by Philip Reeve
‘So!’ chuckled Webster. ‘The Mumby boy sees fit to join us after all!’ And as the servants advanced on me, reaching out with their forelimbs, he added, ‘Bring him too! Bring him to the master!’
There was no point in struggling. They stripped me of my weapons, and I let them heave me up and carry me helterskelter down the funnel of their webs to a dark opening in the red-brown floor. As we reached that doorway, and they carried me through it, I realised that it was not a cave mouth in a captive planetoid, as I had thought. It was too regular, and the walls of the passageway beyond it were not of stone, but timber, neatly planked and fastened with good Sheffield steel. I was aboard an aether-ship, larger and finer than Sophronia, but no less earthly. I could even guess its name. It was HMS Aeneas! Those impudent spiders had captured it and woven it into their nest!
Cabins and staterooms passed me in a blur as I was hurried through that web-bound hulk in a knock-kneed scurrying of white legs and feelers. And then, suddenly, we were in the great cabin at the stern, where the face of Saturn shone in coolly through a spread of windows lightly fogged with web.
Jack sat there, looking pale faced and purplish around the lips, recovering, I guessed, from a dose of spider venom. And before him, in a fine wing chair, the spider’s master waited.
I had expected something monstrous, for it stood to reason that this spider-general must be vast and wicked indeed if even Mr Webster called him ‘master’. But our captor-in-chief was no monster at all; just a man. A small, slight man, with an apologetic sort of face and no chin to speak of, dressed rather eccentrically in clothes which had been woven for him out of spider web.
‘The Mumby whelp,’ said Webster, by way of introduction, as his minions let go of me and I drifted slowly down to the deck.
‘Arp?’ said Jack. His mouth was too numb yet for him to speak clearly, but he had a good try. ‘You rebebber be pelling you bout optor arbigan?’
‘Jack is trying to tell you that he and I are old friends,’ said our host, with a kindly smile. He stood up, and walked towards me, holding out his hand. ‘Doctor Phineas Ptarmigan at your service.’
Chapter Seventeen
In Which Some Projected Improvements to Our Solar System are Described.
I declare, you could have knocked me down with a feather, had I not already been lying on the deck. Dr Ptarmigan picked me up and dusted me down, and as he did so I saw that he was wearing Myrtle’s locket around his neck. It hung against his spider-web cravat as if it were brand new and rested on a bed of cotton wool in a jeweller’s case. He saw me look at it, and his hand went to it. ‘The key, Art, yes. Jack was kind enough to bring it to me.’
‘But …’ I said, and then could not think of anything to add, so I said it twice more, thus: ‘But … But …’
Dr Ptarmigan smiled modestly. ‘I can see that my presence here confuses you, Art. Jack too, perhaps?’
‘Ib bubby bib! ’ agreed Jack.
‘You were assuming that I had perished along with my expedition, lost somewhere upon the trackless aether between Saturn and the moons of Jove?’ asked Ptarmigan. ‘Well, I confess that pleases me. You see, that is exactly what I hoped the great world would assume. When you knew me, Jack, I was just a humble toiler in the vineyards of natural philosophy, but even then I was preparing this plan. Shall I tell you everything, so that you may see it plainly?’
Neither Jack nor I showed any great enthusiasm, but that did not trouble Dr Ptarmigan. He was one of those villains who likes to explain his plots and machinations, in case his victims have failed to understand how fiendishly clever he is.
‘Many years ago,’ he began, ‘the manager of a comet mine sent me a specimen he had unearthed from the ice in one of his shafts. It was unlike anything else I had seen. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. It was somewhat like a spider.
‘Sensing that this was the discovery that might make my name, I began to investigate. I travelled to Mars and the lesser asteroids. I made the acquaintance of the reclusive Sir Waverley Rain, and was allowed to inspect his unrivalled collection of Martian antiquities. And slowly, “through a glass darkly” (as St Paul would have it), I began to see the truth.’
He turned and strolled away from me towards the window, moving with great ease in that faint gravity. His cobweb clothes billowed in the breezes that blew through cracks in the panes, and all the time he kept declaiming like an actor on the stage. I began to see a truth myself: Jack’s Dr Ptarmigan was not entirely right in the noddle.
