Canticle Blue

19. Lillith

The combined agility of everyone would be required to move the chosen airship to the floor of the Great Room, even though it weighed very little. After breakfast, the team gathered on the fourth terrace to try.

Tor told them he felt it would be important to keep the ship as level as possible on the way down. If there were a force constantly pushing against the the R-type elements of the ship, he was concerned about what would happen if it were tipped. To add to the difficulty, the ship was also wider than any of the staircases, so it would have to be held above their heads. Clearly the Per'sa had not designed the city for this. But the width also meant that they could rest the ship's pallet on the railings to change positions if needed. The move took the better part of an hour but, in the end, the area they selected for the airship had ample room and worked well.

As soon as the ship was in place, they surrounded it with lampstand globe lights and tried to determine how to unwrap it. The three main mooring lines for the ship were attached to rings on the bottom of the gondola and connected to hand winches on the pallet, which meant that the covering nets, at least, could be safely removed. Having done this, they found three folded ballonet casings resting on top of the passenger compartment. The largest two—which Syl called "wings"—were connected above the sides of the gondola, extending from slightly ahead of the piloting area in the front to well beyond the passenger compartment in the rear. The third casing filled the area between those in the rear and sheltered an access door there.

Havilan showed the group a small piece of airship fabric which Annibet had found in a work complex. Because of its shape, he felt it was a construction scrap and not a repair patch. It was made of four seamless layers of exotic and normal matter. The outermost layer was Shil. The one beneath that was a flexible, evidently silicon-based material, then a thin layer of N-type above another layer of normal matter. He demonstrated that the fabric could be deeply creased without lasting effects.

After seeing that, they felt more confident working with the material, and they slowly began to extend the lateral, wing-like casings. But they were sometimes reluctant to touch the Shil surfaces because they seemed either too fragile or simply too exotic. It was more than a little disorienting, too, to see reflections of their hands fragment, partially disappear, or appear elsewhere. Other times, it was as if their fingers actually penetrated the surface.

As the casings unfolded, the shape of the entire craft became evident. It was elliptical and relatively flat on top, but with enough curvature and fin-like edges to give it almost an organic appearance, not unlike the streamlined shapes of low-profile fishes. Its piloting canopy featured two curving banks of five windows, framed with N-type matter, and wrapped around the front of the ship in such a way that the pilots' field of view would be greater than 180 degrees.

Once the lateral casings were fully deployed, their storage creases all but disappeared. The third casing was not moveable. In its packed state, it was partially covered by two folded, fin-like vertical stabilizers with rudders. The fins were rigid and also covered with Shil. When they were raised, they easily snapped into their upright positions above the gondola.

After that the propulsion units were fully visible. There were three of them, housed in ring-shaped nacelles, mounted on top of the gondola at port, starboard, and center locations behind the piloting area. They were propeller-driven but did not appear to require fuel. Their power generation apparently came from an interaction between R-type matter in both the nacelle rings and the propeller blades. In their storage positions, the propeller assemblies pointed downward, and their rings were offset from the props by ninety degrees and locked.

After stepping into the passenger compartment for several minutes, Tor reemerged and spoke to Syl and Geddes. "I think it would be worth it, while we have the ship down here, to deploy at least one of these drive units to see if it still works. We could get some idea of what happens between the nacelle rings and props when their relative angle is changed. The brake release for the propeller on the central unit looks pretty straightforward. Once it's off, we could use the unit's control lever to change the ring angle. Havilan says all of the controls are labeled. The outer drive units are meant to be controlled together, but the center one is free and can be rotated in almost any direction. It's designed to be used with most of the thrust-direction ductwork you can see on the ship, too. You can apparently even use it to fill the ballonets with air. It wouldn't change the lift of the ship, but it could tell us if the ballonets are still usable."