The new science of descent terrifies me. The physics of it are straight forward, but the mere inkling of jumping unsuspended from an airship with nothing beyond a bursting pack, packed to the extreme, with a silken tent, to, as it happens, …to slow one’s fall to the earth… This idea is anathema to me.
I think to myself, what of my legs, my shin-bones? Will they break? I know from the last five years of my life, that my personal, psychical fears are for naught.
I must embrace Nila’s resilience.
[You, my dear reader, (I hope these words find you well.
Time will tell, my Dear Siva, the gods only know…and you as well.)]
***
The man called Geophreys, or somesuch, (I mean no disrespect–the man’s name was said in passing and never spoken again.)
Geophreys brought me the “shoot” as he called it. It was merely a pack stuffed full of string-tied fabric. I shall surely die.
But then, the beasts of the sea and the apparent island below call to me. And a little of Nila’s god-like death-wish. To be as much a man as she is a woman, or, no, to be as much a human as she…that is to live.
***
Pool reviewed in his mind the method of releasing the dome of fabric stuffed into his pack. He looked down at the double canvas straps over his shoulders and both around his chest and waist respectively. The buckles seemed engaged and the straps were taught, binding his jacket closed. He could feel his journal and collections of pencils pressed into his breast from his inside jacket pocket. The diagonal shoulder strap of his satchel was awkward; the satchel hung at his hip.
The cold afternoon was a wind blowing through the open hatch in the side of the airship. Captain Carpathia stood by as a pair of stewards (or hands) checked over his equipment. One of them tugged at the satchel’s strap, easing a pressure on Pool’s shoulder that he hadn’t even been aware of.
Pool looked at Captain Carpathia, then out the hatch at the island below. It was a single, roughly round island with a mountainous rise in the center, fractured into three primary summits and a scattering of lesser ones rising around it, the like an encircling crown. Beaches, at least on the near side, gave way to scrub then patch birch forests and then on one of the peaks, opposite the airship, capped with a thin glacier.
Pool’s hand unconsciously brushed holstered pistol at his hip before raising it to perform an awkward, unfamiliar salute toward the captain, who graciously returned it.
The next terrifying, exhilarating moments were an adrenalized blur for Constable Pool.
He was aware of passing through the open hatch into space, the unusual and nauseating experience of weightlessness, the icy wind on his face. At first he thought he had lost his hat, before remembering it was tightly packed in his satchel.
Tumbling end over end for the first eternity of his rapid fall, Pool’s heart raced and panic gripped him. Then, remembering the exceedingly brief instructions back in Londbridge from some assistant of Geophreys, who had allegedly performed several of his own jumps from heights, Pool stretched arms and legs (with great hesitation letting go of the “pull cord”, albeit temporarily) which had the effect of leveling him of, facing the quickly approaching beach.
The initial momentum of the airship had provided him with a forward, westward velocity, to the extent that Pool thought for a moment he would overshoot the western shore and land in the icy surf. (Through the wind-induced tears in his eyes he was positive he had glimpsed several of those mysterious leviathans lurking beneath the waves.
Fortunately, the forward motion was ablated by the drag on his body. Nearer the approaching ground, the air warmed slightly, though it was still far from warm in the near-arctic summer.
Nearly without thinking, but in a twisting jerking motion, that threw him into a roll, he reached up and tugged at the cord attached to the strap on his left shoulder.
The bundled shoot did not open at first.
Pool’s mind raced. Was this intentional? Was this supposed to happen? Is this the end?
He had just begun to scream, praying to his mother’s gods, and any others who might be listening, when he was jerked back, the waist belt of the pack knocking the wind out of him. (Pool was positive he heard his organs rupture from the abrupt braking of his fall, but the shoot.)
It rose over his head, mushrooming out as it caught the air, as he hung suspended by two dozen taught cords.
He flailed around a bit, until he realized that the end of his satchel’s strap had detached from the bundle itself. It now hung by his lower leg and inched toward his feet as the strap pulled free of the pack’s own.
With his left hand, Pool reached for it, his fingers brushing the receding strap as it broke free and dropped.
He tracked it’s descent as it dropped, narrowly missing a tidal pool along the grey-pebbled beach, some ten seconds before he crashed to the ground himself.
[This is a work in progress. Mistakes are present and changes will be made.]
#scifi #sci-fi # science fiction #fantasy #steampunk #writing #fiction
Ion Fyr 