Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Read online

Lighter than Air, by Norman Spinrad

  It’s your dream come true, or at least advertised as such. What work-a-day girl on paid vacation from the work-a-day whirl wouldn’t dream of a cruise on a grand luxe liner, and hopefully a romantic one? And here you are parading your stuff up the gangplank of the Cloud Nine.

  But hey, you’re not merely parading, you’re sashaying, and so is everyone else, and not up a rickety plank stairway with a third-rate cruise company logo on the canvas sides, but jetway out of a Bollywood musical, a long tunnel undulating in a sensuously serpentine manner whose rose-colored walls curve seamlessly into sky-blue overhead, rising gently to a gilded rococo entry port festooned with a gigantic aloha lei of morning glories and lavender lilies wafting welcoming sultry perfume towards you.

  Everyone ascending to the cruise liner, whatever they’ve actually paid for, is dressed in first class Eurotrash yacht-guest style; pastel blues and pinks, lime greens and lemon yellows, whites and creams, pinstriped seersucker and tastefully-muted floral prints, Panama hats and straw pillbox hats. You can’t tell the penurious party-crashers from the minor movie stars, Colombian cocaine heiresses, and four-star TV chefs, and you certainly don’t want to be taken for one yourself.

  Mysterioso is the cruising style of your onboard cruising game, who’s to know who you are or how long you’ve had to save up for your less than top of the line accommodations when you put the land behind you, as long as you dress first class, right, and it’s not as if you’re planning to sleep alone in your second class cabin. For which purpose, better not to dress to blend in, but to stand out.

  If everyone else is dressed for the Polo Lounge or the Cannes Film Festival boardwalk, show some stark black and red flash, nothing punky, Ralf Lauren forbid, but with just enough edge for the metrosexual Flapper to draw the masculine eye. A loosely-flowing sleeveless Coca-Cola-red silk shift cut asymmetrically from the right hip down across to below the left knee. A primary black lace cloaky thing that only looks like a sweater rakishly tied over your shoulder for a trip to the tennis court and a black derby titled the other way, who cares about the less than appreciative looks the outfit gets you from the feminine competition, you’re not here to hang with the girls, now are you.

  Through the lei-draped entrance and directly into the Grand Salon, a great flattened ovoid space, windowless, but with a round bubble of a skylight over the center of the room where fluffy white clouds drift across a bright blue sky, sending a slow dance of light and shadows across the softly glowing mother-of-all-pearls walls. A light-as-air spiral staircase depending from a spidery cable frame ascends at the fore of the salon.

  A long bartop of thin silvery metal is likewise suspended along the port curve, and there are service doors along the starboard curve through which waiters in white eternal summer surfer tuxedos emerge carrying ice-buckets of champagne to round tables with seating for the full compliment of two hundred and fifty passengers scattered around the floor, laid out with white napery, but otherwise holding only white champagne flutes and finger-food platters.

  No one’s sitting down as the last of the passengers board, and you secure a glass of grand cru brut, and drift about to the low muttery mix of retro Dixieland jazz and instrumental steel drum reggae like everyone else waiting for the magic moment.

  Which arrives to a blare of french horny fanfare modulating to a bassoon and flute hornpipe as the Captain descends the staircase from on high.

  Of course he needs no introduction. Of course he’s the Captain. Who else could he be in that costume?

  A royal blue officer’s uniform, but rakishly cut and tailored into a kind of punked Deco tuxedo, complete with white ruffled neck and cuffed formal shirt and one heavy gold chain in lieu of a silly bow tie. Cowboy cut pants tucked into black patent leather boots six inches below the knee. A red leather captain’s hat with a white brim trimmed with a golden eagle’s wings medallion, long carefully coifed wavy blond hair flowing down around the ears like the drapery on a Foreign Legion Cap. A dark black moustacheless beard closely trimmed to accent a noble Tarzanic chinline. Aquiline nose supporting airforce mirror shades.

  Descending the spiral staircase with the athletic grace of a ballet dancer on his way to dunk one off the backboard.

  A dreamboat hunk to die for!

