Читать книгу The Plurality of Worlds - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER THREE

As Thomas awoke, the dream in which he had been languishing fled from consciousness, leaving him cast way in a sea of uncertainty. He did not know where he was, and could not remember where her ought to be. He opened his eyes convulsively, and looked wildly about, in spite of the light that flooded his eyes and dazzled him. He knew that something was wrong.

He remembered, belatedly, that he ought to be weightless, tethered to his couch in the cabin of the Queen Jane—but he was not. Nor, however, was he back on Earth. He was in the grip of affinity, but he felt lighter by far than he ever had on Earth.

A rough hand gripped his shoulder and steadied him. “Tom!” said the voice of Sir Francis Drake. “Thank God! I feared that you’d never wake up. Are you all right?”

“Aye,” said Tom, thickly, rubbing his eyes to clear a certain stickiness from his eyelids. “What did I swallow?”

“As to that, I don’t know,” Drake told him. “Nor do I know whether it’s still inside you—but I’ve seen creatures stranger by far than that one since you fell unconscious, on my honor. Field missed the show too, having fainted in alarm, but Walt and Ned were awake throughout, so I knew that I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Where are they?” Thomas asked—meaning Raleigh and de Vere, although Field was not there either.

“I don’t know,” Drake said. “Probably in a similar prison. Our captors might have recognized the two of us as the senior crewmen—or as the oldest of our company—but I doubt it.” Thomas observed that Drake’s face was scratched and that many of the scratches were somewhat inflamed.

The cell in which Thomas and Drake were apparently imprisoned was reasonably capacious, but all its alcoves were small and set above head-height, making it difficult to make out what they contained. Thomas looked down instead, to see that the “bed” on which he lay was a protuberance in the floor, not a wooden platform on legs. The floor, like the walls and ceiling, seemed to be composed of an organic substance akin to wood or tortoiseshell, but it seemed clean enough—much cleaner than the vast majority of England’s household floors. The floor was grey, but the colors and textures of the walls were very various, and the radiance that lit the space came from silvery ribbons swirling across the ceiling rather than any kind of flame. The doorway was oval in shape; there was no obvious catch securing the door, which might easily have been mistaken for a stopper in the neck of a jar.

“What stranger creatures have you seen?” Thomas asked, belatedly.

“Lunar moths with man-sized bodies and vast wings,” Drake said, tersely. “Grasshoppers walking on their hind legs, and ants too, somewhat taller than a man—and slugs the size of the elephants in the Tower menagerie, with castles of oyster-shell. I thought them brutally violent at first, for they’re very free with the attentions of their various antennae, limbs and slimy palps, but I don’t think they meant to injure us.” Thomas reached up to touch his own face, which was tender and itchy. His hands were no better, and the swelling made it difficult to flex his fingers.

“Are we on the moon, then?” Thomas asked, in frank bewilderment.

“In the moon,” Drake corrected him. “They flew us here, ethership and all, by the power of their multifarious wings, wrapped in a web of what I’d be tempted to call spidersilk were it not that spiders are one of the few creepy-crawlies I’ve not seen inflated to magnanimous dimensions hereabouts.”

“I’ve seen signs of life and movement while studying the moon in my father’s best peeping-glass,” Thomas said, in a low voice, “but I was never entirely sure that they were not a trick of the lens or the mind’s eye.”

“Master Dee’s hatches are a poor design,” Drake opined, “by comparison with the craters that serve as doorways to the moon—but the giants are not as large as all that. You couldn’t see them with a spy-glass any more than we could see elephants strolling in the African savannah were we to turn a telescope on the Earth from the lunar surface.”

“There were ants, you say?”

“Things somewhat reminiscent of ants—not to mention moths, bugs, beetles, and a hundred more types for which I cannot improvise names, all living in a single tempestuous throng. They collaborated in our capture, and....”

He broke off as the door opened. It did not swing on a hinge; the aperture dilated.

