We flew a couple of hours into the desert and hovered the ship. It was time for some experiments. I had always wanted to see what it would be like to break the sound barrier in a sky-sling. Izzy had shrugged her shoulders when I asked if she wanted to try it, so I guess she was sort of interested. Doing that over a desert was the safest place I could think of. We were hovering the Wilizy where two large, dry riverbeds joined. Technically, neither was completely dry right now, but this was only February. They’d probably be dry as dust in a month or two. We found a ghost city nearby – something called St. Louis and it was on our map. I'd be able to calculate our speed if I could end the speed run at another old city on the map.
We each got into our own sky-sling, positioned ourselves so that we were lying as flat as possible, shut the baffles as much as we dared so that the air would stream over the sky-sling, pointed ourselves south, and accelerated until we were at full power.
Actually, I was kind of disappointed. The sling shuddered a bit at one point, but not for long. After that, it was just a boring flight over empty sand until we reached the marshlands of the south coast. I had aimed the slings at a famous old city called New Orleans that had sunk under the waters early in the global warming decades. A huge oil derrick was supposed to be anchored over the sunken city as a memorial. We found the derrick easily and hovered the slings. I opened my lid and nudged my sling next to Izzy’s. “Forty-five minutes,” I yelled. “About 1000 miles per hour or 1600 kilometers per hour.”
As agreed beforehand, we lifted the slings into the upper atmosphere, went to full power and made the return trip. This time we reached 1200 miles per hour. I wanted to test the sling’s speed with more than one pinky-ring computer powering the gravity fields, but Izzy said that flying over sand was boring. So instead, I did a high-speed pass over her so that she could hear what a sonic boom sounded like, and she did the same for me. That was interesting. I heard the whine of Izzy’s sling after she had already passed by. I asked her to do several booms over me at different altitudes to investigate the whine. She did five at increasing heights and then came back, rolled her eyes at me a couple of times and I got the hint. She was so high on the last two flights that I couldn’t hear the noise of her passing – just the boom.
I spent the afternoon doing round trip runs to New Orleans with an increasing number of pinky-rings each trip. I gave Izzy the results over supper: every additional pinky-ring I used added another approximate 1,000 miles per hour to the sling’s speed. I had taken only four additional rings with me, but theoretically, I could keep adding rings for as long as I wanted.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked. “Fast is fast.”
“Just curious. Wondering what would happen as I approached the speed of light.”
We didn’t have anything else to talk about, so we finished supper in silence.
I spent some more time in my workroom – got nowhere on the weaponry. I don’t know what Izzy did with her time. I knew she hadn’t been drawing because there weren’t any new sketches of Winnie in the cabin. She was in her hammock watching some bot but didn’t look up when I approached, so I went to my side of the cabin and watched another western and fell asleep partway through.
# # # # # # # #
From Izzy's journals: February 28.
We were into the second day over the desert and I was bored out of my skull. With no clouds in the sky to rinse ourselves off, we couldn’t do any exercises. Will was into a marathon of western movies and I was already sick of them; not that he asked me to watch them with him anyway.
I had had enough cruising at a gentle speed so I went to the navigational post and put the ring on maximum. Will must have felt the increase in speed because he came up and asked me what I was doing. Told him I was tired of baking myself. He looked disappointed – said that he thought I might have been experimenting to find the Wilizy’s top speed. Yeah. That’s exactly what I would be doing if I were bored. Told him instead that I just wanted to get away from the desert.
Will put some additional batteries onto the power grid – said that it would be good to know the safe cruising speed of the Wilizy if we were in a hurry. The Wilizy was much bulkier than the sky-slings of course, hardly aerodynamic at all, even with the sails furled. But, we did push it up to about 300 kph before we felt some rattles and vibrations. Will dialed it back immediately after that to 275. “Interesting,” he said.
