Read Online Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine - Free Book Online

from her concerns, and she looked up to find herself in front of a clockmaker’s shop. A clockmaker’s shop that also sold automata.
    Prominently presented in the shop window was a fine specimen of an automaton—an artist seated at a drawing-desk, about three feet high. A display model, designed to demonstrate the maker’s skills, only the right half of its body was clothed. The left half lay open to the air, displaying its gears and works.
    But though the mechanism was impressively complex and finely made, it was flawed. The automaton bent and dipped its pen and scratched out its work with a cunning and lifelike motion, but the drawing that emerged—a ship at sea, its sails flying—had a long horizontal line drawn right through the middle of it. Several more copies of the same drawing were visible within the shop, on sale for a penny apiece, and each one was marred by the same error.
    The fine automaton was damaged, just as her life had been damaged by Simon’s perfidy.
    With grim determination she turned from the shop window and continued to the next inn.

 
    4
    THE AERIAL DOCKS
    Arabella awoke the next morning to a brusque kick and an order to “move along” from the keeper of the shop in whose alley she had spent the night. Stiff, cold, and miserable, she parceled out a few coins from her nearly empty purse for a stale bun and a drink from a shared water cup.
    At some point to-day, she reflected as she gnawed on the tough bread, she would have to find some way to send word to her mother about what had occurred at Simon’s. But her prime concern was to find and stop Simon.
    *   *   *
    Having finished her paltry breakfast, she determined that she would concentrate her attentions on the inns nearest the aerial ship docks. If Simon were still in London, she thought, he would no doubt have taken lodging there.
    The docks were not difficult to find. With Mars in opposition, dozens of Mars-bound ships were departing each day, floating up into the sky like Newton’s Bubble—the soap bubble in the great man’s bath which had led him to the principle of aerial buoyancy. All she had to do was follow their path down to its origin.
    The Mars Docks, once she arrived, proved to be a riot of clamor and noise that made the London streets on which she had spent the previous day seem bucolic by comparison. Men and beasts labored, hauling boxes and barrels to and from the docks; sweating stevedores walked in treadwheels, powering the cranes that lifted bales of cargo to the ships’ decks; hawkers cried the virtues of their products, ships, and services; and under all rumbled the ever-present roar of the great furnaces.
    But it was the Marsmen—the ships themselves—their masts swaying as they bobbed on the tide, that drew Arabella’s attention. Smaller than the seagoing ships they resembled, they differentiated themselves by being constructed of honey-blond khoresh -wood, which gleamed like gold in the early morning sun.
    Without khoresh -wood, or “Marswood” as the English styled it, Marsmen would be tiny ships like the fragile little Mars Adventure in which the brave Captain Kidd had been the first Englishman to reach Mars. Kidd had been very lucky to survive his arrival on Mars, and if not for his discovery of the khoresh -tree he would not have returned. Stronger than oak but lighter than wicker, khoresh -wood was now both the major item of Martian export and the material that made interplanetary travel practical.
    And with that thought, the sough of wind in the spars and rigging made her ache with homesickness, reminding her as it did so painfully of the similar sound made by the Martian wind in the khoresh -trees of Woodthrush Woods. Perhaps some of these brave ships might be built of wood from her family plantation … the very plantation where, even now, Michael might be taking toast with guroshkha -jam and planning his day.
    Her