Thomas understood immediately what point Drake was trying to make. The four individuals who came through the door were all insectile, but they were analogues of very different Earthly species. They all walked upright on their hindmost legs, and their heads were equally bizarre, but their bodies were very different in color, texture and equipment. Two were winged, one like a butterfly and one like a dragonfly. Two were brightly colored, one striped like a wasp and the other spotted like a ladybird. Two were stout, two slender. Two were clutching objects in the “hands” attached to their intermediary limbs. Two were carrying implements of some kind in their forelimbs. All of them, however, hurried forward with no regard whatsoever for their captives’ personal space, and began touching them, with all manner of appendages.

Thomas fell back upon the bed, overcome by horror. He wanted to scream, but dared not open his mouth lest something even nastier than the ether-creature slip inside him. He closed his eyes, praying for the molestation to stop.

“Be still,” said a voice, pronouncing the words inside his head like one of his own vocalized thoughts. “Be patient. If you will relax, and let me use your limbs, I can communicate with at least one of them—I can explain the irritation in our flesh, and demand an antidote.”

Thomas inferred at first that one of the monstrous insects must be projecting the words into his head by some mysterious process of thought-transference—but then he remembered that there was already an alien presence within his skull: an etheric ghost that appeared to have dissolved its fragile substance in the flesh of his brain.

“What are you?” he demanded silently. He had made no conscious effort to relax, as he had been asked to, but he did not resist when he felt his hands moving of their own accord.

The insectile monsters seemed more startled by this contact than he had been by theirs. They withdrew their various feelers, and waited while his fingers danced upon the head of one of their number.

Thomas had to collaborate with his intimate invader, rising unsteadily to his feet in order to continue the tactile conservation more effectively. It was an authentic conversation now—the insect addressed by his mysterious passengers gestures was making its reply, in terms of rapid strokes of its antennae—but Thomas felt the irritation and inflammation in his flesh die down.

“I am explaining your origin,” his invader said. “Your nature too, although that is more difficult. I can understand why you think of me as an invader, but I mean you no harm any more than the members of the True Civilization do. It might help us both if you were to try to think of me as a guest.”

“What’s happening, Tom?” Drake asked. “What on Earth are you doing?”

“We’re not on Earth,” Tom retorted, abandoning the internal dialogue to speak aloud, “and it isn’t me who’s doing what I’m doing. It’s the ether-creature that wormed its way into me when the ship leaked. Somehow, it knows how to communicate with this creature. Perhaps it has traveled extensively in the minds of other creatures.”

“Good guess, mine host,” said the creature within him, silently. “You’re an exceptional creature, Thomas Digges, to have such trust in your own sanity. It often requires months or years to establish a rapport—but yours is a dreaming species, I suppose. That makes a difference—few species have that particular gift, or curse.”

Drake had fallen silent, direly puzzled. The insects, however, were frenetically busy in communication among themselves. Touch was only one of the senses they employed; they could not talk as human talked but they clicked and chittered, warbled and hummed. They spoke with their limbs and their wings, and various other kinds of apparatus that Thomas could not discern.

“I think that I have made the situation clear,” Thomas’ internal informant said. “I have asked to be taken to one of the queens’ chambers, since this world has no fleshcore, where we might converse with philosophers closer to the heart of the True Civilization. They will understand your nature, having mechanical analogues of your kind, even if they have not been studying you carefully from afar.”

“I have no idea what you are trying to tell me,” Thomas replied, silently. “All this is meaningless to me.”

“Be patient,” the silent voice said. “I will try to explain when I have the opportunity.

“If you and I are made in God’s image, Tom,” Drake said, softly “What manner of creator made creatures like these?”

It was not like Drake to speculate in such a fashion, but Thomas could understand his confusion very well. Preoccupied with his internal dialogue, however, and disturbed the incessant actions of his unbidden hands, he did not reply.

Drake did not seem to be offended by his rudeness. “Perhaps de Vere was right,” the crewman continued, “but if these are merely insects like those of Earth, what giants the men of the moon must be!”

