Arabella of Mars

by David D. Levine

  The result was, even she had to acknowledge, extremely untidy, being executed with an instrument only middling sharp and without the aid of a looking-glass, but as she pulled the cap low on her brow she reflected that it was not much worse than the rest of her outfit.

  But still … worn, ill-fitting, and stolen though her clothing might be, what a relief it was to have her legs properly covered again! No more would she suffer the indignity of a skirt catching on a protruding branch, nor be forced to concern herself with the prying eyes of the public upon her exposed flesh.

  Her outfit was no thukhong—how she missed that warm, comfortable leather garment!—but in it she nonetheless felt ready for any eventuality.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Arabella swaggered along, hands in her pockets and arms a-kimbo, aping her brother’s confident stride as best she could. Ahead on the path lay an inn, where she hoped she might obtain something to eat and perhaps directions to a mail-coach or stage-coach. To cover her anxiety, she whistled loudly in what she intended as a manly fashion. She hoped she had made no dreadfully obvious mistakes with her unaccustomed garments.

  The inn still lay some five hundred yards distant when she heard, and then saw, a black-and-scarlet mail-coach approaching along the road. She burst into a run, holding on to her breeches at the waist to keep them from sliding down to her ankles and hoping the wad of fabric that filled out the front did not fall too badly out of place.

  As she rushed along, her brains rattling in her head from each blow of her heels on the path in Earth’s heavy gravity, she saw the coach come to the inn, draw to a halt, and the guard at the rear of the carriage hand down a packet of mail to the innkeeper. The coach seemed to be just on the brink of departing.

  But finally, stumbling, panting, and catching at her falling breeches, she leaned heavily against the side of the coach before it left. “I should like,” she gasped, pitching her voice as low as she could, “to take passage, to London.”

  “You are in luck, my lad,” the driver said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s one seat open inside.”

  “Bless you, sir.” But as she reached for the door handle, the driver blocked the door with his hand.

  “Seventeen shillings sixpence, sir.”

  “Sev—!” Arabella’s mouth hung open at the shocking fare.

  “Outside’s cheaper, but there’s none left.” The four dusty and miserable-looking men seated on the coach’s roof regarded Arabella with red-eyed indifference. “Or you could take the stage tomorrow for half the price. But this here’s the Royal Mail, and we waits for no man. So what’s it to be, lad, stay or go?”

  Seventeen shillings sixpence was nearly all the money that remained in her pocket. But one day’s delay could make the difference between intercepting her cousin in London and watching in helpless despair as his ship sailed away into the interplanetary atmosphere. “I shall go,” she said, and counted out the coins.

  Before she had even properly seated herself, the coach jolted into motion, slamming her into the wall on one side and her neighbor on the other in irregular alternation. She felt rather like a hat being rattled about in a hat-box, and the noise precluded all conversation.

  It was not until the coach was halfway to Tetsworth that she realized she had successfully posed as a boy without being questioned.

  * * *

  The day passed as though in a fever. She slept fitfully as the coach jolted along, often waking with a fellow traveler’s elbow in her ribs or coat-button in her eye. She had no idea where they were; from where she sat she had only a sliver of a view through the tiny window. In the darkness and noise of the lurching coach, conversation was impossible even if she had desired it.

  Her stolen clothing itched at her conscience as badly as the worn and rustic fabric itched at her body. For the hundredth time she told herself that she had had no choice—that, despite the great hardship she knew her theft would cause some unknown farmer, the risk to her brother’s life was greater still. Yet she knew her beloved Khema would be terribly disappointed in her.

  She remembered the automaton dancer—a tiny doll, less than two feet tall, which had leapt and pirouetted most realistically when its key was wound. It had been her favorite of all her father’s automata, and very dear to him as well.

  Until one day she had, in a foolish excess of enthusiasm, turned the key one too many times. The mainspring had snapped with a hideous metallic twang, leaving the dancer frozen in mid-leap.

