Starcross Read online

  Your Obedient Servant,

  Mortimer Titfer, Esq.

  ‘What a sweetly kind offer!’ said my mother.

  ‘Yes, but who is this Titfer?’ asked Father. ‘I do not recognise the name.’

  ‘He says he is a friend of Sir Waverley’s,’ Mother reminded him, ‘and that is good enough for me. For though Sir Waverley is somewhat reclusive, he is a very sweet gentleman when one gets to know him. Take, for an instance, the way that he took it upon himself to help us strip out Larklight’s old Shaper engine and cart it off to be melted down, without charging us for carriage or any other thing. I would imagine that this Titfer is a business acquaintance of his, and clearly shares his kind and thoughtful nature. Now that I come to think of it I believe I do recall being introduced to someone of the sort at that reception we attended in Kensington …’

  ‘So may we go?’ I asked. For it is not every day that a chap gets offered the chance to go swimming on an asteroid, and I was all agog to know if Mother and Father would accept this invitation.

  ‘It is most kind,’ Father agreed, peering over Mother’s shoulder at the letter. ‘Alas! I cannot go. I have to travel down to London next week, there to present a report on my investigations into Tegenaria saturnia to the Fellows of the Royal Xenological Institute. But there is no reason why you should not go, Emily, my dear, and take Art and Myrtle with you.’

  ‘Oh, I could not think of leaving you behind, Edward,’ cried my mother, though I could tell that she was thinking how nice a holiday would be.

  ‘I should love to see the asteroids,’ I ventured, as wistfully as I could. ‘We soared through the belt at such speed when I was travelling aboard the Sophronia that I had barely time to catch a glimpse of them.’

  Myrtle said approvingly, ‘Starcross looks most genteel.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, ‘perhaps we might go, for just a week or two …’

  ‘Go for a month,’ said Father, folding his copy of The Times in a decided manner. ‘And I shall join you as soon as my business in London is complete.’

  And so it was agreed. Trunks were packed, straw hats and shrimping nets fetched down5 from the attic, and Mother ordered new bathing costumes for us all. And a week later we found ourselves bidding Father a fond farewell at the Port George aether-dock and going aboard the packet-ship Euphrosyne, outbound for Modesty and the Minor Planets.

  Chapter Two

  A Brief Description of the Asteroid Belt. By the Good Offices of the A.B. & M.P. Rail Traction Co. Ltd We Are Conveyed to Starcross, and Are Surprised at What We Find There.

  I wonder if you know the Asteroids at all. There are a great many of them, and they tumble along in an orbit which lies midway between those of Mars and Jupiter. I have asked Mr Wyatt to provide sketches of a few of the more interesting ones.

  These worlds are home to countless millions of intelligent beings, mostly Earth people, Martians and Jovians who have travelled there in the employ of the big mining concerns. The asteroids are supposed to be the ruins of a planet which once swam there but was long ago destroyed, or else the building blocks of one which never formed – the scientific coves who study such things have never quite been able to decide. Several times on our voyage to Starcross I started to ask Mother about it, for the whole Solar System is her handiwork and I was sure that she would know the answer. But each time I began, I was rewarded with a vicious kick to the shins from Myrtle, and deemed it wiser to speak of something else instead. Myrtle does not like to hear Mother talking about her various previous lives, and would have been mortified if any of our fellow passengers had got wind of the many forms Mother had adopted over the millennia – a giant slime mould, a preAdamite reptile, a Martian princess and Heaven knows what else.

  But one evening, about halfway through our voyage, while Mother and I were taking a turn upon the star deck and Myrtle was curled up in our state-room with her notebook, trying to think of things which rhymed with ‘Havock’, Mother raised the matter herself.

  We were looking at the dim red lantern that was Mars, hanging in the dark just off the Euphrosyne’s port bow, and looking shimmery and ghostly through the ship’s veil of alchemical particles. Suddenly Mother said, ‘Did you know, Art, that our destination used to be a part of Mars?’

  ‘Do you mean Starcross?’ I asked.

