Ballast wedged the gas can under the mouth of her fountain-fish. A stream of bubbles shot out of its silver lips, splashing into the sirops and turning them into a swirl of changing colors blazing with light.
“Just what’s wanted.” She nodded at her cocktail with pride. “Downbound’s Own Nosh of Nostalgia and Antediluvian Antifreeze.”
When B.D. hoisted up Aroostook’s hood, September peered into the maze of the engine, looking for a tiny, growing ballast, a knot of something, anything. She saw nothing, and did not know how she felt about that. The memory-gas flowed silkily into the battered tank, making little delighted gurgles as it drained from the can. When it was done, September turned the automobile on once more and hoped for the best. She did not recall anything about the intersection of sunshine and werewhales in her geology textbook. Nevertheless, Aroostook blossomed into life. The engine fired without argument and fired more strongly and smoothly than September had ever heard it, as though it had never been whacked about the nose with a beech tree in all its days.
She turned to thank the Klabautermann and found that otter’s face suddenly very close to her own. She could smell the smell of Ballast Downbound: salt and the sea and kerosene and rummy sirops. She placed something in September’s hand.
“Call it an orange fizz, mixed just for you.” She chuckled.
September held a small bottle shaped like an egg. Patches of barnacles and pearls grew all over it, sealing in a black cork. Deep campfire-colored spirits bubbled inside.
And then, with a roar, everything shattered.
September felt it in her stomach before it started, like the shadow of a quiver. Earthquakes are not common in Nebraska, or else she might have had something to compare it to. This was not, however, an earthquake.
It was a moonquake.
Ballast’s neat boxes tumbled down; the bottles in the Memory Fountain burst and smashed. The barge groaned horribly as it veered into the briar-rails of the road. The ultramarine fish in its rudder flopped up onto the decks, hoping for safety. The Moon drew very close now. The last off-ramp announced itself cheerfully on a broad sign: WELCOME TO THE MOON! PLEASE WIPE YOUR SHOES. But as the heavens seemed determined to shake itself apart, the sign split in half, falling down into space along with bits of broken railing and silver paving stones and ivory wagon wheels. September screamed, clutching for Ballast Downbound-but her hands met empty air. The Klabautermann was bouncing over the barge trying to keep her boxes and her bottles and her fish and her ship from skittering out into the endless black sky beyond the road. September caught her terrified eyes as she scooped up an armful of rudder fish and dumped them into an old bathtub that was sliding downdeck as the barge heeled at a sickening angle.
“It’s Ciderskin,” Ballast hissed. “It’s the Yeti coming for us!”
The Model A’s door swung open and September’s legs tumbled out sideways, her feet kicking in space. She wrapped both arms around Aroostook’s sunflower steering wheel, her teeth jarring, her legs scrabbling for purchase on the stepboard. Up above, the crescent of the Moon stopped being a crescent and became a wide countryside, full of silver mountains. It was all there was to see. Aroostook lost her grip on the barge and tumbled up, or down, or sideways-who could tell? But the land caught them with a crash and a cloud of fine silver dust.
September had made it. She was on the Moon.
But the shaking went on and on and on.
INTERLUDE
THE BLACK COSMIC DOG
In Which We Examine Perspective, the Geography of the Moon, and a Very Busy Canine
Sometimes it is hard to see the shape of things. The world is frightfully big, and you can only ever see the part you’re standing on. Even if you could find a ledge or a tower so high up that you could see everything from New York to Budapest to Australia and back again, the cosmos is so much bigger and wider than that. You cannot see from your doorstep that the world is rolling along in space with its brothers and sisters, which we call Venus and Jupiter and Saturn and the Sun, but it is so. No matter where you stand, everything is always and forever so much bigger than you can tell.
If September had found such a ledge or tower, she might have seen herself, inside Aroostook the Model A, moving up that long silver road that led from the mountain to the Moon. And she might have seen the mountain itself, a great, gorgeous spire of rock rising out of the fiery cold sea in the shape of a woman with long flying hair and wings like a fish’s many fins on her back. She might have seen the woman’s craggy hand pointing up toward the sky and from the tip of her longest finger the road winding out and up like her own long breath. She might have seen the frozen face of the mountain pursing her lips and puffing her cheeks, blowing Moonbound travelers off her hand like dandelion puffs after some secret stony wish.
But if our girl could have climbed the tallest ladder you or I can imagine and stood upon the topmost rung with her lunch in one hand and binoculars in the other, she might have seen something even stranger and more interesting.
The Moon over Fairyland is always waxing. Because of all I have just told you concerning the difficulty of seeing things as they are, it sometimes looks full to sailors on the Perverse and Perilous Sea or lovesick Physickists in the woolly towers of Pandemonium or young girls walking along intent on some goal or other. They see the vast curve of the crescent turned fully toward them, so vast it looks nothing at all like a crescent. It is on this outer edge that the folk of the Moon live and scheme and play the harpsichord. It is here the Whelk of the Moon looks out over the Sea of Restlessness. It is here the Hreinn once lived, where Moon-walruses practice one-tusk calligraphy and two-tusk billiards.
No one lives on the inner edge of the Moon.
Well, not anymore.
But there is someone there now. Rooting around in the ruins, sniffing at smashed-in statues and pawing at dark, broken houses where nobody is having supper. Somebody is walking around a shattered herald’s square, picking things up, turning them over, weighing them, staring at them with a terrible sharp eye. It’s a long job-no one bothered to clean up after themselves. Objects lie here and there and everywhere, very fine but very forgotten: sledgehammers, rakes, chisels, straight-edge razors, sickles and scythes, spades and hammers, jewelers’ glasses, telescopes, wheels, abaci, longshoremen’s hooks and seamstresses’ tape, wrenches, knives, swords, fishing rods and wrenches, shears and knitting needles and frying pans and brooms and axes and typewriters and film projectors and dead lightbulbs and clocks.
Somebody is investigating all of them, one by one. He is tall and handsome, with thick, curly black hair and a long, noble snout. He is alert and careful. His ears stick up straight so as to miss nothing. His nose is very wet.
His name is the Black Cosmic Dog.
In the middle of the square he pushes a pile of old spectacles aside and begins to dig, furiously, in the soft soil of the Moon.