Our Voyage to the Tin Moon, as Told by Art Mumby, with None of the Slushy Bits.
Oh, honestly! Enough is enough, don’t you think? It is all very well to let Myrtle lend a hand in the recounting of our adventures, but who wants to read about her and Jack spooning, when the whole Empire was riven by war and the fate of entire worlds hung in the balance? Nobody, that’s who, so I have resolved to put a stop to her horrid whimsy and tell you what really happened.
Of course, sailing across those war-torn stretches of the aether was not at all the uneventful pleasure trip that Myrtle has made out. We were all busy repairing the ship and making plans for what to do when we reached Mercury. And Father was telling Charity about her father’s sad condition and assuring her that if we could just find a way to dispose of that nasty Mothmaker, he was certain that rest and loving kindness could restore Rev. Cruet to his former self. Meanwhile, the ship rolled and bobbed and lurched about so violently that Charity turned quite green, and Nipper was actually space-sick. Myrtle does not mention that, you’ll notice! The truth is, she is not nearly so good an alchemist as she likes to pretend, and it was a wonder we did not fall off the Golden Roads entirely, or crash straight through the heart of an asteroid.
Naturally, when Jack gave the helm to Mr Munkulus and vanished into the stern cabin, we assumed he had gone to tell Myrtle off for the skittish way she had the engines behaving. And when he spent so long in there we imagined he was keeping an eye on her to make sure she did not blow us all up. So it came as something of a shock when they emerged together, hand in hand, looking shy and foolish. Myrtle’s spectacles had steamed up, and there were tears shining like pearls in their hair.
‘Father, Art,’ she said, taking Jack’s hand, ‘Jack and I are engaged to be married.’
I believe she was expecting Father to object on the grounds that they were both far too young and that Jack was a sworn enemy of Britain. But his rough handling of Dr Blears had put him in an even sunnier mood than usual, and he just cried, ‘A capital notion! Jack is just what you need, my girl. If only poor Shipton were here, he could perform the service right away!’
‘Oh Heavens!’ exclaimed Myrtle, looking most alarmed, for a wedding in space aboard a speeding aether-ship was not what she had in mind at all. ‘We are prepared to wait, aren’t we, Jack my dearest? I had thought of having the ceremony perhaps three or four years from now, in Port George Cathedral on the Moon. A simple little service, with just a few hundred well-connected guests. I shall need bridesmaids, of course … ’
Father hugged her and shook Jack’s hand. ‘I shall look forward to the happy day,’ he said. ‘But what a pity it would be if your mother could not be there. So I suggest that before we make any detailed plans, we should concentrate all our efforts upon reaching this Tin Moon and getting inside of it. For whatever it is that Emily thought so important must be inside. It is well known that the Tin Moon’s exterior is barren and featureless: a lifeless metal plain roasted by the merciless heat of the Sun.’
‘Not altogether lifeless, Mr M.,’ Grindle put in. ‘It is one of the hunting grounds of the Twooks: the dreaded Sun Dogs, which ate up so many of Captain Cook’s men and many other bold aethernauts since.’
‘What do they look like?’ I asked.
‘Why, no one knows,’ declared Grindle in a ghoulish tone. ‘For everyone who’s met one has been eaten up by it, and their friends caught only glimpses of the creatures as they scarpered. Some say they have the heads of lions, the bodies of snakes and the tails of shrimps; others, that they’re more like jellyfish. Most likely, they look like nothing we’ve ever seen before.’
‘Well, let us hope we never do see them,’ said Myrtle fervently. ‘They sound most unsavoury! Besides, it would not be at all genteel to be eaten up. How would it look in the Obituary column of The Times?’
‘We shall be ready for ’em, whatever they look like,’ said Jack, seemingly glad that the talk had veered away from love and marriage and towards a subject which he knew more of, e.g. fearless battles against dreadful foes. ‘Grindle, Munkulus, break out the weapons—pistols and cutlasses for all, and be sure the cutlasses are good and sharp and the pistols primed and loaded.’
