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 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
