The mariner had an otter’s round, furry face, sporting a beard of crusted icicles and whiskers that clinked when they twitched. But her lower half was a long, gnarled fish’s tail, wound around itself as tight as a bolt. Her scales flowed in wild patterns, dull and gray as old metal, dripping with boney, knife-shaped fins. On her shoulders glowed two ancient glass lanterns. Their brass netting had turned green and misshapen with the junk of years. The candles within blazed a pale, uncanny green. A thousand nights of grizzly wax had busted out the lantern panes and spilt onto the creature’s fur, so thick and so much that her chest vanished completely inside a cuirass of the stuff, a hundred shades of white. She wore a battered, threadbare Admiral’s hat all tangled with white seaweed.
Half-buried in the wax of her chest was a stitched nametag. It read: Ballast.
The otter-fish blinked one dark eye slowly, then the other. Her fuzzy cheeks puffed out and she barked up at the crescent Moon. Then she turned her back, a ridge of salt-crusted fins glittering on her spine, and began banging on a thick copper pipe with her fist in time to a rough, grumbly tune.
Bully for Ahab and Blackbeard and I
We’ve got a doomed ship and a death to defy
We’ve got us a maelstrom and a hook in our eye
We’ve got our salt souls all baked up in a pie
Oh, bully for Blackbeard and Ahab and I!
“Pardon me,” began September. “I don’t mean to be any trouble—”
The otter-fish cut off both her song and September. “Ship’s broke,” she sniffed.
“I think it’s lovely!” September protested. The colored barnacles seemed to breathe gently, swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.
“Not mine, thine. Mine’ll swing anchor at the end of the world.” Ballast threw down a heavy, wet rope. “Yours won’t make tomorrow. Tie her on and we’ll see what we see.”
September hefted the rope and, with much pushing and hauling, got it knotted around Aroostook’s bumper. She caught the salt-caked ladder Ballast humped over the rail and came aboard. Everything on the barge stood very neat and tidy: boxes and barrels and vases and pots and chests, but each one closed, well polished and maintained, and stacked in orderly pyramids. Ballast seemed to have used up her store of neatnickery on her cargo. When she moved, making smart, efficient little hops on her wound-up pewter-colored tail, bits of wax broke off and crumbled away. The barge began to sail again, upbound toward the Moon. The ultramarine fish blossomed out of the lacy rudder once more, their trailing fins floating in space.
And a moment later, Aroostook, too, was floating in space, trailing behind the salvagation barge as a winch slowly hauled it the rest of the way on board.
The great rope lashed barnacled barge and rusty Ford together into one awkward vessel. Ballast rubbed her furry cheeks. Her pelt was the color of good, old rum.
“Do you know anything about cars?” said September shyly, once they were away.
The otter-fish blinked her eyes again. “If that’s what you want to call your ship, then I know everything there is to know. And ship is just another word for what bears you up and keeps you safe. So if you stop your yapping I’ll do yours. It’s my job, anywhat. Ballast Downbound, that’s me, B.D.’s Moondock Salvagation, sundries and subtleties, answer to every SOS and IOU.”
September clapped her chilled hands in relief. “How lucky that you happened along!”
B.D. snorted. Wax and ice sprayed. “What’s luck? Luck is for lubby-landers, leprechauns, and lazybones. I told you it’s my job. More’n my job, it’s my body and soul. I’m the best Klabautermann you’ll ever meet. Can patch a hull in a hurricane, sew a sail in a zombie fight. Or let them all drown, if a ship’s got tired of living and wants a nice patch of seafloor to retire in. Raise anemones. Take up with a fancy fish. Not so many of us working the routes anymore, mind you. On account of how you can get attached to the sailors. They’re sweet, I suppose. Nice tattoos. But they keep their loyalty in their false legs. Better pay, nicer berths? They’re off like shots fired portside. A Klabautermann’s love is for the ship alone. I’d guess some’d call me old-fashioned but that’s as I see it. You can always get more sailors.” B.D. hopped over to a stack of round boxes, rather like hatboxes made of copper and stone. She opened one and rummaged around inside. “I make the run up and down this road day and night. It’s a good current, steady work. Heard you distressing loud and clear. Sounds like a buoy knocking in a storm, the alarm that sounds in a Klabautermann’s heart when a ship’s about to go down.”
