Chapter Six

1.

“I have to admit that these things are safe enough to fly,” said Forbes-Hamilton as he helped Annabelle into the glider, spitting out a few cursory instructions. “Mind you, I can’t guarantee the landing. Just be sure to lift your legs up before landing and let the thing crash into the mud. Thoroughly inelegant design. For pity’s sake, the poor pilot sits like some toddler on a swing, legs all a-dangle.”

“I’ve always dreamed of flying.”

“My dear girl,” he said as he performed a last check of the flight control rigging, “you’re already flying. That isn’t the ground below us, at least not for another thousand feet.” He walked over to the hangar wall and pulled a largish lever. Warm, damp wind poured into the room, making the gliders tug against their moorings.

“Perhaps,” Annabelle said grabbing onto the control bar. “But there’s a certain elegance in doing things the same way Nature does. Perhaps there’s a reason there are no floating animals.”

Forbes-Hamilton stepped back from the gantry holding the gliders. “As you like. Say hello to Nature for me, should you have a chance. Plenty of it down there.” He turned to stare through a mounted spyglass into the distance.

“There!” he shouted. “Good old Thymon came through, once again. Flare just slightly off the starboard bow, estimated two miles. Should be visible for you in a minute or so, just fly straight. No aerial hi-jinks, if you please.”

“None forthcoming!” Nathanial shouted over the wind.

“Right,” said Forbes-Hamilton. “Best of luck and all that. Ready, steady, here you go!” With that, he turned the release crank.

Annabelle looked down. The floor of the hangar opened like a bay door, providing a clear view of the thick tendrils of clouds that swirled about the Aeronaut like smoke pouring out the nostrils of a cigar fancier.

There was a moment of stillness as the gliders dropped. Annabelle’s stomach lurched upwards to threaten her teeth, but it was an oddly exhilarating feeling, rather like floating about in space. Keeping in mind Forbes-Hamilton’s instructions, she held the control bar tightly to her chest. Ahead, she could see Nathanial and Arnaud diving alongside each other like a pair of pelicans after fish.

The glider seemed happy enough to fly along without too much control input. A good thing, she reflected, as her friends were barely visible in cloud, what with the dark mists whipping around them. Moisture beaded on the wings of the glider, turning into little rivulets that sprayed behind her. But at least it was warm, unlike the clouds she was accustomed to back home.

When she was a young girl, she remembered thinking that clouds would feel like cotton balls. She’d made the unfortunate mistake of telling her Uncle Cyrus that, and in his customary way, he launched into an impromptu lecture about the convective cycle of moisture and the adiabatic cooling. Most of it went over her eight year old head, but she didn’t misunderstand what he said next.

“Won’t have my niece growing up as ignorant as the local ploughboys.” He shook his head sadly. “Honestly, did your papa tell you that?”

“No, Uncle. Just my own notion, I suppose.” Annabelle felt tears welling. “I’m so stupid.”

“No!” he said with a vehemence that frightened her. “You were simply making hypotheses in the absence of experimental evidence.” He smiled, seemingly gentle again. “Frankly, nothing that the fellows at the Royal College don’t do all the time. But let me fix that.”

Uncle Cyrus knelt down, brushing the tears from Annabelle’s eyes. “Would you like to go up into the sky next time I test my balloon?”

Annabelle was so shocked that she could barely nod. Then she had a flash of dutifulness. “I’ll ask Mother first.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Cyrus. “How about we keep this a secret? You can surprise her someday with the story. Someday, as in ‘when you’re all grown up and your Uncle Cyrus isn’t in town’.”

Annabelle knew what naughty was. But she wasn’t above agreeing.

And when the time came, she discovered that clouds, like so many other things, were prettier from a distance. Up close, they were wet and cold, with edges that were hard to define. But for all that disappointment, their very size made her tremble with vertigo, just floating next to them. Just because something wasn’t traditionally beautiful didn’t mean it couldn’t stir one’s emotions.

Annabelle was certain there was a moral there somewhere. But Uncle Cyrus didn’t believe in pat stories with morals, he’d told her more than once. He believed in truth. And he’d be dashed if anyone stopped him from discovering that.

For her part, Annabelle had sworn that day wouldn’t be the last time she touched a cloud.

And so, here she was again, deep in the embrace of a cloud, seeking out the unknown. She just wished Uncle Cyrus’ mind was what it once had been. She liked to think that the man of her youth would be proud of her. But there was nothing for that at this moment.

In the space of a heartbeat, they broke out of the clouds. Blinking her eyes in light sparkling across the surrounding walls of clouds, she could see at least three thick shafts of rain crisscrossing their way across the cloud canyon ahead. Soft edged beams of sunlight turned the rain golden before throwing circular rainbows against the dark bellied clouds below them.

She wasn’t getting rained on at the moment, but she wasn’t precisely dry, either. The Venusian air was thick and damp enough to ensure that all by itself. She’d had the wit to wear the dress she’d had treated with gumme waterproofing, but at the moment, all that meant was that moisture pooled down to the base of her spine where she couldn’t reach to pat herself dry. But it was a minor discomfit compared to the awe she was feeling. No other planet did clouds quite like Venus. La spécialité de la maison, as Arnaud might put it.

A mile away, nestled among the rain and the light, floated the Montgolfier flare. It drifted along slowly, held aloft by the heat from its red-orange flame. Periodically, it would be obscured by a sheet of mist, but even then it was bright enough that they could see a diffuse glow where it was.

