Larklight

by Philip Reeve

  No more did it suit Ssil, poor thing. I had never noticed quite how strange her long, blue body was until I saw it crammed into human clothes. Being a type of lizard she had no bosom at all, and her tail made the back of her skirts stick out in a most undignified way. But she tilted her head and swept past us with a haughty look, doing her best to ignore the laughter.

  We followed her out of the dock, pursued by the heartening sounds of hammers and wood saws as Mr McCallum’s shipwrights set to work upon Sophronia. I had been missing Myrtle quite desperately until then – which is ironical, when you consider how often I had wished she would disappear – but the great joke of Ssilissa’s outfit had lightened Jack’s dark mood, and made the others happy, and I soon started to feel happy too. Anyway, Farpoo was not Myrtle’s sort of place at all.

  In the street outside the shipyard we all stopped and stood and craned our necks, looking up at the sky where we would soon be travelling. The sky above Farpoo is striped like a stocking, with vast bands of orange and ochre and Indian red and puce and curdled cream, and it has a curious, curving-away-at-the-edges look about it, which makes you realise, when you have gawped at it a while, that it is not really sky at all, just the mighty face of Jupiter, which hangs in space so close to Io that it blots out all else.

  ‘There’s old Thunderhead,’ said Mr Munkulus, pointing with a couple of his hands to an oval of muddy red that seemed to stare down at us out of the cloud bands like an angry eye. I could see it spinning, trailing flags and scarfs of paler cloud, and little stormlets budding off its outer edges to fall behind, spinning and shimmying in its wake. They looked small from this distance, but of course I knew that even those hatchling storms are as large as the whole Earth, and Thunderhead is bigger yet; the greatest of all the eddies which swirl in the wind-race of Jupiter; the storm which has blown for ten thousand years.

  ‘How do we reach him?’ I asked.

  ‘Pressure-ship,’ said Jack, quite nonchalantly. ‘I know of a man.’

  We set off through the hum and bustle of the city, all in a line, and you may be sure I never let the others out of my sight, for fear I might lose them for ever in the crowds. We wound our way through a labyrinth of crooked alleys, past the paper cottages of Martians and the mudbrick towers of Ionian breeding clans, the nest shops of Woopsies and the spice-scented warehouses of Dutch and Chinese merchants. We were spattered with bluish mud by passing carriages and rickshaws, and jostled by passers-by of every race, each intent upon his own business and not one sparing us a glance. We craned our necks and eye-stalks to peer up at teetering, ramshackle buildings, so tall that the streets between them lay in perpetual shadow and had to be lit by crystal globes filled with phosphorescent glow-fish. Hibernating billipedes had stretched themselves across the gaps between the houses, and the householders had pegged out their wet linen on them

  I was lost within a minute, and by the time we had gone three hundred yards I would not have been able to find my way back to McCallum’s yard if you had paid me. But Jack knew where he was going. He led us to the bank of a slow-flowing river, whose surface shone like liquid lead in the dun light from Jupiter, and we crossed it in a ferry pulled by a huge sea monster called a Bluurg. Nipper told me that these amiable creatures come from his own home oceans on Ganymede, but that they love company, and may be found acting as boatmen on all the worlds of Jove. By way of payment, they ask only for their passengers to scratch their hide with long wooden back-scratchers.

  Reaching the far shore, we turned along a narrow street where raucous drinking songs echoed from the mouths of a line of taverns made from enormous, hollowed-out gourds. Jack led us to one called the Grudge and Gastropod. Never having been inside such an establishment before, I stared about me with great interest at the drunks of various species propped against the bar, the shady-looking gents playing poker and pharo, the small crowd gathered about the jangling piano and the six-armed serving girls who darted about among it all delivering jugs of foaming Ionian spit-beer to each busy, greasy table. Jack had a word with one of them, and she smiled at him and used her antennae to point him towards a distant, deeply shadowed corner. There, in a little cubicle filled with fug and smoke, we met the man whom Jack hoped would carry us into the dreadful winds of Jupiter’s upper sky, where no ordinary ship can hope to fly.

