“I swear she won’t be any trouble, captain.”
“She’d better not. Now get the food.”
Flenn grinned and, agile as a monkey, disappeared into the galley to prepare the first meal of the voyage. He was small enough to be completely hidden by the woven partition which was chest high to the rest of the crew. Toller settled down to refining his control over the ship’s ascent.
Deciding to increase speed, he lengthened the burns from three to four seconds and watched for the time-lagged response of the balloon overhead. Several minutes went by before the extra lift he was generating overcame the inertia of the many tons of gas inside the envelope and the rip line became noticeably slacker. Satisfied with a new rate of climb of around eighteen miles an hour, he concentrated on making the burner rhythm — four seconds on and twenty off — part of his awareness, something to be paced by the internal clocks of his heart and lungs. He needed to be able to detect the slightest variation in it even when he was asleep and being spelled at the controls by Zavotle.
The food served up by Flenn was from the limited fresh supplies and was better than Toller had expected — strips of reasonably lean beef in gravy, pulse, fried grain-cakes and beakers of hot green tea. Toller stopped operating the burner while he ate, allowing the ship to coast upwards in silence on stored lift. The heat emanating from the black combustion chamber mingled with the aromatic vapours issuing from the galley, turning the gondola into a homely oasis in a universe of azure emptiness.
Partway through the meal littlenight came sweeping from the west, a brief flash of rainbow colours preceding a sudden darkness, and as the crew’s eyes adjusted the heavens blazed into life all around them. They reacted to the unearthliness of their situation by generating an intense camaraderie. There was an unspoken conviction that lifelong friendships were being formed, and in that atmosphere every anecdote was interesting, every boast believable, every joke profoundly funny. And even when the talk eventually died away, stilled by strangeness, communication continued on another plane.
Toller was set apart to some extent by the responsibilities of command, but he was warmed nonetheless. From his seated position the rim of the gondola was at eye level, which meant there was nothing to be seen beyond it but enigmatic whirlpools of radiance, the splayed mist-fans of comets, and stars and stars and ever more stars. The only sound was the occasional creak of a rope, and the only sensible movement was where the meteors scribed their swift-fading messages on the blackboard of night.
Toller could easily imagine himself adrift in the beaconed depths of the universe, and all at once, unexpectedly, there came the longing to have a woman at his side, a female presence which would somehow make the voyage meaningful. It would have been good to be with Fera at that moment, but her essential carnality would scarcely have been hi accord with his mood. The right woman would have been one who was capable of enhancing the mystical qualities of the experience. Somebody like.…
Toller reached out with his imagination, blindly, wistfully. For an instant the feel of Gesalla Maraquine’s slim body against his own was shockingly real. He leapt to his feet, guilty and confused, disturbing the equilibrium of the gondola.
“Is anything wrong, captain?” Zavotle said, barely visible in the darkness.
“Nothing. A touch of cramp, that’s all. You take over the burner for a while. Four-twenty is what we want.”
Toller went to the side of the gondola and leaned on the rail. What is happening to me now? he thought. Lain said I was playing a role — but how did he know? The new cool and imperturbable Toller Maraquine…the man who has drunk too deeply from the cup of experience… who looks down on princes… who is undaunted by the chasm between the worlds…and who, because his brother’s solewife does no more than touch his arm, is immediately smitten with adolescent fantasies about her! Was Lain, with that frightening perception of his, able to see me for the betrayer that I am? Is that why he seemed to turn against me?
The darkness below the skyship was absolute, as though Land had already been deserted by all of humanity, but as Toller gazed down into it a thin line of red, green and violet fire appeared on the western horizon. It widened, growing increasingly brilliant, and suddenly a tide of pure light was sweeping across the world at heart-stopping speed, recreating oceans and land masses in all their colour and intricate detail. Toller almost flinched in expectation of a palpable blow as the speeding terminator reached the ship, engulfing it in fierce sunlight, and rushed on to the eastern horizon. The columnar shadow of Overland had completed its daily transit of Kolcorron, and Toller felt that he had emerged from yet another occultation, a littlenight of the mind.
Don’t worry, beloved brother, he thought. Even in my thoughts I’ll never betray you. Not ever!
Ilven Zavotle stood up at the burner and looked out to the north-west. “What do you think of the globe now, captain? Is it bigger or closer? Or both?”
“It might be a little closer,” Toller said, glad to have an external focus for this thoughts, as he trained his binoculars on the ptertha. “Can you feel the ship dancing a little? There could be some churning of warmer and cooler air as littlenight passes, and it might have worked out to the globe’s advantage.”
“It’s still on a level with us — even though we changed our speed.”
“Yes. I think it wants us.”
“I know what I want,” Flenn announced as he slipped by Toller on his way to the toilet. “I’m going to have the honour of being the first to try out the long drop — and I hope it all lands right on old Puehilter.” He had nominated an overseer whose petty tyrannies had made him unpopular with the S.E.S. flight technicians.
Rillomyner snorted in approval. “That’ll give him something worth complaining about, for once.”
“It’ll be worse when you go — they’re going to have to evacuate the whole of Ro-Atabri when you start bombing them.”
“Just take care you don’t fall down the hole,” Rillomyner growled, not appreciating the reference to his dietary foibles. “It wasn’t designed for midgets.”
Toller made no comment about the exchange. He knew the two were testing him to see what style of command he was going to favour on the voyage. A strict interpretation of flight regulations would have precluded any badinage at all among his crew, let alone grossness, but he was solely concerned with their qualities of efficiency, loyalty and courage. In a couple of hours the ship would be higher than any had gone before — if one discounted the semi-mythical Usader of five centuries earlier — entering a region of strangeness, and he could foresee the little group of adventurers needing every human support available to them.
Besides, the same subject had given rise to a thousand equally coarse jokes in the officers’ quarters, ever since the utilitarian design of the skyship gondola had become common knowledge. He himself had derived a certain amusement from the frequency with which ground-based personnel had reminded him that the toilet was not to be used until the prevailing westerlies had carried the ship well clear of the base.…
The bursting of the ptertha took Toller by surprise.
He was gazing at the globe’s magnified image when it simply ceased to exist, and in the absence of a contrasting background there was not even a dissipating smudge of dust to mark its location. In spite of his confidence in their ability to deal with the threat, he nodded in satisfaction. Sleep was going to be difficult enough during the first night aloft without having to worry about capricious air currents bringing the silent enemy to within its killing radius.