Starcross
Page 20
‘Jack,’ asks Myrtle, carefully, for fear the faintest hint of boldness might make his wounds begin to hurt again, ‘you never did tell me, when we were on Mars and aboard the Liberty, why you did not answer my letters?’
Jack looks awkwardly away across the dried-out sea, towards the knoll which was an island once (where some of the Threls are helping Professor Ferny to dig up two trees, and carry them back towards the waiting train, with the intellectual shrub hurrying beside them, calling out, ‘Take care! Mind their roots! I am quite certain that I can effect a cure, if only we can get them safely to my laboratory at Kew!’). And then he says, ‘Thing is, Myrtle, we’re not meant for each other, are we, me and you?’
‘It is “you and I”, Jack, dear. But I cannot see what makes you say so. Surely you know that I … that I …’
‘What I can see,’ says Jack, ‘is that you’re a young lady. A pretty, clever, elegant young lady. And a rough old aethership, cruising on Her Majesty’s service out in the nether end of nowhere, ain’t the place for you.’
‘There is Another, isn’t there?’ declares Myrtle, commencing to sniffle piteously. ‘Some other young woman has claimed your heart, someone ever so much more brave and dashing than I. Oh, I cannot hate you for it, Jack, dearest. I wish you joy. Though I do hope she has only the conventional number of heads and arms and so forth …’
‘Hush, hush, hush,’ Jack has been saying with no effect at all throughout the main part of this speech. Now he reaches out and sets a finger to Myrtle’s lips, which makes her stop talking so abruptly that she gets hiccups. ‘It just ain’t the life for you, that’s all,’ he says. ‘You’re not suited to being chased by monsters and eaten by clams and shot up by secret agents, and if you were, why, you wouldn’t be my Myrtle any more.’
For a moment, misery and anger struggle for control of Myrtle’s phiz, and then, as usual, anger wins. She springs to her feet, throwing up a storm of pale sand which falls but slowly in the gentle atmosphere down here upon the beach.
‘I declare, Jack Havock,’ she declares, stamping her foot, ‘I’ll show you! Mama has been asking me what I should like to study. Very well; I shall study Alchemy. The Moob said I had a talent for it, didn’t he? I shall become the best lady alchemist there is, and when I know all about it I shall come and find you out in the nether end of nowhere, and then we shall see who is suited for whom …’
At which point I cannot help but let out a stifled snort of laughter, and Myrtle realises that I have overheard all this, concealed under the wheels of a nearby bathing machine.
Things might have gone badly for your hero, for she really was in a most terrible bate when she realised I had listened to all her tender talk with Jack. But the Luck of the Mumby’s was on my side, and just as she was dragging me out from under the machine by my stockings, and threatening me with all sorts of torments,33 another whistle sounded, and we looked up to see a second train pulling in to Starcross Halt. It was a small passenger train, which must have been shunted into a siding further up the line to let that armoured affair come tearing through, and had now resumed its journey. We all ran back on to the promenade and watched as a number of gentlefolk emerged, who had doubtless expected a seaside holiday at Mr Titfer’s hotel, and looked most put out to find plenty of side but no sea whatsoever.
And among them, looking his usual amiable and bewildered self, with a shrimping net over one shoulder and a wide straw hat upon his head …
‘Father!’ I cried.
‘Father!’ cried Myrtle.
‘Edward!’ cried Mother.
And we ran to him, and he to us, the Mumbys reunited.
‘Are you all quite safe?’ he asked, as soon as he was able. ‘In Modesty they said that dangerous hats may be on the loose at Starcross. Did they mean “bats”, perhaps? Or “gnats”? And wherever is the sea?’
‘I’m afraid the asteroid belt will never now be numbered among the truly first-class resorts for sea bathing,’ said Mother. ‘I think that we should take the next train back and spend the rest of our holiday on Ganymede. I imagine the great sea lilies are just coming into flower there, and we might take a day excursion into the cloud-tops of Jupiter, so that I may introduce you to my old friend Thunderhead.’
She took his arm, and together they turned towards the cafe, with me and Myrtle following.
