Larklight

  I screamed, for I had never seen a man struck dead in cold blood before. And then I screamed again, for there was no blood, and Sir Waverley was not dead. He glanced down with interest at the axe, which stuck quivering from his breast, and then looked up again at Ulla and said, ‘You simply can’t find the staff nowadays.’

  Ulla was not disheartened. She removed her mob cap and withdrew from the coils of her purple hair a suspiciously long and pointy hairpin, which she flourished like a dagger.

  ‘Have a care, sir,’ she declared. ‘I must inform you that I am an agent of the British Secret Service!’

  ‘Oh, goodie!’ I exclaimed, for this surprising piece of news cheered me no end.

  Sir Waverley, however, seemed unimpressed. He smiled the strange, false smile which I had seen at dinner. ‘I serve an older and a greater empire than yours,’ he said. He stepped into the room, and gestured to the stone plaques or tablets on the walls. ‘Do you see that one? It was unearthed in one of the ruined cities of your people. The one beside it comes from the moon Callisto, from a temple which fell into ruin long before human beings walked upon the Earth. That one was excavated from the sands of dead Mercury. The fourth comes from the Earth, where it was dug up by workmen laying the foundations for the new Houses of Parliament. It was said to be part of a Druid temple, but of course it is far older. It comes from a time when people still recalled the dominion of the First Ones.’

  Ulla and I both stood and watched him as he spoke, and as we watched we became aware of the huge shape of Mr Webster filling the doorway. The enormous spider moved sluggishly, and his breath came in gasps, as if it were a strain for him to creep about in Mars’s gravity, which I found agreeably gentle. He was still monstrous and appalling though, and his cluster of eyes glittered with a terrible intelligence as he peered in at us.

  ‘And now,’ said Sir Waverley, turning to us again, ‘you are of no more use. You may die knowing that both your races will soon be as dead as you. Soon the First Ones will rule again.’

  Ulla raised her hairpin, grasping it like an assassin’s stiletto. Sir Waverley lifted his empty hand and reached towards her, and quite suddenly his arm seemed to extend like a telescope. His hand shot across the room on the end of a shining tube of metal segments, and closed upon poor Ulla’s throat. She dropped the hairpin and struggled to prise his fingers away, her face turning dark as he began choking the life out of her.

  ‘No!’ I begged. ‘Please spare her!’ But the ruthless villain only tightened his grip, and his other hand shot out towards me, propelled upon a similar device. I ducked, and the white glove clutched at empty air, making a sound like snapping scissors. Yet even then I did not swoon. Does this mean I have not been properly brought up? I am quite sure it would have been the ladylike thing to do.

  If only Jack Havock were here! I thought, and wondered what he would do were he to be faced with such a predicament. The answer, I decided, was that he would act. And so I hurled myself at Sir Waverley. I had no plan in mind, but I succeeded in throwing him off balance. He pitched backwards, his flailing arm clutched me as we fell, and glass shattered as the window gave way beneath our combined weight.

  We fell perhaps thirty feet on to a terrace overlooking the lawns and the dismal levels of Stonemere. Sir Waverley fell first, with the full weight of myself and Ulla coming down on top of him. I felt a horrid crunch; a sound of ribs giving way beneath me, as if I had landed on a wicker laundry hamper. I was unhurt, but all at once I found myself enveloped in clouds of acrid, greenish vapour. I scrambled backwards, tearing away Sir Waverley’s hand, which felt limp and lifeless now, flip-flopping at the end of its telescopic arm. Coughing at the noxious vapours, I dragged poor Ulla aside, and was glad to feel her stir slightly, and to realise that the Good Lord had preserved her from Sir Waverley’s murderous attack.

  Sir Waverley lay quite lifeless. I remember thinking, I have killed the richest man in the Solar System, and I shall most certainly hang. But as I stared down at his mangled corpse, thinking how terrible it was that I should have been brought to this, and wondering whether Papa and Arthur would come to visit me in prison, I began to understand that Sir Waverley Rain had not been a man at all. For the clouds of green vapour were thinning now, and through the rents and gashes in his broken body I could see the gleam of wires and tubes and gutta-percha air hoses and other things I cannot name but which were quite unmistakably the work of a mortal designer.

