Starcross Read online

  I joined her in another merry chorus of ‘Dearest Margaret, You Are Danish and Your Dog’s Not Very Well’ (that old music-hall favourite) but it was no use; the train looming behind her posed too much of a distraction. And as she commenced the next verse, the locomotive surged up in a pother of steam and cinders and gave our hand-car a nudge with the tip of its aetheric cow-catcher, such that we were thrown about inside our glass canopy, and even Mrs Spinnaker grew too distracted to sing any more.

  ‘But this ain’t so bad!’ she said brightly, as the train barged us along. ‘They are just pushing us ahead of them. I don’t see how they can reach us, an’ make us put on those ’orrid tiles again. They’d burn themselves on that great steamy boiler if they tried it!’

  I did not reply. For one thing, I did not believe the Moobs would be much troubled if our friends burned themselves in order to recapture us. For another, I had just noticed something strange outside the glass.

  It was hard to see at first, what with all the steam and sparks gushing about, and the reflections of me and Mrs Spinnaker and the frantically see-sawing mechanism of the car filling every pane. But after a few seconds the gas lamp in the hand-car roof failed, which cut out the reflections somewhat, and by the ruddy glow of the locomotive’s fires and the lightning-blue glare of the sparks which leapt up betimes from its hurrying wheels I saw the new phenomena quite clearly. An aetheric icthyomorph was keeping pace with our hand-car, very close. And out in the dark behind it swam another and another – a whole school of them, tails flicking frantically to and fro as they drove themselves through the aether at the same speed as the Moobs’ locomotive. They were common red whizzers (Pseudomullus vulgaris) such as I had oft seen swim in and out among the chimney stacks at Larklight – but I had never seen them whiz quite so fast as this. And when I looked closer I soon saw the reason why they were so interested in us and our hand-car … For each of those fishes wore a sinister grin, and upon the head of every one there sat a black top hat!

  ‘Oh, Mrs Spinnaker!’ I cried – but there was no time for me to explain this fresh peril to her, for at that instant the leading icthyomorph suddenly dived in and struck its bony pate against our canopy. I saw, as it dinged against the glass, that the Moob upon its head had braced itself for the shock by extending its little arms and clasping its small black hands together beneath the fish’s chin, so that the impact should not hurl it off. The glass was thick, and the fish swam away dazed, having done no damage, yet there were a great many others, and their heads came battering against the canopy like the blows of tiny hammers. It was not long before one pane cracked, and then another, and our ears filled with the ominous hiss of air escaping from the canopy.

  A human being may breath pure aether for a while, as all those fishes and other creatures do, but not for long. An hour or two at most, I believe. Yet countless miles still separated us from our destination! If all our air escaped, we should expire long before we reached it!

  And now the train that bore us on was slowing, and along the sides of the locomotives, clad in tarpaulin suits and fireproof gloves which they must have found in the guard’s van, Colonel Quivering and Mr Grindle came scrambling, each with his hat in place and a spare Moob hanging at his waist, ready to fit upon the heads of myself and Mrs Spinnaker!

  But they never reached us. For the mechanism of the hand-car, which had been pumping and see-sawing away so furiously all this time, chose that instant to break. A spring gave way somewhere beneath the floor with a dreadful crack, an axle parted, and the hand-car pitched forward and flew clean off the track, tumbling over and over through the empty aether, leaving a trail of nuts and bolts and wheels and shards of glass, while Mrs Spinnaker and I were hurled helplessly about inside like two dried peas in a rattle.

  And far behind us, along that shining silver thread which was the Asteroid Belt and Minor Planets Railway, that train with its cargo of ungodly hats went thundering on its way towards Modesty, Decorum and the wider Empire!

  Chapter Sixteen

  In Which Our Narrative Returns to Ancient Mars, and We Learn of the Surprising Things Which Had Befallen Myrtle in the Meanwhile.

  Horrid and eerie as that empty ship had seemed before, it seemed ten times eerier and more horrid once I had read those dreadful words in Captain Melville’s log. The Moobs! The Moobs are coming!

