With mingled pride and trepidation she made her way up the ladder, an awkward action with her skirts swirling in the weak gravity. Soon she would have to relearn the old familiar habits of standing, walking, and climbing.
As she reached the deck she saw that the captain’s stance was artificial. He was braced to the deck by three leather straps which extended from a broad leather belt about his waist to brass rings set in the deck—rings she’d often cursed as she’d polished them. One of the midshipmen came over to her with a similar belt, which he handed to her with great embarrassment and averted eyes. If she’d been Arthur Ashby, she knew, he’d have buckled it about her waist with brusque dispatch—or, more likely, left her to manage her own safety line or simply to hang on to whatever rail or rigging might come to hand. She thanked the man as she took the belt, and swiftly cinched herself to the deck beside the captain. “How odd it feels,” she remarked, “to have pressure upon the soles of one’s feet again.”
“Indeed.” The captain smiled and flexed his toes, the polished boots squeaking. “But it would be even worse if your legs were weakened by unrelieved free descent. This is why I insist that every one on my ship, even officers and passengers, take his turn at the pedals.” He put his telescope to his eye, peering ahead at the cloudless air, then muttered a command to Richardson, who immediately called out a series of orders. Topmen scrambled up the rigging and began to adjust the sails.
Arabella flexed her own legs and toes, pressing against the leather straps, feeling the strength of her calves and thighs. She had been surprised when the captain had insisted that, even as a passenger, she must continue taking a shift at the pedals, and had been embarrassed by the great production this entailed, with screens being erected around her so that none would be forced to observe her flailing limbs. But now, with the downward pressure of her weight increasing, she found herself glad she had not protested the inconvenience. Perhaps if she and her mother and sisters had worked the pedals on the voyage from Mars to Earth, they would not have had to be carried from the ship upon arrival.
The captain was again gazing ahead through his telescope. “Horn ahead,” he called to Richardson, though Arabella could see nothing but empty air between Diana and the planet below.
“Are there no storm clouds, Captain?” Arabella asked.
He shook his head. “Not at Mars. The air is too dry. To observe the Horn’s outer edge you must look for scudding flotsam.” He handed her the telescope, but even with its aid her untrained eye saw nothing. Then, conversationally, he remarked, “And here it is.”
Suddenly a great jolt struck the ship. With a creaking of timber and a rattling of lines against yards, Diana slewed hard to larboard. If Arabella had not been strapped to the deck she would surely have been flung over the rail and into the sky in a trice. As it was she nearly lost the telescope, and immediately handed it back to the captain.
He took it with barely a nod to Arabella, being busy calling out commands to his men. Topmen bustled up and down the masts, unfurling and sheeting home t’gallants and royals, then mere minutes later furling them up again in response to the Horn’s ever-shifting winds.
Amidst this maelstrom of wind and wood and voices one familiar voice stood out from the rest: Faunt, the captain of the waist, calling, “Heave away, ye b____ds! Heave away smartly!” Arabella peered over the forward rail to the deck below, wondering what task her former messmates were engaged in.
What they were doing was opening the great cabinet, fixed to the deck, into which the balloon envelopes had been packed shortly after their departure from London. Immediately the wind caught at the alabaster Venusian silk, tugging billows and folds of it into the air, but the men grabbed the first envelope before it could be whipped away and began hauling it into a large untidy circle. From this perspective, the net of sturdy cables that would hold the envelope once it was inflated gave the impression of a gigantic spider’s web.
“Open the flues!” called Faunt, a command that was repeated down the forward ladder. A moment later came a great bellowing roar, louder even than the rush of the wind through the rigging, and the circle of the envelope bellied out into a great flapping disc, then an inverted bowl, then a loose wobbly sphere that nearly filled Diana’s waist.
A midshipman, black from top to toe with charcoal-dust, appeared and saluted the captain. The smell of burning charcoal on him was so strong that even the Horn’s whipping winds could not carry it away. “Boatswain’s compliments, sir,” he gasped. “Charcoal stores holding steady. We’re clear for descent.” The men below on charcoal duty must be shoveling like fiends.