Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Late in the afternoon of the first day, Omar had the professor show him how to use the small metal toilet in the corner, a facility with no illusion of privacy that did however provide a terrifically cold shock to one’s bare bottom. Omar tried not to think about where the waste might fall. Nor did he look forward to witnessing either of his female companions use the device. When Morayo headed back to the round seat, Omar quickly headed forward to linger by the cockpit until she was done. Garai chuckled at him when he returned.

  The nights were worse than the days. There was still nothing to do and no comfort in which to rest, but in the darkness the world outside faded into a ghost landscape of moonlight on shapeless white snowfields. The vast wilderness of España stretched on and on below them, a featureless winter world punctuated by the rare stone cities that huddled like gray mountains in the day and glowed like colonies of fireflies in the night. Kosoko began to describe what they were seeing below, naming cities and landmarks, especially the famous Espani cathedrals, but the man soon grew queasy and fell silent again. He chewed his ginger sparingly.

  It was late during the second night, as Omar leaned shivering against a canvas sack of apples trying to sleep, when lightning flashed across the cockpit windows. A moment later a deep growling thunder rolled through the cabin, and then the soft patter of rain began to fall on the great padded gas envelope of the airship above them.

  After a few minutes of listening to the storm, Omar shuffled forward into the cabin where Riuza sat tall in her seat peering into the darkness ahead. Morayo slumped in her engineer’s station, snoring.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Right as rain,” the captain said softly. “Are you all right?”

  “Quite all right, dear lady. Just bored and a bit cramped.”

  “That will happen. But the good news is that we are now over the Pyrenees and as soon as we reach the lee of the mountains we will be setting down, just after dawn.”

  “You have an airfield up here?”

  “We do.” Riuza tapped one of her indicators, and was rewarded with a little wave of a needle. “It’s called the Bayonne Glacier.”

  He nodded. “Ah. I see.”

  Why do I sense that she doesn’t like me very much? Such a pity. She has such a nicely shaped head. I’ll bet she has a beautiful smile as well.

  “You should try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll probably need your help in the morning to secure the ship when we land.”

  “All right then. Good night.” Omar shuffled back to his seat between the apples and the toilet, wrapped his new wool coat tightly around himself, and closed his eyes.

  He awoke to the hideous noise of metal vibrating against metal. Sitting up, he saw the naked fear in Garai’s unblinking eyes and the breathless panic in Kosoko’s pale face. Both of them were gripping the seats and bags beside them, and all around the men their stores and supplies were shaking against the cabin walls.

  “What’s happening?” he shouted over the rattling noise, but the two men only stared back at him in silence.

  Omar lurched to his feet, clutching the shaking rails overhead for balance. Through the windows he could see the thick stormheads of the gray clouds all across the horizon with their edges set ablaze by the rising sun. Heavy rain drops pelted the windows of the gondola and the heavens thundered without pause as the clouds flashed with lightning again and again.

  He stumbled to the front of the cabin and leaned into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”

  Riuza clutched the controls tightly with both hands and Morayo lay on the floor, a wrench in her teeth and both hands thrust into an open panel by Riuza’s feet.

  “Just some weather, Mister Bakhoum,” the captain said. “Best if you sit back down.”

  Omar didn’t move. Through the forward windscreen, he could see a great plain of black and white ice shining across the ground. And the ground was growing closer. “What can I do to help?”

  “Just sit down.”

  “But look how fast we’re coming down! Are we going to crash?”

  “Sit down!”

  The Finch shook violently and leaned over on its port side, and Omar could feel the freezing wind whistling through some unseen crack in the walls. Behind them, the engine sputtered and the droning of the propellers began to skip and stutter and choke on the winter air. The cabin shook harder.

  Morayo slammed her panel closed and scrambled back up into her seat as she shoved her tools into her pockets. “We’re screwed until I can get outside, captain!”