And so Myrtle, with many a fond glance at Jack, went back to her post by the alembic, and the rest of the voyage passed in the business of checking and preparing the Sophronia’s little arsenal of weapons, and sneaking peeks at ourselves in the cabin looking-glass, and being astonished at how splendid we looked, bedecked with swords and shooting instruments. And also, I believe, we ate and slept, and all in all it seemed not so very long before the ship began to slow, and Myrtle emerged again to announce in tones of unutterable smugness that we were entering the Mercurial aether.
Indeed, we could have guessed where she had brought us to even without her announcement, for as the golden glow of alchemical particles faded from without the portholes it was replaced by another glow, equally intense and also golden, though of a redder hue; and through the Sophronia’s thick, space-weathered planking we felt a summery warmth come creeping, quite different from the usual chill of space. We had arrived in the gardens of the almighty Sun!
You would expect them to seethe with life, those regions of the aether where the great Sun rolls. I had imagined they would be like tropic seas, teeming with abundant shoals of many-coloured fish and groves of song flowers. But when Charity, Father and myself scrambled out on to the star deck, our eyes shielded by smoked-glass goggles, we looked about us at a sky almost deserted. Half of Heaven was taken up with the immense furnace of the Sun, a sphere of blazing coals and towering fires so vast that it made Jupiter seem no bigger than a pea. It was a thousand thousand miles away, but still space was filled with the roar and rumble and crackle of its burning. No wonder we saw no fish, no flowers! Few are the forms of life which can bear for long the gaze of that great golden eye!
‘Look!’ called Charity. ‘There is Mercury … ’
And there was Mercury, a dusty, reddish sphere which swings around its brief orbit with the same scorched face turned always to the Sun. Dimly, in the shadow line between the bright and dark sides of the planet, I made out the forms of crumbled towers and the angles of walls half buried in baked sand: the ruins of one of the cities left behind by the great lost race of the Mercurians. And then, beyond the planet’s curve, something caught the light and seemed to flare up, dazzling, like the burnished helm of some knight of olden times. It was the Tin Moon, rising behind the shoulder of its mother-world, and as it rose, so the Sophronia flew towards it, stirring the hot aether with the steady flap of her wings.
It is hard to explain the Tin Moon in words alone. It is a featureless sphere of metal, and that sounds somewhat dull. But when you see it hanging there in the orbit of that long-dead world, its surface rippling with the reflections of the nearby Sun, it is enough to make the breath catch in your throat. ‘What is it?’ you ask yourself. ‘Who put it there? What is its purpose?’ And you know that for a hundred years explorers have been asking those questions.
I could only hope, as we soared towards it, that we might shortly be provided with an answer!
Jack climbed out on to the star deck then, with Grindle, Nipper and the twins. It was Jack’s intention that Myrtle and Mr Munkulus should stay aboard the Sophronia and keep her in orbit about the Tin Moon while we explored its surface and sought for some clue as to why Mother had sent us there. Nipper had hooked a great many lanterns over his claws and went about handing them out to us, for we were to land upon the moon’s dark side.
We were close enough by then to feel its mild gravity tugging at us. The dim band of twilight between its day and night sides filled the sky to starboard now, and we could see that its dully shining surface was not really featureless at all, but was pock-marked with the imprints of meteors and minor comets. I believe we all felt the same doubt creep into our minds then, though none of us spoke it …
How could we hope to find anything in that dimpled metal wilderness?
But while we all stood staring at it and wondering, we had quite failed to notice that the empty stretches of aether behind us were suddenly empty no more.
