The ethership stood on the launch platform at Greenwich, ready to blast off. The cabin set atop the massive rocket appeared tiny when viewed from the ground; the ladder by which the intrepid voyagers would reach it seemed exceedingly fragile.
Thomas Digges, the captain of the vessel’s five-man crew, stood on the street at the edge of the platform in company with its principal architect, John Dee, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Foxe. Thomas was not looking up but looking down at the cobblestones. They had been scoured and swept in the early hours; he had never seen a city thoroughfare less likely to offend his boots.
“Your father would be immensely proud, had he lived to see this day,” Dee said to the younger man. “This—more than the telescope, the laws of planetary motion, or even the theory of affinity—is the ultimate fruition of his work.”
“He was but one half of a great alliance,” Thomas said, meeting his mentor’s eyes. “Had you not introduced him to Roger Bacon’s works, he might not have begun to toy with the telescope or applied himself to the munitions of war that laid the groundwork for the ethership. Your mathematical expertise was every bit as important as his in proving and improving the Copernican system, and without your fluctual algebra he would never have been able to develop the theory of affinity.”
“You should not forget the inspiration of the Almighty, my son,” Foxe put in, “nor the abundant financial support provided by our glorious queen.”
“No, indeed,” Thomas agreed, willingly. The queen had certainly been generous with her own funds as well as the nation’s, and her generosity had set an example that many of her courtiers had been anxious to emulate, competing among themselves to sponsor the New Learning. “Will the queen be here to witness the launch of her namesake?”
“Her carriage is en route as we speak,” Foxe assured him. “She would not miss it for the world. It means a great deal to her that England should be the first nation to send ambassadors to the moon.”
“We must beware of expecting too much of the expedition,” Dee observed, gravely. “The distance the ship will contrive to travel is entirely dependent on the conditions the crew will discover once they are beyond the upper limit of the air. We do not know whether ether is respirable—and if it is not, the crew will be forced to make a swift return to Earth. Preparations for a journey to the moon would then acquire a new dimension of complexity, more challenging in its way than the design of the ethership’s fuel-system.”
“That is a matter of God’s providence,” Foxe judged. “If the ether is breathable, then humankind clearly has God’s permission to travel between the worlds—but if it is not, the heavens are evidently out of bounds.”
Thomas frowned slightly, but said nothing. Foxe was a powerful influence in the court—powerful enough to have added a man of his own, John Field, to the “crew” of the Queen Jane. In reality, Thomas and Francis Drake were the only ones required—or able—to man the vessel’s controls. Edward de Vere and Walter Raleigh had petitioned the queen to be added to the company in the hope of impressing her with their boldness in quest of adventure. De Vere had a reputation as a playwright and Raleigh as a poet, but neither had any significant skill in mathematics, which put them at a definite disadvantage in a court where the greater part of everyday conversation was devoted to the progress of science. Foxe’s man, John Field, was no courtier—he was fervent enough in his Puritanism to make no secret of his contempt for the affectations of court life—but he was a man of refined conscience who would be able to report to the Archbishop on the potential theological consequences of any discoveries the expeditionaries might make.
Thomas would rather not have had Field aboard the ethership—but he would rather not have had de Vere and Raleigh aboard either, although Raleigh was always an amiable companion. Indeed, he would have been glad to go alone if he had not needed another pair of hands. Drake had an interest in winning the queen’s favor too—and had the advantage of maturity and previous accomplishment over his upstart competitors, being only three years younger than the queen—but he was a good calculator and a cool man under pressure.
“Speak of the Devil!” Thomas murmured, his voice far too slight to carry to the Archbishop’s ever-vigilant ear. Drake was emerging from the Black Bear Inn, his arms linked with those of de Vere and Raleigh; the three of them as merry as men could be who had been forbidden ale for breakfast. A fourth man, who was walking three steps behind them, was as disapproving as they were cheerful; John Field, Puritan firebrand, had a fine talent for disapproval and its display.
The three courtiers were finely clad and their beards were neatly trimmed. Drake was the tallest as well as the oldest, but de Vere—ten years Drake’s junior—was the handsomest of the three. Raleigh, two years younger than de Vere at twenty-five, was not conventionally fair of face, but he had a certain dash in his attitude that had already made an impression on the queen, if Cripplegate rumor could be trusted. In reality, de Vere was probably the more reckless of the two—he was still suffering the bad reputation of having once had an unarmed man “commit suicide by running on to his sword”—but the queen was said to prefer a man who maintained a flamboyant attitude, while behaving politely, to one whose attitude was polite while his behavior resembled a loose cannon.
