Wherein Charity and I Go Fishing and Make a Most Surprising Catch.
It is strange to look back with the benefit of hindsight and recall how happy I was that afternoon. I stood with Charity upon the Sophronia’s star deck, casting our lines out into the dark in hope of catching some of the great icthyomorphs which came scooting past us, and thought that truly this was the life for a British boy. Even the sight of that ominous cloud smeared across the northern sky could not dampen my spirits. Yet how soggy they would have been had I known that within that cloud my own dear mother had just been slain and that her murderer was plotting the overthrow of us all!
‘Got one!’ cried Charity at last, as her groaning rod bent almost double. I clipped my own rod into a brass contraption which had been screwed to the star-deck handrail for the purpose and ran to help her. Luckily we had both put on magnetic space galoshes, which clung like limpets to the iron angling-plates in the deck, for else we should certainly have been hauled clean off the ship.
Charity had caught an absolute whopper! I could see the starlight slinking along its scaly flanks as it thrashed to and fro in the dark off the larboard beam: an ugly-looking brute, whose wide mouth looked quite capable of swallowing us both! We wrestled with it for a few moments, attempting to reel it in, but it was too strong for us. Had the rod not been made of best Venusian bamboo it should certainly have snapped in half. When the angling-plate which Charity was stood on started to be wrenched free of the Sophronia’s planking by the force of the fish’s struggles I decided that, just this once, safety and speed were more important than good sportsmanship, and I drew a pocket blunderbuss from my fishing bag and shot the blighter dead.
Even then it proved no easy feat to drag the huge carcass alongside, but we called below for help and within a few moments were joined by Nipper and Grindle, who helped us heave it on to the star deck and lash it down with ropes. Grindle had his kitchen cleaver stuck through his cummerbund and set about butchering the fish there and then so that we could have it safely stored before the Sophronia moved off. Its severed head and still-twitching tail went tumbling away into the void, where they were set upon by shoals of smaller icthyomorphs. But as Grindle brought his cleaver down upon the dead fish’s belly, a strange cry seemed to issue from within it. Grindle jumped back, much alarmed, as from the cut that he had made a human hand extended. It formed itself into a fist, which shook violently at us.
‘I say!’ complained a muffled voice. ‘Watch what you’re doing! You nearly had my eye out!’
Nipper quickly used his pincers to widen the cut, and in another moment a strange, slime-dripping figure emerged and stood upright, attempting to brush bits of fish innards from a naval officer’s hat.
‘Good Lord!’ it said. ‘Master Mumby? Heavens, but I’m glad to see you. I don’t mind telling you it was jolly stuffy inside there!’
‘Captain Moonfield!’ I cried, overjoyed at this happy turn of events.
And indeed, it was he. Charity and I led him down inside and helped him to change out of his sodden uniform, while Grindle and Nipper went on butchering the fish. In the main cabin, under the wary gaze of Jack Havock, the good captain told us how he had been hurled from the bridge of HMS Actaeon by the moth-riders’ bombs, and had plummeted through space until he was swallowed like a minnow by that passing Georgian gulper. (So you see how the Pudding Worm which had caused so much trouble at Larklight turned out quite providential in the end, for if its offspring hadn’t eaten all the Sophronia’s provisions we should never have thought to go fishing, and poor Captain M. should have been doomed to circle Georgium Sidus in an icthyomorphous belly till he died.)
‘And what of the Actaeon?’ he asked worriedly, as he struggled into a spare pair of Mr Munkulus’s trousers.
‘She is destroyed,’ said Jack. ‘We saw her wreck in orbit as we arrived.’
‘Great Scott! And my men?’
‘Captives, I think,’ I said. ‘The moth-riders herded them up and carried them away. They have my mother and father too. And the Burtons and Doctor Blears. Oh, and Myrtle.’
Captain Moonfield shook his head. ‘This is a dark day. What do you think their aim is, these moth-rider johnnies?’
‘I know what mine would be were I as strong and as clever as them,’ said Jack. ‘And that would be to smash your empire utterly and scour it from the Heavens.’
‘Righto,’ said Captain Moonfield. ‘I detect, young Havock, that you’re still feeling a tad peeved about that Changeling Tree business?’
Jack did not answer, but swam himself to a porthole and put his telescope to his eye again.
‘You see,’ the captain went on, ‘I was rather hoping that you might carry me back to civilised space, so I can raise the alarm about these lepidopterous bounders.’
‘Oh, I’ll do that,’ Jack said, as he looked out into the unending night. ‘But I’ll ask a reward for my services. Enough of the antidote to bring my family and the rest of the Venus colony back to human form. Do you think the British Government will think that a fair price for my saving their empire once again?’
Captain Moonfield said, ‘If it were down to me, you know, you’d have your antidote straightway, without needing to perform any service in return. You’re a brave lad, Jack Havock, and we should do whatever we can to put right the wrongs we’ve done you. That’s what I shall tell my superiors.’
‘That sounds fair enough, Jack, doesn’t it?’ I asked.
But Jack did not seem to be listening. He lowered the telescope slightly, gulped and put it back to his eye. An instant later he was turning from the window, kicking his way up to the steering platform and snatching his speaking trumpet from its hook. ‘All hands!’ he bellowed. ‘Nipper, get that hatchway closed! Ssil, stoke up the alembic!’
‘But half the fish is still outside, Jack,’ Nipper protested, as he reluctantly bolted the star-deck hatch.
‘Then it shall stay there!’ Jack vowed, taking the Sophronia’s wheel in both hands and spinning it so that the old ship turned her bows towards the far-off Sun. ‘We’ll wait no longer here. That cloud is coming fast, and I can see now what it is made of.’
‘And what is that?’ asked Captain Moonfield, clapping hold of a huge chunk of Georgian gulper that hung amidships and carrying it towards the galley.
Jack Havock shook his head, as if he still could not quite credit what his spyglass had shown him. ‘Moths,’ he said grimly. ‘It is a million million God-Almighty moths.’
And as he spoke, the whole ship shook. Charity shrieked, tipped head-over-heels, and I too was caught all unawares and flung against a bulkhead. A greenish light flared through the portholes. I clawed my way to one and saw a great shape go swooping past us, vast wings black as a scrap-book silhouette against the ice blue of Georgium Sidus. ‘The moths!’ I shouted. ‘They are upon us!’
‘Oh Lord!’ cried Charity.
‘Ssil! Full ahead!’ bellowed Jack.
And the alembic in Ssil’s wedding chamber swelled with a song I’d never heard, and all the Sophronia’s aged planking groaned and creaked and crooned as Mother’s magic swept the ship away from that moth-haunted planet and threaded her like a needle through the sighing, silken, shimmering stuff of Alchemical Space.
‘That cloud is coming fast, and I can see now what it is made of.’
