Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  The time she spent changing the captain’s dressings, mopping his fevered brow, and rearranging his disordered bed-clothes was heartrendingly difficult, for many reasons, but also very dear to her. Yet she could not spend nearly as much time at these tasks as she might wish, for no matter what her feelings, her prime consideration was to maintain her identity as Arthur Ashby. No captain’s boy, however loyal, would moon over his superior officer as much as Arabella, left to her own devices, might do.

  And so Arabella wound, cleaned, and fueled the lamps. She restored books, charts, and instruments to the places from which they had been dislodged by the ship’s violent maneuvers and the impacts of the French cannonballs. Every item of brass or brightwork she polished until it gleamed. She assisted the ship’s carpenter in the repair of the cabin’s bulkheads, fittings, and furniture.

  She even cleaned and inspected Aadim. Hesitantly at first, as though approaching an unfamiliar shokari, she brushed soot from his face and clothes, but like the inanimate object he was he did not react. Soon confidence began to return, and she made sure that his springs were wound and all his workings were free of splinters and grit. His other parts, too, which extended throughout the ship, she inspected and repaired as much as she was able.

  So diligent was she in her care of the captain and his cabin that the ship’s officers seemingly began to accept her as part of its furniture, taking little notice of her when they came to visit. Apart from their frequent appearances to assess the captain’s condition and to extend their best wishes to his unconscious, but perhaps still receptive, ears, they also used the cabin as a meeting-place for private conferences away from the crew’s hearing. And though they often shooed Arabella out for the most confidential of these discussions, occasionally they seemed to forget that she was there, and when that did occur she did her best to ignore their muttered conversation. But on one such occasion, acting captain Richardson conferring with the other officers on some point of navigation, Arabella overheard something that made her ears perk up.

  “Though I’m loath to suggest it,” said Stross, the ship’s sailing-master, “we could try the clockwork navigator.”

  Upon hearing this, Arabella glanced toward Aadim, who still sat stiff and unmoving in his accustomed place. After cleaning and inspecting him, Arabella had wound his springs daily, and to the best of her knowledge he was entirely functional. Why would the master imply he was not available?

  Surreptitiously she edged closer to the officers’ conversation.

  “We do have its draughts,” the master continued, “and the instructions Captain Singh wrote up.…”

  “No,” said Richardson, with a sad shake of his head. “I can’t count the number of times he tried to teach me to work the d____d thing, and no slightest bit of it ever stuck in my brain. Even with written instructions, I’m sure I’d never trust any course that came out.” He sighed. “I wish Kerrigan had lived. The man was a lout and a martinet, but he was better with the automaton than I.”

  Even as she continued to quietly polish the lamps behind the captain’s hammock, Arabella quivered with tension. She felt that she should volunteer her knowledge of Aadim’s workings … yet she feared calling attention to herself, for any additional attention could reveal her sex. Furthermore, she lacked confidence in her own, only somewhat trained, skills with the automaton.

  “Well, then,” the master began, but then fell silent, peering out the window with a distant, considering expression. “Well, then,” he began again, “I suppose I shall just have to do my best with ruler and compass. But I must warn you that it will be a near thing, and if we fail to intercept this asteroid…” He blew out a breath. “Well, I cannot tell you what we’ll do then.”

  “Do what you can,” Richardson said, clapping the master on the shoulder, “and put your trust in God.”

  “I shall endeavor to do so,” the master replied, closing his eyes and dipping his head.

  * * *

  The conversation stuck in Arabella’s head, especially because of the unanswered questions it raised. For the whole rest of that day, in between her other chores, she did what she could to remain within earshot of the master and the other officers, trying to overhear and piece together some idea of the ship’s situation.

  If nothing else, the task distracted her from the captain’s deteriorating condition. Despite all her attentions and the surgeon’s care, he seemed to be growing thinner; though his twitching and trembling continued, its frequency and strength were diminishing; even his mahogany brown skin, now dry and clammy, had paled to a weathered gray.

