Arabella and the Battle of Venus

by David D. Levine

  “Prepare to cast off!” came a cry from close at hand. It was Liddon, the chief mate—a lean man with a long white scar on his cheek, whose fierce visage belied the kindliness with which he had welcomed the ladies aboard. The command was repeated down the deck; men moved into position.

  Despite her experience as an airman, this was in fact only Arabella’s third aerial ascent. The first time she had been confined to her cabin; the second, she had been entirely inexperienced. This time, at least, she understood the shouted commands and was in a position to form an opinion of the men’s responses to them.

  Although Touchstone’s crew had at first seemed a rather filthy and disheveled lot, matching the untidy state of their ship, as they worked to make the ship ready for ascent they struck her as experienced and attentive to their duty. As Fox bounded about the quarterdeck, calling out orders, occasionally changing his mind and countermanding them—a marked contrast to her own Captain Singh’s calm, steady command—they were relayed by Liddon to the appropriate quarter of the ship with brisk despatch, and the men there leapt to comply with hardly a wasted motion. Where individual action was needed they performed their jobs with admirable efficiency; where co-operation was required the men worked wonderfully together. Watching the ship prepare for ascent reminded Arabella of the workings of a finely crafted and well-maintained automaton.

  Which drew her thoughts to Aadim, Diana’s unique automaton navigator. What had become of him, with the ship in the hands of the French? Her own hands wrung together in concern and frustration; tens of thousands of miles separated her from Aadim, Diana, and Captain Singh—her captain, her fiancé, her maharajah.

  Oh, how she wished she could be a part of those workings! To be laboring along with the crew, to be doing something to move the ship forward and closer to rescuing her fiancé. But though her fingers itched to haul on a line, on this voyage she would be nothing but a passenger. Even if Fox could somehow be convinced otherwise, Lady Corey would surely prevent it.

  The calls and responses down the length of the ship crescendoed, then died away. “All hands report ready for ascent,” Liddon told Fox.

  Fox’s eye gleamed, and he grinned at Arabella. “Now the fun begins,” he said to her, then turned back to Liddon. “Well, then, what are we waiting for? Cast off!”

  “Ballast away!” Liddon bellowed.

  With a deep wooden thunk, ports in the hull below Arabella’s view swung open, letting streams of sand hiss out onto the plain below. A rising cloud of red dust obscured the view of the other ships … but only for a moment, as Touchstone herself rose out of that dust cloud and into the pale blue cloudless sky above. The rapidity of her ascent made Arabella’s stomach giddy, and even the staid Lady Corey let out a surprised whoop.

  Touchstone ascended from the forest of masts around her like a toy lifted from a tub, giving Arabella a view of dozens of ships laid out like so many automata on a master craftsman’s bench. In moments the full scope of the harbor became apparent, a vast expanse of red sand dotted with ships of every description. That lake of sand lapped at Fort Augusta’s docks, beyond which lay a busy confusion of warehouses and chandleries serving the aerial trade, then crowded lanes of town-houses and shops, and finally the great bulk of the Fort itself, whose great red sandstone walls loomed apparently impregnable above the town. But the town was still pock-marked with burns and wreckage from the recent insurrection, and Arabella knew that even the fort might have fallen if the fighting had gone on much longer than it had.

  Eventually, though, the entirety of Fort Augusta town dwindled to a mere stain upon the landscape, and Arabella turned her attention forward and upward.

  There, glittering in the sky above the rising Sun, shone the planet Venus.

  II

  IN TRANSIT, 1815

  5

  NAVIGATION

  Arabella floated at the quarterdeck rail, gazing up at the great globe of Mars which loomed overhead.

  After departing Fort Augusta, Touchstone had risen from Mars’s planetary atmosphere into the interplanetary atmosphere. Along the way the men had performed the traditional shipboard ceremony of the falling-line, followed by the swaying-out of the lower masts.

