Oliver and the Sea Monkeys

by Philip Reeve

  Iris pulled him aboard, and he ran and hugged Mom, then Dad. The ancient submarine was sinking fast, but Cliff waded over and supported it before it could settle to the seafloor.

  “Wow! That was really amazing!” said a strand of Sarcastic Seaweed, hanging down in front of Cliff’s face, and it sounded as if it really meant it.

  The other islands shuffled closer, trying to look as if they had been right at Cliff’s side all along and not a bit scared of the Thurlstone. Some mumbled that Cliff had done well; others explained that they had never trusted the Thurlstone. A few of the quicker-thinking ones scooped up bits of the Thurlstone’s scattered wig and added them to their own, because it was pretty clear that a new winner would have to be chosen.

  It was Dambulay who was the first to say “Thank you.” She looked at Iris and Oliver, then at Cliff. “Thank you. You have saved us from awarding the greatest honor of our kind to a bad creature who did not deserve it. You have been brave, while we were cowardly. What is your name?”

  “Cliff,” said Cliff, blushing a bit. “This is my seawig,” he added, scooping up the Water Mole and setting it on his top again. “The Thurlstone stole it from me. There were some other bits too, but they got lost.”

  The Rambling Isles all looked at him. The Water Mole did not look nearly as splendid on top of Cliff as it had when the Thurlstone wore it. The strands of weed that he had carried with him from the Sarcastic Sea did their best to look decorative, and Mr. Culpeper perched on the Water Mole’s bow with his wings outspread, but it still looked a bit shabby and scruffy. Even so, Dambulay turned to the other islands and said, “I think it is clear what we must do. Cliff is the bravest of us, and his seawig is certainly the most…interesting. He is the winner of this Night of the Seawigs.”

  “Yay!” shouted Iris and Oliver and Mr. Culpeper. Mr. and Mrs. Crisp clapped politely—they were a bit confused, but they were starting to get the hang of things. Even the weed looked pleased.

  But Cliff slowly shook his head.

  “Not me,” he said. “I can’t hang around here in the Shallows, being feted and fussed over. I don’t care about this Seawig competition anymore. Let Thrumcap be the winner, or Dimsey. I have to take my friends home.”

  Then, with all the other Rambling Isles looking on, he turned and waded away. Up on his head Mr. and Mrs. Crisp fetched out their cameras and took photo after photo of the watching isles and the mermaids. But either because of some magic of the Shallows or because the cameras had been battered too badly during their adventures, not one of those pictures ever came out.

  As for Oliver, he just clung to the Water Mole’s barnacled rail and stared, trying to take it all in. He saw the unearthly purplish sky and the pale sea, the white horses galloping in the wave crests, the mermaids playing in Cliff’s wake like dolphins. He saw the Rambling Isles in all their finery. He did his best to fix it in his mind forever, and unlike the photographs, his memories did come out. He kept them always, and they never faded.

  Not far away, a fragment of the roof from the Thurlstone’s temple floated on the waves. Stacey de Lacey sat on it, bedraggled and alone, using another, smaller piece of flotsam for a paddle. He was paddling himself away from the Hallowed Shallows as quickly as he could. He was hoping that, if the sea stayed calm and the wind in the right direction, he might paddle all the way home. He wondered if his parents had noticed that he’d been away.

  “Eep?” said a little voice. Webbed paws appeared over the edge of his raft. A sea monkey pulled itself aboard and snuggled down against Stacey’s left knee. He patted its head, feeling rather glad that he still had a friend left.

  “Eep!” said another monkey, scrambling out of the sea behind him.

  “Eep! Eep! Eeber! Eeeple!” said a dozen more.

  “No!” cried Stacey. “Back in the sea with you! There isn’t room!”

  But there’s no arguing with sea monkeys, and the sea around his raft was green with them. They swarmed aboard. When there wasn’t a single inch of bare wood left without a little wet green body sitting on it, they started sitting on Stacey de Lacey instead, and when there wasn’t a single inch of him without a monkey, they took to sitting on top of each other, until a teetering, bickering mound of monkeys was piled high on the wallowing raft, with Stacey de Lacey in the middle of it somewhere, still glumly paddling.

