‘So this is the girl,’ she said when she came to me, and she looked deep into my face. How strange and musical her voice was – as if an invisible choir were chanting all her words along with her in a great variety of cadences and melodies. ‘But where is the other child? Dear Shipton told me you had two.’
‘Art was lost when your soldiers attacked our aether-ship,’ said Mother.
‘Lost? How careless!’ said our hostess, and for a moment the invisible choir took on a less agreeable sound – a discord of minor notes. ‘But it is no matter. My moth-patrols will find him. He may already be on his way to join us.’ She peered at me again. ‘Quite fascinating! And did you really give birth to this child? You actually grew her inside your own body? How deliciously primitive!’ She stared at Mother for a moment, then laughed. ‘What fun we are going to have!’
Mother smiled sweetly at her the way you might at a foreigner or someone not quite in their right mind. ‘And what has brought you to my sun, Mothmaker, across all the leagues of interstellar space?’ she asked. ‘I assume it is not merely a social call? Our kind do not usually seek each other out.’
‘Our kind are not even supposed to go on living once they have helped to form a planetary system about their chosen star,’ replied the Mothmaker. ‘Are we not meant to Cease To Be as soon as the first life begins to creep and crawl across the faces of the worlds which we have shaped? And yet here we are.’
Mother inclined her head, allowing the point. ‘Once I had shaped my worlds,’ she explained, ‘I found that I did not wish to die. So much life was stirring on all my planets! It all looked so interesting. I decided that I would live and walk a while in the gardens I had made.’
‘And no doubt you thought that you were the only Shaper who had ever done such a thing,’ the Mothmaker said. ‘I, too, chose to linger and enjoy those worlds which I had shaped. Seven worlds in orbit around a silver sun. Beautiful worlds they were. Why should I fade away and leave them at the mercy of fate? So I stayed and steered those little creeping creatures to intelligence, and showed them my power, and let them worship me!’
‘Then that is where we must differ,’ said Mother. ‘I have watched my creatures, and cared for them, and even taken on their forms, but I have never asked to be worshipped.’
‘I worship you, dearest,’ said Father shyly.
‘Why, thank you, Edward!’ replied Mother with a smile and quickly kissed him.
The Mothmaker made a disagreeable noise, like a pig snorting, and her invisible choir snorted with her. (It sounded like someone sneezing inside a diving bell.) ‘You are fond of your beasts, I see. Well, so was I. It was amusing to watch them fight and bicker. It was delightful to raise one up as a tyrant over the rest, and then throw them down again. I revelled in their wars. I showed them the secrets of space flight and let each world battle against its neighbours. The faces of the worlds I’d shaped shone bright with their blood!’
I glanced at Reverend Cruet, expecting him to show some sign of disapproval at these un-Christian sentiments, but he simply stood watching her with a simpering smile upon his face. It was clear that the Mothmaker had him under some spell or mesmeric influence.
‘Oh, my creatures kept me entertained for aeons!’ she went on, smiling happily at her memories of all that blood-letting and chaos. ‘But then a dreadful thing occurred. My silver sun failed. Some instability deep within it caused it to split asunder. It exploded, and all my pretty worlds were roasted and stripped bare!
‘I just had time to save a few of my Snilth – they had always been my favourites, for they are so fierce and such a pretty blue – and I set out across the aether to find a new home for them. In the outskirts of my system lived a breed of giant space moths, and a few had escaped the explosion of their star. I bred more moths, even bigger and stronger. I formed them into the swarm that surrounds us. I used the engines of my Shaper vessel to forge a home there where my Snilth might live during our long voyage across the night. And I set a course towards the nearest solar system.’
‘Which is this one, I suppose,’ said Mother.
‘Oh no. Not at first. Mothstorm has been whirling across the Universe for longer than you think. Our voyage has taken us a million million years. We have passed a dozen stars, but none has suited me; one was too hot, one was too cold, one was just the wrong shade of yellow. Most had never felt the hand of a Shaper at all and were home only to nasty spiders and other creatures of empty space. Some had been shaped, but the races which thrived there were too few or too stupid to make good slaves. So my Snilth took what they wanted from the worlds of those suns and on we whirled, seeking another. Until I saw a golden sun, with a teeming sea of worlds and moons around it. There, I thought, my Snilth will find a home.’