  His name was Captain Snifter Gruel. In his youth he’d been a harpoonist aboard some of the first whalers to venture down into Jupiter’s wind-race, and he had left all sorts of bits of himself behind aboard splintered boats and in the guts of wind-whales. He had one button-bright eye (the other was covered with a patch), one hand (a hook took the place of its twin) and one leg (the missing one having been replaced with an iron peg). ‘I’m only half the man I used to be!’ he said cheerfully. But he seemed active and vital despite these injuries, and his mind was whole; a shrewd, quick, nimble mind that could steer a pressure-ship through all the rapids and lightning reefs of the Jovian sky, and name a good price for doing it.

  ‘A hundred pound,’ he said, when Jack told him we were hoping to pay a call on Thunderhead. ‘That’ll get you there, but I can’t promise he’ll talk to you. He’s a strange old cove. There’s them as he likes, and them as he don’t, and if he don’t then you might as well talk to the wind.’

  Grindle grumbled at the asking price, but Jack hushed him with a stern look. Mr Munkulus leaned in close to mutter, ‘You sure about this, Jack? I know this Gruel by reputation. You’re letting your heart do the thinking –’

  Jack cut him short. ‘I don’t pay no heed to rumours, Munk, and nor should you,’ he said, and lobbed a bag of gold across the table. ‘I believe Captain Gruel’s honest as the day is long.’

  None of us liked to remind him the days on Io are not very long at all.

  We settled our arrangements with the captain, then went back outside into the blue mud and the curious, seaweedy smell of the Ionian air. We stopped to eat at a pavement café, and then Jack sent everyone but me back to the Sophronia. Before they went he threw a few silver coins to Mr Munkulus and said, ‘Pick up a flock of hoverhogs at the market behind McCallum’s place.’

  ‘Hoverhogs, Captain?’ asked Mr Munkulus, his broad face creasing in a frown as he tried to divine Jack’s purpose. ‘We never bothered with hoverhogs aboard Sophronia before.’

  ‘That’s why she looks like a sty,’ Jack shot back. ‘I mean to keep her good and tidy from now on. Art and me are going to ask old Thunderhead about these spiders, and if he can tell us which world they hail from we’ll be flying there to fetch Miss Mumby. I want the Sophronia looking clean and shipshape for her when she comes back aboard.’

  The crew just stood and gaped at him. They probably thought he had inhaled some advertising spores, but I guessed that he was simply plotting to annoy my sister by showing her that he could be just as neat as she. It was encouraging to see that he was so confident of finding her again.

  Ssilissa seemed worried about his plan of entering the wind-race with none but me for company. ‘I should come with you, Jack,’ she said. ‘I don’t trussst that Gruel fellow. If sssomething goes wrong down in those cloudsss there will be nothing we can do to help.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I’ll need you here, Ssil,’ he said. ‘If we don’t come back it’ll be up to you to get the Sophronia safe away, and look out for the others. But we will come back, of course,’ he went on hastily, glancing at me as if he was afraid he had alarmed me (which he had). ‘Back by nightfall, with word of those spiders. So the rest of you head home to the ship, and make sure McCallum’s people aren’t stealing all her fittings.’

  Our friends wished us fare-thee-well and turned back towards McCallum’s yard, quite happy that Jack was not asking them to risk their necks in the wind-race. I think Grindle and Mr Munkulus were planning to stop off at a few taverns on their way, as well. But Ssilissa stood watching us as we walked towards Gruel’s pressure-ship projector. She was still watching as we turned the corner and the long paper porch of a Ma
rtian boarding house hid her from view. I suddenly realised that she was in love with Jack, and it made me feel so sad I could have blubbed. It must be quite lonely enough to have hatched from a mysterious space egg and be the only creature of your kind in the known aether; how much lonelier to love someone of a different species, to whom you are just a blue lizard. I thought I understood why Ssil had dressed herself up so outlandishly. It was not the influence of some passing spore, simply an attempt to make Jack notice her.

  I resolved to be very kind to poor Ssil, if I lived to return to the Sophronia.

  There was no mistaking Captain Gruel’s ship. The entrance to its projector tower was hung about with colourful signboards declaring THE CELEBRATED PRESSURE-SHIP UNCRUSHABLE – SAFEST ON IO – PLEASURE TRIPS INTO THE WIND-RACE – SEE FOR YOURSELF THE INFAMOUS PLANET OF STORMS! NEVER YET SQUASHED! There were pictures too, of the vast wind-whales and sky-squid and other quaint airborne creatures which inhabit the outward fringes of Jupiter’s deep sky.