  Omar glared at the two women, and opened his mouth to demand more information about what was happening when he caught sight of the ground out of the port side windows. The frozen tips of ice spires whipped by the glass, clattering on the hull. And ahead of them, tilted at a drunken angle, he saw the face of the glacier about to strike the gondola. The world that had once looked so distant and smooth now appeared terribly close and riddled with jagged outcroppings of ice. “We’re going to crash! Do something!”

  “Morayo!” the captain shouted, “The anchor! Now!”

  The engineer leapt from her seat, shoved Omar out of her way, and dashed to the thick brass gunstock welded into the inner panel of the starboard wall. Omar fell to the floor, cracking his head on a railing. Squinting and fumbling for a handhold, he watched Morayo jerk the gunstock up and left and then she pulled the heavy iron trigger. A sudden shock ran through the cabin floor and Omar heard a sharp whistling rip through walls. Briefly he glimpsed the wire cable zipping down from the ceiling above the gunstock and vanishing through a brass eyelet into the world outside.

  The Finch jerked to starboard and Omar stumbled as he rose to his feet. Through the window he saw the jagged spears of ice so close that he could almost reach out and touch them, but no nearer, and no longer coming any closer.

  The Finch had become stuck in midair.

  He turned to ask what had happened, but just then Morayo grabbed a winch handle beside the gunstock and began cranking it around. Omar climbed the uneven deck to her side and lent a hand, forcing the winch over and under, and with each turn he felt the Finch lurch a short distance to starboard. Then the engineer shoved a lockbar into place beside it and waved him back. “We’re good. Thanks.”

  He followed her back to the cockpit and watched as the glacier rose in short hops and slips up toward their feet, until at last the Finch banged down against the hard ground.

  Morayo squeezed past him again, this time to unlock the hatch and let a torrent of freezing air into the cabin. She jogged outside and Omar followed, and he saw that she meant to lash a pair of ropes from the gondola to the nearby columns of ice. The spires had been thrust up from a crack in the glacier, each one stabbing the heavens at a different angle, and half of them had been sheared off by the screaming wind.

  He worked quickly with her, squinting into the howling winds that sprayed his face with needling ice crystals. Snow dust swirled across the ground and the blasted spires shuddered like prisoners in fear for their lives. Overhead he saw an angry maelstrom of white mists and gray clouds colliding and warring for mastery of the skies, and bolts of lightning danced from one thunderhead to another, rumbling like the bellies of hungry gods.

  With the lines secured, Omar climbed back into the cabin behind Morayo and slammed the hatch shut. He blinked. The sudden transition from the freezing noise of the outside world to the warm stillness of the airship was like stepping into a stolen corner of paradise.

  He took a moment to catch his breath while watching the women slump in their seats to glance at their dials and flick their little switches. The Finch’s engine chugged on, its propellers still spinning swiftly but not powerfully outside, only fast enough to fend off the elements.

  “Now,” he said, “would you please tell me what’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”

  Riuza sighed. Morayo laughed. “Nothing’s wrong,” the engineer said. “We just hit a little weather. Just a little squall over the mount
ains. It’s nothing, really, it happens all the time. Welcome to Europa, Mister Bakhoum.”

  He exhaled slowly and glanced back at other men, who nodded at him sheepishly.

  “So this is normal?”

  They nodded again.

  “And will probably happen again?”

  They nodded again.

  “Ah.” Omar swallowed and straightened up. “All right then. Good. Then I can make us a nice hot breakfast now. Where’s the stove?”

  He made them a heavy Espani breakfast of sausages and red potatoes while Morayo explained that the gunstock in the cabin wall connected to a harpoon gun outside that they had modified to fire their emergency anchor down into the ice or rocks to stop the Finch from blowing about in a storm, which happened rather often near the Pyrenees.