‘Boys,’ he said, waving his arms about so that the lacy webs around his wrists flip-fluttered, ‘you must understand that this solar realm which we inhabit is not ours at all. It does not belong to Britain’s Empire, any more than it belonged to the Martians in their time, or the lost race of Mercury in theirs. These planets which we call our home, and upon which we build our little, petty, squabbling nations, should not even be here! They had no part in our Creator’s plan! Look, I shall show you. Observe, my friends, the wizardry of the First Ones, whose machines are as far beyond ours as ours are beyond the simple stone tools of the Tasmanian aborigine.’
He pointed to a nasty big cobweb which stretched across a corner of the cabin, spun between two of the wooden buttress things which we old aether dogs call ‘knees’. I glanced towards Jack, thinking, This fellow is as mad as a milliner, and I could see by the look in Jack’s eye he thought so too. But just then an amazing thing happened, which you would need someone far wiser than me to explain. The web Ptarmigan pointed at began to shiver and shimmer, to glimmer and to glow. And like a magic-lantern slide being projected on a curtain, a picture appeared there – except that I am quite certain there was no magic lantern in that cabin, and what is more, this picture moved!
I gawped at it, so entranced that I did not stop to wonder what it was a picture of, till Dr Ptarmigan set me straight.
‘You are looking at the Sun,’ said he, pointing to a fiery orb that burned most prettily at the middle of a vast, slow-turning, milky ring or disc. ‘But as you will note, it is a much younger, brighter, whiter sun that the one we know today. And around it the aether sea is not ruled by planets, but is filled instead with slowly circling bands of rubble and ice. Strange eddies sweep through these rings of ruin; planetoids collide one with another; some are destroyed, others flung out of the slow dance to wander for ever as lonely comets. Boys, this is an image of a time before the worlds were formed, when the whole of the Solar System had no more form than the rings of Saturn, enlarged to a gigantic scale! This is the world that the Creator built for his chosen ones!’
And the picture changed, showing the whirling rocks and planetoids which he had mentioned, and the skeins of web which tied them all together. From the places where fleet-foot Mercury now orbits all the way to the realms of Uranus and Pluto, all was under the dominion of the white spiders! On plains of web as broad as continents, palaces of silken thread arose. On silken parachutes the spiders’ young went soaring outwards on the solar wind to colonise clumps of lonely stone still further from the Sun. Spider musicians stretched harps of web across the sky, and filled the aether with their music. Spider artists caught sunlight in great discs of web, and broke it into rainbows. It really was all quite pretty.
‘This is the world that was ours,’ said Mr Webster, who had been watching the moving pictures over my shoulder. ‘For a million years we ruled here. Great were the cities we wove, the gossamer machines that we devised. Our webships sailed to other stars, and on towards the island galaxies. And then …’
‘And then the Shaper came,’ said Dr Ptarmigan, and shook his head, and used a cobweb handkerchief to wipe away a tear.
The moving pictures filled with destruction now: webs crumpled and tore; spiders went tumbling into the night. The rocks and planetoids which had been their home began to collide faster and faster, clumping into stony fists. The bigger they grew, the harder they were bombarded by smaller rocks, by ice mountains which burst and spilled water across their dry surfaces. Hu
ge swirling clouds of gas which had been the backdrop to the spider cities tightened into balls and began to spin. And in the midst of all of it, I thought I glimpsed a strange craft riding the blasts of world-shuddering explosions, sending out pale rays which caught and steered yet more rocks into collision with the new-formed worlds. Fleets of spiny, jet-black spiderships flung themselves across the aether to do battle with it, and it swept them aside with a lash of light and sculpted their wreckage into the core of a minor moon.
A thousand million years passed like a sigh. The spiders were gone now. Where their lacy cities had once circled were the worlds I knew: Mars and Earth and Jupiter and all their fleets of moons.
‘The First Ones cannot live long on worlds like these,’ Dr Ptarmigan told us. ‘Gravity pulls too strongly at them there; their legs grow weak, their webs are warped. Once the Shaper built these worlds, the First Ones began to die. And on the new worlds, all kinds of vermin crept and crawled. Where once there had only been the purity of the First Ones, soon all kinds of beings raised up their ugly heads and thought themselves the masters of Creation. The First Ones took to weaving their webs among the asteroids, among lonely comet clouds in the dark beyond the outer worlds. But even there the new life grew, displacing and destroying them. They fought back when they could, destroying the space empires of Mars and Mercury. But slowly, one by one, they died, or left in search of new suns. Now only a handful survive; poor lonely outcasts among these Saturnian rings.’
