Gustav had settled behind me and was already tucking into a bowl of something. He looked up and smiled. ‘Wind speeds I can do, estimated times of arrival I can do, exact dimensions of ships…’ He waggled his free hand as if to indicate that this area of his knowledge may be hazy.
‘Well I’m giving you exact measurements,’ said Hector.
‘I’m very impressed with the cloud,’ I said, hoping this was the desired reaction.
‘Jolly good, I like to impress,’ said the captain with a big belly laugh. He turned towards the gathering around him. ‘You see, Mister Meckler is impressed! All I hear from you lot is complaints. Moaning about the food, moaning about the temperature, moaning about the route, always bloody moaning!’
There was a general murmur from the group. It struck me as the slightly suppressed laughter of adults putting up with a rather noisy child.
‘The noodles are very nice, Cap’, I’m not moaning,’ said a teenage girl sitting to my left.
‘Very pleased to hear it,’ said the captain, who passed his presumably empty bowl to a worryingly thin young man sitting next to him.
‘So, Mister Meckler, as you probably know we are currently resting at 10,000 metres and travelling at about 300 kilometres an hour, and yet we have no engines.’
He turned and faced the people gathered around him. ‘You see, in Mister Meckler’s dimension everything had engines, nothing worked without an engine, isn’t that right, Mister Meckler?’
‘Well, we had bicycles,’ I said rather weakly.
‘But you couldn’t transport many thousands of people through the skies without engines.’
‘No, I suppose we couldn’t,’ I confirmed nervously.
‘You couldn’t have schools and hospitals, dormitories, exercise areas, sun lounges, heat, light and food for thousands of people floating gently through the sky.’
‘No, we couldn’t do any of that.’
‘You see, things aren’t so bad here,’ he said to his audience. ‘So no more moaning, alright, chaps? Mister Meckler is very grateful to be here.’
‘I am,’ I said, again hoping this was the right thing to say.
‘Now, Mister Meckler, tell me this. Are you aware of your predicament?’ Hector raised one of his enormous eyebrows and stared at me intently. It was quite hard not to laugh.
‘My predicament? I suppose it depends which one you mean. I seem to have quite a few.’
‘I am referring to your predicament here in this lovely dimension. You are quite safe among my crew, we all know your circumstances and hold no resentment against you.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, feeling increasingly baffled. ‘Thank you.’
The captain stared at me with serious intent. ‘Do you know anything about the Original Five?’
‘The Original Five?’ Just stating that made it fairly plain I didn’t have a clue. The captain remained silent so I said, ‘No. I don’t know anything about, well, about anything. This is all new to me.’
‘Excellent, well, let me explain,’ he said, leaning forward with his enormous hairy hands resting on his wide splayed knees. I noticed a few of the people sitting around him made no attempt to cover their dismay. It was very like a family gathering where the father of the clan is going to tell one of his stories, the one they’d heard over and over again at every family event.
‘The Original Five are the resentful ones. They really won’t like you.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said trying to play along. ‘May I ask why?’
For reasons I didn’t have a hope of fathoming, this question caused quite raucous laughter among the 15 or so crew members sitting around me.
‘The Original Five are a very resentful group of chaps,’ said Hector, sitting back against his enormous inflated cushions again. ‘They don’t like me, oh no. Indeed they do not, they don’t like my cloud, they don’t seem to like anything that they didn’t build.’
‘Hector is referring to the first five clouds that were launched more than 50 years ago,’ said Gustav. ‘They are still flying, not very high, not very comfortably and, possibly now, not very safely. The people who built them have become, how to describe it, renegades.’
‘Oh, they’re harmless enough, they are just very noisy and can be quite annoying,’ said Hector. ‘The biggest of the Original Five is a mere kilometre long, it is but a puff of mist, Mister Meckler.’
‘But I can’t quite understand what they are resentful about,’ I said. ‘How would they even know about me?’
‘Oh, they know everything,’ said Hector. ‘I believe you’ve already met one of their number.’
‘Ebrikke is from Cloud Five,’ said Gustav.
I stared at him.
‘Where Ebrikke wants to go, Ebrikke goes,’ said Hector. ‘She’s slung her hook now, she’s off back down to Cloud Five which is about 4,000 metres below us, heading away from the pole at a rate of knots, sir!’
I know my mouth was hanging open at that point and I only regret that it may have been full of half-chewed noodles.
‘You mean the woman with the cushion that changed colour who put her fingers on my temple is one of these people?’
‘That is correct,’ said Gustav.
‘But if she’s one of these resentful people who don’t like me, well, you could have told me.’
‘There was nothing we could do,’ said Gustav quietly.
Hector leaned toward me. ‘She’s just a little bit difficult to manage,’ he said in a tone lower than his normal bellow. ‘She’s, well, she’s very advanced, she understands people more than, well, more than we do. She can do more or less as she wants but it would be wrong to suggest she was dangerous or in any way violent.’
I noticed Gustav nodding in agreement.
