‘Heavens, Arthur!’ she said when she saw me climbing towards her up the webs. ‘Is that you?’
‘Oh, Mother!’ I cried. ‘I am so glad you are not dead, but we must leave now. There are a great many spiders after us!’
And sure enough, when I looked behind me I saw them pouring out of the hulk of the poor old Aeneas. They were spider-soldiers, and every one of them looked more adept at climbing those walls of web than us mere humans. Mr Munkulus turned and emptied his pistol into the approaching horde, then flung it at them and climbed onwards, but the spiders climbed faster, scrambling over the bodies of their fallen comrades.
I looked up, and it seemed such an awfully long way to where my mother waited. I thought how sad it would be if I were caught before I reached her, and what a disagreeable awakening she would have had if she had to watch her dear Art ripped to bits by vengeful arthropods before she had even had breakfast or a cup of tea. And an idea came to me, as ideas sometimes do at moments of great desperation. I ripped a curtain of web from the entrance of an empty alcove close beside me, and then, holding it tightly beneath my arm, I groped in the pocket of my jacket and tugged out my box of lucifers. I had remembered, you see, the way that handful of web had burned so well when I was fighting the Jovian squid, and it seemed to me that the spiders might be wary of fire, living in a place made of such stuff. I hoped to try and make a burning torch, with which I might keep them at bay.
My first match failed; my second too. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely grasp the box. The third match flared, but as I raised my handful of web to try and light it the whole lot, web, box, and all, flashed into a bright sheet of flame and I screeched in pain and dropped it. Down and down it drifted, trailing smoke and handfuls of eager sparks. The spiders scrambled over each other to get out of its path.
The floor of the chamber, where anchors of thick web tied it to the hulk of the Aeneas, caught light like a dry leaf in a bonfire. Heat brushed my face, and the screech and pop of roasting spiders filled the chamber. Black smoke stung my eyes as I climbed to where my mother waited. Already the threads which formed the walls on either side were beginning to smoulder and glow red. I didn’t spare them a thought as I hugged Mother, and she hugged me.
‘I woke them all,’ Ssillissa was telling Jack, as she reached down to help haul him up, and presented him with some of the weapons we had brought with us from the Sophronia. ‘I woke them all and told them that the spiders had you aboard that old hulk, and we hatched a plan to save you.’
‘Brave Ssil!’ said Jack, and kissed her. It was just a quick, friendly kiss on the cheek, but it made poor Ssil blush purple as an aubergine. Behind her, the reunited twins were hugging one another, their bright crowns woven together in a great knot of happy light.
‘There’s another one here,’ said Grindle, who was trying to tug the slumbering form of Sir Waverley Rain out of his alcove. ‘He won’t wake up, the great lump. Do we need him?’
‘Poor Sir Waverley!’ cried Mother. ‘He has been here longer than any of us; no wonder he cannot shake off his sleep!’
‘Bring him!’ ordered Jack, climbing nimbly past us, and Mr Munkulus heaved the slumbering industrialist over his shoulder.
There was no time for me to talk to Mother, or to ask her any of the thousand questions which were buzzing about like hornets in my head. I took her hand, and we scrambled together up the sloping web, while the hot updrafts wafted flags of blazing web past from the inferno below. Twice, bold spider-warriors, scrambling up through the smoke and flames, almost reached us, but each time Ssillissa, who was bringing up the rear, dislodged them with a swipe of her tail and sent them tumbling down again before they could do us harm.
Gasping and half choked with smoke, we reached the chamber’s upper entrance, and there we halted, bunching up behind Jack and Grindle, who were leading the way. Ahead of us the web-tunnel was full of spiders, their bright masses of eyes filled with hate and firelight.
To everyone’s surprise it was my mother who said, ‘This way!’ and began tearing at the tunnel wall. Strands and clumps of web began to come away beneath her fingers, and Jack soon saw what she was about and set to work with his cutlass, hacking and slashing at the thick cross-hatchings of silk. ‘Why, thank you!’ said Mother sweetly, and Jack replied, ‘Don’t mention it, missus.’ I wish Myrtle had been there, for it would have pleased her to see that despite our grim predicament we had not forgotten our manners.
