Enigmatic Pilot (20 page)

It was the peculiar hierograms of the Martian diplomats that gave him the critical idea. Using woven strands of cane and millinery wire, he pieced together an enclosed scaffold in the most exact shape of their repeating tornado icon that he could, then he set it loose in a whirlwind of dust in one of the city’s weed lots. The woven spiral, which in his concentration and excitement
he had forgotten to secure, rose so fast that he could barely watch it. He made a larger model, and this time remembered to keep a lead attached. Because Lloyd had integrated panels made of umbrella cloth and handkerchiefs, the structure was able to support a terrified young pig that he pinched to a height of almost a hundred feet. More work, he had no doubt, would produce a still stronger and more effective model, and once the physics were right he knew that it would be a simple matter to enhance the dramatic grandeur through the use of color, reflective materials, and improvised noisemakers. “I am going to build an enormous kite in the shape of the Ambassadors’ favorite symbol,” he said to himself.

The most difficult part was the critical third element—a working glider. For hours he labored, hallucinating a storm of theoretical insects and birds. Ever shifting between the strength of structure and the responsiveness of form, his designs evolved with a life of their own, as step by heartbreaking misstep he taught himself about flight.

He introduced a slight reflex curve at the trailing edge of the wings. Into the body of the glider he fabricated a rudder and an elevator rigged through a universal joint. Then he fitted a moving weight to adjust the center of gravity and improved stability by setting the wings at a dihedral angle. He rose and fell and swung on ropes. Every frantic hour brought a crash and then a jet of hope … some radiant insight … some fresh despair.

He so covered himself in bruises that Rapture tongue-lashed Brother Dowling and the prune of the Baptist school marm, who she assumed had been too vigorous in punishing the boy for missing the sorry excuse for “class” that consisted of nothing but rote memorizing of Bible verses and some half-wit figuring. As if the Wizard of Zanesville would sit still in a stifling prayer room to count on a slate with the dim little dumpling Hiram Pennyweight, an orphan with a knob on his forehead the size of a duck egg, and Cecilia Tosh, who had lost her leg in a wagon accident and smelled like boiling hoof jelly! Lloyd would
rather have faced the strap, and often did. But, despite the enthusiasm of these whippings, they were nothing to what he put himself through when he sneaked out to conduct his trials.

One night a man with a harelip and huge meat-slab hands ambushed him in an alley on the way home. Living in fear of the Vardogers, Lloyd fell victim to this more predictable predator, who brained the boy with a barrel stave and, stinking of dog-piss ale, stripped his britches down.

The pain was excruciating, but even worse was the bestial grunting of his assailant, who left him swollen and bleeding in a pile of ox excrement. Never a tear did the young innovator shed. Not one. He took each thrust straight into his heart and darkened his being around it like a toad trapped in a hot iron box. One day, he vowed, he would find that creature again, and then he would perform some fiery experiment of justice—but in the meantime he had a mission to fly. He renewed his exertions with the cold-blooded certainty of desperation.

Success continued to elude him until one afternoon a waft of wind came up over the water and tickled a wreck of spiderweb, which chanced to break free just as he was watching. Lloyd noted how the transparent netting caught the zephyr, like the sail of a boat, and lofted it away out of sight. A breeze stirred in his mind.

Up to that moment he’d been concentrating on evolving the technology of the kite into a full-size glider, taking what the tethered kite could teach and turning it into something more maneuverable, more protective and sustainable in its flight, a giant version of his popular whimsies. In the glider, Lloyd could see great potential—almost limitless. Falling reluctantly away into the dissolution of sleep, he would glimpse wondrous engined machines propelling hundreds of people through the air at speeds beyond belief—gorgeous riverboats of the sky, able to master space and distance as his father had hoped the Ark would transcend time. Travel to other worlds, yes!

But in structure there is also weakness. This subtle paradox
now struck Lloyd with irresistible force. Perhaps the most beautiful machines are the ones that are least visible.