  ‘The very same. The rest of the asteroids are nothing but leftovers: bits and bobs which I half meant to build into another world, but never quite got round to. But Starcross is a mighty fragment of the Red Planet, which was blasted out to hang among the other asteroids by some immense collision or eruption about one hundred million years ago.’

  ‘You do not know which?’

  ‘I do not know everything, Art, dear. I was living in the seas of Georgium Sidus at the time it happened. How you would laugh if you could see me as I was then, all gills and fins! It was only several millennia later, when I returned to Larklight, that I noticed the new asteroid, and the crater on Mars which told me whence it came. Look, I believe you can see that crater still!’

  And she showed me a sort of dimple on the ruddy cheek of Mars, a gentle depression perhaps a thousand miles across, and quite impossible to connect with the immense catastrophe of which she’d spoken.

  I took her hand, and together we went for another turn about the star deck, nodding to our fellow passengers, Mother calling out cheerfully in Ionian to the startled sailors, who had never met an Earth lady who could master their complicated language before. And it felt very strange and wonderful to have a mother such as she.

  The Euphrosyne docked at Modesty, one of the larger and more settled of the asteroids. In some parts of the belt thousands upon thousands of miles separate those drifting worldlets, but in others they clump quite close together, and the twin asteroids, Modesty and Decorum, lie at the centre of just such a clump.

  It would be neither economical nor prudent for aetherships to fly to all those different little worlds, since some are very little indeed, and in the gulfs betwixt them all sorts of rock and grit and astral debris hangs, posing a danger to shipping. However, good old British know-how6 has found a way around this difficulty. The Asteroid Belt and Minor Planets Rail Traction Company Ltd has constructed a splendid system of bridges and viaducts which link more than a hundred asteroids, with new termini being added to the system almost yearly. Some of these bridges span distances of well over a thousand miles, and make the beholder feel especially proud to be British.

  It was upon this fine railway that we were to complete our journey to Starcross. We disembarked at the Modesty & Decorum Aether Harbour, bidding farewell to our fellow passengers, and set out across the busy docks to the ringing steel and crystal vaults of Modesty Station. Above the entrance a massive advertisement hoarding was being erected, bearing a picture of a top hat and the words, TITFER’S TOP-NOTCH TOPPERS – NONE TALLER, NONE BLACKER. I had not heard of such a make, and I asked Mother if the Titfer responsible was our Mr Titfer, at whose hotel we were to stay, but I could not make my question heard above the hubbub of the station.

  ‘The train on platform 116b is the three o’clock to Chalcedony,’ boomed a voice which sounded like that of God from fluted speakers on the roof. ‘Calling at Vesta, New Rutland, Ivanhoe, Cribbage and Thring.’ The enticing smells of roasted chestnuts and fresh sprune drifted from vendors’ booths, station staff blew whistles and fluttered multi-coloured flags, and a tricephalid muffin man stalked past with a tray of his mouth-watering wares balanced on each of his heads.

  And through it all, with one eye on her Bradshaw’s Timetable and the other on the ever-changing destinations which flickered upon the clattering mahogany departure boards, Mother led us unerringly to platform 237b, where waited a train of dark windowless freight cars with a few passenger carriages attached at the end, their doors painted with a reassuringly sober coat-of-arms: GRAND HOTEL STARCROSS.

  We went aboard and Mother paid our Ionian porters, who gave our luggage into the care of the train’s attend
ant: a gleaming clockwork automaton, one of the latest models from Sir Waverley Rain’s factory and close cousin to the ones he had given us to help at Larklight. It seemed we were the only passengers that afternoon, for all the compartments were empty. We chose the one we liked the best and arranged ourselves on its plush, well-padded seats, where we accepted the cups of tea which the auto-waiter served us, and prepared to enjoy the ride. It is almost ten thousand miles from Modesty to Starcross, but in the near frictionless aether the trains are able to reach enormous speeds, and I gathered that our journey would take but a few hours.

