The Plurality of Worlds. Brian Stableford
prerogative to breathe the intangible sustenance of God?”
“If a lungful of void were likely to strike a man dead on the spot,” Raleigh said, “it might be best to give the task to a man of faith, under God’s dutiful protection.”
“Easy, lads,” Thomas said, as his nervous fingers groped at the interior catch of the hold. “It’s not faith in God that’s required here, but faith in the plenum, and the life-supporting virtue of the ether. Even if I lacked such faith, though, I doubt that I’d be struck dead by a single draught of nothingness.”
“You might be in more danger of drunkenness,” said Drake. “If ether is vaporous nectar, as some say, it might play tricks with your senses.”
“Aye,” Thomas agreed, extracting the sealed bottle from its cradle, “so it might. But as my father used to say: let’s try it and see.” He closed his mouth and set the bottle to his nose, released the stopper and breathed deep. He knew, even before his lungs responded to the intake, that the void theorists were incorrect; had the space beyond the atmosphere been empty, and the Earth’s air aggregated about it by affinity alone, he would not even have been able to remove the stopper; pressure would have held it firmly in place. The plenarists were correct, it seemed; there was no void, and space was full—but full of what?
Had God really intended humankind to be forever Earthbound, ether might have been a poison, and air a protective insulation against it—but Thomas found that it was not. Nor was it a deliriant, as Drake had hypothesized. He was mildly disappointed to discover that breathing ether was very much like breathing air. “It has no discernible odor,” he declared, pensively, “and it’s not cold. That’s odd, I think, for mountain air is as cold as it is thin. This is a little thin, I suppose, but so far as I can tell, it shares the virtues of the....”
He would have said “air we usually breathe” had he not been seized by a sudden fit of dizziness. Recumbent on his couch, he was in no danger of fainting, but he could not speak while his senses were reeling.
“What is it, Tom?” Drake asked, anxiously. He was not the only man present who was Thomas’ senior, but Field was only a year older and Drake was a full five; Drake was the only one with the remotest pretension to serve as a father figure.
“Nothing to do with the ether,” Thomas judged, perhaps a trifle too hastily. “The effect of moving while weightless, I think. A momentary vertigo.”
“There really is an Austral continent,” Raleigh informed them. “Or a sizeable island, at least. Can we claim it in the name of Queen Jane from up here, do you suppose, or must we direct a privateer to plant a banner on its shore when we land?” His voice faltered very slightly as he pronounced the last word; they all knew that landing their tiny craft would be every bit as difficult and dangerous and freeing it from the Earth’s affinity.
“Never mind the Austral continent,” said de Vere. “Can we—do we—press on to the moon?”
“There’s more than the breathability of the ether to be taken into account on that score, Ned,” Raleigh told him, bidding for the intellectual high ground in their private conflict. “There’s the fuel, and the maneuverability of the ship to test. We’ve time in hand. Will they be able to see us in England with the aid of one of your father’s telescopes, Tom, when we’ve overflown the Americas and crossed the Atlantic?”
“We won’t pass over England on the second round trip,” Thomas told him. “They might see us in Rome, though. That’ll make the pope bite his tongue, won’t it, Mr. Field?”
“The pope refuses to look through a telescope,” Field replied, less stiffly than Thomas had expected, “for fear of what he might see.”
“There’s nothing in the moons of Jupiter to frighten a pious man,” Raleigh observed, dryly, “and infinite space is no more visible than finite space.”
“The pope has no need to deny the infinity of space,” de Vere put in, striking back at Raleigh’s presumption of superior knowledgeability. “It’s not a Copernican doctrine. Nicholas of Cusa proposed it, on the grounds that God’s creative power could not be limited. He argued for the plurality of worlds on exactly the same basis.”
“You’re a true scholar, Ned,” Drake said, amiably. “Where do you stand on the dispute as to whether the inhabitants of the other worlds must be identical to ourselves, being made in the same divine image, or whether they must be infinitely various in form and nature, so as not to limit the creativity of the divine imagination?”
“Some might be giants and some tiny,” de Vere observed, “in proportion to the sizes of their worlds.”
Raleigh laughed. “But in which proportion, Ned?” he asked. “Will the Selenites be dwarfs because their world in smaller than ours, or giants, because the force of affinity does not stunt their growth?”
“The fuel stores are still in place and the controls check out,” Drake reported. “No leaks at all—we have fuel enough to take us to the moon and back, and the means to control its deployment.”
“And the attitude of the ship can be adjusted with appropriate precision,” Thomas agreed. “Who’d like to sniff the second bottle of ether when I’ve brought it through?”
“I will,” Raleigh said. “No offence, Tom, but you breathe like a mathematician. I’ve a better nose than you; if ether has a bouquet, however subtle, I’ll feel it on my palate.”
“Fine,” said Thomas, clicking the catch on the second hold—but as soon as he took hold of the bottle, he realized that Master Dee’s “contraption” had not worked as well on the second occasion as it had on the first. The outer hatch of the lock had not closed; there was now a gap in the hull the size of a man’s forearm.
“Don’t panic, lads,” he was quick to say. “If there were a void outside, we’d be in trouble, but so long as the pressure of the ether’s not so very different from the pressure of the air in the cabin, there won’t be much exchange. He fumbled as he tried to secure the inner hatch, however. The ether that Thomas had breathed had been clear, empty of any other apparent substance, but the ether that streamed in through the temporary opening in the hull was cloudy, as if wood-smoke were adrift in it. This was no mere smoke or mist, however, for it was formed into an approximate shape—Thomas could not decide whether it was more like a moth or an artist’s conception of an angel—and it moved as if with purpose, descending upon Thomas’ face like a veil.
“Look out, Tom!” Raleigh cried—but the warning was futile.
Thomas tried to hold his breath, but he was unprepared. Fear made him inhale sharply—and the invader took the opportunity to wriggle up his nose like an eel burrowing into soft sand. Thomas felt its ghostly presence pass, slick but not cold. He expected it to move down his trachea, or perhaps his esophagus, but instead it seemed to move into the space of his skull, diffusing into the nooks and crannies of his brain.
This time, the Queen Jane’s captain did sense a sweet and cloying odor—and when the vertigo took hold of him again, it did not relent. Supine as he was on his couch, he lost consciousness almost immediately.
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