Constable B.A.Pool, In Special Service to the Crown,
I hate to the last chewed nub of my pencil these silly, pretentious titles. I am Pool. That’s what my dear friends call me.
This airship is a lame horse, so-to-speak. It has been since I was a guest aboard BYH. I conserve my pencil stubs because out here, over the dread sea, there is no way to replace them.
Gods, I dearly miss my dear friend, Miss Tagore, and also, more than also, the Baroness Kekszemu. I fear I have left them at an importune moment.
Beneath us, below this caricature of a vessel, there swim great beasts. It has been estimated that some reach spectacular lengths of a thousand or more meters.
I saw one–no, that’s not true–I’ve seen many. Sometimes along the drop-offs, along continental shelfs, where the shallows drop to unthinkable depths, sometimes buried in frozen tundra eons ago. Some quite alive; one extremely dead.
So, here I sit, hang from this swing, this swinging gondola, beneath a gigantic bag of hydrangeum…
With me, in my cabin–paid for by the Baroness, no less–possessed of a notebook, a few pencil stubs and a tiny box of a camera. This last bit of physico-chemical science still enthuses me.
My dear, late, mother was an avid tin-typist. Red-sheathed lamps and silver nitrate. Her fingers were blue before long and, at her wake, she had an eerie cast upon her. In her mother’s tongue–she being a Muskovite by birth–her last words were: the mob in the square, the serf in the field; they are slaves to circumstance. Mind yourself, son–she said–we can freeze, in time, moments…these things, are merely splinters.”
Pool continues: “She had many tales of her homeland. I have been there twice: once as a young boy of four, or at least a late three, and again with Miss Tagore several, but not too many, years ago.
Let us get back to my journey and reason for being here, hanging above this wine-dark sea, watching from above, as the great beasts–I want to say–frolic in the waves.
I draw out my watch and charge it, now. It, and I, seem to have lost hours since I last did so. Longitude, they say…but I doubt that is all.
The nose of the airship pointed generally east, targeting the sun growing increasingly low on the horizon behind a flock of fluffy clouds. The captain had turned southward earlier in the day to avoid what was said to be a storm to the north. Now, hours later, the rhythm of the props jutting out from the vast, bullet-shaped bag of gas, on four wire-bound struts, spun in space in pairs. They were arranged port and starboard, fore and aft. On each strut and attached to each parallel driveshaft there were two propellers, one pushing and one pulling, behind and in front of each suspended nacelle respectively.
Constable Pool, with his special credentials and haughty connections in the Empire, had the run of the ship, though he ignored the 39 small cabins not his own and had only once inspected the engines and maintenance tunnels in the envelope above the gondola.
The only liberties he took which were generally off-limits to the other passengers, were occasional visits to the sprawling bridge at forward end of the gondola, where he kept to himself, scanning the seas below with one of several telescopes kept there, and, more commonly, visits to the warm kitchen where the airship’s cook-staff would fix him morsels outside of the standard dining hours.
Now, he was on the bridge.
The day-captain stood at the anachronistic ship’s wheel (which Pool briefly wondered at–ocean-going vessels were rare due to the dangers presented by the very beasts he was currently in search of.) He let the thought pass, with a vague intention to ask one of the crew about the reasoning behind it. Surely, they could automate the thing.
The captain was a tall woman with a tight bun and impeccable uniform, which was of course festooned with medals and honors from some past conflict. Her salt and pepper hair sat like a bobby’s helmet on her pale and worn face. Captain Winklespright had no given name that he was aware of and he had learned over the last week as passenger that, even with his special status onboard the Uneven Gull, he should not disturb her in her duties, or, for that matter, provide distraction to the half dozen crew hovering around her.
The windows of the bridge were angled downward at perhaps 40 degrees, and stood half a meter tall along the port and starboard sides. Towards teh bow the windows stood taller in two rows totaling over a meter and provided a spectacular view to those facing forward. There were even thick glass panels in the floor on the forward wall so that the captain and navigators could see what moved below the airship.
The gondola was long and much narrower than the great behemoth above them. When it rained one could see a torrent washing off the upper walls of the envelope, while at the same time, the windows remained generally dry.
The interior of the bridge was nearly 15 meters long and close to ten wide, with light tubing running the length of the ceiling in the center and again in a loop around the perimeter above them. It cast an eerie pinkish-white light over the crew and the handful of out of place looking armchairs which no one (other than Pool) seemed to ever use.
Racks of maps and telescopes and assorted other navigational devices were placed at convenient locations, and at the moment two maps of different scales lay open with weights on the corners on a large central table.
Pool had, when no one was looking, dragged one of the chairs close to the starboard windows, near the back wall, where he now sat with a telescope pressed to his eye. His notebook and pencil stub lay against the window itself, resting on the lower frame 700 meters above the sea below.
Now and then, the brass end of the telescope clicked against the glass, threatening to crack it. Pool knew the threats were empty, for the glass was thick and he had been tapping them all week as he sought the monsters in the sea.
…
Whilst the captain of this airship and his inattentive crew looked at their feet rather than the skies and the waters below, I took the opportunity, left alone and to my own devices, to look down at the waters through the handsome telescope in my hands.
It was interesting to note greening prints exactly where my fingers were placed on the inset tubing of the telescope.
I arrive at the more important part in this adventure at this point, my pencil falls apart between my fingers.
I looked out and, behold!, beneath the purple-black waters of the Great Atlantic Ocean, there lay before me, below me, a submersible ship of gigantic size…I would have thought it a ship made by human hands, a ship made to submerge, if it had not moved like a whale-fish, up and down, side to side…and such.
When it first breached and crashed down on the crestless waves, I first thought it a whale, waif amongst the sea-going behemoths. After some thought it was clear that this was one of those beast which I had seen here and there for years, alive and dead, on land and at sea.
I watched for a few moments. My watch had run out, so I was left to perverse and solipsistic reconnoissance and determined later that only a mere 5 minutes had elapsed.
They were elegant in there form, the beasts. Beneath the waves Long and grey-skinned. In shape like a whale, but having large flipper-feet instead of forward flippers, like unto whales.
How long did I say the airship’s length was? In comparison, the whalefish below was easily four times its length.
This is a work in progress. Mistakes are present and mispellings are probably rampant.
Ion Fyr: I think this story is part of the same tale of Nila’s called, at the moment, Kaleidoscope.
#scifi #sci-fi # science fiction #fantasy #steampunk #writing #fiction
Ion Fyr 