Asimov's SF, September 2010 (10 page)

Nonetheless, one of the graduate students who had found the books, Salvatore Bruni, was drawn back to the accounts again and again, intrigued by the large quantities of silk and by the curious varieties of wood, some from as far away as Indonesia, that Pauli had acquired, for it appeared that the merchant had never re-sold the material. Young Bruni saw what none of the investigators from Ca’ Foscari University had even guessed at—Nino Pauli had amassed the materials “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” Furthermore, it became clear to Bruni that what had been regarded as meaningless geometrical doodles on some of the ledger pages were actually airship designs, not complete designs but sketches of what might later be elaborated and engineered to a final structure.

According to a recent monograph (S. Bruni, 2001.
Evoluzione degli desegni strutturale per dirigibile di Giovanni Anafesto Pauli
. [
Evolution of the designs for airship structures of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli.
] Serie di Storia Venezia Pub. 7 Universita Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), Nino Pauli's early plans consisted of a balloon or set of balloons from which was suspended a rectangular construction fabricated of light wood, wickerwork, and cloth. Later designs incorporated balloons of different sizes gathered inside huge white silken bags ("sacchi di seta") in order to more closely resemble clouds, and the final designs employed great swaths of white gauze to camouflage the structure, the “villa,” which housed the living quarters.

6

A few days after that first airplane ride, my uncle drove us again to the grassy airfield, speeding all the way, as if in a race against an invisible competitor, but when we arrived we could do nothing more than stand inside the old hangar and look out glumly at the rain which had begun to fall. “We can't go up in this soup,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, he paced back and forth, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, he sighed, and always he watched the gray drizzle. At length he said, “We're stuck, Jason. We'll have to do it tomorrow.” He muttered a few swear words in Italian, went off to speak to one of the mechanics, then we sped back through the rain.

"Why didn't you ever get married?” I asked.

He laughed. “What a question! I don't know why I never got married. It just never happened."

We drove for a while in silence, just the rumble of the motor and the beat of the windshield wipers.

"Lucia is a nice person,” I announced.

"Yes, she's that,” he said agreeably. “And she has a remarkable singing voice, too."

"Why don't you marry her?"

He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “You ask all sorts of questions, you do. I'm too old, Jason. And she's young. Young women like young men, especially young men who have two good hands and don't have a big crooked nose in the middle of their face."

I felt momentarily sorry for Uncle Vincenzo. He had trained as a meteorologist in Italy, but had earned his living as a fencing master, then an Alpine mountain guide and downhill skier, and later as a race car driver for a French automobile company. Photos showed he had been handsome until another racing car smashed into him. Shortly before immigrating to the States he had learned to fly, and flying had been his love ever since. When World War II broke out he volunteered for the US Army Air Force, as it was called back then, and he was accepted, not as a fighter pilot, but as a meteorologist, forecasting weather for the Northeastern seaboard.

"Anyway, you've had adventures,” I told him. “That's important. Women like that, I think."

He smiled and said, “If you grow up fast enough maybe
you
can catch her."

The next day was gray with sprinkles of rain and the day after it rained even more. It was a classic northeaster, my uncle said, and he went on to explain why New England weather was the way it was. Next morning the air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, just as my uncle had predicted. The meadow was soggy from all the rain and the ground seemed to cling to our wheels, letting go just before we reached the scrub brush at the edge of the field. We skimmed over the tree tops, sailed up and up, then leveled into a straight flight toward the faded hills and low mountains on the horizon. Eventually we passed over the hills and approached the gently rounded blue mountains. We went up one lonely valley and then another and another and at last I spied the solitary cloud lingering against a green mountain wall. We flew over the cloud, then turned in a wide arc and came back to glide slower and slower, following the slope of the falling land and, at the last moment, slipping into the cloud and a bumpy halt.