  Mr. and Mrs. Crisp were very meek during the journey home. They knew that their terrible adventures had all happened because they’d been so eager to explore the islands, and they knew of the dangers that Oliver had braved to rescue them. “No more exploring for us,” they agreed, sitting with Oliver, Iris, and Mr. Culpeper beside the campfire they had lit on Cliff’s head.

  But Oliver knew they didn’t mean it. After all the thrilling new things they’d seen, they would soon be itching to go exploring again. They wouldn’t even have to worry about money anymore, because the old trunks that they’d dragged out of the Water Mole to use as seats around the fire turned out to be stuffed full of Spanish gold. For the moment, though, they seemed very happy to be safe and back with Oliver again. And they were happier still a few days later, when Cliff waded into Deepwater Bay, and they saw their house and the dear old explorermobile standing where they had left them.

  Oliver wasn’t happy, though. He was glad to see dry land again, but he didn’t feel that surge of joy he’d felt when Dad drove them down the lane to the house that first day. He still wanted a home just as badly, but he wanted something else now too: he wanted to be with Cliff and Iris. He was going to miss them. He would even miss crotchety Mr. Culpeper.

  So he stood quietly watching while the shore came closer, and his mom and dad did a happy-to-be-home dance on Cliff’s golden sand. And when they said, “Look, Ollie, it’s our house!” and “Aren’t you glad to be back?” he nodded and said that he was. But Mr. and Mrs. Crisp could tell he wasn’t, and they looked solemnly at one another. They both knew how sweet and sad it could be to want two different things so completely.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Crisp, putting an arm around Oliver’s shoulders. “We’ll find a way.”

  Mrs. Crisp knelt down and tapped politely on Cliff’s forehead. “We were wondering,” she said, “if you’ve nowhere else to go, perhaps you’d like to stay here in Deepwater Bay? It looks so much nicer with an island in it.”

  So Cliff found a comfortable spot for himself just offshore, and that night the Crisp family slept in actual beds, inside a proper house, for the first time in years. (Iris made up a bed for herself in the bath.) Early the next morning Oliver took the dinghy up the coast to Farsight Cove with Iris swimming alongside.

  The beach optician was in his usual spot on the sand, and he looked very startled when Iris came out of the sea. He had never really believed in mermaids either, and his beach optician’s stall was just an excuse to get away from his noisy family and spend a few hours each day sitting quietly by the sea. But he hid his surprise as best he could, and tested Iris’s eyes, and presented her with a very fetching pair of spectacles.

  “Wow!” she said, gazing about her at the cliffs, the sand, the sea. Suddenly everything looked very sharp and clear. She wasn’t sure she liked it, though she supposed she would get used to it in time. “So that’s what you look like!” she said, peering at Oliver through the thick lenses. “Oh.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” asked Oliver.

  “Nothing,” said Iris.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Crisp had been drawing plans on the backs of old envelopes, and Mrs. Crisp had been telephoning local builders and asking if they would accept payment in ancient Spanish doubloons. It turned out that they would, and soon the Crisps’ old house had been dismantled and rebuilt on top of Cliff. (“It’s the best wig a Rambling Isle ever had!” he said delightedly when it was finished.)

  Of course that meant that there was no longer room for the Water Mole, but the old submarine wasn’t really suited to being out in the open air anyway, and its timbers were beginning to crumble as they
dried out. So they carefully lowered it to the bottom of Deepwater Bay, and Iris set up house inside it. When Oliver came home from school in the afternoons, he’d often dive down to visit her, holding his breath for as long as he could to see her latest improvements.

  Now that she could see clearly, Iris had grown rather house-proud, and she had gathered odds and ends from the seabed to decorate her new home. Oliver thought the old toilet bowl she had on display in the center of her kitchen table looked rather odd, but she’d arranged such a colorful collection of live sea anemones in it that he had to confess it brightened up the place. She’d also hung up several mirrors, which Oliver noticed were all cracked, but he was too polite to ask if she’d been singing. The more she showed him, the faster he’d nod and approve it all, as his cheeks went redder and redder from lack of air. But Iris was always pleased to see him making the effort.

