The Martian Agent,
A Planetary Romance
by Michael Chabon

They were the sons of an
imperial traitor, marked for life.
Their only honor lay in their
loyalty to each other. Their sole
chance for salvation lay in the
empire of the clouds.

'Tis theirs to sweep through the ringing deep where Azrael's outposts are, Or buffet a path through the Pit's red wrath when God goes out to war, Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star. —Rudyard Kipling
CHAPTER ONE
WHELPS
1.
The brothers first encountered a land sloop on the night, late in the summer of 1876, that one hunted their father down. It picked up their trail in Natchitoches country, two miles from
Fort Wellington, at the ragged southwestern border of the Louisiana Territories and of the British Empire itself. The moon, as many sad partisans of the mutineer George Armstrong Custer were to record, hung fat in the sky, stained with an autumnal tinge of blood that, to some diarists, presaged hanging and debacle. Outside the windows of the coach in which the brothers and their parents rode lay the wilderness, flooded in black water and in a steady-flowing hubbub of night birds, insects, and amphibians. The coach bobbed and pitched as if borne on that current of bedlam and black water, down a road already ancient when the ancestors of these very insects had jabbed and goaded DeSoto's men along it to their itching feverish deaths. The boot-heels of the coachman, a big, steady Vermonter named Hasel-tine, drummed against the front of the coach, just behind the boys' heads, with the random tattoo of a broken shutter in the wind. The timbers of the carriage groaned with each jolt and stone in the road. The respiration of the mosquito-mad team, a pair of spavined drays for which, two days earlier, they had exchanged the last of their sovereigns, rattled out behind the coach like a string of tin cans.
The first shrill call of the steel throat in the distance left a rippling wake of silence.
—Train, said the little one, or—no.
The cry had sounded too forlorn, too lupine for a train. Before the little boy even saw the knot of grief that deformed the hinge of the father's stubbled, powder-burnt jaw, he knew that whatever had uttered it was hungering for them.
—There are no trains, the older brother said. Not this deep into Indian country. Don't be a dolt.
—I'm not a dolt.
—A train.
—Please, the mother said, boys.
The little boy seized his brother's shoulder, gathering a scratchy wool handful of stained cadet gray. He won't ever be a British officer now, nor will I. Though he was a good forty pounds lighter and seven years the junior, the little boy sent the older brother lurching clear across the coach, slamming his head against a brass fitting. Before the older brother could retaliate there was another cry from the valve, louder, nearer, a blurred double-reeded blat less like the call of a wolf than of an implacable iron toad. At the sound of it the little boy scooted across the bench and buried his head in the brother's lap. The brother put an arm around him and stroked his hair. He pulled an old Ohio River Company trading blanket with its smell of dog and tallow, amid which they had huddled for most of the past week, up to their chins.
The mother turned to the father.
—Harry, she said. What is it? Could it be a train?
—Not here, said the father. Franklin is right. Not this close to Tejas.
They were less than ten miles now from the border and freedom—another fact which melancholy diarists of the failed rebellion would be inclined, in the days that followed, to record.
The father stood up and went to the door of the coach. The night and its furor of animals and bugs blew in and stirred the damp black strands of the mother's hair. Her cheeks were glinting, febrile. All the way from the Yalobusha River to the Red she had thrashed and dreamed fever dreams that to the little boy, whose name was Jefferson Mordden MacAndrew Drake, were unimaginably cavernous, lit with lamps of blood. The proximity of Tejas seemed to have revived her; reasoning conversely, her younger son was certain that if they did not make it across the Sabine River she would die. They were headed for the ferry at Beurre. Jefferson Drake had been in possession of this fact and little else for the past eleven days. The father hung half out of the door of the rocking coach and called upward into the night. The brothers could not hear what he inquired of the coachman, nor what reply he received. But when he sat down again, he hoisted the canvas haversack that had ridden between his feet all the way from Sulla, in the Ohio Territory, and began to take out his guns.

2.

Every lost cause has its sacred litany, each of whose plaints begins with the words "If only." If only Custer could have waited one week more for the road to Ashtabula to clear. If only Phil Sheridan had not been shot by the jealous husband of Mrs. Delaplane. And if only Cuyahoga Drake had made it to Tejas, surely the guns and gold promised by Lincoln . . .