“The queen will be here in a matter of minutes!” Drake announced. “I saw her carriage from the attic with the aid of one of Tom’s telescopes, advancing from Rotherhithe at the gallop. Perfect timing, as always.”
Digges bowed, as he murmured “Sir Francis, milord, Sir Walter, Mr. Field.” Although he was the captain of the ethership, three of his crewmen outranked him by birth—de Vere most extravagantly of all, having inherited the title of Earl of Oxford while still a boy. It was the three aristocrats who returned his bow most graciously, however; Field seemed to think such polite gestures akin to church vestments, and was a dedicated minimalist in their expression.
“Her majesty is doubtless anxious to see Master Dee again,” de Vere said. “While he has been busy here, the Tower has been deprived of its fireworks and its horoscopes alike.”
Dee bowed in acknowledgement, although the remark had not been intended as a compliment. Field took up a position beside the Archbishop, making a row of three Johns in opposition to the three gallants. Thomas felt uneasily suspended between the two ranks. “If her majesty is missing Master Dee,” he dared to say, “it is more likely that she feels the need of her lessons in mathematics.” In 1568, when Dee had presented the queen with a copy of his Propadeumata Aphorisitica, the queen had gladly accepted his offer to give her lessons in mathematics to help her understand it. She had been a champion of natural philosophy since she had come to the throne in 1553—even more so since she had broken free of Northumberland machinations following her husband’s assassination by Elizabethans in 1558—but her generosity had increased in proportion to her comprehension.
Foxe, who seemed even less appreciative of Thomas’s remark than de Vere, might well have made some remark about Bible studies, but he was distracted by a buzz in the crowd that had gathered along the quay. They too had caught sight of the queen’s coach—or its escort, at least.
“Batman’s here, I see,” Dee observed. Stephen Batman, chaplain to the Master of Corpus Christi, was Dee’s greatest rival as a book-collector, although his interest in the manuscripts he accumulated was more antiquarian than utilitarian.
“Who’s that boy beside him?” Thomas asked.
“That’s one of Nick Bacon’s sons,” Drake answered. “Young Francis—a prodigy, they say, likely to eclipse Master Dee himself, in time.”
“Not if the Queen Jane makes a successful ascent into the ether,” Thomas opined. “Whether it is able to go on to the moon or not, that achievement will not be eclipsed for a hundred years . . . and Master Dee is its architect.” He added the last remark lest Drake—or anyone else—thought that he was blowing his own trumpet.
“Here she comes!” Raleigh crowed, immediately joining in with the tumultuous cheering. Everyone else did likewise, in slightly less Stentorian tones—even John Field.
Queen Jane’s carriage, pulled by four black horses, rattled south-eastward along the Thames shore behind the vanguard of a company of cavalry, whose second cohort was bringing up the rear. Their scarlet coats were ablaze in the morning sun, while their polished sabers reflected random rays of dazzling light.
Foxe and Dee hurried forward to greet the monarch, while de Vere checked his doublet and hose and Raleigh reached reflexively for the ornamental hilt of the sword that he would normally have been wearing. Like his breakfast ale, it had been forbidden.
The queen was only a few months short of her fortieth birthday, but she looked radiant as well as regal. Thomas blushed at the sight of her, as he always did, and stumbled as Dee hurried him forward in order to present him to her.
“Your majesty,” the Master said. “Leonard Digges’s son shall make England proud this day.”
Queen Jane extended her hand for Thomas to kiss. “The captain will make us very proud indeed,” she said, “for there is nothing England admires more than courage—and the navigation of the heavens will require courage unparalleled.”
Thomas stammered his thanks. The cavalry had formed a protective cordon around the party, although it was more a show of discipline than anxiety; the Elizabethans were a spent force nowadays, and no agent of Spain could have gotten within five miles of Greenwich on a day like this. Drake, de Vere, and Raleigh took the opportunity to form a cordon of their own, vying for the queen’s attention with effusive flatteries. For once, Thomas felt a pang of sympathy for the awkward and hesitant Field.
“Time is pressing, lads,” he said, when they had played their parts sufficiently. “We’d best be mounting the ladder.” Without any more fuss than that he set off for the ethership, knowing that the others would fall into line behind him. He left it to them to wave to the crowd, while he contented himself with a last glance in the direction of John Dee, the greatest man of science the world had ever produced—or, at least, the man whose reputation to that effect was about to be subjected to the ultimate proof.