The wall tore through at last. In the widening gap I saw a gleam of Saturn-light, and then the warm, yellow face of the planet herself. She hung before us like a ripe, gigantic peach as we squeezed out one by one to cling to one of the spiders’ spindly bridges in the open aether. After a moment we were joined by Ssilissa, who had been holding off the spiders in the tunnel, and we all looked together for an escape route.
Yet none did we see. The great web-fortress flickered like a fire-balloon, venting panicky spiders from every entrance. Squads of spider-servants were hurrying off towards another web-castle, bearing in their forelegs wobbling, bean-shaped bags of jelly which I guessed were spider eggs. I thought how disappointed Father would have been in me, that I had not bothered to try and find out how the spiders were born, or what monstrous spider queen had laid those eggs. But I did not have time to grow regretful, for at the end of the bridge we were all clinging to, patrols of spider-soldiers were busy severing the strands with their sharp mandibles, cutting the blazing castle adrift to stop fire spreading to the rest of their web.
‘I am afraid we find ourselves in a rather trying situation,’ said my mother. ‘Should escape prove quite impossible, I should just like to say thank you to you all for rescuing me from that horrid prison, whoever you may be.’
‘Jack Havock, ma’am,’ said Jack, a little startled, I think, by the cool way she was taking our predicament.
‘Well, Jack Havock,’ said she, ‘I congratulate you on your pluck, and on the loyalty of your friends. Now, how are we to extricate ourselves from this maze?’
‘We’ve got a ship,’ said Nipper, ‘tangled in those webs yonder.’
We all looked to where he pointed, and there, like a blot of dark ink soaking through the sheets of gossamer, we discerned the form of our dear old Sophronia. We did not know if we might free her, but she seemed a better place to be than out there among the spiders in the aether, so we each took the deepest breath we could of that thin element and jumped from the bridge, bare seconds before the spider demolition squad chewed through the final strands and the whole thing snapped in half like a broken fiddle string.
We were all well used to propelling ourselves about in zero BSG, so it was not difficult for us to flap our way across the aether to the web-mass where the ship was caught. But I confess I was surprised by how expert my mother seemed. Ssillissa’s crinoline made her faff and flounder, but Mother, despite her fashionable clothes, swam through that nothingness as gracefully as any Aetheric Icthyomorph, and made it to the Sophronia ahead of all of us.
The ship was still unguarded. Either the spiders had not realised which way we had gone, or they were too busy fighting the fire inside their cobweb castle, which cast long rays of ruddy light and sombre shadow through the nets of web and drifting rock about us. Mr Munkulus and Grindle began hacking with their cutlasses at the webs which tethered the Sophronia. The rest of us dived in through her hatches, and set to work heaving them shut and starting the air generator, while Ssillissa scrambled down into the wedding chamber and set about stoking the alembic. I helped the Tentacle Twins carry Sir Waverley to a hammock and strap him in, and then went to wait beside my mother, who was looking about with great interest at the ship. I felt a little self-conscious at bringing her into such a cluttered, scruffy place, but when Nipper lit the gas lamps I saw that the hoverhogs had been hard at work, and that most of the crumbs and crusts which had been drifting about before had vanished. (The hogs themselves were fast asleep, hovering in a cosy pink clump at the end of their
strings.)
‘This is the Sophronia, Mother,’ I said, clearing a few severed spider limbs from a locker to make a space where she might sit down. ‘She is a good ship. Captain Havock took Myrtle and myself in after the spiders seized Larklight.’
‘The spiders have Larklight!’ cried my mother, and for the first time since she was restored to me I thought I saw real alarm in her eyes. ‘Tell me they do not have the key!’
I remembered the locket, and, reaching into my pocket, drew it out and showed it to her, whereupon she kissed me and ruffled my hair and called me a clever boy. I would have given anything to understand what was going on, and wished that she would explain herself, but at that moment the Sophronia’s engines started, and Mr Munkulus and Grindle came plunging inside, the Ionian bellowing, ‘All hands to battle stations! Those nasty insects are upon us again!’
