TEN
The slowest part of the descent, psychologically speaking, was the last. It seemed to take forever for the parachute to float over the Garden of England, drifting on the wind almost to the Surrey border. Thomas looked around constantly, hoping to catch sight of one of the other parachutes but saw none.
His passage seemed so very gentle that he was taken entirely by surprise by the shock of the landing. He rolled with the impact, and contrived to avoid breaking any limbs—whether by virtue of his own skill or with subtle assistance, he could not tell—but he was winded, and badly bruised.
He ended up lying on his back in the grass of a fallow field, staring up into the blue sky, peppered with light cloud. For a long moment, he could not draw breath—but then his lungs recovered, and he gulped convulsively.
There was a quarter-moon clearly visible in the west; the sun was still in the east.
“Thank you,” Thomas said to his passenger, although he was not at all sure that he had anything for which to thank the ethereal.
Lumen seemed even less certain than he was. “I’m sorry, Tom,” it said. “Truly sorry—but it won’t be forever. We shall meet again, you and I, and you shall know then why I must do what I must do. It will not matter how many of the others survive the fall; you were the captain of the ship, and their word cannot stand up against yours.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas demanded.
“I cannot take the risk that the disaster was no accident,” the ethereal said. “Necessity is the mother of improvisation—but it will not be for ever, Tom. I promise you that. One way or another, we shall meet again, and you shall know the truth before you die.”
Thomas opened his lips then, intending to use his real voice as well as his inner one to formulate a protest against whatever his invader intended to do—but he gasped instead, and a spiral of dark blue smoke emerged from his mouth, arranging itself into a perceptible form as it hovered above his face.
Distinct as it was, the form was not readily identifiable. It might have been the shape of some exotic moth, or an artist’s impression of an angel. It was by no means large, but Thomas could not help imagining that it was really a giant seen from a considerable distance rather than a mere trifle lingering mere inches above his supine body.
The creature could no longer speak to him, or communicate in any other way. Thomas could not tell whether it drifted contentedly away on the breeze, or whether it actively took wing.
But nothing has been done to me! Thomas thought. I am as I have always been, and I know the truth. If it intended to erase my memory of all that has happened, the trick has failed!
Thomas sat up and began to rub his aching limbs. He was alone; it seemed that no one had seen him fall. There were undoubtedly men working in the fields close by, but they had not looked up as they worked. Why would they?
Eventually, he got to his feet and began to walk, aiming vaguely in the direction of London. He hoped fervently that his four companions had made it safely to Earth, because he did not want to lose a single one of them—but partly, too, because he knew that there was little hope that anyone would believe his testimony if it were not supported with all possible vehemence by other voices. Dee might believe him, but anyone else—including the queen—would need the sworn agreement of three or four earnest voices before she could take such a fantastic story seriously.
Now that he had seen the ether-creature make its escape, however, Thomas was no longer entirely sure that he believed it himself. Every step he took upon the good and fertile earth decreased his conviction that it had been real.
We humans are, after all, he thought, possessed of the gift—or curse—of dreaming. We are afflicted with the hazard of hallucination, whether we like it or not.
He remembered everything, but the more he interrogated his memory, the more obvious it seemed to become that it must have been a dream—not even a vision, but merely a dream.
Thomas touched his fingertips to the transparent dressings that the moth-creatures had put upon his wounds when he had “rescued” Walter Raleigh from the spider. Had they added more when he had been rescued himself from the hardcore philosopher who had risked so much to tell him that humankind as not alone, and that help would come on day to assist them in resisting the tyranny of the “dwellers in inner space”? He did not know—but he felt certain that this supposed physical proof of his adventure was blatantly inadequate. Nor did it seem to him, any longer, at all possible that he had actually said what he had said to the Great Fleshcore, or that he had been party to what the ethereal Lumen had said, by means of his dancing fingertips, to the luckless Aristocles...or, indeed, there had ever been an ether-creature inside him, whether it were an angel or an insect. John Dee would prefer the former hypothesis, of course—but Dee was a dreamer at heart, and was always wont to place a little too much hope and faith in the produce of his dreaming.
An idea struck him then and he stopped in his tracks, reaching for his pouch. He opened it, and took out two small objects. One of them looked like a severed finger, although it was made of some mysterious spongy substance with a rod of metal in place of a bone. The other was a crudely-carved figurine, apparently intended to represent an angel. Thomas laughed, thus confronted with the trivial items that had evidently inspired his nightmare. He could not remember now exactly where he had run across them. He threw them both into the hedgerow, shaking his head in bewilderment at the strange tricks played by the human mind.
Thomas knelt down beside the hedge, to place his left palm flat upon the fallow ground across which he was walking. He had been seen now, by men working in a neighboring field, but they did not come to greet him. He was nothing to do with them; they had their own business, which they were obliged by reason and custom alike to mind.
It’s good to be home, he thought, with a sudden rush of glad relief. There’s no other place like God’s good English earth, and no better time to be here than the reign of good Queen Jane, for anyone who values peace of mind.
PART TWO
DOCTOR MUFFET’S ISLAND
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The island’s only hill was so shallow that it would have posed no challenge at all had it been a Devon moor, nor was its vegetation unduly thorny, but the thin-boled trees were parasitized by so many sticky vines that it was difficult for Francis Drake and Martin Lyle to climb it, even with the aid of a machete.
The island seemed to have little in the way of animal life except for birds, of which there were many brightly-colored kinds, which seemed quite unintimidated by their visitors. Whenever Drake was not fully occupied in clearing a path he attempted to watch the birds more attentively, but the only result of his cursory study was a conviction that a few of the larger parrots were studying him with equal intensity. It was easy to imagine that the endless avian chattering was conversation.
When Drake and his young cousin finally got to the top of the rise it was necessary for the boy to climb a coconut palm with the captain’s best telescope clutched beneath his arm. Drake watched him anxiously, afraid for the instrument. It was one of John Dee’s finest, designed with the aid of the theory of optics that Dee and Tom Digges had worked out in happier days and constructed by a lens-grinder from Strasbourg, who had fled to Protestant England to escape the gathering storm of the continental wars of religion. In theory, it was a capital offence for anyone outside the Queen’s Navy to possess a telescope, but Drake had long been an exception to that rule. The ethership fiasco had reduced his reputation as Queen Jane’s favorite privateer, but he ought to be able to recover his prestige if his present expedition went well.
As soon as Martin had attained an adequate height Drake demanded to know whether the large island of which he desperately wanted news was visible. Its real existence was a point he desperately needed to prove, for the benefit of his belief in his own sanity.
Martin uncapped the telescope’s objective lens, and put it to his eye. “I can see two isles to the west, captain,” he reported. “The nearer is tiny, no bigger than this one, but the