  She had been in the dunes behind the drying-sheds, desperately shoveling sand over the broken device, when Khema had found her. “What is this, tutukha?” she’d said.

  “It’s my father’s automaton dancer,” Arabella had replied, her voice quavering. “It … it broke, and I thought that if I took it away and buried it he wouldn’t notice it was gone.”

  Khema’s eye-stalks had curved back in skepticism. “It broke, did it? And I am sure that you had nothing to do with this?”

  Exhausted and still all a-flutter from her frantic rush to conceal the damaged automaton, Arabella had been able to do nothing more than shake her head.

  Khema had bent down to Arabella’s level, her black and subtly faceted eyes fixed on Arabella’s. “We Martians have a concept we call okhaya,” she had said. “In English you would say ‘personal responsibility,’ though that does not quite convey how very important okhaya is to us. We believe very strongly that if one does something wrong, one should immediately admit it and make amends. To conceal a bad action, or even worse to lie about it, brings very great dishonor.” She had sat back on her heels then, the sand crunching beneath the complex carapace of her knees. Silently waiting.

  Arabella had withstood that calm, expectant gaze for no more than a few seconds before bursting into tears and admitting her crime.

  The automaton had not been repairable, and she had had no desserts for a month. But, though he was terribly cross at the damage, her father had said he was proud of her for her confession.

  Suddenly the coach halted and the door was flung open, making her blink in the unaccustomed light. “London!” cried the driver. “All out!”

  * * *

  Arabella stumbled out into a vast confusion. Horses, men, and ladies milled all about in a riot of gaudy colors, the noise of hoofbeats and shouted conversations adding to her bewilderment. Buildings of brick and stone towered three and four stories on every side. A terrific smell of soot and dust and offal assaulted her nostrils.

  “Get out there, you!” someone shouted. She turned to see a coach-and-four thundering down upon her, and threw herself from its path only to collide with a woman in a fashionable green dress. “Take a care, you guttersnipe!” she cried, and shoved Arabella rudely away.

  Heart pounding, Arabella scrambled to the nearest wall and pressed herself against it, trying her best not to be trampled.

  It was the most people she had ever seen in one place in her entire life. The whole population of Shktetha Station, a small town north of Woodthrush Woods, could have fit into this one street without crowding, but this mob of people filled the street and the next one and the one after that … on and on to the limits of the vast metropolis.

  The very thought made her giddy.

  This was not the first time she had been in London, of course; she had passed through the city when she had arrived on Earth last year. But on that occasion, weak and debilitated after a four-month aerial journey, she and her mother and sisters had been carried from the ship directly into a private carriage and conveyed immediately to Marlowe Hall. Too enervated to even raise her head, her impression of London had been little more than a blur.

  And now she found herself in the thick of it. Lost, bewildered, friendless, nearly penniless, dressed as a boy in a suit of stolen clothes, she had to find her cousin Simon somewhere in this enormous crowd and stop him before he could take passage to Mars.

  * * *

  The coach had deposited her in front of an inn called The Navi
gator, whose sign showed a man seated at a writing-desk with a map spread out upon it. If the mail-coach from Oxford always arrived here, Simon might have spent the night here. He might even still be here, awaiting passage to Mars.

  Arabella drew herself straight, pulled up her breeches, and took a deep breath before entering. Then she paused and adjusted her padding, which had slipped down to her knee. This business of being a boy was not easy.

  The inn was as bustling with people within as the street had been without. Raucous conversation babbled at every table, adding up to a terrible din. Looking around, she identified a lean and unfriendly-looking fellow stacking dishes behind the bar as the likely proprietor.

  “If you’re looking for a room,” the barman said as she drew near, “we’re full up.”

  “No, I am looking for my cousin,” she said. It was difficult to pitch her voice low, like a boy’s, while at the same time raising it to be heard above the tumult of the crowd. “Simon Ashby, from Oxford. He would have come in on the mail-coach yesterday.” She could only hope that Simon was not traveling under an assumed name; if he were, the chances of finding him were slim indeed.