  We announced ourselves to the Ionian on duty at the gate, and he rumbled that Captain Gruel was expecting us and waved us through the creaky turnstile. I followed Jack up perhaps a thousand ringing iron steps, until we could see the gambrel roofs and chimney stacks of Farpoo covering the whole world beneath us and curving away over the horizon, black against the amber face of Jupiter. Inside the tower of scaffolding and girders the Uncrushable hung, suspended from thick chains above the muzzle of her launching gun. Like all the best pressure-ships she had been made of stone, from a captured meteor hollowed out and fitted with alchemical rocket engines and thick portholes. We crossed a swaying bridge to go aboard.

  Captain Gruel met us at the hatchway and welcomed us inside. He was keen to show off his little ship. He banged his iron hook against the inside of her stony hull and said, ‘Six yards thick! She’ll drop deeper into old Jove’s atmosphere than any other boat in Farpoo.’ He rapped his knuckles against the porthole glass. ‘Six yards thick! Top quality crystal, grown specially in the Martian window farms.’

  Inside the tower of scaffolding and girders the Uncrushable hung, suspended from thick chains above the muzzle of her launching gun.

  I put my face to the glass and looked out, and it was like looking through nothing; the skies of Farpoo lay outside, busy with carrier-pterosaurs and air-phaetons, and there was not so much as a single flaw or ripple to tell me that I was watching them through eighteen foot of crystal.

  ‘She’s a good ship,’ admitted Jack.

  ‘Best ship, best crew,’ said Gruel smugly. ‘You won’t regret shipping out with us, young Captain Jack.’

  We strapped ourselves into the big, thickly upholstered seats in the centre of the cabin, while Captain Gruel stomped about shouting orders to his crew. They weren’t humans, but things called Dweebs, who came from some moonlet I’d not heard of. They were balls of matted ginger hair from which muscular blue-grey arms would suddenly shoot out to pull a lever or slam a bulkhead door. As the Uncrushable was lowered slowly down the throat of her great launching cannon, I amused myself by trying to calculate how many of these arms they each had, but I lost count at seventeen.

  The pressure-ship thrummed and clanged, settling itself on to the great gunpowder charge which would soon send it hurtling like an artillery shell into the sky. I began to wonder if there was time to change our minds, and whether, if we did, Captain Gruel would give Jack a partial refund on our fare.

  Jack sensed my qualms and smiled at me. ‘It will be all right, Art. And old Thunderhead will know something of those spiders, I’m sure. We’ll soon have your sister back.’

  I was about to tell him that it was myself I was worried about, not poor Myrtle, but at that instant the launching cannon went off, and I was unable to say anything, or speak, or move for several minutes thereafter.

  I wonder if you have ever been fired out of a giant howitzer in a hollowed-out rock? The feeling is somewhat akin to being sat upon by an elephant, while travelling downhill at speed in a tin dustbin. There is a terrible crushing sensation, which is combined with a degree of juddering and shuddering and rolling and tipping and tumbling. Happily, Captain Gruel had a flock of hoverhogs aboard to clean up all the sick.

  By the time the worst sensations had abated (or we had grown used to them enough to think and speak again) the sulphurous orange light of Jupiter was shining in brightly through the portholes, and I realised that we had ripped our way out of Io’s atmosphere and were crossing the sea of space which separates her from her mother-planet. Captain Gruel anchored himself to the deck with a cunning magnet built into the end of his peg-leg, and bellowed orders at his hairy crew in pidgin Dweeb. They fired the Uncrushable’s rockets, and the pressure-ship tore onwards, scattering vast shoals of Icthyomorphs and tearing through drifts of aether-weed, for the heavens around Jupiter teem with life. Within a few hours we were plunging into the thin outer clouds of the storm-planet itself.