Really, the way he went on, it was almost enough to make you blub. I had to keep reminding myself that what he was telling us was all fibs. Everyone knows (I thought) that the worlds of the Sun were made by God, in six days, like it says in Scripture.
Anyway, Dr Ptarmigan seemed to have concluded his lecture. He took Myrtle’s locket from around his neck and toyed with it, smiling at Jack and me all the while.
‘All this I learned from the ancient texts in Sir Waverley’s collection,’ he said proudly. ‘And the more I discovered, the more clearly I saw the truth. The First Ones are the true masters of the aether, and ourselves and the other races merely interlopers, the puppets of that wicked Shaper who stole the First One’s realm away from them.’ (Mr Webster purred in agreement at that.) ‘So I decided to make amends. I began to petition the Government about an expedition to Saturn, and volunteered myself as its chief naturalist, thus giving myself the chance to speak with the First Ones, whom only I knew we would meet here. I was not disappointed! The rest of the ship’s company were seized as soon as we sailed into the web-maze, but the spidergeneral, the noble creature you know as Mr Webster, was impressed enough by my knowledge of his ancient language to stay his stinger, and we soon became firm friends.’
‘Ptarmigan has promised that he will help us to reclaim what is ours,’ said Mr Webster.
‘Quite so,’ agreed Dr Ptarmigan. ‘There are few of the First Ones left now. This web-city is a mere feeble echo of the glories which once were theirs, and they live a sad life here, devouring space moss and the creatures they trap in their nets. They had quite lost hope, till I arrived to cheer them. But with my encouragement Mr Webster has salvaged one of their ships, the only one of the First Ones’ spine-ships to have survived from the olden times. It is far superior to our gimcrack earthly aether-ships. We repaired it using some bits and pieces from the Aeneas and I used it to travel in secret to Mars, where I tried to convince Sir Waverley Rain to join our cause. Alas, he lacked the vision to see our point of view, and we were forced to remove him. He is sleeping peacefully in the web-chamber above us, and his place in the great world was taken by a cunningly crafted automaton, controlled by one of Mr Webster’s smaller colleagues.’
‘A little tiny chap,’ agreed Webster, holding up a foreleg with the pincers about six inches apart. ‘Bred him special for the task, we did.’
‘So that’s why the old fellow in the alcove looked familiar!’ I said to myself. I had seen his portrait many times, in the advertisements which Rain & Co. put out.
‘Alas, your troublesome sister and her friends smashed the false Sir Waverley,’ said Dr Ptarmigan.
‘My sister?’ I asked. ‘Myrtle?’ For I could not imagine Myrtle smashing automata. (Nor having friends, for that matter.) But Dr Ptarmigan was not to be distracted from his speech.
‘It does not signify,’ he said. ‘Our plans are well advanced, and little petty acts of human vandalism cannot upset them now.’
‘What plans?’ asked Jack, speaking much more clearly as the effects of the spider sting wore off.
‘Ah!’ cried Dr P., looking pleased that he’d asked. ‘You see, Jack, while studying the books in Sir Waverley’s unrivalled library I was able to confirm what Webster here has long suspected. The vessel which brought the Shaper here still exists! It hangs abandoned in space, its power forgotten.’
‘Larklight!’ said Jack.
‘That is what they call it now,’ Ptarmigan admitted.
‘But Larklight’s just a house!’ I cried. ‘No, it is more than a house; it’s a home! It is my home!’
Ptarmigan ignored my outburst. I suppose he did not want little things like people and their homes spoiling the grandeur of his great scheme to improve the Solar System.
‘Larklight!’ he said. ‘If I could control it, I might use it to undo everything the Shaper did. So I sent Mr Webster and some of his soldiers to secure it. And now, Jack, thanks to you, I have the key!’ (Here he paused to look fondly at Myrtle’s locket, which dangled from his long, pale fingers.) ‘I shall travel there at once, and go aboard and use the vessel’s gravitational engines to split apart the gimcrack worlds the Shaper made and spread a ring of ruin round the Sun where my friends may weave a new world for themselves. And in that world I shall live with them, and study their arts and their society.’
