Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The bodies of the suits were made of rubber, and seemed very loose-fitting at first glance, but what caught Francis’ attention more immediately was the array of near-spherical helmets, apparently fabricated out of black glass. From without they seemed opaque, but when one of them was fitted over his head—carefully, for the hole intended for the neck was hardly broad enough to accommodate a generous nose—he saw that it was, in fact, translucent.

  “I thought that Tom Digges had proved that the ether is breathable,” Anthony objected.

  “He did,” said de Vere. “He proved that the body can function well enough for a while in ether rather than air, much as it can function between meals—but ether does not support life in the same fashion as air, and a man breathing ether will fall into a torpor eventually, or begin to suffer delusions. Those eventualities are best avoided—but the helmets and suits are also intended to protect us against overly intense light and the possibility of encountering noxious air.”

  “We do not know exactly what we shall find when we set off on the second leg of our journey,” Francis deduced, articulating the conclusion for Anthony's benefit. “We shall certainly reach the surface of another world, but we do not know what difficulties might face us before we can get safely inside it, into the bosom of its fleshcore.” He remembered, too, that Thomas Digges had breathed in the ethereal that had hitched a ride in his body and brain, and guessed that the golem might be anxious to protect his companions against that eventuality as well. The ethereals were evidently something of a mystery to the Fleshcores, and the golem obviously did not trust them.

  After inspecting the suits, Francis and Anthony were taken to another canvas-covered store, where they were shown a number of weapons. In form they resembled arquebuses, closely enough to have been disguised as such, but they were lighter, and their barrels were not amenable to cramming with powder and shot.

  “They fire rays of energetic light,” de Vere told them. “They're all but harmless when fired in air, although they're capable of blinding a man if cleverly aimed, but in ether they're deadlier, especially to insectile wings and compound eyes. Drake's ships will be fitted with artillery of a similar sort, though much more powerful—but his men will wear swords too, just as we shall. If fighting comes to close quarters, there's nothing to match a good blade—except, I'm told, insect jaws and insect stings, which can easily inflict mortal wounds if not adequately parried, by virtue of the poisons they contain. Have you trained with that sword, Master Bacon, or do you wear it just for show?” This time, he was addressing Anthony rather than Francis.

  “We have both been schooled,” Anthony claimed. “Our master may not have been as skilled as Arthur Golding, but he had seen military service in the Netherlands and was no mere fencer.”

  De Vere's eyebrow lifted slightly, suggestive of his skepticism, but his reply was scrupulously polite. “In that case, Master Bacon, Kit and I will be glad to have you at our side, as well as Raleigh's dark folk—although we're told that they're very fearsome fighting men, and I can readily believe it. Faust's master assures us that a battle is highly unlikely, and that we might reckon ourselves unfortunate if we encounter anything more than a patrol of glorified night-flying moths, but it's always as well to be prepared.”

  Francis divined that de Vere was trying to lift his own spirits as well as Anthony's; Francis supposed that any attack they might have to withstand would be launched from an ether-ship, against whose hull the ray-guns would probably be as impotent as blades.

  “How powerful are Drake's guns, Francis?” Anthony asked, a trifle wistfully. He had always envied Tom Digges far more for his work as an artillerist and military engineer than for his exploits as an astronomer and mathematician.

  De Vere answered in Francis’ stead. “Powerful enough to blast holes in the ships of the Selenite Armada,” he said. “That will not put an immediate end to the Selenites inside—they can fly in the ether—but will make it extremely difficult for the ships to withstand the last phase of their journey, through the Earth's atmosphere.”

  Anthony, still trying to match his interlocutor in the appearance of casual courage, continued the interrogation. “How long will we need to stay on the platform high above the Earth?”

  “That I don't know,” de Vere replied. “In the first instance, Master Rosenkreutz will only require a matter of minutes to align the transmitter. We shall, of course, make our initial ascent at a propitious moment. After that ... well, it might be hours, or days, before a messenger returns to give us further information. Be reassured, though, that our greatest difficulty will probably be boredom.”

  Anthony seemed reassured by this, so Francis did not want to question it. He had thought of a hundred more questions by now that he wanted to put to the golem, but none that Edward de Vere would be able to answer reliably. Faust and Low were as busy as the golem himself in making the final arrangements for the use of the ultraetheric canal, whose activation would bring the hyperetheric transmitter out of its other-dimensional hidey-hole within seconds, and then transport a company of bold pioneers to the platform on which it stood. He was not required to lend a hand to any heavy work himself, but he was unable to exploit the waiting time as he would have wished, in recovering more information. Patience Muffet and Walter Raleigh seemed preoccupied with their own concerns, so Francis had little to do but look out over the estuary, from which the fog had now lifted completely enough to allow a clear sight of the sailing vessels making use of the incoming tide.

