by Ian Whates
“All of this invaluable equipment will be situated in the loggia, except for the peripheral holding tanks, of course, which will be controlled from the loggia via very reliable electro-mechanical linkages. Additionally, we will lay in plenty of foodstuffs and beverages, extra garments and bedclothes, a few pistols and some tools. Do these preparations begin to hint at anything to you, Frank? And have you any suggestions to make?”
Frank stared silently at the Duke for a few moments, before breaking into a huge grin. “Well, damn my soul! If you don’t put old Columbus in the shade, Duke, I don’t know who does! My hat’s off to you! I won’t even dare to say what I think you have up your sleeve, but if you can pull it off, the world will hail you as a hero.”
The Duke grinned modestly, and bowed his head. “A father will dare much for his progeny. And if some new knowledge of the cosmos accrues along with the patriarchal deeds, so much the better.”
“I would suggest one thing, though. Heat.”
The Duke cogitated. “Hmm, the transmissive properties of the aether, and its density, are unknown quantities. I had thought solar flux might be enough for comfort... But certainly we could add some extra insurance. Very well, I’ll write to Sir Swan immediately and see what he can provide! Now, as to your task, which requires a delicacy I cannot demand of the common laborers—”
Down to the lowest level of the palazzo the men went. There Frank saw many bundles of cuprous plates, along with kegs of hide glue.
“Here is all the cavourite in the world, hammered out to its thinnest dimensions consistent with lifting strength. I need you to affix it all evenly to the stone interior walls and columns, beams and ceiling.”
“Not the floor too?”
“No, the floor is extraneous. But elsewhere, the plates must be tightly secured. Can you do this?”
“Why, sure, it’s just like sloshing rabbit-skin glue onto a canvas. Let me at it!”
True to his boast, Frank found the process of tiling the basement of the Ca’ d’Oro with cavourite to be a trivial, albeit hot and messy one. Shirtless, with heated pots of glue bubbling, he laid down one metal square after another, conforming the pliable sheets to arches and columns alike. As the days progressed, with other work continuing in parallel, the basement of the palazzo came to resemble Peter the Great’s famed ‘Amber Room,’ a shining sun-colored box.
Restituta came demurely to visit at regular intervals, bringing refreshments and conversation in her improving English. She seemed neither repelled nor distracted by Frank’s bare manly chest, rather regarding it as a mere natural phenomenon.
When all the cavourite was in place, a single wire was run from the basement plates (their contiguous conductive surface needed only one point of electrical contact) to the batteries and rheostat controls in the loggia.
And then came the day they had all been working toward: departure for the Moon.
The voyagers had waited deliberately until darkness descended, bringing with it the anticipated full silvery pockmarked orb high in the heavens, for which they could aim.
The loggia, illuminated by Shaw’s incandescents as if a carnival scene, was replete with supplies and equipment and furniture, but still relatively spacious. Even the big tuns of water did not loom too oppressively. Through the glass wall, the gay night-life of Venice continued in its immemorial fashion, with passing watercraft arrowing lazily through the canals.
Restituta attended to the electrolysis device that was fractionating the water into useful gases. Seated, Ludovic cranked the handle of a generator to top off the batteries. Duke Fossombrone stood at the master controls. The household’s lone servant had been sent away on a contrived errand. A subliminal but real vibration of excitement and expectancy infused the chamber.
“Testing the propulsive jets for the final time now.” Muted hissing penetrated the loggia from various points around the palazzo. “All operational. I will now begin to enliven the cavourite.”
The Duke slid the rheostat control, and the Ca’ d’Oro began to shift and creak, as if in a windstorm. He advanced the control further, and new and louder popping and ripping noises mounted. Still further, and a cataclysmic tumult battered their ears, as the ancient and now weightless palazzo, reinforced by its cage of timbers but suddenly lacking a bottom to the otherwise intact Amber Room, tore completely loose from terra firma and rose gently into the sky, like a drifting feather in reverse.