‘But the British will stop you!’ Jack shouted, and I thought it quite cheering that even a rogue like he put his faith in our Royal Navy when the chips were down. ‘They have hundreds of ships,’ he told Dr Ptarmigan. ‘Thousands of soldiers. They’ll never let you!’
‘Ha ha!’ Dr Ptarmigan chortled, in the fake sort of way that people use to laugh at vicars’ jokes at Harvest Supper. ‘We have plans under way to deal with them. Why, you yourself, with your crew of vermin, have run rings around the British Empire, Jack. Do you honestly believe that the First Ones will be troubled by them? By the time our great work begins, Britain will be in ruins, and all its fleets and armies leaderless.’
I put up my hand to ask a question. All this talk was very interesting, no doubt, but not once had Dr Ptarmigan said anything to explain what my dear departed mother was doing asleep in his webs upstairs.
‘Yes, Art?’ he said, with a patient smile.
‘You’ve got my mother asleep up there,’ I complained.
‘Of course,’ said he. ‘Sir Waverley as well. I would not let harm come to any of my really useful captives. Who knows when I might need them? I keep them close at hand, in the chamber above this ship.’
‘But why Mother?’ I demanded. ‘What makes her useful to you? She is just … just Mother!’
At that moment there was a great commotion just beyond the doorway. Spider-servants were twittering and chittering at each other, and Mr Webster’s eyes flashed with angry light as he turned his fat body to hear what they were saying.
‘What?’ cried Dr Ptarmigan, listening to the spider language. ‘They can’t have! You said you had caught them all!’
I had been so busy listening to Dr Ptarmigan expounding his dreams that it had not occurred to me to wonder had become of Ssillissa and Yarg, last seen darting into those alcoves in the web. Of course, as soon as the spiders had dragged me away they had set to work waking the rest of the crew, and cutting away the webs that bound them, and naturally the first thing they all did upon recovering their wits was to come and rescue Jack.
Poor Dr Ptarmigan looked quite taken aback at the thought that a party of assorted pests could outwit his First Ones. ‘Well,
stop them!’ he cried, springing to his feet, as terrible Grindle-ish curses and spidery squealings echoed down the companionway outside. I heard the familiar, rather cheering sound of Yarg and Squidley’s electric tentacles smiting spiders. Mr Webster shot out a claw to snatch Jack up, and I think he might have dashed him against a wall or bitten off his head, but just then I saw, all fogged and ripply through the cabin windows, the broad, reassuring shape of Mr Munkulus swinging towards us on a rope of spider silk, his big flat feet held out in front of him like a ram.
‘Look!’ I cried.
Mr Webster lowered Jack and turned himself to see. Dr Ptarmigan turned too, and as he did so Mr Munkulus came crashing into the cabin, filling it with a slow storm of shattered glass and splintered woodwork as his size-twenty-four space boots smashed the old stern-window to fragments!
Old Webster made a grab at him as he somersaulted through the cabin, but Munkulus was ready for him. Drawing a cutlass, he hewed off the spider’s forelimb, and it went backwards in a tangle of legs and a lazy spray of blood globs. Then Mr Munkulus drew another sword and tossed it towards Jack, who plucked it from the air as it cartwheeled past him. Together they turned on Mr Webster, but Mr Webster was already scrambling to escape, calling out in his own twittery tongue as he forced his way out through the cabin door.
‘What about the Earthlet?’ asked Mr Munkulus, looking towards Dr Ptarmigan, who was cowering behind his desk, his face as pale as his cobweb clothes.
‘Leave him,’ said Jack. ‘He was very good to me once.’
I had just enough of my wits left about me to run and snatch my sister’s locket from the fellow’s shaking hand. Then we plunged out all together into the dim passageways of that ghost ship, and found Ssillissa and Grindle waiting there, among a heap of clutched white baskets that had been spider-soldiers. ‘Come on!’ they hollered, and ‘Jack!’ and things, and we followed them back up the passage that Mr Webster and his myrmidons had dragged me down, until we burst out into the space and light of the web-chamber. The rest of the crew were there, looking down at us from that line of alcoves high above, and with them was Mother.