Thomas knew that there was nothing mere about these insects. They had been investigating him with manifest intelligence—and still were, aided now by the voice of his invader...his guest. Like humans, they were sapient; like humans, they were curious. The ether-creature called theirs the True Civilization—and why should it not, given that they could fly through the ether between the worlds, to capture stray etherships and interrogate their crews?

When the insects crowding around his bed began to deploy the bulkier objects they were carrying he flinched and shied away, but they still did not appear to mean him any harm. He could not tell what was happening when the objects were pointed in his direction, but none of the monsters was touching him any longer, directly or indirectly. His own hands had been withdrawn from the face they had been fondling so strangely.

Thomas found time to say aloud: “All’s well, Francis. I don’t understand what’s happening yet, but they don’t mean to do us any injury.”

Drake was touching his face and inspecting the back of his hands. “That confounded itching’s stopped,” he observed. “Have they administered some antidote?”

“Yes,” Thomas told him. “They did not realize that we had been stung. The ether-creature seems to know a great deal more about what is happening here, and what is relevant to our welfare, than we do. If it has not visited the surface of the Earth, it must know others of its kind that have.

Drake actually struck a pose, then, and bowed gracefully to the four attentive monsters. “On behalf of Queen Jane of England,” he said, “I greet you, noble sirs. Shall we be friends, then? You don’t have the look of Spaniards about you, and God forbid that you might be Elizabethans....or the spirits of the dead, come to that. Was it Plutarch, Thomas, who first declared the moon to be a world akin to the Earth, where the souls of the dead reside?”

“Plutarch it was,” Thomas confirmed, “but I don’t think his soul is here before us, gathering material for more Lives.”

“Nor I,” Drake agreed. “Can you believe that Raleigh and de Vere could be as brave as we are being, under similar inspection? Not that it matters—by the time they tell the tale to the queen, they’ll have fought and vanquished whole Selenite armies, if Field can’t keep them honest—and we’ll never convince them that we had the bravado to act as we are while subject to such scrutiny. Please assure me that they’re not merely deciding the best way to cook and season us.”

The ether-creature seemed to know that Drake was joking, and did not trouble to reassure Thomas against this ominous possibility. Nor, however, did it forewarn Thomas that he was about to be seized in the upper arms of one of the unburdened creatures, and very thoroughly palpated, although it did say “Patience, Thomas!” once the assault began. Thomas felt his hands making some sort of reply, although he had no idea what it was—but he had a strange impression, as the creature withdrew again, that it was even more repulsed by the texture of his flesh than he was by the horror of the grip and the probing feelers.

“The neo-Platonists and Aristotelian diehards have a saying,” Drake muttered. “As above, so below—but this seems to me to be a very different world from the one we know. Men of that sort are mostly monists, though, who think that the moon is a mere lamp planted in the skies by providence to ameliorate the darkness of night in suitably teasing fashion, and that the stars are candles disposed to foretell our futures. Master Dee is no monist, is he—despite that he wrote a book called Monas Hieroglyphica?”

“He was converted to pluralism thereafter,” Thomas said. “Propadeumata Aphorisitica is his definitive statement. He is committed to the infinity of space and of worlds—and when I tell him of our adventure, he will also be committed to the infinite variety of form and virtue. These are intelligent beings, Francis—including the thing inside me—and I’m praying hard that they might be more virtuous in their treatment of fellow intelligent beings than the great majority of men. Take care!”

It was not he that had pronounced the final words, although they had been spoken aloud. Thomas was abruptly snatched from his bed, and Drake was seized.

“Have no fear!” said Thomas’ inner voice, silent again but still voluble. “They are doing as I have asked, and taking us to a visitor from the galactic core. With luck, he will order your release.”

Thomas and Sir Francis Drake were dragged from the room then, but they were both being held quite gently. They were no worse than lightly bruised as they were hustled along one winding corridor after another, through an interminable labyrinth. Thomas’ impression was that they were going deeper into the bowels of the moon, but he could not be sure.

“Where are they taking us?” Drake shouted back to him, his tall but slender captor having drawn some twelve or fifteen yards ahead of Thomas’ stouter guardian.