The Duke halted their ascent at the height of about forty feet. Despite his expectations, Frank was astonished, his heart beating like a racehorse’s at the end of the newly inaugurated Kentucky Derby. He looked down at the light-pricked city and, despite the darkness he could see the spot vacated by the Ca’ d’Oro filling with water. Astonished gondoliers were falling into the Canal, and bellowing pedestrians pointing upward.
“Goodbye, City of Bridges!” proclaimed the Duke. “We go to build the ponte di stelle!”
To the Moon, and What Awaited
THE UNFORESEEN NULLITY of gravity once Earth had been left behind proved merely distracting and awkward for the Duke and Frank. Luckily, they had brought along extensive coils of stout rope of varying gauges. Using some of the lesser-strength stuff, Frank was able to arrange a spider’s web of lines that allowed one to maneuver about the loggia with ease, and to anchor oneself at a desired spot. (Of the embarrassingly messy and counter-intuitive chamberpot arrangements, conducted behind a floating folding screen, the less said the better). Thus Duke Fossombrone could handle the propulsion controls of the flying palazzo without fear of drifting away at a crucial moment, and Frank could tether himself before the windows in order to fulfill his mandate to sketch their voyage.
Not that he needed any lure of wages to make him hasten to fill his pad, penciling madly and furiously enhancing with pastel colors for hours at a stretch, till he had to be coerced to sleep or eat. What an opportunity this was, one for which any artist would have gladly given his non-facile arm! Had any painter ever been presented with such magnificent vistas before? These incredible and colorful pastures of the heavens, strewn with stars and planets and planetesimals and polychromatic nebulae as thick as daisies, made the subject matter of the vaunted Hudson River School look like a ditch full of rainwater. Not even Thomas Cole had ever achieved such grandeur. If only John and Bill had been able to come along—
But they hadn’t, and when Frank returned to Earth it was his name alone that would be made. All uncertainty about his future, all world-weariness had vanished amidst these celestial splendors.
But if the lack of weight had proven simply a bit of ‘weather’ for Fossombrone and Duveneck, an irksome aspect of the foreign environment, for Ludovico and Restituta the new condition had proven, respectively, inebriating and estranging.
For Ludovico, the lack of weight endowed him with perfect freedom of movement for the first time since he had sustained his wounds and loss. As if granted wings, he soared about the loggia, laughing and shouting.
“Sister, look at me! I fly like an eagle! Already your perfect faith has blessed me! Even if our mission does not secure me new legs, I will always have had these hours of bliss!”
Thus addressed, Restituta, huddling miserably in a floating chair that threatened to dislodge her with every stray breeze, looking like a scared rabbit in a corner of its warren, and clutching a needlepoint cushion to her bosom, tried to make a suitably positive reply.
“I am so glad, brother. You deserve such release.”
Her smile was wan and forced, as if she were trying to manufacture cheer despite some internal upheaval that commanded her true attentions.
Frank had not initially given much concern to Restituta’s grim mien, chalking it up simply to natural female timidity and anxiety. But as the trip proceeded with no cause for alarm, and she still refused to brighten up despite all cajoling, he became alarmed for her. Catching her alone in a far corner of the loggia, he spoke frankly to the jolie laide, for whom he still retained the largest of affections and
hopes.
“Restituta, cara mio, what ails you? Aren’t you happy that things are going so swimmingly? Thanks to your father’s foresight and inventiveness, we are as safe as bugs in a rug while we journey where no man has gone before.”
Restituta’s large eyes brimmed with tears, but did not quite overspill. Frank thought she had never looked lovelier.
“Yes, Frank, I am proud of father. And of you too. You have both exerted yourself beyond compare in fulfillment of my implausible dreams. But it is those dreams themselves that trouble me. Le voci degli angeli—the voices of the angels, which I heard only as a murmur on Earth, have become a swelling chorus in my brain. There is not a minute now when they do not chatter to me. And some of the things they say are—disturbing.”