“Go down?” September said. “She’s only out of gas!”
“You’d never even see me if your ship weren’t on its last leg. S’what a Klabautermann is. An early warning system, I guess you’d want to call it if you’re mechanickly inclined, which I am.” B.D. pulled a case from inside the copper hatbox. It was quite flat and thin and shiny, like the chrome on cars much newer than Aroostook. “See, I bet you don’t know anything at all about shipcraft. Take me for a lesson and a cheap one at that. I’m named for the secret, vital core of a ship. Ballast is the weight down in the deep of you that keeps a vessel upright in dark water.” The mariner bent over Aroostook, speaking to the car more than September. “Oh, the cargo you carry will do it for a while, or even the heft of a crew, mates and mettles, if you love them enough. But a ship’s not a ship till she’s got ballast of her own. Down in the belly, a big massy mess of rope and wood and hardtack and love letters and harpoons and old lemons. Anything that ever fascinated the ship, made it sail true, patched it or broke it, anything the ship loved or longed for, anything it could use. Bo’sun gets in a fistfight with a deckhand over a missing cannonball and they bloody each other up some, but that ball’s just circled down into the baby ballast. Some’ll tell you a ship’s not born till she gets a name or has a bottle of wanderwhiskey broke over her bow, but it’s not so. Without ballast, she’s just wood.” B.D. ran a tender paw over Aroostook’s burlaped wheel. “It all just sort of sinks down and jumbles up together into something hot and heavy inside you, and the weight of everything you ever wanted in the world will keep you steady even when the worst winds blow. Me and mine, we get born when the ballast gets born. Come out of an egg if you want to hear private details, if it’s still an egg when it’s a good hemp Turk’s head knot. We don’t peck our way out, we untie. When the ship despairs, we feel all those old ropes tearing us apart until we get to fixing what’s fouled.”
September touched her chest softly. What have I got, where a ship has ballast? she thought. But what she said was: “I don’t think Aroostook has anything like that. I’ve taken her apart and put her back together pretty often and I’ve never found anything that wasn’t meant to be there, apart from a squirrel that up and died in the manifold one time.”
B.D. blinked her great otter eyes. She shrugged. Wax snapped off from her lanterns and drifted down like snow. “I’m not the arguing kind. I won’t go poking about in her just to show up a girl and make her feel wrongly. Little tugger deserves her privacy. I think there’s more under there than an empty belly, but that’s her business. Mind your own charts and no copying, my mother always said. And if it’s only gas you want, I’ve got it, any kind you please.” The Klabautermann nuzzled the hood of the Model A with her furry cheeks as if she was a cat. “I’ll cook it up special for you, my scruffy wee seadog. No charge for strays.”
Ballast Downbound popped open the shiny case and pulled out a tap, the kind you’d use to open a keg of cider. She bounced up onto her tail and crossed the barge, leaving September to scramble behind her toward a stained oilcloth, draped over something with a great number of points and corners and humps. With a tremendous spring of her tail, the Klabautermann caught the top of the cloth and hauled it down, revealing a soda fountain with a clean chrome counter. It was just like the one in town run by Mr. Johansson the pharmacist. When September needed medicine for her father, she would always stay and watch Mr. Johansson mix up sodas for his customers. Once, she parted
with one of her precious dimes and he’d whipped her up an orange fizz. It looked like fire in the glass.
