Had God really intended humankind to be forever Earthbound, ether might have been a poison, and air a protective insulation against it—but Thomas found that it was not. Nor was it a deliriant, as Drake had hypothesized. He was mildly disappointed to discover that breathing ether was very much like breathing air. “It has no discernible odor,” he declared, pensively, “and it’s not cold. That’s odd, I think, for mountain air is as cold as it is thin. This is a little thin, I suppose, but so far as I can tell, it shares the virtues of the….”

  He would have said “air we usually breathe” had he not been seized by a sudden fit of dizziness. Recumbent on his couch, he was in no danger of fainting, but he could not speak while his senses were reeling.

  “What is it, Tom?” Drake asked, anxiously. He was not the only man present who was Thomas’s senior, but Field was only a year older and Drake was a full five; Drake was the only one with the remotest pretension to serve as a father figure.

  “Nothing to do with the ether,” Thomas judged, perhaps a trifle too hastily.

  “The effect of moving while weightless, I think. A momentary vertigo.”

  “There really is an Austral continent,” Raleigh informed them. “Or a sizeable island, at least. Can we claim it in the name of Queen Jane from up here, do you suppose, or must we direct a privateer to plant a banner on its shore when we land?” His voice faltered very slightly as he pronounced the last word; they all knew that landing their tiny craft would be every bit as difficult and dangerous as freeing it from the Earth’s affinity.

  “Never mind the Austral continent,” said de Vere. “Can we—do we—press on to the moon?”

  “There’s more than the breathability of the ether to be taken into account on that score, Ned,” Raleigh told him, bidding for the intellectual high ground in their private conflict. “There’s the fuel, and the manuverability of the ship to test. We’ve time in hand. Will they be able to see us in England with the aid of one of your father’s telescopes, Tom, when we’ve overflown the Americas and crossed the Atlantic?”

  “We won’t pass over England on the second round trip,” Thomas told him.

  “They might see us in Rome, though. That’ll make the pope bite his tongue, won’t it, Mr. Field?”

  “The pope refuses to look through a telescope,” Field replied, less stiffly than Thomas had expected, “for fear of what he might see.”

  “There’s nothing in the moons of Jupiter to frighten a pious man,” Raleigh observed, drily, “and infinite space is no more visible than finite space.”

  “The pope has no need to deny the infinity of space,” de Vere put in, striking back at Raleigh’s presumption of superior knowledgeability. “It’s not a Copernican doctrine. Nicholas of Cusa proposed it, on the grounds that God’s creative power could not be limited. He argued for the plurality of worlds on exactly the same basis.”

  “You’re a true scholar, Ned,” Drake said, amiably. “Where do you stand on the dispute as to whether the inhabitants of the other worlds must be identical to ourselves, being made in the same divine image, or whether they must be infinitely various in form and nature, so as not to limit the creativity of the divine imagination?”

  “Some might be giants and some tiny,” de Vere observed, “in proportion to the sizes of their worlds.”

  Raleigh laughed. “But in which proportion, Ned?” he asked. “Will the Selenites be dwarfs because their world in smaller than ours, or giants, because the force of affinity does not stunt their growth?”

  “The fuel stores are still in place and the controls check out,” Drake reported.

  “No leaks at all—we have fuel enough to take us to the moon and back, and the means to control its deployment.”

  “And the attitude of the ship can be adjusted with appropriate precision,” Thomas agreed. “Who’d like to sniff the second bottle of ether when I’ve brought it through?”

  “I will,” Raleigh said. “No offense, Tom, but you breathe like a mathematician. I’ve a better nose than you; if ether has a bouquet, however subtle, I’ll feel it on my palate.”

  “Fine,” said Thomas, clicking the catch on the second hold—but as soon as he took hold of the bottle, he realized that Master Dee’s “contraption” had not worked as well on the second occasion as it had on the first. The outer hatch of the lock had not closed; there was now a gap in the hull the size of a man’s forearm.

