The Japanese Devil Fish Girl (11 page)

Read The Japanese Devil Fish Girl Online

Authors: Robert Rankin

BOOK: The Japanese Devil Fish Girl
5.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
The Pope decreed that as no mention of life outside the Earth had been made in the Bible (which was, after all,
the
Word of God), off-worlders must be considered pagan and ripe for conversion to Christianity. The Archbishop of Westminster held to similar views, but was reticent about passing on to Her Majesty a message from the Pope that Rome would send missionaries to Venus and Mars to deal with the peoples there in the manner in which, several centuries before, they had dealt so successfully and kindly with the folk of South America.
 
It was all going to get rather complicated.
 
The matter of interplanetary trade gave rise to more gasps of disbelief from those outside of the British Empire. When they learned that England alone, having signed the exclusive treaties and trade agreements, would be taking care of all interplanetary business. ‘To ensure fairness, justice, truth and virtue,’ Queen Victoria explained.
 
Mr Gladstone put it in a manner that was understandable to all. ‘As representatives of Planet Earth, the British Government has entered into a meaningful alliance with the Governments of Venus and Jupiter, an alliance both mercantile and military, which offers a combination of strength and security.’ Adding, ‘If Johnny Foreigner cares not for this, then so much the worse for Johnny Foreigner.’
 
So that was all sorted! To the Empire’s satisfaction at least.
 
Which cleared the stage for more important matters.
 
Such as the actual name that the spaceport was to be given.
 
Mr Charles Babbage, who had been appointed head of the British Empire’s Space Programme, put forward a number of suggestions that he considered suitable. These included:
 
The Charles Babbage Grand Astronautical Interplanetarium
 
The Charles Babbage Celestio-Pantechnicon Kinetic Harbour
 
The Charles Babbage Tri-World Transportarium And perhaps the most obvious:
 
The Charles Babbage Astro-drome
 
All, however, were rejected, possibly because all were prefixed by the words ‘The Charles Babbage . . .’
 
The name finally fixed upon was:
 
The Royal London Spaceport
 
And so it would remain.
 
 
And so, upon the twenty-seventh of July in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-five, a wondrous silver airship dandled elegantly above runways one to six. The day was of the sunniest and although another pea-souper held London firmly by the throat, here, in this delightful rural setting ’neath the great hill surmounted by the Crystal Palace, the sky was blue, the birdies sang and all was right with the Empire.
 
Around and about the spaceport, strictly segregated according to their planetary origins, stood craft from other worlds.
 
Bulky merchant packets from Jupiter, all burnished copper (or the Jovian equivalent thereof), with swollen sides and riveted flanks and small, glazed piloting ‘pimples’. These sprouted at irregular intervals above, below and to all sides of the bulbous craft, like the symptoms of a mechanical disease.
 
The pleasure-craft of Jupiter were quite another matter. Sleek and steely arrowheads with outboard power units.
 
But what drew the Earthman’s eye upon this or any other morning were the spaceships from Venus. These interplanetary vessels were of surpassing beauty. The folk of Venus did not, of course, refer to their own planet as Venus. That was the name the folk of this world had given to it. The folk of Venus referred to their world as Magonia. And to their spacecraft as ‘cloud-ships’. The cloud-ships of Magonia. And they were of surpassing beauty.
 
They were aptly named ‘ships’ because they resembled exotic galleons. Constructed not from metal but from some semi-translucent organic material, which offered up a rainbow sheen whilst seeming also to constantly shift through a spectrum of colours, these ships appeared to display no aerodynamic features whatsoever. They were the product of whimsy, fairy-tale castles, towers topped by conical roofs rising from galleon decks, with billowing, all-but-transparent sails set one upon another. To catch the solar winds, some said, but others doubted this.
 
It was claimed that these magical ships travelled through magical means, powered by faith alone and referred to by the Magonians as Holier-than-Air craft. Magonians
thought
their way across the vastnesses of space, it was said. And as they offered little in the manner of trade goods, discouraged any form of Earth tourism upon their planet and seemed to seek only to proselytise, they were viewed with a mixture of wonder and suspicion.
 
It was approaching midday and the last of the luggage and straggling rich folk were boarding the
Empress of Mars
. The cargo gangways fairly groaned beneath the weight of oak-bound steamer trunks and sharkskin portmanteaus. Ladies’ dressing cases designed by Peter Carl Fabergé and Louis Vuitton. Delicately packed with exquisite perfumes, powders, lipsticks, smelling bottles by Crawfords of Piccadilly, lace handkerchiefs, countless kid gloves, elaborately hand-stitched ‘unmentionables’, brass corsetry and the entire pantheon of female under and over attire, shoes and hats and parasols and goggles for every occasion.
 
Gentlemen’s ‘diddy boxes’ containing ivory-handled shaving paraphernalia, enamelled moustache-wax cases, inlaid snuff caskets, travelling Tantalus sets, firearms to enforce one’s point in foreign parts, smoking accoutrements and all the tweeds and linen suits and formal wear and hattery that a gentlemen of means required when travelling abroad.
 
Add to this crates of the finest champagnes, medical essentials, travellers’ libraries, picnicking hampers, ukuleles and mechanical musicolas, Sir Digby Pendleton’s horse, Belerathon, without which he refused to travel anywhere, and Lord Brentford’s monkey butler Darwin.
 
The mighty sky-ship sparkled in the sunlight, casting a great cigar-shaped shadow over the spaceport’s cobbles.
 
The last of the luggage was finally aboard and the cargo gangways were mechanically winched into the upright position. The promenade decks were made gay with jostling gentry, waving their farewells to less-fortunate relatives, who could only stand and wave and aspire to emotions that did not include jealousy. The gentry aboard disported themselves in their finest ‘outgoing’ attire. Gentlemen in ‘morning formals’ in soft pastel shades with matching top hats and gloves. Ladies in a riot of silks and tumbling lace with fans of pale satin embellished with bons mots and tasteful erotic drawings, wrought by the pen of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley.
 