The first and more unexpected agony was the sound of the rocket’s ignition. Thomas had known that it would be louder than any sound he had experienced before, and had suspected that its pressure might be oppressive, but he had not anticipated the seeming fury with which it pounded his eardrums, drowning out all other sensation and thought.
Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ethership slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down. He had known that this sensation, too, would be bad, having experienced similar phenomena during the test launches. Those vessels had only ascended into the atmosphere, though, no higher than the summit of a mountain. His body had suffered no lingering ill-effects at all—but this pressure was twice as powerful, and he felt that it was crushing him.
Thomas heard a gasp as Field tried and failed to scream; the clergyman was the only crew member who had not taken any part in the testing program. The scientist could imagine the thought that must be possessing the Puritan’s brain: if God had made the affinity between man and Earth so strong, how could he possibly intend that men should ever attempt to break the bond? But the pressure passed, to be gradually replaced by a very different sensation: that of weightlessness. Thomas had a fine mathematical brain—near equal to his father’s, Dee said—and he had long applied his methods to the artillerist’s art of ballistics; he constructed a picture in his mind of the trajectory of the rocket as it curved away from the ground it had left behind, aiming for a circular orbit about its world.
Only a handful of men, as yet, had circumnavigated the globe in ships, and none of them was an Englishman—although Drake had sworn that if he had not been invited to take his place on the Queen Jane he would have made the attempt in the Pelican. Now, five Englishmen were about to circle the world not once but several times, in a matter of hours rather than months.
“Make sure your tethers are secure, lads,” he said—for Field’s benefit rather than that of his experienced crewmen. “Cleave to your couches if you can, and take care not to release anything into the cabin.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said de Vere, with a slight hint of mockery—but Thomas ignored him.
“Ready, Sir Francis?” he said.
“Aye, Tom,” was Drake’s entirely sincere reply. Drake had to supervise the course of the ethership while Thomas deployed the sampling bottles mounted to collect the pure ether that would soon be surrounding the ship, using mechanical arms to maneuver them into double-doored lockers. From there, if all went well, they could be brought inside without breaching the integrity of the hull. Thomas worked unhurriedly, but not without urgency; Drake was equally concentrated on his work.
Raleigh was closest to a porthole; he was looking out with avid interest, watching the curve of the globe’s horizon.
“I can’t see England at all, curse the clouds!” he said, “but I can see a landmass that must be Africa, and more ocean than I ever hoped to see in a lifetime. The mystery of the Austral continent will soon be solved—or perhaps we’ll see Dante’s purgatory, towering above the ocean hemisphere in solitary splendor.”
“Papist nonsense,” muttered Field, who sounded as if he had spent a stint in Purgatory himself.
“Thank the Lord we have not collided with one of the Romanists’ crystal spheres,” Raleigh said, mischievously. “That would have been cause enough for protest.”
“Nor can I see Plato’s spindle of necessity,” de Vere put in, craning his neck to see through another porthole. “Does anyone hear the sirens intoning the music of the spheres?”
“We’re not as high as all that,” Thomas said, without breaking his concentration. “The planets are a great deal further away than the moon, which is still a long way off. The first of the Classic philosophers’ questions to be settled is the nature of space. If the void theorists are right, ours will have to be a brief excursion.”
“Now there,” observed de Vere, “Puritans and Papists are in rare accord. There’s not an atomist in either orthodox company—they’re plenarists all, save for the occasional rogue. Remind me, please, Reverend Field: is it still orthodox to believe that the ether marking the extent of space is the breath of God?” Whatever his faults, de Vere had been well-tutored in Classics by Arthur Golding; he knew that the notion of gods breathing ether as humans breathed air was a pagan idea, of which Christian theology was bound to disapprove in spite of the Vatican’s approval of selected Aristotelian ideas.
“It is not a question,” Field retorted, icily, “on which the Good Book has any pronouncement to make.” His tone did not seek to conceal his awareness that de Vere was suspected of Catholic sympathies, nor the fact that he was Foxe’s eyes and ears, alert for any advantageous whiff of heresy.
Even so, Raleigh—whom similar suspicion deemed to have atheistic tendencies—felt sufficiently liberated to say: “Was it God’s negligence, do you suppose, or that of his amanuensis Moses, that left the point unclarified? It would be a great convenience to us, would it not, if the statutes of Leviticus had pronounced upon the permissibility or abomination of ether-breathing?”
“Hold your blasphemous tongue, sir!” the clergyman exclaimed. “God revealed to man what man had need to know.”
