Serial Sunday: Tranquillity, Part II
By Paul Leone.
The Tranquilla was, by the ever-rising standards of worldships, a humble vessel. Its design was that of the sea-going caravel, adapted to the great golden ocean of the æther, and it had a crew of twenty-five odd souls. One of those odd souls was in the captain’s quarters some hours after the affair with the sirens had concluded. Rosy evening light shone through the three large portholes, casting a warm glow through the captain’s room.
There, unbothered by the steady, gentle swaying of the ship in æthereal currents, Letizia sat up in bed with a book in her hands. It was De sphaeris coelestibus by Teodoro of Olvera, a Spanish writer of a century ago and one of the leading lights of a generation of natural philosophers just taking flight into the æther. She read from the Preface as she had a dozen times before, finding just as much comfort in it as she did in Isaiah 40:22 and John 1:3.
Quoth Teodoro: “These facts were known to the ancients. First, that creation is an unmoving sphere, within which is all that moves: in like manner hath the uncreated God created it. Second, that the Earth is a sphere. Third, that the Earth is the center of creation. Fourth, that the said unmoving sphere of creation is vast enough that in comparison the Earth is a mere point. Fifth, that the Earth does not move: that is, it does not move in an orbit, but it does pivot so as to provide the procession of seasons. To these we can add a Sixth, that the moving stars which we call worlds are of like size and shape to the Earth.”
Before she could continue into the deeper examination of the newly discovered heavens, there was a pair of taps on her door.
“Enter,” Letizia said, stifling a fierce frown.
Bevill, one of the crewmen on duty, opened the door halfway. “Ma’am, beggin’ your pardon. You asked to be notified as it ‘appened and it’s ‘appenin’ now – we’re comin’ up the æther.”
Now it was a sigh Letizia stifled. Instead she nodded. “Thank you, Bevill. I’d ask you to rouse Emma, but I’m sure she’s already elbowing Mr. Yim away from the helm.”
“Aye, ma’am, something like that.”
Letizia smiled faintly, carefully placed a silk marker in her book, closed it, very carefully replaced it on the small, glass-enclosed shelf above her desk, and then headed to join the others on the bridge.
The bridge was, after the cargo hold, the largest room aboard the Tranquilla, but it always felt crowded to Letizia, even when she was nearly alone in it. For one thing, half of it was occupied by the Æthereal Orrery, a large and complicated brass device of rings and spheres that showed Earth and the position of the twelve worlds that orbited it, from the Moon to distant and mysterious Antichthon. The ship’s wheels (one for ascent and descent, one for port or starboard turning, and one for rolling clockwise or counterclockwise) took up another large part of the bridge, as did the grand celestial compass with its two handspan-long needles, one constantly pointing towards Earth and the other towards the nearest world at a given moment.
All of that was more than enough to crowd a woman on her own, to say nothing of when, as now, the bridge was occupied by other crewmembers. In this moment, Letizia arrived to find Emma and Yim, the navigator, there, as well as Friar Mateo, the ship’s chaplain, factotum and scribe. Between them, Yim and Mateo were responsible for the maps both terrestrial and celestial, some annotated in Latin, some in Arabic and some in Chinese, that covered most of the wall space in the bridge.
Before speaking to the others, Letizia spared a glance out the nearest porthole. The umber evening skies of Vulcan were darkening as the ship glided through the upper airs and towards the black, star-lit æther. She looked at the clear stars for a moment and then turned back to her crew.
“Where shall we go?” Letizia asked, one finger raised in a universal prompt.
The answer was unanimous, as she expected and hoped it would be.
“Io,” Emma, Yim and Friar Mateo all said at once. They glanced at each other and then Mateo smiled. It was his turn to offer the rationale.
“There is no other option for this scoundrel,” he said. “Senk is on Io and Senk is the only man who has both the interest and means to collect such books.”
Letizia nodded agreement. She had come to the same conclusion already, but it was better to walk on a road laid by more than one hand, wasn’t it? The problem was that sailing to Io would mean a long journey, especially now with Jupiter and Vulcan in almost perfect opposition and Earth poised between them. The greater than usual distance would add at least two more weeks to their voyage. And Langley already had a week’s head start on them, if what Turnos said was true. Letizia didn’t doubt that it was. Turnos might lie, but not when his reputation as a reliable intermediary was on the line.
