Hot and Steamy (25 page)

“The melodic patterns of the solar system became clear to me of a sudden,” the young woman said, the light in her eyes almost dreamlike, “and after I began to interweave the various threads of that concerto I began to understand the rhythm of the universe, or should I say, the universes.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“What she's sayin', my boy,” interrupted Dollins, “is that Xibor is where it is all the time, but it's not. Like a ghost what exists in another place, but on occasion slips into view when conditions are right.”

Filimena made to explain further. Indeed, she seemed almost eager to do so, as if the pilot's opinion might almost be important to her. Cutting off any further explanations, however, Stevens turned to Dollins, asking: “And you believe all this, Captain?”

“I've worked with Miss Edgars here for over a year on this, Jackie. She's got me convinced enough to risk the Gibraltar. I've put everythin' I've got into this. She has, too.”

The pilot considered for a moment, turned to stare at his chief mechanic, and then turned back to Dollins and Filimena, telling them as he rose from his seat: “Well, I'll tell you now, I think you're both stomping balmy. My opinion is, if you're wrong, we're dead, and if you're right, we're damned. But, my opinion apparently not being worth anymore than the monkey's, I believe my mechanic and I will retire to the inner skin for bananas and bourbon.”

“Meaning what, precisely, Mr. Stevens?”

“Meaning Spitz and I have work to do, Miss Edgars, and neither one of us feels like doing it on an empty stomach or sober.”

“Does that mean you're finally prepared to begin our voyage?”

Having started for the hatch, Stevens stopped and turned around one last time. Wearing a grin strained by frustration, the pilot answered:

“It means we've got to check our course. We've been in the air for hours, Miss Edgars. If I was half as incompetent as you seem to feel I am, you would have felt us lift off.”

With that Stevens ducked under the hatch's low doorframe and stormed away in the direction of the bridge. Following his friend, Spitz loped toward the exit, turning just long enough to give the others a noncommittal shrug and grimace before disappearing into the hallway himself.

At the sound of a further hatch shutting behind the pair, a slightly embarrassed Filimena asked: “Have we really been in the air for hours?”

“Probably well over the Mediterranean by now. Yeah, Jackie really is that good.”

Filimena merely nodded in response. Staring at the open, empty door, she sighed over her discomfort at having been wrong about Stevens' competence. As she sat quietly, a part of her mind wondered if that was the only one of her assumptions about the pilot that had been wrong.

 

Stevens and Spitz sat atop the
Gibraltar
, watching the night stars drift slowly by overhead. The pilot was there supposedly to verify their heading. In actuality he had a great deal on his mind, and needed both the crispness and silence of the late evening atmosphere to help himself focus. Spitz was present because he enjoyed being on the outside of the ship, and he sensed that his friend needed a companion at that moment. Sitting quietly in two of the large lounge chairs built into the
Gibraltar's
outer skin, a number of empty LaRaja's bitters bottles rolling around in concentric circles beneath their feet, the pair allowed the world to pass beneath them undisturbed. Neither said anything to the other. There was no need.

At least not for a while.

“Spitz, old lad, I hope we haven't gotten ourselves in over our shoulders on this thing.”

“You know Captain Al's been chasing the idea of finding Xibor most of his life. I've been over every scrap of information history has to offer about the place with him, and although it all makes claims that those what reach it all find their hearts desire, not a single bit of it ever says what happen to them what got there.”

“You know it, mate. There might be those what reaches Xibor, but there ain't never been any what's come back.”

“Couldn't we be the first?”

Both crewmen turned at the quite unexpected voice of Miss Edgars. Pulling herself through the Gibraltar's upper escape hatch, taking care to not snag her petticoats on its frame, she emerged onto the ship's crown, exclaiming: “Bit nippy up here, isn't it?”

“That it is,” answered Stevens. “Most don't care for it. That's what Spitz and I like about it. The fact a body can be left alone in peace up here.”

Settling into one of the lounge chairs, Filimena pulled the seat's built-in blanket from its side pocket and wrapped it about herself. The young woman found herself comfortable enough after a moment, except for the fact she had neglected to bring a pair of goggles along for protection against the wind. Shaking his head in amused pity, Spitz took off his own pair and handed them to Filimena as he ambled back toward the escape hatch. She accepted them graciously, stared at them for a moment as if she might be able to perceive any suspected fleas by starlight, then resolutely lifted them to her face and fastened their snaps behind her head neatly beneath her bonnet.

Pulling her blanket a bit more tightly about her shoulders, she asked, “Might I put a question before you, Mr. Stevens?”

“I don't rightly see how I could stop you.”

“How gracious you are,” answered Filimena before she could stop herself. Mentally cursing her temper, she reeled it in quickly then continued. “I've noticed you don't care for me very much. I'll not argue your right to do so, but for the sake of trying to maintain civility while we're all traveling together, might I inquire as to
why
this is so?”

Stevens tilted his head, lifting the flap of his leather flight cap so as to be able to stick a finger into his left ear and scratch at an itch that had been bothering him. Allowing the flap to then drop back into place, he took a draining pull on his last LaRaja, then sighed as he dropped it down to join its still rolling companions. “You're a quite lovely little girl, Miss Edgars, and your brain seems as wide as the ocean and as active as Vesuvius the day it arrested all attention in old Pompeii, but . . .”

“Yes, Mr. Stevens, ‘but' . . .”

The pilot fought the dozen or so malicious utterances suggesting themselves as possible verbal cannonade, but rejected them all, holding his tongue for a moment until he could swim past the delicious influence of his many LaRajases, finally saying: “But . . . I owe the captain plenty—plenty and twenty pounds more. The only reason Spitz and I are here is to be there at the end for him.”

