Chapter 5 Triumph in Lusaka

If you’re new to this series, this is chapter 5 of a novel about an airship that I believe— more or less, but I want people with expertise to check my work about that— could really be built. The purpose of the novel is to prove how useful the machine would be and mobilize philanthropically-minded capitalists to build it! To get up to speed, read chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 4. You can download the whole book as a Word doc, or as a PDF, or if you like the Kindle format, it’s available from Amazon here. Also, all the chapters are available as an audiobook here, except for chapters 18 and 19 (no reason for that, just an error, I’ll fix it soon). Here’s the audio for this chapter.

Isn’t the image cool? It’s AI-generated, and represents this chapter, in which the Jove’s Chariot airship, after flying around the world and through a harrowing thunderstorm and getting outlawed on phony charges of “nuclear proliferation,” delivers to the desperate Zambian people the part they need to repair a broken fusion power plant and end a horrific blackout. But it’s certainly NOT an accurate depiction of the airship that the narrative describes. AI can’t do that yet, as far as I know. Imaginatively, though, I think the impression the image makes is a good fit for the story. Feedback is welcome. Comment sections are good for that, but e-mail or Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever is fine too.

By the way, the coolest airship use case in this chapter may be the close encounter with elephants!

Africa! The grand, vivid, harrowing continent, so full of life, racked with pain and sorrow and yet not sad, full of sunshine, taking it one day at a time. With the storm past us, and the urgent governance question settled, we could settle in and enjoy being in Africa.

I'm no expert on Africa, not by a long way, though I spent almost ten years there altogether, wandering through fifteen to twenty countries, depending on how you count a few casual overflights. I was usually in the air above it, and spent less than 10% of my time on the ground, in remote beauty spots or in just a few cities. I had many opinions about Africa then which were quite ignorant, and I'll try to avoid repeating them unless they're essential to the story. I've learned better since then from books written by Africans themselves, for now a great blossoming of African literature is underway, and people all over the world see those harrowing old days intimately from people that experienced them. 

In some ways I was naive then, blinded by my desire to think well of Africans, and often, since then, as African writers have educated me about the real experience of being African, I've felt ashamed at how, back then, in my eagerness to approve, I felt warm friendship on the briefest acquaintance for people, and types of people, whom their fellow Africans knew to be scoundrels and oppressors. Face, with all his cynicism and contempt, understood them better in many ways. He took it for granted that Africans begged, and took bribes, and abused power. And he was able to navigate Africa, I mean socially, politically and economically, because of that insight. 

Yet I think they had great charity and courage that I, in my naivety, saw with the eyes of hope, which Face didn't understand. Circumstances and hard experience were at the root of many of Africans' faults, and as life has gotten easier, Africans have become less corrupt, with a new spirit of freedom, civic virtue and professionalism. And things I admired about Africa remain as the seamy side that Face knew best has receded. Their spontaneity. Their frankness. A certain resiliency even in the hardest circumstances. And the music! Choirs would spring up in most unexpected places, and how their joyous voices stirred the soul! 

It was a much bleaker place then that it is now, and the rest of the world tried not to think about it because it made them feel guilty that there was a place so poor, so full of hunger and premature death, so deficient in literacy and electricity and shoes and so much else that we take for granted. But in the Africans, I always sensed a strange and lively hopefulness. Now the thought of Africa fills the whole world with hope. It's home to more than a third of mankind, projected to approach half in twenty years. And now most of its people live in modern homes with electricity and send their children to school, African universities climb the international ranks, African companies are becoming household names and not just in natural resources but in creative endeavors and at the technological cutting edge, and retirement portfolios rarely have less than 20% invested in Africa. 

Far be it from me to take credit for that! Africa's new prosperity was the work of parents toiling in fields and factories to give their children the education they never had, of civil society organizations holding governments accountable and working with churches to end ethnic hatreds and forge new civic identities, of national leaders working earnestly within the rules of democracy to propagate a vision of modernization, establish consensus, and then implement it with vigor, determination, and adaptability. Most of all, perhaps, it was the hard work of many devout preachers that converted African men from philandering and drinking to being responsible, hard-working, monogamous fathers and husbands. All that we airshipmen did was to provide the physical means of connectivity with the world economy, plugging Africa in to opportunities. We removed a certain curse of geography, namely, that so much of Africa's population is landlocked, lacking in navigable rivers and good roads. We brought them trade and globalization, and they leveraged that into economic growth and prosperity.