  Every half an hour she dribbled water on his lips and waited for the dry and leathery tongue to lap it up. At these moments the captain’s face seemed at its most animated, merely asleep rather than unconscious, but when the water was gone it returned to a disturbing, ashen mask of himself.

  The sight struck daggers through her heart. “You will recover,” she whispered again and again, in as reassuring a tone as she could muster.

  Though she did not know, in truth, whom she was trying to reassure.

  All that day she fretted over him, doing all that she could, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. As she tended him she kept one eye on Aadim, but though the automaton did move from time to time it never seemed to be responding to her actions as it had on that first day.

  It was after supper, when the officers gathered in the captain’s cabin to drink their grog, that she finally learned that the ship was in even more peril than she’d feared.

  * * *

  Richardson and the others floated above a chart of the region, spread out and tacked to the floor. From her studies with the captain, Arabella recognized the great aerial current in which Diana was now embedded, denoted by a series of arrows, along with its side-currents, eddies, and cross-winds. The ship’s position was marked with a pin, but all the officers’ attention was directed to a tiny spot, labeled Paeonia, in the far corner of the chart. The spot rested at the center of a long, looping figure-of-eight, which Arabella knew represented its motion relative to the current over time.

  “At this time of the solar year,” the sailing-master said, “the asteroid should be here.” He peered at the tiny lettering inked on the figure-of-eight, then placed a second pin about an inch from the inked spot. “And, according to my observations, our current wind speed is eighty-one hundred and a bit knots.” He measured out a distance of about four inches on his calipers, laid a straight-edge against the pin representing Diana, lined it up with the arrows on the chart, and walked the calipers along it. “Here’s where we’ll be in eight hours.”

  The caliper’s pointed tip rested near the straight-edge’s closest approach to Paeonia, still at least five inches upstream from the pin.

  “With the men in the shape they’re in, we can pedal at no more than six or seven knots.” Stross adjusted the caliper to a tiny gap, walked it eight steps from the straight-edge toward Paeonia, and placed a third pin there.

  All the officers stared at it. A gap of nearly four inches separated the third pin from the second.

  “Seven thousand miles short,” breathed Richardson, then cursed quietly.

  “More like ten thousand, actually,” the sailing-master said in an apologetic tone. “Accounting for the third dimension.”

  Richardson cursed again, more vehemently this time.

  All the officers floated quietly, contemplating the chart. Arabella, too, stared hard at the lines and pins. It was exactly like some of the navigation exercises the captain had set her, except that this time the situation was not merely theoretical. There was a cross-current on the chart that would carry them much closer to the asteroid, but to reach it would require them to cover a distance far greater than they could pedal in a mere eight hours.

  “You’ve found no other asteroids in our path?” Richardson said.

  Stross shook his head. “There’s two or three we might reach, but according to the charts none of them is wooded to any degree. T
here’s always the possibility of a wandering comet, of course, but those so seldom have any plant life at all.”

  Richardson sighed. “So it’s Paeonia or nothing. And in eight hours it’ll be behind us.”

  Still Arabella stared at the chart, thinking about something she’d read in one of the books the captain had loaned her. The arrows began to move in her mind’s eye, flowing across the chart, air currents meshing and colliding like gears in a complex mechanism.

  “Perhaps,” suggested Higgs, the boatswain, “we’ll meet up with another Company ship.”

  “Aye,” Richardson scoffed sarcastically. “We’ll pull right alongside and say ‘Pray, neighbor, might ye lend us five hundredweight of coal till Thursday next?’ And they’ll be happy to do so, as they will through sheer happenstance be loaded down with twice the amount required for their own landing.”

  The boatswain’s face darkened. “No need to come it ironical.”

  Richardson sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to burn the cargo, then.”

  “All them fine linens?” moaned Quinn, the purser. “And the furniture and rugs, up in smoke just to fill the balloons?”

  “They tried that in Earl of Wessex, remember?” the master cried. “Fat lot of good it did ’em! Burned up every stick of cargo they did, and half the decking too, and still scattered themselves all over the Juno Plain.” He sighed. “No, lads, it’s coal we need, five hundredweight at least, or else half a ton of fresh charcoal.”