  ‘Whatever is a Moob?’ I asked, trembling a little, so that the dry old pages of the logbook in my hands rustled like dead leaves, adding even more to the general atmosphere of Gothick dread.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Jack. ‘I never heard of such a thing …’

  ‘I have,’ said Delphine, reaching up in a hesitant and confused manner to touch her hair. ‘I had a dream, I think, about a Moob, on our first night at Starcross … Or was it a hat? Oh, the picture of it will not stay in my head!’

  Jack, meanwhile, had been stirring the sad heap of Captain Melville’s clothes with the toe of his boot, so that a small quantity of cobweb-coloured powder tipped out upon the deck.

  ‘Whatever they were,’ he said, ‘it seems they’ve consumed your poor grandfather and his men, and eaten them up inside their clothes, bones and all. And there’s a chance they might be lingering still in these parts. So if you’ve some plan for flying this ship out of here, without an alchemist to start her engines up nor any place to go, you’d best begin. For I don’t wish to be lingering here when these Moobs return.’

  Delphine nodded. She was a woman of action, as I suppose one must be if one is to make a living as a mistress of intrigue. She went at once and shouted to her goblins to leave off their wool-gathering and set a guard upon the ship. She snatched the logbook from my hands and riffled inquisitively through its yellowed leaves. Then she went to the bookcase above Captain Melville’s bunk and took down first one, and then another book. ‘Spatial Geography for the Aethernaut,’ I heard her mutter, glancing at the titles. ‘The Poems of Dryden … On Jove and Its Many Moones … It is not here!’

  ‘Pray what are you searching for, Miss Beauregard?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Alchemy!’ returned the young lady. ‘My grandfather had vowed to publish the secrets of his art that all might learn it. I had imagined that I might find his notes here, and use them to teach myself how to pilot this vessel. But I see no notebooks here, only poems and atlases … Oh, did all his knowledge die with him?’

  ‘A pretty slender hope, even if it were there,’ Jack opined. ‘Gentlemen study for years and years to learn the arts of Alchemy; I doubt you could pick it up from a book in the short time we have.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Delphine, looking cross, as Delphine always did when someone ventured to contradict her. ‘But my grandfather held that that was quite unnecessary. The Royal College erects all manner of barriers about the secret of the chemical wedding, and makes its students sit through years of dreary examinations, and learn reams of Latin words and alchemical signs and symbols, but the truth is that the chemical wedding may be performed by anyone who has a talent for it. It is no harder, and no easier, than singing.’

  ‘Good Heavens!’ I protested. ‘What a horrid, democratic notion! Why, if that were true, then anyone would be able to do Alchemy – foreigners of all sorts might set up as alchemists!’

  ‘Indeed, Miss Mumby,’ replied Delphine, turning to me with a triumphant look, as if I had proved her point for her. ‘Did you yourself not travel through the heavens by means of Alchemy performed by the creature Ssilissa, who was not even a human being, but some unknown breed of lizard?’ And then her expression changed. Her eyes remained fixed upon me, but they took on a cunning, calculating look, which made me grow quite uneasy.

  ‘And did not your own mother, Miss Mumby, steer a whole house across the Heavens, despite the fact that she has no accreditation from the Royal College of Alchemists, or any other learned body? Oh yes, my masters in Paris were most interested by that news. We are not entirely sure what Mrs Mumby is, but she clearly has a talent for Alchemy. And is it not possibl
e that you, as her daughter, have inherited that talent?’

  ‘Most certainly not!’ I cried. ‘Young ladies do not perform Alchemy!’21

  But Delphine was not to be put off. She opened a door in the panelled wall and thrust me down a tight spiral of stairs behind it. She had no doubt studied plans and models of the Liberty, and so knew that this stygian stairway led into the ship’s wedding chamber, but I had no notion of what lay below me, and cried out most piteously to Jack to save me.

  ‘Unhand her!’ I heard him say gallantly.

  ‘Stow it, Havock,’ replied Delphine, displaying that shocking want of feminine delicacy which was so typical of her. ‘I still have my revolver here, and if you try anything heroical I’ll smash your other leg.’

  Still, Jack followed us down, and I was glad of him, for at the stairs’ foot I found myself in a most curious room, filled with pipes and tubes. Long lines of bottles gleamed dully in racks around the walls. In the midst of it was an alchemical oven or alembic, looking for all the world like a large pot-bellied stove.

