Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  Hethor didn’t even know her name, but he was grateful to the woman.

  TWO DAYS later, Midshipman Evelyn de Troyes showed Hethor to the navigator’s cupola. De Troyes was Malgus’ assistant—apprentice in point of practice if not by law—though as a middie he had other duties as well.

  “On the water,” said de Troyes, a small man with sundark skin and pale-streaked hair, “all the officers practice navigation. It’s a more difficult art in the air. Though the captains and the mates are supposed to do it as well, in practice it’s mostly us.”

  He stopped talking as he and Hethor stood beneath the midmast. The “masts” were misnamed, in that they did not carry the sails, which were borne by flying spars reaching outward from the middle decks. Bassett’s masts did not even correspond particularly to the masts of a sailing ship on the water. Rather, they were vertical members that were the primary structure anchoring the gasbag to the hull. As such they offered the easiest access to the interior of the great envelope. When he first boarded Bassett, Hethor hadn’t been allowed anywhere near the midmast or the gasbag.

  “Drop all your metal in the bin there,” said de Troyes. “No buckles nor blades nor flints nor nothing to strike a spark. Then up the ladder. You first, all the way to the top. Can’t get lost on the way.”

  “Me first?” Hethor unclipped his belt and took his flint and striker from his pocket. He grabbed the rubber-coated iron rungs.

  “I want to watch you climb. If you have too much panic in you, we’ll have to send you back to the deck division. Brass or no brass.”

  Hethor climbed like his heart was in it. The stretch-and-reach of the ladder tugged at his wounded back hard enough to bring stinging tears to his eyes. Hethor ignored the pain. I must please de Troyes enough to keep my post with Malgus, Hethor told himself.

  The midmast rose perhaps eight feet off the main deck before it passed within the canvas skin of the gasbag. There was a flap there, set in place with rope and wooden toggles, that closed off the interior. Hethor flipped the toggles free, let the flap drop, and climbed past.

  The inside of the gasbag was dimly lit by a very few electricks strung along the midmast. Hethor hadn’t even realized that Bassett had electricks. He wasn’t sure how they would be powered. The midmast climbed upward at a point where four gas cells met. They were made of silk, stiffened with varnish and rubber, crisscrossed with a fine mesh. Everything reeked of stale air and tar.

  It was like being surrounded by billowing sails, though there was no wind in here. In fact the interior was quite hot. The shadows were just as uncomfortable as the pools of light from the electricks. Even cramped by the proximity of the gas cells there was a sense of vastness to the space, though Hethor knew the gasbag wasn’t much past a hundred feet in height and somewhat wider in cross-section. The quiet was eerie, too, just the slick noise of his hands and feet on the strangely soft rungs, and a very faint thumping like the slow beating of a giant heart.

  “Hydrogen pumps,” said de Troyes behind him as they passed a narrow fore-and-aft catwalk at the midpoint of the climb. “Keeping the cells balanced and trimmed.”

  “Ah.”

  Soon enough the midmast came to the top of the gasbag. There was a wooden hatch set in the bottom of a small platform. Hethor paused to study the hatch. It swung down, which was unusual in that most hatches swung outward to a deck. The hatch was smaller than normal as well, about two feet square. It was flanked by small gutta-percha or gum-elastic vents.

  “Is there a wind problem up here?” he finally asked de Troyes.

  “Good thinking, sailor. Now what can you tell me about those valves?”

  “Ah …” Hethor stared at them a moment. The vents or valves were designed to allow air to exit without manual intervention. They had no stopcocks or levers. “Gas,” he said. “Hydrogen. They let the hydrogen out.”

  “Indeed. Bad air will kill you. Pay close attention on climbing. If you feel weak or faint, climb down immediately and summon the gas division duty watch.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  After waiting a moment more for further instruction, Hethor undid the ropes securing the hatch—no metal latches up here—and lowered it carefully. Leather hinges squeaked. Wind whistled past the opening, carrying the sharp fresh scent of clear air. As he looked up, squinting into the light, Hethor saw only watery gray clouds.