Uncle Vincenzo unbuckled me from my cockpit and hurried me along the white hallway to the room where we had visited Lucia, but she wasn't there. He strode into the next room, pulling me along with his good hand while cursing softly to himself, then boosted me onto something like a stepladder, shoving me up through an open hatch and, hauling himself up, hustled me down another white hallway and into a room with windows on three sides, and there was Lucia with her hand on the ship's wheel, a wheel so big it came up to her chest. “I heard you come on board,” she said, rising from a big wicker chair that was bolted to the floor. “Sorry I couldn't greet you."

"Where is everybody?” Vincenzo's voice was tense.

"They've gone,” she said simply, as if it were a matter of indifference to her. “Gone forever. They're somewhere in flatland. And they've got all the certificates and documents to prove they've always been down there."

Lucia was as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale and I wanted to keep looking at her, but at the same time I was enchanted by the multitude of dazzling gauges and dials, some as big around as a schoolroom clock, and all ringed with gleaming brass.

"You're a reckless fool,” Uncle Vincenzo told her.

"Blame it on the company I keep.” She laughed, but it was a short laugh. “I've spent too much time with you."

"Be serious, Lucia! You can't control this thing by yourself. No one can do it alone. And the ridiculous windmills you call propellers are falling apart. You'll get yourself killed in this thing."

"This
thing
, as you call it, is the last hectare of the independent republic of Venice. I was born here. It's my home. It's where I want to be."

"You want to be here? You want to be in this wrinkled balloon, hugging the side of some god-forsaken valley until a breeze blows the contraption to pieces? Is that what you want?"

"Not at all. I plan to take it up to where it belongs."

"Oh? And where, oh where, might that be?"

"Four thousand meters. And don't bore me with stories about radar. It's all Antonio could talk about."

"Radar is going to be everywhere. You can stay in these valleys and get swatted against a mountain like a fly, or you can go up to four thousand meters and be seen on radar."

"That's more than thirteen thousand feet,” I announced.

They looked at me as if I had materialized out of thin air.

"Four thousand meters, that's more than thirteen thousand feet,” I repeated. “I can convert meters to feet."

"This pack of balloons will be torn apart at thirteen thousand feet,” Vincenzo said, turning back to Lucia.

They went on arguing. I counted fifteen dials and one clock, a big mariner's compass (with a winged lion in the middle and fancy curlicues painted around the letters N, E, S, W), five pressure gauges, three temperature gauges, and—overhead—two curved brass things that looked like sextants with pendulums. In the middle of the room there was a table with a big map under a thick sheet of glass; it showed New England and part of New York, and when you looked closely you could read little notes in tiny handwriting all up and down the Connecticut River and the Hudson River, and even along part of the St. Lawrence. I sat in one of the big wicker chairs. I don't know how much time passed, but it passed slowly.

"What's this?” I asked them. I had just then found a brass funnel attached to a hose.

"That's a speaking tube,” my uncle said. “Lucia can use it to give orders to a non-existent crew."

Lucia turned to me and said, “Your old uncle is a cruel man. He's never believed me, he's only pretended."

"I believe you'll die if you stay here."

"You've never seen this villa high among the cumulus, drifting with the clouds,” she said. “You've never seen this the way it was, the outside dazzling white with pale blue shadows in the silk, the rooms inside like jewel boxes, all floating. You don't know what it was like when I was a little girl and saw the city all together—oh, yes, it was only splendid remnants, but all those clouds drifting together, sometimes so close we could carry on conversations from one ship to another, some of them with grand terraces and ramparts and cloud towers, all white, all floating. You don't know what it's like to be free. You just don't
know
."

For a long moment my uncle didn't say anything. “I know you're in some Jules Verne dream and I can't wake you up,"he told her. “Come on, Jason. It's time for us to go.” And that's what we did.

7

By the end of the week my sister was recovering so well from her appendectomy that my parents came to Vincenzo's and collected me and my dirty clothes. On the drive home I told them how Uncle Vincenzo had taken me up in his airplane twice and both times we had visited Lucia who lived in a cloud. My parents, side by side in the front seat of the automobile, remained silent for a long moment after I had finished my story, so I knew there was something wrong. “
He took you up in that yellow box kite?
” my father asked. I said yes. “Good God!” he muttered. Then he sighed and added, “At least you're here in one piece."

