Airborn (3 page)

“Good work, Mr. Cruse. Very good work, indeed.”

I felt terribly thirsty all of a sudden and tired all the way through my bones, and then remembered that I’d been on duty for more than sixteen hours, and normally would have been in my bunk asleep. Instead I’d been swinging across the sky. I started to climb out, but my knees went wobbly, and Captain Walken and Mr. Chen grabbed me under the arms and swung me to the deck.

“You’re a brave man, Matt Cruse,” Mr. Chen said.

“No, sir. Just light.”

“Lighter than air, that’s our Mr. Cruse,” said one of the sailmakers. “Cloud hopping next, it’ll be!”

Hands tousling my hair, clapping me on the back, voices saying, “Well done,” and me trying not to smile but smiling and laughing anyway because it felt so good to know I’d brought the gondola in, saved the pilot, and impressed everyone. All these men who had known my father. They would have called him Mr. Cruse too.

Doc Halliday and another crewman were lifting the pilot out of the gondola to a waiting stretcher.

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked the doctor.

“I don’t know yet” was all Doc Halliday answered, and his young face looked so grave I felt a queer squeeze in my stomach. The wicker gondola looked odd and out of place in our cargo bay.

“Get some sleep, Mr. Cruse,” the captain said to me.

I nodded, but didn’t want to go. I watched them take the pilot away on the stretcher. I wondered who he was. I wanted to go through the gondola and find out what had gone wrong.

“Sleep first, Mr. Cruse,” said the captain. “Your father would have been very proud of you.”

I blinked away the hot tingle behind my eyes. “Thank you, sir.”

My legs wobbled as I left the cargo bay and trudged aft along the keel catwalk to the crew quarters. Lighter than air, but I felt heavy as lead. I opened the door to my cabin, caught a glimpse of the clock. Five thirty-nine. I shrugged off my shirt and trousers and climbed into my bunk. And, as so often happened when I slept aloft, I drifted free of my body and glided alongside the
Aurora
, and my father came and joined me, and we flew.

In the afternoon I was off duty, so I went to the infirmary to see how the balloon pilot was making out.

“Not good, Matt,” Doc Halliday told me. “He’s got pneumonia, and I believe he had a seizure of the heart several days ago. He’s terribly dehydrated.”

“He’ll live, though?”

The doctor lifted his eyebrows, and his lips compressed into a sad little smile. “I think not, Matt. Even if he were back on shore, his heart and lungs are so damaged there’s not much to be done.”

“Who is he?”

“Benjamin Molloy. According to the ship’s papers he was trying to make a solo circumnavigation.”

You heard such things from time to time. Some fellow trying to float round the world in a hot air balloon. No one had managed it yet. They always got grounded or were never heard from again. I didn’t know if this Mr. Molloy was brave or just plain foolhardy, but I couldn’t help but admire his daring.

“May I see him, please?”

Doc Halliday hesitated, then nodded. “He’s asleep, mind. Don’t wake him.”

The infirmary was off the main dispensary and examination room, just two beds divided by a curtain. The other bed was empty. I pulled up the chair and sat down beside Mr. Molloy. He was propped up with pillows, and his breathing was raspy. It was strange the way I felt about him:
connected
was the only word I could conjure up. I’d spotted his balloon out there in the night sky, and I’d swung onto his gondola and found him lying crumpled on the deck, looking so broken and helpless. Maybe it was also because he looked a little like an older version of my father—but that might just have been imaginings on my part.

I put my hand on top of his. It was scalding with fever, ridged with sinew and bone, and my own hand felt icy against it. He shifted, and I took my hand away, afraid I’d disturbed him. His eyes opened. They were milky, and he stared through me like he was focused on something else. Like he was already leaving.

He coughed a bit, and I held a glass of water to his mouth, but he didn’t seem to want it, or maybe he couldn’t swallow. A little spilled down his chin and onto his bedsheets.

“Sorry, sir,” I said, mopping him with a cloth.

When I finished I looked back at him, and his eyes were intent now.

“Did you see them?” he asked me, his voice scratchy.

“Who?” I wondered if he was thinking clearly.

“Sailing. All around,” he said. It took him a long time to get this out, swallowing and giving little coughs between the words. “Probably always. Been there. Only no one’s. Ever. Seen them.”

He tried to get up, pushing with his elbows like he had somewhere important to go, but he didn’t have the strength, and he sank back down. He turned to me again, swallowed.

“But you. Must’ve seen them.”

It seemed to matter to him, so I lied.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw them too.”

“Good,” he said, and that seemed to calm him down some. “Beautiful creatures,” he said, smiling. “They were. Beautiful.”

“Yes,” I said.

He coughed again, and I wondered if I should call for Doc Halliday.

