Except ... whammied passengers, who knew what they might do? Take it in their scrambled brains to climb up and give themselves the deluxe midnight tour? Or even whammied officers, fumbling in confusion for the tabs they knew perfectly well sober.
The noises were coming faster now. Sounded as if whoever it was, was starting to feel desperate. Thumps, slaps, a muffled ouch.
Ellzett eased into squatting position between her engine and the Daedalus chute. Considering carefully, she opened the toolbox, slipped out the midsize wrench, and stood, balancing it in her right hand. She’d only strike to knock out, but she couldn’t let anyone in a whammied state of mind get to Gertie.
In fact, it might be better to tackle the intruder up on the catwalk, not just stand here waiting to scuffle in the cramped engine gondola. Tumble the floater down into the safety netting. Rebalancing her weapon, Ellzett tabbed the hatch open from her end, reached for the climbercatch—
The whoop from above made her glance up, and that made her finger slip on the catch. She corrected at once, but the intruder slid halfway down the chute before the stair panels flapped up. One booted foot swung round and caught Ellzett on the head. Hard.
Chapter 15
“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46)
“Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)
“Whoever is not against you is with you.” (Luke 9:50)
“The wind blows wherever it wishes, and you hear its sound without knowing where it’s coming from or where it’s going.” (John 3:8)
—The Gospels (New Universal
English Version of C.E. 2027)
Mother Frances was one of the first to recover. She gave a cutting little cry, pushed away from Winterset, and fled to her stateroom.
Still groggy, Winterset reeled to his own cabin, where a few cups of herb tea and a sponge bath with half a vial of jasmine essence finished clearing his brain, unclogging his pores, and retuning the balance between his corporeal and surcorporeal bodies. He could have done it a little more quickly with the added help of candles and incense; but since open flames were forbidden in dirigibles, more by tradition than because it was really essential for safety this time around, he was winging it without matches.
He put on clean clothes and an untouched pentagram amulet, hung the one he had been wearing in the window where moonlight, starlight, cloudlight, and eventually sunlight would purify the frabbled energies it had absorbed, made a few invocations, and returned whistling to the lounge, where he found the company in varying stages of recovery, half of them nursing the other half and starting the cleanup. Miz Ming, shamefacedly spreading terrypaper over the dirty carpet, told him that they were all to reassemble as soon as possible, by Captain Denne’s order, but that Mother Jackson was not in her stateroom and did not answer her personal phone.
Mixed in with gravy and squashed vegetables on the patch of carpet Miz Ming was covering, Winterset saw what looked like blood, quite a lot of blood. Something unfortunate must have happened. He could remember only laughing and dancing. “Anybody hurt?” he asked.
“Major von Cruewell’s seeing-eye dog.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m not sure.”
He nodded, feeling much more sober. “Well, let me find the madre for you.”
* * * *
Angela’s old algenometry prof, M. Rhomboid, traced an oval on the chalkboard, filled it in with white, and added some darker mottlings like the moon’s. After a long time, it turned into Corwin’s face.
Angela blinked, then cautiously shook her head. It didn’t ache, but it felt light, as if she had drunk too much wine. “Pundit?”
He took her left hand in both of his. She brought her right hand up to sandwich them. He winced slightly.
“Corwin? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Garvey, nothing.”
“You’ve got a bandage on your hand.”
“Pundita, you know my propensity for imaging wounds where none exist.”
Careful to hold his hand only by palm and fingers, she pushed herself into a sitting position. “I don’t remember finishing dinner, and I can’t remember going to bed, but I do remember, more or less, some ... very bad nightmares. A lot of nightmares. And some other dreams. And—I’m still dressed! So are you. Poe—I haven’t been drunk, have I? I’ve never been really drunk in my life!”
“No, not drunk.” He added his other hand to the knot that was their intertwining fingers. “Prepare yourself, Garvey. Remember, there’s nothing to worry about. The Melon’s flying safely, we seem to have left the storm well behind us, and—”
“You aren’t making this a bit easier, Corwin Poe!”