‘But she seemed perfectly nice,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get the feeling she was resentful about anything.’
‘Oh, she is,’ said Hector, who then put his enormous fist over his mouth and delivered a substantial belch. ‘And they would be resentful about you because they blame the past for the present.’
‘They blame the past for the present,’ I repeated, although the phrase made no sense.
‘The activities of history have taught us nothing, we have become the destroyer of worlds and we must suffer because of it.’ Hector glanced at Gustav. ‘Or something like that.’
‘A fair rendition of their core beliefs,’ said Gustav quietly. He turned to me. ‘It might be best to think of them as a sect.’
‘I see,’ I said, not really seeing anything.
‘I’m sure you don’t see anything,’ said Hector with a big grin. ‘But worry not, young man, we will look after you.’
I almost jumped off the spongy floor at that moment because Hector clapped his enormous hands together with such force the sound hurt my ears.
‘Much as I would love to sit and chat with you lovely people all day,’ he bellowed, ‘I have a cloud to navigate.’
‘Thanks for the update, Captain,’ said another young man sitting near him.
‘Just doing my job, as I hope in the very near future you will be doing yours. ETA for docking is at zero nine forty,’ said Hector as he slowly got to his feet.
He grunted with effort as he stood. He wasn’t a small man but as he moved through the crowd toward me I could feel no movement in the bouncy floor.
‘Mister Meckler, would you like to accompany me, I’m off to the obs tower to check our progress. I think you’ll enjoy having a look at how we do things.’
‘Okay, that would be great.’
I stuffed the remainder of my noodles into my mouth and started to try and get up. I suddenly felt an enormous force lift me. Only as I was standing up did I realise it was due to the captain – he had grabbed me under the arms and hoisted me to my feet.
&n
bsp; ‘Come along, I haven’t got all day,’ he bellowed and started to half hold, half push me along, my feet only occasionally making contact with the springy surface of the floor.
I passed my bowl to a woman who was holding her hand out to take it from me. They did all seem to work together rather well but I was surprised once again to register little interest from the crowd of people that had been surrounding the captain.
‘Thanks,’ I managed to say as we made our way through the vast crowds of people in this massive tubular tent.
‘I’ll get one of the young folks to teach you how to walk, it’s not that hard, you just have to let the floor support you,’ said Hector as he half carried me back into the corridor from the large white bubble we’d been sitting in.
We turned to the right and at the far end we reached a circular doorway where I thought I saw someone sliding down what appeared to be a bright blue wall on the far side of another balloon-shaped space.
Due to the strange way I was being bounced along the floor by the enormous captain, it was hard to know exactly what I’d seen. A woman emerged from the distant room and walked past us.
‘Captain,’ she said and I saw that Hector nodded at her as she passed. I glanced back at the blue wall as we approached it. Up until that point every part of the structure I had seen appeared to be made of the same off-white material, all except for this blue wall.
It was vertical and set into one of the walls of the smaller spherical atrium we soon arrived in. This was a bizarre enough spectacle, but what was far more disconcerting for my now seriously overloaded twenty-first-century cortex was seeing someone slide up it.
I kid you not, a man just slid up the wall, from what I suppose had to be a lower floor, soundlessly and with no obvious mechanical device holding him there.
‘Captain,’ he said as he passed. I looked up just in time to see his shoes disappear out of the bubble-like room.
I think I was making sounds, nothing of a comprehensible nature, mostly whimpers of fear.
I was faced with a blue wall which looked a bit like a vertical version of the things passenger jets deploy in an emergency, a kind of inflatable slide. The man who had passed up this vertical blue thing was facing us as he slid up, it was nonsensical.
‘You’ll have to let me hold onto you until we get you kitted out in a flight suit,’ said the captain. ‘You may find it a little bit intimate but you’ll survive.’
He manoeuvered me toward the inflated blue wall slide then put his two enormous arms around my chest. He leaned against the slide and up we went.
It wasn’t particularly shocking at first as the movement wasn’t violent. It was just like being in an elevator, except it was nothing like being in an elevator. For a start an elevator has buttons, lights, adverts for the gym and sauna on floor 15, an elevator has sliding doors and most importantly it has a floor.
This vertical journey was not very comfortable. I was being squeezed from behind by an enormous bear of a man and as we went up my head made contact with a soft layer of material.
Initially this was slightly painful because my head was pushed down rather violently as the material flopped back into shape. It didn’t cause actual injury or even muscle strain but there’s no previous experience I can liken it to so there’s no clear way of explaining what it felt like.
‘Sorry about that,’ said the big captain behind me. ‘Just push your head back and you’ll be right as rain.’
I soon realised these were floors we were passing, each of these soft floppy layers of quilted material that thwacked my head were floors in an enormous inflatable building.
‘Here we are,’ said the captain.
He pushed me forward and I half fell onto yet another off-cream padded surface. ‘The view is much better from here, you’ll be able to see what’s going on,’ he said as he hoisted me to my feet and we moved along a wide, brightly lit corridor.