"I don't remember any
Lucia
,” my mother said.

"Vincenzo doesn't report everything in his love life. It only seems that way,” my father told her. “The important thing is we have Jason back."

"The cloud wasn't really a cloud,” I explained. “It's really made of balloons."

"It's really just a foggy field in the Berkshires,” my father informed me. “He's flown there before."

"I don't think he should introduce Jason to his women,” my mother said.

"No, Dad, it wasn't a field. It was like a sailing ship. I was in the control room."

"Especially the kind of women he doesn't tell us about,” she added.

I learned that talking about those flights made my mother and father angry at my uncle, so I stopped. Besides, the whole story was too fantastic to be believed and I had other things to keep me busy.

8

The three account books preserved at Ca’ Foscari University extend the story of Giovanni Anafesto Pauli's proposal “to build a second Venice, an even more beautiful city amid the clouds.” The ledger pages demonstrate, as well as any document can, that Nino Pauli actually constructed lighter-than-air vessels, the airborne villas of legend. According to the so-called Montreal affidavit, sworn to by Santalucia Dolfino, Pauli designed and tested lighter-than-air ships starting in 1797. In 1810, seventeen “cloud-ships” bearing a total of six hundred souls gathered over the Adriatic and—like the men in the year 466 on those shallow islands off the Italian coast—they declared themselves the Republic of Venice. The airborne Republic was presided over by Nino Pauli until his death in 1837; he was succeeded by his nephew, Cosimo Grimani, who retired from leadership in 1879 and was followed first by Alessandro Dolfino and later by Cosimo Dolfino. The community dwindled over the years; there were few births and many people simply left. Cosimo died in 1940, at which time the vessels had become scattered and, in fact, most of the Venetians had abandoned the drifting and increasingly decrepit Republic and had slipped quietly into other communities on solid ground.

Unfortunately, beyond these meager documents there is little but speculation and myth. Legends have Pauli building only five balloon-borne ships or maybe a hundred. A flaming cloud-ship is said to have fallen like a meteor into the waters off the Dalmatian cost, drowning everyone on board, and another is supposed to have crashed in the Italian Alps, burying a treasure of art and gold under falling snow. The most frivolous fable has a cloud-villa coming to rest in Paris where it's somehow transformed into a
maison
close
, an elegant brothel, complete with nude paintings by Titian, as well as the big mirrors and exquisite baubles produced by the Venetian glassworks at Murano.

Of course, there are the two artifacts collected by my Uncle Vincenzo—an old painting, and a seaman's brass telescope, or spyglass. Vincenzo found these pieces of evidence, if that's what they are, after Lucia disappeared.

About three years after we left the cloud-villa for the last time, my uncle made an automobile trip up along the Connecticut River. He was working as a weather forecaster for a radio station and he was convinced the Venetian airship had been torn apart in a storm. He believed Lucia had continued the usual flight pattern—northward up the Hudson River, then east along the Saint Lawrence, southward down the Connecticut River and west to the Hudson again. Sometimes the ship had gone around the other way, but no matter which way Lucia had gone my uncle was certain that sooner or later high winds would have smashed her against the mountains that frame those rivers.

Powerful love can turn a man's life into a desperate romantic fantasy, especially an adventurous man. Vincenzo filled his silver hip flask with brandy and set off in the crazy hope he'd find his Lucia walking down the street in some little town on the Connecticut or, he said in his saner moments, at least he'd find evidence showing where the balloon had crashed. He didn't find anything along the Connecticut. So he drove across Vermont to the Hudson, parked in Burlington for lunch and, as he got out of his car, he saw the spyglass shining like gold in the window of an antique shop. The shop owner said she had bought the telescope about a year ago from a man who had ridden off on a motorcycle.