In a telegram dispatched from Fort Wellington on the Sabine to the C-in-C of Her Majesty's Columbian Army, at Potomac, following the events whose successful conclusion raised him to Command of the Mississippi Army, Lieutenant General H.P.W. Hodge stated that Colonel Harry Drake, fleeing the ruin of the mutiny he had helped to foment, had been spotted by a native Natchitoches scout eleven miles from the Sabine River, eastern border of the Tejas Free Republic. The scout, a half-breed named Victor Piles, turned his mongrel pony toward the squat black turrets of the fort, raising a wild alarm. Word of Cuyahoga Drake's southwestern flight had followed him, more or less delayed by the intermittent drunkenness and indolence of the frontier courier corps, from the moment of his escape from the stockade at Sulla on the Ohio. General Hodge, sad, syphilitic, tormented by hidden sympathy with the mutineers, had been feeding the burners of his shining black pair of Mullock-Treadwell land sloops since early that morning, on the off-chance that Drake and his family might pass through the neighborhood on their way to the rusty yellow Sabine. Wellington was among the last of the southwestern stations to be equipped with steam wagons and had taken delivery of two brand-new Terror-class sloops, the Dauntless and the Princess Louise, only two weeks before. They had emerged from their crates, to the groaning of hot nails and navvies with crowbars, smelling of fresh paint, leather, packing oil, excelsior. Hodge had fallen in love them at once, with a helpless passion fostered by his remote and lonely billet. When Victor Piles came around crying about the rollicking carriage and dappled nags straining for Tejas down the old Natchitoches road, Hodge agonized over which of his darlings to risk and flaunt in pursuit of the renegade hero of Cleveland and Ashtabula.
In the end Hodge chose the Dauntless. She had been among the first wagons rolled out of Mullock-Treadwell's huge new Second Manchester Works, and she more than made up in style and speed what she lacked in seasoning or experience in the field. She was a Model 3 Terror, long and canine, a steel greyhound powered by a hundred-horsepower Bucephalus engine. The relative frailty of her armor-plating was more than compensated for by her maneuverability and by the range and mobility of her big .45 turret-mounted Gatling. Along with her crew of six she could carry a section of infantrymen, eight troopers of the 27th Cajun Fusiliers whom Hodge assigned to the pursuit. The question of whether there would be sufficient additional room in her acrid sweltering hold for a living prisoner remained unsettled as the Dauntless huffed, riveted leather treads clattering against the gangway of pine planking, out through the gates of Fort Wellington into the wilderness. The NCO in command of the Fusiliers, a Sergeant Swindell, had the foresight, in case space was wanting, to bring along a length of stout rope.

3.

In her haste to flee, after her husband's escape from the guardhouse at Sulla, Mrs. Drake, nee Catherine Mordden, had endeavored to condense the wealth and history of her family into an Indiaman chest. Clean linens, a strand of Yalu pearls, her wedding dress, a Bible that had been the gift of her brother at their last parting. Mufflers and oilskins for the boys. Biscuit, wine, a small wheel of New York cheese. A plait of Iroquois wampum likely to have no value anywhere that her family might conceivably alight. A hundred-year-old flag of red and white stripes, with a quartered ring of yellowing stars on a blue field, that was her husband's most treasured possession; and a chromolithograph of Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer, at the time of his accession to the Command of Her Majesty's Army of the Great Lakes, in a rosewood frame, which was her own. (Scurrilous rumors spread by the enemies of the Ohioists, and kept alive for decades afterward by the avid gossip of historians, would link Kitty Drake romantically to the Martyr of American Hopes, and even trace the younger of the two Drake boys to Custer's seed.) Half a mile from the ferry at Beurre Landing the sea chest, strapped to the roof of the rattling coach, worked itself out of its bindings and tumbled to the roadbed. It landed on one corner and split in two with the neat snap of a snuffbox springing open. Starry flag, lace, and biscuits were strewn across the road. Pearls skittered like water on a hot stove lid. The portrait of George Custer lay, glass glinting, in the lovely ill-betokening moonlight. For a moment, the expression of the Martyr in the portrait, that steady, slightly mad blue gaze which had always struck the portrait's owner as summarizing all that was brash, vainglorious, strong, fundamentally and conclusively un-English, about her husband's generation of solitary horsemen and wanderers and Indian fighters, took on a strangely plaintive air. Custer seemed to be remonstrating with the heavens he contemplated. Then, in a half-musical splintering of timber and glass, the Dauntless's left tread nosed its way onto and over the distilled patrimony of the Drakes, flattening what it did not tear or turn to dust and shards.
