News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Okay, I may have a couple of negative things to say,’ I replied eventually, trying to imagine meeting someone like that in Chipping Norton on market day. For some reason that was the location that came to mind when Theda suggested it. A sunny Saturday in Chipping Norton, me and Beth going shopping and suddenly this smartly dressed man in military uniform with a silly moustache starting to hold forth about King and Country, the Bosch, the glory of war and the need for me to defend the British Empire. I’m sure I’d have something cutting to say, but knowing me, I’d think of it three hours later, when I was back at home putting stuff in the fridge.

  ‘Okay,’ said Theda. ‘Now, imagine that the war Great Britain and Germany started didn’t stop, ever. Imagine it was still going on when you were alive and all the young men you’d grown up with had been needlessly slaughtered in an endless war of attrition. You may feel more hostile.’

  ‘Oh, right, okay, I suppose I get your drift.’

  ‘People here, now, the people on this cloud, the few millions of people who manage to survive around the world, they are not constantly thinking that people from 200 years ago are all to blame. Of course not. But if they knew you were from 2011, then it might, as I understand it, cause considerable upset. Some people who have lost members of their families in chaotic weather accidents, people who know their forebears suffered greatly in brutal storms. Yes, there would be a lot of anger and despair aimed at you.’

  It’s important to point out that as Theda was saying this to me she was lying on her back, totally naked. As I recall it, the situation sounds odd, but at the time it all seemed very normal and humdrum. I was also naked and sprawled out on a big cushion beside her.

  We were just topping up our cloud tans, it was all part of the daily routine.

  After six days on-board Cloud Eleven, Theda told me we were approaching a big docking event. Clouds Six to Ten were converging over the Bay of Biscay and it was a very momentous event apparently.

  I was intrigued to see how this could be achieved, but even this extraordinary airborne docking didn’t hold quite the fascination it might have done at one time.

  I was not overwhelmed by it; I’d grown used to life on the clouds and certainly preferred it to living in a culvert. Sure, the docking would be interesting but I was lost in a kind of mesmerised state. Whenever I looked out of a window or lay on a couch in the sun lounges I entered an almost zen-like state of calm, not something I could ever remember experiencing before. Maybe flying in mechanically powered, heavier-than-air machines had given me a taste for it, but flying a plane is quite complicated, requires a lot of concentration and planning, so going all zen-like and dreamy is probably not a good course of action, but on this big cloud it just became a way of life.

  On my last morning on Cloud Eleven I had woken as usual. The amazing window that made up one side of my suite immediately turned from dark opaque to utterly invisible as soon as I started to move around. I was surrounded by embedded technology I’d become so used to that I no longer had any interest in discovering how it operated.

  I had a shower and even that incredible system had become mundane. As soon as I’d had enough of being sprayed I just brushed a finger on a low set panel, the water stopped and I was instantly bathed in a powerful jet of warm air, which dried me in a few seconds.

  I did some stretching, another thing I’d never done before I left 2011, but I’d found it highly beneficial to have a proper stretch in the morning. I wasn’t doing yoga or anything. although I knew there were numerous yoga classes I could have attended.

  I was just starting to ponder what to do with my day when Theda bustled into my silent reverie and, as I’d witnessed on a couple of occasions, she was excited and skittish. It is only worth mentioning because her mood was in complete contrast to her normal rather dour and serious Germanic demeanour.

  ‘Come quickly, Gavin, we will be docking soon!’

  ‘Really?’ I said, without much interest.

  ‘Gavin! Two of the biggest objects ever constructed by the human race are going to become one, we cannot miss this moment.’

  ‘Great,’ I said as enthusiastically as I could. I wasn’t excited. I should have been, but by this point in my journey I didn’t want anything to disturb my calm mental state.

  Theda was pacing around the room, staring out of the window and jumping up and down.

  ‘Also I have just been informed that there is a weather window making it possible for you to transfer to Cloud Nine and head for England.’

  My reaction to this news was a little more enthusiastic.

  ‘That soon?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, the weather patterns are indicating you could get back to Gardenia today,’ said Theda. She walked up to me and hugged me. That was the first time we’d had any physical contact more than a handshake and I found it quite emotional.

  That’s correct, a feeling hit me and I was aware of it, still a slightly perturbing experience for me.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to go,’ I said, as I continued to hold her, ‘I love it on Cloud Eleven.’

  Theda gently broke the embrace and smiled at me. ‘I know it is a very amazing experience to be on-board,’ she said. ‘But we both need to go back home, we don’t belong here.’

  ‘I know we don’t, but I don’t want to forget all this. I don’t understand why I won’t be able to remember anything. I know Brad explained it.’

  ‘It is a very complicated notion,’ Theda conceded with a smile.

  I stood in the middle of my suite feeling hollow, I was having all sorts of feelings all the time and I was very aware of them but that didn’t really help. In fact in many ways having feelings but not being aware of them until much later has its advantages.

  Eventually I said, ‘Due to the madness of this whole experience, I’m prepared to accept that I’ll forget all this. You, Brad, the Chicago Culvert, Noshi, the Squares of London, Gardenia, everything.’