“I’ll get the doctor for you, sir.”

His hot hand was on my arm. “Kate. Would’ve loved them,” he said. “Don’t you. Think?”

“I think so,” I said.

He was looking at me very kindly, and I felt ashamed of my lying, and then it was as if he saw through me, and it was terrible to see the way his face changed, disgust pouring into his eyes.

“You never. Saw them.”

His words were all gaspy now, and it started him coughing again, his whole body jerking. I looked around in a worry. Doc Halliday was coming now, telling me it was best I left.

I went away, feeling terrible. Maybe if I’d talked to him differently, he wouldn’t have got so riled up. Maybe if I’d said things better.

An hour or so later Doc Halliday found me in the kitchen, polishing the silver for dinner, and told me Benjamin Molloy had just died. I was surprised at how wet my eyes got; I didn’t really know him at all.

Doc Halliday squeezed my arm.

“You mustn’t take it to heart, Matt. He was a very sick man.”

I nodded. I just wished he hadn’t been so vexed at me when he died. I told the doctor what he’d said to me. Doc Halliday smiled kindly.

“The dying often say strange things. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

But that night, on my watch, Benjamin Molloy’s words sounded over and over in my head, and I wondered what it was he’d seen. Or thought he’d seen. Something winged in the sky by the sound of it. Beautiful creatures. Maybe he’d caught sight of an albatross or some other great seafaring bird, though certainly it was a rare thing so deep over the ocean.

Well, there was no shortage of fanciful stories about winged things. Angels and dragons, sky kelpies and cloud sphinxes. They always turned out to be something else: a glare off the water, shadows in mist, a mirage projected by a tired sailor’s bleary eyes. But that night, I had to admit, I kept a sharp lookout as I swept the horizons and hopscotched over my constellations. I saw nothing out of the ordinary, none of Benjamin Molloy’s beautiful creatures. But I wish I had. I liked to think there was no end of things aloft in the sky, unseen by us.

ONE YEAR LATER

2

UP SHIP!

Pull up the gangways! Close the hatches! The cargo was all loaded and tied down in the holds; the last of the passengers were on board. There was a cry of “Up ship!” from the control car. The two-hundred-strong ground crew cast off the mooring lines, and with a great splash we were dumping water ballast, and the men and women on the airfield sent up a cheer, and we were rising now, the passengers swinging caps and handkerchiefs from the open windows, and the people down below waving back, and we were rising, the airfield already far below us, and the spires of Lionsgate City spreading out to the north, and we were rising into the dawn sky, sure and smooth as an angel.

I’d just finished a week’s shore leave. My first few nights at home, my mother had made a terrible fuss of me, cooking and baking my favorite things. We had all stayed up late, talking, until Sylvia and Isabel were sent off to bed, complaining loudly, for they had school the next morning. My little sisters had grown since I’d last seen them, shooting up like silver maples. They’d showered me with kisses when I gave them their presents. I always brought them things when I came home, since I most often missed their birthdays and sometimes Christmas too. Isabel got a didgeridoo from Australia, because she was musical and loved instruments of all sorts, and here was one she’d never heard of. For Sylvia, who fancied herself a lady of high fashion now she was pushing twelve, I brought home a beautiful tortoiseshell hairband I’d seen in the Grand Bazaar in Marrakesh. And for my mother, I’d bought, same as last time, a bottle of the Iberian perfume she loved so much. It was the scent my father had always brought home for her. My mother would never buy it for herself; she said it was a luxury we could not afford, but my father used to tell her everyone, no matter how poor, deserved at least one luxury. She had worn that scent as long as I could remember, and it was as much a part of her as her supple seamstress hands or her large, slightly mournful eyes.

I was always glad to come back home, but I never slept well on the ground. After a few days the small apartment would start to feel like a prison. My mother’s exhaustion and silent worry filled up the cramped rooms until I was afraid I’d suffocate. Worst of all, I would start missing my father so badly it was like a clenched fist behind my breastbone.

I never dreamed of him when I was landlocked, only when I was aboard the
Aurora.

Aloft was the only place I could feel close to him, the only place I didn’t feel all broken. But I felt too guilty to tell this to my mother.

Now, airborne once more, I filled my lungs and felt some of the heaviness pass out of my chest and shoulders. There were a few good things about being on the ground, and the best was lifting off again. Nothing grander than feeling the strength and grace of the
Aurora
’s bone and muscle and sinew as she angled up ever so slightly and left the earth below.

