The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 11

  ‘Look at meeee…’

  Richard bounded after her. On the moon, everyone was Peter Pan.

  A Victrola gramophone, plumped down on a vegetable outcrop, played ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ as if underwater.

  A gloved hand had taken root in lunar muck, and grown a spindly green arm, with elbow-buds which opened as eyes. Maybe part of Nordstrom made it through the Shimmer after all. The rest of him was presumably scattered in the void.

  ‘Far out, man,’ said Whitney.

  A furry balloon-bean the size of a prize-winning marrow floated towards them at shin-height, propelled by raspberries emitted from what looked like a human mouth – complete with Ringo Starr moustache – at its rear. Whitney prodded it away with her knobkerrie. It drifted placidly in another direction.

  They were in the lea of a castle.

  It took a moment for Richard to recognise the structure as a colossal version of Mildew Manor, grown from moon-coral. Even the light in the East Tower window was reproduced, magnified as if a white star were imprisoned in the tower. Windows migrated slowly across the castle-face, catching Earthlight like message-mirrors. One wing crumbled like a cake left out in the rain, iced with the blue-green mould. An ostentatious ELF Eismond banner flapped above the highest ramparts in a gentle lunar wind.

  Whitney pointed at the flag with a stick.

  ‘If there’s a wind, there must be some sort of air.’

  ‘For God’s sake don’t try to breathe it.’

  ‘I wasn’t considering that. It’s just… there’s no atmosphere on the moon.’

  ‘There aren’t any castles, either. Or gramophones. Or…’

  Parked in a beaten-down driveway in front of the castle were a 1920 Type 23 Brescia Tourer, a sleek sit-astride device which might be a resting hover-scooter and a scowling orange Pon-Pon space-hopper. In a corral nearby, lizard-horses stumped on kangaroo legs, whinnying and coughing.

  ‘Point taken. This is there, though. The moon?’

  He shrugged, and wobbled in the bulky, now lightweight, suit. The weird feeling in his water was reduced gravity, he realised. His arms tended to float up in unconscious semaphore.

  ‘I suppose…’

  He was reluctant to commit. Could there be another moon, stashed in Earth orbit, so unobtrusive astronomers had never noticed? That was ridiculous – but so were the poodle zeppelins and cocktail umbrella hummingbirds and crab cowpats with human fingers.

  ‘It’s magic,’ he said. ‘You know how it works. It’s a short cut. And short cuts don’t always come out where you think.’

  Whitney raised a glove to shade her eyes from the glare and scanned the lunar skies for Apollo 11.

  A few minutes ago, back on Earth, the television had shown pictures taken from orbit by the astronauts. That was the moon Richard had expected from the blurry transmissions from those now-bust survey probes – less jagged than the desolate, craggy landscape seen in 70mm in the second part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, blanketed smooth by aeons of dust, with craters of all sizes everywhere.

  ‘This is literally wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘A rare correct usage of the word “literally”. Congratulations.’

  ‘We-all did have us prop’r schoolin’ down ’t the one-room shack between corn-shucking, revival meetin’s and lynchin’s. And at MIT.’

  ‘Literally wonderful,’ he mused. ‘Full of wonders.’

  A purple cow the size of the Goodyear Blimp passed over on moth-wings. It was ridden by bipedal lobsters with Maori paint on their organic armour, who stood up like water-skiers, complicated reins in their claws.

  ‘That’s not something you see every day,’ she said. ‘Even in our line.’

  He thought about it.

  ‘If you took every guess mankind has made about the moon, all the way back to the ancients, and mixed them together, you’d get this.’

  ‘Maybe Luna Moon was a realist, Richard. She drew what she saw.’

  ‘Or she saw what she drew…’

  Whitney at once caught his drift.

  ‘The Chalfont Group didn’t travel to this moon. They – what? – they made it?’

  ‘I think we all made it. This isn’t the moon. Not NASA’s moon, or Arthur C. Clarke’s. It’s a moon. It’s all moons. All the imaginary moons…’

  Applause sounded.

  Three people in moon-suits, without helmets, popped into being around them, holding up those fly-spray gadgets. Anemone Zyle, co-authoress of The Marquise of the Moon, had a good seat on the back of a rearing lizard-horse, one hand on the reins, another aiming her moon-gun. A gaunt, grey-blond woman, her set expression suggested the surgical removal of her sense of humour years ago. Richard recognised the ferret-faced oik with an Eismond armband and a top hat as Rudy Gosling, the Frinton Führer. The fellow with the floating cloak and pop-eyes must be Magister Rex Chalfont, King of the Moon. He was the one clapping.

