Rule 649 - Answer For Your Wash - Part 2 of 3

The pilot balloon was an old envelope patched in so many colours that it had long ago stopped having one of its own, held in a tarred net, and under it on four ropes hung a wicker basket with a lamp on a bracket, a coil of weighted line, a narrow bench along one side, and a floor about the size of a kitchen table.

Kemble stepped in and stood at the lamp. Bjorn stepped in after her and found nowhere to put his second foot. The bench had one side, the sandbags had another, the coil of line had the corner and Kemble had the rest. He tried standing on one leg, and then with one boot on a sandbag, which slumped. In the end he knelt on the floor between the bench and the sandbags, facing aft, with his chin level with the rim, and Kemble looked down at him once and gave the winch crew a flat sweep of her hand, and the ground let go.

It let go all at once. The top of the field wall went down past his nose, and the roof of the winch house, and the upturned faces of the crew, and then there was nothing past his nose but air and a long way down to grass.

“Don’t hold the rim,” Kemble said. “Hold the ropes, if you’re holding.”

He held the ropes. She held nothing. She stood with her feet apart and her gloves in her belt and worked the winch crew with her hands, a lifted palm, a closed fist, a finger wound in a slow circle, and far below them the crew did what her hands said, and the tether paid out in long even pulls. She never looked down to check. She watched the ship.

“We go in under the tail,” she said. “It all comes out of her middle, and it comes out downwards. Keep in behind the last ring and it’s no worse than a windy day on a roof.”

It was a good deal worse than that. Twice as they rose, the edge of the wash off the last ring reached out and cuffed the envelope, and the balloon bowed over, and the basket swung out beneath it and came back and knocked Bjorn’s head against a rope. Kemble moved her feet with the swing and went on watching the ship.

Then they were in under the tail, and the belly of the Gentle Reminder was over them like a ceiling, and it was the strangest ceiling he had ever knelt under. The whole long curve of her was a mirror, and in it, upside down, lay the Sky Dock: the three Masts, the pale square of the Scorch Field, the Stilts and their barge, the Tether Field with its balloons all leaning one way, bent round the hull as if somebody had painted it on the inside of a bowl. In the middle of it, very small and very close, hung a patched balloon, and under the balloon a basket, and in the basket, peering up over the rim with his mouth open, a young man on his knees.

He shut his mouth. The young man in the ship shut his.

A hatch opened in the belly a little forward of them, a metal ladder unfolded out of it in three neat jointed lengths to hang within a yard of the basket, and a man came down it. He was big and heavy through the shoulders, in a stained coverall with the sleeves pushed up, and he came down slowly, feeling for each rung with his boot. Round his neck on a padded band he wore a pair of big round ear-muffs, pushed down round his throat. At the bottom rung he stopped and looked at the basket, at Kemble, at Bjorn on his knees, at the bench and the sandbags, and made his calculation.

“If you’ll shift your knees, lad.”

Bjorn shifted his knees. The man stepped off the ladder into the basket, the basket dropped a good yard under him, and Bjorn’s stomach stayed where it had been. Kemble lifted a hand, and the tether stopped.

“Emeka Joss,” the man said. “Chief Engineer. You’re the pilot.”

“Kemble.”

“You flew the red kite.” Joss nodded. “It was a good kite. Came apart very even.”

“Does she float?”

“She floats.” Joss put one broad hand flat against the hull over his head, and the mirror put its hand against his. “She’s cells from end to end, Pilot, with still-gas in the cells. Inert, and it’s declared. She’ll float cold as long as you care to leave her, and a good deal longer than the Captain’s ever cared to. At home we fly her into a spire cradle hot, and the cradle takes her, and nobody’s ever walked her anywhere, because in the Cantons there’s nowhere to walk. That doesn’t mean she can’t be.”

“Nose heavy, cold?”

“With her rings off, yes. I pump the gas forward and she comes level. Put the passengers aft and she’ll lift her chin for your Mast as sweet as a horse for the bridle.”

“Mr Joss.”

The voice came down the ladder from the hatch above. Joss unhooked the ear-muffs from round his neck with both hands and fitted them carefully over his ears.

Captain Stavely was kneeling at the rim of the belly hatch with the skirts of her coat gathered in one hand, looking down into the basket with an expression of great self-command, and while she looked, the thumb of her other hand worked at the smear Joss’s palm had left on the rim on his way out.

“Mr Joss, you will come back aboard.”

Joss gave no sign of hearing, and Kemble said, “He can’t hear you, Captain. He’s got his muffs on.”

