1636: Seas of Fortune (29 page)

“Captain Neilsen said, ‘About four hundred hours.’”

Henrique’s face creased as he did a rapid mental calculation. “Sixteen days?”

“Something like that.”

Henrique picked up his walking stick. “Tell me when it’s over.”

* * *

Maria pointed. “There! His Danish Majesty’s Airship
Sandterne
.” It was an apt name for an exploratory vehicle, as the gull-billed tern wintered in the Caribbean, northern South America, Africa, southern Asia and even New Zealand. The tethered airship, attached to the mooring mast, faced into the steady northeast trades.

“The gondola looks about the size of a Grantville school bus,” Maria commented. “Not much privacy, but fortunately the flight time to Manaus is only about thirty-five hours.”

Henrique executed an exaggerated formal bow. “We will all gallantly look the other way when you use the head, milady.”

“Talking about ladies, you know, most of the female colonists here at Gustavus are already married. And none of them are Jewish.”

“Ahem.” Henrique wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.

“Has it occurred to you that the pickings might be better in Amsterdam? Or Grantville? Or Prague? Or even,” she added slyly, “Copenhagen.”

“Ahem.”

“You’re just going to be infuriatingly reticent about your plans, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

* * *

With the envelope inflated, and the air in the ballonets adjusted to level it off, it was time to attach the gondola. This had been disassembled for shipping, and had been reassembled in the meantime.

“Fuck! We need it about a foot to my left,” yelled Lars. He and his ground crew had come over on the
Valdemar
. “Lift on my command. Three . . . two . . . one . . . LIFT!” The gondola lurched into place, and the ground crew climbed up and attached it to the suspension cables that secured it to the envelope of the airship.

Nearby, in a makeshift roofed shed, the engineer was testing the engines that had been brought over on the
Valdemar
.

* * *

There was a knock on the door, which Henrique answered.

“Maurício!” The two half-brothers embraced.

“Follow me,” commanded Henrique. Maria and I were just going over the route. Looking for landmarks that should be visible from the air.

Maurício peered over Henrique’s shoulder. “Do you have time to talk, Maria?”

Maria looked at him. “I’ll make the time, Maurício. What’s up?”

Maurício shuddered. “Another Americanism . . . Language as we know it is doomed. . . .”

Maria sighed. “Get to the point, Maurício.”

“That’s King Maurício, chief of chiefs, don’t forget. And now that I am involved in politics, I have discovered the cardinal rule of being a successful politician.”

“Finding someone else to blame if something goes wrong?” asked Henrique.

“That’s rule number two. Rule number one is, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Maurício pointed toward the mooring mast. “And what I think would really enhance my status is to ride that airship of yours.”

Henrique snorted. “‘He Who Flies’ makes a better epithet than ‘He Who Talks,’ you think?”

Maria fingered her chin. “I’d have to ask the captain, but I suppose that he might let you do a quick tethered ascent, if it can be managed without wasting any gas.”

“Tethered ascent? I had in mind that Kasiri and I could join you for your little flight. We do a little air show over my villages, to remind them of how awesome I am, and then we fly to Manao so she can visit her family.”

“I am surprised that someone who deplores Americanisms would seek to bring the political junket to the New World.”

“Seriously—”

“Seriously, it’s not going to happen, Maurício. Let me explain the facts. It takes a thousand cubic feet of ninety percent pure hydrogen to provide about sixty-four pounds of lift. Our total lift is less than three hundred times that. That lift, at a minimum, has to support the envelope, the ballonets inside, the gondola, the fins and rudder, the engines, the fuel, and the crew. What’s left—less than half of the gross lift—is what carries the passengers and cargo into the air. Henrique and I have to go; we know how to tap rubber, we know if a rubber tree is healthy or sickly. We can tell whether a seed is from a rubber tree or not. The airship doesn’t have room for tourists. Not even a royal one.”

Lawa River, Beginning of Wet Season

At last, the crew of the
Walvis
decided that it was time to return to their ship, head back to Europe and transform their Lawa River gold into the good things in life. They would have to stop at Gustavus first, to resupply, however.

They rowed back to Maria Falls, the current helping them along, and boarded the
Walvis
.