  “Don’t panic, lads,” he was quick to say. “If there were a void outside, we’d be in trouble, but so long as the pressure of the ether’s not so very different from the pressure of the air in the cabin, there won’t be much exchange.” He fumbled as he tried to secure the inner hatch, however. The ether that Thomas had breathed had been clear, empty of any other apparent substance, but the ether that streamed in through the temporary opening in the hull was cloudy, as if woodsmoke were adrift in it. This was no mere smoke or mist, however, for it was formed into an approximate shape—Thomas could not decide whether it was more like a moth or an artist’s conception of an angel—and it moved as if with purpose, descending upon Thomas’s face like a veil.

  “Look out, Tom!” Raleigh cried—but the warning was futile.

  Thomas tried to hold his breath, but he was unprepared. Fear made him inhale sharply—and the invader took the opportunity to wriggle up his nose like an eel burrowing into soft sand. Thomas felt its ghostly presence pass, slick but not cold.

  He expected it to move down his trachea, or perhaps his esophagus, but instead it seemed to move into the space of his skull, diffusing into the nooks and crannies of his brain.

  This time, the Queen Jane’s captain did sense a sweet and cloying odor—and when the vertigo took hold of him again, it did not relent. Supine as he was on his couch, he lost consciousness almost immediately.

  *

  As Thomas awoke, the dream in which he had been languishing fled from consciousness, leaving him cast way in a sea of uncertainty. He did not know where he was, and could not remember where he ought to be. He opened his eyes convulsively, and looked wildly about, in spite of the light that flooded his eyes and dazzled him. He knew that something was wrong.

  He remembered, belatedly, that he ought to be weightless, tethered to his couch in the cabin of the Queen Jane—but he was not. Nor, however, was he back on Earth. He was in the grip of affinity, but he felt lighter by far than he ever had on Earth.

  A rough hand gripped his shoulder and steadied him. “Tom!” said the voice of Sir Francis Drake. “Thank God! I feared that you’d never wake up. Are you all right?”

  “Aye,” said Tom, thickly, rubbing his eyes to clear a certain stickiness from his eyelids. “What did I swallow?”

  “As to that, I don’t know,” Drake told him. “Nor do I know whether it’s still inside you—but I’ve seen creatures stranger by far than that one since you fell unconscious, on my honor. Field missed the show too, having fainted in alarm, but Walt and Ned were awake throughout, so I knew that I wasn’t dreaming.”

  “Where are they?” Thomas asked—meaning Raleigh and de Vere, although Field was not there either.

  “I don’t know,” Drake said. “Probably in a similar prison. Our captors might have recognized the two of us as the senior crewmen—or as the oldest of our company—but I doubt it.” Thomas observed that Drake’s face was scratched and that many of the scratches were somewhat inflamed.

  The cell in which Thomas and Drake were apparently imprisoned was reasonably capacious, but all its alcoves were small and set above head-height, making it difficult to make out what they contained. Thomas looked down instead, to see that the “bed” on which he lay was a protuberance in the floor, not a wooden platform on legs. The floor, like the walls and ceiling, seemed to be composed of an organic substance akin to wood or tortoiseshell, but it seemed clean enough—much cleaner than the vast majority of England’s household floors. The floor was grey, but the colors and textures of the walls were very various, and the radiance that lit the space came from silvery ribbons swirling across the ceiling rather than any kind of flame. The doorway was oval in shape; there was no obvious catch securing the door, which might easily have been mistaken for a stopper in the neck of a jar.

  “What stranger creatures have you seen?” Thomas asked, belatedly.

  “Lunar moths with man-sized bodies and vast wings,” Drake said, tersely.

  “Grasshoppers walking on their hind legs, and ants too, somewhat taller than a man.

  And slugs the size of the elephants in the Tower menagerie, with castles of oystershell. I thought them brutally violent at first, for they’re very free with the attentions of their various antennae, limbs and slimy palps, but I don’t think they meant to injure us.” Thomas reached up to touch his own face, which was tender and itchy. His hands were no better, and the swelling made it difficult to flex his fingers.