  “Welcome to the Cloud Nine,” he intones in a rich and projective captainly bass, but with something tantalizingly arch beneath it like a cowboy take beneath a BBC accent. “I’ll be your Captain Nemo for this voyage, it’s not my name, but what the hell, maties, better than Captain Bligh, now ain’t it? We’re about to depart on our magical mystery tour, and you don’t want to miss that, so y’all come up to watch from the Sky Dome.”

  And he turns to lead the parade up the spiral staircase.

  There’s no unseemly rush, but still you find yourself in the middle of it when you emerge under a clear glass dome, a long ovoid that covers most of the length of the body of the ship, about two football fields long, with a fenced porch of some kind running around it behind lines of closed doors. There’s a small bridge fore of it with a windowed balcony around it, making it look like a flattened lighthouse. The round Grand Salon skylight sits in the middle of the deck surrounded by a high protective inward-bending wire fence like something atop a skyscraper viewing platform. Three silver metal cylinders project up through the Sky Dome canopy at regular intervals, looking much like steamer smokestacks. No napery on the small cafe tables up here, and there are also scattered beach chairs, director’s chairs, and chaise lounges.

  Nothing else is visible save the blue dome of the cloud-speckled sky.

  And the wings of the ship.

  Yes, the Cloud Nine does have wings. Huge wings, each twice as long as the ship itself and ten feet thick, covered atop with what can only be checkerboard grids of black solar cells, their trailing edges spouting long lines of presently immobile propellers. It’s like standing on the back of a gigantic metal manta ray.

  There’s a judder and then the ship begins to slowly float to oohs and ahs, yours included.

  Upwards towards the drifting clouds.

  “We are now underway,” the Captain announces superfluously. “The Cloud Nine floats on vacuum cells that fill most of the hull, but the solar cell wings that power it are also vacuum cells, and we can’t turn them into keels until the sails are unfurled, which makes her a wee bit wobbly on the ascent, so you swabs gotta help keep her weight evenly balanced until we reach cruising altitude, which is why you can’t be allowed on the promenade until then. You won’t fall off when we let you out unless you climb over the railing to commit suicide. Go ahead if that’s your thing, you’ve all signed waivers, and anyway we’re insured.”

  With which the Captain leaves for the bridge.

  The ship continues its stately rise, rocking a bit back and forth on the breezes, until the lowest of the passing clouds are level with it and tracking it like porpoises. Then it stops. As the wings turn on their propellers and slowly drop down to sixty-degree angles to the hull of the ship to form a V-shaped double keel, the three “smokestacks” expand upward, revealing themselves as masts. The foremost unfurls a great silvery balloon spinnaker, the rear mast sprouts spars that spawn two levels of triangular sails, the middle mast, twice as tall as the others, puts out old-time clipper ship square rigging.

  The masts rotate independently, the sails catch the winds, the airship heels over a few degrees to port, and the Cloud Nine is sailing through the sky, scattering low-flying clouds before its misty bow-wave.

  The Captain returns to the Sky Dome. The airship more or less rights itself.

  “We’re crossing east across Upper New York Bay now because they haven’t allowed airships to fly over Manhattan ever since the Hindenburg, but we’re about to let y’all out on the promenade to get a good view of the skyline and the Statue of Liberty as we head out across the Atlantic. But to keep the ship balanced on an even keel, we ask ladies to go to port, and gentlemen to starboard.”

/>   He signals with a wave, and hatless surfer dudes in short-pantsed white sailor suits open the doors to the promenade, and like everyone else, you rush through them to stare outward and downward over the chest-high railing.

  You’re not exactly flying, you’re truly sailing through the air. You’re up there in the clouds, you have to hold down your derby against the wind of passage caressing your skin flirtingly, but you can smell the briny odor of the bay directly below, and the elusive hum of the city can still be distantly heard, and while the Statue of Liberty is not much more than a green smear on an island from this angle, the Manhattan skyline maintains a vertiginously foreshortened three-dimensionality.

