Is that poker hot yet? Then plunge it in the wine and let the spices mull. Good. Hand me that. ’Twill help with the telling.
It was the madness of an instant that led me to join the airshipmen’s number. Had I taken the time to think, I would not have done it. But ambition was my undoing. I flung my towel away, darted into the kitchen to give my sister a quick hug and a peck on her cheek, and was down the stairs in a bound and a clatter.
In the Library, all was confusion, with the British heading in a rush for the doorway and the Americans holding back out of uncertainty, and fear as well of their sudden ferocity.
I joined the crush for the door.
Out in the cobbled street, we formed up into a loose group. I was jostled and roughly shoved, and I regretted my rashness immediately. The men about me were vague gray shapes, like figures in a dream. In the distance I heard the sound of angry voices.
A mob.
I was standing near the officers and overheard one argue, “It is unwise to leave thus quickly. It puts us in the position of looking as though we had reason to flee. ’Tis like the man seen climbing out his host’s bedroom window. Nothing he says will make him look innocent again.”
“There is no foe I fear half so much as King Mob,” Fuzzleton replied. “March them out.”
The officer saluted, spun about, and shouted, “To the ship—double time, on the mark!” Clapping his horny hands together, he beat out the rhythm for a sailor’s quick-march, such as I had played at a thousand times as a lad.
Rapidly the airmen began to move away.
Perforce I went with them.
By luck or good planning, we reached the prison yard without encountering any rioters. Our group, which had seemed so large, was but a drop of water to the enormous swirling mass of humanity that had congregated below the airship.
All about me, airmen were climbing rope ladders, or else being yanked into the sky. For every man thus eliminated, a new rope suddenly appeared, bounced, and was seized by another. Meanwhile, lines from the Whitpain engines were being disconnected from the tubs of purified river water, where they had been generating hydrogen.
Somebody slipped a loose loop around me and under my arms and with a sudden lurch I went soaring up into the darkness.
Oh, that was a happy time for me. The halcyon weeks ran one into another, long and languid while we sailed over the American wilderness. Sometimes over seas of forest, other times over seas of plains. There were occasional Indian tribes which—
Eh? You want to know what happened when I was discovered? Well, so would I. As well ask, though, what words Paris used to woo Helen. So much that we wish to know, we never shall! I retain, however, one memory more precious to me than all the rest, of an evening during the crossing of the shallow sea that covers the interior of at least one American continent.
Our shifts done, Hob and I went to the starboard aft with no particular end but to talk. “Sit here and watch the sunset,” she said, patting the rail. She leaned against me as we watched, and I was acutely aware of her body and its closeness. My eyes were half-closed with a desire I thought entirely secret when I felt her hand undoing the buttons on my trousers.
“What are you doing?” I whispered in alarm.
“Nothing they don’t expect young lads to do with each other now and then. Trust me. So long as you’re discreet, they’ll none of them remark on’t.”
Then she had me out and with a little laugh squeezed the shaft. I was by then too overcome with desire to raise any objections to her remarkable behavior.
Side by side we sat on the taffrail, as her hand moved first slowly and then with increasing vigor up and down upon my yard. Her mouth turned up on one side in a demi-smile. She was enjoying herself.
Finally I spurted. Drops of semen fell, silent in the moonlight, to mingle their saltiness with that of the water far below. She bent to swiftly kiss the tip of my yard and then tucked it neatly back into my trousers. “There,” she said. “Now we’re sweethearts.”
My mind follows them now, those fugitive drops of possibility on their long and futile, yet hopeful, flight to the sea. I feel her hand clenching me so casually and yet profoundly. She could not have known how much it meant to me, who had never fired off my gun by a woman’s direct intervention before. Yet inwardly I blessed her for it, and felt a new era had opened for me, and swore I would never forget her nor dishonor her in my mind for the sake of what she had done for me.
Little knowing how soon my traitor heart would turn away from her.
But for then I knew only that I no longer desired to return home. I wanted to go on with my Hob to the end of the voyage and back to her thronged and unimaginable London with its Whitpain engines and electrified lighting and surely a place for an emigré from a nonexistent nation who knew (as none of them did) the Calculus.
Somewhere around here, I have a folded and water-damped sheet of foolscap, upon which I apparently wrote down a short list of things I most wished never to forget. I may have lost it, but no matter. I’ve read it since a hundred times over. It begins with a heading in my uncertain Latin.
NE OBLIVISCARIS
1. My father’s burial
2. The Aztec Emperor in his golden armor
3. Hob’s hair in the sunset
4. The flying men
5. Winterjude’s death & what became of his lady
6. The air-serpents
7. The sound of icebergs calving
8. Hunting buffalo with the Apache
9. Being flogged
10. The night we solved the Whitpain Calculus
Which solution of course is gone forever—else so much would be different now! We’d live in a mansion as grand as the President’s, and savants from across the world would come a-calling upon your old father, just so they could tell their grandchildren they’d met the Philadelphia Kepler, the American Archimedes. Yet here we are.