“I can see what he has on.”

Joss lifted one side of one muff. “The engines want a word with the pilot, Captain.”

“The engines are running perfectly.”

“They are,” Joss agreed. “That’s the trouble with them.” He let the muff back down.

Bjorn, kneeling, had a better view along the ship than either of the others, since they were looking up the ladder and his chin happened to be pointed aft along the flank. The portholes nearest the tail had faces in them, two or three to every round window, children at the bottom and grown people above, and in one a man in a peaked cap with a mail satchel on his shoulder. None of them were looking at the captain or the balloon. They were all looking down, and Bjorn looked where they were looking, over the rim of the basket and straight down, at the Tether Field.

Ibbotson was still out in the middle of it. He had got up off his envelope and was going along it on his knees with his hat in one hand, touching each torn panel with the other as he counted, and the wash came down on him and flattened his hair, and he went on counting. From up here he looked like a man sorting laundry in a gale.

When Bjorn looked back up the ladder, the captain had seen where he was looking, and was looking there too.

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“There are forty people at your windows, Captain,” he said. “They’re all watching him.”

Stavely’s thumb stopped on the rim of the hatch. She looked at it, as if it had been doing something without asking her.

“Pilot,” she said. “If I strike my engines at your marks, can your people hold her?”

“The Walk-in can hold anything that floats, Captain, if it floats slow and the pilot’s minding it,” said Kemble. “I’ll be minding it.”

Stavely looked down at the Tether Field a while longer. “Mr Joss. Take your ears off.”

Joss took his ears off.

“Trim her cold. Gas forward. Passengers aft, and tell them it’s for the view.” She got to her feet in the hatch and brushed down her coat. “If she drops out of this sky, Mr Joss, it will be your name in my report.”

“It’s always my name in your report, Captain,” said Joss, and put his boot on the bottom rung.

* * *

He had gone up, and the belly hatch had shut behind him, and Kemble had brought the balloon down forty feet and out from under the tail, when the engines stopped.

They did not stop all at once. The last ring went first, the shimmer under it thinning and failing engine by engine, down one side of the hull and up the other, as lamps go out along a street behind a man with a pole. Then the next ring, and the next. The forward ring ran on by itself for what seemed a long while, as if nobody had told it, and then it thinned and went out too, and the noise went out of the Sky Dock.

It went so abruptly that Bjorn put a hand to his ear. Then everything that had been under the noise came up into the space where it had been: gulls, a dog somewhere among the warehouses, the winch crew’s voices, small and clear, disputing whose turn it was, the creak of the basket ropes. From the Tether Field came a long soft sighing that puzzled him until he looked down and saw every balloon on it straightening slowly on its tether, one after another, until they all stood upright in the still air like people who had been sat on and let up.

The ship sank about a man’s height, and Kemble’s hand went up sharp to the winch crew, and then the ship stopped sinking, rolled a very little, and hung there, silent and cold and shining, turning gently on the breeze, with nothing that Bjorn could see holding her up at all.

“Floats,” said Kemble, and it was the first thing he had heard her sound surprised by.

* * *

The mast crew dropped her handling lines and snubbed the two heaviest round a pair of iron-cored pickets at the corner of the field, and the Gentle Reminder hung over the Tether Field on them through the middle of the day, while the Harbour ate its dinner and nobody at the Sky Dock could stop looking up. When the meal was over, a man at the foot of Mast Three put a long horn to his mouth and blew.

It was a flat, hoarse, carrying note, nothing like a bell. It went away over the wall and down among the warehouses and came back as people. They came through the field gate in twos and fours and then in a crowd: porters in their shirtsleeves, off shift, wiping their mouths; market women with their baskets still on their arms; a cooper in his apron; two girls who had plainly been sent home from somewhere and had decided this counted; a pair of carters with their carts left in the lane; a very old man with a stick; and Ibbotson, hat back on, because he needed the pennies more now than he had at breakfast.

Kemble stood at a trestle by the gate with a box of coppers and a crate of gloves, and she said the same thing to every person who came through it. “Take a line. Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word.”

She said it to the porters, who knew. She said it to the market women, who didn’t. She said it to the very old man, who told her, “I was letting go at the pilot’s word, Zillah, before your mother was born,” and she said it to him again, and he said it back to her word for word and took his penny.

Rolf stood beside the trestle with his hands behind him and did not take a line, and when Bjorn asked him whether it was a Rule, he said, “No. On this field it doesn’t need to be.”

