Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  The passage let them out into a long attic with windows in gables. Loren had to bend over to pass under the joists. At the end of the attic was a door. The little man opened it a crack and peered out. He gestured for Loren to come forward. In front of the door, Loren passed him the child. She held out her hands to the little man as he reached for her. “Nino,” she breathed.

  “Hello, puss. Nothing to fear now. Hold on to Nino.”

  Loren pushed past him to the door. Through the crack, the first thing he saw was a tiny wooden flyer, moored just over the black topped roof. Two guards were standing at the rail, watching whatever was going on below. Loren could hear yelling from the courtyard. Two guards — he could have handled twenty.

  He launched himself through the door and toward the nearer man. He hit him with all his weight at the shoulder, toppling him over toward the rail. Loren reached for his legs and caught a grip of his black trousers, lifted up with all his strength and thrust outward. The man flew over the rail, screaming. The one beside him watched, his mouth open in horror, his own scream continuing after the other’s ended with a thud. Loren’s field of vision was suddenly blood red with rage, the man visible only as a hazy grey figure on the field of red. He reached out for the figure, seized it by the jacket arm and belt, and jerked it upward, lifting the man off his feet. Loren twisted toward the rail and threw this second screaming figure over.

  When he turned back, Nino was climbing up into the flyer with the little girl over his shoulder. Loren raced back toward him. He could hear crashing steps coming down through the attic toward the roof door. Before it opened, he was clambering over the wooden rail onto the flyer’s deck.

  “Why don’t you drive?” said the little man. “I forget which is the front.”

  There were only three controls, indexes for the vertical, the horizontal and the forward Effectors. The one mounted vertically on the control post probably controlled up and down stability. Loren threw the other two to the neutral position and felt the little flyer begin to slide with the wind over toward one side of the roof. There were shouts behind him at the door. He sheeted home the sail to gain speed, and suddenly they were out beyond the roof, over the courtyard. Bellows of rage from below. Loren cleated down the sheet and twisted the keel Effector to turn them square to the wind. The little craft began to gather speed. He looked over the side. There were bowmen aiming up at him with crossbows. The thunk of arrows into their wooden undersides. He took the vertical index into his hand and pointed it sharply downward. The flyer dove sickeningly, gaining speed. He leveled it off as they shot across the courtyard and out over the grassy lawn where the Saturday audiences had been assembled. There was a glint of water ahead, the river. He banked down, skimming over the sloping grass, up to pass just over the trees and then down again to a few feet above the water. He didn’t know what the black-suits might have in the way of radar, but nothing was going to track him at this altitude.

  Turning hard right cost them some speed, but he gained it back in the warm land breeze off the river’s opposite bank. He followed the bank upriver in a long arc, heading more and more toward the west. They skimmed under the overhanging tree boughs at the water’s edge, shooting along at the speed of a rushing car. A fishermen on the bank looked up in fear and surprise as they hurtled past.

  When the river doubled back to the east, Loren sacrificed some speed for altitude to clear the trees on the bank and to continue just over tree top height to the northwest. In the valleys, he dropped down to maintain the same height over the ground. He avoided the roads. There was no compass he could see on the little craft, but he knew where he was headed. The loom of the mountains was on his bow. He could pick up the head and shoulders now of Sterling Summit and what must be Mt. Chiltoes on its left. The line between Asheville and Chiltoes would lead him directly over Dellwood. From there he could follow the timber road north into the forest where he had been dropped and the hidden radio beacon.

  The sun was still high in the sky. He might have wished it were closer to dusk, but no matter. Nothing was going to stop him and no one. There was no sign of pursuit. Loren breathed easier when he saw the forest beginning on his right. There was no need to carry on as far as the road, because he could see the lake from here. He eased the index to his right, paying out the sail as he did to run downwind toward the narrow lake. When they were over it, he slid into a long turn for its far end, backwinding to lose speed. They set down on the same slope where the Canandaigua had dropped him.

