by Philip Reeve
We were standing in a large, silvery room. High above was a domed ceiling, beneath our feet a floor covered in perplexing patterns of tiles, whose texture reminded me of the insides of sea shells. Around the walls, in strange, glassy pods, stood hundreds of people, as if watching us. None of them, as far as I could see, was alive. Very few of them were human. Some were not even people at all, but animals. Flowers of frost had formed on the insides of the pod windows, and some of those who stood there were obscured entirely, but I recognised a Callistan snapdragon, a Venusian shrew and several other exotic species. And surely that huge saurian must be one of the extinct reptilia of pre-Adamite Earth?
Who were they? What power had brought them here? And were Charity and I soon to join them, to be killed and stuffed and mounted in one of those glass pods like butterflies in a display case? For in my bewilderment, I could only imagine that we had blundered into the museum of some unearthly collector!
And then, in the domed space above us, something moved. Something stirred and uncurled. Something made of light and darkness, and so large that I had at once to adjust my whole understanding of the room’s perspective, unfurled long tentacles of shadow and sank down slowly until it hung in front of us and gazed at us with a thousand fiery eyes.
Charity and I had backed against the nearest pod when the thing came down on us, and Charity had drawn her cutlass, which she held out shakily in front of her. But I somehow sensed that we were in no danger, and I reached out and pressed Charity’s hands so that she lowered the sword.
The golden eyes roared softly, circling like suns in the shadows of the thing which watched us. I thought at once of Myrtle’s and Father’s descriptions of the Mothmaker. Was this she? But no. The Mothmaker had been a being of immense power, and this thing before us was weak: the fires that were its eyes kept guttering and threatening to go out, and it seemed barely able to move; the fringes of its shadowy form lay listlessly upon the floor; its tendrils drooped.
I reached down and touched it. It felt like the ghost of a velvet curtain.
‘Mother?’ I said.
And inside that cloud of darkness, fresh fires ignited. The burning eyes whirled faster. The shadows deepened and grew crisper. ‘Yes,’ it breathed. ‘Yes, now I remember … ’
‘Mother!’ I said, wishing I could hug her, but not quite sure how to begin.
‘Art,’ said the darkness, gathering itself and ruffling my hair with a friendly tentacle. ‘Oh Art! I’m afraid I am not quite myself this morning. But I am ever so glad to see you here, and your friend too. Is your sister with you, by any chance?’
Chapter Twenty
A Merry Christmas, One and All!
‘Mother!’ I cried. ‘What are you doing here? And why do you look so … well, I am not sure how to describe you.’
‘I am terribly sorry, Art,’ the strange cloud said. ‘It must be a shock for you to see me like this. It is a shock for me as well. I had grown so used to my old body, and now that wretched Mothmaker has broken it. It was one of my favourites, too, and I had not nearly finished with it; I had planned to have so many more years with you and Myrtle and your father, and grow old, and oh, all sorts of adventures.’
‘But you aren’t dead!’ I shouted happily. ‘I mean, we none of us really believed you were, but even so, we couldn’t help but be worried … ’
‘I am not dead,’ agreed the cloud. ‘My mortal body is shattered and I cannot return to it, but when it died, the essence of me, my Shaper self, fled to this little place that I prepared long millennia ago. The journey across the aether almost finished me; I have been waiting here, too weak to leave, barely certain of who I was. Waiting for you to come and find me.’
‘So you weren’t telling the truth when you said that you would die when your body did!’ I exclaimed. ‘I knew it!’
‘I would not lie, Art,’ said Mother reprovingly. ‘Not to you. But it is no easy matter for a Shaper to die. My death was simply a promise that I made to myself. When Emily Mumby died, I always said, and my essence wound up here at the Tin Moon again, then I would do what I should have done four-and-a-half-thousand millennia ago. I would cease to be. But I can hardly do that with the Mothmaker still rampaging about in my lovely solar system, and without saying goodbye to you and Myrtle and your father, could I?’