  After they finished eating, everyone trooped outside into the freezing ice wind to inspect the Finch’s hull and check the lines. Omar followed Morayo, marveling at the young woman’s ability to notice tiny dings and scrapes in the outer walls of the gondola through the blinding snow gusts. She shouted over the wind to tell him that the ice did this or a rock did that, and which were superficial, and which she would spend the day hammering out or welding over. With the lines secure and the engineer’s repair plan ready, their last task was to follow the steel cable from the harpoon gun across an uneven sheet of ice to find the emergency anchor.

  Peering through his blue-tinted glasses, Omar spotted the anchor hooked under a block of ice that rested on the glacier like a boulder. Staring down at the device, he despaired at the thought of having to chip the anchor free of the ice using hammers and shovels, and he wondered if he might convince the others to leave the task to him alone so that he might make short work of it with his blazing seireiken.

  But Morayo slipped around him, yanked a pin from the anchor’s base, and the long jagged arms of the anchor slid neatly back into its central shaft. The engineer stood up and shoved the cold anchor into his arms. “Here. Thanks.”

  Omar trekked back to the ship and reloaded the anchor into the harpoon gun, and then went inside to winch the entire steel cable back onto its spool, a job that took nearly half an hour of continuous winching. But when that was done, he was free to flop back down into his narrow crevice between the apples and the toilet, and for the first time in two days he couldn’t imagine a more restful place to be.

  After a short break, he turned to Kosoko, whose mood had improved considerably since the landing and was now reading a small leather-bound book, and Omar said, “If the weather is this rough in the winter, why don’t you make your expeditions in the summer?”

  The cartographer snorted. “In the summer, the warm air off the sea mixes with the cold of the glaciers to make storms so violent that they would shatter this ship like kindling before we got anywhere near the Pyrenees. In the winter, all of the air is cold and thus more predictable. This isn’t rough weather, Mister Bakhoum. This is the calm season in this part of the world.”

  Omar nodded slowly. “I see.”

  “We learned that the hard way three summers back.” Kosoko returned to his book. “Don’t worry. If anyone is going to get us all home safely, it’ll be Captain Ngozi. You can trust in that.”

  Chapter 5

  Riuza let Morayo fiddle with the Finch all day long, and the little engineer spent as much time outside banging on the hull as she spent inside banging on the pipes. The men were also called out for a bit of work breaking up the ice under the Finch and hauling the freezing chunks and shards inside to refill the engine’s boiler. The bits of ice bobbed in the warm tank for a moment or two before melting away and Omar marveled that something as simple as steam was driving the huge propellers of the airship. As night fell, he resumed his cooking duties to prepare a traditional Mazigh tajine of lamb, apples, olives, raisins, and almonds with a dash of cinnamon and pepper from the tiny spice kit that Morayo kept hidden in an overhead locker.

  As darkness fell upon the frozen wastes of the Bayonne Glacier, Omar noticed the tiny flickering light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Frowning, he jerked his chin at it and said, “I thought those lights needed sunlight to power them?”

  “Sunlight is just one way to make electricity. Another is wind,” Riuza said. She had tilted back her pilot’s seat to create an uncomfortable-looking recliner to sleep in. “And there is plenty of wind out there right now.”

  The howling gusts outside shook the cabin, and there was a continuous tinkling sound of icy granules peppering the windows from all sides.

  “So, is there nothing alive out there?” Omar squinted into the dark window, but could only see his own reflection in the glass. A sharp gurgle in his belly made him wince.

  “No, nothing alive here,” Kosoko said. “Plenty of dead folk, though. If the wind lets up enough for the aether to settle, we should see the southern migration tonight.”

  Omar jerked away from the glass. “Migration? Of the dead?”

  “It’s not a migration,” Garai snapped. “Animals migrate to find better seasonal habitats. The dead have no habitat. And you call yourself a scientist!”

  “Then what would you call it?” the cartographer asked. “Hundreds of souls all moving south together. Just like birds or fish.”

  The naturalist rolled his eyes, pressed his hand to his belly, and burped. “Don’t be stupid, Kosoko. It’s probably some sort of pilgrimage. These barbarian souls must be looking for their afterlife or their gods or something.”