‘But first,’ she said, ‘I think we should all benefit very much from a nice cup of tea.’
FINIS
Sober them up and lock them in a suite of rooms for a few weeks with pens, ink, paper and a good supply of biscuits.
Two Gentlemen of Devonshire
Who are these ragged figures lurching out of the fog that swirls eternally across this dreadful Moor? Their eyes are wide, their hair unkempt, their gait unsteady and their demeanour barely human. Why, ’tis MR REEVE and MR WYATT and they have been to the PUB again. But sober them up and lock them in a suite of rooms for a few weeks with pens, ink, paper and a good supply of biscuits, and they will turn out the neatest illustrated tale of adventure you could ask for.
Mr Reeve is the author of the Mortal Engines quartet and Here Lies Arthur, as well as the illustrator of many children’s books and co-writer of a musical, The Ministry of Biscuits.
Mr Wyatt leads a double life as a daring intelligence agent for Her Majesty, and is generally to be found swinging from bamboo bridges in the depths of the Sumatran jungle, or engaging in gondola chases through the canals of Venice. But this has not stopped him from becoming one of the leading illustrators of his generation, and his work has graced the books of Professor Tolkein, Mr Pratchett, Mrs MacCaughrean and many others.
Acknowledgements
And where would Mr Reeve and Mr Wyatt be without the guidance and inspiration of their three lovely editrices, Miss Fountain, Miss Szirtes and Mrs Brathwaite? In the soup, that is where, and being pelted with croutons by retired schoolteachers, outraged at their slack grammar and listless cross-hatching.
That lovely ditty ‘Dearest Margaret, You Are Danish and Your Dog’s Not Very Well’ is an ACTUAL SONG and was written by Mr Nick Riddle (‘The Cheeky Chappie from Chippenham’).
Footnotes
1 Even though it has neither, technically.
2 So, you see, it was not all bad.
3 Mother was concerned about Myrtle’s education, too, for it seemed to have been confined to piano playing and deportment. She kept asking anxiously whether Myrtle would not like to study for some Career or Profession, for, as she said, ‘This is the Nineteenth Century, Myrtle, dear, and many avenues of life which were once purely the preserve of men are now wide open to members of the fairer sex.’ Had not Mother’s dear friend, Miss Marian Evans, lately been appointed editor of the Westminster Review? But Myrtle insisted that a lady does not seek anything so common as Paid Employment, and continued playing her horrible piano, and embroidering improving samplers. However, she did agree to learn a little French, for, as she said, ‘then I may write my diary in French, and if A Certain Person is ever tempted to steal bits of it again, he will be most aggrieved to find he cannot read it!’
4 Ever since that day in May when our house had miraculously been transported into the skies above the capital, hopeful journalists and newspaper proprietors had been pestering Mother, no doubt sensing some mystery about her. Myrtle lived in fear that they would find out the truth. ‘I shall never be received in society if it becomes known that my mother is four-and-a-half-thousand-million years old!’ she told me once.
5 Or was it up?
6 Huzzah!
7 All First Class carriages on the Asteroid Belt and Minor Planets Railway are fitted with gravity generators, though passengers who travel second class spend a great deal of the journey bobbing about on the ceiling with their luggage.
8 This is a Clever Literary Reference to the poem by KEATS. I am not entirely ignorant, whatever Myrtle says.
9 Travellers among our extraterrestrial possessions have frequent cause to be grateful to Crevice�
�s Almanac. After all, at any one time it might be three in the afternoon of the first of April on Mars, six in the morning on the third on Earth and twenty-five o’clock on the forty-fifth of Thribuary on Io. Professor Crevice’s master-work provides useful tables for calculating what date and time it is, wherever you are in the Solar Realm.
10 Which was odd, for you may remember that when I was at Modesty Station I was quite surprised to see an advertisement which connected his name with hats. But many odd things occurred at Starcross, as you shall shortly see.