Abandoning spars, frame, or any form of rigid bracing, he designed and stitched together himself an ingenious parafoil made from the two types of material that held the most fascination for him: a couple of large American flags and enough women’s underwear to have dressed both a whorehouse and a church social. While porcelain-skinned matrons dozed on their goose down in the drowse of horsefly afternoons, Lloyd worked an ivory sailor’s needle, fashioning a perforated chamber that would theoretically fill with air when the fabric was fully unfurled and aloft. More veined than ribbed, with slender but strong strands of twined fishing line that he stole from a boathouse—feeding into steering toggles of thick hair ribbon—his new creation traded the toughness of a wood-and-bone enlargement of his soarers for the tuftiness of web and thistle. A second principle of his life had been sewn together in the process: in the face of failure, always become more ambitious and daring.

The breakthrough with the parafoil allowed him to focus more attention on the manufacture of the balloon and the kite components, and Brookmire, understanding these elements better, was able to throw the full weight of his support into their fabrication to a high standard, given the amount of time and materials available. The mill owner’s son recruited a family of free Negroes and an old Indian weaver woman without teeth but with nimbleness to spare, and was enthralled by Lloyd’s supervisory skills and native authority. The boy knew what he wanted, and he was a stern taskmaster when it came to getting it.

There was still no word from Hephaestus, but Lloyd had heard nothing to quench his hope that his father was still alive and surviving better than he would at the mission house, which had just about sapped his mother dry. He labored on, heaving himself into every stitch and crease of the parafoil, so that
whenever he did fall into a doze he felt himself airborne. Airborn.

The giant kite assembly was finished and stress-tested by the boy in the abandoned warehouse. Lloyd hadn’t seen Schelling in weeks and was curious about how much he knew about his activities, if anything. He thought it unlikely that the humpback and Mother Tongue would just let him go. Perhaps they were simply waiting, wondering what he was up to.

He had no way of knowing that his former mentor did indeed know something of his whereabouts—just not the magnitude of his ambition. The bookman would later blame himself for what transpired—or what he felt he allowed to transpire—but there were many things on his mind. Dark forces were gathering strength in Missouri. At night the bloodhounds of the “nigger catchers” bayed in the woods, and men and women from faraway places stepped off the riverboats each day and disappeared but were not gone.

Lloyd was only subconsciously aware of this undercurrent, because the full strength of his intellect was directed to his aeronautical researches. At last, with balloon and kite elements resolved, it came time to formally trial his parawing out on the river, behind the barge, under the cover of night. Of course there were dangers, and of course there were a few glitches at first, but nothing he could not handle. The cells of the fabric wings filled with air, and within two trials he rose to the full tension length of the line, albeit very wet.

And what a feeling! In his dreams he saw future creations, combining the lightness of cloth and the capacity to change shape with the strength of reinforced structure and the thrust of unthinkable motors. He would think them! After his display over St. Louis, he would turn his mind to engines and generators. Beyond steam, electricity, and magnetism, there were miracles on the horizon of his imagination. Mirror-bright machines with the maneuverability of dragonflies. Vast airborne opera houses. Enormous bullets with men in them. He no
longer cared about Texas and his uncle. He longed to get to the future. To plant a flag and stake his claim. Pathfinder. Priest of Invention. Impresario.

The searing heat of September found him ready to step beyond theory and trial. He could not rehearse the complete performance; there were not enough materials or secrecy to go around. He felt that he had mastered the physics and engineering problems as completely as he could without open and comprehensive testing, which he could not afford or risk. His butcher paper and Buffalo-book notes were full of coefficients of drag and the effects of air pressure on airspeed, calculations about wingspan and weight-to-lift ratios—a miniature history of the mathematics of flight strained through a sieve. If only he had more time. If only he had better equipment. If only he could come out and work in the open. But he did not, could not, and a natural tendency toward arrogance settled him on what he had accomplished. It would do. It had to.

So he turned his mind away from the science of his creation to its aesthetics, with particular attention to the stimulation of bewonderment. For this he looked to Mulrooney, master of tinsel angels and two-headed cats. The professor and his mute wives were still battling the marsh fever but had managed to relocate nearer the fresher air of the river. Urim and Thummim remained hardy in health where the fever was concerned but incomprehensible as ever in terms of speech.

