Scattered Thoughts

We are honored to have the opportunity to present to you a serialized steampunk extravaganza by the very talented author Berrien Henderson. This is the first installment, originally published in Vol 1. Issue 4, December 2008.

So If All Do Their Duty

by Berrien C. Henderson

Much like a bloated cigar with stabilizing fins and quick-turning propeller blades, it pushed itself through cerulean patches. The props cut air just behind the great lower cabin and the passenger coaches. The motors hummed and droned in their own rear housing units and powered by Renault-Gaultier batteries–only the best for an airship of the Crown Dirigible Company.

Sunlight glinted off the current score of skitterlings that patrolled in perfect clockwork synchronicity while checking Cloud Majesty’s seams and rivets. Every hour on the hour the next shift of mechanized arachnids would report back to the rear housing unit. They would come clacking in through a little access door and report to a small desk and spin not silk but tiny slips of paper with a series of coded impressions for Old Gabe to parse.

He took a callused hand and almost daintily tore the paper from the first skitterling’s mandibles. He read the analogue computer’s findings and looked up. Over the noises of the motors–lyricism to one such as he–Old Gabe called out, “‘ey, Jase! C’mere boy.” He had to clear his throat of phlegm and repeat himself, handing the printout to a gangly boy of seventeen with coal-black hair. “Give it a gander.”

For a few minutes they boy named Jase struggled with the words. His mouth formed the silent phonemes, and he looked up. “Larboard front quadrant. Adhesive patch needed soon.”

Old Gabe’s one eye sparkled jade satisfaction. “So, it’s been paying off, eh?”

“Yes, sir. Been practicing when I kin,” said Jase.

“Don’t sir me. You know better, an’ I’m a working man. And it’s can not kin, boy.”

“Nobody cares. We’re just a bunch of seamwalkers stuck in the noisiest part of the airship,” said Jase.

Old Gabe shook his head. “Beg to differ. They need us.” He pointed at the skitterling. “Those a man may make. Us? We must needs trainin’ and rearin’. Now go check that seam and mind your new feller.”

“I can get it myself,” said Jase.

“He needs to get his confidence about him,” said Old Gabe.

“He ain’t been off land a month. And he cries in his sleep.”

“Were you so different?”

“No.”

So, Jase made his way to the undercarriage of the coach compartment, which was sectioned into thirds: luggage, supplies, and miscellaneous. Most new boys stayed in the latter compartment and that’s where Jase found Tom. The tow-haired boy–probably ten though it was hard to tell with some orphans–worked with three other jacklegs. They’d only been six months on Cloud Majesty; they were indentured for three years whereupon they could stay on or find themselves recommended for a general apprenticeship in one of the tool shops or factories of Crown Dirigible Company. About half ever stayed on past indenture, and Old Gabe had a good eye, and so did Jase. Tom might make it to journeyman airlad. Those other two? Boy One and Boy Two respectively had half a brain between them and about as many teeth and fumbling hands. So long as they stayed inside the ship, perhaps no one would die on their account.

“Tom,” said Jase. He watched the boy untangling a hell-o-pete of a mess of cargo netting.

“What?”

Jase grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up. Then spun him around. “’What’ don’t cut it on Cloud Majesty,” said Jase. Boy One and Boy Two stopped working to watch the show. “Four years I been here. Journeyman at that. You’d do well to remember your manners, jackleg.”

Tom cut his hazel eyes at Jase and slowly said, “Why do you get to be called ‘Sir’ when Old Gabe gives a rat’s arse, eh?”

Smart feller, thought Jase. “Maybe ‘cause they earned the right not to. Or maybe when guys like us is topside and thousands of feet free o’ the world, maybe that and the safety packs and the guide hooks is all we got.”

The boy’s face softened under the teenager’s quick tongue. Tom remembered the orphanage’s pecking order, still dreamed of watching his back and covering his ears. But this was different. A nod. A shoulder clap. Some easy reprimand balancing a scathing curse. At least this Jase called him by name. He looked at Boy One and Boy Two, both fiddle-faddling with the ends of the tangled netting. Yes, he’d rather be Tom.

“I ain’t gone out but oncet when we left Madrid” said Tom.

Jase handed him the little printout. “Don’t matter. You ‘member how to read skitterling code? You can read, can’t you?”

Tom flushed. “Yes, sir.” He looked at the slip of paper and the slashes and dots and wedges. “Right front o’ the ship.”

“Starboard front quadrant,” corrected Jase. “What else?”

“Ad-Ad-hissive needed.”

“Adhesive.”

“Glue?”

Jase grinned. “That an’ rivets and God’s grace–all what’s holding Cloud Majesty together. Come on. Let’s get some fresh air.”

#

Back in rear housing resided the crew’s safety gear: packs of parachutes and fall ribbons and pop-out gliders (the new stuff and redundantly packed with a small ‘chute). Depending on two things–altitude and task–one wore the apropos gear. You never went out without a ‘chute. Jase and Tom checked the gear–double and triple checked it, in fact–then went through an access hatch to the narrow catwalk outside.

Once there, the winds buffeted them, and they held the guy wires for added support. The little feathery curls on Tom’s head played against the gusts, and the wind whined along the wires and metal catwalk. Sporadic cloud cover marred the view earthward, and Tom was glad. It was one thing to stand on top of a building and catch a twinge of vertigo and cold-sinking in one’s stomach, quite another to go wonky a few thousand feet in the sky.