We went through a circular opening and into an eye-popping space, a large room with massive windows all around the sides. The view of the cloudscape around us was spectacular.
‘Sit there, Mister Meckler,’ said the captain, pointing to what I assumed was a raised seating unit along one wall. ‘Then you won’t be falling all over the place annoying people.’
I clambered up onto the seat. I don’t think I’ve felt so much like a six-year-old visiting daddy’s office since I was six and I visited my dad’s office.
Once I had settled I tried to take in the vision before me. It’s not easy to describe. Obviously being a pilot myself, the vast vision of life above the clouds was no great shock: I could see for literally hundreds of kilometres in every direction through the large windows around me. What was shocking though was my immediate surroundings. I was in a vast floating man-made cloud that, at a glance at least, resembled its water vapour brothers to a baffling extent.
The sun was setting to my right and the light coming through the clouds was breathtaking. Shafts of multi-coloured light bursting forth like some Pink Floyd lighting effect at a 1970s concert. However, my eyes had already grown attuned to the fact that not all the clouds I could see in the vast panorama before me were made of dense collections of water particles. I could spot three that were clearly of a similar construction to the one I was on.
Inside the near-spherical capsule I was seated in were a handful of people in similar garb to the majority of people I’d met. The only one who stood out was the corpulent Captain Hector. I’d remembered his name: Hector.
He had taken up position at a central console and although I couldn’t make out what they were saying there was a lot of chatter going on between the various people surrounding him.
As soon as I settled in the seat I was aware of one thing: we were descending. Not at any great speed, but I could sense the movement in my stomach, that slight rise you feel in your gut as you start to drop down.
As we descended I started to notice other cloud formations emerge from the brilliant vista around us.
They started to stand out from the actual water particle clouds around them. These were not clouds, they were constructions like the one I was in. One that was much closer to us than the others looked fairly small, but I suddenly noticed one in the far distance high above us.
It was beyond belief. It was like looking at a storm cloud from 50 miles away, a massive gathering of material that stretched all credibility. It had to be not only miles long, but miles high, it was a full-sized cumulonimbus cloud built by human beings.
Then I noticed another cloud, and another one behind that, one coming in from above and a couple coming up from lower down. Each of them looked large but still we seemed to be slowly circling the truly massive one.
The captain turned to me with a big grin on his bearded face.
‘Cloud Ten,’ he shouted. ‘Pretty impressive, huh? Bet you didn’t have them 200 years ago.’
I nodded my agreement as the captain turned back to his work, whatever it was he was doing.
So I was on a cloud that had a captain, a man, a massive bearded man who was clearly in control and very confident of the fact. I felt depressed. Although I’d found the Squares of London a difficult place to understand, there was something hugely relaxing about the women who controlled everything.
This encounter with a large authoritarian male made me feel like I was once again a new boy in a big school and he was the friendly bully.
I had also been told that there were renegade clouds, ones used by people who wouldn’t like me, some kind of bonkers religious sect who hated what the human race had done to the planet.
I didn’t particularly like any of it.
5
Do clouds combine?
It’s not something I’ve ever considered. I’m no meteorologist and I don’t know if naturally formed clouds do actually combine togethe
r.
Whether it does or does not happen, what I do know is when huge, inflatable and occasionally frighteningly flexible man-made clouds combine, it’s quite an amazing thing to witness.
The docking process took many hours but I didn’t miss one minute. From my position in a central inflatable tower formation on Cloud Nine I watched as each part of what was clearly going to be a mega-cloud joined together.
The central cloud pulling every other cloud to its flanks was very obviously Cloud Ten. I had spotted numerous other cloud structures, some seemingly smaller than the one I was on, some larger, but essentially of a similar-looking design.
However, as the really big one lowered down toward us, I think I stopped breathing for a while. The captain called over to me at one point.
‘Look up, Mister Meckler, you don’t want to miss this.’
As I looked up I admonished myself for not previously noticing the massive window in the roof of the structure. There had been so much going on all around me I had never thought to look up.
There, above me, and much closer than I expected, was the billowing colossus that I knew to be Cloud Ten. It had to be many tens of kilometres across, maybe hundreds. I certainly couldn’t see either end as it seemed to fill every window.
It slowly approached us, and when I say slowly I mean really slowly; if you stared at it for a couple of minutes you couldn’t see any change, but when you looked at something else and glanced back, suddenly it seemed a lot closer.
It was only after the lower sections of the massive shape came into view through the many side windows that the barely perceptible cloud dance I’d been witnessing started to make sense.
All the other clouds I’d seen had formed a massive circle, a ring of man-made clouds at least 50 kilometres across. Judging distance, size or speed with these floating monoliths was utterly beyond my ability without instruments. Over a couple of hours Cloud Ten slowly descended into this circle and filled it. It was a very different design to the other clouds I’d seen, including the one I was on.
News from the Clouds Page 4