It was after we bought the airship that it really hit us that we were in Africa. The spirit of the vast continent, wild and ancient, endowed with more giant magnificent beasts than the rest of the world put together, full of rainforests and deserts and savannas, came home to us, overwhelmed us. And amidst much praise and admiration for our exploits at this stage in a career, I occasionally hear a blue note of blame that we spent three days partying and enjoying ourselves while Zambia still waited. It's true the atmosphere on Jove's Chariot was wildly festive. To own that airship was very exciting. But we wouldn't have stood for a delay if there hadn't been thunderstorms around Lusaka. 

In truth, the airship was still in considerable danger, being too crippled and short of fuel to outrun bad weather. Archie Jones’ plan to transfer lift hydrogen to the fuel tank had been studied, and rejected for the moment, because the strain the ballonet fabric had been subjected to when the airship went above the altitude ceiling might increase the risks of what seemed a risky move in any case. I learned more about the airship’s danger than most, because with my broken leg, I had to stay in the cockpit and listen to the counsels of the leaders, the gloomy Andreas Fulk, the usually unflappable Archie Jones now decidedly nervous, and even Jake looking rather grim at times as Leonard Lord explained that our only chance was to go in the wrong direction and hope to squeeze between two storm systems. But this desperation was confined to the cockpit. Other guys, meanwhile, were deconstructing the deck again in preparation for the delivery of the Inner Torus, which would have been my job if my leg worked. 

At this point, Jake told the crew that weather conditions delayed entry to Lusaka, so we might as well help ourselves to the fine wines stashed on board, and then someone suggested bungee jumping, and Jake said it was a great idea. He called it a "training exercise." Pretty soon, I could see a bunch of the guys plunging giddily down head first, then bobbing up and down like yo-yos, screaming with excitement. It made me frightened just to look at it, but it looked fun too, and I envied them a little. Well, I got plenty of chances later. Jake, meanwhile, was watching in a very different way, watching how the guys moved, measuring the skill and courage of the men who were now under his command.

And then we saw the elephants.

The scene was mostly dirt and grass and a few thin trees here and there that cast a thin shade. Without knowing it, we were exercising our imaginations to make it exotic, telling ourselves, "This is Africa!" even though nothing about the scene set it apart, as far as we knew, from a lot of places in America. In a word, it was ordinary, and then in the midst of it, a surprise, a miracle, were twenty living mammoths, treading giant footsteps on the land, as if in some mysterious pilgrimage. Not that they look large from where we were except by comparison to their surroundings. They were a long way off. But we knew we had to drop everything and go see the elephants up close. The bungee jumping stopped. All the guys got on board, and spoke in whispers, though that was hardly necessary yet. Archie Jones set a course with expert care. He gave us some momentum, and then the engines fell to whisper quiet, like the crew, moving in slow. Somebody rolled back the undercurtain. When we were straight above them, Archie Jones pointed the propellers towards the sky, and eased slowly down, the whispering propellers pushing air up to move the enormous airship down. 

The elephants didn't notice us for a long time. I think they thought we were a cloud. There was nothing but air between the edges of the huge hole where the deck had been, while we stood behind a railing watching the elephants. They were walking. I fancied that they were grateful for the shade. For what seemed like a long time we just watched them, wondering, silent, grateful to be in the presence of one of nature's masterpieces. It probably wasn't really more than 10 minutes. People get bored quickly. But fortunately, before we had time to get bored, someone had a bright idea. I don't remember who. But they said:

"Can we feed them?"

And I think we all took that to mean, are we allowed to feed them? And I think it was almost exactly the same moment when all of us realized: Sure we can. We're outlaws anyway. We can do anything we like. Who can tell us no? Ah, the joy of that! It was like Christmas morning, when you burst out of the bedroom and you're finally allowed to open all your presents. Of course we would feed the elephants.