  Keeping her pistol trained on us, Delphine prowled about lighting the candles which stood in brackets upon the walls. Their gathering light raised dim reflections through the cauls of dust on all those bottles, and showed us the colours of the substances within: red Mercury, green Antimony, silver-white Newtonium and dozens more whose names I did not know.

  Then, lighting a taper from the last of the candles, Delphine stooped down and kindled a fire beneath the alembic (it was an old-fashioned sort, of course, not one of the modern gas models). She bellowed for her goblins, and told them to get stoking. Soon a veritable chain of them were passing fuel up from some store beneath the deck and feeding it into the under-parts of the alembic, which began to glow deepest cherry red and give off a dry heat which might have made me perspire, were I not so well brought-up.

  ‘Now,’ said Delphine (perspiring freely, of course, and pushing a curl of dampened hair out of her eyes), ‘to work, Miss Mumby. Which elements must we combine to bring this old ship to life?’

  ‘I do not know!’ I cried, almost in tears, for I could not imagine how she expected me to do this incomprehensible thing.

  ‘Then think, if you please,’ she said, ‘before the Moobs come and turn us all to heaps of clothes, and you to a mere empty bathing suit!’

  I stumbled to the rack of bottles and took down one, and then another, trying to read the crabbed writing and mysterious alchemical signs upon their labels. I could not; the words made no sense to me, and my tears made them hard to see. I snatched up a blackened rag which hung upon a peg beside the alembic and dried my eyes, then used it to tie back my hair, which had come quite undone with all that running about.

  ‘Quickly, Miss Mumby!’ my tormentor insisted, and when I looked at her, meaning to tell her that she was quite mistaken and that I had no talent, none at all, for Alchemy, she raised her gun and, pressing it against poor Jack’s temple, repeated, ‘Make my ship fly! You are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you? You must have the skill!’

  I looked down again in desperation at the two bottles in my hands. I did not know if it was the heat of the alembic, or some other thing, but suddenly it seemed to me that the chemicals within were brighter than before: one a vivid, acid green, the other a pleasing russet. It occurred to me that if I mixed a very little of the first with a generous portion of the second, then the green would be rendered less offensive, and the russet more pleasant still.

  Knowing not what else to do, I took down a pewter scoop which hung upon the wall and began shovelling quantities of each substance into a heavy iron pot which rested beside the oven, its surface scorched and rainbowed by the intense heats it had endured. After the russet and the green I found some red Mercury, like crumbly cake. Its very smell told me that it was poisonous, and so I put on some heavy fireproof gloves and broke it up between my fingers, dropping the fragments into my mixture of powders until some womanly instinct told me that the proportions were just right.

  For it had struck me as I worked that this Alchemy was very like cooking, and might therefore be a ladylike thing to do after all – not so much a science as a domestic science. I began to grow quite elated as I sought along the racks of phials and bottles for the colours and textures which I felt my mixture lacked, and added them, and stirred them in.

  And when at last all seemed ready, I used a handy shovel to push my pot inside the alembic, and shut the door upon it.

  And … nothing happened.

  It was most embarrassing. I had become quite carried away with my cookery, and had almost convinced myself that Delphine was right and that I had a natural talent for things alchemical. She and Jack were both looking at me most expectantly, and even her goblins ceased shovelling to stare at me, until she scolded them and ordered them back to work. Yet nothing happened, and slowly Delphine’s wide, waiting eyes narrowed, and her mouth widened into a most disagreeable sneer, and she drew back the hammer of her silver pistol and set it once more against Jack’s head, enquiring, ‘Well?’

  I turned to the mass of pipes and dials and levers which grew like ivy on the wall behind the oven. Oh, how I have always loathed pipes and dials and levers! They are so very Modern, and Lack Soul. I should much rather have lived in olden times, in Merrie England, when a girl had to concern herself with nothing more complicated than a little light dulcimer-playing and the occasional lovelorn swain. Dials, levers, pipes – these things mean nought to me! But in my helplessness I chose a dial, quite at random, and gave it a sharp rap with my knuckles, which set the needle within it a-trembling. And, thus encouraged, I settled upon a lever, and pulled it. And at that, every pipe in the place set up a strange lowing, a howling song, quite unearthly, which rose and fell and twisted itself into the strange harmonies I had heard before aboard the Sophronia, when Ssilissa was preparing to loft us into space.

