by Philip Reeve
Not wanting them to think me funky, I went down the gangplank with them and stepped on to the grass of Venus, which feels thicker and more rubbery than earth grass. The blue blades writhed nervously as we walked on them. On Venus the distinction between the Animal and Vegetable kingdoms is not nearly so definite as it is on other worlds, and there are many species of plant which can move about all by themselves. Indeed, all over the slope where we had landed, small shrubs, unsettled by the Sophronia’s descent, were uprooting themselves and stomping off. I even fancied that I could hear some of them grumbling to themselves. I took a deep breath of the hot, misty air, and thought, Well, Art, if there is Changeling pollen on this breeze you have a lungful of it now, and nothing can save you from the Tree Sickness, so there is no point in fretting.
Then, like any good tourist, I turned around to have a look at the view.
It was quite a spectacle. To the east and west of us the wild, wind-sculpted cliffs stretched away, and the white surf nibbled at their feet. Behind us the forests rose in blue-green waves, and ahead a narrow spur of land jutted out to form a rugged promontory on which the tumbled, overgrown remains of buildings stood. Their roofs had long since fallen in, but their walls and chimney stacks still stood among the trees, sad mementoes of Britannia’s doomed attempt to gain a foothold on this world.
‘What is that place?’ my sister asked.
‘It was called New Scunthorpe,’ said Jack Havock, rather sharply. ‘People lived here, till the Changeling Trees flowered. Now it’s our hidey-hole.’
We followed him in a line along that windswept promontory, with the waves grumbling below. A thick grove of armour-plated palm tree things had grown across the gateway in the settlement’s wall, but when Jack shouted and waved his arms they uprooted themselves and edged aside. Changeling Trees stood like silent sentinels among the empty buildings, rustling their leaves as we passed. Sticky webs, woven by some carnivorous plant, wavered like dirty lace curtains in the blind windows. ‘Well,’ sniffed Myrtle, ‘I hope he will not expect me to clean this place too.’
I paid her no heed. I was too awed by my surroundings. It is one thing to read about the Tree Sickness, quite another to walk among the homes of all the poor colonists whom it had claimed. Truly, this was a terrible place!
But to Jack and his friends it was just a hideaway; a place to stash their stores and loot away from prying eyes. In an old chapel, where planks of green sunlight sloped down through fern-choked rafters high above, they had made a nest of crates and barrels and tarpaulined heaps of plunder. They moved among them laughing, their voices echoing from the mossy walls. Grindle opened a chest of rum, and everyone took a swig except me (I was too young, they said) and Myrtle (who disapproved of strong liquor). Ssilissa, slightly shy, took Myrtle by the hand and led her off to look at something on the far side of the chamber.
‘Girl stuff,’ said Jack dismissively, as he watched them go. ‘Your sister’s a bad influence on Ssil.’
I wondered what he meant. I wondered how he had come to find out about this strange place. I wondered – not for the first time – how he came to be here, sailing the aether with his inhuman crew, so young. But for the next few hours there was no time to try and discover any answers to my wonderings. We were all too busy, with barrows and handcarts, transferring stores from the chapel to the Sophronia, and loot from the Sophronia to the temple.
The months-long Venusian day was nearing its end, and the mists turned lilac and rose as the Sun sank slowly towards the east. We returned to the Sophronia, and ate, and Myrtle and I washed the dishes – rather grudgingly in my case, but Myrtle reminded me in a loud voice that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness.’ Then we went to join the others, who had lit a driftwood fire on the grass outside, and were sat around it talking, and singing the peculiar-sounding songs of other spheres.
Now I shouldn’t want you to think, because I have not spoken much about the grief I felt for Father, that I had not been thinking of him during our trip to Venus. Quite the contrary, I thought of him often, and dreamed nightly of the last time I had seen him, wrapped up like candyfloss in the grip of that great spider. In my dreams the spider blended with the Potter Moth, and with my memories of lying in the moth’s jar, motionless, as if turned to stone by its venom. I began to think a great deal about venom, and about the nasty ways of spiders and other insects. And those webs down among the ruins of New Scunthorpe, in which small, bundled-up insect mummies had hung, now prompted me to speak my thoughts to Myrtle.