"What do they like to eat?" asked Ro Jarvis.

"Peanuts?" I asked.

"I think they'd prefer lettuce," said Scout. "We have lots of that."

"Get all the vegetables out here," said Pierre.

Soon there were boxes of carrots, bananas, pineapple, all sorts of leafy greens, some of it left over from our last stop in the Atlantic, some of it purchased from the crowds by Face with Scott's cash hoard, and our cook, Malachi Drey, had a table and cutting boards and knives and was chopping and tossing furiously, making "elephant salads," which he wrapped in a tortilla to make a kind of burrito, which could be stabbed onto a stick. Not that we had sticks on board exactly, maybe girders or some sort of tool, I don't remember, but anyway, the guys look like they were carrying giant marshmallows on sticks to be roasted over a fire. Then they harnessed up, and lowered themselves down, little by little, until they were within reach of the upraised trunks of the elephants. For the elephants had noticed us by now, and they seemed to understand. 

The first handoff was not smooth, and the stick fell to the ground, and the burrito popped open. A couple of the elephants picked up the scraps and seemed to like them. That made the others eager. We soon got the hang of it, and ten crewmen were yo-yoing up and down on ropes and giving the elephants a treat. How funny those begging trunks looked, the giant creatures begging like birds in a nest. I felt a little guilty as if we were tempting them to betray the dignity of the greatest of beasts. But then Scout had another idea.

"I'm going to go shake hands with one," he said.

"What?!" said a dozen voices.

"It might not be wise to get where they can touch you," said Roy Dodge

"You think they'll grab me and pull me down?" asked Scout.

"Maybe something like that."

"They seem friendly to me,” said Scout. “And anyway, you only live once."

The mood became solemn as Scout harnessed up and slowly, slowly descended. The rest of us stood still and didn't talk, reduced to spellbound spectators. This meeting of two species seemed full of significance. For some reason, it seemed tremendously important that some sign of friendship between Scout and that elephant take place. As if the elephant had some power to bless us to be in Africa. That's silly, but I'm just trying to capture the mood, the suspense. In the cockpit, Archie was watching on camera, and was in an agony of concentration trying to hold the airship’s position perfectly, so that Scout could ease in and make contact. But that's very difficult, and Scout always found that he was moving a little, up, down, side to side. The rope was swinging, too. Scout used the remote to pull a little up, a little down, trying to get to just the right place. His arm reached out. The elephant's trunk reached up. For many seconds that seemed like a long time, they seemed to be reaching for each other. Then, finally, he was holding the end of the trunk. He stopped swinging, held in place by his contact with the trunk. For a few seconds, we watched in awe, and then we started cheering, and he let go and came up again, 40 feet up, level with the bottom of the airship, and someone reached a pole out for him to pull back over the railing.

"Hey, what about Tommy?" shouted Joel Marcos. "He's been left out of it all!" Suddenly all eyes were on me.

I forgot to mention earlier that I was no longer in the cockpit. I had rolled out to the deckside, and was there with the other guys, watching the feeding of the elephants, and Scout's flying handshake with an elephant's trunk. But with my broken leg, I couldn't participate. And I did look rather envious.

"Tommy," shouted Scout, "do you want to shake hands with an elephant?"

I did want to, very much… and also, I didn't. Scout's success might not work for me. He had a way with animals. I'm the guy that cats tend to scratch. But the crew liked the idea, and started shouting, "TOM-MY! TOM-MY!" and so I had to do it. I felt like royalty now, being a kinsman of the captain, and I had to live up to expectations.

"Sure," I said, and immediately many hands were lifting me out of my chair and strapping me into a full body harness, treating my leg with due care of course. And then I was lowering myself down, hovering over the troop of elephants, twenty strong, from the big six-foot-high babies to the giant bulls. I tried to read what mood they were in. Not angry, I hoped. Or annoyed. Or suspicious. Closer and closer. I saw the wrinkles on the ears. I saw the flies buzz. They weren't looking up anymore. They seemed to find me unimpressive.