  With the beacon retrieved and broadcasting, Loren steered the little flyer back down along the lake, trimming sail. The wind was foul for the direction he wanted to go, so he tacked toward the mountains, working his way up little by little. There was no need to wait for Canandaigua, she would find them. They needed only to put distance between themselves and the mansion house, and eventually to get on toward Victoria. If Danny came all the way home behind him, following the beacon, it hardly mattered. What mattered was only getting there as fast as possible.

  Nino and the child were huddled down behind the canvas dodger. He looked at them stupidly, finally realizing that it was because they were cold. It was cold, but it hadn’t gotten through to him before. There was still the heat of rage running through his veins. As he calmed himself he began to shiver, a little at first and then violently in his light wrap. By the time the Canandaigua picked them up, they were all blue with cold.

  16

  WHAT STIRS WITHIN WHEN THE LIGHTS ARE OUT

  “The Jansenists were a seventeenth century cult, followers of the renegade Dutch theologian, Cornelius Otto Jansen.” The speaker was a guest at Monterreal, a middle-aged man with leonine head of prematurely silver hair. He had a deep, resonant voice. The quality of that voice and the man’s control of its tone were giving Loren twinges of envy. He felt his own voice sounded squeaky by comparison. “Today,” the man went on, “we use the word heresy to mean a deviant belief. But in the time of the great heresies, the word also referred to the splinter group that formed around the belief, the community of believers. The Jansenist Heresy was a small group that eventually ended up in the French city of Port Royal. They believed in a return to some of the teachings of Augustine. That is a characteristic, by the way, of all the heresies: They all advocated a return to earlier, harder, beliefs and practices. And they all had a certain infuriating Holier than Thou attitude. They thought themselves holier than the pope, for instance.”

  Kelly had been following his words intently. “What were the particular beliefs of the Jansenists, Father McGrath?”

  “Robbie, please,” he said. “They believed in the inherent corruption of the human soul. It was their conviction that original sin was too wicked for most people to overcome, and that subsequent sin was impossible to avoid. That led them to the strange practices of self-flagellation and extreme fasting. There are records of certain Jansenists who perished from denying themselves water.”

  Loren was shaking his head. “It is something I have never been able to understand, how these anti-human beliefs came to persist. What appeal could it have had to people to be told they were hopelessly bad, that that had to torture themselves? I would have thought such an idea would have gone straight to the junk pile of history, rejected by people as too stupid.”

  Father McGrath sighed. “I know what you mean, Loren. When you look into the heresies, you see something highlighted that is true to a lesser extent of all cults and faiths. It is that a psychology of anti-self can be profoundly attractive to people. You might think that a cult needed to appeal to your best interest, to your common sense and to your desire for physical comfort, self-esteem, love and freedom, basic human needs. But the ones that have endured tend to appeal to none of these. They have all been antagonistic to some extent to the self. I don’t think an entirely comfortable religion could survive. We feel a need to be told things that go against our natural inclinations. That means we are prepared to believe in the wrongness of those inclinations.

&n
bsp; “Consider that most fundamental of all inclinations, the urge to make love. On its surface, it may seem a harmless private matter, at least when it concerns consenting adults. You might think it would be outside the domain of religion. And yet, from the beginning of time, there has never been a religion I know of that didn’t regulate sexual practice. Religions have supplied rules on how and when and where you could make love, and with whom and who could watch and who couldn’t and whether you could use your fingers or your elbows, and who got to be on top and where it was OK to touch and not OK, on love with cousins and minors and parents and siblings, on whether you could fool around with a member of your own sex or not, on whether it was allowed to stimulate yourself, on petting and french kissing and bottom rubbing and window peeking and anything you can think of. There is no erotic practice on earth that has not been declared sinful by at least one legitimate religion, and allowed by some other.