  The sky was cloudy, and the water exceedingly grey. The marsh, Francis judged, must have a rather bleak aspect even at its best—but for a man about to quit the Earth, the scene could hardly help seeming uncommonly hospitable and homely. One of Edward Kelley's favorite sayings was that it was the Earth entire, rather than his magical red powder, that was the true philosopher's stone; Francis took that to mean that it was the evolutionary transformations wrought at the Earth's surface by the passage of millions of years that constituted the real wonder and the real miracle at the heart of these turbulent times. In the vast empire of the Great Fleshcores, it was said, there was—or had been, until John Dee's ether-ship had provoked a disturbance whose extent and durability was inestimable—a calm, a fixity, and a certainty of purpose very different from the politics of Earthly nations and the perpetual squabbles of human individuals. There was something enviable about that prospect, Francis admitted, but there was also something to envy in relentless competition and the urge to rapid progress, no matter what the cost in uncertainty might be. If Thomas Muffet really were on the threshold of discoveries that might give human beings the power to accelerate and direct their evolution, what might his quarrelsome species make of itself ? Something very different, undoubtedly, from what the Selenites wanted to make of it, in order to accommodate humankind to their notion of eternally static utopia.

  In the end, Francis lost himself sufficiently in this reverie that Patience Muffet had to come to fetch him, telling him that he must put on his suit immediately, because the “node” at which the orbital platform would unfold was approaching its ideal position.

  “Could your father not be here to bid you farewell?” Francis asked, as they walked side by side. He felt rather awkward, for he had little idea how to talk to young women, and knew that his experience in dealing with Queen Jane was far from pertinent.

  “He has relationships to build and old scores to settle,” Patience told him, as they went into the storage-tent. “He intends to be the spearhead of a Paracelsian revolution in England and Europe. That is what he insists on calling it, although his medicines have nothing in common with Paracelsus’ silly nostrums.”

  “It will be easier to persuade the needy of its merit if he calls it Paracelsian instead of an Arachnid revolution,” Francis observed.

  She smiled slightly at that. “You're right,” she conceded—but had to stop talking then, in order to get into her suit, which was even more loose-fitting about her slender frame than any of
the others. Rabbi Low and the golem were the stoutest members of the entire company, but even they did not test the elasticity of the fabric unduly.

  Once Francis had his helmet on, a release of air from a satchel on his back inflated the suit slightly. That disconcerted him, but he quickly accustomed himself to the sensation. Now that the company had sealed their suits it was difficult to recognize anyone; he could see out well enough, but he could hardly see into the other black glass shells at all. He could not tell which ones of his ten companions were the five who would undertake the second phase of the journey with him and which would be left behind to man the platform, but he supposed that they would sort themselves out soon enough, once the work of aligning the mysterious hyperetheric projector actually began.

  He took his position randomly, huddled on the narrow dais of the first machine with everyone else, not knowing where Anthony was or with whom he was rubbing shoulders. There was no ceremony, and he did not even see a lever activated to send the company on its way. One moment he was in Kent, and the next...

  * * * *

  6

  The next moment, however, did not seem to follow the preceding one as immediately as it might have done, time itself having been wrenched out of true as the ultraetheric canal snatched him up. For a moment, everything disappeared, or was turned inside-out, including Francis’ body and his mind. A sudden odor of burning onions surged out of his memory, unbidden and completely unexpected.

  When time resumed its course again, the wrench he felt left him feeling extremely dizzy and nauseous. Strong hands moved him out of the way, although there was something very strange about the fashion in which his feet were dragged. He was given something to grip before he was abandoned, and then felt able to open his eyes. His vertigo and nausea returned in full force when he found himself looking down from the edge of a platform, to whose balustrade he was clinging.

  Oddly enough, he did not have any sense of being high up. He had been to the tops of Welsh mountains and had peered down sheer cliffs, and had then been very acutely aware of the distance he might plummet if he lost his balance, but there was nothing now connecting him to the planet below him, and he felt that he weighed nothing at all, although he knew that he was not beyond the range of the Earth's affinity. He felt light enough, at any rate, to imagine that he might float away, drifting in the subtle currents of the ether. It was easier to imagine that than to accommodate the idea that he might tumble from where he now was to the surface of that gigantic ball—which was certainly beneath his feet, given the direction of his unfolded body, but did not really seem to be below him in any truly meaningful sense of the word.

  Francis had seen many terrestrial globes fashioned out of carefully curved pieces of cloth mounted on a wicker frame, as well as many celestial globes depicting the relative positions of the distant stars, but he was slightly surprised to discover that the Earth bore as little resemblance to a geographical globe as the sky did to a celestial one. It was not so much the coloring of the land and sea as the extent of the clouds, which obscured vast tracts of continent and ocean alike, and made it exceedingly hard to identify the outlines of the familiar world-map.

  He had unthinkingly expected the sun to be above his head, but it was not; it was very close to the rim of the Earth and moving closer all the while, about to set—or to be eclipsed, according to terminology that seemed to have loosened considerably. He had also expected the moon to be full, although he had had no particular reason to suppose that it would be; in fact, it was positioned in such a way that three-quarters of its face was sunlit and the remainder in shadow.