  Theda nodded slowly, ‘You will, Gavin, it will be as if none of this happened. There won’t even be traces of these events in your subconscious, it will all be completely erased. But remember there are benefits to this occurrence. Your complete lack of knowledge of everything you have experienced will make your return to your own time much less traumatic. If you knew this would happen to your world, you might go a little crazy, no?’

  I shrugged. There was nothing I could do, the prospect of a return to Gardenia was enough to make me realise I’d go mad if I stayed in luxury on Cloud Eleven for the rest of my life. Besides, there was no way I could do that, I was sure to end up in some remote culvert growing carrots all day.

  I started packing, which to be honest, didn’t take long. My boots and a bag, plus the few bits of survival kit like my cool sunshade eye covers and a sachet of tooth regen-paste.

  Yes, you heard right, there were no such thing as a dentist on the clouds; any decay just disappeared, this paste repaired any damage to your tooth enamel and neutralised damaging microbes from the gum line long before a cavity or gum disease could get a foothold.

  I stood looking out at the majestic view from my stupendous windows for a moment, then sighed, turned and followed Theda out of my luxurious, peaceful Cloud Eleven suite for the last time.

  25

  In terms of scale only actual geography could match what I saw next. When I say geography I mean mountains, oceans, major land masses. I admit they are going to be bigger, but in terms of man-made objects there has, I am confident in saying, never been any single item bigger than Cloud Eleven.

  You could suggest that mega-cities are man-made objects and some of those would indeed be bigger, but then Cloud Eleven was a very large floating city with literally millions of inhabitants.

  It might not be as big as, say, Beijing or Los Angeles back in the day, but it wasn’t far off. In terms of single connected ob
jects it won the race, it was one enormous floating lump as opposed to a collection of millions of buildings scattered about on the ground.

  While I was dreaming away in my suite, the cloud had been slowly reforming itself into a completely different configuration.

  What I’d seen of it from the ground when I was stumbling across the dirt with Noshi was a structure that had looked very much like a cloud.

  Now, from what I could gather by staring over people’s shoulders at a viewing area, Cloud Eleven more resembled a massive swirling storm, a huge cloud formation with a 20 kilometre-diameter hole in the middle. What was rising to fill that mind-boggling cavern was Cloud Ten.

  I soon learned from all the excitement around me that Cloud Ten would dock within Cloud Eleven, and according to one very knowledgeable woman standing next to me, in the not too distant future Cloud Twelve would be able to accommodate Cloud Eleven within its super-sized flanks.

  The clouds were not only vast, they were able to reshape themselves. I was busy working it out with my crude twenty-first-

  century engineer’s brain. I surmised that internal walls within the structure could separate in some elaborate way and reform themselves into a huge kind of doughnut shape, making a protected docking area in the middle.

  I went through my, by this stage, very standard historical calibration trying to imagine what a sailor from the Napoleonic era would have made of HMS Bulwark, a British Naval assault support ship that can half-sink itself, allowing a large section of the interior to become a kind of dock. If you had only ever seen or sailed in wooden ships, if you only knew about tar, ballast, sails, ropes and rigging, the idea of a metal ship that could half sink and then raise itself at will would be preposterous and fanciful.

  So I tried to accept that the notion of a lighter-than-air floating city that could reshape itself into a variety of storm clouds was, well, just one of those things.

  The next two hours were spent either waiting in huge crowds in vast atriums or slowly shuffling forward as literally tens of thousands of people shifted from one cloud to another.

  Theda and I made our way slowly onto Cloud Ten, although there was no narrow doorway, just huge open spaces with vast inner atriums that seemed to go on forever.

  It was only the floor that indicated that we’d passed from one structure to the other. When these vast floating machines docked, their internal areas must have reached the same pressure. After this they retracted parts of the outer walls making two previously internal spaces become one.

  Just as we passed the threshold my wrist buzzed gently, I assume Theda’s did too as we both stopped.

  ‘Brad!’ she said. She looked at me with a very serious, concerned German expression.

  I glanced around at the slow-moving crowd all around us. I couldn’t spot him anywhere but after a moment or two he emerged from the throng.

  ‘Glad I caught you,’ he said. ‘Kind of hard to keep track of people around here.’

  ‘I did not think you were coming with us!’ said Theda, the same thought had occurred to me.

  ‘I wasn’t planning to, but events have unfolded. We’ve had some less than good news about the, um, the possible arrival of slightly unwanted guests.’

  Brad held my arm gently and we moved off to the side of the vast opening between the clouds. We found a quiet corner alongside a vast curtain of material that I took to be the folded back outer wall.

  ‘The Original Five know about the weather anomalies,’ said Brad quietly, looking at me carefully. ‘It was bound to happen, we kind of forget about them most of the time as they tend to hang around the equator at low level, but one of their clouds is approaching our current location. It’s not catastrophic, the news took a while to get through and the nearest cloud, I believe it’s Three, is still a few hundred kilometres to the south. However, it’s possible we’re going to have to deal with a situation.’

  ‘What situation?’ I asked.

  ‘Some disruption, the possibility of rapid replanning and for me, a lot of very complex negotiation.’