Out the windows dozens of other airships were visible, some newly airborne like us, pointing toward all corners of the globe. There was the passenger liner
Titania
bound for Paris, and over there, the
Arctic Star
headed over the top of the world with scheduled stops in Yellowknife, Godthab, Sankt-Peterburg and Arkhangel. I glimpsed the regal
Orient Express
, just arrived from Constantinople, landing below us. Queued high in the sky were air freighters from the Far East, their silver skins blazing with the rising sun’s light, awaiting orders from the harbor master before they made their final approaches.

All the world met here, and there was nowhere you couldn’t go once aloft.

We ourselves were bound for the other side of the world—Sydney, Australia, a five days’ journey across the Pacificus. The past twenty-four hours had passed in a blur, for the entire crew was busy tending to the ship, refueling and reprovisioning her. Overnight we’d topped up our gas cells with hydrium and pumped water into our ballast and drinking tanks.

And the food! What we took on was quite something—and I should know for I helped lug it all on board: sixteen hundred pounds of potatoes, thirty-two hundred eggs, a thousand pounds of butter and cheese. All in all we loaded up close to twelve thousand pounds of food for the voyage, and when you’ve seen it spread out in the loading bay and hefted it up on your shoulders, you wouldn’t think an entire nation could eat so much food.

Now, here was the amazing thing. With all her provisions and cargo and gear and passengers and crew, the
Aurora
weighed more than two million pounds. She was a giant to be sure, nine hundred feet from stem to stern, fourteen stories high. But fill her up with hydrium, and it was like she weighed nothing at all. This morning, all it took were two men, one at the bow, one at the stern, to take hold of her and carry her out of the hangar and across the airfield to the mooring mast.

Easy as that.

First time I saw it, I could barely believe my eyes, for it seemed to defy every law of nature. And then all the
Aurora
had to do was dump a few hundred pounds of water and she was lighter than air.

There’s fancy math to explain all this, of course. It had to do with hydrium being the lightest gas in the world. Much lighter than helium and even lighter than hydrogen. But when you saw the
Aurora
, saw her floating and rising, you forgot all about the math and just stared.

Up ship!

No time for gawking out windows now. I was cabin boy, and there were a hundred twenty passengers on board and all of them needed settling. I was busy showing them to their cabins and staterooms, explaining how the sinks and toilets and showers worked, opening trunks and telling about meals and showtimes for our onboard cinema and piano recitals in the A-Deck starboard lounge.

“When do we set off?” one lady asked me.

“Ma’am,” I said, “we set off twenty minutes ago.”

She turned to the cabin window, amazed. “But I felt nothing!”

“That’s right, ma’am. She’s like riding a cloud.”

And then it was breakfast time, and everyone needed feeding.

Breakfast!

A maelstrom of noise and activity in the galley, all the electric elements blazing and the ranges like kilns. Platters of fresh bread and rolls and cinnamon buns. Sausages and bacon sputtering in the pans. Portobello mushrooms and tomatoes simmering under the grill. And the eggs! Not in a henhouse would you see more eggs than in our kitchen at breakfast time. Eggs served up any way you could want: poached, scrambled, over easy; eggs Benedict, omelettes.

If I hadn’t already eaten a rib-busting breakfast at four thirty this morning, the smell and sight of all this food would have had me running around like a mad dog, cramming my mouth.

Chef Vlad and his cooks and kitchen help had been up for hours, cutting peppers and tomatoes and mushrooms for the omelette fillings and making dough, for everything we served on board was fresh. Not like some of these cost-cutting liners you have now, where you practically have to bring your own provisions on board if you don’t want to starve halfway over the ocean.

The main kitchen was on A-Deck, and the bakery directly below it on B-Deck. The fresh rolls and croissants came up piping hot in the dumbwaiter, almost faster than we could serve them. Baz and Kristof were on duty with me in the first-class dining room. We’d worked together long enough so that you might have thought we were auditioning for the ballet. We swirled about one another as the ship sailed on and the passengers ate and clinked glasses and ordered more morning glories at table nine and laughed at the sheer delight of having a meal six hundred feet in the air.

Serving in the dining room was hardly my favorite part of being a cabin boy. But this morning, I smiled and served and
yes ma’amed
and
no sired
with the best of them, and I believe I even had an extra spring in my step—for I had high hopes that this was to be my last voyage as cabin boy.

There were rumors that Tom Bear, our assistant sailmaker, would be signing on with another ship at the end of this journey. Last year, after we’d rescued that hot air balloon, Captain Walken had told me I deserved a promotion, and as soon as there was a suitable position vacant, he would put me in it.

If Tom Bear was indeed leaving ship, then the next time the
Aurora
weighed anchor, I would be assistant sailmaker.

Sailmaker!

This was my great chance.

If I could become junior sailmaker, then maybe one day I could become head sailmaker, then rudder man, watch officer—and one day, just maybe, captain of a ship like the
Aurora
.

But this was getting ahead of myself.

Soon I might be assistant sailmaker.

This morning, however, I was still cabin boy, and table two was wanting more pancakes and I had better go fetch them now. They were eating so furiously their forks were sparking against their knives. You’d think they were eating their last meal instead of sitting down to the first of many delicious meals aboard a luxury airship. If some of them were expecting a tilty meal, with their plates and forks slewing across the table, they were mistaken. The
Aurora
sailed without a bump or roll. You could stand a fountain pen on its end atop your table, and it would not fall once during the entire meal.

“They’re eating liked starved apes,” Baz muttered as he swished past me with more food.

“Haven’t they had enough yet?” he wondered a minute later when we passed again.

“Keep your hands well clear of their forks,” he warned me as we pirouetted round each other at the dumbwaiter. “I was nearly stabbed clean through. They’ll be eating the cutlery soon!”

“And us if we’re not quick enough,” I added. Baz guffawed then coughed to cover it up.

I was in a fine mood. Out the windows I saw the spires of Lionsgate Bridge, the dawn’s light seeping over their peaks and making the lions’ golden manes gleam. It would be an hour before we were over open sea, but my heart was already beating for that moment when I saw the endless horizon and I felt like anything was possible: the whole world unfurling before you.

“Look at that!” cried one of the passengers, pointing out the window.

I glanced over and saw an ornithopter passing us on the starboard side, its beating wings ablur as it banked sharply to cut across our bow. Now, this was a cheeky thing to do, and I couldn’t help shaking my head in disgust. What was the pilot about, darting in front of us like that? Ornithopters were ungainly looking contraptions, with their flapping feathered wings, and airshipmen tended to look down on them as a foolish business, as they did on all heavier-than-air craft. Mosquitoes, we called them, on account of their puny size and the noisy whine of their engines.

The ornithopter buzzed round again, and this time I spotted two passengers behind the pilot, all kitted out with their goggles and leather caps. Again they cut across our bow.

“What’re they up to?” I mumbled to Baz as he headed toward the kitchen with an armful of dirty plates.

“Taking pictures maybe.”

Sometimes you got photographers wanting photographs of the big luxury airships as they came in and out of harbor, and they’d hire ornithopters to take them up for a good shot. But I hadn’t seen anyone holding a camera.

I wanted to find out what was going on, and since breakfast was winding down, I thought this would be a good time to take coffee and cinnamon rolls to the bridge.

“Cover for me?” I asked Baz. “I want to find out what’s what.”

He nodded, curious as I was. Anyway, Baz was used to me disappearing to the control car, even when I was off duty. I loved watching the officers fly the ship, and there was an awful lot to learn. I strolled down to B-Deck and stopped off at the bakery to load up a tray. With the tray balanced in one hand, I hurried down the gangway to the keel catwalk and walked briskly toward the bow. There was a square hatchway in the floor with a ladder that led down into the control car. I took the rungs one-handed and didn’t spill a single drop of coffee.

The ladder brought me down into the radio room, at the rear of the control car. Its walls were covered with all manner of machinery, transmitters and receivers, lighted gauges and dials. I placed a mug of steaming coffee beside the wireless officer, Luc Bayard, who was pressing his earpiece against his head and scowling and scribbling a message onto his pad.

“Clarify please,
Nimbus
638. You are requesting a landing?”

I put an almond croissant down beside the coffee, taking my time. Bayard glanced up at me and shook his head, making a loony roll of his eyes.

“For what purpose,
Nimbus
638?” He scrawled a message onto his pad, but before I could read it he stood up, speaking into his headset before pulling it off. “Stand by please,
Nimbus
638.”

“Excuse me, Matt,” he said, walking forward through a doorway into the navigation room. It was small, with a chart cabinet against one wall and a broad table against the other, where all manner of maps and instruments were spread out. Mr. Torbay was taking a reading from one of the compasses, and Mr. Grantham was leaning over the table, marking lines and notations as he updated our position on the chart of our new journey. I quickly put down rolls and mugs of coffee and hurried after Mr. Bayard as he made his way forward to the bridge. I didn’t want to miss anything. A landing, Mr. Bayard had said. I could only assume he was talking with the pesky ornithopter buzzing around us.

Through the final hatchway and I was suddenly on the bridge. It took up the entire front half of the control car, a huge glass cage with two-story windows giving a panoramic view of sky, land, and sea. I’d been here many times before, and it never failed to make my skin tingle. There was the rudder man at his wheel, and the elevator man at his. There was the gas control board and the ballast board and the engine room telegraph—I knew all the instruments and what they did, and imagined I could use them if given the chance. The bridge was a crowded place, and I stood well back, not wanting to get in the way. I started putting coffee down for the helmsmen and watch officers, taking my time and listening.