  The moon's face was no larger than it was when seen from the surface, but his eyes scanned it anyway, as if by reflex, searching for some slight evidence of activity or the presence of the Great Armada that was being patiently assembled there in order to attack the Earth. There was no such evidence visible, although the floating disk seemed so very light that it was easy to think of it as a hollow crust filled with a vast hive of ants and beetles, caterpillars and centipedes.

  There was a good deal of activity going on behind him, and he was jostled a little, but the platform of the orbital station was considerably larger than the stage of the Earthbound machine, and Francis did not feel that he was in danger of being thrust over the balustrade. He discovered that the soles of his feet were stuck to the surface of the platform in such a way that they could easily be slid along but were not so easy to lift clear in order to assume a normal gait. Magnetism, he thought, wonderingly. That was another of John Dee's old obsessions, investigated on behalf of the queen's navy and the Muscovy Company, in order to perfect its navigational uses.

  There were people already busy about the strange devices that occupied the four corners of the inner compound where the focal point of the transmitter was, but Francis did not bother to turn round in order to study exactly what they were doing, or to what. He was not the only one standing back, and he felt that he was wise to do so rather than get in the way of workmen who had tasks to complete.

  He tilted his head back and turned to his left, in order to avoid the muted light of the sun, whose rays were reddening now by virtue of their passage through the Earth's atmospheric envelope. He looked at the stars of the Milky Way, which lay across the black sky like a great stain—but not at all like a stream of spilled milk. For every star visible from the surface of Earth, he guessed, there must be hundreds now visible to his unsupported eye, and might be thousands were he not wearing the black helmet, but they seemed oddly frail and tiny, quite disconnected from one another in spite of their profusion. There was nothing misty about the Milky Way now, except for a few strange patches; the greater part of its extent was very obviously a field of distinct points of light, lost in an infinite sea of dark. Had the void theorists not been so thoroughly defeated by the plenarists, Francis could almost have imagined that the space outside the Earth's kindly layer of air really was empty.

  He was about to turn his attention to the moon again when everything changed. He supposed, in the first instant, that he must simply have been looking in the wrong direction to see the attackers approaching—but those whose appointed task it was to take up defensive positions and mount vigil had no time to react either. If anyone had shouted a warning he probably would not have heard it, for the ether was much less efficient at transmitting sound than light, but it seemed more likely that there was simply no opportunity for anyone to do so. Between the instant when the space beyond the Earth's affinity seemed empty enough almost to be a void, and the instant when it seemed entirely full of fluttering wings, there seemed to be no lapse of time at all.

  Francis assumed that the imitation arquebuses were fired, although he saw no beams of light spring from their muzzles. He assumed, too, that the rays struck targets, for he could not imagine how they could possibly miss, but the shots seemed to have no effect at all on the swarm that was now seething around them. He thought of it as seething because he could hear no sound, although he was fully prepared to believe that it might be buzzing, too. He had no weapon at all, so his first impulse was to drop to his knees and cover his head as best he could with his arms, but that was not easy with his soles stuck to the platform, and so he squatted instead, in a remarkably ungainly position, with his knees jutting out. Nor did he cover his head for more than a moment, for the contact of fluttering wings made him lash out reflexively with his hands and forearms, trying to shove the marauders away.

  Francis could not tell, at first, how large the members of the attacking swarm might be. They were at least ten times as large as honey-bees, but he could not narrow that estimate any further when he tried to estimate their average wingspan and the length of their bodies. They filled the ether so densely that it was almost impossible to imagine that their furiously beating wings could avoid colliding with one another and sending them all fluttering out of control—and yet, it seemed, they did avoid collisions, and retained all their awful certainty of purpose.

 
Swords were undoubtedly being used, though not with any need for a fencer's art. They were presumably being used as flails, brandished above the sentries’ heads and twirled in such a way as to carve out circles in space. Doubtless, too, the blades must be doing sterling work, scything through wings and abdomens by the dozen or the hundred—but without any conspicuous impact on the density of the swarm.

  Francis became aware, almost to his surprise, that he was no longer waving his arms above his head, but was clawing instead at his chest and thighs, trying to dislodge fliers that had lighted there and were clinging fast. They could not adhere to the glass of his helmet, it seemed, but they could gain purchase enough on the rubber of his suit to cling and bite—and bite they did.

  At first, their jaws were unable to penetrate his suit, whose rubber yielded and stretched without being torn—but as the creatures persisted, he felt the fabric penetrated in half a dozen places and felt the clothing he was wearing within give way as claw-like entities raked and stabbed his flesh. He felt pricks of burning pain, strangely muted by shock, and was conscious that blood was beginning to flow—first from his left arm, then the right, and then from his breast, no more than a handspan from his heart.

  Why, he thought, in stupefaction, they're killing me! This is not supposed to be happening. We were supposed to be safe, at least until we got to the heart of the universe.

  He felt an arm tugging his own then, and another pair of hands grappling with the insects that were clinging to his suit. He knew that it must be Anthony, reckless of his own danger and fearful for his brother's life. Francis knew, too, that the brave fellow's efforts must be futile—and so they would have been, had help not arrived.