So it is savage irony that I remember that night vividly: the small lantern swinging lightly in the gloom above the table covered with sheet after sheet of increasingly fervid computation—Calculus in my hand and Whitpain equations in Fuzzleton’s— and then on one miraculous and almost unreadable sheet both of our hands dashing down formula upon formula in newly invented symbols, sometimes overlapping in the excitement of our reconciliation of the two geniuses.
“D’ye see what this means, boy?” Fuzzleton’s face was rapturous. “Hundreds of worlds! Thousands! An infinitude of ’em! This is how the Empire was lost and why your capital city and mine are strangers to each other—it explains everything!”
We grabbed each other and danced a clumsy little jig. I remember that I hit my head upon a rafter, but what did I care? There would be statues of us in a myriad Londons and countless Philadelphias. We were going to live forever in the mind of Mankind.
My brother-in-law once told me that in China they believe that for every good thing there is an ill. For every kiss a blow. For every dream a nightmare. So perhaps it was because of my great happiness that we shortly thereafter took on board a party of near-naked savages, men and women in equal numbers, to question about the gold ornaments they all wore in profusion about their necks and wrists and ankles.
Captain Winterjude stood watching, his lady by his side and every bit as impassive as he, as the men were questioned by Lieutenant Blacken. They refused to give sensible answers. They claimed to have no knowledge of where the gold came from. They insisted that they didn’t know what we were talking about. When the ornaments were ripped from their bodies and shaken in their faces, they denied the gewgaws even existed.
Finally, losing patience, Blacken lined the natives up against the starboard rail. He conferred with the captain, received a curt nod, and ordered two airshipmen to seize the first Indian and throw him overboard.
The man fell to his death in complete silence.
His comrades watched stoically. Blacken repeated his questions. Again he learned nothing.
A second Indian went over t
he rail.
And so it went until every male was gone, and it was obvious we would learn nothing.
The women, out of compassion I thought at the time, were spared. The next morning, however, it was found that by night all had disappeared. They had slipped over the side, apparently, after their mates. The crew were much discontented with this discovery, and I discovered from their grumbles and complaints that their intentions for these poor wretches had been far from innocent.
Inevitably, we turned south, in search of El Dorado. From that moment on, however, our voyage was a thing abhorrent to me. It seemed to me that we had made the air itself into one vast grave and that, having plunged into it, the Empire was now engaged in an unholy pilgrimage through and toward Death itself.
When the Aztecs had been defeated at last and their city was ours, the officers held a banquet to celebrate and to accept the fealty of the vassal chieftains. Hob was chosen to be a serving boy. But, because the clothes of a servitor were tight and thus revealing of gender, she perforce faked an injury, and I took her place instead.
It was thus that I caught the eye of Lady Winterjude.
The widow was a handsome, well-made woman with a black ponytail tied up in a bow. She wore her late husband’s military jacket, in assertion of her rights, and it was well known that she was Captain Blacken’s chief advisor. As I waited on her I felt her eye upon me at odd moments, and once saw her looking at me with a shocking directness.
She took me, as her unwritten perquisite, into her bed. Thereby and instantly turning Hob into my bitterest enemy, with Captain Blacken not all that far behind.
Forgive me. No, I hadn’t fallen asleep. I was just thinking on things. This and that. Nothing that need concern you.
At the time I thought of Lady Winterjude as a monster of evil, an incubus or lamia to whom I was nevertheless drawn by the weakness of my flesh. But of course she was nothing of the kind. Had I made an effort to see her as a fellow human, things might well have turned out differently. For I now believe that it was my very naïveté, the transparency with which I was both attracted to and repelled by her, that was my chief attraction for the lady. Had I but the wit to comprehend this then, she would have quickly set me aside. Lady Winterjude was no woman to allow her weaknesses to be understood by a subordinate.
I was young, though, and she was a woman of appetites.
Which is all I remember of that world, save that we were driven out from it. Before we left, however, we dropped a Union Jack, weighted at the two bottom corners, over the side and into the ocean, claiming the sea and all continents it touched for Britain and Queen Titania.
Only an orca was there to witness the ceremony, and whether it took any notice I greatly doubt.
The Empire crashed less than a month after we encountered the air-serpents. They lived among the Aurora Borealis, high above the Arctic mountains. It was frigid beyond belief when we first saw them looping amid the Northern Lights, over and over in circles or cartwheels, very much like the Oriental pictures of dragons. Everybody crowded the rails to watch. We had no idea that they were alive, much less hostile.
The creatures were electrical in nature. They crackled with power. Yet when they came zigzagging toward us, we suspected nothing until two balloons were on fire, and the men had to labor mightily to cut them away before they could touch off the others.
We fought back not with cannons—the recoil of which would have been disastrous to our fragile shells—but with rockets. Their trails crisscrossed the sky, to no effect at first. Then, finally, a rocket trailing a metal chain passed through an air-dragon and the creature discharged in the form of a great lightning bolt, down to the ground. For an instant we were dazzled, and then, when we could see again, it was no more.
Amid the pandemonium and cheers, I could have heard no sound to alert me. So it was either a premonition or merest chance that caused me to turn at that moment, just in time to see Hob, her face as hate filled as any demon’s, plunge a knife down upon me.