  Arabella could not recall that day without considerable melancholy. The events of Touchstone’s falling-line ceremony were similar to those she had experienced upon her departure from London aboard Diana: the slow fall of a gold sovereign from the quarterdeck, demonstrating the diminution of gravity, and the scramble of the crew to catch it after it bounced. But as Touchstone’s crew were all experienced airmen, there were no “new fish” to be hazed by being thrown briefly overboard. It was with a mixture of anger, anguish, and nostalgia that she recalled her own such hazing; it had been terrifying, cruel, and unnecessary, but it had also marked her initiation into the fraternity of aerial sailors.

  Also, of course, it had marked her entry into the service of the man who would eventually become her fiancé, the excellent Captain Singh.

  Her first significant act as a freshly initiated airman had been to be lowered over the side to guide the larboard mast, which was stowed at the ship’s side while in port, into its socket in the lower hull. That, too, had been terrifying at the time, but also deeply satisfying, for without her lower masts the ship could not maneuver in the atmosphere at all, and would surely be dashed to pieces by the winds of the Horn—the zone of perpetual storms where the planetary and interplanetary atmospheres ground together like mill-stones.

  For the equivalent swaying-out aboard Touchstone, Arabella’s role was only that of an observer, as she leaned out over the rail to watch a young, lithe airman perform the task with the calm, almost bored, assurance of one who had done so a thousand times before. And the most interesting part of the exercise to Arabella—the swaying-out of the mizzen, or bottom, mast, which Diana lacked—had been completely invisible to her beneath the curve of the hull.

  The whole exercise had left her feeling small, weak, and useless, and made her miss her captain exceedingly. After the swaying-out she had retired to her cabin, a tiny triangular closet barely large enough to accommodate her hammock and Lady Corey’s at night, and sobbed herself to sleep.

  In any case, the masts had been properly fitted and Touchstone had passed safely through the Horn, using the tempestuous winds there to direct her path to the great interplanetary wind current in which she now found herself embedded. Though the wind in the ship’s vicinity seemed very nearly still, Touchstone was now moving at a speed of some thousands of knots toward Venus.

  Or so Arabella hoped. At this point she was no longer as certain of this as she would have expected, or liked.

  “Oof!” she exclaimed suddenly, as a soft missile of bombazine and tulle collided with her from behind.

  “Oh, dear,” said Lady Corey, grasping the rail and pulling herself down to the deck. “I am so terribly sorry.”

  Automatically Arabella checked her safety line, which coiled lazily from her ankle to an anchor point at the base of the mainmast. It was intact and properly attached at both ends, which would prevent her from being swept overboard and lost for ever in case of another such accident. A similar safety line was—somewhat to Arabella’s regret—properly attached to Lady Corey.

  The two of them, along with every one and every thing else on the ship, were now in a state of free descent. According to the theories of natural philosophy, as Arabella understood them, they were all falling together toward the Sun, but also simultaneously speeding around it—somehow the two together combined to give the impression that gravity no longer existed in the vicinity of the ship. It all seemed terribly counterintuitive.

  But despite her failure to comprehend the philosophical principle or the mathematics, Arabella well understood the practicalities: every thing floated as though under water, lacking the usual concepts of up and down; objects left untethered and unattended could easily drift away and be lost overboard; and her skirt tended to rise up above her hips in a most shocking
fashion and must perforce be confined by a sort of large garter at the bottom.

  Having been dressed as a boy when she had learned to maneuver, and indeed to fight, in a state of free descent, she missed her masculine clothing terribly. Trousers were ever so much more practical than skirts, and when dressed in them she was every bit as nimble in propelling herself through the air as any other airman, and in fact better than some. The basic principles were quite simple: you pushed off against something with a hand or foot, and traveled in a straight line until encountering something else—such as Gowse’s nose.

  Now, though, she must perforce spend the majority of her effort simply keeping her clothing under control. And Lady Corey, lacking Arabella’s experience, was even worse at it. She floundered in the air like some enormous, ungainly jellyfish.

