The Book of All Skies, page 15
“It must,” Imogen conceded. “And their fuel oil yields more heat for the same weight than any of ours. However much the Tolleans hated the culture here, they shouldn’t have cut off trade when they could have had that.”
The globe stood looming above them, perfectly formed now. “You can step in,” Tarin invited them. Del waited for Mehan and Dema to clamber into the basket, then she glanced at Imogen.
“Could you swim back from the middle of the lake?” she asked.
“Yes,” Imogen replied confidently. “And I could tow you all the way.”
“All right, then.”
They climbed in, and Tarin handed out life jackets. The basket was a tight fit for the five of them, with the fuel drum in the center, below the burner, taking up as much space as two or three passengers.
Tarin began lifting sandbags from the floor of the basket and dropping them onto the pier. Del couldn’t detect any change in their condition – until suddenly the basket was floating, rising a few hand’s breadths above the planks that had been supporting it. Tarin discarded two more bags; the basket drifted gently upward, and the breeze pushed the balloon slowly away from the pier.
“Everyone still happy?” she asked. “Ready to go higher?”
The passengers all murmured assent. Tarin turned up the flame, and they began to ascend more rapidly.
Del felt a rush of exhilaration. She peered down at the dark water, and watched the ripples glimmering in the starlight. They were probably high enough for a fall to end their lives, but she’d been far more anxious when she’d first climbed onto the uncompleted bridge. The balloon, at least, was self-contained: there were no wooden beams far out of sight that could snap and undermine its power over gravity. Perhaps the fabric could split, but even then it would take time for the hot air to leak out.
Mehan and Dema were gazing back at the village, apparently hunting for a friend’s house. “That’s it!” Dema exclaimed. “He said he’d make a circle of lamps in the garden!”
Del turned to Tarin. “Have people ever tried to steer a balloon, instead of leaving the course up to the wind?”
“There are versions with propellers,” Tarin replied. “But the engines are heavy, so it’s not really worth it, in my opinion. I’m only interested in taking joyrides, not trying to get somewhere specific in a hurry. A cart or a boat will always be better for that.”
Del wasn’t sure how to take the conversation further, but as she pondered her next question, Imogen interjected.
“Would you ever think of flying this thing up from a nub?”
Tarin laughed. “Do I look that crazy?”
“Why do you say that?” Imogen pressed her.
“The air’s too thin there,” Tarin replied, “and the gravity’s too strong, and unpredictable. People have tried it, but most of them never even managed to ascend.”
“And the ones who did ascend?” Del wondered.
“They either came down again quickly, or they went around the corner and never came back.”
Imogen said, “My friend and I came from around that kind of corner.”
“Ah.” Tarin smiled. “People tell that story, about the diving teachers. But I never knew if they were making it up.”
“They weren’t.” And Imogen wasn’t wasting time gently eliciting Tarin’s opinion on their origins. “Del here was hoping you could carry us home. What would you say to that proposition?”
“Actually, I’m just seeking information,” Del clarified. Imogen’s haste was embarrassing, even if it was advancing the matter faster than she’d ever contemplated. “We don’t have these kinds of machines in our lands. It’s not clear to us what they can and can’t accomplish.”
Tarin took the whole thing in good humor. “Given the past failures at the nubs, it’s not something I’d attempt myself. The air is too thin, the lift is too weak; I’m not speaking from experience, but I have no reason to doubt the accounts I’ve read.”
“So it’s impossible,” Imogen declared.
Tarin glanced over the side of the basket, and adjusted the valve on the burner. “That might be putting it too strongly,” she said. “I heard about a group in Dallya that’s been experimenting with a different source of lift. Instead of hot air, they use hydrogen.” Del’s expression must have made her confusion apparent. “You can break up water into two different gases,” Tarin explained. “One of them is much less dense than ordinary air, even at the same temperature. If you use that for lift, you don’t need a burner and the fuel it consumes, though of course you still need all the extra paraphernalia to move under your own power.”
Del pondered this new information. “It might make a difference, then? No one’s tried that method at the nubs before?”
“Not as far as I know,” Tarin replied.
Del turned to Mehan and Dema. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be impolite. It was never my intention to take over the whole ride like this.”
“That’s all right,” Dema replied. In fact, she seemed to be as fascinated by the foreigners’ exotic plans as she had been by the aerial view of Dreyas.
Del hunted for the lights from the shore; they were still visible, but at the altitude they’d reached the wind was blowing strongly, and it had carried them far over the water. Clarissa had had all the time she needed to take sightings and measure the progress of the bridge, instructing the builders in the precise positioning of every beam. How much control could any balloon have as it moved through the gap, even if it was equipped with an engine and propellers?
But neither her anxieties nor her wishful thinking would settle the matter; it would be up to the balloonists Tarin had mentioned to decide if such a crossing was possible – and safe enough, or even interesting enough, to be worth their while.
“Dallya?” Del asked. She couldn’t recall hearing of that place before; she wasn’t even sure if it was a whole land or just a city. “Is it far?”
Tarin was distracted with her own navigational efforts; it was Mehan who answered.
