Starcross

by Philip Reeve

  I cleared my throat, and explained my plan of battle. There wasn’t much of it, I’m afraid.

  ‘We shall set down on the promenade just outside the entrance to the pier,’ I announced. ‘We shall all arm ourselves with as many swords and guns and cutlasses as we can carry, and as soon as the ship is landed we shall swarm out and charge into the hotel, where we shall wallop, pistol or poke every Moob we see.’

  There was a sort of wondering silence for a second or two. Then Nipper said, ‘Is that it?’

  I gulped, and nodded. ‘I always think it’s best to favour the direct approach in these matters,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a wonderful plan!’ cried Nipper, and to my relief the others all seemed to agree, except for Colonel Quivering, who had doubtless been expecting me to propose Flanking Manoeuvres and Softening Up The Enemy’s Centre with our Light Horse.

  ‘Worthy of Jack himself!’ cried Grindle loyally, and Ssil put her blue arms around my neck and kissed me, which caused me to blush rather more than is proper in a military mastermind.

  To cover my confusion I began arming myself from those handy tubs of cutlasses and boarding pikes which Jack and his friends keep dotted about the Sophronia’s cabin, in much the same spirit that Mother leaves out bowls of nuts and sweetmeats for visitors to Larklight over Christmastide. The others all followed my example, and before long we looked like the most fearsome banditti you can imagine, and I must say it boosted my confidence remarkably to have a few shooting irons stashed about my person. Nevertheless, I could not help wishing ardently that Jack were with us as Ssilissa set us moving towards our landfall.

  Soft as thistledown, the Sophronia settled on the promenade. Nipper kicked open the main hatch, and we all went storming out through it. At first all was silence, but as we ran past the beach cafe we heard the squeak of wheels, and out of the shadows came rolling two striped booths, extending pointy hands and gleaming gun-barrels as they advanced. At once we all let fly with our kerflunderbusses28 and multi-barrelled pistols, and a rattle of gunfire echoed from the front of the hotel. As the smoke cleared the two sinister sideshows collapsed, mere heaps of scrap, with smoke and sparks spewing from their riddled mechanisms.

  ‘Huzzah!’ I said.

  Grindle prodded the nearest wreck with his boot. ‘Hello, boys and sausages …’ it said creakily, its voice running down slowly into silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Nipper, ‘unless those Moobs are all stonedeaf, they will know that we are here now.’

  We reloaded our guns and hurried up the hotel steps, pausing at the top to check that our anti-Moob hats were in place and turbans tight-wrapped. Then, with pistol in one hand and sword in the other, and feeling every inch the bold adventurer, I kicked one of the doors open, Ssil shoved the other open with her tail, and our companions followed us inside in a rush of feet and pincers!

  No Moobs came whirling down to try and steal our brains from us. Nothing stirred at all, except for a few hoverhogs busy snuffling up cake crumbs, and an autowaiter which rolled to greet on us on well-oiled wheels and said, ‘Welcome to Starcross, ladies and gentlemen. I take it you will be joining the other lady for tea?’

  We lowered our weapons and looked at each other, flummoxed.

  ‘What other lady?’ asked Ssilissa.

  ‘Mrs Mumby,’ said the automaton patiently. ‘She is expecting you.’

  It spun about and wheeled away, and we followed it into the withdrawing room, expecting a trap. But there sat Mother, dressed quite neatly and properly in her good blue gown, taking tea with Professor Ferny and Mr Munkulus. And all about them, on tables and sofas and the carpeted floor, Moobs lay heaped about like well-stuffed black cushions. If you listened closely you could hear them murmuring, ‘Moob, moob, moob,’ in a most contented way.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, dears,’ said Mother brightly, looking up and seeing us all standing stunned in the doorway.

  ‘We’re here to resscue you, Mrss Mumby,’ said Ssilissa.

  ‘Well, of course you are, dear,’ said Mother. ‘I was only saying to Professor Ferny and dear Mr Munkulus that you would certainly come back to rescue us.’