Then the Dauntless spoke.
—Colonel Drake.
It spoke in the voice of its chief engineer, a Sergeant Breedlove, who crouched in the dark roaring stink of its cabin, between the stack of metal rungs that climbed to the gun turret and a small transverse slot that permitted him to peer vaguely out into the Louisiana midnight, clutching a wooden funnel to his lips. The funnel was connected to a length of canvas-covered caoutchouc hose that ran up through a small eye in the roof of the land sloop, where it was joined to the narrow end of a large, slender horn or bell that opened beneath the Gatling like a lily, a black tin corsage.
—Colonel Drake, your mutiny is over. Custer has surrendered to the Crown.
The raspy, rather high-pitched tone of the Dauntless and its mushy Yorkshire accent carried easily across the narrowing gap between it and the carriage. The little boy looked at his brother, whose name was Franklin Mordden Evans Drake. Franklin Drake looked at their father.
—It's a trick, he said. Custer would never—
—You will not be permitted to reach the border, said the Dauntless. Please, Colonel. Do not force us to open fire.
The father rose from the bench once more to put his grimed face and staring eyes out into the uproar and moonlight of the bayou. He had a measuring gaze that could guess accurately at the weight of bullocks or the height of weather vanes or the wish, however pure or sinful, in the heart of an eight-year-old boy. He hung there for a long moment, leaning on the open door of the coach, estimating the chances and the outcomes. Then he closed the door and sat heavily down.
—Five hundred yards back, he said. A land sloop. Machine gun. A Gatling. A forty-five, I'd say.
—It's a Terror, said Frank with a hint of awe. Semi-amphibious. This late in the summer she could likely swim after us right into the river.
It was all the little boy could do to prevent himself from going to the door to see this marvel. The father noticed.
—No, he said.
The little boy sat back and looked at his brother, who was struggling with his own desire to see the thing that was running them to ground. The carriage rolled on, but its rocking had subsided and there was no question that Haseltine, the coachman, was losing his resolve. He had seen Gatlings and Nordenfeldts used on the Cayugas at Ashtabula and the Lakotas at Poudre and the Russians at Belokonsk. It was all too easy for him to imagine looking down to see the glaucous gray insides of his body lying steaming in his lap.
—Coward, said Cuyahoga Drake.
There was such universal disgust in his voice that for a moment the brothers were unsure whom the epithet was intended to damn. Then the father rose and went to the door once more.
—Haseltine! You damned milk-soaked—
—Harry.
The father turned to find the mother staring at him, her lips pressed together, worrying the worried kerchief tucked into the bodice of her shirtwaist dress.
Colonel Drake opened his mouth. He had sensibly and carefully and with only the most reasoning sort of bravery led the armies of the British Empire in victory after victory against Iroquois and Sioux and Alyeskan Tsarists before taking the first unmeasured step of his career and enlisting for eight brutal and glorious months in Custer's mad attempt to rekindle the extinguished Republic on the shores of Lake Erie. His sons waited for his next words.
—Colonel Drake, said the Dauntless, this is the final warning I will make.
In the end, the brothers would remember, their father merely nodded. When he drew his sword it was only to rap with the hilt, twice, against the ceiling of the coach.
Haseltine cursed and forgave the horses in a series of unintelligible barks. The carriage creaked and rumbled. The sand beneath its wheels sighed. Through the windows of the coach the clamor of the bayou, as if their forward progress had tended to slip them past or somehow through it like fingers cupped around a candle, now blew in, a steady, flame-snuffing gust. The mother winced and closed her eyes in pain, as if the discordant productions of nocturnal western Louisiana had triggered one of her megrims. Behind or within that clamor lay the grind of gears, the resolute, dumb, canine chuffing of the Terror's big Bucephalus. Up on the box, Haseltine coughed. There was the scratch of a lucifer.
