Starcross (4 page)

‘You do not know which?’

‘I do not know
everything
, Art, dear. I was living in the seas of Georgium Sidus at the time it happened. How you would laugh if you could see me as I was then, all gills and fins! It was only several millennia later, when I returned to Larklight, that I noticed the new asteroid, and the crater on Mars which told me whence it came. Look, I believe you can see that crater still!’

And she showed me a sort of dimple on the ruddy cheek of Mars, a gentle depression perhaps a thousand miles across, and quite impossible to connect with the immense catastrophe of which she’d spoken.

I took her hand, and together we went for another turn about the star deck, nodding to our fellow passengers, Mother calling out cheerfully in Ionian to the startled sailors, who had never met an Earth lady who could master their complicated language before. And it felt very strange and wonderful to have a mother such as she.

The
Euphrosyne
docked at Modesty, one of the larger and more settled of the asteroids. In some parts of the belt thousands upon thousands of miles separate those drifting worldlets, but in others they clump quite close together, and
the twin asteroids, Modesty and Decorum, lie at the centre of just such a clump.

It would be neither economical nor prudent for aetherships to fly to all those different little worlds, since some are very little indeed, and in the gulfs betwixt them all sorts of rock and grit and astral debris hangs, posing a danger to shipping. However, good old British know-how
⁶
has found a way around this difficulty. The Asteroid Belt and Minor Planets Rail Traction Company Ltd has constructed a splendid system of bridges and viaducts which link more than a hundred asteroids, with new termini being added to the system almost yearly. Some of these bridges span distances of well over a thousand miles, and make the beholder feel especially proud to be British.

It was upon this fine railway that we were to complete our journey to Starcross. We disembarked at the Modesty & Decorum Aether Harbour, bidding farewell to our fellow passengers, and set out across the busy docks to the ringing steel and crystal vaults of Modesty Station. Above the entrance a massive advertisement hoarding was being erected, bearing a picture of a top hat and the words,
TITFER’S TOP-NOTCH TOPPERS – NONE TALLER, NONE BLACKER
. I had not heard of such a make, and I asked Mother if the Titfer responsible was
our
Mr Titfer, at whose hotel we were to stay, but I could not make my question heard above the hubbub of the station.

‘
The train on platform 116b is the three o’clock to Chalcedony
,’ boomed a voice which sounded like that of God from fluted speakers on the roof.
‘Calling at Vesta, New Rutland, Ivanhoe, Cribbage and Thring.’
The enticing smells of roasted chestnuts and fresh sprune drifted from vendors’ booths, station staff blew whistles and fluttered multi-coloured flags, and a tricephalid muffin man stalked past with a tray of his mouth-watering wares balanced on each of his heads.

And through it all, with one eye on her
Bradshaw’s Timetable
and the other on the ever-changing destinations which flickered upon the clattering mahogany departure boards, Mother led us unerringly to platform 237b, where waited a train of dark windowless freight cars with a few passenger carriages attached at the end, their doors painted with a reassuringly sober coat-of-arms:
GRAND HOTEL STARCROSS
.

We went aboard and Mother paid our Ionian porters, who gave our luggage into the care of the train’s attendant: a gleaming clockwork automaton, one of the latest models from Sir Waverley Rain’s factory and close cousin to the ones he had given us to help at Larklight. It seemed we were the only passengers that afternoon, for all the compartments were empty. We chose the one we liked the best and arranged ourselves on its plush, well-padded seats, where we accepted the cups of tea which the auto-waiter served us, and prepared to enjoy the ride. It is almost ten thousand miles from Modesty to Starcross, but in the near frictionless aether the trains are able to reach enormous speeds, and I gathered that our journey would take but a few hours.

I settled myself next the window, looking forward to
spectacular views of such strange worlds as Vestibule, which is hollow and inhabited by people who live upside down upon its inner surface, and Abnegation, which was woven out of brown string by Presbyterians.