I shook my head. I don’t know if you have ever seen your mother transformed into a nebulous being of pure energy with innumerable eyes, but I found it a rather disconcerting experience. So many of my notions about who Mother was were bound up with her face and her voice and her little habits, and there was no trace of any of those things left in the cloud which hung before me. And yet it was her. I was certain of it.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘what of Myrtle and your father?’
‘They are out on the surface, with Jack Havock’s crew,’ I replied.
‘Oh, well, that won’t do! We must bring them in, and then you shall tell me all about the Mothmaker and we will try to decide what must be done about her.’
‘But how can they find their way here?’
‘Myrtle will lead them. She knows where the door is, just as you did—though, like you, she does not know she knows. I impressed the secrets of the Tin Moon on your minds when you were both ever so little, in case it might be useful one day. You would have found your way here eventually even if I had not had time to mention it to Myrtle before the Mothmaker so rudely interrupted me.’
‘But there are Sun Dogs outside the door!’ said Charity.
‘I can see you have not known Jack Havock long,’ said Mother, ‘if you believe a few of those creatures will give him any trouble.’
I restrained myself from telling her of the trouble which a Sun Dog had already given us and of the loss of the Sophronia. It was a little like the loss of Mother’s familiar mortal form: a sadness too great, for the moment, to even think about. Instead I said, ‘But Mother, you must not let Myrtle see you as you now are!’
The cloud of fire and shade before me looked thoughtful—or, at least, as thoughtful as a cloud can look. ‘You’re right, Art,’ she said. ‘Poor Myrtle would think it terribly unladylike of me to wander about without a body. Help me to choose one, dear, before she arrives.’
‘Choose one?’ I gaped.
‘Why, yes. Unlike our friend the Mothmaker, I have never learned the art of shaping myself into a human form. Such illusions do not interest me. When I want to live as a Martian, or an Ionian, or an Earthling, I grow a proper, flesh-and-blood body and slip inside it. These figures who you see about you are all bodies that I have inhabited through the millennia. Now which one do you think would be most suitable … ?’
I walked with her down the aisles between the glass pods, where her former selves all waited, frozen by some science beyond my human comprehension. The room was not circular, as I’d thought at first; its shape was constantly shifting, and there were far, far more of the pods than I could count. In one I saw some hideous three-headed thing which wore its muscles on the outside; in another a Ganymedian aquabat floated in brine. A third bore nothing but a clump of moss. (‘Those were a tedious few hundred years,’ Mother reminisced, brushing a shadow-tentacle affectionately over the glass of that pod, ‘but restful, in their way.’) I looked up nervously at the bladed jaws of a mighty dinosaur and shuddered, wondering what Mother had been like when she wore that form. I smiled down at a sweet little Callistan pygmy pompom. (‘A charming body,’ said Mother, ‘but not particularly practical.’) At last we paused before a pod where a tall and graceful woman stood—almost human, she seemed, and yet the cast of her features and the tone of her skin marked her as something quite other.
‘Who is she?’ asked Charity.
‘She was me as I looked when I lived upon Mercury and watched the empire of the Mercurians stretch out to Venus and the infant Earth,’ said Mother.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ said Charity.
‘Why, thank you! She is the body I wore when I dwelled in the Mercurian col
ony of Atlantis and went picnicking upon the lost continent of Mu. But the Mercurians grew tired of their empire, and in time a great white ship came sweeping through our solar system, a starjammer making some endless voyage between the suns, and the Mercurians all joined its crew and flew away, and I was left alone.’ Her veils of shadow rippled sadly. ‘I was so upset that I became a small Venusian shellfish for several thousand years.’
This Mercurian lady looked very like Mother, I thought, but not quite like her; she could perhaps have passed for the half-sister or the cousin of the Mother I remembered.
‘Do you think she will do?’ asked Mother.
‘I think she will do very well,’ I replied, ‘although her clothes are rather out of fashion.’
‘Good quality never really dates, Art,’ Mother assured me.