“Then why aren’t you taking one?”

“Because I would have to let go when somebody told me to.”

“Letting go’s nothing,” Bjorn said, and the queue at the gate heard him. “Anybody can open his hands.”

Kemble put a penny in Bjorn’s hand. “Take a line. Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word.”

“I know.”

“Say it.”

“Everyone lets go at the pilot’s word,” Bjorn said. It came out quieter than the other thing had.

He took a pair of gloves out of the crate, heavy leather gone hard as board with use, and pulled them on as he walked out to the nose lines, and flexed his fingers, and found both his thumbs on the outside. Ibbotson, beside him, took the left glove off Bjorn’s right hand without a word, and the right glove off his left, put them back on the other way round, and patted them.

“Ha’penny of my time, that,” he said. “I’ll not charge you.”

Bjorn’s was a nose line, forward on the left side, with room on it for twenty hands, Ibbotson in front of him and a porter behind whose breath smelled of beer. When Kemble walked out ahead of the whole field with the tin trumpet and called, “Take her up,” two hundred people took the slack out of their lines at once, and Bjorn felt the ship. She weighed nothing, and she pulled like a live thing, gently, from somewhere high and far away, the line going slack in his gloves and taut and slack again as the breeze moved over her.

The mast crew cast off the snubbing lines. “Walk,” said Kemble, and walked backwards over the grass in front of them, and two hundred people walked a ship.

It was very slow, and Bjorn loved it. “I’d walk one of these every day,” he told the nose line, all twenty hands of it. Nobody hurried, because nobody could. The ship’s shadow lay over the whole crowd like a long cool roof, and everyone walked in it with their faces tipped up, and talked. The market women talked about eggs, and about whether she would call again. The porter behind Bjorn, encouraged, told him three times that he had once walked a gasbag in off the outer roads in a hailstorm, and each time the hailstones were bigger. A small boy at one porthole and one of the girls on the lines waved at each other the whole way across the field without a pause, as though they were paid by the wave.

“Hold,” Kemble called, and they held, and the nose swung a little on the breeze. “Walk.”

Ibbotson walked with his line and priced the afternoon. “Penny a line. Eleven panels. A week without ascents, and this penny.” He thought. “Call it two hundred and thirty pennies down on the day, give or take. Still,” he said, looking up at the shining belly going over them, “it’s a nice walk.”

“Why doesn’t the Senior Pilot wear her gloves?” Bjorn said.

“Never does. Carries them.” Ibbotson nodded ahead at Kemble. “Says a pilot doesn’t hold, a pilot tells. Says if she’s got her hands on a rope, she isn’t watching the sky.”

Their way to Mast Three took the ship along the edge of the Scorch Field, so that her nose went out over the flags while her tail was still over grass. The pump crew were somewhere on the lines with everyone else, and the stones had last been wetted in the morning. The noon sun had been at them since, and they lay pale and dry with the air trembling over them, and when Bjorn walked onto the first of them the heat came up through his boots.

The line went light in his hands. It went light, and then it rose, the whole weight of it lifting off his gloves as if someone very large had taken hold of the far end and stood up. Overhead the nose of the Gentle Reminder lifted, slowly and enormously, and all along the nose lines the crowd came up onto its toes.

“Let go,” said Kemble.

She did not shout it. The trumpet did not need her to. It went out across the whole field at once, and every hand on every line opened.

Bjorn’s opened too. He felt them do it. And as they opened he saw, a yard in front of him, the slack that lay in loops on the stone between his hands and Ibbotson’s go flicking up as the line rose, and one loop close round Ibbotson’s wrist. He shut his hands on the line again, so that the loop would not snap tight.

For a moment he was holding a ship. Then the line went up, and his arms went up after it, and the Scorch Field let go of his boots.

Below him he saw Ibbotson sit down hard on the stone, look at his wrist, and shake it, and there was nothing round it. The loop had fallen away when Ibbotson’s hand opened. It had fallen away before Bjorn’s closed.

The Scorch Field went down under his boots, and the crowd with it, faces turning up and mouths opening, a long way below and getting further. Twenty feet. Thirty. The breeze had the ship now and carried her, nose high and silent and shining, away from the Masts and over the corner of the field wall towards the warehouse roofs and the Stilts, and he was hanging from the front of her. Round the hull above him the four rings of engines stood out, cold.

There was one thing at the Sky Dock quick enough to put that nose back down. It was forty-eight engines, and he was hanging on a string beneath them.

End of Part 2