  “So you don’t know?” Omar asked. “You’ve never investigated this migration?”

  Garai slipped his hand inside his belt to pull his pants away from his stomach as he shifted in his seat. “Of course not. I am a scientist, sir, not a priest. Natural philosophy has been the bedrock of Songhai scholarship even longer than in Marrakesh. I don’t concern myself with matters of religion. So until it becomes possible to study aether and ghosts in a controlled manner, there is no place for it in the natural sciences.”

  Omar smiled and turned back to the window. “Interesting.”

  Within the hour, the small light bulb overhead flickered dimmer and dimmer, and then faded completely to leave the cabin in utter darkness. But a pale glow fell on the ice outside and Omar peered out across a vast plain of wintry desolation marked here and there by the light of the stars and he perceived the shapes of the clouds overhead by the dark shadows they cast on the glacier. The Finch itself sat flat and still on the ground, and only a few thin streams of icy dust tumbled across the ground outside.

  The men were snoring in the back of the cabin, and the women looked to be similarly asleep in the cockpit, so Omar pulled on his gloves and hat, wrapped his coat tightly around himself, and slipped out the hatch as quickly and quietly as he could. There was a sharp stitch in his side and he hoped a long walk would ease his digestion before he tried to sleep sitting up for the third night in a row.

  Stepping away from the warmth of the cabin and away from the shadow of the airship, he discovered a world of quiet oblivion. There were no leafy branches or tall waving grasses to shush and whisper in the breeze. There were no owls or nightingales to call, and no crickets to chirp. No wolves howled and no lions roared.

  There was nothing between heaven and earth but the ice and the clouds wrapped in perfect silence.

  He walked carefully across the frozen ground, placing his boots gently on the icy dust and making only the softest crunching noises. When the Frost Finch was merely a dark shape in the distance behind him, Omar stopped. The clouds were breaking up, revealing more stars and spilling more moonlight on the face of glacier. A pale mist hovered above the ice so thick that it obscured the ground completely, and Omar saw the aether moving slowly toward the south, sliding down the skin of the world toward the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees. He turned to look north, and froze.

  My God. Look at them all!

  The ghosts marched toward him in a line that stretched from the east to the west as far as he could see. Their fragile forms rippled and
fluttered as the last weak breaths of wind danced through the aether mist, gently tugging at the outlines of the dead men and women. They walked slowly, their empty hands hanging at their sides. They did not seem to acknowledge one another, all of them walking just out of reach of those around them, never touching, never speaking, never even looking at each other. The army of the dead marched in stone-faced silence.

  Omar stood very still as the wall of ghosts approached him, and when they reached him he took a few steps forward here or backward there to avoid touching them as they passed. But he did study their faces. He saw men and women of all ages, and even a few children in the distance, and all of them bore the sharp noses and thin mouths he had come to associate with the Europan tribes. They wore heavy leather clothes and thick furs, and had small carved bones thrust through their ears and tied into their straw-colored hair.

  After a few minutes of watching the silent procession through the aether mist, Omar fell into step beside the shade of a young woman with a large fur hood resting on her insubstantial shoulders.

  “Good evening,” he said in Rus.

  “Hello.” Her accent was strange, but the word was clear enough.

  “Where are you from?”

  “My home is called Swansea,” she said. “Is this your homeland?”

  Omar glanced at the desolate glacier around them. “No. My home is far to the south and the east, in a land called Aegyptus. It’s much warmer in my homeland than here. Your home in Swansea must be very cold if it’s much farther to the north. Did you die in Swansea?”

  The woman nodded. She never looked at him, only at the southern horizon.

  “If you don’t mind the question, could you tell me how you died?”

  “Reavers.” Her voice was flat and lifeless, like some Mazigh machine that stamped answers in dead metal. “They came during the summer, sailing through the ice. We fought them, but they were too many, and too strong. The Yslanders take whatever they want, and burn what they don’t need. They always have.”