“I’d hoped I was breaking it gently. In brief, then—Do you really want it in brief?”
“In brief—Yes!”
He sighed. “In brief: whammy.”
“What?” She sat bolt upright with a tug that dizzied her and brought a soft cry to his lips. Releasing her grip on his hands, she fell back to a lying-down position.
“There can be no question of addiction,” he hastened to remind her. “One involuntary dose does not make a habit. Nor is there any cause for embarrassment. Everyone fell victim. All our fellow passengers, the cabin crew, the chef, the very officers who sat down to dine with us.”
“Everyone? But how? When?”
“The soup, as it appears. You could not have known. No one could have suspected.”
“It was in the soup? That delicious mock turtle—no, it was really iguanice, wasn’t it? But then you ...”
He actually looked apologetic. “Dr. Junge, her dog, and I were the only unaffected parties. Except, happily, those on duty flying the ship at the time. And, I believe, the off-duty crew above us, who ate a mulligan soup, less objectionably spiced.”
“But who spiced—spiked—the iguanice? And why?”
He shrugged helplessly. Or inscrutably? There might be something he wanted to keep back, thinking to spare her. She didn’t want to be spared. It had been her whammy spin—dear God, how embarrassing! No matter what he said to try to comfort her about it, she had been the one who must have made a complete fool of herself, those had been her drugged nightmares, she was the one who risked addiction and withdrawal horrors if it ever happened again—a lot of people said that two or three times was enough to hook any dryfish, no matter what you read in the printouts—and she had a right to know the worst!
“But why, Corwin?” she insisted. “It surely couldn’t have been part of NTC’s program to keep us all entertained! Was it one of those surprise customer-recruiting parties you hear about, that whammy dealers throw? If it was, we’ll just have to starve till we reach the—what’s their name?—the Azores and demand to be set down there.”
He shook his head. “I doubt it was a recruiting party. Too confined an area, too far yet for us all to travel together. A recruiter would run too great a risk of being unmasked. Far more likely it slipped by mistake into the kitchen stores from some smuggler’s cache aboard.”
“Then who’s smuggling it? And what happened to your hand?” she added, suddenly aware that his original answer had been far from adequate.
“I have no idea who may be the smuggler.” He pulled a wry smile. “In spite of all games, pretensions, and ambitions, I am no C. Auguste Dupin. As for my hand ... I believe that our friend the obersturmbannfuehrerin may suspect me of collusion in the affair. Or at the least of possessing inside information.”
“You? But that’s—that’s—No! That means she must have done it, and she’s trying to cover it up by using you!”
For a moment, he looked a little stunned. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you vent quite so vehement a suspicion of anyone before now, Pundita, under any circumstances. Not even during that ugly business at Squire Fitzhugh’s manor.”
“You never heard the way I talked back
to that hateful Renaissance countess while you were missing, Pundit.” Trying to relax, she smiled at him.
“But a blind woman?” Again he shook his head. “She would have been too careful to misplace the stuff by accident, especially having no reason to move it once it was securely hidden. And presumably she would have even greater difficulty than the rest of us in dosing the soup deliberately.”
“We don’t know it was securely hidden. Somebody else could have been on her trail. Jemmy Tolliver, maybe?”
He stared at his bandaged hand. “No, I doubt that the obersturmbannfuehrerin ... Still ... Garvey, I think perhaps I should confess at once that when I told you, a moment ago, there was nothing to worry about, I was guilty of humane exaggeration.”
* * * *
Winterset found Mother Frances at the far end of the dimly lighted promenade deck, pacing like an overwound droidnik. He tried greeting her with the most neutral yet positive thing he could think of: “Blessed be.”
She gave him back a stare. Like him, she seemed to have washed her face and changed her clothes, but she had left off the white band of her Roman collar. She turned and continued pacing.