  I was not sure what to say next. It is disconcerting for a fellow to come bursting into a resort hotel, armed to the eye-teeth and expecting to do battle with a pitiless foe, only to find that the pitiless foe is asleep all over the floor and he is expected to take tea instead. I gulped once or twice, and said, ‘Mother, I’m afraid Myrtle is lost!’

  ‘Oh dear, again?’ said Mother, with a look of concern which deepened as I explained about the Liberty and its fate. But when I had finished she said, ‘Never mind; I am sure she and Jack will turn up. I may no longer have all the powers of a Shaper, but I am certain that I should know if anything terrible had befallen them. Now do pull up some chairs, all of you; you must be famished. I believe there is a plate of ginger shortbread somewhere …’

  As if in a dream we did as she bid us, pushing the unprotesting Moobs aside with our feet and gathering around the table. Colonel Quivering congratulated Professor Ferny on his swift recovery, and the intellectual shrub replied that it was nothing – that thanks to Mother’s quick thinking he had been removed from the poisoned mulch before very much damage had been done, and that a night in a bowl of restorative plant food had done wonders. Mr Munkulus, meanwhile, asked his shipmates what had been happening to them, and gave us joy of our escape from the Moobs, and shared our concern at the fate of Jack and Myrtle. He looked most embarrassed at having been a part of the Moobish plot himself, and still more embarrassed when we asked him what the Moobs had kept him behind at Starcross for.

  ‘Oh, they had me assisting Professor Ferny,’ he rumbled. ‘Doing this and that, you know …’

  ‘Your friend Munkulus is far, far too modest,’ rustled Professor Ferny. ‘Those spores which he bred for the Moobs are a work of art! He had even me yearning after one of Titfer’s Top-Notch Toppers!’

  ‘But, Mother!’ I cried out at last, quite unable to contain my curiosity a moment longer. ‘What about the Moobs? What have you done to them? How did you escape?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mother calmly, holding out teacups for the mechanical teapots to fill, and also filling two shallow bowls for Yarg and Squidley to dip their feeding-tentacles in. ‘I did nothing at all. The Moobs eat thoughts, you know – indeed, I can see you know that, from those items you have so cleverly wrapped around your heads. Thoughts, and memories, and dreams. Well, I have a great many thoughts, and four-and-a-half-billion years of memories, and so the Moobs who so rudely clambered upon me were very quickly full, and fell asleep, whereupon their friends set about snacking on their dreams. That enabled me to regain control over myself once more, and close the passage into Futurity which they had had me open. I believe that all the Moobs in this era are currently napping.’

  ‘And when will they awaken?’ asked Mr Spinnaker nervously, looking about at the dozing Moobs who clustered on every pouf and window sill.

  ‘Oh, not for a few more hours, I expect,’ said Mother. ‘And by that time we shall have them home. I am planning to carry this hotel into the distant future where these creatures dwell, and put an end to all this silliness. Poor Moobs! It is such a miserable era that they inhabit. I wish I could do something to help them so that they will no longer feel the need to come barging into other people’s bits of history and spoil their holidays.’

  Like so many things my mother says, this left me speechless. Still, I was very glad that she was herself again, and that she knew a way to put things straight. I believe we all felt the same, for everyone around that table relaxed, and some of us went so far as to remove our headgear, which was growing itchy in the cosy warmth of Starcross.

  We drained our teacups and ate up the ginger shortbread. Then, with Mother leading the way, we went down again into the cavern beneath the hotel. Moobs were piled in every corner and heaped up in masses on the metal stairs. We tried our best not to tread upon them, but it w
as impossible not to dislodge a few; they rolled down with wet wobbling sounds like those new rubber hot-water bottles, and mumbled softly in their sleep, ‘Moob, moob …’

  At the bottom of the stairs Sir Launcelot Sprigg sat upon a wooden chair – indeed, he had been tied to it, and gagged with a napkin from the dining room. He looked most displeased at being treated thus, but of course Mother could not trust him to run around free, and anyway, it served him right.