  “Are we on the moon, then?” Thomas asked, in frank bewilderment.

  “In the moon,” Drake corrected him. “They flew us here, ethership and all, by the power of their multifarious wings, wrapped in a web of what I’d be tempted to call spidersilk were it not that spiders are one of the few creepy-crawlies I’ve not seen inflated to magnanimous dimensions hereabouts.”

  “I’ve seen signs of life and movement while studying the moon in my father’s best peeping-glass,” Thomas said, in a low voice, “but I was never entirely sure that they were not a trick of the lens or the mind’s eye.”

  “Master Dee’s hatches are a poor design,” Drake opined, “by comparison with the craters that serve as doorways to the moon—but the giants are not as large as all that. You couldn’t see them with a spy-glass any more than we could see elephants strolling in the African savannah were we to turn a telescope on the Earth from the lunar surface.”

  “There were ants, you say?”

  “Things somewhat reminiscent of ants—not to mention moths, bugs, beetles, and a hundred more types for which I cannot improvise names, all living in a single tempestuous throng. They collaborated in our capture, and…” He broke off as the door opened. It did not swing on a hinge; the aperture dilated.

  Thomas understood immediately what point Drake was trying to make. The four individuals who came through the door were all insectile, but they were analogues of very different Earthly species. They all walked upright on their hindmost legs, and their heads were equally bizarre, but their bodies were very different in color, texture, and equipment. Two were winged, one like a butterfly and one like a dragonfly. Two were brightly colored, one striped like a wasp and the other spotted like a ladybird. Two were stout, two slender. Two were clutching objects in the “hands” attached to their intermediary limbs. Two were carrying implements of some kind in their forelimbs. All of them, however, hurried forward with no regard whatsoever for their captives’ personal space, and began touching them, with all manner of appendages.

  Thomas fell back upon the bed, overcome by horror. He wanted to scream, but dared not open his mouth lest something even nastier than the ether-creature slip inside him. He closed his eyes, praying for the molestation to stop.

  “Be still,” said a voice, pronouncing the words inside his head like one of his own vocalized thoughts. “Be patient. If you will relax, and let me use your limbs, I can communicate with at least one of them—I can explain the irritation in our flesh, and demand an antidote.”

  Thomas inferred at first that one of the monstrous insects must be projecting the words into his head by some mysterious process of thought-transference—but then he remembered that there was already an alien presence within his skull: an etheric ghost that appeared to have dissolved its fragile substance in the flesh of his brain.

  “What are you?” he demanded silently. He had made no conscious effort to relax, as he had been asked to, but he did not resist when he felt his hands moving of their own accord.

  The insectile monsters seemed more startled by this contact than he had been by theirs. They withdrew their various feelers, and waited while his fingers danced upon the head of one of their number.

  Thomas had to collaborate with his intimate invader, rising unsteadily to his feet in order to continue the tactile conversation more effectively. It was an authentic conversation now—the insect addressed by his mysterious passenger’s gestures was making its reply, in terms of rapid strokes of its antennae—but Thomas felt the irritation and inflammation in his flesh die down.

  “I am explaining your origin,” his invader said. “Your nature too, although that is more difficult. I can understand why you think of me as an invader, but I mean you no harm any more than the members of the True Civilization do. It might help us both if you were to try to think of me as a guest.”

  “What’s happening, Tom?” Drake asked. “What on Earth are you doing?”

  “We’re not on Earth,” Tom retorted, abandoning the internal dialogue to speak aloud, “and it isn’t me who’s doing what I’m doing. It’s the ether-creature that wormed its way into me when the ship leaked. Somehow it knows how to communicate with this creature. Perhaps it has traveled extensively in the minds of other creatures.”