Of course, it was not exactly like Mr. Johansson’s soda counter. A silver soda-water fountain took up most of the space, carved into the shape of a huge, ancient fish with spines all down its back. It bent over, its wide mouth pointing downward, its hundred fins aroused and bristling with sticky splashes of old syrup. Row after row of bottles racked up like bowling pins behind the counter: little round globes sloshing with dark, rummy stuff, tall flutes so caked with barnacles September couldn’t begin to guess what bubbled away inside, big-bellied casks fairly glowing with luminous goop. Where Mr. Johansson would have stacked his tall, clean tumblers sat two gas cans all of crystal. Glass spigots arced gracefully out of them, ready to slip into a thirsty tank. September suddenly felt deathly thirsty herself.
“I don’t suppose you have orange fizz?” she asked without much hope. “Or anything to eat?”
Ballast Downbound snorted. Bits of wax blew clear of the lanterns on her shoulders. “S’not for you! This here’s my Memory Fountain and I’ll be mixing up an Egg Bygone for your boat.”
“But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?”
B.D. scratched under her Admiral’s hat. “What’d you think gas was, girl? ’Course there’s all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you’re wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it’s wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.” Her otter’s paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. “It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean’s face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go. And that’s what’s in my bottles here—sirops of sunshine, sunshine that remembers so fierce it burns itself right up. Strong stuff, not for the faint! Drink up yesterday to make today go faster.”
Ballast cracked the cork of a copper-strapped globe and let it trickle thickly into one of the gas cans. The liquid glowered dark gold. She tipped in two glugs from a brown beer bottle in a brown bag; it bloomed bloody when it hit the first sirop. “Pleistocene Concentrate and a swallow of Pure Pre-Seelie Dawn.” She broke the cream on a milk bottle—what slid out was black and full of stars. A mere tangerine drop from a test tube; a whole wallop of bronze, greasy bourbon from an oil can. “The trick is in the mixing. Anything you use changes you. I could turn a pixie into an umbrella stand with the wrong sirop at the right time. Go sparing on the Atlantean Applejack, double down on your Cretaceous Demiglace. That’s all it takes—but don’t you go sniping my recipe, girl. Who knows where you’ll end up when you’ve got fancy combustibles in you, and if it’ll be raining when you get there?”
Ballast wedged the gas can under the mouth of her fountain-fish. A stream of bubbles shot out of its silver lips, splashing into the sirops and turning them into a swirl of changing colors blazing with light.
“Just what’s wanted.” She nodded at her cocktail with pride. “Downbound’s Own Nosh of Nostalgia and Antediluvian Antifreeze.”
When B.D. hoisted up Aroostook’s hood, September peered into the maze of the engine, looking for a tiny, growing ballast, a knot of something, anything. She saw nothing, and did not know how she felt about that. The memory-gas flowed silkily into the battered tank, making little delighted gurgles as it drained from the can. When it was done, September turned the automobile on once more and hoped for the best. She did not recall anything about the intersection of sunshine and werewhales in her geology textbook. Nevertheless, Aroostook blossomed into life. The engine fired without argument and fired more strongly and smoothly than September had ever heard it, as though it had never been whacked about the nose with a beech tree in all its days.
She turned to thank the Klabautermann and found that otter’s face suddenly very close to her own. She could smell the smell of Ballast Downbound: salt and the sea and kerosene and rummy sirops. She placed something in September’s hand.
“Call it an orange fizz, mixed just for you.” She chuckled.
September held a small bottle shaped like an egg. Patches of barnacles and pearls grew all over it, sealing in a black cork. Deep campfire-colored spirits bubbled inside.
And then, with a roar, everything shattered.
September felt it in her stomach before it started, like the shadow of a quiver. Earthquakes are not common in Nebraska, or else she might have had something to compare it to. This was not, however, an earthquake.
It was a moonquake.