  ‘She has done it!’ cried Jack. ‘The engine sings!’

  ‘I hope it does rather more than that,’ Delphine said. ‘To the helm, Mr Havock. Sergeant Tartuffe, keep watch on him; Boke, Gaggarat, Sneave, go along and assist Mr Havock in the working of the ship. The rest of you, keep shovelling! Shovel for all you’re worth! Get this ship spaceborne and back to our own time, where there are fat British ships to prey upon, and you’ll have wool beyond the dreams of avarice!’

  The goblins hastened to do as she commanded, and Jack had no choice but to let them hustle him up that spiral companionway and away to whatever part of the old ship the helm was housed in. Yet he shot me a look as he went which seemed full of pride and affection, as if I had surprised him with my cleverness.

  He could not, of course, have been half so surprised as me!

  Delphine remained in the wedding chamber. ‘Now take us aloft!’ she said.

  I was about to say that I couldn’t, when I realised that I could. If I closed my eyes I could see the ship beneath me, a golden pod shining in my mind’s eye. I could sense the alchemical power which strained to escape and drive her upward, free from the shackles of Mars’s gravity. And I knew that if I just adjusted the controls of the alembic by a whisker, she would obey me.

  ‘But where will we go?’ I asked. ‘There cannot be much fuel aboard, and there is nowhere in this desolate era where we may find more!’

  ‘Then let us leave this desolate era,’ vowed Delphine. She had out her pocket watch, and was consulting it. ‘We shall find the rift in time which brought my grandfather here, and use it to return to 1851.’

  I could sense the pressure building inside the ship. It made me feel quite unwell – a sensation which I had often felt aboard Sophronia, but had put down to simple space sickness. Unable to restrain myself, I reached out and touched the controls, and at once the old ship rose, trembling, creaking …

  ‘Careful!’ cried Delphine. ‘Do you wish to run us upon a mountainside?’

  I suppose that that is exactly what I should have done. Being a patriot and loving Britain, as I do, much more dearly than
my own life, I should have steered the USSS Liberty to her destruction, rather than return her to Known Space to begin her campaign of piracy and revolution against the established order. But I was carried away by the strangest emotions. I felt as if the power of the Alchemical Realm, which lies beyond the world we know, were surging through me in a golden tide. Not only that, but I could feel the pull of other tides: the great slow tug of the planet’s gravity, the warm yearning call of the mighty Sun, and amid it all, just a few miles away, and as ugly as a grease spot upon a much-loved dress, a kind of hole, a nothingness, a tunnel mouth leading to quite other tides entirely …

  The Liberty rose. The bottles jingled, jangled, jingled in their racks – and then jingled no more. A glance at the porthole told me why. We had left behind the fetters of Martian gravity and were soaring on our course through open space! My feet left the deck, and my bathing skirts drifted up about me, but I could not spare a hand to hold them down. Strange to say, I did not care. I felt as free as a bird, soaring through a golden sky, and I was barely aware of the ship straining and complaining as it was dragged along with me. I supposed that this was how Ssilissa felt each day as she helped the Sophronia across the aether’s seas, and I am sorry to say that I felt envious of her, and most regretful that I had not known such splendour until now.

  Ahead of us I sensed again that hole, its ragged edges trailing threads of lost time. I cried out for Jack to steer us a mite to the left, if he pleased, and Delphine translated my request into more nautical terms and barked them up the speaking trumpet to Jack without troubling to add the ‘please’.

  He did as she asked. The Liberty seemed to hesitate for an instant on the boundary of that gash in time. In that instant I fancied that she had become a million, million ships, all laid one atop the other, some smelling of fresh paint and new-cut timber and full of the voices of American buccaneers, some mere rotted hulks, whose rusted nails were turning to powder and letting her mouldy timbers fall away into the blackness of the night. A wave of dizziness o’erwhelmed me! I thought at first that it was because my simple, feminine mind was too weak to comprehend the grandeur and the mystery of Time. Then I realised that I had felt that sensation before, at Starcross, each time the hotel had plunged back or forth through history; it is the sensation aroused in a mortal body when it travels through the Fourth Dimension.