More to his own surprise, perhaps, than that of those whom he addressed, who knew him better, Jefferson Drake found that he was moved by a spasm of profound outrage.
—We can't just sit here and wait for them to grab us!
Colonel Drake lit his own burled pipe. In more normal circumstances the business with match and tobacco might have served to veil his amusement with his younger son, who disdained generally to sit and wait for anything at all.
—What do you propose, Jefferson?
The boy looked at the two revolvers, two rifles, and eight boxes of cartridges that comprised the family arsenal. There were the pair of Webleys, a balky old single-shot Rigby won in a game of faro by the same seafaring maternal grandfather whose trunk had foundered on the Natchitoches road, and a captured Lebeau-Courally ten-gauge, its stock engraved with (Mrs. Drake had said) scenes from a book called Atala by Chateaubriand, and bearing the monogram of the late General Durmanov. It was exquisite but had been designed for the hunting of snipe and woodcock and could not be relied upon to kill a grown man.
Jefferson Drake was an inveterate reader of novels for boys. In these tales there were ever only three possible destinies available to those who found themselves in such a grave predicament. For Heroic Britons, there were the Fighting Martyrdom, guns blazing, and the Impossible Stand, holding out until help arrived. For a noble enemy—Russian, German, Pathan, the odd renegade Frenchman or Iroquois—there was only Defeat Without Surrender, choosing to end one's own life rather than face the ignominy of inevitable capture.
(For "savage" enemies such possibilities rarely arose, for these traveled almost exclusively in Swarms or Hordes, and so never found themselves Surrounded.) Looking at their paltry armaments, and knowing from the grave listening expression on the face of his brother, who was keen on such things, that the approaching Terror must be a formidable piece of machinery indeed, the first two options seemed impracticable, in the first case, and in the second case ridiculous. Then too, they were no longer, for reasons the boy could have just managed to explain without truly understanding, Heroic Britons. They were rebels—mutineers. During those months of rapid victory, barbaric rains, and total failure, the Drake family had passed from that portion of the map of existence tinted proud and homely British red into a blank and hostile territory.
—Take our own lives, the little boy said.
It came out more of a question than he had intended, thin and grave and far too possible. He was hoping to be contradicted, and when the father said, "Nonsense," at once, without even taking his eyes off the glowing bowl of his pipe, the boy was so grateful that he burst into tears.
—Stop that blubbering, the father said.
He turned to the mother with a sharp tone and an air of giving her something useful to do. His tone was not unkind.
—Do button him up.
The mother sat forward and reached across the carriage toward him, trying to draw her son toward her fevered breast. But the boy pulled away, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
—I can button myself up.
He saw that his brother was watching him, with a peculiar empty expression that he knew well, and he sat back to wait, feeling obscurely comforted. Frank was always watching him, studying his words and behavior, not with envy or scorn or concern—though these were not unknown elements of his feelings for the little boy— but with a version of their father's measuring gaze that seemed to take Jeff's outbursts and ideas as a form of weather, phenomena that, correctly interpreted, could be exploited as the raw materials to which a masterly hand and chisel might be applied. All the currents of brotherly respect and imitation flowed in the usual direction between them: The younger idolized the older, nearly as devoutly as he did their father. But the impetus for their common undertakings as brothers—for all that it was the older one who arranged and directed them—nearly always derived from some wild remark, from the unreasoned hotheaded dissatisfaction, of the younger of the pair.
—Jeff's right. Give us a gun, Daddy. Let us go. They won't get us. I'll see to that.
—Oh, said the mother, Harry, no.
—We haven't got more than a few miles to go. It's hours yet until daylight. Do you think I can't get myself and one little kid across a few miles of mud and frogs?
—He can, the little boy said. You know he can, Daddy.
The father sat a moment. Each time he drew on his pipe his long nose cast a flaring shadow up the high furrowed dome of his skull. The land sloop was close enough now that they could hear her crewmen shouting at one another to be heard over the racket of the machine they were laboring to control.