Jase smiled the whole time. “Easy,” he said over the wind. “I lost count long time back how much I come out during a flight. Each time’s different, though.”

Tom nodded and gulped. Starboard front quadrant, he thought. At least it wasn’t up higher and along the pregnant convexity of the fuselage. A curious passenger might look out a window and catch a shadow of a boot passing the way the catwalk lay parallel the coach. No more. These seamwalkers were otherwise unseen. Who wants to think about a popped rivet or frayed seam or that feeling of slight descent when one could be thinking of hot tea and teacakes, a nap on the way to Germany or Italy, perhaps even skip over the Mediterranean and vast sandy sea of West Africa and let the world spin below?

And seamwalking was its own kind of trip. Its own freedom.

“Hey, Tom, don’t go all thousand mile. It’s pretty–pretty like a serpent or some factory gears. ‘Sky to mesmerize, earth to embrace.’”

A flock of birds V-ed by hundreds of feet away as Tom gave a sheepish smile, and his cheeks reddened from equal parts embarrassment and wind chop. They eased along, feeling for the world as if they walked air like some phantom. Once they came to the convexity of the fore of the Cloud Majesty, the catwalk petered out. A band of metal wrapped the circumference of the airship and dotted with regular intervals of rivets. Along one side of each band stretched a narrow rope ladder.

“Up this one,” said Jase. He went up first, and Tom followed.

Skitterlings scurried along the riveted girdles and inspected them and also monitored the seams–not uncommon for these clockwork arachnids to be drawn to a seamwalker’s presence while they worked the airship’s hull. A three-ply material, taut yet springy as the boys picked their way up the ladder, comprised the ship’s skin. The skitterlings hugged close but continued in their stop-and-go manner of inspection.

Tom felt the added weight of the tool belt laden with pliers, a de-riveter, and a glue-gun. The tool belt had a quick release catch; at least they didn’t have to wear the bulky riveting kit this go around. Plus, they had their ‘chute packs.

A skitterling eased to Tom’s hand and regarded him. In a gust of wind, it flattened itself against the hull, and Tom held tight, wishing he could do the same.

Jase looked back. “Focus, Tom. Come.”

They finally came to the offending worn spot inches from a metal band. Although the rip was only a foot long, it ssssshhhhhed helium like a mad adder.

“There she is,” said Tom. He unhooked the glue-gun with its tube of super-adhesive while Jase unrolled a small sheet of new-ply patching.

He eyeballed it and took out a pair of shears from his own tool belt. As he readied to cut it, Tom reached out to hold it with one hand. His right boot and ankle he had hooked into a rung of the rope ladder just in case (and as he’d been taught). Jase stood on his knees yet had one half a boot latched onto a rung near him.

They both wobbled a moment against the momentary inertial tug and drift of the Cloud Majesty’s turning northward.

“Straight on to Germany, eh?” said Tom.

“Good! Yes. They have the best sausages, but they don’t call ‘em that. Brats is what they call ‘em.”

“Sounds like what we called the littlest ones at the orphanage,” said Tom.

They shared a chuckle.

“All right. Let’s do i–”

When asked later by Old Gabe and the captain and the helmsman, Tom would shake his head. His mouth would go dry with the memory.

Exactly as dry as now. One second Jase turned to the seam as Tom applied the super-adhesive. The next moment–an explosion of feathers. A muffled half-squawk. Tom thought it was a falcon. What he thought and what he knew, though, remained as disparate as ale and whiskey. And he later yearned for both.

Jase grunted and flopped back. His right shoulder sagged with it broken clavicle, and his jaw didn’t look right as it hung an extra inch or so to one side. He hung by his twisted boot and fumbled for the quick-button on his tool belt, which went bouncing–once, twice–off the Cloud Majesty’s skin.

Tom ditched the glue-gun and reached for Jase, whose boot slipped its mooring. Jase’s cold blue eyes were the sky into which he tumbled, still clawing for Tom’s outstretched hand.

Then only the wind.

There was still the ‘chute. Tom strained to see the black satiny mushroom explode up somewhere seconds below and earthward. He thought he saw a ripple of something far below. Then he felt the string of tears and knew better and faced an agonizing descent back as some skitterlings scanned pell-mell where Jase had been on the hull and a couple tick-tick-ticked near Tom himself.

In the moaning wind against the Cloud Majesty, he couldn’t hear himself cry and was glad.

#

They docked as soon as possible. As soon as possible meant Germany to deposit travelers and some emissaries of the Crown. Tom numbed his way through the inquiries–interrogations to him–and the sleepless nights where all he saw were an outstretched hand and sky-swallowing eyes of a teenager he’d just made laugh.

“At least he patched the seam ‘fore he left us,” said the captain by way of eulogy in Berlin as Old Gabe painted Jase’s name on a board in the rear housing unit along with a score other names: Jase, 17; Earl, 12; Warren, 15 . . .

Tom noted none were over twenty.

Little wonder it read “Stitch Angels” instead of seamwalkers . . .

Berrien C. Henderson lives in Georgia with his wife and two children. He teaches full time, which actually means nine months out of the year, so the rest of the time is playing catch-up on the writing avocation. Although he loves writing, he still must contribute to the division of household labor since his wife, through her grounding influence, believes that “Writers still have to take out the trash and mow the yard, don’t they?” His children are valuable beta-idea testers who opine that, with any given fantasy or science fiction story, “Snakes are way better than dragons.”

Steampunk Landscape by Amirilli

Tags: amirilli, Fiction Archive, henderson, steampunk