Star Winds

Chapter ONE

As the shrill whistling sound began to pierce the air, the customers drinking in the Pivot Inn glanced roofward and peered with interest through the engraved windows. Then, abandoning their tankards, they streamed out into the street to scan the sky for the source of the noise.

They soon saw what they were looking for. A big sail-ship was riding low over the tiled roofs of Olam, leaning at a perilous angle and making unsteady progress. The Pivot Inn’s landlord, who had also rushed out onto the pavement, shook his fist. “She’s breaking the law!” he shouted excitedly. “She’s breaking the law!” No one took any notice of him; everyone knew it was illegal to spread ether silk this close to town.

As the ship approached the inn the whistling became a shriek fit to curdle the brain. Hands were clapped to ears, faces contorted, and most present squeezed shut their eyes. Rachad Caban, however, kept his gaze steadfastly on the vessel, even though the unearthly shrieking seemed to be shaking his innards to shreds. She was a galleon, square-cut at stem and stern, which were raked to allow her to cut easily through the air. Her underbooms had already been taken in to prepare for a landing on spring-mounted runners, but aloft and on the outriggers she spread a full set of bellying canvas, angled to achieve a parachute effect on the descent to the ship field. Clearly, however, she was in trouble. Somehow her master had bungled the approach to the field, and finding himself losing altitude too quickly he had—completely against regulations—run up too large ether sails whose silky blue sparkle could be seen standing out among all the white windsail. Catching the ether currents now, the ship steadied and soared over the rooftops, narrowly clearing the spire of the cathedral.

There was good reason for the ban on ether sail at such low altitude—over towns, anyway. The impedimentary waves the sails caused in the luminiferous ether, whose currents they trapped to gain momentum, rebounded against the bulking mass of the ground to set up an interference effect. The result was a high-pitched sound vibration in the atmosphere which now, ringing even louder as the galleon sailed overhead, caused all below to fall to their knees in agony.

The drill-like pain abated as the ship receded. The townsfolk came to their feet gasping. Rachad still watched the galleon. A flying sailship was always a stirring sight, with its carved and painted woodwork, its masses of sail, spars and rigging to which men clung with careless-seeming skill.

“What a goddam awful row,” muttered a fat, bald man who still clutched his head.

“That’s right,” Rachad said lightly. “Earth and ether don’t mix.”

A sailor who had been drinking at the bar, wearing a hip-length crimson jacket and chunky earrings, burst out laughing. “That’s Captain Zhorga’s ship, the Wandering Queen. He’ll get it in the neck from the Portmaster for this, that’s sure. That old devil’s always in trouble—if he can’t make a landing under canvas he’s about done, I reckon.”

Rachad went back into the Pivot where he had left his drink. But he made a face when he tasted it: the etheric disturbance had turned the beer completely flat. After a moment’s thought he decided against ordering another, since the landlord might well find his entire stock ruined.

He left the inn and made his way downhill toward the lower part of the town. Rachad was a youngish man of not unpleasing appearance whose dark eyes roved restlessly, some might have said roguishly. His disposition did not belie this impression. By nature he was adventurous, but found it a misfortune to be living in a tame and quiet world. He spent much time hanging about the ship field and drinking in the taverns frequented by sailors, and would have liked to have been a man of the air himself. In his teens he had tried to get himself taken on by various merchant ships, but already there had not been enough work for seasoned sailors, let alone untrained boys.

Sadly, the great age of flying sail was drawing to a close. The reason for this was that there were no new supplies of ether silk, the marvelous material that interacted with the ether in such a way as to be opaque to its winds and currents, deriving inertia from them as canvas does from the atmospheric wind. Earth had declined so much in its level of trade that all space-faring traffic, which had brought the silk here originally, had long fallen off. Nor could the silk be made locally—Earth was too close to the sun to allow it to crystallize properly. In consequence all ether sails now in use were at the very least a generation old, more often centuries old. Every sheet lost, every sheet torn, meant the loss of yet more irreplaceable sailing power. Rachad could not say how long had passed since the last flying ship had been built, but he had heard that down on the coast at Umbuicour they were laying the keels of seagoing ships relying entirely on wind-driven canvas and unable to take to the air at all.