  Awesome, thrilling, spectacular, but in a Zenlike languid manner. The Cloud Nine, to judge by the breeze of passage, can’t be moving much faster than an orca at sprint speed, and the distance and scale of the slowly receding vista of the city creates the visual and visceral illusion that you’re moving even slower, like a great sailplaning albatross riding the mother of all thermals. No engine sounds. Nothing but the wind and the barely audible beehive buzz of the city and the barest undertones of waters lapping shores.

  It’s like being at one with the angels.

  Or it would be if it wasn’t so erotic.

  Well, call it sensual, like the arousal of the skin as a full-body sensory organ, like taking a banked curve in a Formula One Ferrari, like body-surfing an endless wave. As if you were doing all those things while flying like a bird. You could luxuriate unfrustrated in this sweet somatic state forever, you’re not quite sexually aroused, but on the other hand you know you damn well that you would be at the slightest romantic provocation.

  And here comes one now, and primo.

  Ladies portside or not, and there are a good hundred or so of you lined up gazing out over the railing, here comes the Captain, the only male in sight, promenading towards you through what’s on offer, which most of it clearly is, like the cock of the walk.

  Which he clearly is, nodding, smiling, winking, muttering whatevers, not quite yet pressing the flesh but almost, displaying what he’s got on offer.

  As he approaches you, call it predatory instinct, call it a spontaneous genius vamp, you brush your hand across your brow under the lip of your derby as if brushing away a breeze-blown wisp of hair, and surreptitiously flip it off your head backwards, away from the wind of passage, and towards him.

  The Captain snatches it neatly out of the air.

  “Nice move,” he tells you all too knowingly. But he is grinning approvingly. “Dropping your hanky would be so retro.”

  “Nice catch yourself.”

  He laughs, studies your derby attentively, or pretends to, as he hands it to you. “Nice hat.”

  You grin back, a little girlishly, a little edgily, grab his own hat, and do likewise. “Nice hat yourself,” you tell him. You pop it on your own head, plant the derby on his.

  The fancy red leather seacaptain’s hat probably looks silly on you from a certain point of view, but it does match your dress, and you strike a pose like a fashion model doing a deliberately retro Coca Cola Girl on the cover of Vogue.

  The black derby on his head somehow does go with his royal blue officer’s suit, pushing the effect away from uniform and deeper into Deco tuxedo, and him into arch cinematic suave, as he mimes twirling a phantom cane doing a little two-step.

  You laugh, he laughs. You take off his hat, tip it to him, and make to return it, but he clamps his hand on the brim of the derby. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep this for now, and we can exchange again this evening,” he says and he takes his captain’s hat from you, and returns it to your head.

  “Doesn’t that leave you out of uniform?”

  He tips your own derby to you. “I’m never in uniform, but I’m always in costume,” he tells you by way of exit line, “and you seem to like it.” And sashays up the promenade, tipping it likewise here and there to the competition.

  “And so do they,” you mutter sourly, but he’s out of earshot.

  #

  You’re still wearing his signature chapeaux as you find yourself gliding up the spiral staircase out of a sea of feminine glowers like Ginger Rogers into the flame and mauve ocean sunset of the Sky Dome and out onto the promenade, men’s side this time, why not.

  The sea is an infinite mirror of the equally boundless sunset. The fluffy clouds drifting by you glow pastel red like bouquets of roses tossed by passing cupidly angels. You walk up the promenade towards the bow, towards the bridge, and you discover that it runs all the way around the ship. There’s a ladder leading down to it from the Captain’s catbird seat, and yes heis there gazing heroically forward, of course he is, and yes he still is wearing your derby.

  You take off the Captain’s hat, start waving it, and after a few beats he sees you, of course he does, answers with a tip of your derby, and you eye him slowly descending the ladder facing forward, step after step, a vertical dancer’s cakewalk, a show-off routine which he performs with admirable and enticing grace.

  “Enjoying the view?”

  You look him up and down. He looks you up and down.

  “Are you?”

  He takes you by the hand and a galvanic thrill runs up your arm and down through your body at this first touch, as, to judge by his self-satisfied smirk, he knows all too well.