While Lloyd had been tackling the ancient dream of human flight with some success, Mulrooney had made no headway whatsoever in cracking the brothers’ private code, and the two preterhuman charges seemed as remote from the world as when the boy had first met them. They had, however, been busy in their own right, although Mulrooney could make nothing of their written efforts. Since Lloyd had last seen them, they had filled up every scrap of paper and smoothed-out rag that they had been given with more of their queer hierograms. The tent was now littered with their work. In addition to the repetition
of the singular tornado icon, their row upon column of insectoid deliberations mingled regimented dots and curls like imaginary musical notes and unknown mathematical symbols with the filigreed suggestions of animal forms and crystalline shapes that brought to mind the snowflake images that float across one’s eyes when staring.

Lloyd was struck by the fact that, with the exception of his graphs and diagrams, the brothers’ esoterica bore an inescapable resemblance to his own figurings and formulas—to the extent that if some ordinary person compared his Buffalo-book pages with the sheaves and remnants here, they might well have assumed that the teratoids had been working on the same problem in parallel, but from an encrypted perspective. To his further puzzlement, he could not avoid the impression that if gazed at without close scrutiny the goblins’ ciphers took on an overall pattern—a hypnotic labyrinthine spiral. It took an act of will to force himself away from contemplation and back to the reason for his visit.

Mulrooney was beside himself with curiosity about the boy’s request, but believing in Lloyd’s assurances that his plan was almost fulfilled and would soon create significant new business opportunities for them both, the showman was willing to supply what goods he could: strips of painted cloth, jars of colored sand, and bits of broken mirror—all sorts of things he had magpied from his “peregrinations” to fascinate children and lend an enchanted air to his performances. To these Lloyd would add some of his own improvisations back at the warehouse.

An ominous rumble of thunder rolled over the encampment, followed by a flash of light and the intoxicating bite of ozone, which always reminded Lloyd of Lodema. A storm was moving in and, given the hothouse air and the voraciousness of the midges and mosquitoes, a dump of rain was seen as a relief. Lloyd considered it a good omen. He wanted the air fresh and clear for the morrow, with a good wind. Not gusty but steady.

The first pregnant drops of rain hit the roof of the tent and
the wagon, and Lloyd hastened to gather up his booty. He did not want to get caught in the downpour. Before he departed, he gave the Ladies Mulrooney each a kiss on the cheek and told the professor to be at the courthouse on Fourth Street no later than noon the next day.

“I wish you would let me in on your little secret, my boy,” the showman lamented. “After all, we are partners. Aren’t we?”

Lloyd had grown adept at his management of both information and personnel. He thought of Brookmire’s intensifying questions, and how the easterner was probably pacing back at the warehouse awaiting the final preparations.

“Trust me,” Lloyd said. “Remember what you have taught me.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of!” the showman confessed.

“Fear is the price of surprise,” Lloyd answered.

The professor twisted the ends of his mustache at this remark, trying to think if he had said it or if the boy had out-Mulrooneyed him.

“I’ll be at the appointed rendezvous—with bells on,” the showman confirmed. “How will I find you?”

“That won’t be a problem.” Lloyd smiled and then was gone, picking his way through the trees as fast as he could, eyes ever on the alert for confrontation, the warm big drops of rain sticking to his back like flies.

In spite of the boy’s nonchalance, the professor had the nagging suspicion that he would never see his protégé again, and it pained him to think that he was in some way responsible. Little did he know that the boy would be back again later that night.

In the interim, Lloyd had a hectic schedule. He had to return to the mission house and see his mother before lights-out, then slip out of the dormitory, as usual—go meet Brookmire at the vacant warehouse, beautify his creation with Mulrooney’s baubles, make his final inspection, and then return to the showman’s camp amid the storm to perform what would be the most troublesome part of the entire scheme. He had left this
crucial element to the last minute because he had no choice. If he had put forward an open request to Mulrooney, he knew the showman would have outright refused.