‘What if Father is not dead?’ I asked. ‘After all, don’t earthly spiders paralyse their prey and wrap it up alive to keep for later, just as the Potter Moth did to us?’
‘Oh!’ gasped Myrtle, who clearly had not thought of this. ‘You mean poor Papa may even now be hanging in some spider’s larder, waiting to be ate? Oh, how dreadful! Art!’ (Et cetera, et cetera.)
‘But those were no ordinary spiders,’ I insisted, talking quite loudly to make myself heard above her fussing. ‘They were intelligent. At least, their leader was. He had a spacecraft and a hat, and spoke quite passable English. What if he were keeping Father for some other purpose? To be a slave, perhaps, or so that he might question him?’
‘Art, you read too many cheap novels,’ Myrtle declared, pulling out a handkerchief and blowing her nose. ‘What would they wish to question Father about? He is not a spy, or an officer of government. He doesn’t know anything, except about Aetheric Icthyomorphs, and he will happily talk of those to anyone who will listen; there is no need to wrap him up in cobwebs first!’
Jack Havock, who had been lazing on the far side of the fire, now came across and sat down beside me, ready to back Myrtle up. This was a little embarrassing, for I had not intended him to hear what I was saying. I had hoped him to think me a very swashbuckling, devil-may-care fellow, and it pained me that he should know how I was pining for my father.
‘Listen, Art,’ he said kindly, ‘I know you want to keep your hopes up, but your father’s gone, and you must accept it. I know how bitter it feels …’
‘Oh, fiddlesticks!’ said Myrtle, who I suppose thought him very ill-mannered to be poking his nose into our private sorrows so. ‘How can you know? You’ve been an orphan for ever, no doubt. For us the pain is still fresh.’
Jack fell silent, staring at the fire. The others were quiet too, wondering what he would do. At last he stood up, but instead of returning to his former place he held out his hand to me and said, ‘Come, Art.’
Myrtle said, ‘Where are you taking him? I will not allow it!’
‘You can come too, if you wish,’ said Jack without so much as looking at her.
I took his hand and let him help me up. Side by side we set off down the slope towards the shining sea, Myrtle stomping along behind us. The pirates by the fire began to mutter as we left, and then Mr Munkulus set up a cheery song, but the sound of their singing was soon lost as we walked out along that gloomy promontory, between the shadowy ruins. The sea whispered, and between the shush of each wave’s breaking and the long sigh as it washed out again I fancied that I could hear the faint, slow heartbeats of the Changeling Trees.
‘Where are we going?’ demanded Myrtle.
Jack did not reply, but led us inside one of the old houses: a small, square place where weeds grew thickly, rustling and muttering at us as we invaded their home.
‘And why have you led us here?’ asked Myrtle, hands on hips. Her fear of the gathering darkness and all the Venusian creepy-crawlies which might lurk in it made her speak more loudly than usual, as if she were addressing a deaf person.
‘This was my parents’ place,’ said Jack.
That shut her up. Me too.
‘The first sign of the sickness was a dizziness, and a pleasant sort of sleepiness,’ said Jack, looking about him at the crumbled-down walls. Out in the streets the Changeling Trees clustered, thick and still. It was easy to imagine they were listening.
Jack said, ‘I was only a kid, but I re
member how sleepy everybody got, dozing off over their work and suchlike. They said it was just a summer cold at first, but slowly their waking periods got shorter and shorter. They used to stand for hours, just staring at the Sun. Their talk slowed down, till a single word might stretch out to fill an hour, and a sentence take a day to utter. Soon they stopped using words at all. Their skin turned hard and silver-grey. One by one they went out into their gardens or up into the fields and forests and found a place for themselves and curled their toes down into the soil and never moved again.’
Myrtle said softly, ‘But you can’t remember that. You can’t have been here. Nobody survived the Tree Sickness!’
‘Everyone survived,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just that once the illness had run its course they were not themselves any more. Except one boy. When the rescue parties arrived, in their rubberised tarpaulin suits and goggles and filter masks, they found one little boy. Kept it quiet, of course. Thought he’d been affected by the Changeling Tree pollen in some other, subtler way to all the rest. Thought maybe he was a carrier of infection. Took him away to a quarantine place on the back of the Moon, and then, after a few months, to the Royal Xenological Institute in Russell Square, London.’
