Chapter 4
“Airports,” Drakeforth declared with his hands on his hips.
I finished extracting my luggage from the trunk of the taxi while Drakeforth stood looking around.
“I haven’t been on a zippelin since before Mum and Dad passed.”
“And whose fault is that?” Drakeforth asked.
I started explaining in detail how having a job, a mortgage, and all the myriad things that make life the grinding chore it is, left little time for zipping off to exotic locations on a whim. Drakeforth was already vanishing through the automatic doors that led into the terminal. My silent companion appeared to be listening, though, so I felt less stupid than usual.
Loading the bags onto a trolley reminded me of why nobody enjoyed their time at airports. The cacolet-leather set had a large suitcase, two smaller suitcases and a carry on bag with little wheels and an extendable handle. Perfect for someone with four arms and a centre of gravity located around their ankles.
The courtesy luggage trolley provided by airports is one of the great ironies of life. By definition, a courtesy is an act of kindness towards others. By example, an airport luggage trolley is an act of malicious rudeness bordering on aggravated assault.
I placed the first of the suitcases on the trolley and then squeezed the smaller two in front of it. Reaching for the fourth meant the third fell off. Setting the fourth down, and repacking the third, I discovered that for some reason it now didn’t fit.
I precariously balanced the fourth case in the basket near the bar handle and laid the second case flat. Placing the third on top of it, I eyed the set-up warily. Frictionless surfaces have long been sought for their range of uses in mechanical engineering. Researchers are looking in the wrong places though. They should simply look at suitcase materials.
Moving carefully, I went to the back of the trolley and took hold of the handlebar. With the way ahead clear, I gave it a gentle push. The trolley didn’t move.
I pushed harder until my feet were set on the concrete and my face glowed with strain. Without warning, the trolley released its stored energy and shot sideways.
The luggage leapt in all directions as if still alive. I gathered the cases up, cast a baleful glare at the trolley and left it to snare its next victim.
The air inside the terminal felt like it had been captured on some distant mountain vista, shipped here at great expense and then recycled until the musk of traveller’s frustration formed a shell around every molecule.
The pale woman wandered ahead of me as I negotiated my way across the terminal’s endless carpet. As I trudged, I concluded that the only possible reason for making airport terminals so large was to give you the sense that you were already getting away from it all. The drawback was that it all included the check-in counter that shimmered like a mirage on the distant horizon.
Reaching the shining desk, I unloaded my luggage.
“Good morning, my name is Earnest. Thank you for choosing Zephyr Zippelins for your journey today.”
“Crowfat,” I said absently as I handed my ticket and passport over to the man behind the counter.
“I’m sorry?” Earnest’s visage glowed with his eagerness to deliver exceptional customer service.
“Crowfat’s Dilection of Customer Relations. It’s a vocal style for interactions when working in the service industry. It is supposed to make you appear helpful and fully capable of adding some joy to the receiver’s day. In fact, it just makes you seem like an insufferable zygote.”
“I’m not sure I—” Earnest’s teeth shone brighter than the polished counter.
I set the largest of my suitcases on the scales. The weighing machine didn’t whimper, so I took that as a good sign. “Dalmatian Hyperbole concluded that Crowfat was in fact tone-deaf, so he wasn’t really the right person to be pioneering verbal communication techniques.”
A slot in the counter purred and produced a coded luggage slip like a mottled tongue.
“Vista Class, Modicum of Comfort, or Express Transit?” Earnest asked, doing a backflip into more familiar territory.
“What’s the difference?” I slipped the adhesive luggage tag through the handle of the suitcase and lined up the two sticky sides perfectly. Pressing them together meant they were no longer aligned, and I worried that I would lose my luggage without ever knowing what had been packed for me.
The suitcase slid onto a conveyor belt, and I repeated the process with the rest of my bags while Earnest explained the seating options.
“Vista Class gives you access to the glorious sky view without having to leave your seat. Express Transit gives you speedy access to the aisle for off-boarding.”
“Modicum of Comfort?”
“That’s the middle seat.”
“I’ll take the window please.”
“Vista Class?”
“Yes, the window seat.”
“Vista Class.” Earnest said as if it were a secret handshake required to unlock the machine that printed my boarding pass.
He handed over the freshly generated page and pointed west, “Gate seventy-nine.”
My luggage had vanished through the wall, so I started the long hike past everyone else.
I found Drakeforth trying on sunglasses at a stand that also sold newspapers, magazines, and apple core futures.
“Where did you get the hat?” I asked.
“I’ll pick it up on my trip to the Aardvark Archipelago.”
“When did you go to the Aardvarks?”
“Yes,” Drakeforth replied. He paid for the sunglasses using cash, which took some convincing and finished his spending spree by going short on a three-month future contract for pickled apple cores with a fifteen per cent margin.
“Here.” He handed me a hat and dark glasses similar to his own, and yet not so similar that we might be mistaken for a couple, for which I was grateful.
