Star Winds

“Pah!” Zhorga made an expansive gesture. “Many of these old mapmakers had fanciful imaginations. How many charts have I seen showing monsters in the sea, monsters in the air? Where are these monsters? They don’t exist.”

“Then you must use your own discretion.” Gebeth laid the chart on one side and, taking an ephemeris, began to construct a geocentric horoscope.

“The day and hour of departure must be chosen with care. How soon will your vessel be ready?”

Zhorga stuck out his lower lip. “Three weeks, perhaps? Maybe longer.”

“Let us see if we can find a suitable day …” Consulting the tables, the alchemist marked his chart with planetary signs. He studied it briefly, then laid it aside and set to work yet again. This time he constructed, on transparent paper, a heliocentric horoscope, using a second set of tables. This he laid over the big main chart and began to trace various features from it, skillfully drawing curved lines to indicate the course of the ether winds, and so forth.

Rachad noticed that this horoscope differed from the chart in many respects. “You seem to be marking those vortices in the wrong places,” he remarked. “Why is that?”

“The first map is a general one only,” Gebeth explained. “As the planets move, their relationships to one another alter, and the flow of the ether winds is affected. This causes the eddies, vortices and rapids to move, too. They shift and waver, and some die down while new ones spring up. It’s as if large stones were to be kept moving in a stream. Sometimes the configuration of the planets is such that the whole of solar space erupts into a violent storm and navigation is impossible.”

“There are unpredictable times of bad ether weather on Earth also,” Zhorga rumbled. “Could that be from the same cause?”

“No doubt of it.”

The air captain grunted. “Then this astrology could be useful to sailors after all, if it can forecast storms. It’s strange it hasn’t been adopted. Though one knows, of course, that the direction of the ether changes with the positions of the sun and moon, and also with the moon’s phases.”

“It was used extensively once, and every captain possessed an ephemeris. But like much else it has fallen into disuse with the ending of transspatial communication.”

The work finished, he nodded judiciously. “The time I have selected would seem propitious enough. Takeoff should be during mid-morning, say ten-thirty. Enter the slipstream above the atmosphere, set your sails to travel at an angle thus—” he indicated with a thrust of his pen—“and you will be on your way. But it will take skill. Mismanage the maneuver and you risk being carried by the slipstream round the curve of the world. If that happens you could fall into the Earth’s lacuna—a dead spot in her shadow where there is no ether movement. Your sails will be becalmed. You could well end by crashing onto the moon.”

Zhorga stared somberly at Gebeth’s chart. “Then we’d better do the job right,” he declared.

“Some practice forays into space would be well-advised before embarking on the main journey,” Gebeth continued. “You must also learn the art of drawing up these charts yourself, so that you may interpret the changing planetary positions during the course of the voyage. Jupiter and Saturn, and the planets beyond, will produce little change since they move so sedately and in any case lie downwind. But it is the upwind planets, close to the sun, that you must watch, since they move with alacrity. Mercury, especially, exerts an influence out of all proportion to its size, lying only thirty-six million miles from the sun and completing an orbit every three months. All planetary ether fluctuations begin, in fact, with Mercury.”

Zhorga nodded his understanding.

“Space captains would sometimes carry an orrery as an aid to quick judgment,” Gebeth added. “Are you familiar with the instrument?”

“An orrery? No, what’s that?”

The alchemist hesitated. Then he moved to a cupboard and unlocked it with one of many keys on a key ring. From the cupboard he lifted out an unwieldy gangling object, all orbs, nested armillary rings, cogwheels and gears.

Setting it down, Gebeth turned a handle. The gears creaked and tinkled; the variously sized orbs circled, each at a different rate. It was a perfect representation of the solar family, from the sun to Saturn. Even the relative distances were given some demonstration, though much scaled down as was inevitable. And the Earth even had the moon in attendance, whizzing round it on the end of a rod, thirteen times to every orbit of its own.

“See?” Gebeth said. “At one glance one can see how the planets stand in relation to one another.”

“Indeed,” Zhorga breathed. “Wonderful! Will you lend me this device, Master Alchemist?”

“I place considerable value on it,” Gebeth said reluctantly. “But possibly I could donate it toward the success of the venture.”

“They move—it’s like magic!” Zhorga was enchanted—and hardly less so was Rachad.

Hypnotized, they both stared at the dancing orbs.

Chapter THREE