  I settled myself next the window, looking forward to spectacular views of such strange worlds as Vestibule, which is hollow and inhabited by people who live upside down upon its inner surface, and Abnegation, which was woven out of brown string by Presbyterians.

  But as the train started up and we began to pull out of the arched maw of the station, opening up thrilling views across the shunting yards towards the aether harbour, I saw something which startled me, and was to cast a little cloud over our trip. Moored at a launching tower there, among a gaggle of more ordinary ships, hung one that I should have known anywhere. That barnacled wooden hull and crooked bowsprit, those battered exhaust-trumpets and much-darned aether-wings. ‘Why,’ I blurted out, ‘’tis the Sophronia!’

  I regretted it at once, of course. Myrtle, who had been leafing happily through a journal called The Young Lady’s Orbital Miscellany, sprang to my side at the mention of Jack Havock’s ship and stared out through the thick crystal of the window, quivering like a gun dog.

  ‘Then he is not facing peril in some far-off corner of the sky,’ she said, gazing out at the Sophronia until a passing train hid her from our view. ‘He is here on Modesty, in the heart of British Space, and yet still he has not answered my letters.’

  Moored at a launching tower there, among a gaggle of more ordinary ships, hung one that I should have known anywhere.

  She slumped into her seat again, like a marionette with all its strings cut. Honestly, I thought she was about to blub. I hope that I shall never form a Sentimental Attachment with anyone, for it seems to lead to nothing but tantrums and melancholia.

  ‘Poor Myrtle,’ said Mother, gently smoothing her hair. ‘Perhaps we should ask the auto-porter if it is possible to turn the train back. We might find Jack aboard his ship, and –’

  ‘No,’ said Myrtle, with a deeply spiritual sigh. ‘I would not think of it! It is clear that he does not wish to see me. I was his plaything for an idle hour, but now that he is out doing manly deeds in the aether again he has thought better of all those tender words which passed between us at Larklight.’ A tear sneaked out from behind her spectacles and dropped into her tea,7 and she lowered her head on to a handy hatbox, and remained there, like Isabella with her Pot of Basil,8 for the next two thousand miles.

  I must confess that I felt hurt by Jack’s behaviour, too. I had thought him a friend, and it seemed unamiable of him to act so aloof. If only he had written and told us the Sophronia was putting in at Modesty, I thought, we might have broken the journey there and looked him up! And I felt suddenly a strong desire to see again his crew, Mr Munkulus and Mr Grindle, brave blue Ssilissa, the Tentacle Twins and my good, true crab friend, Nipper!

  However, time is a great healer, and after a minute or two I emerged from that fog of nostalgia, and sat with my nose pressed to the window and my hands cupped around my face to blot out the reflections of the carriage gas lamps and the mournful figure of my sister. Outside, whole worlds flicked past us in the wink of an eye: verdant asteroids like hanging baskets, covered in tulip fields or golden crops of wheat; manufacturing worldlets bristling with chimneys, where furnaces glowed through a pother of factory smoke. Sometimes our train plunged us through the interior of a tiny, hollowed-out world; sometimes it ran on for miles along singing silver trackways in the empty aether, and once, another train went by, roaring upside down along the underside of the same track, like our reflection. What could be more fascinating than to be whisked through the open aether aboard a speeding railway train?

  Well, quite a few things, actually. Train travel in space is all very well while one is passing through a great asteroidal hub like the Modesty and Decorum clump, where worlds cluster thick and railway lines run alongside one’s own, and entwine with each other like strands of spaghetti. But after a few hours we were out in the nether reaches, where the only things to see were mined-out rocks, dead, sere and drab, and even those were few and far between.

  Somewhere nearby, back in 1804, Admiral Nelson had fought a famous battle against the aether-ships of some rebel Americans, and I looked out hopefully for the drifting wreckage of their flagship, the USSS Liberty, which had never been found. Naturally, I did not see anything nearly so romantic. Now and again I glimpsed a shoal of aetheric icthyomorphs, but they were small and far away, all the bigger forms having been hunted to extinction, or scared off by the trains. (The days when daring railway passengers used to roll down their carriage windows and take pot-shots at passing shoals of giant space jellyfish and aetheric manatee are long gone, worse luck!)