“To a queen’s chamber, I believe,” Thomas replied, retaking control of his own vocal cords.

“I have heard that ants have queens,” Drake said. “None as pretty as my darling Jane, though.”

“Is she your darling?” Thomas called back, although he could fee the ether-creature’s impatience to revert to silent conversation.

“She will be,” Drake said, “if I get out of this alive with the means to return to Earth—always provided that I tell my tale before Ned and Walt tell theirs. There’s naught like a little gooseflesh to animate affection, and I think I have the means now to make her majesty’s flesh crawl prodigiously.”

Thomas was ashamed to feel a sudden pang of resentment at the observation that Drake—who was, after all, five years his senior and no great beauty—had not thought to include him with de Vere and Raleigh in the list of his rivals for the queen’s affection. Such was the burden of humble birth, and perhaps the myth of mathematicians’ disdain for common passion.

Thomas now had the opportunity to see for himself that the giant inhabitants of the moon did not all resemble insects, although its insectile population was exceedingly various; there were, as Drake had briefly mentioned, creatures like slugs the size of elephants, with shells on their backs like mahouts’ turrets, and many other creatures shelled like lobsters, whelks or barnacles. There were legions of chimeras clad in what Thomas could not help likening to Medieval suits of armor designed for the protection of entities with far too many limbs.

“Why, this must be a busy port or a great capital,” Thomas said, though not aloud. “A cultural crossroads where many races commingle and interact. If the moon is hollow throughout, honeycombed with tunnels, how far must its pathways extend, and how shall its hosts be numbered?”

“Very good, Thomas,” his invader said. “I’m assisting you as best I can, but you’ve a naturally calm mind, which makes it a great deal easier. Thank God you have no relevant phobias—they’d be a lot less easy to counter than your allergies.”

“You talk a deal of nonsense,” Thomas said, “for someone using a borrowed tongue.”

“Aye,” the creature replied, “but I’ll make sense of it for you if I can. I must, for we’ve work to do here, now that the True Civilization is aware of your new capability. They must have studied you, I dare say, but they could not have thought you capable of building an ethership for another four hundred years—and study conducted at a distance is always calmer than a close confrontation, where differences stand out that distinguish you from burrowers and ethereals alike. We must convince an influential philosopher that you are harmless still, and likely to remain so.”

“Have you a name, guest?” Thomas demanded. “I feel that I am at every possible disadvantage here. Or will you name yourself Legion, and make things even worse?”

“I am no possessive demon,” the creature assured him. “I shall be as polite a guest as circumstances permit, and will take my leave before I overstay the necessity of my visit. You may call me Lumen.”

“As in light, or cavity?” Thomas retorted.

“A little of both. We are chimerical creatures by nature, and our aims are syncretic. I cannot bind your race to the True Civilization at present, but I must persuade someone close to its heart that humankind might one day be so bound—if I fail, the consequences might be catastrophic.”

Thomas wanted to demand further clarification of this remarkable statement, but he did not have time. They had just arrived in a much larger cavern: a vast and crowded amphitheatre, with terraces arranged in multitudinous circles about a central core.

“I told you so,” Drake shouted. It took Thomas several seconds to realize that his friend was referring to his assertion that an insect queen could never be as pretty as his darling Jane. Thomas had to agree, as he looked upon a vast individual, which was surely the queen of a hive, although her resemblance to an ant or bee was no greater than its resemblance to a moth or a centipede. Her ugliness in human eyes was spectacular in its extremity. She was laying eggs at the rate of one every ninety seconds, which acolytes carried away into tunnel-mouths dotting the rim of the central arena.

It was not the queen to whom the two prisoners were taken, though—it was to a group of individuals twenty-five or thirty strong, situated no closer to her head than her nether end, who were in conference in one of the inner ranks of the array of terraces. The majority were more moth-like than any other species Thomas had yet seen, conspicuously furry, with multifaceted eyes each larger than a human head; the minority were very varied indeed.

“Now,” said Thomas’ uninvited guest, “you must let me speak. The future of your nation, and perhaps your world, may depend on it.”