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.
“Make a note that the ptertha has just popped itself out of existence,” he said to Zavotle, and — expressing his relief — added a personal comment. “Put down that it happened about four hours into the flight… just as Flenn was using the toilet… but that there is probably no connection between the two events.” Toller awoke shortly after dawn to the sound of an animated discussion taking place at the centre of the gondola. He raised himself to a kneeling position on the sandbags and rubbed his arms, uncertain as to whether the coolness he could feel was external or an aftermath of sleep. The intermittent roar of the burner had been so intrusive that he had achieved only light dozes, and now he felt little more refreshed than if he had been on duty all night. He walked on his knees to the opening in the passenger compartment’s partition and looked out at the rest of the crew.
“You should have a look at this, captain,” Zavotle said, raising his narrow head. “The height gauge actually does work!”
Toller insinuated his legs into the cramped central floorspace and went to the pilot’s station, where Flenn and Rillomyner were standing beside Zavotle. At the station was a lightweight table, attached to which was the height gauge. The latter consisted of nothing more than a vertical scale, from the top of which a small weight was suspended by a delicate coiled spring made from a hair-like shaving of brakka. On the previous morning, at the beginning of the flight, the weight had been opposite to the lowest mark on the scale — but now it was several divisions higher.
Toller stared hard at the gauge. “Has anybody interfered with it?”
“Nobody has touched it,” Zavotle assured him. “It means that everything they told us must be true. Everything is getting lighter as we go higher! We’re getting lighter!”
“That’s to be expected,” Toller said, unwilling to admit that in his heart he had never quite accepted the notion, even when Lain had taken time to impress the theory on him in private tutorials.