by Philip Reeve
‘We have landed!’ cried Jack. ‘But how can we land upon a cloud?’
‘Old Thunderhead has ways and means,’ said Captain Gruel. ‘He can alter the pressure in here, change the makeup of the air, do what he pleases. This is what we call the trading floor. Merchants come from the outer world to buy samples of the strange gases he brews up down inside himself, and in return he likes them to talk to him, tell him things. Care to step out and have a word?’
I had thought till then that we would have to converse with Thunderhead the same way Captain Gruel’s crewman had, by tapping out messages upon the telegraph machine. It seemed I was wrong. I was very, very glad that Jack was with me, but even he looked apprehensive as the Uncrushable’s gangplank was run out and we walked down it into a sculpted fairyland of cloud which Thunderhead had prepared for us.
It was beautiful. Snow was falling all about us, but none of it settled upon us. All around the careful winds shaped strands of vapour into fluted columns and archways and pillars, but no wind stirred our hair. Above our heads the fire-moons drifted, crackling faintly and washing us in their white light until we each walked at the centre of a star of a dozen shadows, but no fire touched us. And beneath our feet the solid cloud was soft and gently yielding, like a raft of cotton wool a-swim upon a lake of soup.
Out of the lightning-scribbled dark, high, high, high above, the sound of thunder rolled and rumbled, forming into words.
‘Small beings,’ it said. ‘Why have you come?’
Why had we come? I was so filled up with awe that I had almost forgot, but Jack still had his wits about him. He said, ‘If you please, sir, we’d like to know about the white spiders. ’Bout where they’ve taken Myrtle Mumby. She’s Art’s sister, you see, and my … well, my …’
‘They took my father too,’ I said, finding my voice at last.
The thunder crashed, the lightning crackled all around us, forming into the shapes of dancing spiders.
‘I am old,’ boomed the storm. ‘I have blown for many of your lifetimes. I cannot leave my sky, but travellers come to me from beyond it, and tell me tales, and I remember them …’ Deep among the folded clouds tall flares of lightning ignited one by one, like memories sparking. ‘It is a long time since anyone has come to me with stories of the white spiders.’
‘Then you have heard of them?’ cried Jack and I together.
The thunder said, ‘I am old. But they are older still. Older than all the worlds of the Sun. Once all this was theirs. Now they live in only one place, weaving their webs among the rings of stone and ice. They have lain quiet for a long time. Now you small beings have roused them again.’
A branch of lightning reached down and touched my chest. It did not hurt, but made me yelp with fear. I looked at Jack, wondering if the lightning would touch him too, but he was just staring at me. I felt electricity scrambling up and down the ladders of my nerves, probing the crannies of my brain. After a moment it withdrew, leaving me gasping, my heart hammering, and a taste of metal in my mouth.
‘You are Shaper kin,’ the storm said.
‘No,’ said I. ‘I’m Arthur Mumby. M-U-M-B-Y.’
‘I knew your mother,’ said the storm.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked weakly.
‘I have spoken often with her, in the time-that-is-past. I hope that we shall speak again in the time-that-is-to-come. She was a wise and kind small being, and she told me many interesting things.’
I looked at Jack, helpless. ‘There has been a mistake, your worship,’ I explained. ‘My mother was Mrs Amelia Mumby of Larklight. She –’
‘Larklight!’ the storm thundered, as if that name reminded it of something. I had the impression that it was not the least bit interested in anything else I might have to say. ‘You must keep the key safe. The spiders desire the Lamp of Dawn for themselves, but they must not have it.’
‘The lamp of what?’ I said. ‘What key?’
‘And Myrtle?’ asked Jack. ‘Have you heard anything of Myrtle? Art’s sister, taken by the spiders …’
Lightning flicked and juddered, throwing our stuttering shadows across the cloud. The clouds above us seemed to convulse, as if in pain. Thunder drummed, but it was only thunder now. I looked to Jack for comfort, as usual, but he appeared as dumbstruck as I by these new developments. We both clamped our hands over our ears as they began to pop and ache with sudden changes of pressure, and my stomach writhed; I felt suddenly aware again that we were standing on a cloud, at the heart of a great vault of cloud. Apart from the Uncrushable, which rested twenty yards away like a speck of grit upon a large meringue, there was nothing solid for thousands of miles around.
