Asimov's SF, September 2010 (11 page)

It's a simple brass telescope without an inscription or mark of any kind to show it was used in the Venetian airship. The tube has a few dents here and there, but most important to Vincenzo was the eyepiece. The original eyepiece of the telescope he had used on the airship had been damaged in the nineteenth century and a new eyepiece had replaced it. On the spyglass he brought back from the antique shop, he was able to point to little mismatches between the eyepiece and the telescope tube. Those minor imperfections were enough to convince my uncle that the spyglass had come from the airship which, he was now certain, had been ripped to shreds by winds somewhere along the Hudson.

The next summer Vincenzo made a desperate trip up the Hudson, scouring every antique shop along the way. He didn't find anything from the airship and he ended up at the source of the Hudson, a little lake called Tear of the Clouds, where he wept and drank the last of his brandy. The next day he drove north along Lake Champlain, following as closely as he could the route Lucia's airship used to take. Before getting to the Saint Lawrence he stopped at a tavern in Plattsburgh to refill his hip flask and saw above the bar a darkish banner, a painting of a bearded man with grape leaves in his hair, stretching out his arm to offer a crystal goblet of wine to a receptive woman with dusky rose breasts. Vincenzo was sure he had seen that painting aboard the Venetian villa.

The owner said the banner had been hanging over the bar when he bought the tavern six months ago from the previous owner's daughter; she had flown in from California to sell the place soon after her father died. Vincenzo drove back to Boston with the seven-foot-long painting draped over the front passenger seat and into the back of the car. According to a conservator at the Worcester museum, the paint and cloth suggested that it survived from the late eighteenth century; the torn edges indicated that the painting had been scissored from a larger work. The cloth was silk, a rarity. The figures may have been copied, the conservator suggested, from a Giorgione or Titian or Bellini or, more likely, from one of their inferior imitators. Vincenzo was convinced that the airship had been torn apart by winds over Plattsburgh and the pieces had gone down, most of them, in the deep waters of Lake Champlain.

9

In fact, the airship went down over Lake Champlain, not at Plattsburgh, New York, but on the other side, close by Burlington, Vermont. And it didn't get torn apart. It was a calm night in late March with a soft wet heavy snowfall, so soft that Lucia didn't wake up until the ship was collapsing with great groans onto the jumbled jigsaw of ice on Champlain. It was the drifting ice that did it—ground everything to bits—and by morning there wasn't a stick or a shred of cloth left to see.

A year after finding the painting in the tavern, Vincenzo drove back to Plattsburgh and followed Lake Champlain into Canada. Champlain flows north and empties into the Richelieu River, which continues northward to join the St. Lawrence below Montreal. Lucia was singing at the Blue Angel, a cramped and smoky downstairs blues club in Montreal, and that's where he found her. He stumbled against a chair at one of the small tables at the back of the room and sat down to watch Lucia sing, hoping that his thumping old heart would not explode in his chest. When she finished the set he abruptly stood up, accidently knocking over the table. Lucia looked at him. She quickly shook off what she saw as a trick of her eyes, but then she began to walk slowly toward him just to make sure. She saw it was her Vincenzo, broken nose and all, but at the same time she didn't believe it.

"What are you doing here?” she whispered, much as she might question a ghost.

"I came looking for you,” he said. “What are you doing here, underground?"

"I belong here."

"No,” he said. “You belong in the sky. And I can make that happen."

She half smiled. “Ah, Vincenzo, who's the dreamer now?"

"Come on,” he said. He was already heading for the door as he threw his arm around her. “Let's get out of here."

They did get out of there. They left the Blue Angel, ducked into his car and drove from Montreal south out of Canada through the night, not stopping until they reached St. Albans, Vermont.

Vincenzo and Lucia lived happily—not forever after, it's true, but for a good long time. They had a house on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, a rural area, where Vincenzo built her a balloon airship they called
The Winged Lion
, an emblem of Venice. The craft was a single airy room, surrounded and supported by puffy white silk clouds.

Lucia survived Vincenzo by some fifteen years. She was never able to say for sure whether the old brass spyglass that he had found in an antique shop came from her airship. But she was certain the seven-foot-long scrap of painted silk had been torn from the ceiling of one of the larger rooms. Furthermore, she insisted that the painting was by Titian. “Who else could have painted it?” she'd say, as if daring anyone to dispute her. “He was the greatest of all the Venetian painters. Of course it's by Titian."

And if I dared to say, “Titian died in 1576. The experts say the cloth it's painted on was woven around 1750 at the earliest."

She'd reply, “Clearly the experts are
wrong
!” Then she'd laugh and open her arms, all her bracelets jingling. “Now, who are you going to believe? Me or the experts who don't know a Titian when they see it? You've got to have
faith
.—Now cast off the hawser and we'll go up. Vincenzo always loved going up at this time of day."

So I'd unhook the hawser or tether and we'd float up into the twilight sky, dark blue to the east, pale blue overhead, and red gold to the west. “Your uncle was a great man,” she'd say. Then we'd drift over the darkling expanse of the lake, its margin defined by the twinkling of hundreds and hundreds of house lights on the shore, while she told me about her escapades with Vincenzo or about the great fleet of air castles riding high and white in the sky when she was a girl.