But that, of course, was only to speak of Earth, a decaying backwater planet which no one from outside visited any more. What was happening on other worlds it was impossible to say. Perhaps their skies were crammed with scudding sail. Rachad had even heard of worlds where the wind blew so strong that canvas alone was enough to lift the heaviest ships, which used ether silk only for steering and tacking.

Coming to Marekama Street, he walked between gable-ended, half-timbered buildings that the weak autumn sunlight invested with a sense of nostalgia. Olam was an old town that had prospered because its geographical location in relation to the seasonal ether winds made it an ideal port nearly all the year round. Rachad had lived all his life there, and even in that time he had seen its outer suburbs begin to empty and the seedy process of decay and obsolescence begin to set in.

A movement over the rooftops caught his eye. In the distance a ship was maneuvering into its landing approach. There was a sudden flowering of white canvas and a glinting flash of blue as the ether sails were simultaneously reefed.

Sooner or later he must leave Olam, Rachad told himself for the hundredth time. He thought of cities across the world that were little more than names to him, larger than Olam and still offering a greater wealth of experience. Perhaps he would go to Umbuicour and try to get work on the new sea ships. But somehow such slow, lumbering vessels did not attract him.

Presently he came to the marketplace and wandered for a time between the stalls. He lingered beneath the awnings of merchants who had recently brought in consignments of garments from foreign lands, fingering the rich velvets and satins and admiring the gallant styles. By contrast, he glanced down at his own costume. His green woolen tunic was faded and was fastened with worn cords which left it a couple of inches open at the chest, showing a mat of curly blond hair. He could have used a new pair of breeks, too; however, all this fine garb was beyond his present means. Perhaps if Gebeth were to succeed… He paused also at a nearby armorer’s shop and inspected various swords and foils. This engraved blade, now, with a scabbard plated with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl, would lend him considerable dash. But he reflected that, even leaving aside the cost, it might advertise to others an exaggerated self-esteem and so lead to his having to use it, which was far from his desire. The short poniard he already carried was jaunty enough, with its copper pommel, and did not invite challenges.

A curious thought occurred to Rachad. When air traffic eventually dwindled into insignificance—as it must—Olam would lose its place altogether. All these goods, for which it was currently a center of distribution, would come instead through Umbuicour. In his imagination Rachad could see Olam as a tumbledown ghost town whose few inhabitants reminisced sadly about the past.

He sighed and under the armorer’s watchful eye carefully replaced the slender sword. Then he left the marketplace and walked into the old part of the town where the houses were mostly of blackened timber, picturesque and ancient, until he came to the Street of the Alchemists.

In an earlier generation the street had, as its name implied, been a coterie of those who delved into the secrets of matter and labored to find the Philosopher’s Stone. Those who came after them had shown only a cursory interest in such long and fruitless researches, and the street was stocked instead with practitioners of related matters—apothecaries, metalsmiths and the like. In the whole avenue there was only one proper devotee of the ancient art, and that was Gebeth, whom Rachad referred to as his mentor, in his more flamboyant moments.

As in much of this quarter the street was laid with loose sand instead of with cobbles, for such had been the custom in older times. Rachad passed by the open workshop of a maker of bronze door-knockers and, at the next house, had occasion to make use of a sample of the same man’s work: a large heavy knocker fashioned in the form of Mercury, the winged messenger and symbol of quicksilver, which he pounded decisively against the thick plank door.

He had to pound a second time before there came a scraping of wood on wood from within and the door eased open. Standing in dimness, because of the shuttered windows, was the man he knew only as Gebeth the alchemist.

“Good day, sir,” Rachad said brightly.

The other grunted in displeased fashion. “Oh, it’s you. You’d better come in.”

Rachad followed him into a small living room which, despite the bright sunshine outside, had as its only illumination a small oil lamp on a book-strewn table in the corner. Gebeth liked to shut himself away from the outside world, to ponder, study and work in quiet solitude.

The alchemist seated himself at the table, where he had evidently been reading when interrupted by Rachad. He was a man advanced in years, his face much lined by the effort of prolonged thought. His hair was white and wispy. His eyes had an introspective look, as of one given to daydreams, but when they settled on Rachad they were steady and challenging.

“And to what do I owe this unexpected visit?”

“I am here for the same reason as always, Gebeth.”

“I have not seen you in three days,” the older man said, disgruntled. “With such laxness you will not learn much, and why should I bother to teach you?”