And then Jake's voice boomed over the intercom. "Dr. Lord says it's safe to go to Lusaka. All hands on deck! Last leg of the journey!"

At that, everyone scattered so quickly, jumping to work, that they forgot about me! The airship began to move, with me still dangling there. I used the remote control to try to pull up, but it was stubborn. Something about the button needing to be pushed harder or not pointing in the right direction, I don't know. So for at least a full minute, there I was, surfing the skies over Africa, watching the elephants get small, watching the ground fall away, up and up and up, and the wind getting fast around my ears. "Tommy, get back inside!" shouted Jake over the intercom. That made some guys remember me, and it seemed to make my remote control work as well. 

After they bundled me back into my wheelchair, Ro Jarvis apologized. "Sorry about that, Tommy. Are you all right?"

"Oh, sure," I said, still trying to live up to the courage expected of the captain's cousin. "A little sky surfing never did anyone any harm."

Sky surfing. That became the name for it, for just hanging from a rope under the airship and watching the landscapes go by. It became a moderately common activity for the crew of Jove's Chariot. A great way to get away from it all, to overwhelm your mind and stop thinking about things you didn't want to. A kind of exhilarating relaxation.

"Ten miles to Zambia…" said Archie, and then a few minutes later, "Five miles to Zambia…" Back in the cockpit, I wondered if I'd recognize it when we saw it. We did, because the Zambians were there to greet us.

We were the first giant airship that had ever been seen in that country. We were also the largest man-made object that had ever been seen in that country. We came as the dawn of a brighter future, not only in restoring the Captive Sun and turning the power back on, but in heralding the Airship Age which would, in the decades that followed, reduce the economic distance from central Africa to markets in Europe in the United States, bringing jobs galore, as people foresaw even then. And so enormous crowds greeted us, cheering, as we went. 

Only a few hundred were there even at the border, where no one lived. Motorcycles and cars had pulled up to the border, having heard somehow the exact place of our crossing. It was not a huge crowd yet, but they made up for it by the fervor of their cheers. When we passed over the city of Chingola, the whole population and many from the countryside roundabout were out watching us, and cheering, and holding up signs. 

"Welcome to Zambia." 

"Welcome Jove's Chariot." 

"Praise to the heroes!" 

"Power to the people!" 

Many were gathered in a park where President Bwalya was giving a speech. All of them turned and looked at us, and at his urging they all saluted, and some began to follow. We were flying quite slowly, to preserve hydrogen, but too fast for pedestrians to keep up. But the presidential motorcade caught up with us on the road to Lusaka, along with a fleet of motorcycles and ATVs and cars and pickup trucks, and proceeded beneath us all the way. We were too fast for pedestrians but slow enough that people running could keep up for a little way, and there were always some running alongside the cars to get as long as the glimpse of us as they could, then dropping off and being succeeded by others. All the villages along our route seem to contribute their share of runners. The cheering never stopped. And there were even more of them awaiting us in Lusaka. It was very rewarding and exciting.

I was looking for signs of the suffering of Zambia which we heard so much. Actually, we'd not only heard but seen it, for there had been some television journalism even amidst the blackout, but of course journalists may pick unrepresentative scenes to film, so I was eager to see what I might learn by actually seeing the country. I was too ignorant, however, to really distinguish the special suffering caused by the blackout from the general poverty of Africa. Also, the celebrating crowds masked the underlying state of things. We were flying low enough that I could see with the naked eye that most of the people had no shoes. And the pedestrians outnumbered the cars. It seemed, too, that the ratio of people to structures was inexplicably high. And then at some point, I looked in the telescopes that were all around the deck, and found the hovels amidst the grass, which I had hardly recognized from a distance as human dwellings. The city of Chingola had a weirdly abandoned air. There seemed to be quite a bit of smoke, and the countryside around the city looked denuded of brush. I dimly guessed then and learned later that many people had left the cities and towns, which were more dependent on electricity, and moved out to the countryside, while those who remained in town had to improvise cook stoves in place of their usual electric stoves, and ravaged the lands roundabout as they gathered things to burn. 