All hands meant me, I supposed, so I left Mother and ran to help the Tentacle Twins run out one of Sophronia’s big, antique space cannon. Through the gunport I could see the nearby webs silhouetted in the glow of the great fire that still burned off the shoulder of Saturn. Every strand was crawling with the spiders.
Sophronia groaned and shuddered, trying to heave herself clear. The Tentacle Twins trilled at me to stand aside and Squidley pulled the lanyard of our cannon, setting it off with a great roar and severing a thick, spider-creeping bridge of web a few hundred yards away. I opened the shot-locker and heaved out a fresh round, which Yarg shoved into the smoking breech. Grindle’s gun went off on the far side of the ship, and he gave a shrill squeal of victory – ‘Got the _________!’ and then noticed Mother watching and said, ‘Pardon my Martian, ma’am.’
But the Sophronia was still trapped, and now we could hear the scrabble and scratch of white claws on the hull above our heads. A hatch burst open, and Jack emptied a blunderbuss into the horrid face of the spider who pushed through it, the recoil throwing him across the ship. Bouncing from the bulkheads like an India-rubber ball, he shouted, ‘Ssil!’
Ssilissa poked her head out of the wedding chamber, looking more inhuman that ever in her smoked glass goggles. She was in time to see Nipper snatch a cutlass and slice the foreclaws off another spider as it groped in through the hatch. The Sophronia was pitching now with the weight of spiders scrambling over her, and all the hatches were bowing inwards under their fierce, incessant blows. Grindle fired his gun again, but didn’t waste time watching where the shot had gone, just flung the breech open and ran to reload.
‘Get us moving!’ Jack ordered. ‘Full speed, Ssil!’
‘But Jack, among these rocksss and websss …’
‘The wedding, Ssil! Begin the wedding!’
She stared at him a moment longer, then turned and fled back to her work. Another hatch gave way, and another spider tumbled in, scrabbling and clawing until my mother, of all people, snatched up the cleaning rod from Grindle’s gun and pinned the monster to the wall as if it were a specimen in a collector’s display drawer.
‘Good Heavens, Mother!’ I cried. ‘Please do not overexert yourself!’
The Sophronia shook herself like an old dog waking. From the exhaust-trumpets beneath her stern burst the bright, uncanny clouds of wedding fire. Still the webs held tight, although those astern were already parting and bursting into flame. Suddenly a spiky ship loomed up huge in my porthole, driving towards us as if intent upon impaling Sophronia upon its spines. It was the very ship I had seen off Larklight on that first day, and again on the night the spiders stole poor Myrtle, and I knew somehow that Mr Webster was aboard it, determined to destroy us all.
And then, before I could so much as cry out a warning, we were moving, and moving so fast that everything was a blur, a rush of fire and gossamer and spider legs that brightened and faded and vanished into gold.
Thus we made good our escape from the webs of Saturn, which is a horrid place, and one that I pray I may never have cause to visit again!
Chapter Eighteen
In Which I Discover the Curious Truth about My Mother.
Safe on the seas of space, we licked our wounds. Jack had a dozen claw cuts on his hands and arms, and his coat hung in bloody tatters. The Tentacle Twins had each lost several arms, and Mr Munkulus had been badly nipped by spider pincers. Yet all of them made light of their injuries, and said that they counted themselves lucky to be alive.
‘We must go to Larklight,’ said Mother, when everyone’s wounds were bandaged, and my own poor, scorched fingers had been smeared with soothing balm.
‘No,’ said Jack firmly. ‘Myrtle’s on Mars. That’s what Ptarmigan and Webster said. In danger on Mars. Dead, maybe. But we’ve got to go to her.’
‘No, Jack,’ said Mother.
‘What, don’t you care about her at all, missus?’ he cried angrily. ‘Your own daughter? I’d have thought –’
‘I care exceedingly,’ said Mother. ‘But if she is dead we are already too late to help her, and if she is not she faces a greater danger. We all do. The spiders control Larklight, and even without the key they may do terrible harm there.’
‘What is Larklight, Mother?’ I asked.
