Arabella of Mars (15 page)

Arabella positioned herself on her seat, tied herself into place with a stout cord across her lap, then slipped her feet into the pedals' leather straps and awaited the command to begin. All around her the other waisters and idlers—any one else who was not currently occupied in the handling of the ship—grumbled and sighed as they did the same. “Step lively, now!” Binion called from his station near the bow. “Time's a-wasting!”

Finally all the men were settled. “By the right,” Binion shouted, “pedal!” The command was accompanied by a
thud
from the drum fastened to the deck before him, which he struck with a large wooden mallet.

Arabella grunted as she pressed hard with her right foot on the wooden pedal, the strain transmitting itself through her body to the stout horizontal rod she grasped in her hands. Most of the other pedalers grunted as well, but the sound was lost behind the groaning creak of wood and leather as the whole complicated system of cogged wheels and perforated leather belts beneath the deck moved complainingly into action.

A long, creaking moment later Binion called, “By the left!” and struck the drum again. Arabella and all the others leaned to the right as they pressed with their left feet, the awkward protesting pedals moving slowly in a circle beneath each man, returning to the point where they'd started. “Right!” and another drumbeat began the cycle again.

Before the pedals had gone around ten times Arabella was already streaming with sweat—sweat that in the close warm dark of belowdecks refused to evaporate, and which in a state of free descent did not even have the decency to run down her face. Instead, it clung to her forehead and temples and cheeks, stinging and blinding her eyes no matter how much she blinked and shook it away. Not that there was any thing to see here in any case. Grimly she set her jaw and pedaled, pedaled, pedaled to the incessant beat of the drum.

Beneath the deck, she knew, a series of creaking shafts and belts transmitted the force of the men's pedaling feet to the propulsive sails, or “pulsers,” at the ship's extreme aft. These five triangular sails, unlike any others on the ship, turned in a circle like a windmill's blades, and somehow—Arabella didn't quite grasp the philosophical principle—rather than catching the wind that usually pushed the ship forward, they actually
created
a wind where no natural wind existed.

But the pulsers' wind, the product of mere human effort, was but a pale imitation of God's own wind, and for all the men's labor it pushed the ship at a comparative snail's pace. But still, from what Arabella had learned, it was better than drifting hopelessly, and after some hours or days of work might serve to move the ship from an area of calm into a favorable wind.

At least, that was the men's hope. Arabella had heard tales of ships thoroughly becalmed, crews pedaling day upon day for weeks, men dying of thirst and of cramp while fruitlessly praying for the faintest breath of breeze.

On and on the drum pounded, the men grunted, the pedals creaked, the belts wailed like tortured cats. The carpenter and his men were kept busy anointing the many moving parts with grease, and from time to time a halt was called so that a broken or misaligned part could be repaired. The complex mechanism that transmitted the men's effort to the pulsers was balky and unreliable but, again, better than drifting hopelessly. Arabella gritted her teeth and tried to ignore the burning in her upper thighs.

And then—oh, God be praised!—a new sound intruded upon the dark and groaning space between decks, a faint whispering rush, and Arabella felt the ship shift with a new and tentative life that issued from a source other than her and the other men's pedaling efforts. A weak cheer sprang up at that, and a few men slacked off their labors, but Binion cursed them and pounded his drum still more insistently. “You'll pedal till I tell you to stop!” he said, and so weary were the men that none could spare even a mutter of complaint at that.

Finally, as the whisper of wind grew to a constant, comforting waft accompanied by a gentle yet insistent pressure, one of the other officers appeared and whispered in Binion's ear. “Leave off pedaling!” Binion called, and with a great sigh the men obeyed.

Arabella floated, gasping, in her seat, her burning legs twitching like a pond full of agitated frogs. Sweat stung her eyes and pooled beneath her arms. The smell was of the Augean stables.

“Stow pedals!” Binion shouted then. Wearily, with fingers numb from hours of gripping the rod before her, Arabella began to untie the cord that bound her to the hateful seat.

 

10

LIFE IN MIDAIR

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

Captain Singh turned from where he sat staring out the wide, paned window. The roiling gray clouds of the Horn lay well abaft now, and the sun streamed in from a clear blue sky. The ship's constant shifting and jerking had been replaced by a smooth, imperceptible drift that felt like no movement at all, though the other members of Arabella's watch assured her that the mass of air in which
Diana
was embedded was moving at some thousands of miles per hour, carrying the ship along with it.

“Yes, Ashby.” The captain swiveled himself about, his body twisting in the air to face her, though he did not touch the wall or deck with either hands or feet. Arabella had grown far more comfortable with weightlessness, but this elegant demonstration of experience and skill brought home just how much more she had to learn. She hoped that some day she might move as handsomely as he. “Now that we have rounded the Horn, I have time and attention to devote to the education of the ship's young gentlemen. And in that number, for certain purposes, I include yourself.”

“Thank you, sir.” She bowed in the air, which caused her to begin a tumble which she checked with a hand to the door frame.

The captain, to his eternal credit, appeared to take no notice of Arabella's clumsiness. He moved to where Aadim, the clockwork navigator, sat fixed to his desk, facing out the same window. “Please come over here and observe these dials.”

Arabella pushed off from the door frame and drifted across the cabin, bringing herself to a halt beside the captain. For a moment she nearly brushed against his buff-clad shoulder, and the sudden effort of controlling her motion in the air to prevent that contact made her heart race.

Suddenly, with a soft creak and a whir of gears, the navigator's head swiveled to face Arabella and inclined in a slight nod.

Arabella gaped in astonishment. “Did he just … notice me?”

“An interesting question.” The captain smiled. “Aadim is, in effect, the face of the ship. His mechanisms extend throughout
Diana
, from the forward anemometer beneath the figurehead to the rotational counter on the pulser drive shaft. Within this cabin he has several components that affect the actions of his head and eyes.” He gestured to a small, unobtrusive lens in a brass fitting on the bulkhead to his left. “Sunlight from the window falls upon that lens. When it is interrupted, the change in temperature causes a cam to shift, transmitting power to the shafts that turn the head.”

Arabella couldn't look away from the green glass eyes that seemed to meet her own. “It's rather … disquieting.”

At that a small line appeared between the captain's bushy black brows. “I'm sorry you find it so.”

For some reason the captain's disapproval, however mild, bit deeply at Arabella's heart, and she quickly amended her position. “Well, it's all a bit strange now. I am certain I shall become accustomed to it.”

The captain's face betrayed no emotion. “I hope so.”

For a moment longer the automaton's eyes remained still, then with a click and a whir the eyes and head swiveled back to face out the window. Arabella strove to focus her attention on the ingenuity of the mechanism rather than the somewhat disturbing effect the action had upon her sensibilities.

The captain pointed to one of the dials on the front face of the desk. “This dial indicates our current air speed, as determined by the anemometer I mentioned earlier.”

Arabella turned herself in the air for a better look at the dial. “Twenty knots?”

“Twenty-one, to be precise. But, of course, we are traveling much faster than that relative to the Earth.” He pointed to another dial.

“Seven and a half.…
thousand
knots?”

“Indeed. Would you care to speculate how the two figures are calculated, and why they differ?”

“Well … an anemometer measures the speed of wind, so this must measure the ship's speed relative to the air mass we are passing through. But the other…” She frowned, concentrating. “The ship's speed relative to Earth is largely determined by the speed of the air mass itself, but how to measure that?” She thought a bit more. “Could one determine the distance to Earth by measuring the angular distance between, say, London and Paris, as seen through the telescope?”

The captain shook his head, though he smiled—and that smile warmed Arabella's heart far out of proportion to its slight extent. “An interesting guess, and not entirely incorrect.” He opened a cabinet, revealing several cylinders of gleaming brass. “These devices form part of the actual solution.” He removed one of the devices from the cabinet. It was a small brass telescope, perhaps ten inches long and an inch in diameter, attached by a swivel onto a wooden shaft about two feet long. He pointed out that the bottom end of the shaft was a brass fitting with a cross-shaped point. “This fits into one of several sockets in key locations throughout the ship.” Drifting across the cabin, he indicated a brass disk set into the deck with a matching cross-shaped hole in it. He inserted the pointed end of the telescope's shaft into the hole, where it seated with a precise click, then swiveled the telescope back and forth. From this location, she noted, the telescope had a view of nearly half the sky through the broad stern window. “The horizontal angle, which we call lambda, is transmitted to Aadim through cables. The vertical angle, or phi, is measured on this scale here”—he pointed to a brass scale etched onto the telescope's swivel—“and set by the operator through the dial next to the socket.”

Struggling to follow the demonstration, Arabella asked, “The angle between what and what?”

The captain grinned and held up one finger, then put his eye to the telescope and swiveled it back and forth for a time, first with large motions and then with careful, precise adjustments. “Observe,” he said then, and gestured Arabella to take his place.

Careful not to jostle the telescope out of its alignment, Arabella put her eye to the telescope's eyepiece. Swimming there, pale against the blue of the sky, lay the planet Saturn, seemingly large as a penny, his broad ring plainly visible and the pinpoint lights of two moons gleaming nearby.

“An excellent view for such a small instrument,” she mused.

The captain quirked an eyebrow at her observation. “You are familiar with telescopes?”

Arabella's mouth went dry and she began to stammer, then blurted out the truth. “I … my father, he, he … was an amateur astronomer.” Silently she cursed herself for letting slip her opinion of the instrument. Though this bit of information could not, she hoped, lead to the discovery of her true identity and sex, she knew that she must keep as many secrets as she could. The more the captain and the other crew members knew about her, the more likely it was that they could puzzle out who and what she really was. “But what,” she said, hoping to change the subject, “does the observation of Saturn have to do with the ship's speed?”

The captain tapped the scale on the telescope's side. “Why do we measure these angles?”

Why did he always answer her questions with a question? “As the ship moves through the air,” she thought aloud, “the planet appears to fall astern.” She considered the question for a moment more. “The changing angle of the telescope over time can be used to determine how fast it is receding.”

“Very nearly correct. Consider, though, that the ship does not travel in a straight line, nor does Saturn or any other planet stand still. What could be done to compensate for these issues?”

Arabella closed her eyes, her mind wheeling. This was so much harder than the simple household economics she'd had from her mother! If it hadn't been for Michael, and the lessons in trigonometry he'd passed on from their father, she'd be completely lost.

At that reminder of her late father, and her beloved Michael who was even now, unknown to himself, in such danger, the worry and exhaustion of the last week seemed to fall upon her from a great height. Suddenly she could barely breathe, and hot tears squeezed out between her closed eyelids.

But she could not show such weakness in front of the captain! She sniffed and shook her head hard to mask the tears. “I'm afraid I don't know, sir.” Silently she cursed her quavering voice.

The captain gave her a smile which was not quite condescending. “Do not be too disturbed at your own limitations, young man. These problems are rather difficult, but I have confidence you will comprehend them in time.” He extracted the telescope from its socket and replaced it in the cabinet with the others. “The answer is twofold. First, we take observations of several stars and planets and use triangulation to determine the ship's position, independent of her heading. And second, the motions of the planets are incorporated into Aadim's workings.”

He unlatched the side of the automaton's desk and swung it open, pointing out the complex shapes of several notched wheels and explaining how they worked together to calculate the motions of the planet Jupiter. But as he did so, Arabella could not help but notice that he laid a hand on the machine's shoulder, as though reassuring it that this exposure was necessary and would not go on too long.

Arabella nodded and tried to concentrate on the captain's descriptions of the mechanisms. But though the automaton's head faced the window, it still seemed to be regarding her from the corner of its glass-and-ivory eye.