Thomas, who was busy capturing a bottle of ether within the transfer-hold, found time to think that God had been a trifle vague when it came to the necessities of mathematics, navigation, and engineering, let alone the still-impregnable mysteries of physiology. “Got it!” he said, as his manipulative endeavors bore fruit. “The Master’s contraption worked beautifully.”
“Did we decide who was to be first to inhale from the bottle?” de Vere asked, with a mischievous glance in Field’s direction. “Should we draw lots, or it is a clergyman’s prerogative to breathe the intangible sustenance of God?”
“If a lungful of void were likely to strike a man dead on the spot,” Raleigh said, “it might be best to give the task to a man of faith, under God’s dutiful protection.”
“Easy, lads,” Thomas said, as his nervous fingers groped at the interior catch of the hold. “It’s not faith in God that’s required here, but faith in the plenum, and the life-supporting virtue of the ether. Even if I lacked such faith, though, I doubt that I’d be struck dead by a single draught of nothingness.”
“You might be in more danger of drunkenness,” said Drake. “If ether is vaporous nectar, as some say, it might play tricks with your senses.”
“Aye,” Thomas agreed, extracting the sealed bottle from its cradle, “so it might. But as my father used to say: let’s try it and see.” He closed his mouth and set the bottle to his nose, released the stopper and breathed deep. He knew, even before his lungs responded to the intake, that the void theorists were incorrect; had the space beyond the atmosphere been empty, and the Earth’s air aggregated about it by affinity alone, he would not even have been able to remove the stopper; pressure would have held it firmly in place. The plenarists were correct, it seemed; there was no void, and space was full—but full of what?
Had God really intended humankind to be forever Earthbound, ether might have been a poison, and air a protective insulation against it—but Thomas found that it was not. Nor was it a deliriant, as Drake had hypothesized. He was mildly disappointed to discover that breathing ether was very much like breathing air. “It has no discernible odor,” he declared, pensively, “and it’s not cold. That’s odd, I think, for mountain air is as cold as it is thin. This is a little thin, I suppose, but so far as I can tell, it shares the virtues of the. . . .”
He would have said “air we usually breathe” had he not been seized by a sudden fit of dizziness. Recumbent on his couch, he was in no danger of fainting, but he could not speak while his senses were reeling.
“What is it, Tom?” Drake asked, anxiously. He was not the only man present who was Thomas’s senior, but Field was only a year older and Drake was a full five; Drake was the only one with the remotest pretension to serve as a father figure.
“Nothing to do with the ether,” Thomas judged, perhaps a trifle too hastily. “The effect of moving while weightless, I think. A momentary vertigo.”
“There really is an Austral continent,” Raleigh informed them. “Or a sizeable island, at least. Can we claim it in the name of Queen Jane from up here, do you suppose, or must we direct a privateer to plant a banner on its shore when we land?” His voice faltered very slightly as he pronounced the last word; they all knew that landing their tiny craft would be every bit as difficult and dangerous as freeing it from the Earth’s affinity.
“Never mind the Austral continent,” said de Vere. “Can we—do we—press on to the moon?”
“There’s more than the breathability of the ether to be taken into account on that score, Ned,” Raleigh told him, bidding for the intellectual high ground in their private conflict. “There’s the fuel, and the manuverability of the ship to test. We’ve time in hand. Will they be able to see us in England with the aid of one of your father’s telescopes, Tom, when we’ve overflown the Americas and crossed the Atlantic?”
“We won’t pass over England on the second round trip,” Thomas told him. “They might see us in Rome, though. That’ll make the pope bite his tongue, won’t it, Mr. Field?”
“The pope refuses to look through a telescope,” Field replied, less stiffly than Thomas had expected, “for fear of what he might see.”
“There’s nothing in the moons of Jupiter to frighten a pious man,” Raleigh observed, drily, “and infinite space is no more visible than finite space.”
“The pope has no need to deny the infinity of space,” de Vere put in, striking back at Raleigh’s presumption of superior knowledgeability. “It’s not a Copernican doctrine. Nicholas of Cusa proposed it, on the grounds that God’s creative power could not be limited. He argued for the plurality of worlds on exactly the same basis.”
“You’re a true scholar, Ned,” Drake said, amiably. “Where do you stand on the dispute as to whether the inhabitants of the other worlds must be identical to ourselves, being made in the same divine image, or whether they must be infinitely various in form and nature, so as not to limit the creativity of the divine imagination?”
“Some might be giants and some tiny,” de Vere observed, “in proportion to the sizes of their worlds.”
Raleigh laughed. “But in which proportion, Ned?” he asked. “Will the Selenites be dwarfs because their world in smaller than ours, or giants, because the force of affinity does not stunt their growth?”