Oscar Wilde was aboard, of course. And so too were Bram Stoker, Dame Nellie Melba, who had been engaged to provide entertainment in the Grand Salon, Mr Babbage, Nikola Tesla, Little Tich, who was travelling to New York, the first port of call, to take up a six-month residency at Carnegie Hall, and a host of other London glitterati. Charles Darwin
4
(unaware that his simian namesake gibbered in the cargo hold) shared a joke with the mystic and adventurer Hugo Rune. Princess Elsie, one of Queen Victoria’s lesser known daughters, spoke in whispered tones to an enigmatic figure swaddled in the blackest of blacks with a velvet face mask and hat of outlandish size. This gentleman was rumoured to be none other than the society favourite Joseph Carey Merrick, famously known as the Elephant Man.
 
And so the summer sun shone down. The gentlemen smoked their expensive cigars in blatant disregard of any health and safety implications and toasted each other with glasses of deep-cut crystal. The ladies fluttered their fans and gently turned their parasols. The waiters and sky-men, serving folk, menials, menservants and maids, in uniforms starched and immaculately laundered, came and went about their business. Lines were dropped and bosun’s whistle blown. The
Empress of Mars
prepared once more to rise into the sky.
 
But then calls were to be heard. Calls to hold hard and please to hold on for one moment. A honking of a hansom’s horn as one of these horse-drawn conveyances was being driven at reckless speed across the cobbled space towards the airship, scattering members of the grounded waving crowd before it.
 
The cab drew up as the passenger gangway was rising. Two men, dressed in the most fashionable attire, hastened from the vehicle burdened by their luggage and pell-mell leapt to the rising ramp and boarded the
Empress of Mars
.
 
This late arrival elicited much mirth and applause from the assembled multitude, as ‘fashionable lateness’ had only recently begun to find favour.
 
‘Your names please, gentlemen,’ said the airship’s major-domo, bowing to the stylish latecomers and snapping his fingers at bellboys to take the gentlemen’s luggage.
 
The elder of the two twirled an ebony dandy cane topped with a silver skull. ‘Professor Coffin,’ he said. ‘And my youthful ward and student, Lord George Fox.’
 
12
 
‘L
ord
George Fox?’ asked plain George Fox, turning a shining brass ‘Aristocratic Cabin’ key upon his kid-gloved palm. ‘And how did I come by this title?’
 
Professor Coffin shushed the lad to silence with a fluttering of fingers. ‘A little conceit of my own invention,’ he whispered, ‘which you will come to appreciate when communicating with these swells.’
 
George Fox grinned and stroked at his striking chin. ‘It is a pity that we do not have friends and family here to wave us off,’ said he. ‘If my mother could see me now . . .’ But George’s voice trailed away, as it saddened him to think of his parents. Perhaps he would send them postcards from exotic ports of call. Wish them well, bid them love, ask forgiveness for running away.
 
George Fox sighed and waved at strangers, and then he cried, ‘Oh – look.’
 
Professor Coffin followed the direction of George’s now-pointings to view wheeled conveyances being driven at dangerous speed, to the considerable alarm of the ground-level wavers, and bound for the great airship.
 
‘Other late arrivals,’ called George to the major-domo. ‘Do not leave without them.’
 
‘All are ticked off on the manifest, Your Lordship,’ this fellow replied. ‘But see, they are tradespeople, I believe.’
 
George looked on and said, ‘Oh yes, they are.’
 
For oh yes, they were tradespeople indeed.
 
George spied a high-sided wagon upon which the words
JONATHAN CRAWFORD
Suiting to the Gentry
 
were emblazoned.
 
‘We had our suits made there,’ George observed.
 
Also a steam cart being steered with reckless abandon:
 
ELIAS MAINWARING
Quality Canes and Umbrellas
 
 
‘We got our new dandy canes from there,’ George observed.
 
A yellow brougham, drawn by two pairs of matched black geldings:
LOUIS VUITTON
 
 
 
‘And our luggage came from—’ And George’s voice once more trailed away. He gave hard looks towards Professor Coffin, who shrugged.
 
The landing lines dropped, the ground anchor was weighed and the
Empress of Mars
rose gracefully into the sky.
 
George gave Professor Coffin further hard looks. ‘I think I hear my name being called out by those tradespeople below,’ he said. ‘My name, prefixed with the title “Lord”.’
 
Professor Coffin shrugged once more, though somewhat painfully it seemed. ‘What could I do?’ he whispered to George. ‘We needed new clothes, new canes, new luggage. You could hardly have come aboard in your old suit, stinking of Martian, now could you?’
 
George shook his head, somewhat sadly.
 
‘They are snobs to a man, those tradesmen,’ Professor Coffin continued. ‘They would not have extended credit to common folk like us, but to a “lord”, oh yes indeed.’
 
‘So you represented me as a lord. And they found out to the contrary.’
 
‘Fiddle de, fiddle dum,’ said Professor Coffin. ‘When you return to England with gold in great store you can pay them off if you so choose.’
 
‘Indeed I will,’ said George.
 
‘And please do not think unkindly of me,’ said the professor. ‘I sold all that I owned in order to purchase the tickets. You do not begrudge me a suit of clothes, surely?’

Other books

The Lightkeeper's Ball by Colleen Coble
VOLITION (Perception Trilogy, book 2) by Strauss, Lee, Strauss, Elle
The Marshal's Pursuit by Gina Welborn
Deep Blue by Randy Wayne White
Sunset Park by Santino Hassell
The Seascape Tattoo by Larry Niven
On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon