a brightly painted sea. In a matter of seconds the entire world had fallen out from under him and all he could see were surreal replicas in miniature. Roofs, walls, roads, and trees lost all meaning to him from the sky, and people vanished entirely.
I wonder if this is how God sees us. As ants. Or not at all.
Omar glanced at the professor.
Two days to the glacier. In two days, I’ll be beyond the northern edge of all civilization. At last!
From the port city of Tingis they crossed the Strait of Tarifa in half an hour and began the first leg of their journey across the Espani sky to the Pyrenees Mountains. The engines droned, the little professor snored, and the tall cartographer breathed through his open mouth looking somewhat greener than he had on the ground. The ginger root remained tightly gripped in his white-knuckled hand, but eventually he managed to place a small sliver of it in the corner of his mouth.
For two days, Omar sat in the back of the cabin. He made small talk with his fellow passengers, and occasionally he stood up to pace the narrow floor and to look out the other windows, and even to peer into the cockpit at the arcane assortment of levers and dials and gauges around the pilot and the engineer’s console. But there was never more than two minutes’ diversion anywhere in the cramped and crowded cabin. So he sat in his seat and closed his eyes and rested his hand on the pommel of his seireiken, and for hour after hour he listened to the sweet voices of Numidian songstresses, Hellan poets, and Persian courtesans who had all lived and died centuries ago.
When the cartographer was looking less likely to vomit, Omar offered him a look at the old Rus map. Kosoko took it grudgingly and then passed the rest of the afternoon comparing it to his own hand-drawn maps from their earlier expeditions. Omar watched the man’s face for some reaction, some sign to confirm that the Rus map was accurate, but the cartographer merely looked grave and thoughtful and returned the leather map without comment when he was finished.
Omar offered to cook when he guessed the lunch hour to be upon them, but he was casually dismissed by Morayo, who said they wouldn’t be cooking in the air and he would have to wait for their first landing for a warm meal. So they ate dried meat and fruit and seeds, and drank lukewarm water that tasted of copper from an overhead reservoir.
Late in the afternoon of the first day, Omar had the professor show him how to use the small metal toilet in the corner, a facility with no illusion of privacy that did however provide a terrifically cold shock to one’s bare bottom. Omar tried not to think about where the waste might fall. Nor did he look forward to witnessing either of his female companions use the device. When Morayo headed back to the round seat, Omar quickly headed forward to linger by the cockpit until she was done. Garai chuckled at him when he returned.
The nights were worse than the days. There was still nothing to do and no comfort in which to rest, but in the darkness the world outside faded into a ghost landscape of moonlight on shapeless white snowfields. The vast wilderness of Espana stretched on and on below them, a featureless winter world punctuated by the rare stone cities that huddled like gray mountains in the day and glowed like colonies of fireflies in the night. Kosoko began to describe what they were seeing below, naming cities and landmarks, especially the famous Espani cathedrals, but the man soon grew queasy and fell silent again. He chewed his ginger sparingly.
It was late during the second night, as Omar leaned shivering against a canvas sack of apples trying to sleep, when lightning flashed across the cockpit windows. A moment later a deep growling thunder rolled through the cabin, and then the soft patter of rain began to fall on the great padded gas envelope of the airship above them.
After a few minutes of listening to the storm, Omar shuffled forward into the cabin where Riuza sat tall in her seat peering into the darkness ahead. Morayo slumped in her engineer’s station, snoring.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Right as rain,” the captain said softly. “Are you all right?”
“Quite all right, dear lady. Just bored and a bit cramped.”
“That will happen. But the good news is that we are now over the Pyrenees and as soon as we reach the lee of the mountains we will be setting down, just after dawn.”
“You have an airfield up here?”
“We do.” Riuza tapped one of her indicators, and was rewarded with a little wave of a needle. “It’s called the Bayonne Glacier.”
He nodded. “Ah. I see.”
Why do I sense that she doesn’t like me very much? Such a pity. She has such a nicely shaped head. I’ll bet she has a beautiful smile as well.
“You should try to get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll probably need your help in the morning to secure the ship when we land.”
“All right then. Good night.” Omar shuffled back to his seat between the apples and the toilet, wrapped his new wool coat tightly around himself, and closed his eyes.
He awoke to the hideous noise of metal vibrating against metal. Sitting up, he saw the naked fear in Garai’s unblinking eyes and the breathless panic in Kosoko’s pale face. Both of them were gripping the seats and bags beside them, and all around the men their stores and supplies were shaking against the cabin walls.
“What’s happening?” he shouted over the rattling noise, but the two men only stared back at him in silence.
Omar lurched to his feet, clutching the shaking rails overhead for balance. Through the windows he could see the thick stormheads of the gray clouds all across the horizon with their edges set ablaze by the rising sun. Heavy rain drops pelted the windows of the gondola and the heavens thundered without pause as the clouds flashed with lightning again and again.
He stumbled to the front of the cabin and leaned into the cockpit. “What’s going on?”
Riuza clutched the controls tightly with both hands and Morayo lay on the floor, a wrench in her teeth and both hands thrust into an open panel by Riuza’s feet.
“Just some weather, Mister Bakhoum,” the captain said. “Best if you sit back down.”
Omar didn’t move. Through the forward windscreen, he could see a great plain of black and white ice shining across the ground. And the ground was growing closer. “What can I do to help?”
“Just sit down.”
“But look how fast we’re coming down! Are we going to crash?”
“Sit down!”
The Finch shook violently and leaned over on its port side, and Omar could feel the freezing wind whistling through some unseen crack in the walls. Behind them, the engine sputtered and the droning of the propellers began to skip and stutter and choke on the winter air. The cabin shook harder.
Morayo slammed her panel closed and scrambled back up into her seat as she shoved her tools into her pockets. “We’re screwed until I can get outside, captain!”
Omar glared at the two women, and opened his mouth to demand more information about what was happening when he caught sight of the ground out of the port side windows. The frozen tips of ice spires whipped by the glass, clattering on the hull. And ahead of them, tilted at a drunken angle, he saw the face of the glacier about to strike the gondola. The world that had once looked so distant and smooth now appeared terribly close and riddled with jagged outcroppings of ice. “We’re going to crash! Do something!”
“Morayo!” the captain shouted, “The anchor! Now!”
The engineer leapt from her seat, shoved Omar out of her way, and dashed to the thick brass gunstock welded into the inner panel of the starboard wall. Omar fell to the floor, cracking his head on a railing. Squinting and fumbling for a handhold, he watched Morayo jerk the gunstock up and left and then she pulled the heavy iron trigger. A sudden shock ran through the cabin floor and Omar heard a sharp whistling rip through walls. Briefly he glimpsed the wire cable zipping down from the ceiling above the gunstock and vanishing through a brass eyelet into the world outside.
The Finch jerked to starboard and Omar stumbled as he rose to his feet. Through the window he saw the jagged spears of ice so close that he could almost reach out and touch them, but no nearer, and no longer coming any closer.
The Finch had become stuck in midair.
He turned to ask what had happened, but just then Morayo grabbed a winch handle beside the gunstock and
