A Web of Air (29 page)

ever, dearest?”

Her mother was bending over her.

Her
mother?

She tried closing her eyes and opening them again.

“Fever,” her mother said, “it’s me.”

And so it was. Wavey Godshawk, with her ash-white hair wound in an elaborate chignon around her beautiful head, and wearing a costume that had been designed by some expensive dressmaker to look slightly like a sailor’s uniform without concealing any of her natural curves.

“But where…?”

Fever sat up, and felt salt prickling where the seawater had dried on her skin. The cabin was luxurious: all wood and bronze, with curtained windows, glass-fronted bookcases, soft chairs, a scent-lantern playing something cool and minty. There were paintings on the panelled walls and one of them was a portrait of Fever’s father, looking awkward in a stiff-collared tunic. Only the beat of big engines trembling through the walls and floor let her know that she was still at sea. She seemed to be always waking up on strange boats these days.

“What ship is this?” she asked.

Wavey leaned over her, smoothing a soft hand over her face. “You are aboard the steam-ram
Supercollider,
my darling, and you are perfectly, perfectly safe.”

When Wavey Godshawk received word from Dr Teal to say that he had found her missing daughter, she had gone straight to Quercus to ask for a ship that she could take to Mayda, and Quercus had lent her the
Supercollider.
He had built the great steam-ram to protect the convoys of shipping which helped feed his new city’s hunger for raw materials, but the northern seas were clear of pirates now, and he saw no harm in letting the barbarous southerners see how powerful London’s new masters was. He had lent her to Wavey with his blessing.

The voyage south had been brisk, pleasant, uneventful. It was a sort of honeymoon for Wavey and her latest husband, who had both been busy since their wedding working on the immense task of mobilizing London. They had stopped at Cape Bretagne to see the famous Petrified Car-Park, and touched at Nowhere and Evora too. They had retired to their cabins the previous night with the lights of Mayda twinkling in the south, looking forward to going ashore next day and finding Fever. But before sunrise Wavey had been woken by the
Supercollider
’s captain, who reported a war-galley flying the colours of the Oktopous Cartel at anchor off the Ragged Isles.

She had gone up on to the quarterdeck in that pearl-pink dawn to see it for herself. A red ship upon a pastel sea. What was the Oktopous doing there? she wondered. And then, as she watched, she saw that white wing rise from one of the islands, and she knew. So the Thursday machine was really flying, and the naughty Oktopous had stretched out a tentacle to try and steal its secrets!

“Full ahead,” she told the captain, and sent a sailor below to rouse her husband. They stood together on the ship’s prow in the blown-back spray and watched the new machine sweep eastward, dip and fall, and never guessed that it was Fever flying it.

“Take us to where it came down,” Wavey ordered the captain. “We must not let that galley reach it first.”

It wasn’t until the galley was sunk and the sailors brought Fever aboard – sodden, lifeless-looking, that red weal across her face still welling blood – that she realized who the pilot of the machine had been.

“What about the kite, lady?” they asked her, as she knelt down on the deck to take her daughter in her arms. “What about that old-fangled flying contraption?”

“Sink it,” said Wavey quickly.

She did not even bother to stay and watch as the boatmen smashed and weighted it and let the sea take it.

Fever knew none of that, and there was no time to ask, no time to wonder. This ship, her mother, it all felt like a mystery she could never hope to fathom, like the torus, something unreasonable that she would simply have to accept.

She looked down at herself. Someone had taken off her wet clothes while she slept and replaced them with a sailor’s too-big trousers and smock. She touched her face and there was a soft pad of lint across her gashed cheek.

“Don’t worry,” said her mother. “You’re healing remarkably fast. I don’t think you’ll have a scar.”

Fever didn’t care whether she had a scar or not. She was thinking about Arlo, left alone on that island again. “How long have I been sleeping?”

“Not long,” said her mother. “You haven’t missed much. We’ve been searching the place where that galley went down, picking up survivors – it was
dreadfully
boring, but apparently it’s a Rule of the Sea – the captain was most insistent. At present we’re off Mayda-at-the-World’s-End, negotiating with the authorities there to let us moor in their harbour. They have some silly prejudice against motor vessels, but I expect they’ll come round. Now, where is Arlo Thursday, I wonder?”

“Arlo is still on the island,” said Fever. “So is Master Hazell. And Dr Teal…” She looked sideways at her mother. Her beautiful, brilliant, dangerous mother. “How do you know about Arlo? And the machine? Dr Teal said he reported only to Quercus and the Chief Engineer…”

Wavey laughed. “Oh, Fever! You
are
out of touch! Did Dr Teal not tell you? He must have wanted to let me surprise you. He’s
such
a sweet man! You see, I
am
the Chief Engineer! Dr Stayling kept raising stuffy objections to all Quercus’s plans, so Quercus fired him and gave me his job. Oh, Fever, you simply
must
come back to London and see how well things are going…”

“He was going to kill Arlo!” said Fever, pushing herself upright.

“Well, he had good reason,” said Wavey. “That flying machine was most impressive. We can’t have things like that flapping around, they would ruin everything. We’ll send a boat to the island and deal with Senhor Thursday.”

“You mean kill him?” said Fever.

“Well, if you will insist on being crude about it, yes…” Wavey looked curiously at her. “Does he mean something to you, this Thursday boy?” She reached out and stroked Fever’s hair. “Poor Fever! He’s only a common-or-garden
Homo sapiens,
you know. There are
loads
more where he came from.”

A knock at the cabin door interrupted her. It opened, and a young sailor leaned in and said, “Captain’s compliments, ma’am. A small boat is approaching from the islands.”

“Is Dr Teal aboard?” asked Wavey sharply.

“No, ma’am. Two gentlemen, ma’am; strangers both.”