  ‘Why!’ I declared. ‘He is nothing but an automaton!’

  At which moment, rather horribly, the top of his head unscrewed like the lid of a jar and dropped with a thump upon the flagstones. Out from inside his skull came creeping a white, fat-bodied spider, coughing just as much as me at the green smoke. It wore goggles, and as it scuttled clear I glimpsed the upholstered saddle inside his lordship’s head, and the bank of wheels and steering levers with which the unspeakable creature must have controlled that mechanical body.

  Then, like a crashed aether-ship in a melodrama, the body exploded, showering little cogwheels and fragments across the terrace and knocking the spider-helmsman off its feet.

  The spider cried out in a shrill scratchy voice, ‘Mr Webster!’

  I had forgot the other brute, and all his lordship’s cactus-servants. I could only stare upwards in horror as the giant white spider let itself down on a rope of thread from the shattered window and began to creep towards me. Fortunately, my Martian companion had recovered enough to see the danger. She took my hand again and we ran together across the lawn and into the shadow of the copper beeches. There we paused to catch our breath and gather our scattered wits. Oh, how my heart pounded! How I shook! And how I wished that J. H. were there with his elephant gun to save me!

  I believe I really might have swooned then, had not Ulla distracted me by suddenly putting both hands to the waistband of her dress and ripping off her skirts! ‘It will be easier to run like this,’ she explained, stepping out of both skirts and petticoat and standing there quite shamelessly in nothing but a pair of frilly white drawers so skimpy that they ended halfway down her shins, leaving her ankles exposed! She looked expectantly at me, and I believe she seriously intended that I should take the same step! Naturally, I pretended not to understand her. I was quite relieved when we heard the heavy footfalls of cactus-men approaching our hiding place. Forgetting her strange notions about rational dress, Ulla grabbed my hand and began to hurry me away down the long slope of the lawn towards the lake.

  We were on the wrong side of the island to make use of the bridge, and anyway it would doubtless have been guarded by more of Sir Waverley’s fearsome cacti.

  ‘We must go across Stonemere!’ whispered Ulla.

  I hesitated, for there was a notice near the lawn’s edge which read quite plainly KEEP OFF THE LAKE, and a well-brought-up young lady does not stoop to trespass. However, I decided that desperate times require desperate measures, and hitching up my skirts, I set out after my Martian friend across the stony surface of the mere. The plates and crumbs of rock that formed its crust ground one against another with the most dolorous noises, and sometimes one would tilt sharply, threatening to plunge us to a ghastly fate in the morass of liquid stone which lay beneath. But when I glanced back at the shore we had left I saw the monstrous white spider creeping to and fro, as if uncertain whether the surface would support his weight, and I knew that we must not turn back.

  Then I glanced ahead, towards the farther shore, and saw that we could not go on either, for from among the rocks and tangles of Martian knotweed which fringed the lake’s edge yet more cactus-men were rising. They seemed to be growing there, sprouting arms and heads as we watched, and when each one reached man height it would tug itself free of the ground and start lurching down on to the lake. Some slipped clumsily between two plates of stone-crust and were lost in the molten stuff beneath, their struggles made more terrible by the fact that they were entirely silent. Yet there were always others growing to take the place of those who perish
ed, and soon an army of the spiky monsters was creeping towards us.

  I looked at Ulla, hoping that she would produce another sword or halberd and prune these vicious vegetables just as she had their comrades inside the house. But the Martian was weaponless, and still weak from her travails. She clutched her bruised throat, and her every breath rasped painfully. The cactus-men were almost upon us, and the slab of crust we were balanced on was far from stable. I realised that I could do nothing but consign myself into the safe keeping of the Good Lord, who watches over all of us. Kneeling, and taking the hand of my startled Martian sister, I began to sing. ‘He who would valiant be …’

  Ulla tugged urgently at my hand. I thought she was objecting to my hymn. Then I saw what she was trying to show me. At the first sound of my voice the approaching cacti had paused in their advance. They came on again when I paused, but as soon as I sang the next line they hung back again, raising their prickly paws towards their heads as if in pain.

