The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions

by Robert Rankin

  It was all going to get rather complicated.

  The matter of interplanetary trade gave rise to more gasps of disbelief from those outside of the British Empire. When they learned that England alone, having signed the exclusive treaties and trade agreements, would be taking care of all interplanetary business. ‘To ensure fairness, justice, truth and virtue,’ Queen Victoria explained.

  Mr Gladstone put it in a manner that was understandable to all. ‘As representatives of Planet Earth, the British Government has entered into a meaningful alliance with the Governments of Venus and Jupiter, an alliance both mercantile and military, which offers a combination of strength and security.’ Adding, ‘If Johnny Foreigner cares not for this, then so much the worse for Johnny Foreigner.’

  So that was all sorted! To the Empire’s satisfaction at least.

  Which cleared the stage for more important matters.

  Such as the actual name that the spaceport was to be given.

  Mr Charles Babbage, who had been appointed head of the British Empire’s Space Programme, put forward a number of suggestions that he considered suitable. These included:

  The Charles Babbage Grand Astronautical Interplanetarium

  The Charles Babbage Celestio-Pantechnicon Kinetic Harbour

  The Charles Babbage Tri-World Transportarium And perhaps the most obvious:

  The Charles Babbage Astro-drome

  All, however, were rejected, possibly because all were prefixed by the words ‘The Charles Babbage . . .’

  The name finally fixed upon was:

  The Royal London Spaceport

  And so it would remain.

  And so, upon the twenty-seventh of July in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-five, a wondrous silver airship dandled elegantly above runways one to six. The day was of the sunniest and although another pea-souper held London firmly by the throat, here, in this delightful rural setting ’neath the great hill surmounted by the Crystal Palace, the sky was blue, the birdies sang and all was right with the Empire.

  Around and about the spaceport, strictly segregated according to their planetary origins, stood craft from other worlds.

  Bulky merchant packets from Jupiter, all burnished copper (or the Jovian equivalent thereof), with swollen sides and riveted flanks and small, glazed piloting ‘pimples’. These sprouted at irregular intervals above, below and to all sides of the bulbous craft, like the symptoms of a mechanical disease.

  The pleasure-craft of Jupiter were quite another matter. Sleek and steely arrowheads with outboard power units.

  But what drew the Earthman’s eye upon this or any other morning were the spaceships from Venus. These interplanetary vessels were of surpassing beauty. The folk of Venus did not, of course, refer to their own planet as Venus. That was the name the folk of this world had given to it. The folk of Venus referred to their world as Magonia. And to their spacecraft as ‘cloud-ships’. The cloud-ships of Magonia. And they were of surpassing beauty.

  They were aptly named ‘ships’ because they resembled exotic galleons. Constructed not from metal but from some semi-translucent organic material, which offered up a rainbow sheen whilst seeming also to constantly shift through a spectrum of colours, these ships appeared to display no aerodynamic features whatsoever. They were the product of whimsy, fairy-tale castles, towers topped by conical roofs rising from galleon decks, with billowing, all-but-transparent sails set one upon another. To catch the solar winds, some said, but others doubted this.

  It was claimed that these magical ships travelled through magical means, powered by faith alone and referred to by the Magonians as Holier-than-Air craft. Magonians thought their way across the vastnesses of space, it was said. And as they offered little in the manner of trade goods, discouraged any form of Earth tourism upon their planet and seemed to seek only to proselytise, they were viewed with a mixture of wonder and suspicion.

  It was approaching midday and the last of the luggage and straggling rich folk were boarding the Empress of Mars. The cargo gangways fairly groaned beneath the weight of oak-bound steamer trunks and sharkskin portmanteaus. Ladies’ dressing cases designed by Peter Carl Fabergé and Louis Vuitton. Delicately packed with exquisite perfumes, powders, lipsticks, smelling bottles by Crawfords of Piccadilly, lace handkerchiefs, countless kid gloves, elaborately hand-stitched ‘unmentionables’, brass corsetry and the entire pantheon of female under and over attire, shoes and hats and parasols and goggles for every occasion.

  Gentlemen’s ‘diddy boxes’ containing ivory-handled shaving paraphernalia, enamelled moustache-wax cases, inlaid snuff caskets, travelling Tantalus sets, firearms to enforce one’s point in foreign parts, smoking accoutrements and all the tweeds and linen suits and formal wear and hattery that a gentlemen of means required when travelling abroad.

  Add to this crates of the finest champagnes, medical essentials, travellers’ libraries, picnicking hampers, ukuleles and mechanical musicolas, Sir Digby Pendleton’s horse, Belerathon, without which he refused to travel anywhere, and Lord Brentford’s monkey butler Darwin.

  The mighty sky-ship sparkled in the sunlight, casting a great cigar-shaped shadow over the spaceport’s cobbles.

  The last of the luggage was finally aboard and the cargo gangways were mechanically winched into the upright position. The promenade decks were made gay with jostling gentry, waving their farewells to less-fortunate relatives, who could only stand and wave and aspire to emotions that did not include jealousy. The gentry aboard disported themselves in their finest ‘outgoing’ attire. Gentlemen in ‘morning formals’ in soft pastel shades with matching top hats and gloves. Ladies in a riot of silks and tumbling lace with fans of pale satin embellished with bons mots and tasteful erotic drawings, wrought by the pen of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley.

