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Post By The Hooded hood wonders of people are getting tired of this story yet and want a change? Fri Jun 18, 2004 at 11:18:03 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Other Lost City of Mystery - Part the Nineteenth: The Turquoise City and the Odd Observer | |
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| Part the Nineteenth: The Turquoise City and the Odd Observer The chamber was carved of turquoise malachite, and it had been old when the pyramids were being built. It was shattered now, the elaborate roof-arches bare ribs beneath a starry sky. The elegant floor was covered with powdery white sand amongst the rubble of the ruined cupola. Miss Canterbury looked around her, and then at her captor. “Where are we?” she demanded. The Expediter laughed again. “You are a very long way from home,” he assured her. “Around two hundred and forty thousand miles from Frampton Parva, I’d estimate. “Really?” Miss Canterbury snorted sceptically. “Even though the Earth’s circumference is only 25,000 miles?” The Expediter pointed to the sky. “Even so,” he gloated. Despite herself the vicar’s daughter looked up. The blue orb of Terra hung low in the midnight sky over the lunar landscape. “This…” gasped Miss Canterbury, trying not to panic. “Another of your mind tricks…” “I don’t need mind tricks here, honey,” the Expediter warned her. “There’s nobody to save you within a quarter million miles.” “Ahem,” coughed Sir Mumphrey Wilton so that the mercenary would swing round to meet the fist heading towards his face. There was a very satisfying crack. “Mumphrey!” gasped the vicar’s daughter. “Good day, Miss Canterbury. Sorry to take so long but setting the pocketwatch to wind back to when that portal at Spurn Point was just closing was deuced tricky, what? The Expediter clawed his way up one of the alien columns. “You’re dead, Wilton, dead,” he promised, clutching at his holster. Mumphrey held up the revolver he’d seized from the villain as he’d punched him to the floor. “You think so, you murderous traitor? Don’t move. I’m taking you back for the murder of Farharquar-Phelps.” Miss Canterbury gasped in shock. The Expediter’s eyes flickered from the eccentric Englishman to the vicar’s daughter. “Kill him,” he ordered her. “Shoot him,” Miss Canterbury advised Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “You’re both dead then,” the Expediter promised. “It’ll just take longer, as you to starve.” His fingers pushed the hidden activation sequence on the column he was pressed against and he fled through the brief energy doorway that flickered around him. Mumphrey’s gunshots passed right through the escaping villain and prised chips of purple stone from the pillar behind. “After him!” Miss Canterbury shouted. “Don’t let him get away.” Mumphrey looked abashed. “I’m afraid the poor old pocketwatch is out of charge. Took a lot to rewind time so I could leap after you and the Expediter to be here now.” Miss Canterbury examined the carved column where the Expediter had disappeared. “I don’t see any controls,” she worried. “How are we going to get out of here?” “Where are we anyway?” Mumph wondered, staring at the bizarre ruined city for the first time. Miss Canterbury pointed up to the Earth in the skies. “By Jove!” said Sir Mumphrey Wilton. It took the better part of a day for them to walk the perimeter of the canyon where the Turquoise City rested. Beyond the edge of the city the atmosphere thinned and then became vacuum. Only amongst the ruined dwellings and civic structures of an unfathomable unknown civilisation did some forgotten device regulate the atmosphere for carbon life. “This is fantastic!” Miss Canterbury marvelled as they sat down in the vast main plaza, amidst the ruins of a circle of noble statues. “We’re on the Moon! The moon! And there are… were… men on the moon! Moon men!” “Not so sure,” Mumphrey admitted. “These statues look human enough. Except for that one with the fins. But I remember those Versalian legends about a race who lived on the Moon and used ancient devices to grant intelligence of the apes?” “Yes. And the Expediter mentioned a Deviate War. Didn’t that Abhuman race engineer the talking apes and other species as solders in a conflict with some abhorrent foe called the Deviates?” “This could be the very place where those Abhumans bred their allies, then. We’re walking through history.” “Is that what the Nazis want then?” speculated his companion. “The technology to twist biology and create new life forms? To conquer the moon?” “Clearly not,” reasoned the eccentric Englishman. “Or else the Expediter could have just brought them here – assumin’ they know he can do this, which I doubt. And he seems able to come here at will, so that’s not his objective either. No, it must be something else. Something deeper.” “Then what?” Miss Canterbury wondered. “And how does this fantastic city relate to it?” Mumph checked his chronometer. “These stones were raised five thousand three hundred and twenty-four years ago,” he noted. “Your pocketwatch can be that precise?” “I