Steamlust by Kristina Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

at three hundred feet would have to do. Fog still clung to the land, but sunlight flashed from wavelets in the bay, and the forested Oakland hills were in full sunlight. Directly northward the peak of Mt. Tamalpais stood clear and serene above veils of mist caressing its lower slopes.
    I gripped the ropes connecting the gondola to the balloon, exulting in the freedom of my sky, my space; mine alone…
    Until something denser than fog rose suddenly below, shattering my elation, very nearly stopping my heart. I pushed up the goggles and stared, unbelieving, as a great dark shape breached the mist like a whale surfacing from the ocean’s depths. Once in the sunlight it was dark no longer, but glinted with a coppery sheen. Not a whale after all, I thought, in a daze born of panic, but a fish, with scales…or…no, those were meant to be overlapping feathers, decorative traceries inscribed into a skin that was, in fact, metal.
    This was no monster or wild delusion, but a machine, some sort of flying device! A machine, however fantastical it seemed,
was something I could understand. More to the urgent point, it had moved sideways enough that it would miss colliding with me as it rose. A flying machine that could be steered, and propelled! And with lift enough to cloak its gasbag with copper!
    I didn’t realize my breathing had stopped until it started up again. Then I gasped again, and cursed, as air currents stirred up by the intruder hit and made my gondola pitch and sway. It was all I could do to hang on and not be tumbled out, and the Prairie Lily above me thrashed about until I wasn’t sure the tethers could hold her.
    Observation of much about the flying machine rising past was impossible, except to note that the gasbag was oval in shape and so was the enclosed gondola tucked up close beneath it. But I did catch a glimpse of a face at a window, helmeted and goggled and hidden as well by a short black beard. I recognized that beard with its jagged silver streak on one side. To my shame, I’d even dreamed about that beard, in vividly improper ways, proceeding from stroking it with my fingers to feeling it against my skin in a very different region.
    It was Miklos, that cursed lecturing fellow from the symposium!
    When I managed to look again, his gondola was higher than mine, though scarcely a stone’s throw away. I fervently wished I’d brought along a supply of just such ammunition.
    He’d shut down his propelling devices, at least, so the air wasn’t battering at me much. I glared across at him. He pushed up his goggles and looked nearly as panicky as I’d been, but when I let go of one rope to shake my fist at him, he flashed the broad smile that had also figured in my dreams, put a finger to his lips as though signaling a secret, and drifted away upward before restarting the propellers. From below I could see that both gasbag and gondola were colored a misty white on their
undersides, the way some birds and fish try to blend in with the brightness above them. Then he set off toward the northeast, confident in his craft’s ability to cross the Bay to its northern tip without depending on the whims of the wind.
    I shook now not with fear but rage, and a burning envy. A directable airship! What was the word from that lecture? Dirigible? But he’d made it seem all theory and speculation, and wild speculation at that; nothing already possible, already built and fashioned with such attention to fanciful detail. Who could ever see that tracery of feather shapes on the top surface? Unless they were flying in another such airship—or a hot air balloon like the Prairie Lily, which he’d clearly regarded with a degree of condescension when we’d conversed after his lecture.
    Later, though, when the old professor had brought him along to Ruby Lou’s notorious parlor house, he’d appeared to take some interest in accounts of my uncle Thaddeus Brown, who’d flown surveillance airships with Colonel Lowe’s aeronauts in