Fox’s already-displeased expression soured still further. “I will thank you not to school me in the use of my own crew, Miss Ashby, and I believe from your choice of words that the answer to my question is ‘none.’”
“To be precise, that is not a transfer I happen to have been called upon to perform. But I did help to guide the ship through a similar transfer, from the southern trades to the Muller Current, on approach to Mars.”
He snorted. “Trades to Muller is child’s play. It’s the inbound transfer that’s tricky. And I note that ‘helped to.’ Who did the real work?”
“I did the real work, using the automaton to perform some of the calculations.” Here, too, she recognized that she had perhaps overrepresented her actual experience. “True, Captain Singh inspected my work before performing the maneuver. But he pronounced it acceptable, and did not make any modifications.”
“Acceptable?” He arched one eyebrow in a display of skepticism.
“He is a man of great restraint.” Unlike yourself, she did not say aloud. “From him this was high praise.” She paused, held her breath a moment, and then looked Fox straight in the eye. “If you permit me to calculate our course to Venus, I guarantee that we will arrive three weeks earlier than we would otherwise. Perhaps even sooner.”
Fox regarded Arabella for a long moment, tapping one long finger upon his chin. “If you were a member of my crew,” he said at last, “I could have you flogged for insubordination. And, given your stubborn intractability, I might very well choose to do so. However, as you are a passenger, and as I like your pretty face”—Arabella bridled at that, but chose not to interrupt—“I shall not flog you. Instead, I shall accept your offer, but on my own terms.” Again he maneuvered in the air, as tidily as she had ever seen, and suddenly he was so close she could feel the heat of his body upon her face. “I desire a rapid arrival at Venus as much as you do. If you can work out a course that you can convince me will get us there faster, by even a single day, I will follow it. And if it succeeds … I shall write you a fine certificate proclaiming to all and sundry that you, a girl of nineteen, have bested me in aerial navigation. But if you try and fail…” He pulled back a bit and stroked his chin. “If you fail, you must give me a kiss.”
“A kiss?”
“That is all I ask, I assure you. Just one kiss.”
Arabella felt heat rise in her cheeks. “A heavy price for failure,” she said, realizing even as she did that she was playing the coquette, and furthermore that her chaperone was no longer on deck. She had no idea where Lady Corey had gone, but for the moment she was not inclined to enquire after her.
Fox shrugged, and she was suddenly aware just how muscular his shoulders were. “No bet is worthwhile unless the stakes are serious.”
Arabella considered the captain’s proposition seriously. If nothing else, the exercise would serve to pass some of the long hours of the voyage, and keep her wits and navigational skills sharp. “May I make use of your charts and tables?”
“By all means. I desire a fair challenge.”
“And who will decide whether my course is, in fact, sufficiently superior to yours that you will follow it, and hold you to it as regards the execution? I shall suffer no prevarication nor procrastination.”
Fox considered, tapping his chin with one long finger. “Will you accept the judgement of Liddon, my chief mate? Though I count him a friend, he is often employed by the crew as a fair judge for wagers such as this. You may make any enquiries you desire regarding his impartiality.”
Arabella pursed her lips, still considering. “Pending the outcome of such enquiries, then … I accept your challenge.” And then, so full was her head with navigational thoughts, she unthinkingly put out her hand like a man.
The captain took the proffered hand, with gentlemanly delicacy, and gave it a brief polite shake. His grip, though restrained, plainly held considerable strength in reserve. “I eagerly await the fruit of your labors. Your servant, miss.” Then he bowed in the air and departed.
Arabella was left staring at her own hand and wondering just what she had gotten herself into.
* * *
Three weeks later, she was still wondering the same thing.
She was in the captain’s cabin, scratching away at a sheet of foolscap tacked to a writing-board in her lap, with charts and books of navigational tables floating in the air all around her. Paper not being cheap, she had already crossed and recrossed her calculations on both sides of the sheet and was now attempting to work diagonally. But the letters and figures were now so obscure, due to the multiple layers of ink, that she was having increasing difficulty keeping track of them all. With a disgusted noise she thrust her pen into Fuller’s Patent Free-Descent Inkwell and gripped her hair as though to tear it out by the roots.