He walked along, matching his stride to hers. He caught a whiff of fragrance. One of the venerable Chanel numbers, he thought. Whether cologne or perfumed soap or deodorant, the madre used essences, too.
“If you’d like to make your confession or anything ...” he remarked.
“What, to you?”
“So far as I know, I’m the only other clergy aboard.”
“And according to your creed, there’s nothing to confess!”
“You’re wrong there, Madre. ... Well, you’re wrong and you’re right. I’d have been guilty of using some pretty heavy energies against you, except that I was as whammied as you were. So we neither one of us have anything to feel guilty for.”
“Whammied?”
He nodded. “I took that dazzledust once in college. Years ago, but I could recognize the feeling.”
“Once. Only once?”
“Believe it or not, Madre,” he told her with a grin, “drugs are not the Way. Once was enough to help me understand that guideline.”
“But how did it happen? Someone must have slipped it to us. Who—”
“Not me. My word on that, Madre.”
The storm was long over. They could still hear wind hush over the hull, but it was the wind of the ship’s own passage, the wake he made going through the air. It could have been shut out, but the builders had avoided sound-soak materials in the outer walls on purpose so that passengers could enjoy that nostalgic, atmospheric whisper.
“You knew what it was,” said Mother Frances, “and you made no attempt to keep control?”
“With whammy, there’s no point. Some floaters think they can fight it, but that’s just another part of the illusion.”
“There is always a point in fighting. ‘For God permits no one to be tempted beyond personal strength.’”
“Hey, now. If you’re going to start whipping Scriptures around again, what was Ezekiel if he wasn’t on some kind of dazzledust?”
“Ezekiel!”
“The prophet who ate scrolls and lay on one side or the other for days on end, besieging a picture of Jerusalem on a little clay tablet. Sometime you might try comparing his flying wheels and four-face cherubim with some of Coleridge’s and other people’s wilder opium dreams. St. John, too, or whoever it was who wrote the Book of Revelation, probably wrote it on a brainful of hallucinogens.”
For several seconds, Winterset feared he’d blanked whatever chance they might have had to find common ground. Then, just as he was about to deliver the message about gathering together at the captain’s command, Mother Frances suddenly laughed.
“Well,” she observed, “lightning hasn’t struck us yet.”
“Hey, now, that sounds more like the good, old-time pastoral spirit!”
“Pastoral!” She sat down heavily in one of the deck chairs. “A fine pastoral record! Lending credence tonight to all the centuries of slander and calumny against priests and religious ...”
“Talking about centuries of slander,” he said in a carefully whimsical tone, “you should glance back through them from the Pagan side. You’ve caught it for five or six hundred years from the Protestants. We’ve caught it for two millennia from all you Christians—Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox—and for millennia before you were around, we had the Jews breathing hard on our necks, accusing us of much nastier things than a whammy bash.”
When she made no answer, he sat down in another deck chair. His wristphone started chiming. He turned it off, as the madre must have turned hers off long ago. After a few moments, he leaned forward and touched one of the light controls. “We could see the outside view better with no deck light at all. Do you mind, Madre?”
At first she gave no sign of having heard him. Then she replied, “Not if it was entirely the fault of the drug, and you’re completely over it now.”
“Cool as glass.” He tabbed the deck lights down to nothing.
Their shadowy reflections vanished, along with the barricade of blue-gray light, and healing darkness poured in around them. Now a spirit could forget being encased in a tiny shell of steelglass and duralumin, could feel at one with moon, stars, and ocean, with air rushing gently alongside and stormcloud curling away far behind, carrying its lightnings to charge the land with nitrogen and new vitality.
“Madre Frances, it’s good for people to have a few reminders now and then that we priests are human, too.”
“Foibles and venial sins would have been enough for that.”
“Say, would you rather parade around in solid, stainless-steel virtue like Brother von Hofer?”