  Oscar Wilde was aboard, of course. And so too were Bram Stoker, Dame Nellie Melba, who had been engaged to provide entertainment in the Grand Salon, Mr Babbage, Nikola Tesla, Little Tich, who was travelling to New York, the first port of call, to take up a six-month residency at Carnegie Hall, and a host of other London glitterati. Charles Darwin4 (unaware that his simian namesake gibbered in the cargo hold) shared a joke with the mystic and adventurer Hugo Rune. Princess Elsie, one of Queen Victoria’s lesser known daughters, spoke in whispered tones to an enigmatic figure swaddled in the blackest of blacks with a velvet face mask and hat of outlandish size. This gentleman was rumoured to be none other than the society favourite Joseph Carey Merrick, famously known as the Elephant Man.

  And so the summer sun shone down. The gentlemen smoked their expensive cigars in blatant disregard of any health and safety implications and toasted each other with glasses of deep-cut crystal. The ladies fluttered their fans and gently turned their parasols. The waiters and sky-men, serving folk, menials, menservants and maids, in uniforms starched and immaculately laundered, came and went about their business. Lines were dropped and bosun’s whistle blown. The Empress of Mars prepared once more to rise into the sky.

  But then calls were to be heard. Calls to hold hard and please to hold on for one moment. A honking of a hansom’s horn as one of these horse-drawn conveyances was being driven at reckless speed across the cobbled space towards the airship, scattering members of the grounded waving crowd before it.

  The cab drew up as the passenger gangway was rising. Two men, dressed in the most fashionable attire, hastened from the vehicle burdened by their luggage and pell-mell leapt to the rising ramp and boarded the Empress of Mars.

  This late arrival elicited much mirth and applause from the assembled multitude, as ‘fashionable lateness’ had only recently begun to find favour.

  ‘Your names please, gentlemen,’ said the airship’s major-domo, bowing to the stylish latecomers and snapping his fingers at bellboys to take the gentlemen’s luggage.

  The elder of the two twirled an ebony dandy cane topped with a silver skull. ‘Professor Coffin,’ he said. ‘And my youthful ward and student, Lord George Fox.’

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  ‘Lord George Fox?’ asked plain George Fox, turning a shining brass ‘Aristocratic Cabin’ key upon his kid-gloved palm. ‘And how did I come by this title?’

  Professor Coffin shushed the lad to silence with a fluttering of fingers. ‘A little conceit of my own invention,’ he whispered, ‘which you will come to appreciate when communicating with these swells.’

  George Fox grinned and stroked at his striking chin. ‘It is a pity that we do not have friends and family here to wave us off,’ said he. ‘If my mother could see me now . . .’ But George’s voice trailed away, as it saddened him to think of his parents. Perhaps he would send them postcards from exotic ports of call. Wish them well, bid them love, ask forgiveness for running away.

  George Fox sighed and waved at strangers, and then he cried, ‘Oh – look.’

  Professor Coffin followed the direction of George’s now-pointings to view wheeled conveyances being driven at dangerous speed, to the considerable alarm of the ground-level wavers, and bound for the great airship.

  ‘Other late arrivals,’ called George to the major-domo. ‘Do not leave without them.’

  ‘All are ticked off on the manifest, Your Lordship,’ this fellow replied. ‘But see, they are tradespeople, I believe.’

  George looked on and said, ‘Oh yes, they are.’

  For oh yes, they were tradespeople indeed.

  George spied a high-sided wagon upon which the wordsJONATHAN CRAWFORD

  Suiting to the Gentry

  were emblazoned.

  ‘We had our suits made there,’ George observed.

  Also a steam cart being steered with reckless abandon:

  ELIAS MAINWARING

  Quality Canes and Umbrellas

  ‘We got our new dandy canes from there,’ George observed.

  A yellow brougham, drawn by two pairs of matched black geldings:LOUIS VUITTON

  ‘And our luggage came from—’ And George’s voice once more trailed away. He gave hard looks towards Professor Coffin, who shrugged.

  The landing lines dropped, the ground anchor was weighed and the Empress of Mars rose gracefully into the sky.

  George gave Professor Coffin further hard looks. ‘I think I hear my name being called out by those tradespeople below,’ he said. ‘My name, prefixed with the title “Lord”.’

  Professor Coffin shrugged once more, though somewhat painfully it seemed. ‘What could I do?’ he whispered to George. ‘We needed new clothes, new canes, new luggage. You could hardly have come aboard in your old suit, stinking of Martian, now could you?’

  George shook his head, somewhat sadly.

  ‘They are snobs to a man, those tradesmen,’ Professor Coffin continued. ‘They would not have extended credit to common folk like us, but to a “lord”, oh yes indeed.’

  ‘So you represented me as a lord. And they found out to the contrary.’

  ‘Fiddle de, fiddle dum,’ said Professor Coffin. ‘When you return to England with gold in great store you can pay them off if you so choose.’

  ‘Indeed I will,’ said George.