  He scrambled up onto a platform about four feet wide and five long. The hatch was set almost in the middle. Unlike the main deck there was no railing to speak of here, but rather a built-up lip around the edge perhaps a foot tall, with a number of hooks set into it as well as a few stanchion braces. Hethor wasn’t willing to stand upright in such an unprotected place, so he squatted on his heels.

  The wind plucked at him as Hethor looked around to better understand the layout of the platform. The gasbag sloped away to his left and right, while a narrow plank catwalk, completely unrailed, marked the spine of the ship. The curve of the gasbag seemed to invite a dive, to slide slowly along it, moving faster and faster until one tumbled into the open air to fall to the sea below—how far? A thousand feet? Two?

  Except for directly fore and aft Hethor found he had an unobstructed view of the horizon. The height, with no railing or restraint around him, was unnerving, but not debilitating.

  Back in New Haven he’d never imagined such things. Gabriel had indeed set him on a journey. This almost made the agony in his back worthwhile.

  “We’re gaining altitude,” said de Troyes, scrambling up onto the platform and sitting tailor fashion. “Trying to rise high enough to weather the coming storm. Down too low an airship can be driven into the water. Oh, and welcome to the navigator’s rest.”

  Hethor looked at the ragged, overcast sky, the darker clouds piled in the distance. “Is that southeast?” he asked.

  “About right. What else can you tell me?”

  They had brought no instruments. De Troyes was testing Hethor’s education, his common sense, his powers of observation. How would Librarian Childress have looked at this place, at this sky, he wondered? “Hooks for tying us down when there’s more wind,” he said, thinking through the realities of the position. “Stanchions for the instruments. I assume you have poles.”

  “Staves, actually. Wouldn’t do to pack a metal pole up through the gasbag.” De Troyes nudged the edge of the platform with his foot. “These planks open up to our lockers. Ropes, staves, even a few brass chains stowed in there. One of your jobs is to make sure everything needful’s present and available at all times. Once in a while we lose a rope or something over the side.”

  Once in a while we lose a navigator over the side, Hethor thought.

  “Anything else?” de Troyes asked.

  “Equatorial Wall’s that way.” Hethor pointed south before looking up. “If the sky were clear and the light just right, we could sight in on Earth’s orbital tracks and work out our position. I assume you have books and tables for that.”

  “You can hear midnight very well up here, too.”

  Sidereal midnight, when the great brass teeth atop the Equatorial Wall met and meshed with Earth’s orbital track, clattering against the vast ring gear set in place around the sun by God himself. Hethor had used that moment for setting clocks back in New Haven, the precise timing of the world’s turning, adjusting for longitude to arrive at the correct local hour. “And of course, you set your clocks by it up here, too.”

  “Another duty of yours. Lieutenant Malgus has a boxed set of marine chronometers. You can carry it with a strap. Set one face to midnight based on your observations of sidereal time. Later we compare that face to the other face to establish longitude, how far we’ve traveled east or west.”

  “Or to establish the error of the timepiece.”

  “Clockmaker.” De Troyes managed to make it almost a curse and almost a blessing in the same breath.

  “So I’m to climb up here for midnight?”

  “And twice during daylight, to check the suppl
ies and equipment. And whenever we have time to teach you something new.”

  Hethor decided there could be no finer duty on Bassett than to climb the midmast to set the midnight hour.

  THE STORM broke on them that afternoon in a swirling fury, wrenching Bassett in every direction but forward for some hours. Rain drummed on the gasbag like all the tom-toms of the Iroquois while wind shrieked and howled among the shrouds. Hethor was back with the sailors of the deck division temporarily, securing cargo and equipment and watching for storm damage. It was worth his life to even take a few steps, but at least at altitude they did not have the roiling seas clearing the scuppers with each roll of the ship. Just more rain than he’d imagined possible, and a drop over the rail that no one could survive.

  He held tight and did as he was ordered. The tempest died down just after sunset, the clouds skating away to reveal a sullen moon sow-bellied on the barely visible thread of her track, and a few persistent stars.

