He met her gaze with a nasty, knowing smirk. “Don’t get above your station, bum-boy,” he whispered. “You’ll be smacked down, and don’t think you won’t. And don’t go running to the captain neither.”
She glanced quickly at the captain, who stood in conference with the other senior officers just as though they were not all floating in a near-weightless state. The captain’s eyes met hers, and he flicked one finger in a clear gesture: Go.
She went.
And she’d show that snotty little Binion that she was too good to rise to his bait.
*
Days passed. As Diana drew further round the Horn, the constant buffeting of the winds grew stronger and even more capricious. The captain kept the topmen busy watch after watch, constantly raising and striking and adjusting the sails to catch the favorable winds and coast through the unfavorable ones.
When the wind was in Diana’s favor and all sails were set, life was calm; the ship seemed to simply drift along, the sails billowing gently and a mild breeze blowing across the deck from astern. But this seeming tranquility belied the ship’s actual velocity, for she was embedded in a mass of moving air whose speed might exceed eight thousand knots.
But when the wind blew contrary, the captain struck all sails and Diana flew with bare poles, doing her best to glide through with the speed and heading she’d built up during the last favorable wind. Winds might come whipping in from any side, above, or below, and could shift dramatically at any moment. Even seasoned hands wore safety lines, and the men of the watch on duty scrubbed the deck or polished the brass with one eye on the weather. For at any moment a favorable breeze might pick up and the captain call all men aloft to set sail, or equally likely a new and even more inimical wind might suddenly begin to blow from another quarter, tumbling men set too firmly against the old wind over the side.
*
And then came the times when no wind blew at all.
These times were rare at the Horn. But when they did occur, Diana must needs move quickly and nimbly, lest she find herself becalmed in an atmospheric eddy, losing all the momentum she hoped to build up at the Horn for the long swing to Mars. Without that momentum, the voyage to Mars might take not just two months, but over a year.… a year for which the ship’s stores of food and water would be sadly inadequate.
Arabella was filling and winding the lamps in the captain’s cabin—a fascinating small clockwork mechanism advanced the wick and provided a draught to keep the flame alive—when the bosun’s pipe sounded, followed by a chorus of voices: “Idlers and waisters to the pedals!” Sighing, she carefully capped and stowed the oil canister before reporting to her duty station.
As she arrived at her station belowdecks, pulling herself through the air hand over hand along the guideline, the other waisters had already cleared away most of the cargo from the ship’s central line and opened the panels in the floor, exposing fifty or sixty wooden seats. Each “seat” was a hard, narrow, massively uncomfortable saddle, really nothing more than a board whose hard edges had been softened by years of pedaling thighs, and as Arabella raised her seat and locked it into place with a peg her legs and bottom began to ache preemptively. She could not imagine how men, whose natural equipment occupied the same space between their legs as the wooden seat, could possibly pedal without doing themselves serious injury, but somehow they managed.
Arabella positioned herself on her seat, tied herself into place with a stout cord across her lap, then slipped her feet into the pedals’ leather straps and awaited the command to begin. All around her the other waisters and idlers—any one else who was not currently occupied in the handling of the ship—grumbled and sighed as they did the same. “Step lively, now!” Binion called from his station near the bow. “Time’s a-wasting!”
Finally all the men were settled. “By the right,” Binion shouted, “pedal!” The command was accompanied by a thud from the drum fastened to the deck before him, which he struck with a large wooden mallet.
Arabella grunted as she pressed hard with her right foot on the wooden pedal, the strain transmitting itself through her body to the stout horizontal rod she grasped in her hands. Most of the other pedalers grunted as well, but the sound was lost behind the groaning creak of wood and leather as the whole complicated system of cogged wheels and perforated leather belts beneath the deck moved complainingly into action.