“The fuel stores are still in place and the controls check out,” Drake reported. “No leaks at all—we have fuel enough to take us to the moon and back, and the means to control its deployment.”
“And the attitude of the ship can be adjusted with appropriate precision,” Thomas agreed. “Who’d like to sniff the second bottle of ether when I’ve brought it through?”
“I will,” Raleigh said. “No offense, Tom, but you breathe like a mathematician. I’ve a better nose than you; if ether has a bouquet, however subtle, I’ll feel it on my palate.”
“Fine,” said Thomas, clicking the catch on the second hold—but as soon as he took hold of the bottle, he realized that Master Dee’s “contraption” had not worked as well on the second occasion as it had on the first. The outer hatch of the lock had not closed; there was now a gap in the hull the size of a man’s forearm.
“Don’t panic, lads,” he was quick to say. “If there were a void outside, we’d be in trouble, but so long as the pressure of the ether’s not so very different from the pressure of the air in the cabin, there won’t be much exchange.” He fumbled as he tried to secure the inner hatch, however. The ether that Thomas had breathed had been clear, empty of any other apparent substance, but the ether that streamed in through the temporary opening in the hull was cloudy, as if woodsmoke were adrift in it. This was no mere smoke or mist, however, for it was formed into an approximate shape—Thomas could not decide whether it was more like a moth or an artist’s conception of an angel—and it moved as if with purpose, descending upon Thomas’s face like a veil.
“Look out, Tom!” Raleigh cried—but the warning was futile.
Thomas tried to hold his breath, but he was unprepared. Fear made him inhale sharply—and the invader took the opportunity to wriggle up his nose like an eel burrowing into soft sand. Thomas felt its ghostly presence pass, slick but not cold. He expected it to move down his trachea, or perhaps his esophagus, but instead it seemed to move into the space of his skull, diffusing into the nooks and crannies of his brain.
This time, the Queen Jane’s captain did sense a sweet and cloying odor—and when the vertigo took hold of him again, it did not relent. Supine as he was on his couch, he lost consciousness almost immediately.
As Thomas awoke, the dream in which he had been languishing fled from consciousness, leaving him cast way in a sea of uncertainty. He did not know where he was, and could not remember where he ought to be. He opened his eyes convulsively, and looked wildly about, in spite of the light that flooded his eyes and dazzled him. He knew that something was wrong.
He remembered, belatedly, that he ought to be weightless, tethered to his couch in the cabin of the Queen Jane—but he was not. Nor, however, was he back on Earth. He was in the grip of affinity, but he felt lighter by far than he ever had on Earth.
A rough hand gripped his shoulder and steadied him. “Tom!” said the voice of Sir Francis Drake. “Thank God! I feared that you’d never wake up. Are you all right?”
“Aye,” said Tom, thickly, rubbing his eyes to clear a certain stickiness from his eyelids. “What did I swallow?”
“As to that, I don’t know,” Drake told him. “Nor do I know whether it’s still inside you—but I’ve seen creatures stranger by far than that one since you fell unconscious, on my honor. Field missed the show too, having fainted in alarm, but Walt and Ned were awake throughout, so I knew that I wasn’t dreaming.”
“Where are they?” Thomas asked—meaning Raleigh and de Vere, although Field was not there either.
“I don’t know,” Drake said. “Probably in a similar prison. Our captors might have recognized the two of us as the senior crewmen—or as the oldest of our company—but I doubt it.” Thomas observed that Drake’s face was scratched and that many of the scratches were somewhat inflamed.
The cell in which Thomas and Drake were apparently imprisoned was reasonably capacious, but all its alcoves were small and set above head-height, making it difficult to make out what they contained. Thomas looked down instead, to see that the “bed” on which he lay was a protuberance in the floor, not a wooden platform on legs. The floor, like the walls and ceiling, seemed to be composed of an organic substance akin to wood or tortoiseshell, but it seemed clean enough—much cleaner than the vast majority of England’s household floors. The floor was grey, but the colors and textures of the walls were very various, and the radiance that lit the space came from silvery ribbons swirling across the ceiling rather than any kind of flame. The doorway was oval in shape; there was no obvious catch securing the door, which might easily have been mistaken for a stopper in the neck of a jar.
“What stranger creatures have you seen?” Thomas asked, belatedly.
