The Plurality of Worlds. Brian Stableford
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