“So,” Filimena snapped, “you're just like all the rest. Pat me on the head, you will, for my accomplishments, ‘so clever for a mere woman, isn't she,' but you don't believe I can actually guide us to Xibor, do you?”

“On the contrary, Miss Edgars,” replied the pilot. Standing from his seat, stuffing his own blanket back into its pocket, he stretched his arms out at his sides, and then began to slowly stagger back to the hatchway. “I've no doubt you've got it all figured out. If you were just leading the captain on a wild goose chase, that would be different. A man's true mate will let him get into all manner of loony trouble so's he can rib him till he's tender then help him heal afters. But that's not what's happening here.”

“Oh, and according to your narrow, male mind, what exactly
is
happening here?”

“In small words, the only kind I know, you're leading the man who's been a father to me most of my life to his doom. Albert Dollins is a good and proper sort what don't deserve to have ever met up with the likes of you. And Spitz and me, with all we owe him, well . . . tiny brains like we possess and all . . . we can't let him die alone.”

And with that, Stevens caught hold of the hatchway's ladder and began to carefully maneuver his less-thansober self back down into the
Gibraltar
, taking care not to strike his head against the jamb or his hair-triggered Robbins and Lawrence against anything at all. Seated in her chair, listening to the soft whir of the twin steam engines' turbines below propelling the great ship forward, Filimena Edgars stewed for a moment.

After all, she had only come forward as a proper, enlightened human being to try and propose the adoption of a touch of civility between herself and the pilot—and his monkey—so as to make their voyage more pleasant. And he had—

And then, while a number of comforting comments roared into the young woman's mind, several gentle whispers drifted in along with them, asking her to pause, and to reflect, on exactly what Stevens
had
actually done—if not from her viewpoint, than from his own?

The only answers she could come up with left Filimena feeling small and alone under the night stars, and filled with a shivering even the heaviest blanket could not dispel.

Despite the extraordinary intake of their beloved LaRajas on their night of departure, Stevens and Spitz managed to keep the
Gibraltar
straight and true, following each new course change as the captain and Filimena decided upon them. The pilot was perfectly willing to admit he could not begin to determine how playing a harp while singing mathematical formulas in a variety of languages could produce anything but a novelty act at which even Crabtree's Curious Carnival of Clowns—London's West End's oddest collection of performers—would roll their eyes. But, being an honest man, he also had to admit that, whether they would find Xibor or not, they were still headed on a true course for the middle of the Dasht-i-Kavir.

“I don't get it, Spitz,” Stevens mused one morning, some eight days into their voyage. The pair inspected the port engine's piston assembly, “I mean, I know the captain's always had this seed stuck in his teeth over Xibor, but to buy into this dizzy business . . .”

Satisfied with the tightness of the galvanized lug nut he had been tightening, Spitz turned and gave the pilot a weary shrug, indicating he had no better explanation for their situation than his friend. Stevens was about to respond, when suddenly Filimena's voice sounded through the overhead speaker:

“Mr. Stevens, Mr. Spitz, your presence is required on the bridge, thank you.”

The pair eyed one another, wondering what would require the both of them in the middle of a shift. Seeing no reason not to comply, however, man and beast wiped their oily hands dry for the purpose of safe climbing, hung their tools in their required positions, and then started up the ladder to the gangway leading to the bridge.

Once on deck, Spitz scampering up behind him, Stevens asked: “All right, we're here. What's so important you needed us to break our maintenance check?”

A most untypical impish grin on her face, Filimena turned to the captain. “Would you do the honors, sir?”

“Most 'appy to, my dear. Tell me, Jackie my boy, what would you expect to find at this longitude and latitude of the Dasht-i-Kavir?”

Checking his pocket watch, the pilot answered, “Assuming we haven't drifted any, we should be smack over the heart of the Kavir now. Which means there shouldn't be anything but sand in any direction for seventy, eighty miles.”

“Then what,” asked Dollins, stepping away from the bridge's front wind screen, “would you say that was?”

And, jaws hanging open, eyes wide, AppleJack Stevens and his pal Spitz walked forward as if in a dream, staring silently as the sprawling magnificence that could only be Xibor.

The approach to the city had been something out of a story told by an Irishman, a thing of glorious light and dazzling wonder. Spires that reached far into the sky from which gay pennants flapped in the breeze stood like the most graceful of reeds—delicate, towering. Xibor looked to have been constructed of every precious stone and metal known to man. Granite foundations gave way to bricks of jade, silver, and amethyst. Doorways were decorated with strings of gold and rubies, windows hung with drapes woven from dazzling silks and the most colorful feathers.

The
Gibraltar
made easy landing in a field practically set in the center of town as if it had been expected. Cheering citizens thronged the zeppelin, lifting Dollins, Stevens, and Edgars onto padded divans. The crew was ordered to secure the ship and see to her provisioning. All but Spitz snapped to attention, saluted and turned to their duties, the mechanic stowing away on the open-air lounge transporting Stevens.

The parade through the streets of Xibor seemed to last for hours, and yet when the quartet was ushered into the main ballroom of the kingdom's great central palace, the four felt refreshed and invigorated. The sextet of men carrying each divan lowered them carefully before the throne of the king of Xibor, then bowed and removed themselves quietly. Standing from his throne, the mystic kingdom's ruler proved to be tall, large of shoulder and strikingly handsome. His features were the expected brown of the desert, his beard black and well-groomed, his eyes flashing with a fierce intelligence which made Filimena shiver.