Copyright © 2010 Eugene Mirabelli

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go ask Alice they say

ask her how data morphs

how reality changes so easy

how revision eats away at

the now we almost inhabit

and when it corrupts

it corrupts absolutely

and you won't notice

until Alice is ten feet tall

or fits beneath your thumb

as her every mutation brings

new iteration to seeming life

go ride the noise they say

ride the raging funnels

of nano-formula and tsunami code

how they reveal a Cheshire smile

across the noir cityscapes

of Calcutta, Baghdad, Tokyo, Beirut

how the statue of Christ above Rio

beams an immense virtual aurora

over the hilltop favelas and cold sea

stretching out his arms

to gather in all who have

become the true belief

Copyright © Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier

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Through some mysterious and unexpected process, the author, like the protagonist of this story, finds himself entering middle age. Since he's not traveling on a generation starship, Ben is coping with the situation by doing lots of backpacking in the Sierras.

The men picked an inconvenient time to fall out of the air. I wasn't being paid to play my fiddle that day, and I'd intended to spend it philandering. Well, a bad impulse thwarted is twice as bad, because then you're left with all the guilt but none of the fun to make up for it. I don't mean guilt in a prudish way, but, even to someone with my underdeveloped capacity for remorse, it was clear that Anuradha wasn't the type to keep the right sense of perspective about a love affair.

I was navel-gazing, which is especially enjoyable when the navel belongs to someone as young and beautiful as Anu. My head rested on her bottom ribs. These days my eyes don't see so well up close, and the blur helped to make the gentle mound of her belly into a kind of magical panorama, with the knot of her sarong like the gate of a mysterious temple in the distance.

The fantasy landscape heaved, and my face hit the sand.

"What
is
that?” she said in her one-of-a-kind voice. She had a contralto like a fast, deep river: exhilarating, but not the type that gets the showy parts.

I wiped the grit off of my lips, propped myself up on one elbow, and looked around before answering.

We were abovedecks at my favorite love-nest by the edge of the Consul's hunting reserve, on the shore of a lake so big that you could see the upward curl of its surface to left- and right-spin. I had access to the spot because of my connections at court. The lake was on the down-axis frontier, and the groundskeeper told me that whenever the Consul came here she brought bodyguards to watch out for Sinhal assassins on the far shore.

"What's what?” I asked.

She was looking away to left-spin.

"Those, Rui!” She pointed up at an angle.

The glare of the glow-tubes made it hard to see. As the landscape curved up into the distance, the dark green pines turned suddenly into crowded villages and fields of rye. Finally my eyes picked out motion: two black spots in the air.

"Crows?” I asked, standing up.

"No, they look like people. You can't see?"

"My eyes aren't as good as they used to be,” I admitted, “but it can't be people.” But as I squinted I saw that they did seem to have human shapes. I realized that my squinting wasn't what was making them easier to see; they were coming closer. Now I could tell that they were angling down sideways with the kind of coriolis you see when a hawk makes a dive at a rabbit. One looked limp as a glove, but the other had his arms spread out like a bird. I barely had time to register any of this before they plunged into the lake at an angle, first one and then the other, close to our shore. The slaps when they hit were like timpani crashes, and the spray reached us on the beach.

Even if they'd been alive before they hit, it seemed obvious to me that after an impact like that they must be dead. I congratulated myself on not being smashed like a wine grape, which was what could have happened if they'd come in twenty meters up-axis. Even while I was thinking that, Anu dashed out into the water. (Anu was an illegal third child from a merchant family, raised by Christian nuns. If she came across a wild dog shaking a chipmunk, she'd probably box the dog's nose and make it apologize.) I shook my head and waded in after her. We were in up to our thighs when the flying men bobbed to the surface on their own. They were jacketed from head to foot in something black, with bulbous helmets. Space suits? That couldn't make sense, but it was true that they were riding high in the water, as if the suits were full of air.

A dozen strokes brought me to the nearer one, who was floating face down. When I uprighted myself the water was only up to my neck. I managed to get him turned over on his back, but the tinted visor on the helmet made it impossible to see his face.

"Tow him to the beach,” I yelled to Anu, and went on to fetch the other one, who'd surfaced face up. He surprised me by moving his arm, but he still seemed dazed, so I got a grip on some of the equipment strapped to his back and started pulling him ashore.

"Rui, look out!” Anu shouted from the beach, just as an arrow plunged into the water in front of me. I twisted around and looked at the far shore. There was no beach there, just a steep ridge of exposed foundation material. At the top of the ridge a swarm of Sinhal solders were jumping off of horses, milling around, pointing, waving their arms, and brandishing weapons. At this point the sane thing to do would have been to let the second astronaut go on playing his assigned role in the target-shooting exercise. Unfortunately, as I've known ever since I was a pup, I don't act sane around beautiful women. I kept up my kicking and my one-armed sidestroke until I had him back on the sand.

By that time he was showing more signs of life, so Anu and I left him on his own and concentrated on slinging his dead or unconscious friend over a saddle. After what seemed like a long time messing around, while I imagined arrows sprouting from my back, we got both astronauts onto the horses. The conscious one had to sit on my rented mare sidesaddle, because apparently it's not possible to ride astraddle in a spacesuit. Finally we led the horses up the trail into the forest, with me and the one who was out of action bringing up the rear.

Once the trees were around us, it suddenly got quiet. The astronaut said, “
Gobble gobble
.” Water was still dripping from the chin of his helmet.

"I don't think we speak your language,” Anu said. She was leading his horse by the bridle since he didn't seem to know what to do with the reins. “Do you speak Portuguese?"

"
Goo goo goo,
” the astronaut said, and then a second voice came from his helmet, speaking funny Portuguese: “
Muitissimos agradecidos
."