“Lunar moths with man-sized bodies and vast wings,” Drake said, tersely. “Grasshoppers walking on their hind legs, and ants too, somewhat taller than a man. And slugs the size of the elephants in the Tower menagerie, with castles of oystershell. I thought them brutally violent at first, for they’re very free with the attentions of their various antennae, limbs and slimy palps, but I don’t think they meant to injure us.” Thomas reached up to touch his own face, which was tender and itchy. His hands were no better, and the swelling made it difficult to flex his fingers.
“Are we on the moon, then?” Thomas asked, in frank bewilderment.
“In the moon,” Drake corrected him. “They flew us here, ethership and all, by the power of their multifarious wings, wrapped in a web of what I’d be tempted to call spidersilk were it not that spiders are one of the few creepy-crawlies I’ve not seen inflated to magnanimous dimensions hereabouts.”
“I’ve seen signs of life and movement while studying the moon in my father’s best peeping-glass,” Thomas said, in a low voice, “but I was never entirely sure that they were not a trick of the lens or the mind’s eye.”
“Master Dee’s hatches are a poor design,” Drake opined, “by comparison with the craters that serve as doorways to the moon—but the giants are not as large as all that. You couldn’t see them with a spy-glass any more than we could see elephants strolling in the African savannah were we to turn a telescope on the Earth from the lunar surface.”
“There were ants, you say?”
“Things somewhat reminiscent of ants—not to mention moths, bugs, beetles, and a hundred more types for which I cannot improvise names, all living in a single tempestuous throng. They collaborated in our capture, and . . .”
He broke off as the door opened. It did not swing on a hinge; the aperture dilated.
Thomas understood immediately what point Drake was trying to make. The four individuals who came through the door were all insectile, but they were analogues of very different Earthly species. They all walked upright on their hindmost legs, and their heads were equally bizarre, but their bodies were very different in color, texture, and equipment. Two were winged, one like a butterfly and one like a dragonfly. Two were brightly colored, one striped like a wasp and the other spotted like a ladybird. Two were stout, two slender. Two were clutching objects in the “hands” attached to their intermediary limbs. Two were carrying implements of some kind in their forelimbs. All of them, however, hurried forward with no regard whatsoever for their captives’ personal space, and began touching them, with all manner of appendages.
Thomas fell back upon the bed, overcome by horror. He wanted to scream, but dared not open his mouth lest something even nastier than the ether-creature slip inside him. He closed his eyes, praying for the molestation to stop.
“Be still,” said a voice, pronouncing the words inside his head like one of his own vocalized thoughts. “Be patient. If you will relax, and let me use your limbs, I can communicate with at least one of them—I can explain the irritation in our flesh, and demand an antidote.”
Thomas inferred at first that one of the monstrous insects must be projecting the words into his head by some mysterious process of thought-transference—but then he remembered that there was already an alien presence within his skull: an etheric ghost that appeared to have dissolved its fragile substance in the flesh of his brain.
“What are you?” he demanded silently. He had made no conscious effort to relax, as he had been asked to, but he did not resist when he felt his hands moving of their own accord.
The insectile monsters seemed more startled by this contact than he had been by theirs. They withdrew their various feelers, and waited while his fingers danced upon the head of one of their number.
Thomas had to collaborate with his intimate invader, rising unsteadily to his feet in order to continue the tactile conversation more effectively. It was an authentic conversation now—the insect addressed by his mysterious passenger’s gestures was making its reply, in terms of rapid strokes of its antennae—but Thomas felt the irritation and inflammation in his flesh die down.
“I am explaining your origin,” his invader said. “Your nature too, although that is more difficult. I can understand why you think of me as an invader, but I mean you no harm any more than the members of the True Civilization do. It might help us both if you were to try to think of me as a guest.”
“What’s happening, Tom?” Drake asked. “What on Earth are you doing?”
“We’re not on Earth,” Tom retorted, abandoning the internal dialogue to speak aloud, “and it isn’t me who’s doing what I’m doing. It’s the ether-creature that wormed its way into me when the ship leaked. Somehow it knows how to communicate with this creature. Perhaps it has traveled extensively in the minds of other creatures.”
“Good guess, mine host,” said the creature within him, silently. “You’re an exceptional creature, Thomas Digges, to have such trust in your own sanity. It often requires months or years to establish a rapport—but yours is a dreaming species, I suppose. That makes a difference—few species have that particular gift, or curse.”
Drake had fallen silent, direly puzzled. The insects, however, were frenetically busy in communication among themselves. Touch was only one of the senses they employed; they could not talk as humans talked but they clicked and chittered, warbled and hummed. They spoke with their limbs and their wings, and various other kinds of apparatus that Thomas could not discern.