  ‘And please do not think unkindly of me,’ said the professor. ‘I sold all that I owned in order to purchase the tickets. You do not begrudge me a suit of clothes, surely?’

  And surely George did not. He smiled a bit at this, did George, and stared out at the landscape spreading beneath them.

  The Crystal Palace diamond studding the hilltop. The sprawl of outer London edging its way into the countryside. The village of Penge in all its beauty.

  ‘It is all too beautiful,’ said George, enthralled.

  ‘It is something to be marvelled at,’ agreed the professor. ‘But all that dust raised by the hooves of the hansom cab’s horse—’

  ‘You failed to pay the driver,’ said George.

  ‘Have given me a throat most dry,’ Professor Coffin said. ‘And so I suggest we adjourn to the bar.’

  ‘There is a bar on board?’ George asked.

  ‘Two, I understand, and a billiard hall. And a gaming lounge where one might engage in card games, or chess or suchlike, with one’s fellow passengers.’

  ‘Card games?’ said George, recalling his lost gold watch.

  ‘And I have something for you,’ said Professor Coffin, producing same from his waistcoat pocket. ‘His Lordship requires a timepiece, do you not think?’

  George received the returned timepiece with gratitude. ‘Well, thank you very much indeed,’ he said.

  ‘Think nothing of it, my boy. We are partners now, fifty-fifty all the way. Now what say you to a gin and Indian tonic water?’

  ‘I say yes to that.’

  The bar for gentlemen only was on an upper deck. It lurked, and ‘lurked’ was surely the word, within the bowels of the ship. It boasted no natural light, nor outside windows, and was already filling nicely with cigar smoke.

  Big-bellied beings in acres of tweed, with pork-chop whiskers and multiple chins, tugged upon Cuban cigars and cradled brandy balloons in pink-sausage fingers. On their heads they wore sola topis; perched on these, colourful goggles.

  ‘Tourists from Jupiter all set for a tiger hunt,’ explained Professor Coffin.

  A strange angular personage, wearing a frock coat of the Regency period, a high violet-tinted peruke and a veritable galaxy of gemstones upon his waistcoat area, was entertaining these Jovian tourists by conjuring all manner of unlikely objects from his delicate pocket handkerchief.

  Professor Coffin ordered drinks and, unknown to George, charged these to Lord Fox’s account. Then he joined George, who had seated himself at a Britannia-style public house table, wrought ingeniously from aluminium and balsa wood. George was giving this a good looking-over.

  ‘Everything is light of weight,’ he said. ‘This is all such a wonder to me.’

  ‘I am happy that you find it to your liking,’ the professor said.

  And George truly did. Being here was beyond anything he could possibly have imagined. Although he rather fancied getting back to the promenade deck as soon as he and the professor had done with their drinks. It was, although lavish in its way, somewhat stuffy in this gentlemen’s bar and there was so much to be seen all over the rest of the marvellous pleasure ship.

  ‘Which includes your accommodation,’ said the professor, as if attuned to George’s thoughts. ‘You have a cabin with a view. You will not be disappointed.’

  ‘I am so grateful for it all,’ said George. ‘I only hope that I do not disappoint you. You have ventured all on this expedition of ours. I hope that we find what we seek. The Jap—’

  But the professor placed his hand lightly over George’s mouth. ‘Best not to speak the name aloud,’ said he. ‘It is our sacred secret, yours and mine, fifty-fifty – do you not agree?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said George, as a waiter arrived with the drinks.

  ‘Just sign for those, if you would,’ said the professor.

  ‘Lord’ George did so.

  At length the angular gentleman in the Georgian finery concluded his entertainment, bowed to his portly alien audience and, having asked whether he might do so, and having been told that he might, seated himself at George and the professor’s table.

  ‘I spy,’ said he, a-smiling at Professor Coffin, ‘a fellow traveller.’ And he reached out his hand and received a certain handshake.

  ‘Professor Cagliostro Coffin,’ said the showman. ‘Celtic Lodge Five Hundred and Sixteen.’

  ‘The Count de Saint-Germain,’ said the other. ‘Prague Four Hundred and Twenty-seven.’

  Knowing nods came into play. George looked on, bewildered.

  ‘My young charge, Lord George Fox,’ said the professor.

  George put out his hand in the hope of a certain shake, but received in return one of standard issue.

  ‘Whence bound?’ asked the professor of the count.

  ‘All points, all cities. So much progress has been made, so many new sights to be seen. So much to be learned.’

  ‘I am taking m
y charge on the Grand Tour,’ said Professor Coffin. ‘It will be an education for both of us, I am thinking.’

  ‘Are you presenting an entertainment?’ enquired the count.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the professor. ‘I am temporarily retired from the showman’s life.’

  ‘But it never leaves your blood.’ The count diddled with his hankie and produced a live chicken. This he set upon his knee and tickled at its feathered neck.

  ‘You have great skills,’ said the professor, ‘yet I do not recognise your name from any poster.’

  ‘Prestidigitation is nothing more than a hobby for me at present,’ said the count. ‘I retired from the itinerant life many years ago. I am a chemist now. I formulate perfumes.’