Skies of Anarchy

It was a girl named Nell, fishing off the end of the pier at Matagorda, who saw it first: a long gray shape moving against the wind, very high, with no sound at all.

The Sovereign Sky had been an advertising blimp once, and then a wreck in a field in Oklahoma, and then, over three patient years, the work of a settlement of about forty people who did not believe in governments and did believe, very much, in each other. They had stripped the old envelope and rebuilt it around a lattice of carbon tubes, and they pumped the air out of a chain of rigid cells to make it rise, so it needed no gas at all. They grew lettuce in the gondola under grow lights fed by the skin of solar film. They took turns with everything: cooking, steering, sleeping in the narrow bunks under the hum.

They had no destination. That was the point. They went where people were cut off, mountain towns and island towns and the small places the networks never reached again, and they lowered down seeds and batteries and news, and they took up whatever people wanted carried, and they went on.

Above the hills an old dirigible drifted, inhaling the sky clean.

That was how Nell would describe it later to her mother, though she was nine and didn't know what she meant by it, only that the air around the ship looked clearer than the air anywhere else, as if it were breathing in and not letting the dirt back out.

That autumn the crew began to notice something in the sky ahead of them that none of their instruments could explain: a patch of air, south and very high, where the clouds would not form. It moved. It kept its distance. When the Sovereign Sky turned toward it, it was always a little farther off, and when they turned away, it followed.

They argued about it for a week, the way they argued about everything, in a circle on the gondola floor with the lettuce glowing above them. In the end they did what they always did. They took a vote, and the vote was to follow it, and nobody slept very well.