Frank sought to minimize Restituta’s worries. In truth, he only half-believed in her angels, placing his faith more in the Duke’s natural philosophy. Granting credence to this tale of supernatural beings living on the Moon and able to confer new limbs on Ludovico had been, he was certain, merely a necessary pretext to motivate a more practical and rational venture.
“Don’t worry, my darling. I’m sure the angels are just excited finally to have a chance to meet you. If they are indeed angels, then their intentions must be only for our good.”
Restituta spoke haltingly. “Yes... yes, I continue to believe that. But it is only that what angels deem good is so much larger and more complex than what mortals understand of that realm. And that infinitude frightens me.”
Frank spontaneously clutched the young woman to him in an embrace that sent them both pinwheeling away across the loggia. Ludovico looked up from his cranking of the Gramme Dynamos to smile. The Duke was napping, sending gentle elderly snores into the room.
Frank stole a kiss and whispered, “Have faith, Restituta. This will be a bold tale to tell our children once we are safely home, doddering elders in our seats by the hearthside.”
“I would like to believe that, Frank. Truly, I would.”
Over subsequent days, Frank continued to hover for most of his waking hours near the windows. The swelling bulk of the Moon provided endless inspiration—to the Duke as well, who employed a telescope upon its silvery face. The limiting factor on Frank’s sketching was the intense cold radiating inward from the glass. Despite positioning one of Shaw’s electrical heating mechanisms close to him and wrapping himself in a blanket, his hand would often chill and cramp.
The Duke acknowledged Frank’s stamina, saying, “What a blessing you hit upon those heaters, son! And to think I was going to put our water supply outside the loggia to save room, and pipe it in. It would have frozen solid, and then where would we have been?”
Frank pictured the rest of the rooms of the Ca’ d’Oro, outside their tiny, fragile nest of warmth and air. The ghostly mansion must be a dark and frigid and spectral domain, like Dante’s lowest Hell, or some spell-locked castle from a Gothic novel. He shivered at the forceful image.
The Duke had regularly to make steady adjustments in their course, puffing hydrogen this way and that, always seeking to catch up with the Moon not where it currently appeared, but where it would be in its orbit upon their arrival in that region. He relied more on dead reckoning than mathematics. Luckily their supply of hydrogen gas seemed equal to the task.
At last came the day when just a tiny slice of the satellite filled their view, and they hung motionless with respect to the orb.
“Daughter, where shall I land us?”
Restituta was supine, if such a term could apply in the absence of up and down, with her eyes closed and a cold wet cloth laid across her brow and held in place with a limp forearm. Her voice, when she spoke, was haunted, of a timbre unheard before.
“Move the palazzo slowly around the lunar globe, and I will direct you.”
Before too long, Restituta signalled that they hovered over the exact landing spot preferred by the angels. The Duke changed the orientation of the flying mansion, and suddenly for the first time the Moon seemed below rather than ahead. They began their controlled descent.
The return of some small fraction of their terrestrial weight was accompanied by a soft crump of the palazzo settling to the lunar soil. Outside the windows, a cloud of fine argent dust from their landing arose in eerie slow motion unlike any such event on Earth. Light spilling forth from the mansion illuminated a small wedge of pockmarked ground.
Duke Fossombrone uttered the first words of mankind upon another world. “All praise to Isaac Newton, Garibaldi, and the Pope.”
Frank swore. “Holy Christ! What I’d give to be outside so I could sketch the sight of a Venetian palace smack dab in the middle of all this starkness. It’s more fabulous than anything out of Lane’s One Thousand and One Nights.”
Restituta had joined them mechanically. Dragging himself forward easily along the ropes with leg stubs trailing, Ludovico arrived at the windows also, completing the quartet. “Lift me up, please, Frank, so I may better see.” Frank turned a fallen chair upright and hoisted the cripple into it.