  ‘Very close, very good, Mr Jeperson. But not imaginary. Nothing is truly imaginary. Potential. And imperilled. This moon is here, accessible through magic, just so long as no one comes the long way and spoils it by saying it’s not so. Know what happens if one of those astronauts sets his dirty great space-boot here? Puff! All gone.’

  He illustrated his point, by jabbing a finger at a passing balloon-bean. It burst and evaporated.

  ‘At the south pole, there used to be an entrance to worlds inside the Earth. Known of for centuries. Magicians used it. Visited mole men, Atlanteans and dinosaurs. Then that boring Norwegian trudged there and the hole went away. Just like that. No yeti has been seen in the Himalayas since Hillary crawled to the top of Everest. We can’t have that here, can we? You see that now.’

  Richard thought it over. Many phantom moons would be lost when the real one was gained.

  ‘Richard,’ cautioned Whitney.

  ‘Don’t worry, I know he’s wrong. I’m just trying to frame a way of making him see that.’

  Whitney breathed again.

  Richard looked at the moon people. Closed, tight, grim faces. Reluctantly, he concluded reason was probably not an option. But he had to share an insight.

  ‘The blue-green stuff, the mould,’ he said. ‘It’s recent, isn’t it? It wasn’t here before your purge?’

  Only Chalfont tumbled, and tutted with irritation.

  Rudy Gosling raised his fly-spray, spun slowly – he was practised in this gravity – and fired a puff of flechettes which spread and tore the Victrola to pieces. Music leaked out of the broken bell for long seconds, then died. Gosling grinned, showing ferret teeth, and brought the moon-gun to bear on Richard and Whitney.

  ‘Hold,’ said Chalfont.

  ‘I knew you’d seen it,’ said Richard. ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’

  Gosling was furious, but didn’t go against his magister.

  ‘We need them alive,’ Chalfont said. ‘They’re here to stop the rot.’

  Richard had an answer to something that had bothered him. He knew why they were still alive when the Chalfont Group could have swatted them at any point in the last two days. Why the catspaws used against them – Sky-Ray Roly, the angry ducks, the Space Kiddettes – were non-lethal, when the Temple purge had been carried out so ruthlessly and effectively.

  He and Whitney were needed.

  ‘The dreams of nasty people are limited,’ Richard told Whitney. ‘“Sick in the head” is the expression. This moon feeds off imagination, and is a hungry beastie. Since 1953, the Chalfont Group have preserved it – by ignoring what you could read in New Scientist or see through a telescope. Lately, that’s taken a lot more effort. To maintain a wonderland, you need inspired loons – and this little lot killed off their big dreamers. Was it Luna Moon? Or Mungo Zyle? Who put the most in, but wasn’t noticed till you forced them out? Without them, the place has been sighing and dying. It’s literally a blue moon.’

  * * *

  Richard knew Anemone Zyle wanted to shoot them, but understood that she couldn’t without bringing down a h
ouse of cards.

  ‘I’m imagining parasitic moon-rats with a moral compass,’ Whitney told Anemone Zyle. ‘Their tiny eggs lodge in the windpipes of the wicked, then hatch into furry, toothy balls which choke their hosts. So, have I thunk them into reality yet, Annie? Can you feel a tickle?’

  Anemone Zyle didn’t laugh. She desperately stifled a psychosomatic cough.

  She was their gaoler in Moondew Manor, while Gosling and Chalfont were off upstairs about important men’s business. She didn’t much care for the gig.

  In a lunar version of the Great Hall, Richard and Whitney were strapped to chairs bolted to the floor in the middle of a morris square.

  ‘If you undo these tethers,’ said Whitney, ‘we could get down and boogie. I’ll bet Mr J. has some funky moves on him.’

  ‘Shut up, witch,’ snarled Anemone Zyle.

  ‘That’s about the standard of dialogue in her books, Richard. I assume she wrote the garbage bits. Mungo was the one with the talent.’

  The authoress snarled. She wore a chainmail bikini and a veil-trailing triple-moon tiara. A long, thin athamé was strapped to her thigh. She was gym-toned, with any ounce of flab scalpelled or sweated off – but her skin wasn’t healthy, especially in the moonglow inside the manor.