‘And I am sure that they will be most welcome,’ said Mother. ‘There is plenty of room for them here among the outer planets. But I am afraid they shall have to mend their warlike ways, and I am at a loss to know what we shall do with all these moths.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ said the Mothmaker.
She still spoke sweetly, but the choir that sung her words beneath the surface of her voice had changed: they sounded shrill and angry, more screeching than singing. Her skirts seemed to stir and shift in some ghost-wind that I could not feel, and for an instant I thought they were not skirts at all but some oily, shadowy substance filled with cold gold eyes!
8
‘You misunderstand me, Mrs Emily Mumby. I did not bring my creatures here in search of charity. I am here to take your worlds from you. They will become the worlds of the Snilth, and all the creatures who live on them shall be the slaves of the Snilth. From across the universe I sent forth the power of my mind. Your creations are not as susceptible to the power of my thoughts as those of my own Snilth and I could sense them only dimly, yet I was able to probe a few of them and I soon learned of some primitive primates who possessed devices which could only have been made by Shaper science. I guessed at once that you were still among them. I sought and sought for you, but could not trace you – until I happened upon the mind of this idiot priest. Among his thoughts I found the image of your Shaper vessel, which he knew as Larklight, the ancestral home of his dear friend’s wife. I knew who she must be, this Mrs Emily Mumby. So I lured the fool Cruet to me in the hope that you would follow him and meet me here upon the outer edge of your system. For before I venture any closer to your sun, I have decided to make you a proposal. Will you join me, so that we may rule as gods together? Or do you mean to try to stop me?’
Mother spread her hands. ‘How can I stop you? I have no powers to match yours. I gave them up when I chose to become human. The vehicle which brought me here has become a simple home, draughty but much loved. The machines which shaped my worlds have been destroyed. Unlike you, I do not simply manipulate the thoughts of others to give me the outward appearance of a human woman. All that I am is contained within this body of flesh and blood and bone. When it dies, so will I.’
‘Then that is why I cannot see your real self!’ said the Mothmaker, almost to herself. She circled us and her skirts rustled in a way that was somehow quite exquisitely repellent. She opened her mouth too wide and laughed in a manner I thought most unladylike. ‘You fool!’ she said, and her choir went on laughing as she spoke. ‘You could have been a god, and yet you have chosen to become one of these brief, limited creatures! You are as powerless as them! I shall kill you, Mrs Emily Mumby, and I shall enslave these creatures that you love.’
Mother simply shrugged. ‘You shall do as you wish, I daresay,’ she said. ‘For you are horribly powerful. But someone will stop you. Sooner or later, someone will grow tired of your tyranny. Perhaps it will be a human being, or an Ionian, or another from the worlds of my sun. Or perhaps your own Snilth will overthrow you.’
‘They tried it once,’ sniggered the Mothmaker. ‘A queen rose up among them who dared to challenge me and tried to turn them against me. That was fifty thousand of your years ago, but my ve
ngeance was so terrible that it still lives in their legends. Let them try again! I shall destroy them as easily as I destroy you.’
Mother reached out and took my hand and squeezed it hard for a moment, and let it go. I saw her do the same to Father. Then she stepped forward, and the Mothmaker took a step back despite herself.
‘All I know is this,’ said Mother. ‘A god who does not understand suffering or love is worth very little, and how else can we learn to suffer and to love except by living as mortal creatures live?’
I thought her sentiments very beautiful indeed and well suited to that Christmas season, when we recall how one far mightier than any Shaper chose to be born a human baby in a manger. But our hostess only laughed and laughed, and as she laughed so she seemed to grow. A vast and inky shadow swelled around her, speckled with drifting motes of golden light, and her own shape blurred and spread and smudged till she and the shadow were one, an immense cloud of darkness and fire!
‘Well, isn’t this nice?’ observed Reverend Cruet, beaming at us all.