  ‘They cannot stand the noise!’ said my companion. ‘Keep making the noise!’

  ‘It is not noise, it is one of our fine old English hymns,’ I protested, but as soon as I stopped singing the cactus creatures surged forwards again, so I hastily added, ‘Let him in constancy/Follow the master,’ et cetera. Truly, John Bunyan would have been proud to see the way that his words drove back the devilish brood who had been crowding so close to us! When Ulla joined in, singing weakly along with me as I arrived at that wonderful phrase, ‘There’s no discouragement/Shall make him once relent/His first avow’d intent/ To be a pilgrim’ several of the thorny thugs actually hurled themselves into the depths rather than listen to us any more!

  Hand in hand, still singing lustily, we walked swiftly across the remainder of the lake and reached the shore without further upset.

  (Note to self: in retrospect, it occurs to me that – strange though this may seem – it may not have been the rousing Christian sentiments of the hymn that distressed our attackers so much as the sound of my voice. I must ensure that Art never comes to hear of this, for he would be sure to tease me about it in his usual childish manner.)

  We stumbled up the shore, leaving Stonemere and its gloomy grange behind us, and as we went I sang ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ and then started all over again on ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. But in the dry air my voice quickly faltered, and poor Ulla’s had never been much more than a whisper to start with. The cacti, who had been following us at a distance, began to gather their courage and close in, waiting for the moment when my voice failed altogether.

  I managed another two verses before I broke down, coughing. One of the cacti, a great tall fellow with white flowers sprouting all over his head, came loping forwards, stretching out his sharp paws to snatch me. But just before he reached me something huge and dark rose up behind him in the moonlight, there was a flash of metal, and he came in half, drenching me with gouts of sticky green sap and quite spoiling my dress. ‘Oh!’ I cried indignantly, and, ‘Whatever now?’

  A great deal of dust was being kicked up as the panicking cacti turned this way and that. As if through a veil I saw great, dim shapes circling us – blunt heads and segmented bodies, plump and leathery as antique armchairs. I knew what they were, of course; I am not entirely ignorant, whatever Art may say. We were surrounded by a herd of Martian worms.10 High on their backs in paper howdahs naked Martians rode, hurling down half-moon-shaped blades which whirred and sliced, cutting through cactus flesh like butter. Within a minute all the cactus-men had been hacked down, and their severed bits and pieces lay about on the sand, twitching and fidgeting and putting down roots.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ called a friendly, English voice, and I jumped back as one of the towering worms slithered to a halt beside me. ‘It will take many hours before they grow again.’

  ‘Richard!’ gasped Ulla, raising a hand in greeting, and the worm’s rider jumped down, grinning broadly at us. Behind him, others of his band were leaping from their mounts and hurrying to our aid. They were young gentleman Martians, for the most part, and I ashamed to say that apart from a few barbaric necklaces of metal scales they were all stark naked.

  At the sight of them, my delicate girlish constitution overcame me at last, and finally, thankfully, I fainted.

  Chapter Twelve

  Leaving Myrtle Unconscious upon the Red Planet, We Return to the Narrative of Her Heroic Younger Brother, in the Course of Which the Free-Port of Ph’Arhpuu’Xxtpllsprngg is Described, and Jack Havock and I Make Our Descent into the Wind-Race.

  Ph’Ahrpuu’xxtpllsprngg, or ‘Farpoo’ as our jolly British aethernauts prefer to call it, is the capital of Io, and has been a harbour town for ten thousand years. Back in the days when Pharaoh was being so beastly to the Israelites the old city was welcoming the trade ships of the lost Martian empire, and now they welcome ours. In the centuries between, the Ionians quietly minded their own business, trading with their neighbours. For the moons of Jupiter form a little model planetary system of their own, with Jupiter as their sun, as if God tried out his craftsmanship here in miniature before he set to work on the rest of our solar realm. On all those little worlds there is life and intelligence of some kind, and the people who live there have been so content to deal with one another that they never bothered trying to buy or build an engine which would carry their little brass saucer-ships across the wilds of space to trade with Earth and the other great planets.