“Let’s get to it, then circle down!” Nathanial shouted. Although his glider was thirty feet away at best, his voice sounded thin and distant over the rush of the wind and the distant booming of thunder. It was as if he wasn’t entirely real, as if humans weren’t really supposed to be here in this world more suited for Nordic gods than mortal creatures such as themselves. Go back to your world of comfortable hearths and quiet cups of tea, the clouds seemed to say to her.

“The devil with that!” Annabelle cried, earning her a startled glance from the gentlemen. She pulled the control bar hard against her chest. The glider pitched its nose down and the wind obligingly built up speed, making the fabric of the wings flap alarmingly. She wasn’t entirely certain about how fast the craft could go, and a little voice in the back of her head was telling her that she was being needlessly reckless. But for the moment, exhilaration was exceeding discretion.

She felt alive.

Speeding along over a transparent cloud strand towards the flare, she glanced back to see that Arnaud and Nathanial were a good distance above and behind her. Feeling a bit foolish, she tried to throw herself to the left to start the turn. Bound by near immobile control linkages, her swing seat barely moved. The glider didn’t alter its course at all.

“Are we safe, Uncle?” the eight year old girl asked with no real fear as she leaned over the rail to touch a cloud.

“Certainly. I try to make it a rule to fly within established parameters when carrying precious cargo such as you.” Uncle Cyrus smiled with a rare dash of warmness that made Annabelle’s heart feel close to bursting.

Then she considered his words, mouthing them silently to herself. There was something serious there, she knew.

“Uncle? How does one discover what ‘acceptable perimeters’ are?”

“Parameters, my dear.” He pursed his lips, staring at the horizon. It seemed even further away up here. “I’m afraid that their discovery requires the occasional death.” He turned to meet her eyes. “Never forget that.”

Swallowing, Annabelle nodded.

“Good girl,” he said. “How about a Blackjack chew?”

An uncomfortable sensation of alarm settled itself in her stomach. The seat was stubbornly rigid, but it was slowly moving now. The same couldn’t be said of the glider itself. Her muscles burned with the effort of holding the seat forward; she relaxed her grip on the bar to recover. The glider pitched violently upwards into the base of a cloud bank. She felt the whole craft shudder as she snatched the control bar back before she lost too much airspeed. She had no desire to explore what the minimum airspeed necessary for flight was. Let others discover the glider’s acceptable parameters.

There was far too much she had yet to do to allow the luxury of dying in a crash. Or the luxury of sporting about in excitement. She shook her head angrily. Lord, in her own way, she could be as foolish as any silly debutante, couldn’t she? Save in place of squealing over the latest crop of young men, she fell head over heels for adventure.

Or, perhaps denial of limitations. But enough of those thoughts. There’d be plenty of time for introspection on the ground. In the meantime, she’d best steer this glider back to Nathanial and Arnaud before the two of them did something foolish and chivalric. Something such as trying to follow her.

Now that she was back at best glide, the controls reverted to normal. Even so, the glider was hardly as responsive as an aerial flyer. It was less like being a bird than being strapped to a slightly drunken kite. But at least she had it enough under control to rejoin the others.

Spotting the flare through the mists, Annabelle banked in its direction. She promptly flew into a rain shaft hidden by the cloud. The glider bucked downwards, but she had become accustomed enough to its ways that she was able to quickly bring it back to straight and level. Water streamed over her as a sudden gust plastered her hair over her eyes. Brushing it aside, she saw that the glider was glowing a soft violet.

St Elmo’s fire. She’d heard of it, but dismissed most of the odder stories as the exaggeration of sailors. This was no subtle glowing effect, however. Great streams of violet light worked their way across the surface of the glider before reaching the wingtips, where they spun off in spirals like Mayday ribbons off an invisible pole.

Annabelle realised she was holding her breath. She could feel crackling energy run through her, making her feel jittery, as if she’d had a full pot of coffee. No longer stuck to her face, her hair whipped freely in the airstream. She noticed that her locks were trailing their own violet streamers. Perhaps she might set a fashion trend, should she discover a way to replicate the effect for home use. Stranger things had made fortunes in these modern times.

But as fascinating as the phenomenon was, she needed to get back on course. Peering through the glow, she was able to make out the amber light of the flare. She turned towards it, then saw five more flares blink in and out of existence nearby.

Was Thymon setting off multiple flares? But why did they go out? Rain?

A large winged shape plunged at her out of the mists. Orange fire shot ahead of it, billowing around her. Blinded, she pushed the glider into a dive, feeling heat steaming the water off her. Four heartbeats later, she pulled back as hard as she could and punched herself left, a tight spiral.

Something screamed near her, sounding like nothing so much as a crow the size of an elephant. She remembered Forbes-Hamilton telling her about the great creatures of the sky, like the one that had nearly eaten Thymon.

Multiple roars joined the first. She felt heat, but no steam this time, just an acrid smell of smoke. Unable to see anything through the St Elmo’s and the rain, she took a deep breath and steepened her dive, pushing the control bar out to the edge of shudder, then a little beyond.

And just like that, she found herself a few hundred feet above a wide clearing with a bonfire in the middle. At the edges of the clearing were the largely intact shapes of the other two gliders. She could just make out the sound of Nathanial and Arnaud yelling.

Annabelle kept her eyes on the clouds above as she eased out of the steep spiral. She could see nothing up there. The St Elmo’s fire was gone, and the rain had momentarily stopped. As she circled down over the clearing, she thought that it looked like one of the most peaceful places that she’d ever seen.

But she knew better.