  The blue fungus spread wildly across the walls.

  ‘Annie,’ said Whitney, ‘tell me something… how can you rest your chin on your elbows? Go on, demonstrate now.’

  Anemone Zyle was puzzled.

  ‘I suppose you’ve written so many clunker sentences you don’t remember just one gaffe. I wonder which is your worst book? Some fans say Ghyslayne, Moon-Elf of Bumph is the absolute pits, but on consideration, I’d have to pick the wind-up of the Tomes of the Dragonwing saga. Tome the Third: Countess of the Craters. That one really sucks like an Electrolux! I wouldn’t think anything could be more crappily drivelling than Tome the Second: Seraphim of Satellite Sigma, but you surprised me again. The only even passable passages are copied out of an old pulp novel by Otis Adelbert Kline. Which would you say was the worst chapter in your worst book? That scene where Blodwyn the Troll-Girl plights her troth to the Peri Prince Pyrcyvyl? Or the pie-fight which disrupts the moon-vow ceremony of the itsy-bitsy nipsies?’

  Anemone strode over to Whitney’s chair, hand out to clamp over the prisoner’s mouth.

  Whitney shut up and twisted skilfully in her chair, legs scissoring. Her entire lower body lifted and stretched, anchored by the leather straps which fastened her wrists to the armrests. Her knees hammered either side of Anemone Zyle’s neck.

  ‘This’ll only take a moment.’

  Anemone tried to scratch Whitney’s dance-powerful legs.

  ‘That won’t help,’ Whitney grunted. ‘Try using your knife.’

  Surprised to be getting sound advice in this situation but too pressed to wonder at its sincerity, Anemone drew her athamé and angled it to stick into Whitney’s thigh. Whitney gave a squeeze and the gaoler passed out in an instant. Anemone dropped the knife, and Whitney caught its hilt between chin and chest.

  Whitney let Anemone fall in a heap, and resumed sitting position, careful not to lose the knife. She manoeuvred the athamé to slide down her arm, bounce off her inner-elbow and spring into her hand. She reversed it, slipped the blade under the strap and sliced herself free.

  ‘You should have used chains,’ she said to the unconscious Anemone.

  Whitney cut her other strap, but undid Richard’s buckles. Between them, they hauled Anemone into Richard’s chair and strapped her in. Richard took off her tiara and gave it to Whitney.

  ‘I thought you’d only read a single page of the Zyles’s books,’ he said.

  ‘As a grown-up,’ she admitted. ‘I was a science fiction fan in grade school. I read an enormous amount I’ve done my best to forget. Ever heard of Varno Zhoule? Keith Winton? Cordwainer Bird?’

  ‘Can’t say I have. I prefer mysteries myself.’

  Their moon-suits had been taken off to facilitate strapping them down. The air in the mansion was breathable, if heavy with spice smells and an underscent of rot.

  Anemone moaned, starting to come round.

  Whitney gagged the woman with her own veil. Anemone’s furious eyes sparked.

  ‘You’ve had your say, hack queen.’

  Whitney gave Richard the knife and fetched her knobkerrie from a corner where their stuff had been flung in a pile.

  ‘To the battlements,’ she said.

  * * *

  Blue mould was turning grey and falling off the walls, dissipating like fluff. Richard assumed he and Whitney were responsible for that.

  How many active imaginations did it take to keep this moon alive?

  They climbed stairs. Twice, they stepped on morris squares which entirely negated gravity, allowing them to float up between floors. Richard gathered Chalfont and Gosling were busy up in the tall tower.

  They had already hinted it wouldn’t be necessary to keep their prisoners alive after their immediate Great Work was done. That had to involve the Eagle, now descending from lunar orbit.

  How exactly did the moon prepare to repel boarders?

  The answer became obvious when they came to the room with the eternal light. Approaching quietly, keeping to shadows, they peered through a doorway and saw figures clustered around a large, fat cannon aimed out at the sky through a big hole in the wall.

  Chalfont and Gosling were there. Chalfont wore M&S wizard-robes, a coronet with stick-ons representing the phases of the moon, and complicated multi-lensed spectacles. He held a long taper, flame dancing slowly at its end. Gosling was in black tweed with a red sash, an Eismond armband, red wellington boots and a top hat – the uniform of the ELF upper echelon.

  The other people in the room were phantasms. They worked on the cannon – manipulating an apparently lightweight but solid giant ball into the muzzle, attaching a fuse, making minute adjustments to an aiming device.