“Your angels, sister! The ones who will help me. Where are they?”
Restituta’s voice sounded resigned. “Right before us, brother. Can you not see them?”
Frank said, “But there is nothing—”
And then an unearthly city appeared, as if a painted curtain of false lunar scenery had been instantly whisked away.
Needle-shaped crystal spires of all sizes, warty with random excrescenses, thrust toward the black, star-riddled sky. Portions of the structures seemed to spin, and wink into and out of existence. Twinkling pinlights of all hues glimmered from within the towers, as if signaling a convocation of fairies. And outside among the spires the angels cavorted, looking just as Frank had drawn them, employing their big bat wings to dip and curvet, swoop and glide, in whatever strange Selenic atmosphere existed. Their emaciated equine muzzles opened and closed in silent exaltation.
“The angels want to see me,” said Restituta mournfully. “I need to go to them.”
The Duke began, “But my dear, please consider—”
Frank said, “Forget it!”
Ludovico said, “Is that truly necessary, sister?”
Ignoring the men, Restituta moved toward one of the capped exit doors. Frank raised a hand to halt her—
—and found himself frozen! Straining with all his might, he still could not budge.
Restituta opened the inner door of the little ‘mudroom,’ as full of air as the loggia. She entered the chamber, then closed the door. She must have unlatched the outer door leading into the cold, dark precincts of the palazzo, for an audible whoosh of air reverberated through the panels of the mudroom.
Unable even to vent his rage and impotence, Frank felt himself going mad. Then, just at the nadir of his frustration, he lurched forward, released. He took a step or two after Restituta, then was brought up short by the Duke’s exclamation of “Look!”
Outside the window, Restituta walked serenely across the lunar soil, the hem of her long skirts stirring up the dust. A transparent nimbus seemed to cloak her. She moved steadily toward the angelic city, and then disappeared within its precincts.
“I’m going after her,” said Frank.
“No, my son! You do not know if you could even survive the lunar conditions.”
“She did!”
“But,” Ludovico said with a mixture of sorrow and fraternal pride, “my sister was always favored of the celestials.”
Frank felt he had to do something. “I can’t just stand here!”
“Let me pump some air into the portal, then.”
The Duke did so, and Frank hurried to the exit chamber. He entered, and latched the inner door. Then he opened the outer one.
The air gusting instantly out into the vacuum swept Frank off his feet and carried him willy-nilly to bang his head against the wooden arm of a sofa. He felt hot and cold at once, and struggled to rise. His eyeballs seemed as dry as the dust in an Egyptian tomb. Impossible to
think—
Frank awoke lying on a pallet of blankets. He opened his eyes and saw the Duke and Ludovico bending solicitously over him. He tried to speak, but his throat was so raw he could only croak. The Duke gave him a drink of fiery grappa.
“What—what happened?”
“Ludovico was just a second or so behind you. The air pressure inside the loggia, acting against the chamber door with naught but vacuum on the far side, made it incredibly hard to open. But together, we did so. My son was sucked through, and I let the door slam. Apparently, he was able to retain his sensibilities long enough to crawl to you and drag you back. Thank the Lord you had not fallen even further away! Then he even managed to pull the outer door shut before losing his own consciousness, whereupon I could introduce fresh air into the portal. Then I hauled both of you unfortunates inside.”
Frank regarded Ludovico, and saw that the young man’s face was a map of vacuum-blistered blood vessels. He supposed his own mug looked the same. He gripped Ludovico’s mighty bicep with one hand and said, “I owe you my life, brother.”
“I learned in battle that one’s comrades are as dear as one’s self.”
Frank got painfully to his feet. “What of Restituta and the angels?”
“Nothing. And yet I—”
Without warning, silent speech filled every niche of Frank’s mind. He could tell the others were undergoing identical communications. This must have been what Restituta had experienced unrelentingly throughout the voyage.