  “We could take the entire contents of the Kama Sutra and give each practice a number. And then we could form a table with the numbered practices along one direction, and the hundred major religions along the other. And in the intersecting boxes we could put a mark indicating whether Religion number N accepted or rejected Practice M. And that table would be simply chock full of notations and footnotes. ‘OK on Wednesdays, with the toes crossed,’ or ‘forbidden except for clergy.’ When you consider the rules of any one religion on any given question, you might be able to make a case for it. But the entire matrix seems more like the work of a cosmic comedian than of sensible, sincere believers.”

  “Sounds like your having some trouble yourself, accepting the concept of religious sexual rulings,” Loren offered.

  “Oh, none whatsoever. It’s just the dictates of other religions that trouble me. Our own are perfectly OK.”

  Loren stared, wondering whether he was being put on.

  “Would it be possible,” Kelly asked, “for a group of sincere and religious people to convince themselves that rape, for instance, was an acceptable practice? Because it debased the individual, and the individual needed to be debased because of its intrinsic evil?”

  “I never heard of that one,” Father McGrath said, grimacing. “But why not? I can imagine such a cult. It wouldn’t be worse than some of the others.”

  “I have some questions about damnation,” Kelly continued. “Could you give us your thoughts on that as well, Robbie? Is there any precedent for people believing they are hopelessly damned, and still feeling an obligation to atone for sins and help others to atone?”

  He nodded. “The Jansenists again. They believed that most people were predestined to burn. There was only an elite that God had chosen for admission into heaven. The damned were required to live lives of purity and submission, and for no possible reward. It was the Jansenist concept of total sacrifice, the sacrifice of your soul as well as your life. Very popular among folks with low self-esteem, I guess. In any event, it evidently didn’t end up on the ‘junk pile of history,’ as Loren’s fantastic experience demonstrates.”

  “And were the people who believed these impossible things, not just mad?”

  He held out his hands with palms up. “Who is to say? What is ‘mad?’ The mullahs and ayatollahs think I am mad for what I believe, and I think they are mad for what they believe. But what does He think?” A glance upward. “If He thinks about it, if He exists, if He is a He and not a She, if He/She cares at all…. Is there more beer?”

  Kelly rang a silver bell on the cocktail table. When the tray arrived, she helped herself after serving her guest. “It’s hard to believe, though, that these crazy beliefs can still be alive in the twenty-first century.”

  “Ah, the twenty-first century.” Father McGrath looked amused. “That, my friends, is a concept that is not nearly so robust as we might sometimes think. For much of the world the twenty-first century, even the twentieth, have simply not yet arrived. For some, it had arrived and then was cancelled when the Effectors went on. And for the rest of us, well, it’s here, but not always. When we’re alone, when the lights are out, when the reality of the day has begun to dim a bit, then the stirrings within us are pure Dark Ages. Then, the twenty-first century is nothing more than a distant, almost academic concept. The Dark Ages are alive and very real to most humans.”

  Kelly sat back in her chair. She couldn’t feel the Dark Ages stirring, at least not in herself. But what Father McGrath was saying might be at least a partial explanation to the events in Asheville. The Dark Ages did seem to be prospering there. She looked up, smiling at their guest. “What I’ve learned today, among other things, is that it’s too bad we haven’t had an occasion to make your acquaintance before, Robbie McGrath. I hope you’ll come back often to Monterreal, and be our friend.”

  He grinned foolishly. “I’d like that,” he said.

  When Father McGrath was gone, Loren and Kelly stared at each other over the empty tray, still aware of the specter of the Dark Ages. “What I’ve learned today,” Loren said at last, “is that the junk pile of history is not going to save us from Sonia. Her madness is not a fatal flaw, as we might have hoped, but the source of her frightening power.”

  Loren and the Proctor had spent most of a week, reviewing and revising security arrangements. They formed a new palace guard of ethnic Cuban soldiers. Before, they had been considered a potentially unstable element, not entirely trustworthy. Now Loren felt they were the only ones he could trust. The pile of photos taken inside the palace and at La Sabana haunted him. Buxtehude admitted there had also been evidence of penetration of the Chancellor’s office, something they were still investigating.