  “Good guess, mine host,” said the creature within him, silently. “You’re an exceptional creature, Thomas Digges, to have such trust in your own sanity. It often requires months or years to establish a rapport—but yours is a dreaming species, I suppose. That makes a difference—few species have that particular gift, or curse.” Drake had fallen silent, direly puzzled. The insects, however, were frenetically busy in communication among themselves. Touch was only one of the senses they employed; they could not talk as humans talked but they clicked and chittered, warbled and hummed. They spoke with their limbs and their wings, and various other kinds of apparatus that Thomas could not discern.

  “I think that I have made the situation clear,” Thomas’s internal informant said. “I have asked to be taken to one of the queens’ chambers, since this world has no fleshcore, where we might converse with philosophers closer to the heart of the True Civilization. They will understand your nature, having mechanical analogues of your kind, even if they have not been studying you carefully from afar.”

  “I have no idea what you are trying to tell me,” Thomas replied, silently. “All this is meaningless to me.”

  “Be patient,” the silent voice said. “I will try to explain when I have the opportunity.”

  “If you and I are made in God’s image, Tom,” Drake said, softly. “What manner of creator made creatures like these?”

  It was not like Drake to speculate in such a fashion, but Thomas could understand his confusion very well. Preoccupied with his internal dialogue, however, and disturbed by the incessant actions of his unbidden hands, he did not reply.

  Drake did not seem to be offended by his rudeness. “Perhaps de Vere was right,” the crewman continued, “but if these are merely insects like those of Earth, what giants the men of the moon must be!”

  Thomas knew that there was nothing mere about these insects. They had been investigating him with manifest intelligence—and still were, aided now by the voice of his invader … his guest. Like humans, they were sapient; like humans, they were curious. The ether-creature called theirs the True Civilization—and why should it not, given that they could fly through the ether between the worlds, to capture stray etherships and interrogate their crews?

  When the insects crowding around his bed began to deploy the bulkier objects they were carrying he flinched and shied away, but they still did not appear to mean him any harm. He could not tell what was happening when the objects were pointed in his direction, but none of the monsters was touching him any longer, directly or indirectly. His own hands had been withdrawn from the face they had been fondling so strangely.

  Thomas found time to say aloud: “All’s well, Francis. I don’t understand what’s happening yet, but they don’t mean to do us any injury.” Drake was touching his face and inspecting the backs of his hands. “That confounded itching’s stopped,” he observed. “Have they administered some antidote?”

  “Yes,” Thomas told him. “They did not realize that we had been stung. The ether-creature seems to know a great deal more about what is happening here, and what is relevant to our welfare, than we do. If it has not visited the surface of the Earth, it must know others of its kind that have.

  Drake actually struck a pose, then, and bowed gracefully to the four attentive monsters. “On behalf of Queen Jane of England,” he said, “I greet you, noble sirs.

  Shall we be friends, then? You don’t have the look of Spaniards about you, and God forbid that you might be Elizabethans … or the spirits of the dead, come to that.

  Was it Plutarch, Thomas, who first declared the moon to be a world akin to the Earth, where the souls of the dead reside?”

  “Plutarch it was,” Thomas confirmed, “but I don’t think his soul is here before us, gathering material for more Lives.”

  “Nor I,” Drake agreed. “Can you believe that Raleigh and de Vere could be as brave as we are being, under similar inspection? Not that it matters—by the time they tell the tale to the queen, they’ll have fought and vanquished whole Selenite armies, if Field can’t keep them honest—and we’ll never convince them that we had the bravado to act as we are while subject to such scrutiny. Please assure me that they’re not merely deciding the best way to cook and season us.” The ether-creature seemed to know that Drake was joking, and did not trouble to reassure Thomas against this ominous possibility. Nor, however, did it forewarn Thomas that he was about to be seized in the upper arms of one of the unburdened creatures, and very thoroughly palpated, although it did say “Patience, Thomas!” once the assault began. Thomas felt his hands making some sort of reply, although he had no idea what it was—but he had a strange impression, as the creature withdrew again, that it was even more repulsed by the texture of his flesh than he was by the horror of the grip and the probing feelers.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7