Suddenly the thunder formed words again. ‘Leave now, small beings. There is …’ And then just a long, bumbling crash that might have been, ‘Danger!’
We turned, Jack Havock and I, and began to race back towards the safety of the pressure-ship. The cloud country was starting to come apart as fierce gales tugged at the arches and pillars, tearing them down as easily as you or I might tear off handfuls of candyfloss or tufts of thistledown. Snow whirled giddily about us, and freezing rain stung our faces. I looked up, and wished I hadn’t, for it gave me a nauseous, falling feeling, as if I had looked into an abyss. A chasm had opened in the vaults of cloud above our heads, and far, far up something black moved; too big to be a ship or an animal; so big that it could only be another of Jupiter’s great storms. Flashes of lightning burst from it, and were met by other flashes which leaped from the clouds of Thunderhead, so that for a moment I was reminded of two antique men-o’-war hammering each other with broadsides of cannon fire.
On the Uncrushable’s gangplank Captain Gruel stood waiting, one hand outstretched towards us. I remember thinking what a loyal friend he was to linger in that awful place until we could climb aboard. Then Jack Havock shouted a curse and slithered to a halt in the cloud-tops just ahead of me, and I realised that in the captain’s hand there was a pistol.
‘Give me the key!’ he shouted, over the howling of the wind. ‘I heard what the old storm said! You’ve got a key and the spiders want it. Give it me!’
‘But I haven’t any key!’ I said. ‘The storm has it wrong!’
‘Thunderhead’s never wrong,’ growled Gruel, advancing towards us with his pistol wavering from my face to Jack’s and back again. ‘I’ve heard whisperings about these spiders. They’re strong, and growing stronger. Reckon they’d look kindly on me if I gave them this key they want.’
‘But there isn’t any key!’ I wailed.
The pistol swung towards Jack again. ‘What if I put a bullet in your friend here? Reckon that might jog your memory, little boy?’
A mint-green zigzag of lightning came down on him. The electric crackling muffled his shriek, and the flash of his exploding pistol was lost in the dazzle. Jack and I stumbled aside, rubbing our eyes till we could see again. By then, though, there was nothing left to see of Captain Gruel except a cloud of greasy smoke that thinned swiftly in the urgent wind.
‘Many small storm systems are attacking me,’ boomed Thunderhead. ‘They are pups; young stormlets, only a few thousand years old. I believe they are acting on behalf of –’
‘The spiders!’ cried Jack. He snatched my hand and we started to blunder towards the waiting pressure-ship, but the hairy Dweebs had seen their captain vaporised, and were in no mood to wait for us. The rocket engines roared, ripping steam out of the clouds ahead, and the Uncrushable jumped into the air and plunged upwards through a dark wing of cloud that was descending fast from overhead. Jack shook his fist after her, and shouted things that would have made Myrtle turn very red indeed had she been there to hear them. I was glad that she was not, for I was already considering our situation, and it seemed to me that, whatever my poor sister might be enduring at the hands of her spidery captors, it could not be half as bad as the fate which now awaited Jack and I.
The black wing tore. A shaft of dim, Jovian sunlight reached down into Thunderhea
d’s heart, and dark specks showed in it like dust motes. A herd of panic-stricken wind-whales had been sucked inside the storm by the sudden pressure changes. Jack clutched at my arm and pointed. ‘Look, Art! They’re our way out!’
‘They’re miles away!’ I protested. But although I did not see what help those far-off behemoths could be to us, neither could I see any other way out of our predicament. Poor Thunderhead was clearly hard-pressed, and could no longer sustain the pillar of solidified vapour upon which Jack and I were standing. Even the atmosphere was growing sulphurous, as hot air from the depths was sucked upwards past us. I held tightly to Jack’s hand as the last island of firm cloud was whisked out from beneath us, leaving us to tumble free in that savage sky.