  As for the great machine, Larklight’s old engine, it had changed while we had been gone. I could not imagine how Mother had found time to make so many alterations, to string so many lengths of cable and duct about it like Christmas paperchains, and add so many dials and switches to its mahogany control desk. When I asked her about it she said, ‘Oh, I simply made time.’29

  The old machine, it seemed, was now ready to do all that Sir Launcelot Sprigg had wanted, and more; it would move through space, and also through the Fourth Dimension. No wonder that he looked so furious, fastened to that chair in a corner and forced to watch this miracle of science take shape, knowing that it would never be his to command!

  ‘There,’ said Mother, and she patted the flank of her machine as if it were some faithful old dog. ‘She is good for one last journey, I believe. All we need do is pull this lever, and turn that handle, and tweak that – well, I do not believe there is a word for one of those in any earthly language, but we shall tweak it just the same, and this hotel will be transported in an instant to that far-off future where Moobs eke out their cheerless existences.’

  And as she was saying all this she did pull that lever, and turn that handle, and tweak the final what-do-you-call-it, and the old engine began to sing and churn and spin and shift in and out of various dimensions, while the rest of us clung to any solid thing that we could find, for the waves of giddiness we felt when Starcross whisked us back through a hundred million years to ancient Mars were as nothing to those which swept over us now, as the hotel went careering into the unknown vistas of Futurity!

  On and on that dizzy, falling feeling went, until we began to grow used to it, and were able to uncover our eyes and let go of the things we had clung to when it started and walk about. Yet still a certain lingering unease remained. Perhaps it was a sort of disappointment at being cheated of our famous battle, but I think all of us who had been aboard the Sophronia felt the same nagging worry: that things were moving a little too swiftly and smoothly, and that somehow All Was Not Well.

  It was Grindle who finally put his finger on it. He raised a hand. Something about my mother always makes him very polite and schoolboyish, and although he had something that he was itching to say, he kept it bottled up until she smiled at him and said, ‘Yes, Mr Grindle?’

  ‘Thing is,’ Grindle said, ‘and pardon me for speaking out of line, yer ladyship, but as soon as we land in the time of the Moobs, aren’t hundreds and millions of them going to come a-swarming in on us, all bent on eating up our thoughts?’

  Mother turned to look at him. Her vast mind was busy with far deeper questions, and so her gaze was mild at first. ‘Mm?’ she said. Then what Grindle had just asked seemed to sink in; her grey eyes widened; she put a hand to her bosom.

  ‘Oh crikey!’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We Arrive in the Depths of Futurity and Find Them Chilly and a Trifle Dark.

  The trouble with having a mother who is so very old and so very wise is that it is easy to start thinking that she knows everything and is always right. But like any of us, Mother can forget little details sometimes, and that was exactly what had happened. Or perhaps she was still a bit confused after her time as a mind slave of the Moobs. At any rate, it seemed she had been so busy reconfiguring her old machine to carry us into their future age that she not spared much thought to what would actually happen when we got there.

  ‘We mussst put our hatss back on,’ said Ssilissa. ‘That will protect usss.’

  But would it? I could see that Mother doubted it. A few Moobs might be foiled by wool and blankets and the like, but if we came under attack by many millions of them, it could not be long before their small black hands would find a way through our defences, and we would perish in Futurity as their slaves!

  ‘Mother, stop the machine!’ I cried.

  ‘I would rather not,’ she replied. ‘We are travelling through unknown reaches of Time. Who knows what civilisations now rule the worlds of the Sun, or what mischief we might cause if we suddenly appear among them? No, we must exert our minds and think of some sure way to keep ourselves safe when we reach the Moobs’ era. The journey will take another hour or so, I believe.’

  I exerted my mind. And sure enough, I found a plan there! ‘Huzzah!’ I cried. ‘Mother! Why not have Mr Munkulus design an advertising spore that will convince those Moobs what a good idea it would be not to sit on our heads and eat our brainwaves up?’

  Mother looked thoughtfully at me, and the more she thought, the more convinced she seemed to be that my idea was a good one. ‘Well done, Art!’ she said. ‘But why stop at just dissuading the Moobs from sitting on us? That is hardly kind. What we need is a spore that will inspire them a little. Something to stop them moping about in their chilly future age, and start enjoying it and making the best of things.’

  ‘But breeding a complex ideospore like that would take months, or even years,’ Mr Munkulus protested.