On the theory that when you feel like crap, you might as well deal with crap, I suggested that flying over the desert would allow us to take care of a problem that neither Will nor I wanted to talk about; namely the smell that was wafting up from the sanitary units in the hold that were connected to the ship’s heads.
We had two heads – one for Will and one for me. Traditionally, sailing ships just open the bottom hatch of the sanitation units and empty the contents into the ocean which, when done in moderation, adds nutrients to the ocean bed, promotes vegetation growth, provides food for fish, and so on. I didn’t see that same benefit from emptying our sanitation units over land. Actually, thinking of that grossed me out. Someone could be walking along, minding his business, when he’d receive a little surprise shower? Who would do that to another human being? So, when the smell had started to become nasty, I had put my foot down. Absolutely, no cleaning of the units over land. Will said that if we did it at high altitudes, nothing actually would land, but I wasn’t buying it. Told Will we could test it out on him. He had backed off after that; said he had been speaking only theoretically.
But the ship was beginning to stink. We were still over desert; perhaps some nutrients might help; if not, Nobody was underneath. So, with the ship cruising at a good speed, we opened the hatches. Will rigged up some filaments to suck in some air and then push it out in a narrow stream at high velocity. An air hose, if you like. Neither of us wanted to hose the sanitation units out, but we each finally agreed to do our own. Didn’t take long, but I wouldn't want to do it every day.
Will was curious about whether or not his Nothing would land on the ground theory was correct, so he offered to take a little trip in his sky-sling to see if he could see or smell anything under our flight path. I rolled my eyes at him and said something like “Yeesh, Will. What’s the matter with you? You enjoy studying - - - ?” I finished the question with a crude word that I don't normally use.
I smelled so bad that I didn’t even want to touch myself. High velocity air spray is not easy to control. So I told Will I’d meet him back at the ship, pointed my sling west and let her rip. Found a lake in about ten-minutes at 1200 kph – speed is useful when you really need to be somewhere else fast. I set the air baffles at wide-open and drove the sling through the water about ten feet below the surface; bubbles and water current felt great – like being inside an agitator-based washing machine. Washed me, my clothes, and the sling too. Decided to try the second step too; raised the sling into the air and rotated it at high speed – baffles still wide open. Got me dizzy but dry. Who says clothes washing had to be boring?
I returned to the ship to find Will waiting for me with all of his dirty clothes in a bundle. Told him of my invention of the high-speed sling-based washing machine and dryer. We agreed that he could wash his clothes and sunbathe naked without me being anywhere around. Then it would be my turn. Except, I would be sunbathing nude. He didn’t understand the difference and even up wind of him, I didn’t want to take the time to explain it.
I bundled up all my clothes, along with anything else made of fabric that might need cleaning and waited for Will to return. It wasn’t that any of these things stunk – it was only the bottom of the hold that was the problem, and that no longer. I just wanted to feel clean again. So, when Will arrived, I said I was taking two hours of sunbathing time because I had to do the towels and other ship linens. He felt kind of guilty about not thinking of that, so I told him he could pay me back by inventing some way that both of us could leave the ship, let it proceed on its course, and
still be able to find our way back to it.
# # # # # # # #
From Will's journals: February 28.
Up to now, if both of us wanted to be away from the ship at the same time, we’d anchor the ship in an obvious place – like above the junction of two rivers. But, being invisible, it was still hard to find. When we returned, we would have to fly around in our slings at slow speed – hands stretched through the sling's force field, feeling for the ship. We needed a homing beacon of some kind – but not one that Zzyk could ever discover.
We also needed a way to get in and out of the ship without having to turn off the invisibility force-field first. There was no way to push an entire body through the ship’s force field even if the baffles were wide open. So, whenever we wanted to exit or enter the ship, the force field had to be off. The ship was visible for only a few seconds, but it was risky. I thought that I would work on that too.