  “Don’t worry,” Lombardo said as he patted Hethor on the shoulder at chow call. “When we hit a real storm, you’ll know why air sailors never marry. Her Imperial Majesty doesn’t want to pay all them bloody widows’ pensions.” With a laugh, Lombardo sent Hethor back to de Troyes and Malgus.

  That night after a long session on the main deck working with the boxed chronometers, de Troyes sent Hethor up the midmast on his own. “Fall off if you must,” the middie warned, “but don’t lose the instruments.”

  Hethor made the climb at five bells of the evening watch. He met one of the gas division among the cells, a fellow he didn’t know who nodded in the electrick dim. Up, through the wooden hatch, and onto the observation platform. His whipped back hurt less and less, either with the passage of time or the joy of meaningful work.

  The moon was waxing toward full, dangling on the thread of its tracks. The lamps of the stars were bright as ever. Sitting amid light and beauty, Hethor carefully tied the boxed chronometer to two of the hooks, then flipped the catches to open the lid. There were three dials just as de Troyes had shown him. One was set to Greenwich time. The second was set to the last properly measured reading. The third was his to adjust, though it still matched the second at the moment. Radium dials gleamed against ghostly white faces, while more radium dots marked the little knobs that would reset the time.

  He wondered what mechanisms were within, whether this was of the new machine makes from Lancashire and the Germanies, or if an honest horologist had cast and cut the gears with a knowledgeable hand.

  A few high clouds scattered pale smears across the heavens, but mostly the lamps of the stars were clear. This close to midnight, Earth’s track gleamed above the southern horizon as their face of the world came to kiss the orbital ring. The moon’s track crossed half the sky as well, her offset to Earth’s plane all the more obvious from this vantage. He closed his eyes and listened, the gentle damp breeze no distraction at all. Bassett’s engines thrummed somewhere far below. The hydrogen pumps cycled. He heard his breath, as always, and the creaking of the ropes and the booming of the canvas gasbag.

  Beneath it all, the rattle of the turning world. The sound seemed restored now, without that false note he had sensed back in Malgus’ cabin.

  But midnight was coming. Already the hour brought with it a louder version of the clatter than he’d ever heard before. Higher up in the pure ocean air and much farther south than his New Haven home, Hethor was closer to the sound. Eyes still shut, he found the interrupter on the adjustment face of the boxed chronometer. Hethor was ready to reset to midnight so Malgus could calculate how far the storm had thrown them off course.

  The sidereal clatter approached a crescendo, less a chattering racket here, he realized, than the sound of true brass on true brass. He listened, waiting for the peak, knowing when it would come.

  Hethor pressed the interrupter to set midnight at the proper moment. At his bidding the boxed chronometer did its job, faithfully recording the hours of their passage.

  Only one thing was wrong. In his heart, in his head, wherever it was that he always knew the time, midnight was almost three seconds late.

  The sun rising dark as a cinder could be no more horrible. This was not the way of the world. It simply wasn’t.

  The archangel Gabriel had been right. The world was winding down, slowing. The Mainspring needed to be wound. Hethor had proof now. It was no longer a matter of faith. The problem was, who could he tell? How could he make the truth known?

  He didn’t trust Malgus, or anyone else for that matter, but he could not find the Key Perilous on his own.

  Hethor unlashed the boxed chronometer, stowed the ropes, and slowly made his way back to the main deck. He would have to develop objective evidence independent of his inner sense before he could convince anyone else.

  Simpler, he thought, had Gabriel come to Queen Victoria herself. Her Imperial Majesty could have set whole armies and navies in motion to search for the Key Perilous.

  Instead of just him.

  FOUR

  APPROACHING SEVENTEEN degrees latitude, Hethor saw the Equatorial Wall for the first time in his life. He and de Troyes were up in the navigator’s rest, reviewing the basics of a sextant, when de Troyes stopped what he was doing, picked up a telescope, and pointed it south.

  “Here,” he said after a moment, handing the telescope to Hethor. “Tell me what you see.”

  “A line of clouds on the southern horizon.” Hethor swept the scope. “But it’s a huge storm.”