  Even Mr. Culpeper stayed. He complained that the island was getting very built up, and he enjoyed telling other visiting birds that he could remember when it was all just rocks and grass. But he built himself a large, raggedy nest on the roof just above Oliver’s bedroom and enjoyed waking Oliver up each morning by leaning down and shouting “Time for school!” through the window. Oliver didn’t mind, though: he enjoyed school.

  Mr. and Mrs. Crisp made a little bridge to link Cliff to the mainland, wide enough for the explorermobile or the cars of visiting friends to drive across. But it wasn’t a permanent bridge: it could be folded back onto Cliff’s shores whenever the Crisps wanted to remember that they really did live on an island. And sometimes, on Oliver’s school holidays or on other days when they just felt like it, they’d say to Cliff, “This feels like an exploring day.” Then they would fold the bridge away, and Cliff would wade off in search of strange seas and forgotten coves, with Mr. and Mrs. Crisp safe and snug in their own living room, Mr. Culpeper keeping watch from his nest, and Iris and Oliver riding on the beach.

  It was by far the most comfortable way to go exploring.

  The trouble with space is, there’s so much of it.

  An ocean of blackness without any shore.

  A never-ending nothing.

  And here, all alone in the million billion miles of midnight, is one solitary moving speck. A fragile parcel filled with sleeping people and their dreams.

  A ship.

  To travel from the Earth to the moon takes a few days. From Earth to Mars, a few months. To Jupiter, a few years, and to Neptune and Pluto a few years more. But Astra was traveling farther still. Much, much farther. The world called Nova Mundi, where Astra and her family were going to live, was so far from Earth that it would take them 199 years to get there.

  yelled Astra when her mother first told her. “We can’t sit in a spaceship for one hundred and ninety-nine years! It’ll be so boring! There won’t even be anything to look at out of the window, even if spaceships have windows…which they probably don’t! And I’ll be old by the time we arrive! I’ll be…” She counted on her fingers. “I’ll be two hundred and nine years old! I’ll be all wrinkly!”

  But Astra’s mother just laughed, bouncing Astra’s baby brother, Alf, up and down on her knee until he laughed, too. “Don’t worry, Astra. We won’t be awake. When we go aboard the spaceship, we’ll get into special sleeping pods….”

  “Like beds?” asked Astra.

  “A little like beds,” agreed her father. “And a little like freezers.”

  “Won’t we be cold?” asked Astra with a shiver. She imagined herself snuggling down among the frozen peas and Popsicles, an ice cream cake for a pillow.

  “We won’t feel cold,” said her mother. “We won’t feel anything. We’ll be fast asleep. The machines that run the ship will cool us right down so that we don’t age. Then the ship will steer itself to Nova Mundi while we sleep, and when we get there it will wake us, and we’ll feel as if only a single night has passed. And we’ll be at our new home!”

  “A whole new world!” said Dad.

  “Nova Mundi!” said Astra.

  She was excited to be going to Nova Mundi. She had seen videos and pictures of it. She and Mom and Dad and Alf were going to live in a big house there, between the wide green ocean and the fern forests, with a garden of blue grass. They would work at making the new planet ready for other people from Earth.

  But she still didn’t like the sound of this long, cold journey, even if she was going to be asleep.

  “Will there be dreams?” she asked.

  “Only nice ones,” her mom promised.

  And that’s how it was. They took a shuttle from the spaceport.

  Straight up it went, slicing through the clouds, through the sunlit air above, right up into orbit. As it rose, the clutch of Earth’s gravity grew weaker and weaker, until it slipped away entirely and Astra felt herself grow weightless. Her hands floated up off her lap; her feet kept lifting from the floor. If it hadn’t been for the harness that held her in her seat, she would have drifted up and bounced off the ceiling. A few objects that the other passengers had forgotten to secure did just that. Pens and cameras and cuddly toys went tumbling through the cabin, and the shuttle crew flew after them, graceful as swimmers in clear water, catching the lost things and returning them to their owners.

  Everybody’s hair started to misbehave.

  “I feel sick!” complained a girl in a nearby seat, and her mother quickly passed her a bag. Astra’s dad looked a little bit green, too. “It feels like falling,” he said, taking a space-sickness pill.

  But Astra didn’t mind the feeling. She liked it! Falling felt good, as long as she didn’t have to worry about hitting the ground. She liked the thought that they were going to fall all the way to Nova Mundi.