“I think that I have made the situation clear,” Thomas’s internal informant said. “I have asked to be taken to one of the queens’ chambers, since this world has no fleshcore, where we might converse with philosophers closer to the heart of the True Civilization. They will understand your nature, having mechanical analogues of your kind, even if they have not been studying you carefully from afar.”
“I have no idea what you are trying to tell me,” Thomas replied, silently. “All this is meaningless to me.”
“Be patient,” the silent voice said. “I will try to explain when I have the opportunity.”
“If you and I are made in God’s image, Tom,” Drake said, softly. “What manner of creator made creatures like these?”
It was not like Drake to speculate in such a fashion, but Thomas could understand his confusion very well. Preoccupied with his internal dialogue, however, and disturbed by the incessant actions of his unbidden hands, he did not reply.
Drake did not seem to be offended by his rudeness. “Perhaps de Vere was right,” the crewman continued, “but if these are merely insects like those of Earth, what giants the men of the moon must be!”
Thomas knew that there was nothing mere about these insects. They had been investigating him with manifest intelligence—and still were, aided now by the voice of his invader . . . his guest. Like humans, they were sapient; like humans, they were curious. The ether-creature called theirs the True Civilization—and why should it not, given that they could fly through the ether between the worlds, to capture stray etherships and interrogate their crews?
When the insects crowding around his bed began to deploy the bulkier objects they were carrying he flinched and shied away, but they still did not appear to mean him any harm. He could not tell what was happening when the objects were pointed in his direction, but none of the monsters was touching him any longer, directly or indirectly. His own hands had been withdrawn from the face they had been fondling so strangely.
Thomas found time to say aloud: “All’s well, Francis. I don’t understand what’s happening yet, but they don’t mean to do us any injury.”
Drake was touching his face and inspecting the backs of his hands. “That confounded itching’s stopped,” he observed. “Have they administered some antidote?”
“Yes,” Thomas told him. “They did not realize that we had been stung. The ether-creature seems to know a great deal more about what is happening here, and what is relevant to our welfare, than we do. If it has not visited the surface of the Earth, it must know others of its kind that have.
Drake actually struck a pose, then, and bowed gracefully to the four attentive monsters. “On behalf of Queen Jane of England,” he said, “I greet you, noble sirs. Shall we be friends, then? You don’t have the look of Spaniards about you, and God forbid that you might be Elizabethans . . . or the spirits of the dead, come to that. Was it Plutarch, Thomas, who first declared the moon to be a world akin to the Earth, where the souls of the dead reside?”
“Plutarch it was,” Thomas confirmed, “but I don’t think his soul is here before us, gathering material for more Lives.”
“Nor I,” Drake agreed. “Can you believe that Raleigh and de Vere could be as brave as we are being, under similar inspection? Not that it matters—by the time they tell the tale to the queen, they’ll have fought and vanquished whole Selenite armies, if Field can’t keep them honest—and we’ll never convince them that we had the bravado to act as we are while subject to such scrutiny. Please assure me that they’re not merely deciding the best way to cook and season us.”
The ether-creature seemed to know that Drake was joking, and did not trouble to reassure Thomas against this ominous possibility. Nor, however, did it forewarn Thomas that he was about to be seized in the upper arms of one of the unburdened creatures, and very thoroughly palpated, although it did say “Patience, Thomas!” once the assault began. Thomas felt his hands making some sort of reply, although he had no idea what it was—but he had a strange impression, as the creature withdrew again, that it was even more repulsed by the texture of his flesh than he was by the horror of the grip and the probing feelers.
“The neo-Platonists and Aristotelian diehards have a saying,” Drake muttered. “As above, so below—but this seems to me to be a very different world from the one we know. Men of that sort are mostly monists, though, who think that the moon is a mere lamp planted in the skies by providence to ameliorate the darkness of night in suitably teasing fashion, and that the stars are candles disposed to foretell our futures. Master Dee is no monist, is he—despite that he wrote a book called Monas Hieroglyphica?”
“He was converted to pluralism thereafter,” Thomas said. “Propadeumata Aphorisitica is his definitive statement. He is committed to the infinity of space and of worlds—and when I tell him of our adventure, he will also be committed to the infinite variety of form and virtue. These are intelligent beings, Francis—including the thing inside me—and I’m praying hard that they might be more virtuous in their treatment of fellow intelligent beings than the great majority of men. Take care!”
It was not he that had pronounced the final words, although they had been spoken aloud. Thomas was abruptly snatched from his bed, and Drake was seized.
“Have no fear!” said Thomas’s interior voice, silent again but still voluble. “They are doing as I have asked, and are taking us to a visitor from the galactic core. With luck, he will order your release.”