I noticed a smell in Chingola, which at the time I assumed it was a symptom of the blackout, a burnt smell, not really pleasing, yet somehow my mind endowed it with a kind of exotic charm. Over the years, I begin to think of it as the smell of African towns, without understanding where it came from. Yet the answer, when I learned it, seemed obvious and prosaic. It was the smell of burnt trash. Garbage pickup services either didn't exist or functioned inefficiently and corruptly, so people burned their trash, and the smell of it always hovered in the air. I hear that's gone now, as Africa modernizes. If I went back, I would hardly know where I was.

But to be clear, I felt no repugnance at all, and even pity was overwhelmed by gratitude for the immense good will poured out by the people towards us. I have never felt so loved. You know, I think everyone, or at least everyone who's raised well, has the feeling of a debt owed to society. So much is invested in us all, from earliest childhood, all the parental attention, the schooling, and a hundred years of investment in roads and power lines, and thousands of years of culture, all building up to the moment when we take the stage. And then it's our moment to do something worth doing, to matter, to justify the universe in giving us being. All through my childhood I was nervous about whether I would amount to anything in life. I heard about famous people in history, I saw many accomplished people around me, and I measured myself against them, and I fell so far short. Of course, there were all sorts of people around me telling me that they loved me, that I was special, that my accomplishments were great, that they were proud of me, and so on, but I didn't believe them. I knew perfectly well that they were all either being diplomatic and politically correct, or else, like my parents, they were irredeemably biased. In the grand scheme of things I was nothing, I didn't matter at all, I wasn't part of history but a mere spectator, and the world would be just as good a place had I never lived. I didn't want to ask the world for anything, because it would just be throwing good money after bad.

Well, the moment that Jove's Chariot entered Zambia, I knew that I had earned my keep in the world, paid the debt for my education and upbringing and privileges, made a difference, done a little good, and I could roam the Earth without shame, and look anyone in the eye, for now I could render an account of myself, and justify my existence. We were the knights of the sky, the light bearers, the rescuers of a people in despair and darkness, and we would always have that, for richer or poorer, in prosperity or prison, while the blood ran in our veins. If we needed an epitaph someday, we had one. From that day on, our lives were stories worth telling, and the uneasy feeling of being too unimportant to deserve the world was gone.

As soon as we arrived in Lusaka, we tied the airship to a mast that had been specially built for the purpose above the Captive Sun by Lightning Bolt. We had seen pictures of it before but there's something different about seeing it live. Mostly, I was awed by its size. I had seen a smaller fusion reactor in the United States, but this was different, mostly to secure the large extra margin of safety that seemed fitting for a country where the professionalism of the staff might be less reliable, as well as for some ease of operation, and more power. It was far larger than the facility in Taiwan, and almost as large as Jove's Chariot itself. First, we refueled the airship, so that the propellers would have enough power to hold position in case the wind changed modestly. Larger changes in the wind would make it difficult to impossible to hold position, so it was important that the operation proceed rather quickly. It was more difficult this time than in Taiwan, since the Inner Torus had to be lowered exactly into place. And we hadn't prepared as much, having been so busy with the storm and the mutiny and the governance question and everything. On the other hand, we were a more seasoned and confident team. 

Also, there was the Mike Mulligan effect, the encouraging effect of crowds. There had been few spectators in Taiwan, where airships were already a common enough sight. (I think there may also have been some legal restrictions on who could be present motivated by security considerations, but I don't know the details of that.) In Zambia, everyone was welcome to watch, and everyone did, and that made you want to perform. The crowd had a long wait, as Archie and Jake talked urgently with their Lightning Bolt counterparts below, and all the crewmen, except me of course, were checking and rechecking the wire ropes and making sure the cargo was ready to drop. The actual descent of the Inner Torus through the open roof of the Lusaka Captive Sun power plant took only about ten minutes, and it would have been anticlimactic, but for the cheering crowns that made the ten minutes seem like an hour in their intensity. Then up came the wire ropes, and we were done. Mission accomplished!

We detached from the mast and flew slowly across the city to another mast where we would park longer term for repairs. All along our route the crowds followed, cheering and waving signs. They began chanting "Natotela, nanotela, Natotela…"

Face happened to be in the cockpit. "What does that mean?" Jake asked him.