  “Might as well wish for a flying pony!” the boatswain shouted. “H—l, a flying coach-and-six!”

  In reply the master growled and clenched his fist. Richardson’s eyes darted, all in a panic, from one angry officer to another, but only a series of ineffectual blubbing sounds emerged from his lips.

  And then Arabella burst out one word: “Drogues!”

  All at once the officers’ argument cut off. They stared at her as though she’d appeared from nowhere.

  Arabella clapped her hands across her mouth.

  She hadn’t meant to speak. She had not even realized at first that she had spoken aloud. It had only been the suddenness of the realization that had forced the word from her mouth.

  “How long have you been hiding there?” Richardson snapped, straightening in the air, his expression cold. The other officers skewered Arabella with their gazes, pinning her to the spot where she floated. “What’s your name?”

  This was Arabella’s worst nightmare. “I—I’m Ashby, sir. I’m, I’m tending to the captain, sir.” As she spoke, she realized that she had positioned herself between the captain and the quarreling officers, as though to protect him from the knowledge of his crew’s disarray. “Surgeon’s orders, sir.”

  “Surgeon’s orders or no, you are not to intrude upon my private conferences with—”

  “Just a moment, sir,” Stross interrupted. Richardson fixed him with a hard glance, but he stood his ground, glaring back just as hard for a moment before turning his attention to Arabella. “Did you say ‘drogues,’ lad?”

  Arabella swallowed. “Aye, sir, I did.”

  Stross licked his lips, staring upward in concentration, then peered down at the chart. “Mr. Quinn, did you mention linens?”

  The purser stammered for a moment before replying. “W-we’ve fifteen crates of fine linens, yes, bound for Fort Augusta.”

  “Tablecloths, that sort of thing? Good sturdy Ulster linen?”

  “What the d—l does—?” cried Richardson.

  Stross held up a hand in Richardson’s face, quite rudely. “Tablecloths!” he demanded of the purser. “Do we have some? At least ten or twenty?”

  “Yes!” the purser squeaked. “Sixty, in fact, I think.”

  Stross nodded slowly, scratching his chin, contemplating the chart. He reached out one finger and tapped the cross-current Arabella had spotted, then took the calipers and measured the distance from there to the pin representing Diana. “Drogues,” he repeated, and looked Arabella right in the eye.

  “We’d have to start right away, sir,” Arabella said.

  “Aye,” Stross said. “And the calculations will be tricky. Very tricky indeed, without the navigator.”

  In for a penny, thought Arabella. “I can work the navigator, sir. A bit.”

  All the officers looked at her.

  “The captain was teaching me, sirs. Before the French attacked.”

  Richardson’s glance darted from Arabella to Stross and back again. “What in blue blazes are you contemplating?”

  Stross glared balefully at the acting captain. “You do know what a drogue is, don’t you, sir?”

  For a long moment Richardson blinked rapidly, lips pressed together, jaw set hard. “Refresh my memory,” he spat at last.

  Stross grinned and nodded toward Arabella. “I’m sure Ashby can explain it.”

  Richardson looked at Arabella with an expression of undiluted malevolence. She glanced toward Stross for assistance, but his face held nothing but a studied, beatific calm. The other officers looked on with a mixture of shock and frank curiosity. Trembling, she closed her eyes. It’s no worse than reciting Martian history for Khema, she thought, and began to speak, quoting from Thompson’s Guide to Aerial Navigation. “An aerial drogue is a construction of sturdy, windproof fabric, typically conical or hemispherical, whose open end is fastened to a cable attached to an airship. The drogue is generally propelled downwind by means of a gun, catapult, or other mechanism. The ship can then employ the drogue as an anchor point so as to proceed in a direction nearly perpendicular to the wind.” She swallowed and opened her eyes. All of the faces but Richardson’s had changed to expressions of amused satisfaction. For his part, Richardson ignored Arabella and glared at Stross. “That is the general principle, at least.”