Thomas and Sir Francis Drake were dragged from the room then, but they were both being held quite gently. They were no worse than lightly bruised as they were hustled along one winding corridor after another, through an interminable labyrinth. Thomas’s impression was that they were going deeper into the bowels of the moon, but he could not be sure.
“Where are they taking us?” Drake shouted back to him, his tall but slender captor having drawn some twelve or fifteen yards ahead of Thomas’s stouter guardian.
“To a queen’s chamber, I believe,” Thomas replied, retaking control of his own vocal cords.
“I have heard that ants have queens,” Drake said. “None as pretty as my darling Jane, though.”
“Is she your darling?” Thomas called back, although he could feel the ether-creature’s impatience to revert to silent conversation.
“She will be,” Drake said, “if I get out of this alive with the means to return to Earth—always provided that I tell my tale before Ned and Walt tell theirs. There’s naught like a little gooseflesh to animate affection, and I think I have the means now to make her majesty’s flesh crawl prodigiously.”
Thomas was ashamed to feel a sudden pang of resentment at the observation that Drake—who was, after all, five years his senior and no great beauty—had not thought to include him with de Vere and Raleigh in the list of his rivals for the queen’s affection. Such was the burden of humble birth, and perhaps the myth of the mathematician’s disdain for common passion.
Thomas now had the opportunity to see for himself that the giant inhabitants of the moon did not all resemble insects, although its insectile population was exceedingly various; there were, as Drake had briefly mentioned, creatures like slugs the size of elephants, with shells on their backs like mahouts’ turrets, and many other creatures shelled like lobsters, whelks, or barnacles. There were legions of chimeras clad in what Thomas could not help likening to Medieval suits of armor designed for the protection of entities with far too many limbs.
“Why, this must be a busy port or a great capital,” Thomas said, though not aloud. “A cultural crossroads where many races commingle and interact. If the moon is hollow throughout, honeycombed with tunnels, how far must its pathways extend, and how shall its hosts be numbered?”
“Very good, Thomas,” his invader said. “I’m assisting you as best I can, but you’ve a naturally calm mind, which makes it a great deal easier. Thank God you have no relevant phobias—they’d be a lot less easy to counter than your allergies.”
“You talk a deal of nonsense,” Thomas said, “for someone using a borrowed tongue.”
“Aye,” the creature replied, “but I’ll make sense of it for you if I can. I must, for we’ve work to do here, now that the True Civilization is aware of your new capability. They must have studied you, I dare say, but they could not have thought you capable of building an ethership for another four hundred years—and study conducted at a distance is always calmer than a close confrontation, where differences stand out that distinguish you from burrowers and ethereals alike. We must convince an influential philosopher that you are harmless still, and likely to remain so.”
“Have you a name, guest?” Thomas demanded. “I feel that I am at every possible disadvantage here. Or will you name yourself Legion, and make things even worse?”
“I am no possessive demon,” the creature assured him. “I shall be as polite a guest as circumstances permit, and will take my leave before I overstay the necessity of my visit. You may call me Lumen.”
“As in light, or cavity?” Thomas retorted.
“A little of both. We are chimerical creatures by nature, and our aims are syncretic. I cannot bind your race to the True Civilization at present, but I must persuade someone close to its heart that humankind might one day be so bound—if I fail, the consequences might be catastrophic.”
Thomas wanted to demand further clarification of this remarkable statement, but he did not have time. They had just arrived in a much larger cavern: a vast and crowded amphitheater, with terraces arranged in multitudinous circles about a central core.
“I told you so,” Drake shouted. It took Thomas several seconds to realize that his friend was referring to his assertion that an insect queen could never be as pretty as his darling Jane. Thomas had to agree, as he looked upon a vast individual, who was surely the queen of a hive, although her resemblance to an ant or bee was no greater than her resemblance to a moth or a centipede. Her ugliness in human eyes was spectacular in its extremity. She was laying eggs at the rate of one every ninety seconds, which acolytes carried away into tunnel-mouths dotting the rim of the central arena.
It was not the queen to whom the two prisoners were taken, though—it was to a group of individuals twenty-five or thirty strong, situated no closer to her head than her nether end, who were in conference in one of the inner ranks of the array of terraces. The majority were more mothlike than any other species Thomas had yet seen, conspicuously furry, with multifaceted eyes each larger than a human head; the minority were very varied indeed.
“Now,” said Thomas’s uninvited guest, “you must let me speak. The future of your nation, and perhaps your world, may depend on it.”…
