Barrington Bayley - Star Winds

As the shrill whistling sound began to pierce the air, the customers drinking in the Pivot Inn glanced roofward and peered with interest through the engraved windows. Then, abandoning their tankards, they streamed out into the street to scan the sky for the source of the noise.

They soon saw what they were looking for. A big sail-ship was riding low over the tiled roofs of Olam, leaning at a perilous angle and making unsteady progress. The Pivot Inn’s landlord, who had also rushed out onto the pavement, shook his fist. “She’s breaking the law!” he shouted excitedly. “She’s breaking the law!” No one took any notice of him; everyone knew it was illegal to spread ether silk this close to town.

As the ship approached the inn the whistling became a shriek fit to curdle the brain. Hands were clapped to ears, faces contorted, and most present squeezed shut their eyes. Rachad Caban, however, kept his gaze steadfastly on the vessel, even though the unearthly shrieking seemed to be shaking his innards to shreds. She was a galleon, square-cut at stem and stern, which were raked to allow her to cut easily through the air. Her underbooms had already been taken in to prepare for a landing on spring-mounted runners, but aloft and on the outriggers she spread a full set of bellying canvas, angled to achieve a parachute effect on the descent to the ship field. Clearly, however, she was in trouble. Somehow her master had bungled the approach to the field, and finding himself losing altitude too quickly he had—completely against regulations—run up too large ether sails whose silky blue sparkle could be seen standing out among all the white windsail. Catching the ether currents now, the ship steadied and soared over the rooftops, narrowly clearing the spire of the cathedral.

There was good reason for the ban on ether sail at such low altitude—over towns, anyway. The impedimentary waves the sails caused in the luminiferous ether, whose currents they trapped to gain momentum, rebounded against the bulking mass of the ground to set up an interference effect. The result was a high-pitched sound vibration in the atmosphere which now, ringing even louder as the galleon sailed overhead, caused all below to fall to their knees in agony.

The drill-like pain abated as the ship receded. The townsfolk came to their feet gasping. Rachad still watched the galleon. A flying sailship was always a stirring sight, with its carved and painted woodwork, its masses of sail, spars and rigging to which men clung with careless-seeming skill.

“What a goddam awful row,” muttered a fat, bald man who still clutched his head.

“That’s right,” Rachad said lightly. “Earth and ether don’t mix.”

A sailor who had been drinking at the bar, wearing a hip-length crimson jacket and chunky earrings, burst out laughing. “That’s Captain Zhorga’s ship, the Wandering Queen . He’ll get it in the neck from the Portmaster for this, that’s sure. That old devil’s always in trouble—if he can’t make a landing under canvas he’s about done, I reckon.”

Rachad went back into the Pivot where he had left his drink. But he made a face when he tasted it: the etheric disturbance had turned the beer completely flat. After a moment’s thought he decided against ordering another, since the landlord might well find his entire stock ruined.

He left the inn and made his way downhill toward the lower part of the town. Rachad was a youngish man of not unpleasing appearance whose dark eyes roved restlessly, some might have said roguishly. His disposition did not belie this impression. By nature he was adventurous, but found it a misfortune to be living in a tame and quiet world. He spent much time hanging about the ship field and drinking in the taverns frequented by sailors, and would have liked to have been a man of the air himself. In his teens he had tried to get himself taken on by various merchant ships, but already there had not been enough work for seasoned sailors, let alone untrained boys.

Sadly, the great age of flying sail was drawing to a close. The reason for this was that there were no new supplies of ether silk, the marvelous material that interacted with the ether in such a way as to be opaque to its winds and currents, deriving inertia from them as canvas does from the atmospheric wind. Earth had declined so much in its level of trade that all space-faring traffic, which had brought the silk here originally, had long fallen off. Nor could the silk be made locally—Earth was too close to the sun to allow it to crystallize properly. In consequence all ether sails now in use were at the very least a generation old, more often centuries old. Every sheet lost, every sheet torn, meant the loss of yet more irreplaceable sailing power. Rachad could not say how long had passed since the last flying ship had been built, but he had heard that down on the coast at Umbuicour they were laying the keels of seagoing ships relying entirely on wind-driven canvas and unable to take to the air at all.

But that, of course, was only to speak of Earth, a decaying backwater planet which no one from outside visited any more. What was happening on other worlds it was impossible to say. Perhaps their skies were crammed with scudding sail. Rachad had even heard of worlds where the wind blew so strong that canvas alone was enough to lift the heaviest ships, which used ether silk only for steering and tacking.

Coming to Marekama Street, he walked between gable-ended, half-timbered buildings that the weak autumn sunlight invested with a sense of nostalgia. Olam was an old town that had prospered because its geographical location in relation to the seasonal ether winds made it an ideal port nearly all the year round. Rachad had lived all his life there, and even in that time he had seen its outer suburbs begin to empty and the seedy process of decay and obsolescence begin to set in.

A movement over the rooftops caught his eye. In the distance a ship was maneuvering into its landing approach. There was a sudden flowering of white canvas and a glinting flash of blue as the ether sails were simultaneously reefed.

Sooner or later he must leave Olam, Rachad told himself for the hundredth time. He thought of cities across the world that were little more than names to him, larger than Olam and still offering a greater wealth of experience. Perhaps he would go to Umbuicour and try to get work on the new sea ships. But somehow such slow, lumbering vessels did not attract him.

Presently he came to the marketplace and wandered for a time between the stalls. He lingered beneath the awnings of merchants who had recently brought in consignments of garments from foreign lands, fingering the rich velvets and satins and admiring the gallant styles. By contrast, he glanced down at his own costume. His green woolen tunic was faded and was fastened with worn cords which left it a couple of inches open at the chest, showing a mat of curly blond hair. He could have used a new pair of breeks, too; however, all this fine garb was beyond his present means. Perhaps if Gebeth were to succeed… He paused also at a nearby armorer’s shop and inspected various swords and foils. This engraved blade, now, with a scabbard plated with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl, would lend him considerable dash. But he reflected that, even leaving aside the cost, it might advertise to others an exaggerated self-esteem and so lead to his having to use it, which was far from his desire. The short poniard he already carried was jaunty enough, with its copper pommel, and did not invite challenges.

A curious thought occurred to Rachad. When air traffic eventually dwindled into insignificance—as it must—Olam would lose its place altogether. All these goods, for which it was currently a center of distribution, would come instead through Umbuicour. In his imagination Rachad could see Olam as a tumbledown ghost town whose few inhabitants reminisced sadly about the past.