  “Nicely done, Ashby,” said Stross, who then nodded pleasantly to Richardson.

  With a visible effort, Richardson controlled his anger. “Very well,” he said through gritted teeth, then turned to the boatswain. “Mr. Higgs, you are ordered to requisition a quantity of fabric, and any other necessary materials, from the cargo, in order to create a drogue or drogues sufficient to change the ship’s course and intercept the asteroid Paeonia. Mr. Quinn, you are ordered to assist Mr. Higgs and to keep proper records of all materials requisitioned. Mr. Stross, you are ordered to plot an expeditious course to the asteroid Paeonia, using any available means to do so, and bring the ship directly there forthwith. And Ashby, you are ordered to assist Mr. Stross in his efforts.” He straightened in the air, doing his best to look down his nose at the others present, though as it happened they were all floating above his eye level. “Are your orders clear?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” they all chorused.

  “Come on, lad,” said Stross. “We’ve much to do, and little time to do it in.”

  * * *

  As the other officers left the cabin—Richardson favoring Stross with a withering look as he departed—Stross unpinned the chart from the floor and spread it out on Aadim’s desk. While he was doing this, Arabella tended to the captain.

  The poor man, unconscious though he might be, seemed distressed by the sounds of the argument. He had thrashed off almost all of his bed-clothes, and beads of sweat had burst out on his wrinkled brow. Arabella gently tucked the captain’s blanket back in place and patted away the sweat with a soft cloth. “All will be well, sir,” she murmured low. “We’ll get Diana to Mars safely, you’ll see.”

  The sound of Arabella’s voice, the touch of her hand, seemed to calm him somewhat. His face relaxed a bit, though it still retained the quietly pained expression it had held ever since the battle with the French, and he lay still beneath his blanket. “Rest well, sir,” she said, and patted his shoulder.

  “Ashby, come here!” Stross said, and she joined him at the desk. “Here’s the situation.”

  The three of them made an odd conference. Arabella trembled beneath her shirt, frightened as much by the responsibility that had been placed upon her shoulders
as by the fear of discovery. Stross, the sailing-master, was a man she’d barely even encountered before the current crisis. Balding, with dark hair and eyes, his rather portly torso contrasted with the hard hands and strong arms of an experienced airman; his attitude of bluff confidence and attention to duty nearly masked the worry that lurked behind his eyes. And Aadim, though his eyes gazed woodenly out the window, seemed nonetheless to be paying close attention to the discussion, the mechanisms within his desk ticking and whirring beneath the chart.

  The situation, as Stross put it, was grim. Two of the French cannonballs had shattered the hull of Diana’s coal-store, and over half the coal had drifted away before the breach could be repaired. This coal, carefully budgeted because of its great weight, was intended to fill the ship’s balloons with hot air upon arrival at Mars, allowing her to drift gently downward to a landing. Without it, once the ship entered the influence of Mars’s gravity she was doomed to smash upon the surface. Returning to Earth, where they would be more likely to encounter another ship that might have coal to spare, was out of the question—the ship’s stores of food and water would never stretch so far.

  “So we’re bound for Paeonia,” Stross concluded, tapping the pin on the chart. “It’s a substantial asteroid, uninhabited but forested; there we can cut timber and make charcoal. Not so good a fuel as coal, to be sure, but adequate to the task.”

  “How much time will it take to make the charcoal we require?”

  Stross considered, rubbing his chin. “Some weeks, I should imagine.”

  “I see.” Arabella’s heart grew heavy at this news. Any delay might allow that dastardly Simon to reach her brother before she could warn him. But she must not give up hope.

  “You say you have some facility with the navigator,” Stross said, breaking into Arabella’s distressing train of thought. He grasped Aadim’s right hand and wrenched it toward the pin representing Diana, the sudden rough motion making the navigator’s gears shriek in protest. Arabella cringed as though she felt Aadim’s pain in her own shoulder. “I know how to plot a course from here to here”—he hauled the hand across to the pin representing Paeonia—“but not how to tell the d____d thing to use drogues.”