Eh? Oh, I’m sure she did. Your mother was never one for halfway gestures. I could show the scar if you required it. Still, I’m alive, eh? It’s all water under the bridge. She had her reasons, to be sure, just as I had mine. Anyway, I didn’t set out to explain the ways of women to you, but to tell of how the voyage ended.
We were caught in a storm greater than anything we had encountered so far. I think perhaps we were trapped between worlds. Witch fires danced on the ropes and rails. Balloons went up in flames. So dire was our situation and sure our peril that I could not hold it in my mind. A wild kind of exaltation filled me, an almost Satanic glee in the chaos that was breaking the airship apart.
As Hob came scuttling across my path, I swept her into my arms and, unheeding of her panicked protests, kissed her! She stared, shocked, into my eyes, and I laughed. “Caroline,” I cried, “you are the woman or lass or lad or whatever you might be for me. I’d kiss you on the lip of Hell itself, and if you slipped and fell in, I’d jump right after you.”
Briefly I was the man she had once thought me and I had so often wished I could be.
Hob looked at me with large and unblinking eyes. “You’ll never be free of me now,” she said at last, and then jerked away and was gone, back to her duty.
For more than a month I wandered the fever lands, while the Society for the Relief of Shipwrecked Sailors attended to my needs. Of the crash itself I remember nothing. Only that hours before it I arrived at the bridge to discover that poor dear old Fuzzleton was dead.
Captain Blacken, in his madness, had destroyed the only man who might conceivably have returned him to his own port of origin.
“Can you navigate?” he demanded fiercely. “Can you bring us back to London?”
I gathered up the equations that Fuzzleton and I had spent so many nights working up. In their incomplete state, they would bring us back to Philadelphia—if we were lucky—but no further. With anything less than perfect luck, however, they would smear us across a thousand worlds.
“Yes,” I lied. “I can.”
I set a course for home.
And so at last, I came upon my father’s grave. It was a crisp black rectangle in the earth, as dark and daunting as oblivion itself. Without any hesitation, I stepped through that lightless doorway. And my eyes opened.
I looked up into the black face of a disapproving angel.
“Tacey?” I said wonderingly.
“That’s Mrs. Nash to you,” she snapped. But I understood her ways now, and when I gratefully clasped her hand, and touched my lips to it, she had to look away, lest I think she had changed in her opinion of me.
Tacey Nash was still one of the tiniest women I had ever seen, and easily the most vigorous. The doctor, when he came, said it would be weeks before I was able to leave the bed. But Tacey had me nagged and scolded onto my feet in two days, walking in three, and hobbling about the public streets on a cane in four. Then, on the fifth day, she returned to her husband, brood, and anonymity, vanishing from my life forever, as do so many people in this world to whom we owe so much more than will ever be repaid.
When word got out that I was well enough to receive visitors, the first thing I learned was that my brother was dead. Jack had drowned in a boating accident several years after I left. A girl whose face was entirely unknown to me told me this—my mother, there also, could not shush her in time—and told me as well that she was my baby sister Barbara.
I should have felt nothing. The loss of a brother one does not know is, after all, no loss at all. But I was filled with a sadness wholly inexplicable but felt from the marrow outward, so that every bone, joint, and muscle ached with the pain of loss. I burst into tears.
Crying, it came to me then, all in an instant, that the voyage was over.
The voyage was over and Caroline had not survived it. The one true love of my life was lost to me forever.
So I came here. I could no longer bear to live in Philadelphia. The gems in my pocket, small though they mig
ht be compared to those I’d left behind, were enough to buy me this house and set me up as a merchant. I was known in the village as a melancholy man. Indeed, melancholy I was. I had been through what would have been the best adventure in the world, were it not ruined by its ending—by the loss of the Empire and all its hands, and above all the loss of my own dear and irreplaceable Hob.
Perhaps in some other, and better, world she yet survived. But not in mine.
Yet my past was not done with me yet.
On a cold, wet evening in November, a tramp came to my door. He was a wretched, fantastical creature, more kobold than human, all draped in wet rags and hooded so that only a fragment of nose poked out into the meager light from my doorway.
Imploringly, the phantasm held out a hand and croaked, “Food!”
I had not the least thought that any danger might arise from so miserable a source, and if I had, what would I have cared? A violent end to a violent life—I would not have objected. “Come inside,” I said to the poor fellow, “out of the rain. There’s a fire in the parlor. Go sit there, while I warm something up.”
As the beggar gratefully climbed the stairs, I noticed that he had a distinct limp, as if a leg had been broken and imperfectly healed.
I had a kettle steaming in the kitchen. It was the work of a minute to brew the tea. I prepared a tray with milk and sugar and ginger, and carried it back to the front of the house.
In the doorway to the parlor I stopped, frozen with amazement. There, in that darkened room, a hand went up and moved the hood down. All the world reversed itself.
I stumbled inside, unable to speak, unable to think.
The fire caught itself in her red hair. She turned up her cheek toward me with that same impish smile I loved so well.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 56