By the time Izzy returned to the ship from her sunbathing, I had created a special field around our top-most solar-sail. It operated like an air lock. We would position a sky-sling so that it was touching the edge of the invisibility lock and, on command, a magnetic field would immediately inhale the sling into the ship. The invisibility lock was wide enough that both of us could enter at the same time and deep enough that we wouldn’t damage the sail by accident. Leaving the ship was done in exactly the same way except that we would be exhaled from the ship.
I had made the magnetic inhalation/exhalation so strong that there would be only a millisecond or two of visibility – and then, only the solar-sail would be visible. Since the sail would be reflecting sunlight, nobody would think anything of seeing a brief flash in a sunny sky.
I had also inserted a homing beacon into the invisibility lock so that we could find our way back to the ship. The beacon emitted a beam of magnetic force UPWARDS. That meant the beam couldn’t be detected by anyone below it, and since the Wilizy could fly higher than anything Zzyk could put into the sky, it would be undetectable. All we had to do was fly our sky-sling higher than the Wilizy, and when we got close, the sling would respond when it felt the magnetic force and we’d just follow the beam into the ship. The beacon would work well enough that we could leave the Wilizy sailing on a steady course and still be able to find our way back to her.
All I needed to do now was install altimeters in both the Wilizy and the sky-slings so that we would know roughly how high the Wilizy was when we left her. I had a filament-device ready to test but was stumped on how I could calibrate it in meters. There was nothing big enough nearby to use as a baseline reference. Izzy solved the problem by suggesting that I set the device to record height as a certain amount of gravitational force. “Why do we care how high it is so long as we can find the ship?” she asked.
I had the system set and tested within the hour. Izzy said that she was impressed that I had managed two inventions so quickly and without going into a zombie trance. I told her that I had been thinking about using a gravitational device as a weapon for the Wilizy in case we had another situation like Chicago. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. She gave me a long stare.
Later that night, I was telling her about a movie called Zorro that I had watched. I was using a pretend sword to demonstrate how Zorro could slash Zs into everything when Izzy said that she had a pretend magnetic shield. Then, she pretended to turn her shield on high, snatched my pretend sword out of my hand, and snapped it in half over her pretend knee. Well, the knee wasn’t pretend.
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Chapter 12
From Izzy's journals: March 15.
We spent a week at the lake where we washed our clothes, cleaned the ship inside and out, replenished the water supply, and caught a lot of fish. Will thought we could freeze dry the fish if we took them up to high altitude, but he was stuck on how to attach the fish to the sky-sling. I suggested just putting a filament through the dead fish and magnetizing the filament to the sling. Worked like a charm. Sometimes, Will thinks of elaborate solutions when the simple solution works better. We added some freeze-dried venison too. Living in the woods again made me a little homesick; more like Doc-sick. Wondered how he was doing.
Will and I headed west from the lake, and like we did when we were on the eastern side of the desert, we continued to visit communities; new security provisions were in place, though. We had no arguments about it; Will even added a few that I hadn’t thought about.
The towns on this side of the desert seemed to be organized in the same way – by colour, tribe, religion; separately or in different combinations. Only the religions had changed from what we had found back east.
Weapons were everywhere. Usually two guns in holsters like in the western movies Will watched. I think part of that was because there was no order to how closely they placed their communities. You could have a white, elephant, Baptist community within a kilometer of a black, donkey, Southern-Methodist community. Almost every community we visited hated its neighbours – sometimes because they were the wrong colour, tribe, or religion. But often, the downstream community hated its upstream neighbour because it hogged too much water. Inevitably, the downstream community would launch a raid in the middle of the night that usually ended in bloodshed. Over time, communities would become smaller and smaller. Starvation from inadequate crops was a big reason for the declining population; but also, these people were busy killing each other out of hatred instead of repairing the pipes that were supposed to carry the water for their crops.
The worst violence I ever saw was today. We floated over a little village of only five houses in southern Nevada. Seemed deserted, but we could see clothes drying on lines and children’s toys in yards. So, we dropped down and went looking for the admission signs. Found them easily; only a single rut ran through the village.