—Harry, the mother said. No. They will be cared for. They will not be harmed.
—They will be turned against us, said the father. Perhaps you do not consider this to be a form of harm.
He reached down and picked up one of the Webleys, opened the chamber, and checked it for the third time in ten minutes. Then he snapped it shut, and handed it to his older son.
—Your brother has never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lincoln, Franklin. See that you get him to San Antonio.
—Yes, sir. I will look after him, sir.
The boys slid from the bench and crouched down to fill their pockets with boxes of cartridges. Then the little boy went to the door. Afterward he would recall the way his heart pounded with the knowledge that he ought to go and throw his arms around his mother and father and bid them farewell. He was inclined, in later years, to excoriate himself for this omission. The truth, however, was that at the time his mind was such a jumble of agitation, apprehension, and the sheer blind desire to be free at last of that miserable rattletrap box, to be doing something, that it was not until he was already out of the coach, and scrambling across the road into a twisted thicket of dwarf-bearded oaks, that it occurred to him that he would never see his parents again. By then the land sloop was less than twenty yards from the coach, and it was too late. He crouched in an inch of sucking water, breathing hard, watching his brother's spidery form in the coach's open door. It was difficult to tell for sure but it looked as though Franklin and their father were gravely shaking" hands. No doubt he had kissed their mother as well. Although it was Jefferson who concerned himself with the fine gesture and the act of panache, it was Franklin, who found such things laughable, who was always pulling them off.
There was a thud, a sharp huff of breath, and then Frank came scrambling into the trees, clutching the revolver to his chest. He found Jeff, and they squatted together in the foul-smelling mud, painting their backsides with swamp water, watching as the flame of the land sloop's lantern, mirrored and lensed, reached out to engulf the bayou in a swelling balloon of light.
—Get down, Frank said.
He pushed Jeff facedown into the mud and then lay beside him. The land sloop came, slowing, with a sound like an enormous box of nails and broken crockery falling down a flight of stairs. She stopped. In the moonlight Jeff could read the name, Dauntless, picked out in gilt letters on her flank. There was a flat chiming as her rear hatch rolled open, then the scrabble of boots, and then suddenly the roadbed seemed to fill with redcoats. They trotted, rifles aslant, to the carriage. Three of them pulled Haseltine from his seat and threw him to the ground. Several others dragged out Colonel Drake, and then with rough politesse assisted Mrs. Drake to step down. She stood slim and straight-backed, head held up, giving the soldiers a look the boys could not in fact see but could easily imagine. Their father struggled against them and was beaten, once, sharply, with the stock of a Martini. After that he stood, and suffered them to put him in irons.
—Colonel Henry Hudson Drake, in the name of Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Victoria, I place you under arrest on the charge of mutiny and treason against the Crown.
—Shoot! the little boy hissed. Shoot the gun.
—Quiet!
—Let me shoot it, then!
He reached for the revolver, kicking at his brother's shins, blind
with rage or with the tears his rage incited. The older brother stuffed the gun into the waist of his pants and wrapped the boy up in his long arms that always seemed capable of encircling the younger one several times around. His left hand he clapped firmly, and for far from the first time in their lives, over the little boy's mouth.
The boy struggled for another moment, then just hung in his brother's embrace, and they watched as their parents and Haseltine were pushed toward the hatch of the Dauntless. Their mother was handed up into the hold at once, but the soldiers stood around the two male prisoners for some time, talking in low voices that occasionally broke out into angry hisses and, once, four words, shouted.
—I'll not permit it!
The boys recognized the thick Yorkshire burr in which the land sloop had called to them through the darkness. Then their father and Vernon Haseltine were heaved up into the Dauntless, like two buckling sacks of bricks. An order was given, and the iron hatch rolled shut, sealing up their parents within.
The older brother did not relax his grip, or remove his hand from the little boy's mouth, until the glow of the land sloop's lantern, handed from treetop to treetop in the eastern distance, dwindled and finally winked out, and the thump of her engine had been absorbed once more into the universal clangor of the swamp.

4.

