Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [131]
He cast a strange glance at her. For a minute the woman and the man looked into each other’s eyes. Then suddenly:
“You’re really Jeanne Hargreaves’?” He demanded.
“Yes. Why?”
“How strange that I should meet you thus!” He commented, ignoring her question. “So you’re Linwood Hargreaves’ daughter, eh?”
“Yes. I’m on my way to meet him now, in Osaka.”
The man kept silent. He pushed back his cap a little, and ran his fingers through his hair, still more black than gray.
“Let’s walk a bit,” he suggested. “The night’s too fine for us to miss it, sitting back here in a corner.”
She agreed. Together, in silence under the soft glow of the lights, they paced the deck, a turn or two; a deck reminding one more of a city street, so numerous the throng was, than of anything ever seen in the old days of surface navigation. A confused murmur of speech blurred the air, fused with the throbbing of powerful electrocons. Here and there the glower of burning tobacco and its grateful odor told of one habit, at least, which not even half a century of the New Order had been able to eliminate.
They paused, presently, by the rail just abaft the kinetogram office, and looked out over the world of cloud and sea, which under the moonlight seemed to hollow upward like a vast cup, its rim fading into inchoate vagueness. Far overhead, the black bulge of the vacuum-chambers blotted out the vivid pinpricks of the stars. The creak and strain of struts and braces vaguely recalled sea-vessels of former times, Beyond the gale-breaks the outlines of whose vast out-riggers loomed against the sky, a 300-mile-an-hour hurricane was raging terrible beyond all words — a hurricane lashed into being by the hurtling trajectory of the ship herself, as she cleft the night — but on deck only a mild breeze was loitering.
A faint cloud-wrack immensely high, now and then slightly tarnished the moon. A mile or more below, as Jeanne and the novelist bent over the rail, they saw the shadow of the Imperatrice that skimmed at terrifying speed across the shining fields of vapor — fields that, gapped here and there, showed the black abysses of the ocean spinning backward, ever backward, toward the east.
Very far away to northward, a fine, slim spear of white light stabbed upward through the night. On the horizon, quiverings of radiance reached out, felt into the void, leaped and died-tenuous arms of illumination shot upward from the great aerial centre at Port Howard, on Lisiansky Island. The woman and the man kept a moment’s silence, peering into the stupendous gulf of emptiness that rushed away beneath them:
Hale spoke first.
“In the old days,” said he, blowing a trail of smoke, “even this commonplace scene, in itself, would have been considered romantic and exciting. Writers would have reveled in it and artists would have portrayed it. What an easy time they had, in those days, when there were still really new things in the world to describe! It seems hard to realize, doesn’t it, that an aerial trip around the world was once something to talk about and make ‘copy’ out of?”
“Just imagine!” Jeanne commented.
“And now — ”
“Of course. Now that China and India and Thibet are weekend excursions, on tourist schedules, what can be left to wonder at or be romantic about?” He stifled a yawn, with difficulty. “Not one uncivilized or semi-civilized place in the whole world — even the very Esquimaux and Patagonians sophisticated and selling postcards — bah! In these days of motive power drawn from the sun or from polar currents streaming to it, these days of synthetic foods, etheric energies, and all-embracing mechanism, what part is left for the personal equation?
“Civilization? Ugh! I detest it! I’d give a year of my life — five years — for a touch of the real, the raw, the primitive! Life has become as dull as men and women themselves. Are there any real women in the world to-day? “I’ve never met one. That’s why I’ve never married — ”