Charity was the first to sense a movement. She turned to look. I saw her eyes widen in surprise and heard her say, ‘Is that a Sun Dog, do you think? Good Gracious, I had no idea they would be quite so large … ’
And then it struck us. The silly creature must have sensed the ripples which the Sophronia had made when she first entered the Mercurial aether, and had tracked us ever since. But in its brutish ignorance it seemed to think that the ship was a living creature—and I suppose that with her aether-wings flapping like fins she did somewhat resemble a gigantic icthyomorph. At any rate, the Sun Dog came swooping down upon her, driving itself forward with great lashing movements of its vile transparent tail, and before we could do anything about it there was an almighty wrenching and a crashing of torn timbers, and those of us who stood ready on the star deck, waiting to go ashore, found ourselves thrown unceremoniously into space instead!31
‘Is that a Sun Dog, do you think? Good Gracious, I had no idea they would be quite so large … ’
Well, it was not the first time I had been flung into space, and I don’t suppose that it shall be the last, so I did not worry overmuch at first. But then, as I turned a slow somersault and was able to look back whence I had come, I beheld a Very Dreadful Thing.
The poor Sophronia, which had borne us all so faithfully across so many leagues of space, had been torn quite in half! Weakened as she was by her recent hurtling to and fro about the aether, her aged timbers had not been able to withstand the dreadful impact of the Sun Dog. A spreading cloud of splinters and smashed timber was all that remained of her mid-section. A torn-off aether-wing flapped feebly as it whirled away into the dark. Mr Munkulus, looking most surprised, still clung to the dismounted wheel. The bows were caught in the jaws of the wretched Sun Dog, which was worrying and savaging them like a terrier with a rat. The stern section, responding to the gentle pull of the Tin Moon’s gravity, was tumbling down to the surface. Alchemical fire billowed in bluish veils from the ruptured ducts and pipework of the wedding chamber, and Myrtle was scrambling desperately across the wreckage, trying to escape the flames!
‘Au secours!’ she wailed.32
The Sun Dog saw her too. It tossed aside the splintery remnant of the bows and flicked its tail, speeding towards the drifting stern. I saw Myrtle snatch up a floating jar of alchemical potion and heave it at the oncoming monster’s face, and saw the creature flinch aside as the contents burst upon its nasty nose in a flare of green vapours. But it was not defeated; it merely swerved around the stern section and came at Myrtle from the other direction, and this time she had no weapons to hand, nor any way to escape or defend herself …
So I realised, with a horrible sinking feeling, that I was going to have to defend her.
‘Raaargh!’ I shouted (or something very similar—trying to sound fierce, you see). The Sun Dog, which I believe had no more brains than Myrtle herself, was distracted by the sound. It twitched its glassy head in my direction and flexed various barbels and feelers. ‘Boo!’ I told it. ‘If you want to eat something, shrimp, come and eat me!’
Well, I was wrong to say it had no brain, for it appeared to understand that perfectly. What’s more, as it whooshed at me, I saw its brain quite clearly, hanging in its transparent head like a pickled walnut trapped in a block of ice.
Luckily, that sight gave me an idea of how I might see off this nuisance. Kicking myself frantically out of its path, I drew my cutlass and drove it with all my might through the taut jelly of the Sun Dog’s skull and clean through the middle of its brain.
Screeching in pain and fury, the creature lashed violently about and flung itself back towards the light of the Sophronia’s blazing stern section. ‘Myrtle, jump!’ I shouted, and she did and came swimming gracelessly through the aether. In another instant the Sun Dog had crashed headlong into the wrecked wedding chamber, to be consumed in a colossal blast of multi-coloured fire. For a moment I saw all my companions clearly, scattered across a mile of open space. In the light of that conflagration, I could read shock and distress upon the faces of those nearest to me and guessed that mine must wear a similar expression.33 Then the light died, and in the dark that followed we all fell gently, gently towards the surface of that strange satellite.
We had survived the onslaught of the Sun Dog. I heard Jack calling out the names of the others as we fell, and there was none that did not answer. But what good had our survival done us? For we were shipwrecked and quite alone, marooned without hope of rescue upon the barren surface of the Tin Moon!
