Starcross (38 page)

Sober them up and lock them in a suite of rooms for a few weeks with pens, ink, paper and a good supply of biscuits.

Two Gentlemen of Devonshire

Who are these ragged figures lurching out of the fog that swirls eternally across this dreadful Moor? Their eyes are wide, their hair unkempt, their gait unsteady and their demeanour barely human. Why, ’tis MR REEVE and MR WYATT and they have been to the PUB again. But sober them up and lock them in a suite of rooms for a few weeks with pens, ink, paper and a good supply of biscuits, and they will turn out the neatest illustrated tale of adventure you could ask for.

Mr Reeve is the author of the
Mortal Engines
quartet and
Here Lies Arthur
, as well as the illustrator of many children’s books and co-writer of a musical,
The Ministry of Biscuits
.

Mr Wyatt leads a double life as a daring intelligence agent for Her Majesty, and is generally to be found swinging from bamboo bridges in the depths of the Sumatran jungle, or engaging in gondola chases through the canals of Venice. But this has not stopped him from becoming one of the leading illustrators of his generation, and his work has graced the books of Professor Tolkein, Mr Pratchett, Mrs MacCaughrean and many others.

Acknowledgements

And where would Mr Reeve and Mr Wyatt be without the guidance and inspiration of their three lovely editrices, Miss Fountain, Miss Szirtes and Mrs Brathwaite? In the soup, that is where, and being pelted with croutons by retired schoolteachers, outraged at their slack grammar and listless cross-hatching.

That lovely ditty ‘Dearest Margaret, You Are Danish and Your Dog’s Not Very Well’ is an ACTUAL SONG and was written by Mr Nick Riddle (‘The Cheeky Chappie from Chippenham’).

Footnotes

¹
Even though it has neither, technically.

²
So, you see, it was not
all
bad.

³
Mother was concerned about Myrtle’s education, too, for it seemed to have been confined to piano playing and deportment. She kept asking anxiously whether Myrtle would not like to study for some Career or Profession, for, as she said, ‘This is the Nineteenth Century, Myrtle, dear, and many avenues of life which were once purely the preserve of men are now wide open to members of the fairer sex.’ Had not Mother’s dear friend, Miss Marian Evans, lately been appointed editor of the
Westminster Review
? But Myrtle insisted that a lady does not seek anything so common as Paid Employment, and continued playing her horrible piano, and embroidering improving samplers. However, she did agree to learn a little French, for, as she said, ‘then I may write my diary in French, and if
A Certain Person
is ever tempted to steal bits of it again, he will be most aggrieved to find he cannot read it!’

⁴
Ever since that day in May when our house had miraculously been transported into the skies above the capital, hopeful journalists and newspaper proprietors had been pestering Mother, no doubt sensing some mystery about her. Myrtle lived in fear that they would find out the truth. ‘I shall never be received in society if it becomes known that my mother is four-and-a-half-thousand-million years old!’ she told me once.

⁵
Or was it up?

⁶
Huzzah!

⁷
All First Class carriages on the Asteroid Belt and Minor Planets Railway are fitted with gravity generators, though passengers who travel second class spend a great deal of the journey bobbing about on the ceiling with their luggage.

⁸
This is a Clever Literary Reference to the poem by KEATS. I am not
entirely
ignorant, whatever Myrtle says.

⁹
Travellers among our extraterrestrial possessions have frequent cause to be grateful to
Crevice’s Almanac
. After all, at any one time it might be three in the afternoon of the first of April on Mars, six in the morning on the third on Earth and twenty-five o’clock on the forty-fifth of Thribuary on Io. Professor Crevice’s master-work provides useful tables for calculating what date and time it is, wherever you are in the Solar Realm.

¹⁰
Which was odd, for you may remember that when I was at Modesty Station I was quite surprised to see an advertisement which connected his name with hats. But many odd things occurred at Starcross, as you shall shortly see.

¹¹
Or whichever Greek Goddess it is who is supposed to have emerged from the sea, I can never remember which is which.

¹²
Art had assured me that it was not really a flirtation, and that Jack was only making himself agreeable to that beautiful young person in the course of his duties as a secret agent of the British Crown. But there are duties and duties, and I still feel that Jack enjoyed that particular duty overmuch.

¹³
Back in 1776 a gang of American gents who were too stingy to pay their taxes decided to break free of old England, and declared the thirteen colonies independent, calling them ‘The United States’. I believe they held a tea party to celebrate. King George promptly dispatched Lord Cornwallis with a squadron of aether-ships to teach them some manners, and that was the end of the matter. But from time to time in the years since there have been instances of odd, enthusiastic chaps trying to revive the designs of those old revolutionaries. Wild Will Melville was one of them. His aether-ship caused quite a panic when it first took flight in 1801, preying upon British shipping on the Earth–Mars run — A.M.