  ‘Oh blimey,’ I said.

  The three of us moved off. Theda said nothing, in fact none of us spoke as we went deeper into Cloud Ten.

  I couldn’t help noticing it all seemed rather tatty. Using our wristbands for guidance we walked through Cloud Ten and eventually, after a few missed turns down identical tubular corridors, we found our way to the entrance of Cloud Nine.

  That wasn’t so hard to spot as the entrance to it looked so pokey and small. It was a surprise for me to think back to how impressed I had been with this tiny little structure, which was at this point totally engulfed within Cloud Eleven.

  The crowds had thinned out by the time we arrived at the entrance; clearly not a lot of people needed to get on-board Nine.

  ‘Here I leave you, Gavin,’ said Theda as we stood in the near empty corridor.

  Theda and I held each other for some time. She was effectively my great-number-of-times-great-granddaughter who lived in another dimension, who I would not only never see again but would also completely forget about.

  ‘It’s been immense,’ I said.

  ‘That is true. I hope your return home is without mishap.’

  ‘You too, don’t break any more legs and thank you, Theda, you are a truly amazing person.’

  ‘That is kind, but then I have good genes,’ she said with a smile. She possibly had a tear in her eye, I couldn’t be sure.

  At that she turned and walked away, leaving Brad and I standing in a totally empty corridor that led to the entrance to Cloud Nine. I had already started to miss her, not in a lover sort of way, more like how a brother might miss his older sister.

  ‘Welcome back, Gavin,’ said Kirubel as we passed over the threshold. He was standing just inside Cloud Nine looking very smart. ‘You are looking very well, nice cloud tan.’

  We shook hands and I felt the familiar and awkward bouncy floor beneath my feet.

  ‘Thank you, Kirubel,’ I said with a smile. I knew his name, I’d remembered it somehow and I was genuinely pleased to see him.

  ‘This is Brad Dorschel, he’s been helping me.’

  ‘Hi, Brad, good to see you again,’ said Kirubel. I glanced at Brad and he nodded and I felt a little foolish.

  ‘I’ve travelled a great deal on good old Nine,’ said Brad kindly. ‘It’s a fine old cloud.’

  ‘As you can see we are almost empty,’ said Kirubel. ‘Only a few hundred passengers. They are all hoping to get to the Wycombe Culvert, which is, as you may know, close by to where we found you.’

  ‘Wycombe?’ I said, ‘Oh, d’you mean High Wycombe?’

  Kirubel smiled as we walked along an almost deserted reception lounge. ‘It may have been high once, sadly it is now completely subterranean.’

  That rushed journey through the various clouds was exactly the reverse of the experiences I’d had up to that point. I had gone from small and scruffy to huge and utilitarian to massive and luxurious.

  Now I was back with small and scruffy. Everything about Cloud Nine was a bit tatty and worn out. I didn’t notice when I’d first stumbled about on it, but the walls were a bit discoloured. I could see where repairs had been made to the material that made up the internal spaces and of course the elevators were crude.

  We went up the elevator to the control room and this time I barely gave it a second thought.

  ‘Doctor Bradley Dorschel, very nice to see you, old chap,’ said Hector as soon as we’d made our way along the springy corridor. ‘We’re off on a bit of an adventure. And welcome back on-board, Mister Meckler, I see you’ve found your cloud legs!’

  It was true. Somehow I had become used to walking on the springy flooring of the old cloud and I felt perfectly stable.

  ‘Your drone is ready, it’s stashed in the hold, we’ll be
setting off in moments, the wind is with us, Mister Meckler, we should make good time.’

  He then turned and started conversing with Brad in a surprisingly quiet manner. I ascertained that this was a conversation that wasn’t meant to include me so I moved away.

  While they were talking I checked the view out of the surrounding windows, all I could see was white cloud material up close. Very close. I moved toward one of the windows and realised it wasn’t just close, the material that made up Cloud Eleven was actually touching the windows. Cloud Nine was tightly engulfed in the mother ship.

  ‘Undocking complete,’ said Kirubel. ‘I’d hold onto something, Gavin, we are going to drop a little.’

  At that point the light coming in through the windows changed rapidly and I felt the cloud drop just as Kirubel had warned. It dropped fast and I was grateful to be half-squatting and gripping a nearby handrail.

  Within moments we had emerged from the belly of Cloud Eleven and started to move gently along the vast underside of the floating behemoth. It took a full hour to eventually emerge into open sky.

  During that time I had clambered onto the seat that Hector had sat me on during my first visit to the control tower bubble. This gave me a good view of proceedings.

  After another hour I could finally make out the full splendour of the floating city I had been residing in for the last few days. It was breathtaking in scale but it was also exquisitely beautiful. However it was constructed, it had to have been designed by people who really loved clouds.

  The further away we got from this floating city, the more beautiful it appeared and I literally could not take my eyes off it. After a long, long time it still filled the horizon to our south, just a huge ball of white fluff resting in a peaceful blue sky.

  Hector tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘We need to have a little chat, old chap,’ he said. ‘As you may have noticed, we have company on the starboard bow.’