But as the train started up and we began to pull out of the arched maw of the station, opening up thrilling views across the shunting yards towards the aether harbour, I saw something which startled me, and was to cast a little cloud over our trip. Moored at a launching tower there, among a gaggle of more ordinary ships, hung one that I should have known anywhere. That barnacled wooden hull and crooked bowsprit, those battered exhaust-trumpets and much-darned aether-wings. ‘Why,’ I blurted out, ‘’tis the
Sophronia
!’

I regretted it at once, of course. Myrtle, who had been leafing happily through a journal called
The Young Lady’s Orbital Miscellany
, sprang to my side at the mention of Jack Havock’s ship and stared out through the thick crystal of the window, quivering like a gun dog.

‘Then he is
not
facing peril in some far-off corner of the sky,’ she said, gazing out at the
Sophronia
until a passing train hid her from our view. ‘He is here on Modesty, in the heart of British Space, and yet
still
he has not answered my letters.’

Moored at a launching tower there, among a gaggle of more ordinary ships, hung one that I should have known anywhere.

She slumped into her seat again, like a marionette with all its
strings cut. Honestly, I thought she was about to blub. I hope that
I
shall never form a Sentimental Attachment with anyone, for it seems to lead to nothing but tantrums and melancholia.

‘Poor Myrtle,’ said Mother, gently smoothing her hair. ‘Perhaps we should ask the auto-porter if it is possible to turn the train back. We might find Jack aboard his ship, and –’

‘No,’ said Myrtle, with a deeply spiritual sigh. ‘I would not think of it! It is clear that he does not wish to see me. I was his plaything for an idle hour, but now that he is out doing manly deeds in the aether again he has thought better of all those tender words which passed between us at Larklight.’ A tear sneaked out from behind her spectacles and dropped into her tea,
⁷
and she lowered her head on to a handy hatbox, and remained there, like Isabella with her Pot of Basil,
⁸
for the next two thousand miles.

I must confess that I felt hurt by Jack’s behaviour, too. I
had thought him a friend, and it seemed unamiable of him to act so aloof. If only he had written and told us the
Sophronia
was putting in at Modesty, I thought, we might have broken the journey there and looked him up! And I felt suddenly a strong desire to see again his crew, Mr Munkulus and Mr Grindle, brave blue Ssilissa, the Tentacle Twins and my good, true crab friend, Nipper!

However, time is a great healer, and after a minute or two I emerged from that fog of nostalgia, and sat with my nose pressed to the window and my hands cupped around my face to blot out the reflections of the carriage gas lamps and the mournful figure of my sister. Outside, whole worlds flicked past us in the wink of an eye: verdant asteroids like hanging baskets, covered in tulip fields or golden crops of wheat; manufacturing worldlets bristling with chimneys, where furnaces glowed through a pother of factory smoke. Sometimes our train plunged us through the interior of a tiny, hollowed-out world; sometimes it ran on for miles along singing silver trackways in the empty aether, and once, another train went by, roaring upside down along the underside of the same track, like our reflection. What could be more fascinating than to be whisked through the open aether aboard a speeding railway train?

Well, quite a few things, actually. Train travel in space is all very well while one is passing through a great asteroidal hub like the Modesty and Decorum clump, where worlds cluster thick and railway lines run alongside one’s own, and entwine with each other like strands of spaghetti. But after a few hours we were out in the nether reaches, where the only things to see were mined-out rocks, dead, sere and drab, and even those were few and far between.

Somewhere nearby, back in 1804, Admiral Nelson had fought a famous battle against the aether-ships of some rebel Americans, and I looked out hopefully for the drifting wreckage of their flagship, the USSS
Liberty
, which had never been found. Naturally, I did not see anything nearly so romantic. Now and again I glimpsed a shoal of aetheric icthyomorphs, but they were small and far away, all the bigger forms having been hunted to extinction, or scared off by the trains. (The days when daring railway passengers used to roll down their carriage windows and take pot-shots at passing shoals of giant space jellyfish and aetheric manatee are long gone, worse luck!)

Mother, who has the knack of sleeping anywhere, was soon napping. Even Myrtle fell into a snooze, in which she sometimes murmured Jack Havock’s name in a martyred
fashion. But I could not sleep, and I sat watching my own reflection in the trembling crystal of the window, and feeling my posterior become more and more benumbed.