Rule 22019 - Strike Nothing That Is Still Flying - Part 1 of 3

Rolf had the station book open on the loft desk and was reading it the way he read anything written in pencil, with his head tilted. Above him, out of a brass horn lashed to the rail, a young woman a long way up was talking about her breakfast.

“It was a biscuit,” the horn said. “One. I’d have saved half if I’d known. There’s a gull been sat on my spar since first light, looking at me as if I’m the one with the biscuit.”

It was the Welkin’s speaking-wire. It ran up inside her line to the topmost kite, and at first light her kiters had carried its horn up the Station ladder on a long lead and lashed it to the rail, so that the pilot could talk to the top of the train. It also meant that the top of the train could hear everything the loft said. The voice came down it with a thin ring round the edges, like a voice down a drainpipe, and it wanted no reply.

Bjorn stood at the open side of the loft with Kemble’s spyglass and counted kites.

The Kite Station’s own were all in the rack behind him, every one, red and white and short-tailed and long, folded on their pegs like washing brought in before rain. The signal line ran up bare from the rail to its block. Nothing could be flown from the Station today. Anything sent up that line would have gone straight into the Welkin’s.

The Welkin lay on the Tether Field below, and there was very little of her. She was a long, narrow hull of pale planking with a float on an outrigger either side, sitting on the grass on a pair of runners, like a boat somebody had carried up from the sea and then forgotten about. Three pickets held her down. Amidships stood a drum as high as a cartwheel, and from the drum her line went up.

It went up past the loft rail, near enough to reach with a boathook, and then out, over the field wall and the warehouse roofs and the quays, over the moored boats and the grey water of the Harbour, climbing all the way, and on out over the outer roads until the glass lost it in the light off the sea. Along it, at intervals, stood the kites. The lowest was the size of a barn door and the colour of rust. Above it, smaller with distance, stood three more, and then a fifth, each fixed to the line and bending it into one long shallow curve like a rod with a fish on. Past the fifth the line went into a knot.

It was not only line. Three kites had folded into it together, their bridles wound round the line and round one another, and they turned on the wind as one lump, blue and green and a red gone pink with weather, trailing loose ends. From the top of the knot the line went on, far out and very high, to the ninth kite, which was white and no bigger in the glass than a fingernail, and had somebody on it.

“Nine,” said Bjorn.

He had made it nine twice and eight once, and the eight had been the glare. He was holding the glass in his good hand and resting it on the wrist of the other, which was in a splint and did not care to be a shelf.

“Nine,” said Rolf, without looking up. “It says so here.” He read aloud, since the entry was short. “First light. Kite-ship Welkin at the outer marks under nine kites. Train fouled. One hand aloft. Could not strike. Brought her in under her train.” He turned the page, and turned it back. “Hand’s name Orrin.”

“Saffi,” said the horn, “if it’s being written down.”

Kemble, the Senior Air Pilot, was at the rail with her back to them, bare-handed in the cold, her gloves pushed through her belt, and she had not taken her eyes off the white kite since Bjorn came up. She put out a hand without turning round. Rolf gave her the pencil. She wrote Saffi in front of Orrin, and gave it back.

“Is anybody down there,” said the horn, “going to tell me how long? The master’s been saying soon since the crossing. He says it the way he says it to the kites when they won’t fill.”

Bjorn was at the horn before he had decided anything. He put his mouth to the brass and said it loudly, so that it went up the wire and round the loft and down the ladder to the people on the grass.

“Yes. Whatever it is, somebody down here is going to tell you the truth about it. And if nobody else does, I will.”

It went up the line, and there was no getting it back.

The old caution came along a moment afterwards, from somewhere under his breastbone, and wanted to know whether he had any idea yet what the truth was going to be.

He looked at his boots.

“Right,” said the horn, after a while. “I’ll hold you to that, Harbour.”

* * *

Master Idris Calloway had been halfway up the loft ladder when Bjorn said it, and he finished the climb one-handed, because the other hand held a can of tea wrapped in a cloth.

He was a lean, brown, loose-jointed man with a long plait down his back and a coat stitched together out of old kite silk, patch on patch, and he had been keeping that can hot on the Welkin’s stove since first light. Bjorn had watched him from the loft: filling it, wrapping it, unwrapping it to see if it was still hot, wrapping it again. He set it on the desk beside the station book and looked at Bjorn the way a master looks at a stranger who has just made his crew a promise over his head. Then he looked at Rolf, who was reading.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“She’s a kiter,” Calloway said, to the loft. “She’s rode out worse than this.” He took something from inside his coat. “Harbour Master, I’d like to send this up.”

It was a disc of stiff paper a hand across, with a hole in the middle, a slit running in to the hole, and set along one edge a short curved blade.

“A messenger,” Calloway said. “Slip it on the line and it climbs, the way paper climbs on a wind. When it gets to the knot, the blade takes the bridles. The three fouled kites go. The line runs clear, and we wind Saffi in on the drum like any other morning.” His eyes stayed off the horn. “Mostly the top kite holds, when the ones under it go. Mostly.”

The horn said nothing at all.

“And when it doesn’t,” said Rolf.