  With an annoyed sigh, the barman set down his dishes and shifted to the other end of the bar, where he drew out an account-book from a cupboard. “No one by that name,” he said after running his eye down the last page.

  Arabella’s heart fell, but only a little. It would have been unreasonably good fortune to have found Simon in the first place she looked. “Thank you for looking, anyway.”

  The barman shrugged. “I hope you find him.” He stuck out his hand. “Best of luck, Master…?”

  Awkwardly Arabella took the proffered hand, which gripped her own with crushing force. “Ashby,” she stammered as her hand was briskly pumped. “Ara … Arthur Ashby.”

  * * *

  Arabella spent the rest of that day calling at inn after inn looking for her cousin. Sometimes she received concerned, solicitous aid, other times a brusque rebuff, but no one admitted having seen any one by that name.

  What would she do, she thought as she walked, if she did find him? She was smaller than he, and weaker, and he might be carrying his pistol, so she would be foolish to attack him physically. She could denounce him to all the people around when she found him, and importune them to assist her in detaining him. But all she had against him was an accusation—she held no proof that he had imprisoned her, nor that he planned to murder her brother.

  But still … the accusation, together with the pistol, might carry some weight with the local magistrate. When she found Simon, she would have to make enough noise that the two of them would be detained by the constables; once she had explained herself, surely, as the Gospels promised, the truth would make her free.

  As plans went, she had to confess, this was not much of one.

  A merry sound of chimes distracted her from her concerns, and she looked up to find herself in front of a clockmaker’s shop. A clockmaker’s shop that also sold automata.

  Prominently presented in the shop window was a fine specimen of an automaton—an artist seated at a drawing-desk, about three feet high. A display model, designed to demonstrate the maker’s skills, only the right half of its body was clothed. The left half lay open to the air, displaying its gears and works.

  But though the mechanism was impressively complex and finely made, it was flawed. The automaton bent and dipped its pen and scratched out its work with a cunning and lifelike motion, but the drawing that emerged—a ship at sea, its sails flying—had a long horizontal line drawn right through the middle of it. Several more copies of the same drawing were visible within the shop, on sale for a penny apiece, and each one was marred by the same error.

  The fine automaton was damaged, just as her life had been damaged by Simon’s perfidy.

  With grim determination she turned from the shop window and continued to the next inn.

  4

  THE AERIAL DOCKS

  Arabella awoke the next morning to a brusque kick and an order to “move along” from the keeper of the shop in whose alley she had spent the night. Stiff, cold, and miserable, she parceled out a few coins from her nearly empty purse for a stale bun and a drink from a shared water cup.

  At some point to-day, she reflected as she gnawed on the tough bread, she would have to find some way to send word to her mother about what had occurred at Simon’s. But her prime concern was to find and stop Simon.

  * * *

  Having finished her paltry breakfast, she determined that she would concentrate her attentions on the inns nearest the aerial ship docks. If Simon were still in London, she thought, he would no doubt have taken lodging there.

  The docks were not difficult to find. With Mars in opposition, dozens of Mars-bound ships were departing each day, floating up into the sky like Newton’s Bubble—the soap bubble in the great man’s bath which had led him to the principle of aerial buoyancy. All she had to do was follow their path down to its origin.

  The Mars Docks, once she arrived, proved to be a riot of clamor and noise that made the London streets on which she had spent the previous day seem bucolic by comparison. Men and beasts labored, hauling boxes and barrels to and from the docks; sweating stevedores walked in treadwheels, powering the cranes that lifted bales of cargo to the ships’ decks; hawkers cried the virtues of their products, ships, and services; and under all rumbled the ever-present roar of the great furnaces.

  But it was the Marsmen—the ships themselves—their masts swaying as they bobbed on the tide, that drew Arabella’s attention. Smaller than the seagoing ships they resembled, they differentiated themselves by being constructed of honey-blond khoresh-wood, which gleamed like gold in the early morning sun.