‘You wish to learn to suffer?’ the Mothmaker demanded, with an unearthly laugh. Long tentacles of shade reached out and wrapped about Mother and pinioned her and lifted her from the floor. ‘I shall teach you how to suffer!’
Oh, gentle reader, I can hardly bring myself to write these next lines. My eyes grow misty as I set the pen to the page; my hand trembles and I get ink all over my cuffs. I close my eyes and I can still see quite clearly in my mind’s eye the way the Mothmaker lifted my mother up, her myriad eyes glittering with chilly laughter, and how Father ran forward to try to defend Mother and was flung aside by a blow from one of those shadow-tentacles. The elegant hallway was fading from my sight, as if the Mothmaker no longer deemed it worth deluding us with her glamours. I saw her house now as I believe it truly was: not carpeted or furnished at all, but ancient and foul and full of dust and webs, its walls and stairways built from Snilth bones and the desiccated carcasses of moths!
Mother, struggling in the merciless embrace of the Mothmaker’s tentacles, looked down at me and said, ‘The Tin Moon, Myrtle! You must go to the Tin Moon…’
And then, as easily as a heartless boy might kill a butterfly, the Mothmaker crushed her. I heard her cry and the dreadful sound as her neck was snapped, and I saw the shadow-tentacles release her and watched helpless as her poor broken body fell upon the floor in front of me, stone dead!
And then I saw nothing more for a while, for merciful darkness overwhelmed my senses and I fell down beside her in a swoon.
Chapter Twelve
Wherein Charity and I Go Fishing and Make a Most Surprising Catch.
It is strange to look back with the benefit of hindsight and recall how happy I was that afternoon. I stood with Charity upon the Sophronia’s star deck, casting our lines out into the dark in hope of catching some of the great icthyomorphs which came scooting past us, and thought that truly this was the life for a British boy. Even the sight of that ominous cloud smeared across the northern sky could not dampen my spirits. Yet how soggy they would have been had I known that within that cloud my own dear mother had just been slain and that her murderer was plotting the overthrow of us all!
‘Got one!’ cried Charity at last, as her groaning rod bent almost double. I clipped my own rod into a brass contraption which had been screwed to the star-deck handrail for the purpose and ran to help her. Luckily we had both put on magnetic space galoshes, which clung like limpets to the iron angling-plates in the deck, for else we should certainly have been hauled clean off the ship.
Charity had caught an absolute whopper! I could see the starlight slinking along its scaly flanks as it thrashed to and fro in the dark off the larboard beam: an ugly-looking brute, whose wide mouth looked quite capable of swallowing us both! We wrestled with it for a few moments, attempting to reel it in, but it was too strong for us. Had the rod not been made of best Venusian bamboo it should certainly have snapped in half. When the angling-plate which Charity was stood on started to be wrenched free of the Sophronia’s planking by the force of the fish’s struggles I decided that, just this once, safety and speed were more important than good sportsmanship, and I drew a pocket blunderbuss from my fishing bag and shot the blighter dead.
Even then it proved no easy feat to drag the huge carcass alongside, but we called below for help and within a few moments were joined by Nipper and Grindle, who helped us heave it on to the star deck and lash it down with ropes. Grindle had his kitchen cleaver stuck through his cummerbund and set about butchering the fish there and then so that we could have it safely stored before the Sophronia moved off. Its severed head and still-twitching tail went tumbling away into the void, where they were set upon by shoals of smaller icthyomorphs. But as Grindle brought his cleaver down upon the dead fish’s belly, a strange cry seemed to issue from within it. Grindle jumped back, much alarmed, as from the cut that he had made a human hand extended. It formed itself into a fist, which shook violently at us.
‘I say!’ complained a muffled voice. ‘Watch what you’re doing! You nearly had my eye out!’
Nipper quickly used his pincers to widen the cut, and in another moment a strange, slime-dripping figure emerged and stood upright, attempting to brush bits of fish innards from a naval officer’s hat.
‘Good Lord!’ it said. ‘Master Mumby? Heavens, but I’m glad to see you. I don’t mind telling you it was jolly stuffy inside there!’
