The Japanese Devil Fish Girl Read Online Free Page B

you.’
     
    The lovely creature giggled girlishly. ‘You are a gentleman, Mr Fox,’ she said. ‘My name is Ada Lovelace.’
     
    ‘Your servant, ma’am.’ And George did doffings of his bowler.
     
    It was a pleasant moment, strolling towards the mighty palace of glass, lit to a dazzling brilliance from within. On every side the folk of fashion, gorgeous in their finery, folk of this world and beyond. The crème de la crème of this belle époque.
     
    George gave guarded looks to all and sundry: to the provosts and paladins and papal nuncios, the plutocrats and panjandrums and princely potentates. He viewed the hospodars and shahanshahs, commissioners and commissars, the oligarchs and grand viziers, the emperors and subadars, the ecclesiasts of Venus, with their vestments and perfumers, the merry trolls of Jupiter, in pantalettes and bloomers . . .
     
    ‘This would be the life,’ said George unto himself.
     
    Ada beckoned George and whispered, ‘Do you like Venusians?’
     
    ‘I do not really know,’ George replied. ‘I have never met one.’
     
    ‘I’ve met several.’ Ada’s voice was soft, but George was listening intently. ‘And I don’t like them at all. You cannot tell what they are thinking.’
     
    George did shruggings and said that he rarely knew what anyone was thinking.
     
    ‘And they have three sexes,’ Ada said.
     
    George, though tall, stopped short in his tracks. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.
     
    ‘They have three sexes,’ said Ada once more. ‘Male, female and “of the spirit”. And their spaceships do not have motors in them. They are powered by faith. They call them “Holier-than-Air craft”.’
     
    ‘That sounds most unlikely,’ said George, expressing doubts.
     
    ‘But it is true,’ said Ada. ‘Aether ships they also call them. And I have heard that their intention is to convert all the people of Earth to their religion. They have their own bible called The Book of Sayito and speak of a “Goddess of the Stars” who will manifest herself to all in a time not far from this, when the “Great Revelation” will occur.’
     
    ‘Ah,’ said George. ‘Please do not consider me impious, but I hold to be prudent those men who do not offer to explain the Book of Revelation.’
     
    ‘Well, I find Venusians fearful,’ whispered Ada. ‘Sleek and beautiful perhaps, but so too is a fencing foil.’
     
    A tall Venusian passed them by, then paused and turned them a glance. George could see the beauty, but he could not sense a threat. The being of Venus, man, or woman, or be what else it was, stood tall and slender to behold, with hair as white as alabaster and teased to dizzying plumes. The face was gaunt, the cheekbones angled, the eyes pure gold and radiant. The high-shouldered vestments were pinched at the waist and reached all the way to the ground. The perfumer, without which no Venusian was ever to be seen, swung censer-like from the being’s pale left hand. Small whispers of luminous green smoke issued from the perfumer. Human yet inhuman was the creature. George wondered how such beings as this had managed to move incognito amongst the peoples of Earth for quite so long. Masters, mistresses or otherwises of disguise, George supposed, although their innate ‘otherness’ would surely be hard to conceal.
     
    But no further words were said upon the matter of Venusians, as George and Ada had now reached the entrance of the Crystal Palace. George looked up at the dizzying walls of glass, the great distant swirl of the high façade. The golden glow of light within, provided tonight, George overheard a fellow remark, by Mr Nikola Tesla, who had positioned ten thousand neon tubes around and about the vast glazed building, brought to fluorescence by an induction loop of cable that did not actually touch the tubes themselves.
     
    ‘One day all domestic lighting will be as this,’ George heard the fellow say.
     
    And then they were within. Within that vastness,