  Jupiter’s sky is a million miles deep, and what lies beneath it no mortal knows. Some people say that there is rock down there; some reckon the pressure is so great that the clouds themselves are squeezed into a hot, hard world. Mrs Abishag Chough, Deaconess of the Church of the Lunar Revelations, claimed that Heaven itself lies at the heart of the great world’s cloud mass, and jumped out of the pressure-ship Ganges in 1836 to try and prove it, but she was never seen again. Since no ship has ever gone deeper than ten thousand miles without being squashed as flat as a lead soldier, nobody can say whose theory is correct.

  Luckily for us, Thunderhead keeps to the outer levels, zooming along in the high-level winds. Once we had entered the right wind band Captain Gruel began firing more rockets, steering us into the huge storm’s path, while one of the Dweebs popped a set of headphones over what I suppose must have been his head and commenced tapping out a message on the Uncrushable’s telegraph machine.

  ‘What is he doing?’ I asked. ‘Surely Thunderhead cannot have a telegraph receiver? The cables would never withstand all this jostling and ballyhoo …’

  Captain Gruel chuckled, and translated the innocent question for his shipmates, who all laughed too. ‘Bless you, lad,’ he said, wiping tears of mirth away with the tip of his hook. ‘We don’t use cables in the wind-race. Pulses of electro-magnetical fluid carry our messages about. And old Thunderhead needs no receiver to pick ’em up, neither. Why, he is made of electro-magnetical pulsations himself, or at least the thinking part of him is.’

  He paused, listening, as his crew-thing turned to twitter at him. ‘Aha! We’ve caught him in a biddable mood, lads! He’s prepared to talk to you. Come, come, and you may have a look at him while the lads take us in.’

  He rolled back the carpet and opened a trapdoor in the metal floor, showing us down a ladder into a little compartment where one wall was made up almost entirely of a huge lens of the thick Martian crystal. Through this window Jack and I could see the sky ahead of the ship, and we both cried out in terror, for it was filled with one vast, slowly turning wheel of cloud: red and orange and brown and bruised purple, flashing and fluttering with busy lightnings.

  ‘Handsome brute, ain’t he?’ said Captain Gruel, with a proprietorial air. ‘Sorry about the paint on the floor down here, by the way. I had an artist chap as passenger a few seasons back. A Mr Turner by name. He would keep splashing and daubing and dashing away, no matter how rough the weather grew. Didn’t care much for his pictures myself. A child could have done better.’

  Neither Jack nor I paid the least heed to his babbling. We were intent upon Thunderhead. The approaching storm was like a world in its own right, complete with continents and chasms and towering mountain ranges all of cloud, and the lightning pouring in rivers between them. Far off, a pair of sky-squid circled, looking out for prey, ooshing themselves through the atmosphere with pulses of their mile-long tentacles. They looked smaller than fleas against the bulk of Thunderhead.

  ‘B——H—!’ murmured Jack, and although I know that it is very wicked to curse I coul
d not help but agree with him, for before our astonished eyes a great tentacle of vapour was reaching up towards us from the storm’s heart. It was a tornado, and a hole the size of the Americas yawned open at its tip, swallowing our tiny ship into a tunnel whose walls were whorls of whirling, roiling cloud.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In Which I Make Conversation with the Great Storm.

  Shuddering and groaning, with rivets popping from her moaning metal decks, the Uncrushable went whirling down that cloudy throat into the heart of the ancient storm. Hailstones hummed past, even the smallest of them much larger than the ship, but none struck us. Was Thunderhead controlling their flight just as he was guiding ours, making minute adjustments to his internal pressure fronts and wind speeds to ensure we were not wrecked? I hoped so, but I could not put my hope into words; I just clung to Jack and went, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!’

  And then, all of a sudden, the noise and shaking ceased. The Uncrushable had flown out into what was, I suppose, the eye of the storm: a worlds-wide cavern of calmer air, where the clouds turned in a slow and stately dance quite different to the violent revolutions we had just been flung through. There appeared to be structures here: arches and pillars of vapour braided into a form of net, all veined with crawling lightnings, blue and white. We were far from the light of sun or star by then, and these electric fires were the sole source of illumination, a crackly, gothick glare that made Jack and I look like phantoms.

  A pillar of cloud, boiling up from the depths, formed itself into a flat, white plateau ahead of the ship, and drifting balls of fire as big as moons ignited in the air above it. The Uncrushable steered towards it, and we all stumbled as she set down.