  “Your garter has slipped up again, Lady Corey,” Arabella said, helping the great lady to adjust it and to turn herself so that her feet were closer to the deck than her head was. Though there was no practical requirement to do such—indeed, some airmen spent more time upside-down than otherwise—it seemed to make Lady Corey more comfortable if she and those around her were all oriented in the conventional fashion.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Lady Corey said, brushing her dress down with one hand while clinging to the rail with the other. “I swear I shall never learn the knack of it.”

  “You will. You are already doing much better.”

  “So this is Mars,” Lady Corey said, gazing up at the rust-colored sphere. “To think I have lived there nearly all of my life and never before beheld the whole of it, at least not since I was too young to remember.”

  “It is quite unlike the globe in your library, is it not?”

  “Indeed. Where are the canals, and the cities?”

  Marked clearly on any map or globe of Mars—in addition to the borders of the English territory of St. George’s Land and the various Martian satrapies and princessipalities, which even Lady Corey understood could not be seen in reality—were the sites of the major cities and the razor-straight lines of canals between them. Yet these products of English and Martian industry were invisible from this distance, or nearly so.

  “I think I may be able to point out Fort Augusta. You see the terminator—the edge of the illuminated area? Along that line it is sunset for those who live there. It is late afternoon at home, and so it must be somewhere on the illuminated side of that line, at a latitude of thirty-one degrees north—two-thirds of the way from the white polar cap at the top to the equator.” She peered up. “That lighter-colored patch must be the Sukush Desert, and Fort Augusta is on the northern edge of that. Perhaps that small dark spot. Do you see it? If we had a telescope, we might even be able to pick out the glint of sunlight on the canals around it.”

  Lady Corey shaded her eyes, but after a while gave up. “Your young eyes may be able to pick it out, but not mine.” She shook her head. “You say it is late afternoon ‘at home.’ Why?”

  “Well, at this point in the voyage, the ship keeps the same time as our departure point. It is late afternoon here, so it must also be late afternoon there. We could ask Mr. Fox to consult the ship’s chronometer for the exact time.”

  “But … surely late afternoon is late afternoon every where? The time is the time, is it not?”

  “Oh no, not at all.” She pointed up at the globe. “The time of day depends on where you live. To those living along the terminator, there, it is sunset. Over there, in the center of the illuminated area, it is noon. Around back, just past the planet’s limb, or horizon, it is sunrise. And on board ship, we keep the time of our departure city until we come within telescopic sight of our destination, at which point we gradually adjust our time to match. Otherwise, when we land, we might find ourselves eating breakfast at midnight!”

  Lady Corey’s face showed nothing but incomprehension. “Breakfast at midnight?”

  “It is complicated,” Arabella said, not unkindly. “I will attempt to explain it again some other time.”

  There would be plenty of time for that—the voyage would last months.

  * * *

  Later that day, Arabella came upon her old messmate Mills. He floated near the capstan, and was working with great concentration upon a cylindrical construction of wood and leather held in his lap. “What is that?” she asked.

  “Drum!” he replied, smiling and handing it to her. “My people call it tama.”

  “Tama,” she repeated, inspecting the object. It was about eight inches tall and bore a taut head, made from what appeared to be lizard-skin, at each end. The two heads were connected by a surprisingly complex net of leather cords, whose tension he had been carefully adjusting. “And what is the purpose of these cords?”

  “Changes the tone,” Mills explained. Taking the drum back, he tucked it under his arm and beat several notes upon it with a curved stick. As he played, he pressed the drum against his side with greater or lesser force; the changing tension upon the cords caused the drum’s note to rise or fall accordingly.

  “How fascinating!” Arabella cried delightedly.

  “Miss Ashby!” came a shrill cry from behind. It was Lady Corey, of course, hauling her way hand-over-hand along the gunwale. “I thought I made it quite clear to you, even before we left the ground, that conversation with”—she glanced sidewise at Mills—“common airmen is entirely inappropriate for a young woman of quality.”

  “Mills is no common airman,” Arabella replied with a mischievous grin. “He is the captain of the mizzen-top, and an accomplished drummer besides.”