She reached out wisps and tendrils of herself. She smoothed her shadows over the glass of the pod. The air—or whatever it was in there—grew smoky, and my cloud mother seemed to fade, her eyes of drifting fire dwindling to pinpricks in her depths. Then she was gone, and the door of the pod slid silently open, letting out a faint breath of cold. And the Mercurian woman inside opened her eyes, and she was Mother.
‘There!’ she said, blinking her new, golden eyes. ‘A little stiff, and I could eat a horse, but I think this will suit me very nicely for the time being.’
And so it was that when Myrtle brought the rest of our shipwrecked company to the secret door, she found someone who looked very much like our own dear mother waiting there, and so never saw Mother in her true cloudy Shaper form.
The others did not want to follow Myrtle, of course, as they told me later. They were busy making a camp out of sundry sections of the poor old Sophronia when my sister suddenly started to wonder what had become of Charity and me and had the idea that they should all go looking for us in a north-easterly direction. Father agreed at once, of course, but the others were reluctant, because they were tired, and the camp they were constructing was one that would have done credit to any shipwrecked mariner. But you know how impossible Myrtle can be once an idea finds its way into that tiny mind of hers, and at last they set out, waving their lanterns in a desultory manner and crying out, ‘Hulloa! Art! Charity! Ahoy there!’
There came no answer, save for the gentle whiffling of the solar wind as it gusted across that drear moon’s tinny plains—and then the not-so-gentle whiffling of two ravening Sun Dogs, who had grown weary of snuffling and slavering over the pit where we had vanished, and were eager to eat up these new arrivals instead. But the Sophronias and their friends were wise to those beasts’ tricks by then. Munkulus and Grindle hauled out their largest firearms and let fly a perfect storm of shot, which pierced the Sun Dogs’ translucent hides and found their brains and hearts and other squelchy, pulsating inner parts, and brought them crashing down in ruin. Huzzah!
A little time was wasted then, as Jack and the rest went to and fro, shining their lanterns in through the glassy walls of the dead monsters’ bellies, very fearful that they might see Charity or myself trapped inside and already part-digested. (It was such a horrible prospect that Myrtle fainted before they even started looking, just in case.) But when they had satisfied themselves that their lost lambs (e.g. us) had not been eaten, and Myrtle had been revived with a whiff of Mr Munkulus’s pipe tobacco (in the absence of salts or sal volatile), they pressed on upon their former course and shortly saw the circular opening of that well-like shaft before them. Shining down their lanterns, they spied the handprints in its metal floor, at which Myrtle, just like me, felt a strange compulsion to float down and set her hand over one of those prints. And in another minute, she, Jack and Father and all the others were descending in the shaft of light and looking about in great awe and perplexity at the secret chamber and the ranks of Mother’s former selves. And a very pretty reunion we had there, with fond good wishes expressed on every side, though I believe Father and Myrtle were a little troubled (just as I was) by Mother’s new form.
‘Now,’ she said, when we told her how we had been reunited in the Jovian aether, and how the battle had gone, and how Ssilissa had been stolen and the Sophronia wrecked. ‘Where is the Mothmaker? For if there is one thing I am certain of, it is that we must deal with her before she causes any further unpleasantness and inconvenience to the races of this system.’
We all started telling her at once, in a great din, but she quieted us down and had us speak one by one and soon understood where the Mothmaker was bound—and why.
‘Naturally, she will see the Queen as her chief enemy now that I am gone,’ she said (tilting her new head thoughtfully on one side in the same old, Motherish way). ‘She will betake herself to London, and may be there already.’
‘But if our friends among the Snilth continue to spread their influence,’ said Father, ‘she may find that her legions are too polite to do any fighting by the time they reach England and will only curtsey when they meet the Queen.’
Mother clapped her hands, delighted at the vision he conjured up of the fearsome Snilth o’erwhelmed by genteel good manners. ‘But alas,’ she said, ‘the Snilth are many, and it is too much to hope that all of them will have escaped the Mothmaker’s control. And even a few of them, with those great ships and tame moths, would be more than a match for Britain’s fleets. We must go at once to London.’