David inspected the ship and somewhat grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied with how it had been cared for in his absence.

“Up Anchor!” David ordered.

Surinamese Short Dry Season (February to April 1637)

The gas envelope was an elongated teardrop, with a side panel bearing the Danish coat of arms: three lions passant in pale Azure, crowned and armed. The gondola slung beneath it was painted red and yellow, the colors of the House of Oldenburg that ruled Denmark.

And a spy basket hung below the gondola. In it, from a height of a hundred feet, King Maurício waved to his people.

The idea for the spy basket had come from a 1930 Howard Hughes film,
Hell’s Angels
. A German zeppelin is shown flying over London, and it lowered an observer in a little streamlined observation car. This wasn’t a wild fancy on Hughes’ part, there were German spy baskets that could be lowered as much as several thousand feet below the zeppelin, on steel wire paid out with a winch. The support wire doubled as a telegraph line. The
Sandterne
’s spy basket was a more primitive affair.

Maurício heard a horn from above, and waved acknowledgment. It was time to descend. The “spy basket” he stood in was slowly winched down, and when the bottom swung a couple of feet above the ground, the ground crew grabbed and steadied it so Maurício could clamber out.

Once he was free, they signaled the airship, and the basket was raised back into the bowels of the
Sandterne
. The name painted on the
Sandterne
’s drop basket was, rather irreverently,
The Yo-Yo
.

As his wife, Kasiri, hugged him, Maurício told Carsten, “Now all of my people will tremble when they see me. King Maurício dared climb into the Heavens!”

“More daring than you realized, my dear King Maurício.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lars just told me that the
Sandterne
has not previously used the spy basket to carry a person. You are a true pioneer!”

It was fortunate that Kasiri had her arm around Maurício, as it wouldn’t have looked very kingly if he had fainted.

En route to the Central Amazon by Airship

“I can barely hear the engines, Captain.”

“I am not surprised, Mevrouw Vorst. We are just letting them idle, the northeast trade winds are carrying us in the direction we wish to go.”

“Then why run the engines at all? Doesn’t that use up fuel?”

“Oh, yes, but if there’s a sudden wind change, or other hazard, we don’t want to cold start the engines. If you want to ride out at a moment’s notice, it’s best that the horse already be saddled and bridled, yes?”

* * *

The airship was progressing southwest, at a height of about six hundred feet. They had already passed over the Coppename and skirted the northern tail of the Bakhuys Mountains. They passed south of Blanche Marie Falls, on the Nickerie, and then directly over Tiger Falls, on the Courantyne. This gave them a precise navigational fix, because its latitude and longitude were known from an up-time atlas. At their present height, they could easily see Frederik Willem IV Falls, perhaps thirty miles upriver.

“Right rudder!”

The rudderman pressed the right rudder pedal, beginning the turn to the right. Since the airship lacked wings, it didn’t roll into a turn.

“Engines one-half forward,” Captain Neilsen spoke into the speaking tube.

“One-half forward,” the engineer, in the engine compartment acknowledged.

The captain kept his eye on the compass. “Neutralize rudder.” The ship’s angular momentum kept it turning, but ever more slowly.

“Heading two seventy,” the captain said with satisfaction. The course change avoided the Kanuku mountains, farther south. While the
Sandterne
could easily climb high enough to cross them, Henrique and his party had come from the Rupununi, to the west.

They ran west along the fourth parallel north for six hours, then turned south. In still air, their cruising speed was twenty miles per hour, but they would have a bit of a westward boost from the diminished trade winds. It wasn’t too long before they spotted a key landmark, the Rio Branco.

They followed this guide to the mighty Rio Negro, the largest blackwater river in the world. Continuing downstream, they came at last to the confluence of the Rio Negro with the Solimoes, forming the Amazon. Here, on the north bank, in another universe, the 1669 Fort of São José da Barra do Rio Negro had become the nucleus about which the nineteenth-century town of Manaus had aggregated. And that town was the home of the rubber barons, who built an Opera House to prove that they were equals of the plutocrats of America and Europe.

Now, in the year 1637, there was no fort, and no European town, but there was a village, a small settlement of the Manao Indians. “Manaus” was their word for the confluence; it meant, “mother of the gods.”