11 Or whichever Greek Goddess it is who is supposed to have emerged from the sea, I can never remember which is which.
12 Art had assured me that it was not really a flirtation, and that Jack was only making himself agreeable to that beautiful young person in the course of his duties as a secret agent of the British Crown. But there are duties and duties, and I still feel that Jack enjoyed that particular duty overmuch.
13 Back in 1776 a gang of American gents who were too stingy to pay their taxes decided to break free of old England, and declared the thirteen colonies independent, calling them ‘The United States’. I believe they held a tea party to celebrate. King George promptly dispatched Lord Cornwallis with a squadron of aether-ships to teach them some manners, and that was the end of the matter. But from time to time in the years since there have been instances of odd, enthusiastic chaps trying to revive the designs of those old revolutionaries. Wild Will Melville was one of them. His aether-ship caused quite a panic when it first took flight in 1801, preying upon British shipping on the Earth–Mars run — A.M.
14 If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy’s Own Journal, Blackwood’s Magazine, etc., she would have known that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerned with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it. This great work, which they call the World Cosy, will, if ever it is completed, be the largest piece of knitting anywhere in Known Space. Progress upon it has been troublesome and slow, however, for until the arrival of British trading ships in 1829 the only yarn the poor Threls had to work with was some skimpy stuff which they spun from the fleece of the hairy space monkfish, shoals of which cruise past their asteroid each spring and sometimes leave clumps of their scraggy wool snagged upon the branches of its briar forests. Indeed, after nearly sixty centuries of steady knitting, the World Cosy still covers less than an eighth of Threlfall’s surface!
Naturally, the Threls were awed and delighted by the varieties of woollen stuff our aethernauts brought with them, and our Government purchased the mining rights to the entire asteroid in exchange for a few shiploads of old socks and half-unravelled jerseys. These rights were then leased to a French concern, the Grande Compagnie pour l’Extraction des Minerales Extra-Mondiale. It seems to me that this was a MISTAKE. The Grande Compagnie must have been a mere front for the French Secret Service all along, and those Frenchies had undoubtedly been tempting the peaceable Threls with promises of yards and yards of wool, and had turned them, not into miners, but into soldiers! — A.M.
15 A Threllish folk hero.
16 Threllish prophets speak darkly of a time to come called the Moth Storm, or Great Nibbling, when they fear a cloud of gigantic interstellar clothes moths will descend upon Threlfall and undo in a few instants the work of all those generations — A.M.
17 Of course, what we called the gravity generator at Larklight was not just a gravity generator. It was a Shaper machine, capable of transferring Larklight clear across the Universe to bring Mother to the early Solar System, and of re-shaping with fans and rays of gravitational force the drifting clouds of gas and matter she found when she got there.
18 I wondered at the time how Jack and Nipper had failed to recognise their old oppressor, but they told me later that they had very few dealings in person with Sir Launcelot during their time at the RXS, and so much had happened since that neither of them had a clear memory of him, and so his black whiskers and tinted spectacles were quite a sufficient disguise.
19 I have often wondered why Myrtle was not affected by the siren-song of the hat in our sitting-room closet. I heard it, as you have seen, and as for Mother her age-old brain is so mighty that it could not be easily influenced by such a brute. But Myrtle has barely any brain at all, and I should have thought a hypnotic hat would have found her easy prey. The only explanation I can find is that she is so concerned with appearances that, even when fast asleep, she finds the notion of donning gentleman’s headgear completely unthinkable.
20 The Moobs seemed to have some difficulty controlling poor Nipper’s limbs, either because he has so many, or because the thickness of his shell made it harder for the Moob to gain control of his thoughts.
21 Myrtle is wrong, as usual. The alchemist of the aether-ship HMS Minerva was found out be a lady in disguise, and there was a person named Miss Dunkery, who, in the last age, passed all the Royal College’s exams with flying colours and became ship’s alchemist upon a trading vessel; but since she wore men’s clothing and smoked cigars she does not perhaps count as a true lady — A.M.
22 Cardigan (n): a curious knitted garment with buttons up the front, named after Lord Cardigan, who had one made to keep him warm when he went on aether-fishing expeditions off Vesta — A.M.