“Is the work not going well, Miss Ashby?” Captain Fox enquired, trying and failing to keep the smirk out of his voice.
In response she favored him with a most unladylike glare.
Sharing the captain’s cabin—it was called the “Great Cabin,” though it was barely as large as Arabella’s bedchamber at Woodthrush Woods and untidily crammed with Fox’s possessions besides—with Fox was a continual exercise in annoyance. The man could not keep still … constantly shifting, clearing his throat, humming snatches of risqué tunes, even picking his nose. A greater contrast with the dignified Captain Singh could scarcely be imagined.
“Perhaps a turn around the deck will help to clear your head,” offered Lady Corey. Having her in the cabin made an already barely tolerable situation even less so, with the constant clack-clack-clacking of her knitting needles adding to Fox’s humming, and the ever-growing length of the shawl she was working drifting everywhere. But the cabin was where the charts and instruments were stored, and Arabella could not be permitted to work there in Fox’s presence without her chaperone, so the three of them must perforce crowd themselves in all together. At least the absence of gravity made the usable space somewhat greater, as Fox tended to spread his log-books and bills of lading on the ceiling.
“It is the tedium of the calculations,” Arabella said—to no one, to any one; her gaze was directed out the wide aft window, spanning the full width of the ship, and the tiny red circle of Mars just visible against the deep cloud-flecked blue of the sky beyond. “With every sheet of paper I deface I understand more thoroughly why Captain Singh spent so much of his time and fortune building an automaton to perform this work.” And, though she did not say this aloud, how much she missed his brilliance, his steadfastness, and the warmth of his long brown fingers on hers.
“And there you see the risk of automata,” Fox replied. “They are all well and good as amusements, I grant you. But when they are built to perform the work of men, surely this must result in the atrophy of the mental processes they replace.”
Again she gave Fox a glare. This time Lady Corey spotted it, and admonished Arabella with a slight shake of the head. “I must disagree, sir,” Arabella said. “Would you also have us give up the huresh, or the horse, on account of the atrophy of men’s legs?” She shook her head. “Instead, sir, I believe that automata have the potential to lead to the perfection of the human species, by taking away all tedium and make-work, leaving men’s minds free to contemplate the greater questions of life.” She sighed. “Such as the simple question of how best to make our way from here to Venus.”
Suddenly Fox’s eyebrows lifted, then slowly lowered, his face acquiring a sly expression she found not at all attractive. “I have just recalled,” he said, “an item in my hold which could make our wager still more interesting.”
Arabella’s eyes darted to Lady Corey, who was looking back at her with sharp interest. “What ‘wager,’ Captain Fox?”
Before Arabella could speak in her own defense, Fox immediately and correctly assessed the situation, which was that Arabella had not informed her chaperone of the bet. “It was more in the way of a challenge, Lady Corey,” he said. “I used the term
‘wager’ only out of my own habit.”
“Gambling is a wretched vice,” Lady Corey replied with a sniff. “A snare for men of weak character.”
“I acknowledge this,” he said, hanging his head melodramatically. “And yet I do persist in it, for more times than not it is I who wind up holding the snare, and some other poor wretch who dangles from it.” To this assertion Arabella replied with a pointedly skeptical look, to remind Fox that when they had first met he had been well and truly snared, and he at least had the grace to look abashed. But he continued: “In any case, my challenge to Miss Ashby, which I mistakenly termed a wager, was to use the navigational skills she learned from Captain Singh to help us find our way to Venus more quickly.” Though Arabella was annoyed at Fox’s claim that he had challenged her, she did appreciate his solicitude and quick thinking in defusing Lady Corey’s anger. “The item I just recalled,” he continued, “was a trunk of clockmaker’s materials which we seized from a French merchantman last year.”