‘No,’ said Father, ‘to Scotland! The Queen and her family are spending Christmas at Balmoral Castle; I remember reading of it in the Court & Social columns of The Times before we left Larklight.’
‘To Balmoral, then!’ declared Mother.
‘But how?’ asked Jack. ‘Don’t you recall, Mrs Mumby—the poor old Sophronia is ash and matchwood? I don’t see how we can ever get off this moon, unless you have an aether-ship stashed somewhere about.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Mother, but she had a twinkle in her eye, and I knew that she had something ‘up her sleeve’.
‘Mother,’ I said, casting a glance at all the motionless bodies which had once been hers. ‘How did all these beings come to be here? When you wearied of life as a Callistan snapdragon, for instance, did you flap your wings and fly back here before you abandoned that body and put it in its pod? And likewise, when you abandoned the body of that Mandarin lady I see standing over there, did you simply climb into an aether-ship and sail back to this moon? Surely such behaviour would have raised eyebrows in medieval China?’
Mother laughed. ‘Of course, Art, I did none of those things. I come and go from the Tin Moon just as I please.’
‘But how?’
‘I use the door, of course.’
We all looked up at the door we had come in by. It had vanished neatly into the eggshell dome of the ceiling, and only the faintest circular crack showed where it was.
‘That door does not only open on to the surface of this moon,’ said Mother. ‘It can lead to any place within my Solar Realm. It may take an hour or so to arrange it, for the Shaper device which powers it is very old and very complicated, but we should be able to step through it and emerge in the hills above Balmoral. With luck, we may even get there before the Mothmaker.’
‘Impossible!’ cried Myrtle.
‘Remarkable!’ gasped Father.
‘Nice one, Mrs M.!’ chuckled Grindle.
‘I shall begin the process at once,’ said Mother. ‘And while we are waiting, I suggest we have a little something to eat. Did you salvage any food from the Sophronia? Good! Then some of you hurry back and fetch it before those nasty Sun Dogs find it. I seem to recall that we missed Christmas, what with one thing and another. But it is a complicated business working out the date on all these different, whirling worlds we flit between. Whatever date it is on Earth today, I am almost certain that it must be Christmas Day upon this Tin Moon.’
And so we made it the best Christmas that peculiar little world has ever seen. Munk and Grindle scurried back to camp and returned bearing a barrel of grog and a crate of table wine as well, and several jars of pi
ckles from Mother’s hamper, along with some well-salted chunks of that space fish which had swallowed Captain Moonfield, and fruit cake, chocolate, ship’s biscuits and other delicacies rescued from the wreck. And Mother, by some scientific magic, caused all her pods of cast-off bodies to fold themselves away, and a neat little kitchen and dining room with a table set for dinner materialised in their place. Sat around that table we enjoyed the jolliest Christmas dinner you can imagine, with toasts and carols and jokes and food a-plenty. And if there was no goose and no pudding and no tree, it hardly seemed to matter. For, as Myrtle said, ‘Christmas is about goodwill and good cheer and good company, and not about mere outward trappings, don’t you think?’
And for once, dear reader, we all agreed with her.
But all good things must come to an end, and once our long meal was finished Mother clapped her hands again and said, ‘Well now, I think a quick bout of Saving the Solar System from an All-Powerful Enemy would aid our digestion uncommonly well.’
‘Oh, do we have to?’ grumbled Grindle, who I believe had taken a little too much table wine. ‘What about another glass and some poetry? I know some grand limericks, I do.’
‘Or we could play Charades,’ suggested Nipper.
‘Dear Mr Grindle,’ said Mother, looking fondly at him, ‘I can too well imagine the sort of limericks you know. And Nipper, Charades is a capital game, but it is hardly exercise, and exercise is what a young crab needs if he is not to grow stout around the middle in his later years.
Now what could be better exercise than a nice brisk walk across the Scottish Highlands, followed by pitched battle against the legions of the Snilth?’