At Tir-Na-Nog, the house on a Derbyshire hilltop, fifty miles from the sea, to which their maternal grandfather, Joseph Mordden, had retired at the end of his career as a ship's surgeon, there had stood an oak tree of great age and height. In the branches of this Khyber redoubt, storm-tossed yardarm, donjon, eyrie, pagoda, minaret and pharos, both boys had spent a cumulative total of perhaps twenty-nine full, long August days during the course of their childhoods. And yet in all that time, it had never occurred to either of them—and certainly they would never have been permitted—to attempt to pass a night in the tree. But both of the boys had seen men under their father's command take off into the bush in a boiling cloud of dogs, in pursuit of deserters, fugitives from conscription, runaway spies. Frank suspected that it would be only a matter of time until a squad returned to look for the sons of Cuyahoga Drake. And so, after leading Jeff in a number of elaborate dog-baffling figures and hieroglyphs in and around the shallows of the bayou, he took hold of his younger brother, by the seat and waist of his breeches, and hoisted him up into the branches of a cypress for the night. The moon had set, and it was too dark for them to reconnoiter a way to the Sabine that would keep them off the road. He pulled himself up after Jeff, and they made their way carefully, dizzied by a medicinal odor, into the dark heart of the tree. The branches were coarse and slender and made an unpromising bed. They spent an hour that seemed like five hoping that the dawn would come and proving repeatedly to themselves and to one another that it was impossible to fall asleep while clinging. In the end they chanced the lower, broader boughs, and somehow fell asleep. Jeffs dreams were tormented by lurching and rocking, the creaking of old bones, the ghostly singing of frogs.
Frank hit him.
Jeff opened his eyes. The intervals among the foliage of the tree were filled with luminous needles and clusters of blue, and fringed with Spanish moss and tufts of mist. Jeff sat up, abruptly. If his brother had not caught hold of his arm he would have tumbled into the fly-rippled water below.
—They're coming.
He said it almost without voicing the words, rolling his eyes to the east. Jeff listened. The day lay in an interval of silence between the conversation of the night animals and that of the morning's birds. It was not long before Jeff heard the voices. He could hear that they were irritable and amused; he could hear that some were British and others bayou French. He could hear the labored, happy gasping of a hound. Frank stuck the revolver into the waistband of his uniform trousers, at the back, and lowered himself, hand under hand, down to the shallows. Jeff started after him.
—I thought you said we'd be safe up here, he whispered.
—Safe from alligators. Not redcoats. I just didn't want the dogs to find us before we had a chance to see where we were going.
—Where are we going?
Jeff nearly stumbled over the body of his brother, so quickly did he fall to the soft ground, and threw himself down alongside Frank.
The voices had grown louder, the words intelligible; the men from Fort Wellington were coming their way, their boots sloshing and slurping in the mud. Now Jeff could make out the distant rumble of a steam wagon, idling perhaps, back on the Indian road. Perhaps a pair of wagons. No doubt the troops had been ordered to fan out into the bayou in all directions from the point at which the boys' parents had been taken. Frank was looking wildly around for a place to conceal themselves. The brush was thin, here; now Jeff could make out wavering patches of red moving toward them, beyond the clearing in which they had blindly landed the night before.
The expression on Frank's face was blank, thoughtless.
—Do something, Jeff said. Shoot them, swim for it, do something—
Frank seemed to come out of his fog.
—Give me your penknife, he said.
He cut a pair of the reedy stalks that grew all around them and investigated their cores, which proved to be not quite hollow but filled with a spongy mass through which, as he quickly demonstrated, sucking out his cheeks, a faint but steady breath could be drawn.
—What about the alligators?
—I just made them up.
Jeff looked at him. This was precisely the kind of lie that Frank excelled in; one which claimed that an earlier statement had been a lie. Often such a lie was followed by a third that claimed to invalidate it. Frank handed him a short length of reed, then started to crawl toward a deep pool on the other side of the tree in which they had waited out the night. He stopped and took the revolver from his waist, and tucked it lovingly into a hollow formed by the wild braiding of some thick old roots. Then he lowered himself, wincing broadly to cover the apprehension and disgust he felt at so doing, into the black water with its skin of slime.

5.