“I think about nineteen circuits of the Hoops,” he said. “With one crossing between them, but it’s through Jierra. So you’d have to go soon, if you don’t want to put it off for another year.”
Del still wasn’t sure exactly what a “year” was, but she gathered it was a considerable interval, almost as long as she and Imogen had spent in the Overgap so far. “Why would the timing make any difference?” she wondered. Was there some cultural restriction on travel she was yet to learn about?
Mehan exchanged a glance with Dema, as if he wanted to be sure he hadn’t misinterpreted Del’s strangely accented words.
“Because if you go too late, you can’t get through,” he said. “It’s Jierra! It won’t be long before the entrance from the Hoop there is in sunlight, and you couldn’t take a step without being fried.”
Chapter 25
“Do I have any choice?” Imogen asked. “I can’t just stay here and give the lessons on my own.”
“You could take on an apprentice,” Del replied. “What about Nisha? She’s your best student by far, and she keeps coming back. Don’t you think she’d be thrilled to be more involved?”
Imogen didn’t answer. Del walked over to the balcony and glanced out at the lake. Their trip over the water barely felt real any more; when she’d lived beside the bridge, at least she could see it all the time, but with the balloon folded up in Tarin’s cart, all the evidence that the ride had actually taken place had vanished, like the implausible premise of a fading dream.
“I want you to come, though, if you’re willing,” she told Imogen. “Everything would be ten times harder without you.”
Imogen shifted irritably on her chair. “We’re stuck here,” she said. “We just need to accept that, and make the best of it.”
“You don’t miss anyone from home?”
The question seemed to anger her. “It doesn’t matter whether I miss them or not. That won’t get us back.”
“It won’t, if it’s completely impossible,” Del agreed. “But if all it takes is persistence, it might.”
Imogen said, “These people aren’t timid, or foolish. They’ve explored around the nubs, as far as they could go. Do you really think a different gas in the balloon is going to solve all the problems there?”
“I have no idea,” Del confessed. “I can’t do those kinds of calculations. But if we share what we know about the gap with the people in Dallya, they can make their own decisions. What’s the worst that can happen? We get to see a bit more of the world, along the way?”
“Getting burned to death doesn’t bother you?”
Del laughed. “I doubt that’s happened to anyone, for a long time.”
“And I doubt anyone quite as ignorant of things every child here should know has tried it, for a long time,” Imogen retorted.
“Maybe we can find another traveler who’s making the same crossing,” Del suggested. “Someone who’s done it all before.”
“And if we can’t?” Imogen persisted.
“Well, we might be ignorant, but we’re not helpless. The angle of the sun above the horizon at any given point is completely predictable; it’s not that different from moonrise and moonset back in Thena.” Del walked over to the atlas, which included some diagrams showing the progress of sunlight over the land, along with four whole pages devoted to the art of scheduling safe passage. “Jierra is not all that special or mysterious; it just happens to have one star so close to it that it moves around that star, the way a moon goes around any other land.”
“Silvio always claimed that moons keep one face turned toward the land below them,” Imogen recalled. “So why doesn’t Jierra keep one face toward the sun?”
“I don’t know,” Del conceded. “But it doesn’t. It’s the distant stars that stay fixed there, just like anywhere else. Maybe the Hoops have something to do with that: Montano said they’re hard to turn.”
Imogen was silent for a while, but then she succumbed to the urge to start reasoning about the problem. “So the land around one Hoop is drenched in sunlight for half a year, while the other is in darkness, and vice versa?”
“Almost,” Del said. “But not quite. The Hoops’ axis isn’t exactly perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, so there’s a time when each aperture is only partly lit, as the dividing line sweeps over it.”
“Making everything more complicated.”
“Maybe, but I think it also makes the journey less dangerous. The way in or out closes off gradually; no door slams shut in an instant.”
Imogen walked over to the table where Del had laid out the atlas. “The Hoops barely rise above the ground,” she observed.
“Isn’t that what you’d expect,” Del said, “so close to Sadema? I’m almost tempted to make a detour there, just to look at the mountains and convince myself there really is no way through.”
Imogen clearly wasn’t tempted at all. “My point is, the Hoops won’t offer much shade. Once you go through, you’ll be at the mercy of the local sky.”
“That’s true. But if you look at the next page, you’ll see that the schedules take that into account. And it’s coming up to the ideal time to enter through the western Hoop: any earlier, and we’d have to cool our heels waiting for sunset to reach the eastern Hoop; any later and we’d risk stepping out into sunshine. Go now, and we can drive from Hoop to Hoop at an ordinary pace, with no delays – but even if we get held up for some reason, it’s only the way back that will be blocked. The way out will stay open for half a year.”
Imogen said, “What if the cart breaks down?”
“We could walk from Hoop to Hoop in less than half a year.” Del caught herself. Was that true? Jierra was larger than Zeruma, and the accessible portions of the Hoops were much farther apart. She joined Imogen at the table and began checking the route on the map, comparing distances by reasoning that the full globe couldn’t be more than twice as large as Zeruma, but halfway through her calculations she realized she still didn’t know precisely how long a year was.