  He leads you forward to where the promenade bulges outward at the prow of the ship, a pulpit hanging out above the sunset mirror of the sea below like the bowsprit of the ship and you’re the figurehead, a dolphin effortlessly body-surfing the aerial bow-wave, above and beyond the material world.

  But you can’t help being a material girl.

  You spread your arms up and out like Winged Victory.

  You laugh. “You bastard! You’ve got to know I’ve seen this movie!”

  He laughs. “Who hasn’t? But this is not the Titanic and there are no icebergs up here to collide with, just clouds, and if you hit one, you float right through it. . .”

  And you do, as the bow of the airship glides through a misty white puffball and out again into the open air. “On the Silver Screen as schlocky romantic tragedy, above it all as a merry little take of romantic farce, come on, you know you want to. . .”

  And of course you can’t help yourself.

  “I’m on top of the world!” you shout, breaking up into giggles, and he breaks up in a more masculine version, and then of course you’re laughing in each other’s arms, which of course was the intent of the pixie piece of business in the first place.

  And of course the first kiss is the next step in the musical comedy dance.

  But it’s not PG rated at all.

  It’s seriously serious and seriously hot, open-lipped, tongue-on-tongue for a long lingering beat, breast-to-chest, a quick swirl of pelvis-to-pelvis that leaves you, if not breathless, full-bloodedly eager for more. Much more. Everything you can think of more, and hopefully a few things that only he can.

  A breeze flips the Captain’s hat off your head, up, up, and away. He just laughs.

  “Frankly, Scarlett,” he tells you, “I don’t give a damn.”

  “And neither do I,” you cry, taking your hat from his head and gaily flipping it away. “Shall we dance? Or you got a better idea? Like in the Captain’s cabin?”

  “You do know how to whistle, don’t you Thoroughly Modern Milly, but what makes you think I’m that kind of guy?”

  “So what kind of guy are you? I don’t need your little bird to tell me you’re not gay.”

  “I’m your Sky Captain,” he tells you, “and don’t you bother to tell me you’ve ever. . . had one before.”

  “What do I have to do to. . . have this one?”

  “A gentleman never tells.”

  “I’m not asking a gentleman, I’m asking you.”

  “Then ask me again when I’m feeling less like a gentleman,” he tells you, “like in my cabin. . . when we’re over Paris. I promise you something spectacular.” And he turns a
nd ascends the ladder backwards to the bridge, blows you a kiss.

  “Ready when you are, C.B.!”

  #

  Or so you hope are, as you flash the Captain’s card at the snobbish steward playing gatekeeper to first class. He leers at the sight of it, then at you, as he admits you to the descending staircase with a smarmy little bow.

  And now you comprehend why first class is down here in what one would think would be steerage, and why those who can afford it are willing to pay for voyaging in a dreamscape likethis.

  A salon like the Grand Salon above only a good deal smaller, and with the domed ceiling done up a mirror.

  Mirroring not the sky but the floor.

  The floor that isn’t there.

  Well, it must be there because you’re standing on it, but it’s some kind of plastic or glass so perfect that you can’t quite see that it’s there, holding you in the air thousands of feet over verdant cloud-shadow-dappled farmland in bright sunlight.

  This isn’t like flying. This isn’t like floating. This isn’t like anything you’ve ever felt before. And that the ceiling above is the mirror image of the passing ground below doubles the magical effect. If this were at all humorous, which it isn’t, you’d know how Wile E. Coyote feels running a dozen horizontal steps off a cliff and then looking down.

  But you don’t fall, and as the shock passes it’s replaced by a giddy hit of transcendent power at the wonder of standing there magically and effortlessly aloft above it all. And as you catch your breath, you notice that there are couches and chairs scattered about the floor, soft cushy things of clear gel, and a dozen or so people sitting in them, talking, sipping drinks, attempting seductions, like gods and goddesses of the air to whom it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  There’s a ring of doors around the salon, all of them closed, all of them numbered; the doors to the first-class staterooms, no doubt, save for one right at the front painted royal blue, than can only be the Captain’s cabin.

  You stride directly across the void to it, knock.

  “Open sez me,” says the voice of the Captain.