This news piqued Arabella’s interest exceedingly. “What kind of materials, sir?”
“I know not.” He shrugged. “But it seemed to me something that might fetch more in London than in Sor Khoresh, so rather than sending the trunk to Mars in the captured vessel I retained it here. We have not called at London since, so here I assume it remains. I must confess I had entirely forgotten its existence until now.”
The forgotten trunk was, she reflected, probably noted on one of the untidy papers which littered the cabin. Yet another way in which Fox differed from her own captain. “I may be able to make use of it,” she said.
“Then let us see if it can be located.” He called for his purser, a dour plump man by the name of Fitts, and requested that the trunk be brought up from the hold. “Take two men,” he said, “for as I recall it is extremely heavy.”
* * *
Heavy it was, indeed—though no larger than a common sea-chest, it required the full strength of two burly airmen to maneuver it through the door and bring it to a halt before it crashed through the cabin’s broad window. Even in a state of free descent, heavy objects retained their momentum; this was another reminder that weight, which the absence of gravity reduced to nothing, and mass, which made objects difficult to shift into motion, were separate quantities.
The trunk’s key, alas, had gone missing, if indeed Fox had ever possessed it, but one blow of the carpenter’s chisel made short work of the lock. “Open sesame!” Fox cried as he swung up the lid.
What was revealed within did indeed make Arabella feel as though she had stumbled into Ali Baba’s cave. The trunk contained layers of trays, each divided into numerous compartments lined with maroon baize. The top tray held tools—pliers, files, drills, fine saws, and a profusion of screwdrivers, each neatly housed in a fitted recess—and the others were densely packed with all manner of gears, cogs, wheels, springs, and screws. The bottom half of the trunk, below the lowest tray, was given over to raw materials: blocks of dense wood, sheets and strips of copper and brass, and bundles of rods in various materials and cross-sections.
“This is marvelous,” Arabella said, unable to keep the enthusiasm out of her voice. “I am certain that I shall be able to make use of it.”
“I am pleased,” said Fox. He dismissed Fitts and the two airmen and returned to his paperwork.
* * *
Later, as Arabella was engaged in sorting and cataloguing the contents of the trunk, Fox paused in his work to yawn and stretch elaborately, his hands reaching nearly all the way from his position on the ceiling to where Arabella scribbled below. She strove to ignore him, but then a small papery sound called her attention upward.
Fox held a folded bit of paper between his extended fingertips, which he was fluttering at her. She glanced up at him—his eyes had a conspiratorial cast—and then at Lady Corey, whose attention was fixed on a troublesome bit of knitting.
Quickly Arabella reached up and took the paper. A moment later, after making certain that Lady Corey was still distracted, she unfolded it.
I am glad that you like the trunk, she read. However, it comes at a price. If you make use of its contents and succeed in our wager, in addition to the certificate I shall gift you with a prize huresh from my stables upon our return to Mars. But if you use them and fail, in addition to the kiss you must have dinner with me, alone. Alternatively, you may retain the terms of our original bet and I will return the trunk to the hold. Do you accept?—F. Beneath this was written, much smaller, P.S. I swear to you I will not press the acquaintance any further than dinner.
Despite Fox’s assurances—which, notwithstanding her annoyances with the man, somehow she felt she could rely upon—she knew that accepting his terms would put her far beyond the bounds of propriety. Yet her hunger for the contents of the trunk was very great.
If she could but work with clockworks again in the context of navigation, it might keep alive her connection with her fiancé, as the harpsichord player had with her father. Already her mind whirred with possibilities for the contents of the trunk.
She turned the paper over and wrote one word on the back: YES. Then she placed it on her writing-board—where Fox could see it but Lady Corey could not—cleared her throat, and looked upward.
Fox met her eye, nodded, and winked.
Somewhat disturbed by her own actions, Arabella tore the paper into bits and put them with the other scraps.