Above Manau, Central Amazon

The
Sandterne
lurched upward, caught by an updraft, and the elevatorman adjusted the elevator to compensate. He checked the variometer, a barometer modified to measure the rate of change of altitude. “Holding steady again, Captain.”

Captain Neilsen eyed the rainforest below. “Looks good.”

Maria spoke. “Can you bring us down any farther?”

“Not a chance,” said Captain Neilsen. “I have to keep at least thirty feet above the treetops. There’s no telling when a downdraft might send us down.”

“But if that happened, couldn’t you adjust the elevator wheel, or drop some more ballast?”

“Sure. But there are limits to how much, how fast.”

Maria studied the ground. “But Henrique and I need to get down there, and pick the rubber trees whose seeds we want to harvest. And of course we’d like to get back up again, too, it’s a long walk back to Gustavus. And the canopy is a good hundred feet high. I am not going to manage a hundred-thirty-foot descent, even in that ‘spy basket.’”

“Then we will need to find a clearing,” said Captain Neilsen. “That would be best in any event, since I wouldn’t want the wire to snag on these giant trees.”

“Does the river count as a clearing?” Henrique asked abruptly.

“This gondola is waterproof, so we can ‘land’ on water. And you could then lower a canoe. But we have only practiced landing on a lake, I am not comfortable about landing on a river, except for an emergency.”

Nature might or might not abhor a vacuum, but Nature
qua
rainforest most definitely abhorred open spaces. A tree struck by lightning might fall over and, connected by lianas to neighboring trees, cause a chain reaction that cleared a considerable area, but the sudden exposure to sunlight would cause seedlings and saplings to burst into frenetic activity, and soon the clearing would be erased by a green explosion. They found a clearing, close to the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon, but it was at least a day’s hike away from Manaus.

It would have to do.

* * *

Maria gazed out over the coffee-colored waters of the Rio Negro. She knew, from her studies in Grantville, that the color was the result of tannins leached out of decaying vegetation.

“Henrique, I think I have spoken of movie night at the Higgins Hotel in Grantville.”

“Moving pictures, yes. What about them?”

“This place reminds me of a movie called
Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The creature was a Gill-man—”

“Excuse me?”

“A Gill-man. Half-man, half-fish. My friend Lolly said that it was based on a merman legend from the Amazon, so naturally I thought of it here.”

Henrique pondered this for a moment, then gestured with his gun. “If it comes here, I’ll shoot it.”

* * *

The next day, as they approached the outskirts of the Indian village of Manaus, Coqui and several of his fellow Manao Indians jumped in front of them.

Henrique lowered the rifle he had just pointed at Coqui. “You idiot, I could have killed you.”

Coqui was still grinning. “We saw the great bird, and I see it laid two little eggs.”

* * *

Coqui held out a reed basket. “Here are many seeds, all from a tree that gave much tree-milk when I cut it the way you taught me.”

“‘Milk of the Moon,’” she dubbed it.

“Milk of the Moon,” Coqui repeated. “But the Man in the Moon is male, a warrior. How can the moon give milk?”

“How does the moon enter into it?” asked Henrique. “I know that the moon makes the tide, and that affects fish, but I don’t remember seeing any change in the flow of latex according to the lunar phase.”

“There isn’t,” said Maria, “I just like the alliteration. It works in Dutch as well as English. ‘Melk’ and ‘Maan,’ you know.”

Henrique pondered this. “It even works in Portuguese,” he said in a surprised tone. “‘Leite’ and ‘Lua.’”

“Besides,” added Maria, “the Indians up north call gold the ‘Tears of the Sun,’ and the encyclopedias say that latex was once called, ‘white gold,’ and the moon is ‘white’ . . . I just like the imagery.”

“Well, you’re an artist . . . I’m not surprised. . . .”

Coqui rapped the trunk to get their attention. “There is evil news from downriver. Where the Cuyari meets the Mother of Rivers, there are many bad white men.” The Cuyari was the Indian name for what the Portuguese, and the up-time atlas, called the Madeira. “The whites make war on the Tupinamba.

“And the Tupinamba told us that before this happened, the white men had returned to the Tapajós.” That was where, a few years ago, Henrique had taught the Tapajós Indians how to tap rubber.