We read the sign. We are a town of pacifists. We do not believe in violence. We have no possessions that will interest you. We are no threat to you. Anyone who believes the same way that we do is welcome to join us. Others are welcome to walk through the village and continue with your journey. All we ask is that you leave us alone.
Will and I stepped out of our slings and started to walk. I thought it would be interesting to talk with some pacifists because I was anti-violence myself. Peeked into the first house; the entire family was dead; a single bullet hole in each forehead. Nothing in the hovel had been touched; nothing had been removed from the barn; cows were still in their stalls; chickens were still in the yard.
Every house was the same. The last house was the worst. Mother, father and eight children – each lying in a row on the kitchen floor from oldest to youngest. The youngest looked like Winnie.
# # # # # # # #
I woke up the next morning, alone in the ship’s stateroom, and with a foul taste still in my mouth. Both Will and I had been violently ill several times before we could bury all the bodies yesterday. Will had found a solar powered digger and excavated a mass grave. Said he didn’t know what to do about the bodies; we could carry them in the digger, use a filament pallet, or carry them ourselves. Told him we had to carry them to their grave in our arms. We had to remember this day for the rest of our lives.
So we did, even though both of us kept finding ourselves bawling or puking – usually at the same time. Didn’t know what to say at the grave; their village sign didn’t say what religion they were; not that we would have known what to say anyway. In the end, Will left a marker over the grave. Victims of mindless anarchy.
Returned to the ship; asked Will to please, please, please take me away from this place as quickly as he could. I went to the cabin, threw off all my bloody clothes, wiped the blood stains off my body as best as I could with a towel, crawled under a blanket, and eventually cried myself to sleep. Will tried to comfort me but I just slapped and pushed him away until he left. Couldn’t help it; couldn’t stand to be touched.
First thing I did after waking was to look for Will. His hammock was gone. Dress
ed and went on deck; saw his hammock slung under a spar; big weight in it; climbed the mast and peeked in. “Sorry about last night,” I said. He was awake; just staring at the sky.
“S'alright.”
“Where are we?” I had been so intent on finding Will that I hadn’t even thought to look over the rails.
“Hovering over a lake. You can have a swim; then, we’ll leave. I’ve already had mine.”
“My clothes and the towel?”
“Buried. Like mine.”
I cleaned myself up quickly – didn’t want to stay a minute longer than I had to. Will pointed us west; I climbed the mast and tumbled into his empty hammock. I felt him climbing the mast a few minutes later.
“OK if I get in?”
“Please.”
So, we held each other; both of us awake the whole time; alone with our thoughts; wondering why life was so horrible, at least that’s what I was thinking.
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Chapter 13
From Will's journals: March 17.
Izzy was sitting in a canvas chair on the deck, ignoring her cup of hot chocolate. It was the third cup I had given her this afternoon – trying to cheer her up. It wasn’t working.
“Do you mind if I use your hammock?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” I said.
Izzy climbed the mast and disappeared. I didn’t see her again until the next morning. I kept the ship on a westerly heading until we reached the Pacific Ocean, settled the Wilizy into the waves, anchored her, and then slept in Izzy's hammock in the stateroom – surrounded by pictures of Winnie. I figured that she was sleeping in my hammock because she didn't want to be reminded of little children.
# # # # # # # #
We were slipping comfortably through the Pacific Ocean waves on a northward heading when Izzy slid down the mast for breakfast. She ate it without uttering a word. Then, she grabbed some food bars and water, wrapped herself in a sleeping bag, and threw herself over the side of the ship. I rushed to the railing and saw her adjusting the controls of her sky-sling so that she was making just enough headway to bob comfortably through the waves. She saw me looking, gave me a little wave, and settled back in her little sling-raft. I slowed the speed of the ship so that she was keeping even with the ship, and did some gymnastics in the warm breeze.