“Do not be displeased with me, sir,” Rachad said defensively. “I have been working to earn money. See, I have brought you a sum to help further your work.”

Gebeth inspected the coins he handed over, and glanced at Rachad suspiciously. Rachad’s countenance remained bland; in point of fact, the money was a part of his share in the spoils of a minor escapade—theft from a warehouse near the airfield—but he did not wish Gebeth to know that. Financing his research was a continual problem for the old man and Rachad regarded it as in his best interests to help whenever he could.

Gebeth sighed and waved a hand as if waving away the fumes of his former bad humor. In all honesty he could not regard Rachad seriously as an apprentice in the Hermetic Art. The boy was flighty and volatile, and little interested in abstract matters. Nevertheless he was useful as an assistant, which was one reason why Gebeth had kept him on. A certain amount of grumbling over his defections was an integral part of their relationship and not at all harmful. He had even managed to teach Rachad a smattering of alchemical lore.

He closed the book he had been studying, marking his place, and rose to his feet.

“Come.”

With a key from the pocket of his gown he unlocked a door to a short, dark corridor leading to the rear of the house. At the end of it he unlocked a second door. Rachad’s nostrils were assailed by various acrid odors, predominantly the smell of burning sulphur.

Unlike the living room, the laboratory took advantage of natural light which came through smoky glass panels in the sloping roof. It was also uncomfortably hot. Each degree of heat required a different furnace and Gebeth had half a dozen, three of which were currently stoked.

Besides the furnaces the room contained a fantastic clutter of alembics, retorts and cucurbics, crucibles and mortars, and more elaborate apparatus such as the kerotakides for performing projection, which had been used recently for it stood blackened on the workbench, and the infusorator, a cumbersome piece of equipment incorporating plates of zinc and copper bathed in acid. Gebeth crossed to the other side of the laboratory and returned with a slab of something gleaming. “This I made today by projecting mercury on sulphur.”

Rachad accepted the object and inspected it. It was yellow, with a red tint; heavy and with the feel of metal. He gasped involuntarily as he turned it over, rubbing it and holding it to the light. His eyes widened with excitement and triumph.

“You have succeeded at last! You have made gold!”

With a sour smile Gebeth took back the slab. “Not gold. This is merely a form of cinnabar, which I have given some of the properties of gold. But it is not gold.”

Rachad looked crestfallen, and stuck out his lower lip in a pout.

“All metals, as you know, are compounded of mercury and sulphur in various ratios,” Gebeth said, “so theoretically any metal can be transformed into any other by altering those ratios. That mercury and sulphur can, by marrying, yield cinnabar, would seem to confirm this fact Yet others besides myself have gone down this road, tinting and projecting for years on end without finding true gold at the end of it. Without preparing the tincture itself, nothing can be done.”

“So?” Rachad frowned. He knew the alchemist was leading to something.

“Look at me, Rachad. I am an old man. For nearly forty years I have been on this quest, trying to turn base metal into gold. But where is my gold? Do you want to expend your life likewise, Rachad? You are not properly into the hunt yet. But once it grips your soul—” Gebeth clenched his fist convulsively. “It will not let go. My advice is to leave the great work alone.”

“I have never heard you speak like this before, sir,” said Rachad in a disappointed and surly tone. “You have been full of encouragement up until now.”

“True, but in the past few days I have reached a momentous conclusion. Never will I make gold. Never will I have the Tincture that heals metals in my possession. Of that I am certain.” The old man’s voice was dry with a defeat that he had forced himself to face up to.

Rachad instantly wished that he had withheld the money he had just given Gebeth, but the thought was squashed in his general dismay. “But you have been so close,” he protested weakly.

“Hundreds of others have been as close. How many have made gold?” Gebeth took out his key ring again, and moved to a wall safe which he opened with considerable squeaking and clanging of steel. Carefully, as if handling something precious, he took out a stiff, bulky book. “There are definite reasons for my decision, which means that as from today I shall probably abandon my efforts—the last in the street to do so.” He paused and his eyes went dreamy, as though he remembered past colleagues and neighbors. “It is only fair that I should explain why. Four years ago this rare book came into my possession. Few copies of it exist in the whole world, and I am showing it to you now only in the belief that you can hold your tongue and speak of it to no one.”