  “Biggest storm the world’s ever known,” said de Troyes with a laugh. “A hundred miles of brass-topped rock, haunted by ghosts from every age. It will never blow over, not while God’s universe yet runs onward.”

  “That’s it,” Hethor breathed. Somehow he’d expected forests of monkeys, exotic crystal cities, wizards’ palaces. Not just a smudge where sky met horizon.

  “Keep an eye to the south,” said de Troyes. “The Wall grows closer day by day.”

  BASSETT CALLED at Georgetown in Guyana to take on more fuel as well as undergo the dangerous process of topping the hydrogen in the gas cells before striking east for the Cape Verde Islands. Everyone but the senior officers and the gas division were given a mandatory shore leave during the hydrogen work. The pumps and fittings grew brittle over time with exposure to the noxious gas, and so close inspection was critical at every operation. Hethor had been given to understand that results of error were spectacularly fatal. Every Connecticut schoolchild certainly knew about the Hibernia disaster, which had rained fire in the sky of New London.

  He was glad enough of the chance to work on his ideas. Hethor took his notes and observations on the errors of midnight, hoping for a chance to collate them in private in some flophouse room. The Equatorial Wall had gotten quite large so far south, but little more definite, the curvature of the Earth’s track even flatter here. Sometimes he thought he saw sunlight sparkling off the brass gear teeth high atop, where the Wall would mesh with the track. No matter how hard he looked, Hethor couldn’t be sure.

  Not yet.

  Now he and a few dozen others were crammed in a small barge being rowed by brown-skinned natives who smiled and rolled their eyes at secret jokes but said nothing. The air was so hot Hethor thought he could have made stew with it. No one complained.

  “Hey, boy, be y’goin’ to Madam Fossiter’s wit’ us?” growled the big Scot from his press-gang, whose name Hethor had learned to be the somewhat unlikely Thread-gill Angus al-Wazir. Al-Wazir was the chief of the ropes division, the crew that handled the lines and shrouds, deployed the sails and steering paddles, and worked the outside of the gasbag as needed. The rest of Bassett’s crew called al-Wazir and his men the “airheads,” because they spent so much time with nothing more beneath their feet than a bit of rope, and often not even that.

  “No, I believe I’ll do a little exploring.” Hethor smiled. “I always wanted to see a monkey.”

  “To be sure, Madam Fossiter has got some fewk-monkeys, too, if that be yo
ur taste,” shouted one of the other airheads. They all laughed.

  Al-Wazir gave Hethor a somber look. “Feller shouldn’t work too bloody damned hard on his leave day.” He winked.

  “Oh, hard ain’t in it,” said Hethor, which provoked another round of laughter.

  There was more chatter about the merits of different girls, as compared by shade of skin, size of jugs, and other, more obscure criteria with which Hethor was unfamiliar. The barge finally thumped against a decrepit dock, pilings silvered with age and salt. The structure looked ready to fall into the ocean and strike out on its own. The dock could scarcely ask for greener shores, however, as the streets of Georgetown seemed to be nothing but whitewashed walls and vegetation denser than anything Hethor had ever seen.

  Where Hamilton town had been scattered with palms, a tree previously unfamiliar to Hethor, Georgetown was host to an entire menagerie of plants, flowers, insects, even animals that all might have come from the Southern Earth, for all Hethor could make of them. This was as much a city of his imagination as anything he might hope to encounter up on the Equatorial Wall.

  A large spotted cat padded by on a silver chain held by a gleaming black man, himself chained at the neck, though no one held that one in turn. Three white children carried a pole with a shaggy green animal hanging from it that looked like nothing so much as a taxidermist’s mistake, except that one doleful orange eye turned in its socket to follow Hethor’s progress. Gap-toothed women of some sun-browned race sold fruits from little trays, the brilliant, bilious colors of their skirts competing with the unnatural hues of their produce.

  Hethor pushed his way through the crowded, urgent streets, slipping on mud and dodging carts—no electrick taximeter cabriolets here—until he found a quiet park around an equestrian statue. He leaned against the statue’s marble plinth, screened from the raucous streets by walls of bushes covered with bright flowers larger than his head, and spread his notes between the horse’s iron hooves.