Ballast’s neat boxes tumbled down; the bottles in the Memory Fountain burst and smashed. The barge groaned horribly as it veered into the briar-rails of the road. The ultramarine fish in its rudder flopped up onto the decks, hoping for safety. The Moon drew very close now. The last off-ramp announced itself cheerfully on a broad sign: WELCOME TO THE MOON! PLEASE WIPE YOUR SHOES. But as the heavens seemed determined to shake itself apart, the sign split in half, falling down into space along with bits of broken railing and silver paving stones and ivory wagon wheels. September screamed, clutching for Ballast Downbound—but her hands met empty air. The Klabautermann was bouncing over the barge trying to keep her boxes and her bottles and her fish and her ship from skittering out into the endless black sky beyond the road. September caught her terrified eyes as she scooped up an armful of rudder fish and dumped them into an old bathtub that was sliding downdeck as the barge heeled at a sickening angle.
“It’s Ciderskin,” Ballast hissed. “It’s the Yeti coming for us!”
The Model A’s door swung open and September’s legs tumbled out sideways, her feet kicking in space. She wrapped both arms around Aroostook’s sunflower steering wheel, her teeth jarring, her legs scrabbling for purchase on the stepboard. Up above, the crescent of the Moon stopped being a crescent and became a wide countryside, full of silver mountains. It was all there was to see. Aroostook lost her grip on the barge and tumbled up, or down, or sideways—who could tell? But the land caught them with a crash and a cloud of fine silver dust.
September had made it. She was on the Moon.
But the shaking went on and on and on.
INTERLUDE I
THE BLACK COSMIC DOG
In Which We Examine Perspective, the Geography of the Moon, and a Very Busy Canine
Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of things. The world is frightfully big, and you can only ever see the part you’re standing on. Even if you could find a ledge or a tower so high up that you could see everything from New York to Budapest to Australia and back again, the cosmos is so much bigger and wider than that. You cannot see from your doorstep that the world is rolling along in space with its brothers and sisters, which we call Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and the Sun, but it is so. No matter where you stand, everything is always and forever so much bigger than you can tell.
If September had found such a ledge or tower, she might have seen herself, inside Aroostook the Model A, moving up that long silver road that led from the mountain to the Moon. And she might have seen the mountain itself, a great, gorgeous spire of rock rising out of the fiery cold sea in the shape of a woman with long flying hair and wings like a fish’s many fins on her back. She might have seen the woman’s craggy hand pointing up toward the sky and from the tip of her longest finger the road winding out and up like her own long breath. She might have seen the frozen face of the mountain pursing her lips a
nd puffing her cheeks, blowing Moonbound travelers off her hand like dandelion puffs after some secret stony wish.
But if our girl could have climbed the tallest ladder you or I can imagine and stood upon the topmost rung with her lunch in one hand and binoculars in the other, she might have seen something even stranger and more interesting.
The Moon over Fairyland is always waxing. Because of all I have just told you concerning the difficulty of seeing things as they are, it sometimes looks full to sailors on the Perverse and Perilous Sea or lovesick Physickists in the woolly towers of Pandemonium or young girls walking along intent on some goal or other. They see the vast curve of the crescent turned fully toward them, so vast it looks nothing at all like a crescent. It is on this outer edge that the folk of the Moon live and scheme and play the harpsichord. It is here the Whelk of the Moon looks out over the Sea of Restlessness. It is here the Hreinn once lived, where Moon-walruses practice one-tusk calligraphy and two-tusk billiards.
No one lives on the inner edge of the Moon.
Well, not anymore.
But there is someone there now. Rooting around in the ruins, sniffing at smashed-in statues and pawing at dark, broken houses where nobody is having supper. Somebody is walking around a shattered herald’s square, picking things up, turning them over, weighing them, staring at them with a terrible sharp eye. It’s a long job—no one bothered to clean up after themselves. Objects lie here and there and everywhere, very fine but very forgotten: sledgehammers, rakes, chisels, straight-edge razors, sickles and scythes, spades and hammers, jewelers’ glasses, telescopes, wheels, abaci, longshoremen’s hooks and seamstresses’ tape, wrenches, knives, swords, fishing rods and wrenches, shears and knitting needles and frying pans and brooms and axes and typewriters and film projectors and dead lightbulbs and clocks.