Dumbly Rachad nodded.

“Let us return to the other room,” Gebeth said.

Back in the living room the alchemist laid the book on the table under the lamp. Rachad saw now that though the book was large in area it actually had few pages, but that these were thick and stiff. The binding was of beaten copper and was engraved with letters and figures in some foreign script he did not recognize.

Gebeth opened the book and began to show him some of its pages, which were closely lettered in the same strange language or else finely colored in beautiful and mysterious pictures, usually several pictures to a page, though sometimes a whole page was devoted to a single illustration. One or two of the figures had some meaning for Rachad—such as the figure of mercury, and the caduceus, a staff entwined with two serpents, which filled the seventh page—but most were completely baffling to him. Then again some of the illustrations of alchemical vessels which accompanied the text were familiar to him, but they were followed by glowing scenes which were wholly symbolic. On a high mountain grew a flower with a blue stalk, sporting white and red flowers and golden leaves, and shaken by the wind while dragons and griffins nested around it. In another picture a king and his soldiers slaughtered many young children, gathering their blood in a vessel in which the sun and the moon bathed.

Gebeth kept silent while Rachad pored over the pages.

“An interesting story accompanies this volume,” he said when the younger man had closed the end cover. “The book is known to have existed nearly four thousand years ago when by chance it came into the hands of one Nicolas Flamel and his wife Perrenelle, who lived in a country then called France. For twenty-one years Flamel tried to carry out the instructions in the book, but could not decipher the symbols for the First Agents, which as you see are very cryptic, and the advice of learned men in this respect only led him astray. Finally he journeyed to another country called Spain, where he found a man able to understand the symbols and explain the text. Unfortunately this man died before explaining everything, but by now Flamel had learned enough to be able to discover the rest for himself, and after a further five years of research he completed the tincture. By projecting it onto mercury he was able to make both silver and gold better than that from the mine.”

“Do you believe this story?” Rachad asked, running his fingertips lightly over the copper binding of the book.

Gebeth nodded. “For one who has studied the book it has the ring of truth. I have applied myself to it for four years now, and like Flamel know that I shall never comprehend it without help. Yet I am convinced that here is the secret of the preparation of the Tincture.”

“And you are going to give up?” Rachad said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“But here it is,” breathed Rachad. He held the book in his hands reverently, his eyes darting here and there over the engraved surface. “All we have to do is find someone who understands it.”

“That is just the point. There is no one on Earth who understands it. That I have already ascertained insofar as I am able. Yet recently I heard where the necessary explanations may be found.”

“Where?” demanded Rachad, his eyes flashing. “Tell me where and I shall bring them to you—that I swear!”

“You are too rash, my friend, far too rash,” Gebeth said with a smile. “Three days ago I was visited by an itinerant scholar, one of those strange people who wander about the world gathering knowledge here, there and everywhere. His conversation proved him to be knowledgeable in alchemical matters—indeed in all sciences. After some deliberation I spoke of the book to him. He already knew of it, and was greatly interested as he had never seen a copy and asked me if I could obtain this book. So eventually I showed it to him and he studied it for two hours. He then said that, to save me from further decades of fruitless toil, he would tell me a secret known to very few, which he had learned from the high priest of the Temple of the Holy Ciborium, a religious order dwelling in the city of Kalek-Tepek. This order itself sprang from alchemical origins many centuries ago, though it no longer practices the art. At any rate, it was disclosed to my visitor that there exists a second book, written by one coming long after Nicholas Flamel—something like two thousand years after. This book explains the hidden meanings in the first book, supplying the missing signs and containing much else besides. Furthermore, it is explicit enough to be deciphered by one well versed in the field. But only one copy exists, and it will never be found. It is in a secret hiding place in the Temple of Hermes Trismegistus, which is in Kars, a city in Syrtis Major.”

“Syrtis Major?”

“A region of Mars.”

Rachad looked stricken. “Mars!”

Gebeth nodded. “A planet at one time famous as a center of alchemical researches, even more so than Earth. Many are the tales of marvelous transmutations accomplished there. But do you see the irony? The one possibility of achieving our aim lies far, far beyond our reach.”

