Rachad was staring blankly at the tabletop. “Well, isn’t that real hard luck, sir? To learn a thing like that and not be able to do anything about it.”
“I imagine I would never have received the information if it had been at all possible to act on it,” Gebeth said resignedly. “The high priest of the Holy Ciborium would not have disclosed the tale, nor would my itinerant visitor have disclosed it to me, were not the Temple of Hermes Trismegistus wholly inaccessible. Only worthless knowledge is gained so easily.”
Gebeth smiled. Rachad’s chief interest in the business was plain to see, of course. He lusted after gold. That was the reason why he had so eagerly apprenticed himself to Gebeth.
And at the beginning, Gebeth reminded himself, he too had been driven by that hunger, almost to the exclusion of everything else. But time and decades of work had somehow wrought a change. He sought the stone by this time not merely for the wealth it would bring—he was old, now, and how much good could that wealth do him?—but for the glory of succeeding in the Great Work, for the sake of verifying with his own eyes that base metal could be transmuted into gold, and for the joy of seeing the secret operations of nature laid bare in his very own vessels. He could not say just when this change had come about. It had emerged gradually over the years.
“Mars!” exclaimed Rachad in a savage tone, thumping the table with frustration.
Outside the shuttered room, the sun sank slowly in the west.
Chapter TWO
Captain Zebandar Zhorga came out of the Portmaster’s office wearing a glum face. He muttered a few curses for the man, glancing back at the office’s lighted windows, then padded with his lumbering gait across the beaten earth of the field.
Captain Zhorga was a man whose qualities could all be summed up in one word: bluntness. His approach to problems was always direct, often clumsily so. His weather-beaten face showed this, with its heavy-lidded, slightly bulging eyes and powerful nose that was corrugated through having been broken twice. The hairs of his beard were like stiff black wires, though fringed with gray.
He had always been an air sailor. In his time he had been a fighting man, an armed midshipman in the world’s last flying navy. But that was all in the past now. As he would put it, “The world hasn’t got the guts for a decent war any more.” Fighting with ether sail was no longer a going proposition, all available silk having been pressed into commerce. So he had become a merchant, and in time had bought his own ship, though it had nearly broken his back paying off the installments.
The panorama of the ship-strewn field was still visible in the dusk, which was enlivened by the light of numerous lamps. From the decks of craft of all kinds—galleons, clippers, chebecs, cogs—a forest of topmasts raked the darkening sky. There was even a schooner, a relatively rare type of vessel whose highly skilled crews made use of the “ground currents” that raced along close to the Earth’s surface during the hours of daylight. Over one or two hulls repairmen swarmed with much hammering and calling, while from others rose the merry sound of pipes and of singing. Most, however, were silent and dark, guarded by ground watches.
And on the margin of the vast field the rotting hulks of boomers and jammers, giant ships of bygone times, loomed against the fading sky. There was no ship owner alive who could gather together enough sail to loft one of those great hulls now. Indeed, were an air sailor of an earlier generation able to inspect some of the craft on which the world’s trade depended these days, he would probably have shaken his head with dismay.
The crudest type of ether rig was the balloon jib, which was used by the comparatively primitive cogs, many of which were mastless. Consisting of a single square (or sometimes triangular) sail set before the bow, the balloon jib simply dragged its load along behind it. The principle was somewhat further elaborated in the three-masted barquentine. Here the balloon jib, still carried before the bow, was raised on the foremast, the foot being lashed to radiating hullsprits, while mid and aft masts carried fore-and-aft canvas sail—a neat combination of wind and ether which greatly increased maneuverability.
But it was in ships like the galleon and the clipper that the science of sail really came into its own. Permanent masts on top, shipable sprits and booms below and around, these ships could so completely shroud themselves in sail that they resembled scudding clouds. Except in the chebec, which boasted upright masts and elegant lateens, topmasts were always raked. Mounted on movable block-and-beam arrangements, they could take up any angle of slant—for flying a sailship was a delicate matter of balance and the ship behaved aerodynamically like a free-flying kite. Yards could carry either silk or canvas, or both together in any combination. A ship could “keel” herself on the wind and tack against the ether, or vice versa. More simply, she could play wind against ether to move in practically any third direction, aided by a large rudder made of laminated wood or metal wrapped in ether silk.
There were other complications, of course. Since ship fields were invariably located on the outskirts of large towns, landing and takeoff presented the nuisance of ether whistle. Landing was less of a problem, since any crew worth its salt could put a ship safely on the ground using canvas alone, furling all ether sail just before entering the land-ether interference band. Takeoff, though, clearly could not be accomplished with canvas. One answer was to loft ships by means of huge gas or hot-air balloons, and only then to spread their silk. The simpler recourse adopted here in Olam was to restrict departure to a certain time of day (dawn in this case) when ships could gain altitude quickly without having to pass over the town. During that period, of course, everyone in the immediate vicinity wore earplugs.
Zhorga paused in front of his own ship, the Wandering Queen. Her timbers were in fairly good shape, but little else could be said for her. As on most other ships these days, her ether sails—what there was of them—were a mass of patches and sewn-up rents. For some time Zhorga had been flying overburdened and now, as he was forced to recognize, he had hit rock-bottom.
He hesitated, his mind half made up to go aboard, but instead he raised his gaze to the sky. In the clear night air the stars were strengthening; low over the horizon, visible even through the light of the lamps, shone a glowering red spot. Zhorga stared at the red planet, a reckless idea forming in his mind.
Then he began to curse again, the oaths becoming a monotonous grumble in his throat, and at length, an expression of disgust on his face, he turned and trudged away.
On the town side of the field, half a mile away, he approached a lone building outlined against the dusk. The building’s narrow windows glowed from the light within, and were composed of strips of colored glass. A painted signboard picturing a clipper hung outside the door. The tavern was named, appropriately enough, The Ship.
Zhorga pushed open the door and let the comforting noise and confusion of the taproom sweep over him. The lamplight gleamed on burnished oak ceiling beams, pewter tankards and teak tables. Many of his crew were already there, including his first mate, Clabert. He ignored them and shouldered his way to the counter.