“We don’t go in for Fairyish decadence up here. Commit your crimes under cover of darkness like an honest crustacean, I say. Folk down below might treat you fancy just because you’ve got a dash of official danger on you—and danger approved and accounted for is hardly danger at all if you ask me and my grandmother—but here on the Moon, we call them like we see them and I see you plain as the tide! No Writ of Rascalry recognized! Petition denied! Take your trash elsewhere, missy!”
But the lobster could not help being at least a little curious. She peeked through the rough teeth of her green claw at September’s scroll. Then she opened it wider. And wider still.
“Professional Revolutionary?” she cried, reading the writ. “Do you mean to say you’ve led revolts? Real rebellions? In Fairyland?”
September demurred. “No, no, it’s all a misunderstanding, everything’s got twisted round…” But she saw the jackals’ ruffs rise and the lobster stiffen. She cleared her throat and changed her tack. “What I mean to say is that I brought down the Marquess who ruled over all of Fairyland, but it wasn’t a revolt, it was just me.”
“Don’t be modest!” roared Nefarious Freedom with delight. “Any enemy of the Fairy establishment is a bosom companion of mine. My gran would drop her shell if she caught me treating rough with comrades-at-arms!”
Rushe bowed, stretching his legs in front of him like a cat. “Right up the stairs, ma’am,” he purred, “and watch your step.”
Waite licked his chops. “And if there’s a thing we can do to aid and abet you just howl and we’ll hear it. Excellent acoustics in Almanack.”
September did not like using the Marquess as a strange sort of password. It had been so much more complicated than that. And it felt like bragging, which was not at all nice when you considered the consequences of it all. Nor could she understand how these beasts could hate Fairyland so—and Fairies, who were nearly as extinct as dimetrodons, save a few stray orphans like King Charlie and Belinda Cabbage and Calpurnia Farthing. But she had little to barter with but her reputation. The sooner she finished with this nonsense, the sooner she could set about finding A-Through-L and Saturday.
“You could winch up my…my friend. I fear she won’t make it up the steps.” September did not know what to call Aroostook, but what use might a lobster and two jackals have for the word car?
The lobster-knight looked dubious. “Your friend would crack the pearl! Smash it right to bits. We’ve got strict preservation codes. No Alien Conveyances Allowed. But never you worry. You’ll find Almanack has taken care of all your needs, I promise. Travel by Public Tram, Taxicrab, or Regularly Scheduled Trapeze! See the Grand Moonflower Lawn from the sack of a luxury lunar pelican! You’ll have no cause to complain, friend.”
“I can’t just leave Aroostook. What if someone made off with her or vandalized her parts? Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t mean to, but she’s a complicated machine. A Tool, really, and Tools Have Rights.” September fell back lamely on the only law she knew by name.
The jackals exchanged glances. “Who told you that?” they said together.
“Never mind, never mind!” cried Nefarious, waving her emerald pincers in the air. “We’ll watch over her nice and snug. Safe as seahorses. It’s what we do, after all! Come back for her when you’re finished.”
September felt very reluctant indeed to leave the Model A. Fairyish folk seemed so terribly fascinated by the automobile. But faster in, faster out! September turned off the engine and pocketed the key. She patted the burlaped wheel. “I won’t be long,” she whispered. “Don’t go running off this time! You can’t trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!”
Aroostook settled into silence as September walked up the coral staircase and into Almanack.
When she was quite out of sight, a peculiar thing happened. The big, rusty horn nestled into the driver’s-side door melted away into hot steam. In its place billowed up a huge cobalt and white striped phonograph bell. A squeeze bulb ballooned out from the bottom of it, looking a bit like a tulip bulb, delicate and coppery and sheathed in gauzy layers like a live thing.
The jackals sniffed at it. It smelled of sunshine.
September stepped inside the snail-shell and onto a long shimmering street full of sound and tumult. It spiraled down and in along the floor of the great shell—but up and down had clearly become such good friends here that it hardly mattered who was who. Almanack was all mother-of-pearl, silver-green, and blue-violet chasing each other in gleaming ribbons. Houses and streetlamps and storefronts and skinny bright towers and fountains and bridges and pavilions sprung out everywhere: not only out of the floor of the shell but sticking out sideways from the walls and upside down from the misty reaches of the ceiling. It looked as though they had grown there, budded out of the shell itself like mushrooms. Every bank and gambling hall and bakery and public house flashed with the same mother-of-pearl. Everything was Almanack and Almanack was everything. Fishwives cast nets in a pearly river that ran across a curve of spiral wall and should have spilled out all over the avenue and September herself, but somehow did not. People and creatures and carts walked and rolled along, chatting merrily, the men wearing fabulous anemones like corsages, the women tipping coral top hats to anyone they passed. A great pelican whose tail sported no feathers but flapped a long, diaphanous goldfish’s tail behind it wafted overhead, its hefty pouch filled with a tumult of mermaids splashing in a specially provided pool.
With a skittering thump, something barreled toward September, nearly crashing into a lovely, tall mother-of-pearl candelabra that lit the way into Alm
anack, only righting itself with a wild thrashing of four of its eight legs as it careened up on its side. It brought itself in hand with a thud and a scrabble and looked up at September with piercing, intelligent eyes: a broad, polished, black-and-white-checkered crab.
“Afternoon,” he said crisply. “Name’s Spoke and I’ll be your Taxicrab on this fine day. First visit to Almanack? I can always spot a first-timer. Can’t stop gawking at the ceiling. Sometimes they throw up! Please don’t throw up. I’ve just had a wash.”
September looked from the checkered crab to the green pearl ceiling and back again. “But I didn’t call for a…a Taxicrab,” she said softly.
“Who calls for one? Screamingly inefficient, if you ask me! Almanack takes care of all your needs. I suppose if you felt like insisting on it I could fetch you a walking map, but they’re a devil to catch and take at least four hands and an opposable tail to operate so it’s my professional opinion as a crabbie of venerable years that you ought to climb on and let me scuttle you wherever you need to scut!”
Indeed, a very comfortable-looking cushioned chair was strapped to the crab’s chessboard back with a number of enormous black belts. Throw pillows in all the shades of mother-of-pearl plumped invitingly along the seat.
“I’m afraid I haven’t got a fare…” September bit the inside of her cheek so as not to show the fullness of her embarrassment. How hard she had tried to avoid this! How carefully she’d saved!
The Taxicrab’s slender claws went snick-snick-crunch. “Fare? I don’t know the meaning of the word! You’re a fair young girl; I’m a fair old crab and I pinch my children equally when they’ve been wretched. But if you mean paying your way, like I summed it, Almanack looks after your littlest need before you know you’ve got one in your pocket. Hup, hup, hup! In you go, don’t be shy, I won’t drop you—well, I won’t drop you far. I’m low to the ground, which is how I spell safety!”
September could not help smiling. After the Blue Wind, she felt the crab’s cheerfulness wash over her like a hot and happy bath. She put her foot in one of the belt loops like a horse’s stirrup and hoisted herself onto the plush seat.
“Where to, my four-legged maid?”
“I haven’t got four legs! I think you must have miscounted.”
“Sure you have! Just like I’ve got ten. Oh, the ignorant will say eight, but my claws are for walking as well as snatching and pinching and digging. I daresay you could walk around on your hands and knees if you had a hankering to do it. And why slow yourself down by only using your body parts for only one thing each? Very limiting!”