  Mother, who has the knack of sleeping anywhere, was soon napping. Even Myrtle fell into a snooze, in which she sometimes murmured Jack Havock’s name in a martyred fashion. But I could not sleep, and I sat watching my own reflection in the trembling crystal of the window, and feeling my posterior become more and more benumbed.

  At last the train began to slow, and the auto-guard came stumping along the corridor and slid open the door of our compartment to announce, ‘Next stop, Starcross Halt.’ We traversed a last, dark, echoey tunnel through the heart of a mined-out boulder called Scarcity, and I watched my own reflection in the window and waited wide-eyed for my first glimpse of Starcross.

  ‘There!’ cried Mother, just as eager as I, kneeling at the window as the train shot out from the shadows of the tunnel. Even Myrtle raised her head a little.

  Ahead we could see the end of the line, a tiny world of reddish mountains with deserts of pale sand flashing in the starlight. I felt a great wave of excitement, and then, almost at once, a wave of disappointment even greater. I could see the roof of a small station, but precious little else. Starcross was just another old mining asteroid pitted with ugly craters. A few spindly aether-trees clung to the uninviting crags, while here and there some fragment of old pithead winding gear jutted up like a gibbet. Where was Sir Waverley’s hotel? I wondered. For the only building I could see, apart from the station itself, was the ruin of some old mine-owner’s mansion, which stood among the spoil-heaps, stark white and empty windowed, like a gigantic skull.

  Chapter Three

  We Arrive at the Grand Hotel and Are Made Welcome by Its Mysterious Proprietor.

  ‘Oh, I declare!’ cried Myrtle, as the train bore us down a last long curve towards that dismal world, with its lonely cluster of station buildings. ‘We have been practised upon! Mr Titfer’s invitation was but a foolish prank, and we have come all this way for nought!’

  I was inclined to agree. Even Mother seemed downcast. Then I looked again at the grim mansion, and saw that I had ‘ been mistaken. Some trick of the light – some passing haze or optical illusion – had made it look a perfect ruin. Indeed, it still seemed to have a hazy, wavering, insubstantial look. But an instant later it stood out sharp and solid, and I could not understand how I had been deceived. It was no ruin at all, but rather a grand, elegant building, standing on a curved sweep of promenade which overlooked one of those dry, dead basins of white sand, its lofty Gothick turrets reaching up through the asteroid’s thin atmosphere to touch the very tides of space.

  The train descended a last long incline, and came to a halt beside a station platform with a painted canopy, hanging baskets full of song flowers, and its name, STARCROSS HALT, picked out in white stones upon a bed of space thyme. I saw several liveried automata waiting on the platform to help us with our luggage, a three-legged water tower looking for all the world like
one of those fighting machines the ancient Martians used to employ, and on a siding beyond it a small hand-car standing idle, with asteroid light glinting off its glass canopy. It was as pretty a station as you can imagine.

  Myrtle, however, was still dissatisfied. ‘Mr Titfer promised us sea bathing,’ she said fussily, as we made our way to the door. ‘And yet there is no sea.’

  I knew why she was so vexed. One of the big trunks which the auto-porter was heaving down on to the platform contained her new bathing costume, a very fashionable garment ordered straight from London, and I knew she had been looking forward to a little graceful swimming in it.

  ‘Perhaps the place is still under construction,’ Mother said. ‘I gather it is not unknown for these resort hotels to advertise themselves as their proprietors hope they will one day be, rather than as they really are.’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Titfer plans to import some sea from another, more watery sphere, and set it down in that dry depression in front of the promenade!’ I said, for I well knew that all manner of things are possible in this great age of engineering and invention in which we live.

  We stood on the platform and looked towards the hotel. Behind us the train snorted and let out a single, shrill hoot before chuffing onward, past the station and on to a turntable where it would be spun about, ready to begin its journey back to Modesty. The station-master automaton who had waved it on its way turned and strode to where we stood, bowing low as he reached us.