‘And that boy was you?’ I asked.
‘Well, what would be the point of the story if it had been someone else?’ snapped Myrtle. ‘Really, Art. Do try to keep up.’ She sighed, and gazed at our companion with a soulful look upon her face. ‘Poor Jack! How terrible it must have been for you here, your father and mother dead …’
‘Not dead,’ said Jack. ‘Come and see.’
A band of lemon-coloured light stretched along the horizon, above the sea. It shone on our faces as we walked on along the promontory. Outside the ruinous houses the Changeling Trees stood in little clumps and spinneys, always two or three or four together. Their vegetable hearts pulsed slow and steady. The ground sloped upwards, rising to a low headland.
‘My brother Syd was the first to turn in our household,’ said Jack. ‘I remember well how we brought him out here, Ma and Pa and me, when it came time to settle him. There’d been riots in some of the other settlements, with frightened people burning and hewing the new trees, and we didn’t want that for Syd.
‘By then Ma was changing too. I remember how her hand felt, holding mine. Hard and scratchy it was, but warm, like bark. And it took ages to walk up here, because she kept stopping and standing still. “Mammy, Mammy,” I’d go – I was only four-and-something – but she was already drifting away from us, thinking her tree thoughts. The following week she came up here herself, and stayed, and the week after that it was Pa’s turn. And then I was all alone. There was plenty of food to be had – it was high summer, remember, and a bumper harvest in the fruit cages and the market gardens that year. I looked after myself as best I could, and sat up here most of the time, waiting to change. But it never came to me.’
We climbed the last few feet to the top of the headland. The sea lay below us, gleaming like bronze in that strange, slow sunset. On the headland’s crown, among weathered rocks and soft blue grass, Jack’s father and mother and brother stood as if waiting for us, their leafy branches casting dappled shadows on our upturned faces. They made handsome trees, with their silvery bark and those pale green leaves that showed almost white when the wind rustled through them.
‘I kept thinking about this place,’ said Jack, ‘all the time they had me penned up a prisoner in Russell Square. Came back here as soon as I had the Sophronia. That was when I saw it would make a good place to lie low, and make repairs and such.’
‘Oh, come,’ said Myrtle, following him down into a gentle dell between the three trees. Her heart had been touched by the picture he had painted for us of that lone little boy in the abandoned town, and she wanted a happy ending to the tale. She said (but quite sweetly), ‘I am sure you were not really a prisoner. Presumably the gentlemen of the Royal Xenological Institute treated you with kindness?’
‘Funny sort of kindness,’ scoffed Jack. He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he sat down with his back to a stone, and gestured for us to do so too. And there, in the twilight of the Morning Star, beneath the spreading trees who had been his family, he told us his story.
Chapter Ten
A Brief Digression, in the Course of Which We Learn Certain Facts Concerning the Early Life and Adventures of Jack Havock.
Imagine London. Imagine the capital of Great Britain; the Heart of Empire; the largest and the greatest city in all the worlds of the Sun. Imagine the launching towers of the aether-ships, rising above the rooftops of Shoreditch and Wapping like a mighty forest, the masts of seabound shipping in the Thames another, and in the east the shaft of Mr Brunel’s new space elevator, shining in the sunlight. Imagine the Houses of Parliament, the palaces and villas, the endless bustle in the teeming streets. And now imagine a boy growing up in the heart of such a city, but hidden away, locked up, knowing nothing of the world beyond the dark, echoey building in which he lived, nothing of the outside world at all except for the drear, high-walled garden where he was allowed to play sometimes.
The Institute (as he learned to call the place) smelled of wax polish and formaldehyde and carbolic soap. There was a kitchen in the basement from which stodgy meals emerged at regular intervals, along with an odour of boiled cabbage. The women who worked in the kitchen sounded cheerful; sometimes Jack was able to press his ear to the door and hear their voices; their muffled laughter. But they were not allowed to talk to him, or come out of their kitchen into the dreary halls.