In imparting this precious information Gebeth had a definite aim. He wished to persuade the boy once and for all of the hopelessness of seeking alchemical gold, before his ambitions gelled in that direction. Gebeth knew from personal experience what happened once that fever took hold. He thought of his past labors and fell to dreaming once more, his eyes glazed. Calcination, sublimation, solution, putrefaction, distillation, coagulation… he had mastered all these main operations, as well as the adjunctive ones—congelation, fixation, ceration, projection, infusoration, and so on. He had spent much money on obtaining the textbooks of this numinous work and had a library of which he was proud.

One needed to be an artist, too, to comprehend these texts. How else would one know that the silvery water, the divine water, the ever-fugitive, the seed of the dragon, the water of the moon, the milk of the black cow, were all names of mercury, or quicksilver?

A fragment of a poem from one of his manuals drifted through his mind:

… A dragon springs therefrom, which when exposed to heat,

Devours his tail till naught thereof remains.

This dragon, whom they Ouroborous or Tail-Biter call,

Is white in looks and spotted in his skin,

And has a form and shape most strange to see.

What layman, by following this poem, would be able to alloy copper and silver, heating them in the presence of mercury which bound them into a single white amalgam?

Gebeth had tried hundreds of recipes for the making of gold, generally useless and even fraudulent, which could be obtained from spurious books or from “alchemists” who were little more than tricksters. He had learned the hard way how to distinguish those works which were genuine and imparted real knowledge. Among these were The Sophic Hydrolith and The Chariot of Antimony. He well remembered how, by following these and other authenticated works, he had embarked upon a detailed procedure for preparing the Tincture. In the course of a process lasting several months he had observed with excitement the predicted color changes, first to the deep black known as the Raven’s Head, then going through a reddish phase, then from the Peacock’s Tail with its white, green and yellow spots, to the deep red Blood of the Dragon. Then, sealed in a transparent receptacle of rock crystal, the preparation had been subjected to the most intense heat. At last it had transformed itself into the Raven’s Wing—a semi-gaseous, semi-liquid haze of glorious purple color that swirled and raved, the penultimate step, so the books said, in the creation of the Tincture. Yet try as he might Gebeth had not, after cooling and breaking open the receptacle, been able to accomplish the final stage. Several times he had started anew and repeated the whole procedure, believing that his ingredients had not been purified enough—and once wrecking his laboratory when the crystal vessel exploded—before admitting failure and immersing himself in yet more study.

On the other hand his career had not been without its joyous moments. He had, for instance, isolated the essence of animal vitality. This he had done by boiling off large quantities of urine until a residue remained. Upon his opening the vessel and exposing it to the air this residue had instantly flared up to flood the entire room with a vivid white glow eerie to behold, which had caused him much wonderment. The manual he had consulted for the experiment called this unstable substance phosphorus, explaining that it was almost unique among the compounds of earth and fire in being earth in which was mixed enormous amounts of fire in its purest state. So easily did this fire flee its corporeal prison that phosphorus constituted the natural essence for animating the body; it was responsible even for bodily warmth. Needless to say, Gebeth had been immensely impressed by this example of how subtle and variegated were the admixtures between the five elements earth, water, air, fire and ether.

Rachad was staring blankly at the tabletop. “Well, isn’t that real hard luck, sir? To learn a thing like that and not be able to do anything about it.”

“I imagine I would never have received the information if it had been at all possible to act on it,” Gebeth said resignedly. “The high priest of the Holy Ciborium would not have disclosed the tale, nor would my itinerant visitor have disclosed it to me, were not the Temple of Hermes Trismegistus wholly inaccessible. Only worthless knowledge is gained so easily.”

Gebeth smiled. Rachad’s chief interest in the business was plain to see, of course. He lusted after gold. That was the reason why he had so eagerly apprenticed himself to Gebeth.

And at the beginning, Gebeth reminded himself, he too had been driven by that hunger, almost to the exclusion of everything else. But time and decades of work had somehow wrought a change. He sought the stone by this time not merely for the wealth it would bring—he was old, now, and how much good could that wealth do him?—but for the glory of succeeding in the Great Work, for the sake of verifying with his own eyes that base metal could be transmuted into gold, and for the joy of seeing the secret operations of nature laid bare in his very own vessels. He could not say just when this change had come about. It had emerged gradually over the years.

“Mars!” exclaimed Rachad in a savage tone, thumping the table with frustration.

Outside the shuttered room, the sun sank slowly in the west.