Down and down and down we fell, and up as well, and sideways, hurled this way and that by the hot gales that came battering at us out of chimneys of cloud. My hair was blown across my face, and one of my boots was torn off – if Myrtle had not been kidnapped by those spiders she would have made me double-knot the laces, and I should have it still. Naturally we shouted and wailed and flailed about, although we knew full well that there were no handholds we could hope to grab and cling to.
But gradually I came to understand that Thunderhead had not entirely forgotten us. He was too embattled to conjure up any more castles in the air for us to perch upon, but these whirling winds all had a purpose; he was wafting us towards that school of whales which we had glimpsed earlier.
I do not know how far we hurtled through that mad gavotte of clouds and lightning. It is difficult to judge scale or distance in a place where nothing is familiar, and everything is gigantic. Sometimes it seemed that the whales were close, and then they would be hidden momentarily behind some passing Matterhorn of cloud, and we would realise that they were much larger and much farther off than we had thought. But at last we began to hear their mooing songs blowing towards us on the wind. Soon we were close enough to smell them, and to spy the details of those gigantic, mottled bodies.
They aren’t very like whales, those wind-whales of Jupiter. More like big, gas-filled jellyfish, but without so many tentacles. There were twelve in the school which we found ourselves plummeting towards: six calves, five cows and an old bull male, from whose scarred hide poked a veritable forest of broken harpoons. His broad mouth gaped at us like a railway tunnel, and for a moment I thought that Jack and I were to be swallowed whole like a couple of airborne Jonahs, but the winds whirled us past. The huge, dim windows of the whale’s eye-cluster regarded us dolefully as we went by. Then we struck against his curved flank, bouncing and slithering over the rough, leathery hide. I lost my grip on Jack’s hand, and grabbed at his leg instead, and Jack snatched hold of one of those rusting harpoons and brought us to a stop.
The wind wailed, and the wind-whales mooed, and the thunder crashed. Sometimes it seemed to be forming words, but the gale carried them away before I could glean their meaning. I stared about me at the plain of mustard-coloured flesh which curved away in all directions, harpoons jutting out here and there like the stumps of blasted trees. ‘Well, we cannot stay here,’ I said.
Jack looked grim. ‘I can think of no better place for the moment,’ he confessed. ‘If we fall too far we’ll drop into the pressure-deep and be squashed like beetles. Our best hope is to stick with this beastie and hope we’re sighted by another ship.’
Light broke over us. It was not lightning, but the thin Jovian sunlight. Our whale had been flung out of Thunderhead’s towering flank into clear sky, its lowing family tumbling and rolling in its wake. The wind blew us swiftly away from the great storm. Looking back, I saw clearly the smaller storms whirling at its edges, while lightning of every colour fizzed and crawled. I suppose they did not know that Jack and I were no longer within Thunderhead’s cloudy halls, and even if they did perhaps there was no way for them to break off their attack. But I had no fear for Thunderhead, for he was so much greater than those little storms, and as I watched he tore one into whirling scraps of cloud which were absorbed into his own churning flank, and sent another spinning helplessly into a neighbouring airstream, where it was ripped quickly asunder by powerful winds.
Then an updraft lifted the whales into calmer air, and a pale yellow fog wrapped us round, veiling the remainder of the battle. Warm raindrops the size of hens’ eggs bespattered Jack and me.
Creeping gingerly from one harpoon to the next we made our way down the wind-whale’s back in search of shelter. After perhaps half an hour we saw ahead of us an ancient, rusting whaleboat which had become entangled in the lines of its own harpoons and caught fast. The hatches were open, so presumably the crew had escaped and we did not have to worry about any lingering ghosts as we heaved ourselves inside. We sat on the rusty thwarts and wondered what the future held, while the old boat shifted uneasily, tipping from side to side as the whale rode the wind-race. With each movement an empty rum bottle rolled to and fro across the bottom boards, reminding us that it was the most awfully long time since either one of us had drunk anything.
‘Poor old Thunderhead,’ I said, thinking of that sensible storm and wondering how it was faring down in the cloud wrack beneath us. ‘Do you think it is because of us he was attacked?’
‘A bit of a coincidence if it weren’t,’ said Jack. ‘Those other storms showing up so soon after we did. I reckon those spiders of yours had a hand in it.’
‘You mean a leg. They don’t have hands. They’re spiders.’