  Farpoo is the crossroads and marketplace for traders from all these moons, and over the centuries it has grown and grown, sprawling outwards until it now covers almost the whole of Io’s surface. A single city wrapped around a world! Its lamps glint and shimmer in the darkness off the shoulder of Jupiter, and for thousands of miles around it the aether is filled with the lights of ships coming and going, or waiting off one of its thousand harbours for a berth. Most are system ships: small trading vessels from Jupiter’s other moons, bringing in cargoes to sell in one of Farpoo’s vast and busy marketplaces.11

  They are peaceable worlds, these satellites of Jupiter, but it was not always so. Back in old Pharaoh’s time the peoples of the various moons and moonlets fought fierce wars against each other, and statues of generals and captains in elaborate uniforms still speckle the streets of Farpoo, looking like overdressed shoppers who have turned to stone while waiting for an omnibus. But the Jovian’s fighting all came to an end with the Spore Wars (circa 5000 BC). Certain plants in the Jovian regions produce ideospores which can affect the minds of thinking creatures, persuading them to grow more of said plant, or not to eat it. Clever Jovian weapons botanists learned how to breed ideospores which would infect anyone who breathed them in with a particular notion. So an Ionian general might bombard the armies of Europa with the idea that they should all throw down their weapons and start doing folk dances, or a Pogglite chief fill the heads of the Callistan snail cavalry with the sudden compulsion to ride over the nearest cliff.

  Then the King of Chumbley, a small and rather neglected moon, developed a spore which was meant to make all the other moons lose interest in the whole concept of war, so that his tiny space armada could conquer them all. It worked like a charm, but unhappily for the Chumbleyites their spores blew back to fill their own heads with the same peaceful ideas, and so the art of war was lost for ever among the moons of Jupiter. (That, of course, made things nice and simple for Sir Arthur Welseley when he breezed in with a fleet of aether-ships in 1806 and declared the entire Jovian system a British Protectorate. Huzzah!)

  The dread spore-cannon still exist on Io, but these days they are mainly used by commercial gentlemen to advertise their wares. Several spore-balls burst softly against the Sophronia’s planking as we swept low over the roofs of Farpoo, and by the time we touched down our heads were filled with the ideas that we should not WALK but RUN to PHENUGREEK’S GAS-TEA EMPORIUM, try a bowl of sizzling Sprune at the CAFÉ JUPE, holiday on the leisure-rafts of EXOTIC GANYMEDE and be sure not to miss the latest instalment of Mr Dickens’ new
story in HOUSEHOLD WORDS. But luckily the Jovian spores do not affect the human brain very strongly, and the sights, sounds and smells of the huge city soon drove all these curious notions from my head.12

  We set the Sophronia down at an out-of-the-way shipyard run by a Scotsman named McCallum, who seemed well used to dealing with pirates, smugglers and other ne’er-do-wells. He did not ask our business, simply pocketed the bag of gold Jack passed him and gave us a sly wink, tapping one grimy finger against the side of his nose. Then, as his crew set to work mending the Sophronia’s poor battered hull, we gathered up our things and prepared to set off into the city.

  Ssilissa surprised us all by stepping ashore dressed in one of the pretty crinolines she had stolen. I suppose when she drew Myrtle aside back in New Scunthorpe she had been asking her advice on how such a garment should be worn. Nor did her transformation end with the dress. She had drawn back the spines on her head into a sort of bun and fastened them with a silver clasp. I even thought she had put on rouge, until I realised that the deep mauve blotches on her face were blushes. They grew deeper still as her shipmates turned to goggle and laugh at her.

  ‘Heavens, Ssill,’ said Jack. ‘What spore got into your head to make you put those on?’

  ‘Good thing we didn’t a get a dose of it,’ chuckled Nipper, whose laughter sounded like some thick liquid simmering in a tub. He had regrown his severed eye-stalk during our journey from Venus, and the new eye shone with mirth along with all the rest as he contemplated Ssil’s unlikely get-up. ‘That fashion wouldn’t suit me one bit!’