  Without khoresh-wood, or “Marswood” as the English styled it, Marsmen would be tiny ships like the fragile little Mars Adventure in which the brave Captain Kidd had been the first Englishman to reach Mars. Kidd had been very lucky to survive his arrival on Mars, and if not for his discovery of the khoresh-tree he would not have returned. Stronger than oak but lighter than wicker, khoresh-wood was now both the major item of Martian export and the material that made interplanetary travel practical.

  And with that thought, the sough of wind in the spars and rigging made her ache with homesickness, reminding her as it did so painfully of the similar sound made by the Martian wind in the khoresh-trees of Woodthrush Woods. Perhaps some of these brave ships might be built of wood from her family plantation … the very plantation where, even now, Michael might be taking toast with guroshkha-jam and planning his day.

  Her stomach clenching at the responsibility that had fallen to her, she continued down toward the docks, hoping against hope that she might not be too late.

  * * *

  The inns of the Mars Docks were mostly on Rotherhithe Street, grand imposing structures with names like The Asteroid, The Khoresh-Tree, and The Thork, whose sign depicted a Martian warrior, properly a thorakh, with the traditional oval shield and forked spear. The Martian shown on the sign had clearly not been drawn from life; though his spear and shield were reasonably authentic, his carapace—painted as a hard, unnatural red—was far shorter and wider than any actual Martian’s, and his hands were simple two-pincered claws like those of an Earth crab. Also, he was naked as a savage, lacking the true thorakh’s colorful battle dress.

  Simon’s purse, Arabella reflected, would be heavy with the money obtained from pawning his family silver, and he planned to return richer still, so she selected the largest and most luxurious inn of them all, The Martian King, to begin with. The inn’s sign depicted a figure having a Martian’s eye-stalks and mouth-parts, but otherwise human, in the garments of a Medieval English monarch; the wide and solid door was of khoresh-wood, a pointless luxury.

  The keeper of the inn affected a buff coat, aping those of Company ships’ captains, and a haughty attitude likewise. “We’ve no need of errand-boys today,” he said as Arabella approached.

  “I am lo
oking for my cousin,” she replied, undeterred. Dozens of similar encounters in the last day had inured her to any amount of hauteur. “Simon Ashby, from Oxford. Have you a guest by that name?”

  The innkeeper’s expression showed clearly that he did not believe any cousin of such a shoddy-looking figure as Arabella could possibly be a guest at his fine establishment, but he did consult his guest-book. “No, we have not…,” he said without looking up.

  “Thank you anyway.” She turned to leave.

  “He departed just this morning.”

  That stopped Arabella where she stood. “What?”

  “Are you deaf as well as ill-mannered, young man? I said that he departed this morning.”

  Arabella’s heart hammered in her chest. “Did he say where he was going? I have … I have some important news for him.”

  The innkeeper peered at his guest-book. “It says here that he booked passage on the Marsman Earl of Kent.”

  At this news Arabella’s pounding heart seemed to stop cold.

  * * *

  “Earl of Kent!” Arabella shouted as she ran toward the docks, the cobbles slick under her feet. “Earl of Kent! Where is the Marsman Earl of Kent?”

  Passerby after passerby gave her no reply save an annoyed or disdainful glance. On she rushed, dodging dray-carts and stevedores rolling heavy barrels. “Where is the Earl of Kent?” Finally one stranger pointed, saying something about the Heron Place dock.

  But this new intelligence seemed only to make her search the harder, as she now sought two targets rather than one. Again and again she doubled back, chasing up and down the sea-wall, importuning strangers for directions and trying to sort out contradictory advice. No one seemed to know where the Earl of Kent might be found.

  At last she found herself on a stinking, filthy wharf at the foot of Heron Place. Surely this was the dock the stranger had indicated, yet the ship that bobbed nearby was no Marsman at all, merely a nameless cargo barge, and the area was practically unpopulated.