‘Captain Moonfield!’ I cried, overjoyed at this happy turn of events.
And indeed, it was he. Charity and I led him down inside and helped him to change out of his sodden uniform, while Grindle and Nipper went on butchering the fish. In the main cabin, under the wary gaze of Jack Havock, the good captain told us how he had been hurled from the bridge of HMS Actaeon by the moth-riders’ bombs, and had plummeted through space until he was swallowed like a minnow by that passing Georgian gulper. (So you see how the Pudding Worm which had caused so much trouble at Larklight turned out quite providential in the end, for if its offspring hadn’t eaten all the Sophronia’s provisions we should never have thought to go fishing, and poor Captain M. should have been doomed to circle Georgium Sidus in an icthyomorphous belly till he died.)
‘And what of the Actaeon?’ he asked worriedly, as he struggled into a spare pair of Mr Munkulus’s trousers.
‘She is destroyed,’ said Jack. ‘We saw her wreck in orbit as we arrived.’
‘Great Scott! And my men?’
‘Captives, I think,’ I said. ‘The moth-riders herded them up and carried them away. They have my mother and father too. And the Burtons and Doctor Blears. Oh, and Myrtle.’
Captain Moonfield shook his head. ‘This is a dark day. What do you think their aim is, these moth-rider johnnies?’
‘I know what mine would be were I as strong and as clever as them,’ said Jack. ‘And that would be to smash your empire utterly and scour it from the Heavens.’
‘Righto,’ said Captain Moonfield. ‘I detect, young Havock, that you’re still feeling a tad peeved about that Changeling Tree business?’
Jack did not answer, but swam himself to a porthole and put his telescope to his eye again.
‘You see,’ the captain went on, ‘I was rather hoping that you might carry me back to civilised space, so I can raise the alarm about these lepidopterous bounders.’
‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ Jack said, as he looked out into the unending night. ‘But I’ll ask a reward for my services. Enough of the antidote to bring my family and the rest of the Venus colony back to human form. Do you think the British Government will think that a fair price for my saving their empire once again?’
Captain Moonfield said, ‘If it were down to me, you know, you’d have your antidote straightway, without needing to perform any service in return. You’re a brave lad, Jack Havock, and we should do whatever we can to put right the wrongs we’ve done you. That’s what I shall tell my superiors.’
‘That sounds fair enough, Jack, doesn??
?t it?’ I asked.
But Jack did not seem to be listening. He lowered the telescope slightly, gulped and put it back to his eye. An instant later he was turning from the window, kicking his way up to the steering platform and snatching his speaking trumpet from its hook. ‘All hands!’ he bellowed. ‘Nipper, get that hatchway closed! Ssil, stoke up the alembic!’
‘But half the fish is still outside, Jack,’ Nipper protested, as he reluctantly bolted the star-deck hatch.
‘Then it shall stay there!’ Jack vowed, taking the Sophronia’s wheel in both hands and spinning it so that the old ship turned her bows towards the far-off Sun. ‘We’ll wait no longer here. That cloud is coming fast, and I can see now what it is made of.’
‘And what is that?’ asked Captain Moonfield, clapping hold of a huge chunk of Georgian gulper that hung amidships and carrying it towards the galley.
Jack Havock shook his head, as if he still could not quite credit what his spyglass had shown him. ‘Moths,’ he said grimly. ‘It is a million million God-Almighty moths.’
And as he spoke, the whole ship shook. Charity shrieked, tipped head-over-heels, and I too was caught all unawares and flung against a bulkhead. A greenish light flared through the portholes. I clawed my way to one and saw a great shape go swooping past us, vast wings black as a scrap-book silhouette against the ice blue of Georgium Sidus. ‘The moths!’ I shouted. ‘They are upon us!’
‘Oh Lord!’ cried Charity.
‘Ssil! Full ahead!’ bellowed Jack.
And the alembic in Ssil’s wedding chamber swelled with a song I’d never heard, and all the Sophronia’s aged planking groaned and creaked and crooned as Mother’s magic swept the ship away from that moth-haunted planet and threaded her like a needle through the sighing, silken, shimmering stuff of Alchemical Space.