23 Published by Messrs Gargany, Nisbit and Stringg of Clerkenwell Road.
24 This is why the better sort of countries do not employ mercenaries: they change sides in an instant if you offer them more gold. Or, indeed, wool.
25 By which I mean, of course, even more blank and glassy than usual.
26 The book was How to Write Love Letters: A Guide for the Perplexed, by A Lady, which seems an odd volume for a pirate and spy to keep aboard his ship. No doubt Jack had been using it to prop up a wobbly table.
27 I remember being very troubled about breaking this same bad news during our earlier adventures, when I believed that Myrtle had been eaten up by the white spiders. Some time when I am at leisure I must work out a suitable form of words and write it down and keep it always in the pocket of my Norfolk jacket, so that at least I shall have one less worry the next time we are in mortal peril. I imagine something along these lines might do the trick: Dearest Mother/Father (delete where applicable); I am most awfully sorry to have to tell you that Myrtle has been eaten/blown up/squashed/lost in the inky blacknesses of the interplanetary void/other. But do not grieve, for she did not suffer/deserved it/has gone to a Better Place, etc., etc.
28 Like a blunderbuss but much, much LOUDER.
29 It seems that she had found a way to keep Starcross hovering in the Fourth Dimension, so that while less than a day had passed in the world outside, more than a week had gone by in Starcross, giving her plenty of time to tinker.
30 Oh, the cheek of it! Naturally, I reprint this ugly slur against our island race only so that you can see what a very nasty piece of work Delphine was.
31 Poor Myrtle could do nothing else for fear that Delphine would harm Jack, and she had spent so long with the Moob upon her head that she looked quite pale when she arrived at Starcross. As for the Moob, it had grown somewhat Prim, and had taken to flinching whenever the Threls used colourful language.
32 I discovered later that Messrs Gargany and Stringg also publish a wall chart called 101 Terms of Abuse Which May Properly Be Hurled at Young Ladies. How I wish that I had had a copy about me!
33 You would imagine that Myrtle would think it unladylike to be forever kicking, punching and boxing the ears of a mere innocent child, e.g. me. But she says that being beastly to one’s younger brother is a genteel sport in which ladies are quite able to participate, like grouse-shooting, or riding to hounds.
Praise for the series:
‘Remarkable … Out of this world.’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘I hope this series never ends.’
LITERARY REVI
EW
‘The pleasure is in the detail – the breadth of invention is staggering – and the fluent writing.’
TELEGRAPH
‘Reeve’s mechanical fantasy world is every bit as enthralling as in his Mortal Engines, and Wyatt’s illustrations add to the fascination.’
INDEPENDENT
‘Satisfying, enjoyable and engaging. Mr Reeve has done it again.’
MR PHILIP ARDAGH, GUARDIAN
‘Larklight is a glorious space adventure set in 1851. Forget what history tells you, and enjoy this laugh-out-loud, old-style page-turner which is coupled with David Wyatt’s fantastic illustrations.’
FUNDAY TIMES
‘It’s hard to pin down Philip Reeve’s prodigious imagination in just a few words. It’s Monty Python meets Dan Dare meets Diary of a Nobody, and it rattles along, cheekily tangling historical figures in Reeve’s brilliant fictional web.’
SUNDAY HERALD
‘It keeps you gripped all the way through.’
SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘Inspired space adventure.’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Elegantly constructed, a frothy confection of fanciful imagery and fantastical footnotes.’
GUARDIAN
‘Larklight is completely engrossing, miss-your-tube-station excellent. The first in a new series by the writer of the popular Mortal Engines quartet, it is a brilliantly witty quest set in outer space that will get children turning pages at the speed of light.’
TELEGRAPH
‘Any fan of fantasy or science fiction will love it.’
MR CHARLIE HIGSON, MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘Truly original.’
PUBLISHING NEWS
‘The rollicking, devil-may-care attitude of the book is an absolute delight. This book will provide enjoyment for all ages, and I long for more from Reeve’s pen.’
LITERARY REVIEW