‘I wonder what they promised those stormlets to make ’em attack old Thunderhead?’ Jack mused, ignoring me. ‘Stories, I suppose. Information. If the spiders are as old as Thunderhead reckons, they must have seen a deal of history go by and have a great store of stories to share. But how did they even know we were talking to Thunderhead? And how did they get down into the wind-race to make deals with those other storms? Oh, but they’re clever bugs!’
‘And we still don’t know where they come from,’ I said. ‘“The rings of ice and stone.” Where’s that?’
Jack looked oddly at me. ‘What did the storm mean about the key to Larklight? Have you got that?’
I shook my head. ‘I can only think Thunderhead mistook me for someone else,’ I explained. ‘He said he knew my mother, yet I am sure my mother never came to Jupiter …’
Yet was I sure of that? For now that I happened to think of it, I found that I knew almost nothing of my mother’s past, her family, or anything that she had done before she married my father in Cambridge, the year before Myrtle was born. With a heartfelt sigh I leaned against the bulkhead behind me, missing poor Mother dreadfully. Remembering Myrtle’s locket, I reached into my pocket and drew it out. (I was terribly relieved to find it still safe. For a horrid moment it had occurred to me that it might have fallen out during our rumble-tumble progress through the sky.) I opened it, and tears came into my eyes as I looked at her kind face. But I consoled myself with the thought that she was in a Better Place, that Father and Myrtle might already be there with her, and that I would probably be going to join them quite shortly.
‘What is that?’ asked Jack.
‘Myrtle’s locket,’ I said. ‘It has our mother’s picture in it.’ On a sudden impulse I held it out to him. Although he had never known my mother, I felt that he might be comforted as I had been by her kind smile. But all he said as he took it was, ‘You have carried this all the way from the Moon?’
‘I thought to give it back to Myrtle when we were aboard the Sophronia,’ I admitted. ‘but she asked me to keep hold of it. She was afraid you might search her cabin and steal it.’
Jack looked hurt. ‘I would not rob her!’ he said. Then he took out his trusty pocket knife, and applied the tip of the blade to the locket casing.
‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Oh, stop! What are you thinking of!’
‘I think there is more to your mother than meets the eye,’ he replied.
‘It doesn’t open!’ I warned, reaching for the locket, while Jack patiently worked his knife in the ti
ny crack between the portrait and its gold casing.
But it did open. Mother’s picture lifted like a book cover, and beneath it, packed into the tiny space by some craftsman of supernatural skill, minute devices glittered and gleamed. Cogs and wires and coils and ratchets and unearthly things I had no words for shone in the dim light: a whole world of intricate machinery in perfect miniature.
I snatched the locket, and as my hand closed on it the strange machinery took on a faint, blue glow.
‘This is what the spiders are after!’ cried Jack. ‘It has to be! This is what they came to Larklight for, and why they have been following you ever since! They kidnapped poor Myrtle for to get it, and when they found she didn’t have it, they trailed us here and came to capture you!’
The whaleboat rocked. The beast we were riding gave a sudden sideways lurch, and its outraged bellowing rang in our ears. I snapped the locket shut and stuffed it back into my pocket, wedging it down carefully beneath my handkerchief. Jack was already in the hatchway, staring out.
‘Oh, what’s this?’ I heard him say.
I hastened to his side. The wind-whale had brought us very high, into the thin clouds of Jupiter’s uppermost atmosphere, what our whalers call ‘the High Tops’. Clumps of airborne bladder bushes were drifting all around us, staining the sunlight green as it poured through their semitransparent leaves and gas-sacs. Herds of wild hoverhogs, which had been nibbling peacefully at the vegetation, were fleeing now, along with the whale calves and the females. I could hardly blame them. Bearing down on us out of the eye of the wind was a thousand-armed horror, an octopus of the heights, supported by a colossal, finned balloon of reddish hide. It must already have struck once at our whale – we could feel the poor creature shuddering and starting to list – and now it was coming back to make a second pass. It unrolled its mile-long legs, each armed with dozens of vicious thorns. I guessed at once what its intention was; to puncture our whale’s internal gas bladder so that it could no longer stay aloft.