¹⁴
If only Myrtle would pay attention to the
Boy’s Own Journal, Blackwood’s Magazine
, etc., she would have known that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerned with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it. This great
work, which they call the World Cosy, will, if ever it is completed, be the largest piece of knitting anywhere in Known Space. Progress upon it has been troublesome and slow, however, for until the arrival of British trading ships in 1829 the only yarn the poor Threls had to work with was some skimpy stuff which they spun from the fleece of the hairy space monkfish, shoals of which cruise past their asteroid each spring and sometimes leave clumps of their scraggy wool snagged upon the branches of its briar forests. Indeed, after nearly sixty centuries of steady knitting, the World Cosy still covers less than an eighth of Threlfall’s surface!

Naturally, the Threls were awed and delighted by the varieties of woollen stuff our aethernauts brought with them, and our Government purchased the mining rights to the entire asteroid in exchange for a few shiploads of old socks and half-unravelled jerseys. These rights were then leased to a French concern, the Grande Compagnie pour l’Extraction des Minerales Extra-Mondiale. It seems to me that this was a MISTAKE. The Grande Compagnie must have been a mere front for the French Secret Service all along, and those Frenchies had undoubtedly been tempting the peaceable Threls with promises of yards and yards of wool, and had turned them, not into miners, but into soldiers! — A.M.

¹⁵
A Threllish folk hero.

¹⁶
Threllish prophets speak darkly of a time to come called the Moth Storm, or Great Nibbling, when they fear a cloud of gigantic interstellar clothes moths will descend upon Threlfall and undo in a few instants the work of all those generations — A.M.

¹⁷
Of course, what we called the gravity generator at Larklight was not just a gravity generator. It was a Shaper machine, capable of transferring Larklight clear across the Universe to bring Mother to the early Solar System, and of re-shaping with fans and rays of gravitational force the drifting clouds of gas and matter she found when she got there.

¹⁸
I wondered at the time how Jack and Nipper had failed to recognise their old oppressor, but they told me later that they had very few dealings in person with Sir Launcelot during their time at the RXS, and so much had happened since that neither of them had a clear memory of him, and so his black whiskers and tinted spectacles were quite a sufficient disguise.

¹⁹
I have often wondered why Myrtle was not affected by the siren-song of the hat in our sitting-room closet. I heard it, as you have seen, and as for Mother her age-old brain is so mighty that it could not be easily influenced by such a brute. But Myrtle has barely any brain at all, and I should have thought a hypnotic hat would have found her easy prey. The only explanation I can find is that she is so concerned with appearances that, even when fast asleep, she finds the notion of donning gentleman’s headgear completely unthinkable.

²⁰
The Moobs seemed to have some difficulty controlling poor Nipper’s limbs, either because he has so many, or because the thickness of his shell made it harder for the Moob to gain control of his thoughts.

²¹
Myrtle is wrong, as usual. The alchemist of the aether-ship HMS
Minerva
was found out be a lady in disguise, and there was a person named Miss Dunkery, who, in the last age, passed all the Royal College’s exams with flying colours and became ship’s alchemist upon a trading vessel; but since she wore men’s clothing and smoked cigars she does not perhaps count as a true lady — A.M.

²²
Cardigan (n): a curious knitted garment with buttons up the front, named after Lord Cardigan, who had one made to keep him warm when he went on aether-fishing expeditions off Vesta — A.M.

²³
Published by Messrs Gargany, Nisbit and Stringg of Clerkenwell Road.

²⁴
This is why the better sort of countries do not employ mercenaries: they change sides in an instant if you offer them more gold. Or, indeed, wool.

²⁵
By which I mean, of course,
even more
blank and glassy than usual.

²⁶
The book was
How to Write Love Letters: A Guide for the Perplexed
,
by A Lady,
which seems an odd volume for a pirate and spy to keep aboard his ship. No doubt Jack had been using it to prop up a wobbly table.

²⁷
I remember being very troubled about breaking this same bad news during our earlier adventures, when I believed that Myrtle had been eaten up by the white spiders. Some time when I am at leisure I must work out a suitable form of words and write it down and keep it always in the pocket of my Norfolk jacket, so that at least I shall have one less worry the next time we are in mortal peril. I imagine something along these lines might do the trick: Dearest Mother/Father (delete where applicable); I am most awfully sorry to have to tell you that Myrtle has been eaten/blown up/squashed/lost in the inky blacknesses of the interplanetary void/other. But do not grieve, for she did not suffer/deserved it/has gone to a Better Place, etc., etc.