  ‘Then we shall make months and years!’ said Mother. ‘I shall divert a portion of the machine’s power into a sort of time-greenhouse, where we shall be able make time pass as quickly as we like and breed whatever ideospores we need!’

  And so that is what we did.

  Mr Munkulus and Professor Ferny hurried into that secondary cave which opened off of the main cavern, and there busied themselves with tweezers and test tubes of dormant ideospores. Every few minutes one or other of them would emerge with an earth-filled tray in which some tweaked spore lay waiting, and Mother, having tinkered with curious silvery bits and bobs in an open panel on the side of her machine, directed a bluish ray upon it, which made strange Ionian puffballs swell abruptly from the soil, and burst, and be replaced with more – whole generations of spores going through the cycles of life and death in about as long as it takes me to blink. And then our brainy botanists would carefully carry the results away, and seal themselves and Mother back in their laboratory to peer at the resulting spores through microscopes and magnifying glasses, and drop them into flasks of different coloured chemicals, and watch how they reacted. And after a lot of discussion and the shaking of heads (or leaves, in Ferny’s case), Mother would come out and say, ‘It is not quite ready yet, I fear,’ and the whole process would start again.

  And all the while, Starcross went plummeting into the future, century after century, millennia after millennia …

  It is all very clever, this spore-breeding business, but I don’t believe it will ever catch on in a big way as a spectator sport. After watching for ten minutes or so, the rest of us wandered off to find something to eat, and to check on the Moobs, who were still sleeping peacefully. A strange light hung over the pier and the dry beach, and glimmered in the Sophronia’s rigging. Nipper and Ssil and I went out on to the steps and looked up at the sky above the promenade. It had become a swirl of light, painted with the smeared tracks of a million stars that whirled about us. The Milky Way spun above the Sophronia’s upperworks like an immense wheel, endlessly circling. But as we stood watching it, too awed to speak, I began to notice that the light was dimming, and that the shadows we cast upon the hotel steps were not so dark. We watched the whirling stars grow red and dull, and one by one, at last, go out.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Nipper.

  ‘We’re drawing near the end,’ said Ssil. ‘We are passsing through the autumn of the Universsse, and into winter.’

  ‘The end of all things,’ I whispered. ‘The end of all hope …’

  ‘Oh, there is always hope, Art,’ said Mother, opening the do
or and stepping out to join us. With her came all the others, led by Munkulus and Grindle, who carried between them a tray containing what looked like many grey-green cannonballs, moulded out of moss and dust.

  ‘Are dose de spores?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mother. ‘There is no need to hold your nose in that dramatic manner, Art; they will have no effect upon the human brain.’

  ‘Oh! But they will work on Moobs?’

  ‘I certainly hope so! Come, let us carry them aboard Jack’s ship; it will be so much easier to distribute them from there. I believe we have just enough time …’

  How cold it had become there upon the steps of Starcross! Now only a few stars were left, and most of them were dim and red, like embers glowing in a heap of black ashes. We hurried together aboard the Sophronia, where I helped Mr Munkulus load a spore-ball into each of the old ship’s space cannon. I wondered if we should drop one ball into the hold, so that we could make sure it worked by observing the effects upon the captive Moobs there. But Mother said, ‘No, Art; after all, it might not work, and then think how depressed we should all feel, for there is no time to make more, and we are almost at our journey’s end.’

  My dizziness returned, and I guessed that we were slowing. I went carefully to a porthole and looked out. Above us, the sky was faintly washed with the dim red glow of the last, dying suns. But clouds of utter blackness lay across that sky: great, complicated, raggedy-edged clouds bigger than worlds, which seemed to swirl and billow in an unseen wind. And in those blacknesses, as I watched, countless tiny firefly lights began appearing, bobbing and winking as they spread over the abandoned vaults of Heaven.

  ‘New stars!’ said Nipper, who is a hopeful sort of crab. ‘New stars are growing!’

  ‘No, they ain’t,’ said Grindle.

  In the infinite emptiness which lay all about us, the cold bright eyes of countless Moobs were turning hungrily on Starcross.