“You want me to wear this?”
“No, I want you to take care of it. Feed and clothe it. See it is educated and stays out of trouble with the law.”
I put the hat on my head.
Drakeforth continued, “Only to one day, leave you and go out on its own to join a fringe cult of astronomers.”
“Astronomers are not a fringe cult,” I said, checking my look with the dark glasses in the stall mirror.
“Tell that to the people who believe that the curvature of the planet is an illusion.”
“Are we in disguise? I mean, I’m not sure we are notorious enough to require disguising.”
“Notoriety notwithstanding, Pudding, we are dressing appropriately for our culture. We shall arrive in Pathia, the locals will see us wearing our hats, dark glasses and perplexed expressions. Thus, they will know we are tourists and avoid us.”
“Like those venomous caterpillars that are brightly coloured to warn predators that they aren’t good eating?”
“Pudding, does it ever bother you that your perspective on the world is entirely limited by what you believe?”
“Nope,” I cocked my hat at a jaunty angle and we started walking again through the cavernous terminal. “We have to get to gate seventy-nine.”
Drakeforth gave an implied shrug.
“No rush, they won’t leave without us.”
“Why? Do you have the keys or something?”
Drakeforth nodded.
“Noteworthy sarcasm, Pudding.”
“Gate twelve…” I commented as we passed a sign. “Gate twelve? How many days’ walk do you think it is to gate seventy-nine?”
“There was a time when I, that is, Arthur, walked all day, every day,” Drakeforth mused.
“Now you just talk all day, every day?” I felt I was getting the hang of sarcasm.
“Imagine I am patting you on the head and saying, who’s a good girl?”
“Is she coming with us?” I asked.
“Who?”
“That woman who has been following me around all morning.”
“Well that certainly narrows it down. Is she wearing some kind of tag? Hello, My Name Is: The Woman Following Pudding Around All Morning?”
“I’m serious, Drakeforth. I’m having the oddest kind of day.”
“Well, you are uniquely qualified to determine the oddness quotient of a given day.”
I looked around as we walked. The pale woman with black hair had vanished.
“Seventy-nine,” Drakeforth announced as we reached the next gate sign.
“Really? You’re sure it’s not forty-six with the sign turned upside down and… the number four scratched up a bit?”
“Time and space do not follow the same rules in airport terminals as they do in other time-space continuums.”
I raised an eyebrow so high that if my face had been a flagpole, it would have proudly flown as the banner for cynicism.
“Why do you think these terminals are always so bandicooting large?” Drakeforth asked.
My immediate response was vetoed by an executive order from my rational mind to actually consider the question. “Well… I… I mean they have lots of zippelins to load people on to.”
“Zippelins, Pudding? Zippelins take off and land vertically. They are gleaming, cone-tipped cylinders of shiny metal. When the wings are folded in, they can be parked next to each other close enough to hold a human hair between them.”
“Yes, but they need space for the luggage transfer and to manage the flow of people.”
“Do you have any idea how luggage is transferred from the check-in counter to the baggage carousel at your destination?”
“Of course I do! It’s a system of conveyor belts and luggage handlers. You see them driving those little trucks about with the trailers all loaded up with bags.”
Drakeforth gave one of his shark’s-tooth smiles.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes?” I mentally rolled my eyes at my own foolishness.
“You put your luggage on one of those weighing machines, yes?”
“Yes.” Like the elastic band on a cheap pair of knee-high stockings, I could see defeat coming and just kept on sliding down into rumpled discomfort.
“It went on the conveyor belt thing and vanished through a hole in the wall?”
“Yes.” I sighed. Drakeforth was infuriating in the way he drew out explanations. The only thing that made it worse was the explanations were utterly ludicrous and yet, somehow plausible.
“You never see your luggage again, until it appears through another hole in the wall in some other time and space.”
“Perhaps I could come back when you have finished explaining and be impressed?”
“No, Pudding. This is important. The truth of it is that no one knows where your luggage goes. Airport terminals have a strange effect on the quantum state of matter and energy. Time and space don’t like to talk about it.”
“So why are the terminals so large?”
“Because the larger the terminal is, the less likely you are to lose your luggage. It has been theorised that the null-space of a terminal void allows for the extrapolation of all the possible outcomes of every single state of matter.”1
“Then why aren’t there suitcases drifting around everywhere? They should be popping in and out of existence all around us.”
“No one can explain why, Pudding. Simply put, you don’t have to believe the Universe is a cat to know nature abhors a vacuum cleaner.”
“How is that putting it simply?”
Drakeforth had abandoned the conversation for the boarding gate. I joined the queue behind him, a sense of unease crinkling the skin between my shoulder blades.
I scanned the code on my boarding pass and walked through the door, the strange sensation of transience that rippled through me probably was just nerves.
1 You might want to bookmark this bit. It is going to be important in the fifth book in the Drakeforth series.