6
A NEW MECHANISM
Weeks passed. Arabella busied herself with the clockmaker’s trunk, often working late into the dog watches, filing and sawing and occasionally pounding together recalcitrant parts. As she worked, she did feel a connection with her dear departed father, her greatly missed Captain Singh, and the remarkable Aadim … and even with the anonymous French clockmaker whose tools and materials were now hers. He had been a fastidious man, she knew, with every screwdriver and bit of metal well oiled, properly ranged, and neatly stowed, and she was sorry he had lost his trunk. But such, she reminded herself, were the fortunes of war; the trunk, along with every thing else on the merchantman Trianon, had been taken by Fox entirely legally. If any one were to blame for the trunk’s loss, it would be Napoleon.
The one thing she regretted was that all of the tools and materials were calibrated in French units of measure. Which, however logical they might be in theory, as a matter of practical use she found completely unintuitive.
The complexity and size of her workings soon outgrew the captain’s cabin, and with the captain’s permission, she transferred herself to the officers’ ward-room. The officers quickly became accustomed to stepping around, and sometimes even eating around, her gears and springs and scribbled notes, and the corners of the room grew cluttered with navigational charts and tables of logarithms.
The officers were not unkind to her. She felt herself treated as a pet, or perhaps a curiosity, like a monkey that had been taught to crank a barrel-organ. But her project, though nowhere near as sophisticated as Aadim, was more complex than any barrel-organ or, in some ways, even her father’s lifelike automaton harpsichord player.
The problem her mechanism was attempting to solve was easily enough stated: given the observed angles of declination and right ascension for certain well-known celestial bodies, such as Saturn and Polaris, what was the ship’s position in space? This was only a small part of the function that Aadim performed, of course, but it was the foundation of all else—with repeated observations over time, and a sufficiently precise chronometer, this information could be used to determine her speed and direction of motion, which could be projected forward along the navigational charts to establish the exact time and angle for a future change of course.
The most difficult part was incorporating the motions of the planets, which were fiendishly complex but absolutely essential to the device’s function, the fixed stars being too distant to establish the ship’s position within the solar system. For each planet represented, she was forced to calculate and fabricate an
entirely unique elliptical gear from sheet brass, a difficult and painstaking endeavor which, more often than not, resulted only in the waste of irreplaceable metal.
Gear after gear she spoiled; plate after plate of precious brass was eaten away. Soon all the two-millimeter plate was gone and she was reduced to riveting together two plates of the one-millimeter. She tried and failed to remake her earliest failures into better, smaller gears; she tried and failed to braze together half-ellipses which could be eked out from the remaining scraps.
Finally even the scraps of one-millimeter sheet brass were gone, and she was forced to confess that she had failed. The work simply required more precision than her tools and her skills could produce.
She supposed she would have to return to calculation with pen and paper. But after so many weeks of challenging, intriguing work with steel and brass the prospect seemed even more fatiguing than before.
Or, of course, there was the possibility of simply admitting defeat. A kiss and a dinner for two were not such a high price to pay. Might, in fact, be rather pleasant. Fox did have some good qualities.…
No! she thought, shaking her head sternly. She would not give in so easily. But what other option did she have?
She sat, despondent, listlessly rotating the small portion of one elliptical gear which had actually worked against one of the manufactured round gears with which it had been intended to mesh. Her best hand-filed gear teeth were simply too irregular for smooth continuous motion, but in this one small stretch she had managed to keep them regular, crisp, and even. If she had had more time and more materials, she might eventually have learned to do this for an entire gear.
Something nagged at her. She leaned in and peered minutely at the small section that meshed properly. It was perhaps one-quarter of the gear representing the orbit of Saturn. As she rolled it against the circular gear, back and forth, she imagined the great ringed planet himself, sweeping majestically through the chill outer reaches of the interplanetary atmosphere. Back and forth he sailed with the motion of the tiny gear, dashing at impossible speed, covering in seconds a distance of hundreds of thousands of miles, a distance which the real planet required many years to traverse.
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 6
