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“Well, maybe I should of thought like that too, Calde, but I didn’t. To tell the truth, I got kind of mad.”
“You didn’t play some trick on her, I hope.”
“No, but I started thinking about what had happened and if she’d really been in the middle like she said. Pretty soon I saw she hadn’t at all, but you’d been there more than anybody, more even than General Mint. And what Scleroderma said about meeting you when you got out of the schola? Well, I met you then too. You used to come into our class and talk to us, and naturally I’d see you helping Patera Pike at sacrifice. So I decided I’m going to write down everything I can remember as soon as I get some paper. I’ll call it Patera Silk’s Book, or something like that.”
“I’m flattered.” This time Silk succeeded in suppressing his smile. “Are you going to write about this, too? Sitting up here talking to me?”
“Yes, I am.” Horn filled his lungs with the still, pure air. “And that’s another reason for you not to jump off. If you did, I’d have to end it right here.” He rapped the deck with his knuckles. “Right up here, and then maybe I’d wonder a little about why you did, and then it would be over. I don’t think that would be a very good ending.”
“Nor would it be,” Silk agreed.
“But that’s the way you were thinking of ending it. You were standing too close to the edge to of been thinking about anything else. Whats the trouble, Calde? Something’s — I don’t know. Hurt you somehow, hurt you a lot. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help, or Nettle could.”
Without rising, Silk turned away; after a moment, he slid across the varnished wood so that he could let his legs dangle over the edge. “Come here, Horn.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“You aren’t going to fall. Feel how smooth the motion of the airship is. Nor am I going to push you off. Did you think I might? I won’t, I promise.”
Face down, Horn crept forward.
“That’s the way. It’s such a magnificent view, perhaps the most magnificent that either of us will ever see. When you mentioned your class, you reminded me that I’m supposed to be teaching you — it’s one of my many duties, and one that I’ve neglected shamefully since you and I talked in the manse. As your teacher, it’s my pleasure as well as my duty to show you things like this whenever I can — and to make you look at them as well, if I must. Look! Isn’t it magnificent?”
“It’s like the skylands,” Horn ventured, “except we’re a little closer and it’s daytime.”
“A great deal closer, and the sun has already begun to narrow. We haven’t much time left in which to look at this. A few hours at most.”
“We could again tomorrow. We could look out of one of those windows. All the gondolas have them.”
“This airship may crash tonight,” Silk told him, “or it may be forced to land for some reason. Or the whorl below us might be hidden by clouds, as it was when I looked out of one of the windows earlier today. Let’s look while we can.”
Horn crept a finger’s width nearer the edge.
“Down there’s a city bigger than Viron, and those tiny pale dots are its people. See them? They look like that, I believe, because they’re staring up at us. In all probability, they’ve never seen an airship, or seen anything larger than the Fliers that can fly. They’ll speculate about us for months, perhaps for years.”
“Is it Palustria, Calde?”
Silk shook his head. “Palustria doesn’t even lie in this direction, so it’s certainly not Palustria. Besides, I think we’ve gone farther than that already. We were hoisted up early this morning, and we’ve been flying south or east ever since. A well-mounted man can ride there in less than a week.”
“I’ve never seen off-center buildings like those,” Horn ventured. “Besides, there aren’t any swamps. Everybody says Palustria’s in the middle of swamps.”
“They’ve turned them into rice fields, or so I’m told — if not all of them at least a large part of them, no doubt the part closest to their city. Their rice crop’s failed this year because of the drought. They say it’s the first time the rice crop’s failed in the entire history of Palustria.” For a while Silk sat in silence, staring down at the foreign city below.
“Can I ask you something, Calde?”
“Certainly. What is it?”
“Why isn’t it windier up here? I’ve never been up on a mountain, but Maytera read something about that to us one time, and it said it was real windy just about all the time. Looking down, it seems like we’re going fast. It’s not taking us very long at all to go over this, and it’s big. So the wind ought to be in our faces.”
“I asked our pilot the same thing,” Silk told him, “and I was ready to kick myself for stupidity when she told me. Look there, up and out, and you can see one of the engines that’s still ru
“Like a mill.”
“Somewhat; but while the arms of a windmill are turned by the wind, these are turned by their engines to create a wind that will blow us wherever we wish. They’re making very little wind at present — just enough to keep us from tumbling about. We’re being carried by a natural wind; but because we’re blown along by it, like a dry leaf or one of those paper streamers the wind tore off our victory arch, it seems to us that the air is scarcely moving.”
“I think I understand. What if we turned around and tried to go the other way?”
“Then this still air would at once become a gale.”
The smooth wooden deck on which Silk was sitting tilted, seeming almost to fall away from under him.
“Patera!”
He felt Horn clutch his robe. The sound of the remaining engines rose. “I’m all right,” he said.
“You could’ve slid off! I almost did.”
“Not unless the gondola were to slope much more steeply.” A vagrant breeze ruffled Silk’s straw-colored hair.
“What happened?” From the sound of Horn’s voice; he was far from the edge now, perhaps halfway to the hatch.
“The wind increased, I imagine. The new wind would have reached our tail first; presumably it lifted it.”
“You still want to die.”
The plaintive note in Horn’s voice was more painful than an accusation. “No,” Silk said.
“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong? Please, Calde?”
“I would if I could explain it.” The city was behind them already, its houses and fields replaced by forbidding forests. “I might say that it’s an accumulation of small matters. Have you ever had a day when everything went amiss? Of course you have — everyone has.”
“Sure,” Horn said.
“Can you come a little closer? I can scarcely hear you.”
“All right, Calde.
“I also want to say that it has to do with the Plan of Pas; but that isn’t quite right. Pas, you see, isn’t the only god who has a plan. I’ve just understood this one, perhaps while I was still in the cockpit, as it’s called, guiding this airship and thinking — when I didn’t have to think much about that — about Hyacinth’s overpowering our pilot. Or perhaps only when I was talking with General Saba, just before I came up here. It might be fair to say that I understood in the cockpit, but that the full import of what I had understood had come only when I was talking with Nettle and General Saba.”
“I think I get it.”
“On the other hand, I could say that it was about facts that the Outsider confided on my wedding night. You see, Horn, I was enlightened again then. Nothing I learned at the schola had prepared me for the possibility of multiple enlightenments, but clearly they can and do take place. Which would you like to hear about first?”
“The little things going wrong, I guess. Only please come back here with me, Patera. You said it was hard to hear me. Well, I can hardly hear you.”
“I’m perfectly safe, Horn.” Silk discovered that he was grasping the edge of the deck; he forced himself to relax, placing his hands together as if in prayer. “We might begin anywhere, but let us begin with Maytera Marble. With Moly, as she asks us to call her now. Do you think her name was really Moly — Molybdenum — before she became a sibyl? Honestly.”