There were lots of scientific gentlemen in the Institute, and lots of mechanical servants, but the mechanicals could not speak, and the gentlemen spoke only to each other.
There were also other inmates. Other children? Jack was not sure. They were not human beings. He saw them sometimes, walking in the garden, or passing along the corridors in the care of sombre, dark-coated doctors and professors. A pair of things like walking sea anenomes, specimens from Sir Abednego Steam’s recent expedition to the ocean-moon of Ganymede. A giant land-crab, known as Nipper, who had been collected on the same trip, and who now served as a sort of general dogsbody7 to the Institute. A simple, harmless monster, Nipper was often to be heard humming to himself as he patiently swept the endless stairs and corridors, or black-leaded the grates. Jack liked Nipper. He was always friendly, and sometimes, returning from some errand in the outside world, he would smuggle in a pastry for Jack, hidden in some nook of his shell. The pastries usually ended up tasting slightly of fish, but Jack was still glad of them, and glad of Nipper’s friendship.
He felt less sure about another monster, the slender blue lizard-thing with spines for hair, who smiled at him sometimes, a smile so full of sharp teeth that he thought it must want to eat him. He always felt uneasy when he had to go past the lizard-thing’s room, number seventy-six, in the west wing. He heard the lizard-thing crying in there once, and he was afraid it was crying from hunger and might pop out and gobble him up if it heard him passing by.
Jack had a room of his own, high up under the roof, with a window looking down into a courtyard. An iron bed and a wash-stand. Scratchy clothes in dark colours hanging in a cupboard. There was a cupboard full of toys too: colourful blocks and balls, lead soldiers, model aether-ships, a woollen rabbit that Jack loved and would secretly cuddle each night when he went to bed.
Each day, ever since he could remember, began with lessons. He studied History and English and the Scriptures. Also Mathematics, which he was good at. Then there was luncheon, always the same: brown bread and grey soup. Then a walk in the garden. Then more lessons, except sometimes the doctors would take him into one of the big rooms on the ground floor, where the light came in wanly through tea-coloured blinds. It was a lecture theatre, and stern old faces would stare down at him from the steep-raked banks of mahogany seats, as the gentlemen of the Institute measured him and asked him questions, and made him play odd little games with balls and numbers. Then they would a
ll whisper among themselves, scribbling notes in their big black books.
‘Still no sign of infection …’ Dr Allardyce might say, sounding disappointed.
‘He appears to be a normal, healthy child,’ Professor Snead might agree, purse-lipped.
‘He is a normal, healthy child, Snead,’ Dr Ptarmigan would hiss. ‘When will you admit that and let him out of here?’
Then the others would shake their heads and murmur, ‘Too risky, Ptarmigan,’ and, ‘Can’t be sure,’ and, ‘Much more evidence required,’ packing away their papers and pencil cases, leaving the pale, nervous young Dr Ptarmigan to lead Jack back up the spiral stairways to his room.
Dr Ptarmigan was different from the rest. Kinder. More inclined to see Jack as a person, not a thing. Once or twice, shyly, Dr Ptarmigan brought Jack a gift – a toy from some shop out in the invisible streets beyond the Institute’s high walls – a book called Sea Stories for Boys, which Jack read and read, drinking in tales of pirates and buccaneers and places where the skies were blue, not smoke-coloured.
It was Ptarmigan, of course, to whom Jack turned when he was older and beginning to wonder, Why am I here?
‘What is this place, Dr Ptarmigan?’ he asked, one ditch-dank November Wednesday.
‘This is the Royal Xenological Institute,’ the young doctor replied. ‘It is where we study anomalous specimens of unearthly life.’
Jack looked at his hands. He knew he was a darker, richer colour than pasty Dr Ptarmigan and the other gentlemen who studied him, but in all other ways he seemed much like them. He said, ‘Am I such a specimen?’
‘Why no, Jack! You are as human as I. At least …’
‘What?’
The pale young man looked awkward. His Adam’s apple bobbed down to hide behind his high, starched collar and popped back up again. He led Jack into a gallery filled with the bones of fossil Icthyomorphs, deserted except for Nipper, who was patiently sweeping in a far corner, and there he told him quickly of the fate that had befallen Jack’s parents.