Buried in water, Franklin Drake clung to the bottom-mud, clutching a fistful of slick tangling tree roots for an anchor. Water hissed and whispered in his ears. Air came into his lungs only in recalcitrant sips that had a taste of stale bread. His circulatory system was protesting this ill treatment and at first, when he heard the water-muffled gunshots, he thought they were the pulse of his starved heart redounding in his ears. He let go of the roots, burst up into the light and air, and saw that his little brother had killed two men. The dead men lay facedown in an inch of brown water, near the plaiting of roots in which, five minutes earlier, Frank had hidden the gun. And Jeff was still shooting, taking careful aim as their father had taught him, both eyes open, one hand steadying the wrist of the other, as a dozen redcoats rushed him. A third fell backward, clutching his throat; then Jeff was swallowed up in scarlet wool. The gun was twisted from his hands, and he was hoisted into the air by the collar of his shirt.
—Jeff.
He thought they were going to kill his brother for what he had just done. Not five hours and I've already broken my promise, he thought. He waded out of the pool and up onto the slightly firmer mud, then lost his footing and went sprawling forward, hitting his head on an exposed root hard enough to render him almost senseless. There was shouting, and more shouting, red sleeves, spattered gaiters. Then a hand with very cold fingers grabbed him by the back of the neck and jerked him to his feet. Frank stumbled. There was blood in his right eye and then the smell of blood in his nostrils and finally the taste of it, like rawhide, in his mouth.
—Stand up, boy.
—I'm trying.
The soldier's knee found the seat of Frank's britches. Frank stumbled forward a few feet in the direction of his brother, reaching for him though he could no longer see him; though he could no longer see anything at all.

6.

A spatulate darkness, shaped like a shark, poured itself along the rues and alleys of the Vieux Carre. It splashed against the sides of houses and shops, then surged up walls of brick and clapboard to flood the Quarter's rooftops—drowning chimney pots, weather vanes, and tin flues—before brimming over the volutes of a cornice and ladling itself once more down an iron balcony into the street. The shadow, thrust by the angle of the rising sun several hundred feet ahead of its source, drifted west, toward the Place D'Armas and Government House. When it reached the pair of squat bell towers that flanked the dark brick barn or upended ark of the St. Ignatius Boys' Home, the shadow started up the side of the campanile, then hesitated, as if uncertain whether it would clear or be snagged on the tooth of the high black iron cross. After a moment, however, the shadow resumed its progress, inching its immense snout forward. It topped and descended the tower of St. Ignatius, drifted across the dairy and some other outbuildings, and flowed over the high stone wall that separated the home's grounds from those of the old Pres-bytere, which since the Declaration of Reunion had served as the territorial courthouse and bridewell. Here, as if having at last sniffed out what it sought, the great shadow came to a stop, falling halfway across the broad expanse of the jailyard, where it plunged into gloom the crew of Negro carpenters who were working there, effecting last-minute repairs to the old gallows that had once dangled the hooded carcasses of Andrew Jackson and the pirate Jean Lafitte.
In the office of the rector of St. Ignatius, the inveterate gloom, which served so well to cow the reprobate spirit of boyhood that was the ineradicable plague and evil genius of the institution, deepened to an almost nocturnal pitch. A faint aureole of dust bloomed around the globe of the gaslamp atop the escritoire at which the rector, in his dressing-gown, sat perched on a velvet stool. With his left hand Father Paul Joseph de St. Malo reached to turn up the flame in the lamp. His right hand went on scratching away at the page on his blotter. After a moment he looked up, and contemplated the dull patch on the carpet where, moments before, the morning sunlight slanting in through the leaded window had fallen in bright bars and chevrons. He smiled. He was engaged in the composition of a letter to the parents of an inmate who had died, and though he had written countless such missives over the twenty-odd years of his rectorship, and though the deceased boy had been a sniveler, a liar, and good-for-nothing, Father de St. Malo was nonetheless glad for the interruption, which had been foretold, the previous morning, in a cable from Savannah.
The old priest rose and passed through a stealthy door cut into the Spanish cedar wainscoting of his office. In his small, white bedchamber he washed his hands in the copper basin, emptied his bladder into the pot, and took off his dressing gown. He was still buttoning up his best shoes—from the workshop of Scapelli, the papal cordwainer—when Father Dowd, the rector's secretary, rapped softly on the hidden door.