“We’ll find a guide,” she told Imogen. “We’ll find other travelers. This is Jierra – the most Bounteous of the Bounteous Lands – not some wasteland out near the nubs. If anything, our biggest problem will be all the traffic sharing the roads. There won’t be a moment that passes without another cart rattling by.”
Chapter 26
“I can fix it,” Imogen said. “Just be patient, will you?”
Del walked away from the cart and sat at the side of the ring road, watching the tankers go by. There were so many of them that she couldn’t tell if they were the source of the incessant warm breeze blowing across her skin, or merely happened to be driving in the same direction as the natural motion of the air.
Imogen muttered curses as she tinkered with the engine. They’d found the cart in a scrapyard in Yerada, and Halem had helped Imogen restore it, teaching her as they went; it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that she could manage the same feat again. Del was starting to wish she’d mastered some of the same skills herself; her driving wasn’t bad, but the machinery beneath the panels was still largely a mystery to her.
“Can I help?” she called out to Imogen, sincerely; she could hold things that needed to be held, while other things that would normally cause the things she held to move could consequently be moved themselves, in a more productive manner.
“No,” Imogen replied. “Not unless you have a functioning dynamo coil hidden up your arse.”
“We don’t have a spare?”
“If we had a spare, would I be asking?”
“So ... can you fix something like that?” Del rose to her feet and approached the cart warily. Imogen had removed the coil, and Del could see a black streak that cut across its windings. The lacquered metal of the intact wire gleamed in the headlights of the passing traffic, but something had melted the strands and their insulation into a congealed mess along a full third of the coil’s height.
“Probably not,” Imogen conceded.
“Don’t worry,” Del said. “This is the Overgap.”
She stood by the stationary cart and held up an arm, hoping the tableau would be self-explanatory. The tanker drivers who chose to stop were polite, and as helpful as they could be, but no one was carrying a spare coil of the right size, and all they could offer was a ride back to the nearest town, Finlaw – or various other places, more distant, but more likely to have the component.
Imogen didn’t want to leave the cart. “If we go back for the coil, who knows how long it will take to get it?”
Del agreed; they couldn’t risk missing the window into Jierra. But the fuel tankers filing out of Jierra were all constructed on a different scale to their own vehicle; it was hard to imagine any of them having exactly what Imogen needed.
When Del saw a cart traveling in the other direction, she was so surprised that she almost failed to act. But she stretched out her arm and waved, peering into the headlights with a supplicatory expression that she hoped was amiable enough to overcome the entirely reasonable assumption that someone else on the crowded road would help.
The cart pulled up beside them. “Having trouble?” the driver asked.
“Yes.” Del and Imogen introduced themselves; the driver was named Sejan.
Imogen explained the problem.
“I’m sorry,” Sejan said. “I have some tools and some other spare parts, but no coils.”
“It’s all right,” Del said. “Thank you for stopping.”
“Were you just circling, or heading for the eastern Hoop?” he asked.
“The eastern Hoop,” Imogen replied.
“I’m going that way.” Sejan thought for a moment. “I could probably give you a ride, depending on how much luggage you have.” The back of his cart was piled high with crates.
Imogen had left all the diving equipment with Nisha; they only had their tents and sleeping bags, some books and some food. Sejan jumped down and took a look for himself, glancing back at his own vehicle, trying to judge by eye whether the problem was soluble before he committed to anything. Finally he said, “I think we can do this, if you don’t mind being squashed back there.”
They carried their things over. Imogen wasn’t happy abandoning the cart, but she appeared resigned to the outcome.
They climbed on, and Sejan started the engine. Del hadn’t realized how parched she was from the heat; she rummaged in her pack and took out her water bottle.
“Have you been through Jierra before?” Sejan asked.
“No.” Del waited for him to inquire about their accents and their origins, but he gave all his attention to the traffic as he pulled out onto the road.
The edge of the Hoop emerged from the hill here at an angle farther from the vertical than Del had seen since Celema. She glanced up at the sky; with the lights of all the tankers, and the dust they were raising, she didn’t expect to see any stars, but the usual gray had acquired a faint pinkish tinge.
“We’re not too late, are we?” she asked Sejan.
He laughed. “That might look like dawn, but I promise you, it’s not close.”
“Dawn?”
“Sunrise.” He glanced back at her over his shoulder, surprised that she hadn’t recognized the synonym. “It wouldn’t actually kill you, but it could certainly damage your eyes if you weren’t careful. But don’t worry: we’ll have a head start, and we’ll easily outrun it.”
The stream of tankers began to thin out; there might still be time remaining before exiting Jierra through the western Hoop became dangerous, but clearly most people had chosen to err on the side of caution.
“Where are you headed?” Sejan asked.
“Dallya,” Imogen replied.
“Ah. I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s nice.”
“Where will you be going?” Del asked.
Sejan said, “Round the other side, back to where I started.”
“I’m sorry?”
“When we get to the eastern Hoop, I can take you through to the first town on your way, but then I’m following the sunset, back around Jierra.”