“Arlo and Master Hazell,” said Fever. Wavey glanced quickly at her, and Fever could see that the news had worried her. If the Suppression Office was as secret as Dr Teal had said, the chances were that no one else aboard this massive ship knew what she had planned for Arlo Thursday. If he had stayed on the island she might have been able to have him killed and claim it was an accident, but she could hardly have him assassinated aboard the
Supercollider
with her whole crew looking on…

Wavey, being Wavey, recovered almost instantly. “Come,” she said pleasantly, offering Fever her hand to help her off the bunk. “Let’s go and meet your friends.” To the sailor she added, “We shall have to send a boat to the island to collect Dr Teal. And will you please tell Dr Crumb that his daughter is awake?”

Fever, who had been thinking frantically of ways to keep Arlo safe, thought she had misheard at first. “Dr Crumb is here too?” she asked.

Wavey looked at her with that expression of mischievous delight which meant that she knew something startling which Fever didn’t. “Of course he’s here! It would have looked most peculiar if I’d left him at home. He is my husband!”

They met Dr Crumb on the way to the quarterdeck. He had got Wavey’s message and he was running to find them, but as soon as he saw them he stopped running and tried to look as if he had not been hurrying at all, because although he had a wife and a daughter he was still an Engineer, and displaying emotion was difficult for him.

Difficult for Fever too. It had been such a long time since she had seen him, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about her discovery of two years earlier that he really was her father, not just her guardian. She had no idea what she should make of his marriage to Wavey, but she didn’t think she liked it; she thought she wanted him all to herself. She wanted him the way he had always been; bald and indoors-y and white-coated.

But he had changed as much as she had. He looked better-fed and better dressed and he had let his grey hair grow until it was about a half inch long and stood upright all over his scalp like an experiment with magnets and iron filings.

She started to run to him, and slowed, and stopped an arm’s length away and gave him a neat little Engineerish bow. “Hello, Dr Crumb.”

“Fever!” he said, fidgeting uneasily with a small telescope which he had brought with him from the quarterdeck… “This is – I mean – oh, that we’ve found you – that is – it is – most satisfactory.”

He couldn’t stop looking at her. Her hair, her clothes, her long, tanned hands, the dressing that she wore like a mask. “Your face… You are hurt…”

“It’s not bad,” lied Fever. “Wavey says…”

Wavey took her hand, took Dr Crumb’s. It was the first time that their strange little family had ever been all together in the same place, and it silenced them. They stood there together on the swaying deck, while sailors hurried past them and the sun slid into their eyes. The
Supercollider
was turning, spray from her paddle wheels drifting like a cool mist across her upperworks. Fever saw that the cliffs of Mayda and the harbour mouth were quite close on her left-hand side, and that a small boat was sailing up on her right.

“Dr Crumb,” she asked, “might I borrow your telescope?”

He gave it to her, very glad to find that she still needed him for something. She extended the telescope and trained it on the boat. After a moment’s trouble focusing she saw Jonathan Hazell at the helm, and Arlo sitting in the front, leaning against the mast.

Her father had turned to look at the boat, too. Marines were running to the
Supercollider
’s rail to aim muskets at it and shout at the merchant to lower his sail, but the boat was already slowing, the sail already rattling down. Jonathan Hazell had stood up uncertainly in the stern and was shouting something, his words lost in the slap of the waves against the
Supercollider
’s side.

“Who are those people?” Dr Crumb was asking.

“The young man is Arlo Thursday,” said Fever.

“The inventor of that remarkable flying machine!” Her father looked pleased, and she knew that at least he did not know about Wavey’s plans. “He must be a very talented Engineer! I was most vexed when our clumsy sailors let his machine sink. I shall look forward to making his acquaintance!”

“I imagine that Wavey will want to hand him over to the Suppression Office,” said Fever, looking at her mother.

Wavey flushed a little.

“The Suppression Office?” asked Dr Crumb. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” said Wavey. “A misunderstanding, nothing more…”

The boat was close now, and sailors were throwing down lines, advising Jonathan Hazell to “Hook on, mate!” Dr Crumb went hurrying along the
Supercollider
’s deck towards the place where the newcomers would climb aboard, and Wavey would have gone with him, but Fever caught her by a sleeve and held her back. She knew that there was no point in trying to persuade her mother that the Suppression Office was irrational, but maybe she could meet its madness halfway; suggest some compromise that could keep Arlo safe.

As quickly and as calmly as she could, she said, “You can’t hope to stamp out flying machines in this piecemeal way. Murdering inventors won’t work in the long term. Someone else will always have the same idea. Even if you… Even if you deal with Arlo, there must be dozens of people all over the world working towards the conquest of the air. What about me? I’ve flown. I helped build the
Goshawk.
Are you going to kill me?”

“Of course not, Fever,” said Wavey irritably. “You’re one of us. Now be sensible.”

“I
am
being sensible!” said Fever. “If
you
were sensible you’d see that it can’t work. If you really want to stop people thinking, you don’t use guns or bombs. You use religion.”

She waved one hand towards Mayda and hurried on, not sure where her words were coming from or where this idea was going, but blurting it out anyway. “Look at this place! They don’t even use engines! Why not? Because they think their goddess has forbidden it. Out there to westward somewhere, beyond the sea, there’s a whole continent waiting to be re-explored, but no one goes there, because the gods have cursed it. Down south, in Zagwa, they destroy every scrap of old-technology they find because they say it offends
their
god. All over the world, all sorts of good things are banned and forbidden in the name of one religion or another. You don’t have to hurt Arlo. Please don’t. You can stop his ideas being used. Just bribe a few priests. It’s the job of priests to control knowledge and stand in the way of progress: it’s what they’re
for.
Let them spread the word that the gods never meant us to fly.”