She turned to me, looking troubled. ‘I suppose I must tell you,’ she said. ‘Larklight is what you would call a ship. A ship of a most uncommon sort. It’s real name is …’ (and here she said something in a flutey, musical language that I shall not even try to spell) ‘… which means the Lantern of Creation’s Dawn in the language of my people.’
‘Bit of a mouthful,’ grumbled Grindle.
‘But I thought your people came from Cambridgeshire?’ I asked.
‘Dear Art!’ cried Mother, smiling at me, and reaching out to take my hand. ‘How can you forgive me? I am afraid that I have been less than honest about my past. I do not come from Cambridgeshire. I was born – or rather, I came into being – four and a half billion years ago, far from your sun, out among the island galaxies. I am – or was – a Shaper. My people have existed since the first morning of the Universe. We travel among the stars, giving new solar systems the helping hand they sometimes need to bring forth life. For we do love life, in all its infinite variety.’
I remembered the moving pictures that Dr Ptarmigan had shown us. That strange vehicle, half-glimpsed, dragging planetoids together with its flickering rays and swatting the First Ones’ ships aside with fans of force. Jack must have been thinking of it too. He said, ‘What about the spiders, Mrs Mumby? You don’t seem too fond of them, nor they of you.’
Mother glanced at him. ‘The First Ones. Yes. Were it not for them, there might be no need for Shaping. Left to themselves, most stars stir up planets out of the clouds of dust and gas which gather around them in the aether. But the First Ones drift through space on their gossamer threads, and when they find a solar system in the early stages of formation they bind it, and tie it, and wrap it in their knots and cradles, and make sure that no worlds can ever form, and no sort of life but their own can ever thrive.’
‘Until you Shapers come along and slaughter them all?’ asked Jack.
‘The Shapers only destroy in order to create,’ said Mother. ‘Though I am afraid it is rather hard luck on the spiders.’
‘Serve them right,’ said Grindle, rubbing his bruises, and most of us agreed with him. But I could see that Jack felt a sort of sympathy for those spiders. He was no friend of the British Empire, remember, and I believe he saw the Shapers as just an empire of another sort, sticking their cosmic noses into other beings’ business and moulding the Universe to reflect their own notions of right and wrong.
‘If it is you Shapers who make everything,’ Mr Munkulus asked, ‘what place is there for God?’
‘Think, dear,’ said Mother. ‘Who made the Universe and lit the suns? Who shaped the Shapers? For Shapers are not gods, just servants of that invisible, universal will which set the stars in motion.
‘Usually,’ (she went on) ‘when a Shaper vessel has done its work, it dies, and the Shaper aboard it dies too. At least, they choose to
cease to be – we are not alive in the same way you are, so we can never really die. But I chose another course. After all my hard work, I longed to stay and see what grew in the gardens I had made. Oh, I slept for the first billion years or so, for these worlds were no fun at all till they had atmospheres and suchlike. But once I awoke …! How jolly it all was! Life popping up everywhere! I flew about aboard the Lantern of Creation’s Dawn, peeking down first at this planet, then that. But I could not imagine what it would feel like to be one of the creatures who lived on them, so I began taking on corporeal forms. (That means, inhabiting living bodies, Mr Grindle, dear.)
‘I was a dinosaur for a while – so invigorating! And the Age of the Great Slime Moulds on Venus was awful fun. Then, for centuries and centuries, I tried being a Martian.
Ah, the morning sun upon the porcelain pinnacles of Lllha Ahstellhion! Wind harps playing in the perfume gardens at Oeth Ahfarreth! It seems like yesterday. And then I was an Ionian, but four arms didn’t suit me. I could never think what to do with all those hands. But when humans arrived … Oh, I simply loved being a human! I parked Larklight in orbit out beyond the Moon, and visited Earth every century or so. And … Well, I’m afraid I did something rather silly.
‘I met a man named Isaac Newton. An odd sort, but so clever. It was sweet to watch him puzzling over gravity and so forth. How could I resist giving him a helping hand? Just little hints at first – hiding in that tree and dropping apples on his head, that sort of thing. He worked out the rest all by himself, you know. Perhaps I should have just left it at that. I admit, I got carried away. But he was such a dear.’