“Brother von Hofer! That showscreen fallgood with his ... You’re making me speak uncharitably, M. Windsong,” she said, but now there was a joking note in her voice. “Get thee behind ... No. Get thee far away from my behind.”
“At least we think alike on the subject of Brother von Hofer and his ilk.” They sat in silence for another moment or two, letting the peace of the universe soak in, before he spoke again. “We were all whammied tonight, everyone in that lounge. They’ll all be too busy wrestling with their own embarrassment to worry about anyone else’s. Just the way it’ll be on your Judgment Day.”
“Oh. And if they talk about the fallen priest, I suppose that will only be to console themselves for their own frailty?”
“They’d probably be too bashful to come for counseling if they weren’t aware that you’ve got firsthand knowledge of it yourself now. ‘Tried as human flesh is in everything.’ Isn’t that how it goes?”
“‘In everything except sin.’” She sighed heavily.
“Well, even Jesus might be a little more approachable for having sinned once or twice. Like some of the Mother’s earlier dying and resurrected Sons and Daughters—sorry, Madre, blank that.” This was hardly the best time to resume theological disputation. “There were a lot of very intense energies bouncing around in there this evening. It’d have taken a Jesus to resist. An un-whammied Jesus.”
She sighed again. “It couldn’t have been part of the planned entertainment. If it was ...” She sat up suddenly, sending out a strong wave of anger. “If it was, if this sort of thing is NTC’s idea of entertaining its passengers, by Heaven I’ll call for such an investigation—”
“It wasn’t. There’ll be an investigation, but NTC wasn’t responsible. Between Cygnus and Hindenburg II, this is my fourth flight by airship, and nothing like this happened on the first three.”
“And with the captain and officers affected as well ... unless they were acting,” she mused.
“Captain Denne? Too undignified for her. But they’ll ride a Moebius band till they find out whose idea it was of a practical joke, and I wouldn’t like to be in the guilty floater’s
place when they find out. Besides the criminal charges, there’ll be one heck of a crippling civil suit brought by NTC, plus the private-court actions more than half of us are probably going to file.” For himself, Winterset felt no particular inclination to sue. He wouldn’t have taken whammy again by choice, but he didn’t feel soiled or hung over. Of course, extra funds always came in useful at the Sanctuary; but by the time NTC and the Tribunal of Illegal Substances, which funded itself primarily on penal fines, had finished divvying the lion’s share, there wouldn’t be that much left to parcel out in damages to individual citizens. He wondered briefly if Mother Frances would sue, and guessed she might consider even private court too embarrassing.
They lapsed into another silence. Clocked time meant little to Winterset Windsong, who refused to carry even a sundial charm; but he might have guessed it at anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes before the madre spoke again.
“Between sky and ocean,” she said, “even this great dirigible seems very tiny.”
“I always feel closer to Earth in an airship than in a plane.”
“We are closer. Planes have much higher cruising altitudes.”
He shook his head. “Not because of that. Your plane’s a militant—fighting Nature for every centimeter of flight. Your airship swims along with nature. That’s why I take the airships whenever I can.”
After another moment she said musingly, “Yet the laws of aerodynamics that keep planes up are as natural as the laws of lighter and heavier gasses.”
“Maybe it’s just the rate of speed. Here, I feel as if I’m floating in the airy part of Mother Gaea’s womb. An airplane snaps the umbilical at takeoff. Why are you flying by dirigible, Madre?”
“The discount for clerics capable of serving as chaplains.”
“Yes, there is that, too,” he replied, pretending not to hear the strain of conscience in her words. “Airplanes get from departure point to landing point too fast to bother about needing chaplains aboard.”
“That, and the chance to pray Mass in the clouds. ‘Nearer to God in an airship ...’” She let her voice trail off, then resumed in brisker tones, “M. Windsong, it may be time to revive ecumenism.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 82