“Mr. Yim, if you have any special tricks up those beautiful silk sleeves of yours, this is the time to unleash them,” Letizia said to the stout Cathayan navigator.
He nodded and tugged his straggly beard. “I’ll do what I can, captain, but I’m a navigator, not a miracle man.”
“I have nothing but faith in you, Mr. Yim,” Letizia assured him. She meant every word.
At times like these, there was little for Letizia to do to influence the course of events. Her crew would work as hard as possible. Hovering over them and constantly demanding their best efforts, would only impede them, or worse, provoke them. Letizia was familiar with stories of crews that had had enough of overly demanding captains and tossed them overboard. While on the seven seas of Earth that would most likely mean a quick death by drowning, in the æther it promised an endless fall through the misty upper airs. At least until you finally perished of thirst, that is.
Letizia did not care to dwell on the very notion.
Instead, she walked the length of the ship’s main deck, sometimes stopping to speak a quiet word to one of her crew or to admire the sleek, efficient lines of the ship. Her ship.
Unlike the seafaring vessels that had earned her beloved Genoa its fortune, the Tranquilla had no sails. Its tall masts instead held great circular frames filled with translucent aquamarine crystal. These crystal lenses caught and amplified both the subtle currents of the æther and the Harmonies, the faint, delicate melodies of the celestial spheres. This combination of subtle energies was redirected into the ship’s aeolipile at the stern, heating the water contained in that device’s large metal tank so that it spun with furious speed. This spinning also rotated a great metal shaft affixed to the aeolipile, which in turn propelled the entire ship.
To be honest, Letizia didn’t entirely understand the exact mechanics of the process, especially the crystalline transformation of æther and sound into light. It undoubtedly worked, though, to the general benefit of humanity and its neighbors within the æthereal realms. Letizia shuddered, genuinely shuddered, at the idea of mankind forever bound within the tight circles of a single world, unable to touch even the cool grey sands of the Moon, let alone the splendors of all the other worlds.
She was pulled out of her philosophical musings by a sudden ripple of motion in the corner of her eye. Letizia looked up sharply. She saw faint shapes in the mists of the æther. Too swift and too small to be another ship, but it was hard to see what it was.
Fortunately, she was equipped for that situation. Letizia reached down to her belt and removed a long brass tube from a leather sheath of sorts. She extended the long tube even further and stared through the narrower end. Then she sighed happily.
Dolphins. Green dolphins, rare and beautiful beasts of the æther. There was an entire school of the noble things, dozens upon dozens of them, each as big as a horse. Soon, she didn’t even need the spyglass to watch them. They saw the Tranquilla and turned towards it. The school gracefully swam through the thin golden mist around the ship – all around it, above and below as well as to port, where Letizia had first spotted them.
This, too, was something you could never see on Earth, Letizia realized. A smile lit up her face as she watched the green dolphins dance around the ship. All work slowed and then stopped as the rest of the crew did the same, from the watchman high atop the mainmast to the former urchin scrubbing the deck near the forecastle.
Emma emerged from below decks and joined her captain at the deck railing. The Englishwoman stared out the dolphins, impressed but clearly less entranced than Letizia was. Letizia wasn’t surprised, but she was slightly saddened.
After a while, she turned and looked at her first mate.
“Captain?” Emma obligingly asked her.
“What year is it in the æther?” Letizia asked, her voice uncharacteristically wistful.
Emma frowned as she answered. “1529, the same as –”
Letizia waved the words away. “But it’s not the same. Look. What do you see?”
Emma didn’t see the point, but she did something. The same thing she saw every morning aboard ship. “The æther. Dolphins.”
“Aye! A golden sea, golden skies, noble creatures undreamt of by even Pliny or Isidore, and nothing between us and the firmament but our own hesitation. Back home, it’s Turks and famine and greed. But up here… ah, here…” She trailed off with a sigh and stared out into the golden heavens with her hands clasped in a prayerful posture.
After a moment, Emma nodded and left her alone with waking dreams and wandering dolphins. Letizia smiled sadly at her back, then turned back to her reverie.
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Paul Leone is an author who, among other works, wrote the book In and Out of the Reich for Sea Lion.
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