could tell you the time of day they were put up if I wanted to be that accurate,” admitted the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. “The question isn’t when, but who?” “I thought the question rather was how do we get out of here?” suggested Miss Canterbury. “In all our travels here we haven’t found water or food.” “True,” agreed Mumph. “I don’t have any clever temporal means of getting’ us from here. We seem to be castaways.” “By romantic moonlight,” sighed Miss C looking around. Then she shuddered. “I’d prefer not to die, Mumphrey. I’m starting to get a little scared.” “Brave heart, m’dear. We’re not finished yet. I’m still planning to give a stupendous thrashing to those Wertham and Expediter oiks, so we’ll have to find a way out of here.” Miss Canterbury tried to smile. “I expected you to come after me, you know,” she confessed. “That seems terribly unreasonable of me.” “Not at all. Happy to see you again. We always seem to get to the interestin’ tourist spots, what? And it’s fascinatin’ to speculate why the city was put here, and what happened to ruin it. If we could work out more about the makers then maybe we could understand those doorway thingies the Expediter used to get here and escape.” “You wouldn’t need to escape if you hadn’t followed me,” Miss Canterbury pointed out. “But we keep having variants of this conversation, don’t we?” “Yes. We’ll have to work on that. I was fortunate to get there within the limits of my ability to reverse time. That Expediter cad had tried to get his high-up chum in the US Secret Service to make me lay off. Had to call on some political support to get ‘em to let me come.” “You called one of your superiors?” “You could say that. And if he hadn’t ordered them to let me go…” Well, the next call would have been King George. Miss Canterbury examined another of the malachite columns. “The Expediter said the portal technology was… hardly functioning. He mentioned a charge. Could you perhaps make them work with your Chronometer?” “’Fraid not,” Mumphrey said, staring at his instrument. “It just doesn’t work that… hello!” “What?” Miss Canterbury glanced over at the green illuminated face of the bizarre timepiece. A little dial she hadn’t noticed before was whizzing round quickly. “What’s that?” “Temporal disturbance nearby,” frowned Mumph. He twiddled one of the clock’s winders. “Just let me refine this a bit and… ah!” A surprised-looking fat man in a toga blinked into view. “Good evening,” said Miss Canterbury with amazing equanimity. “Oh,” said the Observer, flushing from his sandals upwards. “Damn.” “Language,” growled Mumphrey. “Mem-sahib present.” “You can hear me to?” winced the ten-foot-tall cosmic watcher. “Dam… er, drat.” “Who are you and why were you spyin’ on us?” demanded Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Well, sirrah?” “Are you sure you can see me? I might be a figment of your imagination.” “We see you alright,” Mumph assured him. “Is this your city?” “The Turquoise Zone? No, I live over… No, I’m just passing through, and I saw there were visitors.” The big bald man squinted a little. “Humans!” “We came through a glowing doorway,” Miss Canterbury explained. “That’s not possible,” the observer denied. “Homo Sapiens can’t operate those.” “So who are you?” Mumphrey persisted, “And why were you spyin’ on us?” “I was not spying,” denied the Observer. “It happens to be my job to record all the things that go on in this quadrant of the universe, for archive purposes, so that when the Parodyverse comes to an end we can work out what it was for and who won. And what the answer to the big question was.” “Can you help us to get home?” wondered Miss Canterbury. “Absolutely not! I’m not allowed to interfere in the slightest.” “Too bad,” noted Sir Mumphrey. “To whom do we report your misconduct?” “Misconduct? I told you I refuse to send you back to Earth, even if you have to starve to death up here.” “Exactly,” said Mumph triumphantly. “You told us. Let us see you, gave us information. Interfered. That’s got to be a breach of the rules.” The Observer looked stricken for a moment and then his face turned cunning. “But you’re only humans. And if you die up here how can you ever lodge a complaint? Eh?” Mumphrey held up his pocketwatch. “I’m Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, one of the Lesser Officeholders. Want to observe me referring this to the Chronicler of Stories?” “Urk,” gulped the Observer. “So, um, where did you say you wanted to be?” “Piccadilly Square should do fine,” Miss Canterbury assured him. “Near the tube station.” The Observer scowled and sulked but eventually he waved his hands and the two intruding humans vanished back to Earth. The Observer peered towards the distant planet with a certain smug satisfaction. “Oops,” he giggled to himself. “Missed.” In our next exciting episode:We don’t even find out where Mumph and Miss C end up. Instead it’s time to read the Bertram Diaries and see what all the fuss has been about. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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