"Thank you," said Face. "In Bemba."

"Bemba?" asked Jake.

"The largest ethnicity in Zambia," explained Face. 

And then they started to sing. The whole crowd, thousands of voices, singing together, simple innocent folk melodies. I think there were some drums too, but gentle in the background. Mostly it was just singing. And whenever one song faded away, another would begin, and it went on and on, occasionally in English, but mostly in African languages. Happy songs. Simple songs, mostly, that might have been for children. They were singing in gratitude for the coming end of the blackout, and in gratitude to us. They sang as we pulled up to the mast. There was great cheering as we took our station there, then after a pause, the singing began again. The afternoon waned gently in the evening, a warm, peaceful evening of gentle breezes, and we were inclined to go about our affairs, write home, post pictures, have a bite to eat, take a shower, and get to bed. But the singing went on, and the crowds of thousands didn't seem to dissipate. No doubt many left, and probably others came to take their places, to see the great airship, and to join the celebration. Hour after hour. As the last of the daylight faded, I told Jake:

"You've got to speak to them."

Archie and Andreas agreed.

"Face had better do it," said Jake. "I don't speak the language."

Face was usually one to steal the limelight, but in this case even he knew that was impossible. "You're the captain," he said. "It has to be you. Many of them can understand some English."

"Do you think you know enough Bemba to…?"

It was one of the few occasions when I saw Jake shy.

"To interpret?" said Face.

After a long pause of reluctance, Face said, "Sure."

And so we lowered a basket down, with Jake and Face in it, and turned the floodlights on it, and the crowd fell silent. Then Jake began to speak.

"Well, I feel great relief today! We're so glad to be here! I thought for a while that we wouldn't make it. I'm sorry it took us so long. I'm sorry for all that you've suffered while we were waiting." He waited, and Face translated.

"There are things I could have done that might have brought us here sooner. Now I wish I had." Face translated again.

"But what a wonderful welcome you've given us! This is the happiest moment of my life. Now I know what I was living for all this time. To see your faces and hear your voices is such a joy." Face translated.

"I wish this moment could last forever. But maybe in a way it will. I'll never, never forget you. We love you. We love you with all our hearts. We would have come even if we had to go around the world ten times." Face translated, and the crowd, which had been held silent in awe for a while by Jake's solemn sincerity decided this was the moment to break out in cheers. It seemed for a moment that the crowd would put a forcible end to the speech. But Jake didn't seem to be finished. So they fell silent again.

"Many thanks to my crew, to all these brave and noble-hearted men." Face translated, and there were a few more cheers.

"We love you all," said Jake again, and now his voice began to break with emotion. "We love you with all our hearts." And I seem to see the gleam of tears on his cheeks. It's funny, in all the time I knew him, I never saw him cry from sorrow. Thirteen years later, when he asked rather urgently for a meeting with me on the giant food convoy off the Horn of Africa, then seemed to have no agenda, and he knew, but I did not, that he was saying goodbye, but I felt the air was heavy with emotion… well, even then, he didn't cry. I never saw him cry for Alyssa D'Angelo, though she cried for him a few times. He was too tough to cry from fear or sadness, but he did cry from love and joy that day for the people of Zambia. Face translated his words.

"We are at your service," said Jake. "As long as we live, if you're ever in trouble, we'll do anything we can to help. Anything in our power, I promise you that."

Face looked at him with dismay. A full minute passed before he offered a translation, and it was in a tone that undermined the

seriousness of the promise. Jake didn't notice his reluctance or the change of tone. He was too overcome with feeling.

"Well, thank you," said Jake. "And good night." The cheers of the crowd crescendoed to a raucous climax, and then gave way to more singing.

And we hauled the basket in, and got ready for bed, and darkness fell, but the crowd did not go home. They lit torches, and remained, and went on singing. And some of us went to bed, but others stood there, watching, spellbound. They sang all night long, not all of them of course, not even most, but enough still to be a crowd, and when we woke up in the morning, a few of them were still there, singing.