  Lady Corey was not amused. “I care nothing for your mizzen-tops, nor your futtock-grommets nor block-knees.” She had, by now, dragged herself along the rail to interpose herself physically between Arabella and Mills, who looked over Lady Corey’s shoulder with an expression of apologetic chagrin. “This man is entirely beneath your station, and I absolutely forbid you to engage in any form of intercourse whatsoever with him or any of his sort.”

  Fury rose in Arabella’s breast, but she determined that she would not lose her temper. “Very well,” she replied with icy calm. “In that case, I shall depart to consult with the captain on a matter of navigation.”

  “Upon navigation only?” Lady Corey asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Upon no other thing.”

  Lady Corey’s eyes were full of doubt, but nonetheless she waved Arabella along. “Very well,” she said. “But do not go out of my sight.”

  Arabella curtseyed with elaborate grace to Mills, and said sweetly, “If you will excuse me, sir?” And then she departed, without the slightest gesture to Lady Corey, who remained at the rail huffing with indignation.

  * * *

  She found Captain Fox—now that the ship was in midair, she supposed she must address him, and even think of him, by that title—on the forecastle, peering ahead with a telescope. Lady Corey remained within sight, though at the furthest extremity of the ship, looking back at Mars.

  Unlike Captain Singh, who inevitably either floated with his head uppermost or actually stood with feet on the deck, held down by leather straps affixed to his belt, Fox seemed to enjoy floating horizontally, hanging insouciantly in midair as though lounging in a hammock. At the moment he lay at head-height above the deck, head pointing generally forward and feet aft, with the glass held to his eye. He was not, she noted, wearing a safety line—although seemingly foolish, this was the practice for most experienced airmen once outside the turbulence of the Horn, and indeed on her previous voyage she had adopted it herself. Suddenly she, with her skirt held down by a garter and her ankle tethered to the ship, felt simple and girlish.

  “Captain Fox,” she said, “may I have a word?”

  “Of course, Miss Ashby,” he replied, collapsing the glass and tucking it into his coat pocket. He did not, however, adjust his position in the air to match hers, which she took as a slight.

  “It has to do with our navigation. I have not consulted any charts, of course, but a
ccording to my recollection of the winds near Mars at this time of year we should be taking the Vanderveer Current for the most rapid transit to Venus. Yet it seems to me that we are currently in the Simpson Current. Am I, perhaps, mistaken in this?”

  He considered her for a moment before replying. “You are not completely mistaken, Miss Ashby. We are, in fact, embedded in the Simpson Current at the moment, and, may I add, making excellent time. By my calculations, our sidereal velocity—that is, relative to the fixed stars—is in excess of eight thousand knots. In the Vanderveer Current, we would be making at best three thousand.”

  “I know what sidereal velocity is, sir, and I also know that the wind speed of the Simpson Current is greater. But the Vanderveer Current would deliver us directly to the northern solar trades, which blow in excess of ten thousand knots and would deliver us to Venus much sooner.”

  He blinked. “The transfer to the trades from Vanderveer is tricky. Too early, and you could be ripped to pieces by the cross-wind. Too late, and you must pedal for weeks to reach the main breeze.”

  “No competent navigator would have any difficulty with that maneuver. I have calculated it myself, many times.”

  “I see.” Now he shifted himself in the air, using his hat to maneuver, until he was floating vertically to match her. “Apparently I must bow to a girl of eighteen years, whose vast navigational experience exceeds my own.” The tone of his voice showed he believed no such thing.

  “I am nineteen years old, sir, and I was trained in navigation by Captain Prakash Singh of the Honorable Mars Company, designer of an automaton navigator which made his Diana the fastest ship in the fleet. His knowledge of the navigational arts is unparalleled.”

  “I note that you claimed to have calculated the transfer many times. How many times have you performed it?”

  She knew she was on uncertain ground now, but she chose to plant her feet firmly upon it. “The navigator’s role is not to execute the maneuver. That is the role of the sailing-master.”