“Then she comes down into your roads with it, and we go and get her.” Calloway turned the disc so the blade lay against his palm. “It’s how it’s done at home. I’d have done it on the crossing if I’d had a boat under her.”

Rolf closed the station book. He laid the Rule Book open along his arm, at a page he did not have to look for, and read it once, plainly, to the loft and the horn and whoever was listening on the grass.

Rule 22,019. Nothing is struck from a vessel while any part of it is still flying.

The Lighthouse sounded its one note from across the Harbour. It came to the Sky Dock low and late, and when it reached the loft every kite in the rack stirred on its peg, the way coats on hooks move when a door opens somewhere else in a house. Rolf let them settle before he spoke.

“She’s crew,” Calloway said. “She’s not the ship.”

“She is riding the ship, Master, and the ship is in the air. So is she.” Rolf laid a finger on the line of print. “That blade strikes three kites off the Welkin while the rest of the Welkin is flying, and one of the parts still flying is Miss Orrin. You may not send it.”

Calloway looked down at the disc for a long moment. What Bjorn saw in his face was not anger. It was a man who has been told he may not do the thing he has been dreading since first light, and who is ashamed of how much that helps. He folded the paper over the blade and put it back inside his coat.

“I heard that,” said the horn. “Thank you, whoever that was.”

“The Harbour Master,” said Bjorn.

“Tell him ta, then.”

Rolf turned the leaf over, and read on down the next.

* * *

The runner from the Office came up the ladder a little after that with an envelope, and with a message she had brought from the clerks’ room without dropping a word of it.

“The kite-ship’s Notice, Harbour Master. And the clerks say would the apprentice please do something about his Proclaimatron Three-Hundred-and-Something, because it’s been going in his locker since nine, and it’s tried the door twice, and somebody’s put a coat over its horn.”

Rolf went on reading, the way a man goes on through a noise in the street.

Bjorn took the envelope and felt his ears go hot. The Notice was the single card every arrival got, with the handful of Rules that bore on a kite-ship inside the Sky Marks printed down it, and the third of them was Rule 22,019, in the words Rolf had just read. It seemed to him that the person at the top of that line ought to have it.

“Can a messenger take this up?” he said. “Without a blade in it.”

Calloway held out his hand for it. Bjorn tried first to fold the card himself, one-handed, against the rail, and it sprang open and went half over the side, and Calloway caught it without a word and did it for him: a hole with the point of a knife, a slit in to the hole, a twist. Then he took Kemble’s boathook from its brackets, leaned out from the rail, and slipped the card over the Welkin’s line.

The wind had it at once. It went up the line in little jerks and spins, catching the light, past the rust kite and the second and the third and the fourth, getting smaller, past the fifth, and into the knot. It did not come out of the knot.

“There’s a letter stuck in my kites,” said the horn, with interest.

“It’s your Arrival Notice,” Bjorn said into the brass. “It’s got the Rule on it.”

“I’ll take your word for the Rule.”

* * *

Kemble turned round from the rail for the first time.

“The land breeze drops an hour after dark,” she said. “It always does, at the turn of the year. When it drops, a train comes down by itself, slow, the way a sheet comes off a line when you take the pegs out. I’ll have the Walk-in on the field. They take the line as it comes and walk the whole train in, knot and all, onto the grass, and she rides the top kite down into their hands.” She looked at Rolf. “Nothing struck. Nothing cut. Nothing in my air that I didn’t put there.”

It was a good plan. Bjorn could see all of it: the dark field, the hands on the line, the white kite coming down from the sky like a leaf off a tree with no wind to hurry it. Calloway sat down on the bench with his elbows on his knees and let out a long breath.

“She’s got a day in her,” he said. “Tonight’s nothing to Saffi.”

Bjorn looked at the horn. “How long have you actually got?” he said.

“I’ve just said,” said Calloway. “She’s till tonight and past it.”

“I know, Master. I’m asking her.” He went to the brass. “Not soon. Not the master’s number. What’s left in your water, and how are your hands?”

The wire went quiet for long enough that he heard, faint and small inside the horn, the gull.

“Water for six hours,” the horn said, “if I’m mean with it, and I’ve been mean with it since the crossing. Hands about the same, in this cold. I’d not want to be up here in the dark, and that’s the truth, since you’re handing it out.” A pause. “Six hours. Not a day. Sorry, Master.”

Calloway did not say anything. He took the can of tea off the desk and held it between his palms, as though it were his own hands that had gone cold.

Kemble glanced up. The light was already the low, thin light of the short days, and Bjorn watched her do the sum everybody in the loft was doing. The lull came an hour after dark. Six hours from now it would still be afternoon.

“Then the lull is no good to her,” she said.

Rolf drew the pencil from the station book and wrote under the morning’s entry, and Bjorn, reading it upside down, saw that it was the time now and the time six hours on. Ten o’clock. Water until four. Rolf underlined the second, once, and shut the book with the pencil inside it to keep the place.

Out over the outer roads the knot turned over slowly on the wind, and something small and white dropped from the underside of it and went down, turning and turning, all the long way to the sea. It was only the Notice. Bjorn watched it until the sea had it.

End of Part 1