  Some looked familiar.

  ‘The big-schnozz guy must be Cyrano de Bergerac,’ whispered Whitney.

  ‘The one from the play, yes,’ Richard agreed. ‘The historical Cyrano had a normal nose. With him is Baron Munchausen. The fellow in the toga must be Lucian. The bald Frenchman is Georges Méliès, or at least his character in Voyage to the Moon. The bug-faced one is a Selenite, from Wells. The girls in leotards I can’t place…’

  ‘Cat-Women of the Moon. It’s a film. The giant toy spider is theirs. Who’s the tall silver goon with pipes in his ears?’

  ‘A Cyberman, from Doctor Who. He’s British.’

  ‘The big cheerful robot with the hammer and sickle? The one who looks like a giant refrigerator?’

  ‘It’ll be from some comrades-across-the-stars socialist realist space epic.’

  ‘The bearded drunk?’

  ‘Captain Haddock, from the Tintin album, Objectif Lune.’

  ‘The blonde in riding britches?’

  ‘The heroine of Frau im Mond, the Fritz Lang film. Look who she’s with…’

  ‘Dr Floyd, from 2001.’

  ‘Arthur C. Clarke is a magician after all.’

  A black monolith stood in the room too.

  The workers were not transparent, but showed various degrees of unreality. Some were in black-and-white, or poorly tinted. Some seemed engraved rather than living.

  The cannon was stamped ‘Property of the Baltimore Gun Club’.

  Captain Haddock looked around, rimmed eyes bulging, and pointed a fat gauntlet at Richard and Whitney.

  ‘Bashi-bazouks!’ he shouted. ‘Ostrogoths! Shibboleths! Vermiform appendices! A billion blistering blue barnacles!’

  Then they all turned to stare. All the lunar explorers and inhabitants, all the pioneers and colonists, the masters and the monsters. Munchausen doffed his plumed cap.

  ‘I knew that bint was too stupid to be trusted,’ fumed Gosling, reaching for a moon-gun.

  Chalfont looked almost happy to see them.

  After living off the books f
or so long, Magister Rex wanted an audience. It might be his magic needed an audience.

  ‘You’re going to blast the Eagle out of the sky,’ Richard accused. ‘Using a cannon ball painted with cavorite.’

  ‘A defensive measure,’ Chalfont admitted. ‘To keep this moon alive, to keep all these moon people alive.’

  ‘Surely, you can’t want to see an end for poor Munchausen?’ pleaded the Baron. ‘So much would be lost.’

  ‘Miaow,’ said a Cat-Woman expressively.

  Méliès mimed, impassioned. His films were silent, of course. The Soviet walking fridge saluted Permanent Revolution. The Cyberman raised a headlamp between handles. Richard recognised it as the BBC props’ department’s improvised Cybergun. Cyrano went for his deadly blade.

  Whitney raised her knobkerrie, but Richard laid a hand on her arm.

  Before resorting to violence, he would appeal to reason.

  ‘Gentlemen, Selenites, Cat-Women,’ he began, ‘I salute you. On behalf of all mankind, you have done your job with honour. You flew ahead, on fancy, on calculation, on ambition, on a dream. Now, the rest of us must catch up. What’s about to happen in the Sea of Tranquillity isn’t your death, it’s your glory. I implore you, in the name of the spirit which seized you all in the first place, please do not do the bidding of these mean-spirited men. It’s your moon, not theirs. They made the moon sick, remember.’

  One of the Selenites still had patches of fungus around its mandibles. The giant spider’s legs were limp, the strings eaten away. Haddock’s beard had a blueish tinge too.

  ‘You can’t hold this scrap of territory for them, you must give it up. You have other homes, where you have other shapes. There’s Mars and Venus and Vulcan and Skaro. There’s Metropolis and Atlantis and Freedonia and Utopia. And Narnia and Oz and Erewhon and Wonderland. The men coming in their capsule have you in their hearts, much more than these pretenders to magic. Their whole enterprise is built on your example. Dr Floyd, you must understand this. Science is indistinguishable from magic. You should welcome the Eagle. It’s the keeping of the promise you made.’

  Gosling raised his moon-gun, but was caught up short – a ghost blade stuck out of the soft part under his chin. Cyrano pulled his epée free, and the Frinton Führer collapsed. He was not bleeding, not even wounded, but was dead.