounded his drum still more insistently. “You’ll pedal till I tell you to stop!” he said, and so weary were the men that none could spare even a mutter of complaint at that.
Finally, as the whisper of wind grew to a constant, comforting waft accompanied by a gentle yet insistent pressure, one of the other officers appeared and whispered in Binion’s ear. “Leave off pedaling!” Binion called, and with a great sigh the men obeyed.
Arabella floated, gasping, in her seat, her burning legs twitching like a pond full of agitated frogs. Sweat stung her eyes and pooled beneath her arms. The smell was of the Augean stables.
“Stow pedals!” Binion shouted then. Wearily, with fingers numb from hours of gripping the rod before her, Arabella began to untie the cord that bound her to the hateful seat.
10
LIFE IN MIDAIR
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Captain Singh turned from where he sat staring out the wide, paned window. The roiling gray clouds of the Horn lay well abaft now, and the sun streamed in from a clear blue sky. The ship’s constant shifting and jerking had been replaced by a smooth, imperceptible drift that felt like no movement at all, though the other members of Arabella’s watch assured her that the mass of air in which Diana was embedded was moving at some thousands of miles per hour, carrying the ship along with it.
“Yes, Ashby.” The captain swiveled himself about, his body twisting in the air to face her, though he did not touch the wall or deck with either hands or feet. Arabella had grown far more comfortable with weightlessness, but this elegant demonstration of experience and skill brought home just how much more she had to learn. She hoped that some day she might move as handsomely as he. “Now that we have rounded the Horn, I have time and attention to devote to the education of the ship’s young gentlemen. And in that number, for certain purposes, I include yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.” She bowed in the air, which caused her to begin a tumble which she checked with a hand to the door frame.
The captain, to his eternal credit, appeared to take no notice of Arabella’s clumsiness. He moved to where Aadim, the clockwork navigator, sat fixed to his desk, facing out the same window. “Please come over here and observe these dials.”
Arabella pushed off from the door frame and drifted across the cabin, bringing herself to a halt beside the captain. For a moment she nearly brushed against his buff-clad shoulder, and the sudden effort of controlling her motion in the air to prevent that contact made her heart race.
Suddenly, with a soft creak and a whir of gears, the navigator’s head swiveled to face Arabella and inclined in a slight nod.
Arabella gaped in astonishment. “Did he just … notice me?”
“An interesting question.” The captain smiled. “Aadim is, in effect, the face of the ship. His mechanisms extend throughout Diana, from the forward anemometer beneath the figurehead to the rotational counter on the pulser drive shaft. Within this cabin he has several components that affect the actions of his head and eyes.” He gestured to a small, unobtrusive lens in a brass fitting on the bulkhead to his left. “Sunlight from the window falls upon that lens. When it is interrupted, the change in temperature causes a cam to shift, transmitting power to the shafts that turn the head.”
Arabella couldn’t look away from the green glass eyes that seemed to meet her own. “It’s rather … disquieting.”
At that a small line appeared between the captain’s bushy black brows. “I’m sorry you find it so.”
For some reason the captain’s disapproval, however mild, bit deeply at Arabella’s heart, and she quickly amended her position. “Well, it’s all a bit strange now. I am certain I shall become accustomed to it.”
The captain’s face be
trayed no emotion. “I hope so.”
For a moment longer the automaton’s eyes remained still, then with a click and a whir the eyes and head swiveled back to face out the window. Arabella strove to focus her attention on the ingenuity of the mechanism rather than the somewhat disturbing effect the action had upon her sensibilities.
The captain pointed to one of the dials on the front face of the desk. “This dial indicates our current air speed, as determined by the anemometer I mentioned earlier.”
Arabella turned herself in the air for a better look at the dial. “Twenty knots?”
“Twenty-one, to be precise. But, of course, we are traveling much faster than that relative to the Earth.” He pointed to another dial.
“Seven and a half.… thousand knots?”
“Indeed. Would you care to speculate how the two figures are calculated, and why they differ?”
“Well … an anemometer measures the speed of wind, so this must measure the ship’s speed relative to the air mass we are passing through. But the other…” She frowned, concentrating. “The ship’s speed relative to Earth is largely determined by the speed of the air mass itself, but how to measure that?” She thought a bit more. “Could one determine the distance to Earth by measuring the angular distance between, say, London and Paris, as seen through the telescope?”
The captain shook his head, though he smiled—and that smile warmed Arabella’s heart far out of proportion to its slight extent. “An interesting guess, and not entirely incorrect.” He opened a cabinet, revealing several cylinders of gleaming brass. “These devices form part of the actual solution.” He removed one of the devices from the cabinet. It was a small brass telescope, perhaps ten inches long and an inch in diameter, attached by a swivel onto a wooden shaft about two feet long. He pointed out that the bottom end of the shaft was a brass fitting with a cross-shaped point. “This fits into one of several sockets in key locations throughout the ship.” Drifting across the cabin, he indicated a brass disk set into the deck with a matching cross-shaped hole in it. He inserted the pointed end of the telescope’s shaft into the hole, where it seated with a precise click, then swiveled the telescope back and forth. From this location, she noted, the telescope had a view of nearly half the sky through the broad stern window. “The horizontal angle, which we call lambda, is transmitted to Aadim through cables. The vertical angle, or phi, is measured on this scale here”—he pointed to a brass scale etched onto the telescope’s swivel—“and set by the operator through the dial next to the socket.”
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