  Sonia had said that the Princess was her enemy, a symbol that she intended to destroy. So the symbol had to be more carefully protected. As Loren saw to its protection, he felt an increasing dismay that the woman he happened to love should be attached to that symbol. The entire notion of a princess seemed stupid now. He wished they could have thought out the consequences more carefully, so that Kelly could be today his wife and lover and Shimna’s mother and nothing else. In anonymity, they would have been safe to live their lives together. Now that ideal seemed impossibly naive.

  If Kelly had come to represent the essence of Victoria, the shadow of Sonia Duryea was becoming a symbol of another kind. Officially, nothing had been said of the presence of a second hostile force on the mainland. No one but the inner circle was supposed to know of the destruction of the laser weapons, or of Sonia’s role in that destruction. And nothing had been said of what Loren had found in Asheville. Still, there was a growing popular perception of Sonia, the only person ever known to have deserted Victoria, as some kind of a threat to the nation’s existence. The popular press in St. James made frequent mention of her, and often printed her picture. She was the perfect antidote to a slow news day, mysterious and beautiful and dangerous.

  Within a few weeks of Loren’s return, there was an article in the St. James Diary portraying Sonia as the leader of a faction somewhere in the Atlantic states. Obviously one of the new arrivals had brought some real information. The article said the group had set as its objective the utter destruction of Victoria. There was a rumor, it said, that they had airships and perhaps even strategic weapons. The headline over Sonia’s picture had read, “DRAGON LADY PLOTS WAR.”

  All of which posed a particular problem for what to do with the child Laura. So far, she had been a happy guest in the castle, bunking in with Shimna. She had evidently never met another child, so when she’d first set her eyes on Shimna, it was as though she’d realized that this was the kind of creature that she was herself. Kelly’s theory was that the poor little girl had thought herself some kind of a freak before, because she was so tiny and unformed compared to everyone around her. And then, when she found Shimna, she suddenly understood that she was normal. Whatever the explanation, she loved Shimna with her whole heart. And Kelly too.

  In Kelly’s mind, there was no problem of what to do. They would adopt Laura. They would have tw
o babies instead of one. They would love the two little girls with all of their might. It was obvious, her every instinct told her so. But it wasn’t obvious to Loren. It would be clear enough to anyone who considered it that Laura was his child, but not Kelly’s. There were hundreds of people in St. James who remembered Sonia, and remembered that he had loved her. They could deduce from Laura’s age and her looks who her mother had to be. So the child would be called the Dragon Lady’s daughter. And if there were a war with the Jansenists, Laura would be brought up with the stigma of her mother’s betrayal attached to her.

  His solution was to give Laura up, to let her become the child of someone else so that her likely parentage was not called to everyone’s attention. His candidate was Maria del Sol. When Kelly agreed, they took Laura for a visit to the little cottage Edward had built for his bride-to-be, adjacent to his own. Maria del Sol sat at Edward’s side, thoughtful, as Loren explained. Then she looked at the pretty little girl, playing on the rug at her feet.

  “She would be my daughter. She would be ours, Edward, when we married.” Her eyes were bright. “Our lovely child. Oh, Loren and Kelly, what a stupendous gift you have thought to give us. She is…perfect.”

  Kelly looked back at her, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “I believe,” Loren offered, “that people might just think…”

  MariSol laughed easily. “We know exactly what they will think. That Miss Mary Sunshine had a youthful indiscretion. They will find that very easy to believe because they think hot-blooded Spanish girls can’t keep their pants on. What do you think, Edward, of the damage to my reputation?”

  “Not damage at all. I think it adds a dash of romance, a bit of spice. I am delighted by this idea, by the way. Or don’t I get to voice an opinion?”

  “Absolutely not,” Maria del Sol said firmly. “I am the one who gave birth to this love-child, because I simply couldn’t help myself. And you, poor man, are obliged just to accept that I come with a daughter.”