—Did you put him in the garden?
—As you said.
—Did you offer him tea or coffee? Did you set out the fraises des bois?
—He declined them. He was not happy to be made to wait. He wanted to be taken directly to them.
The rector, having smoothed the scant hair of his pate with water and scrutinized his nostrils in the glass, opened the door. Father Dowd looked him over with professional detachment, and nodded. Suitable attire in which to meet a newly made O.B.E., a conqueror of the clouds, a hero of Empire and Science.
—I don't imagine he's very happy about anything just now, the rector said. Do you suppose he can have heard this morning's news?
—He said he has spent the last ten hours on his ship.
—Ah. Then I suppose I shall have to tell him myself.
They hurried, the gangly young priest from Cork and the stout Acadian rector, down the long corridor that led to the garden. The garden was the rector's only vanity, apart from his calfskin boots. He trained and reserved an elite crew of boys to turn its earth and pollard its fruit trees and sweep clean its sandy paths. Naturally these were the only boys ever permitted into its confines. The remainder of the wards of St. Ignatius found employment in the kitchen, the laundry, and in the shops, where they learned the manufacture of such useful items as bandages, laces, dippers and basins, simple furniture, toothpicks, and, lately, coffins. As they walked to the door that opened onto the garden, the priests passed—and inspected the labor of—five little boys on their knees, spread down the length of the corridor, going over the soft marble floor with buckets and chamois and rags.
—His ship, the rector said. You saw it?
—It's lovely, said Father Dowd. Looking at it, Father, I confess, it was difficult not to feel a desire to ...
—Fly away? From this wonderful place?
They stepped out into the garden. The ponderous late-summer humidity of the last several weeks had diminished and the daylight had a touch of that delicate, wistful clarity that was perceptible only to natives of New Orleans as autumnal. The squash vines were effulgent as a horn section with brass-bright flowers, and a light, lightly rank breeze off the river stripped the petals from the last of the roses. It was, the rector thought, ideal weather for a hanging.
The inventor Sir Thomas Mordden stood beside a white-painted iron chair, his back to the garden door. A silver tray, with tea and coffee and cream from the teat of the home's own cow in silver pots, lay on a white iron table, beside an empty teacup and an appetizing red mound of wild strawberries that looked untouched. The inventor was gazing up at the windows of the dormitory. His hands were clasped behind his back with a suggestion of difficult restraint. He might have been trying to determine if he should call out to the boys he had come to redeem, or if he ought just to scale the wall with his bare hands and climb in through their window. He was a diminutive man, but his shoulders were broad, his legs thick, and the hands that labored to constrain one another behind his back looked capable of governing stone, of discovering fingerholds in the narrowest of chinks. At the sound of the priests' footsteps he spun and showed them a face that was sunburnt and wanted flesh. His pewter hair fell in lank strands, nearly to his collar; the breeze lifted and disarranged it. His suit, though it looked new, fit him poorly, as though it had been chosen in haste or disdain. The hair, the baggy suit, the enormous and snarled sideburns, the irritable cast of his haggard features, were more in accordance with the proctor's notions of a Methodist pamphleteer, unkempt, idealistic, and doctrinaire, than of a savant, a renowned engineer, a man of considerable means.
—Father.
—Sir Thomas. May I say that however tragic and unfortunate the circumstances, you are most welcome in New Orleans.
—Thank you.
The aeronaut briefly weighed the hand the rector had offered him, then discarded it as if it suited no purpose of his.
—And may I say that it is with considerable interest and a sense
of profound pride that I ... that we all ... have read of your wonderful experiments over these last several years. The newspapers—
—You may or may not, as you please.
—We read that you anticipate . . .
—Extraordinary things.
This in the same impatient, haughty tone, lips pursed, as if his nostrils burned with the saltpeter whiff of priestcraft. But Father de St. Malo saw something kindle in the aeronaut's eyes at the thought of the outlandish things he and his assistants were verging upon, in his laboratories in the wolds of Lincolnshire.
—Is it true, said Father Dowd, can it really be true, Sir Thomas, that you believe that it will one day be possible for men to travel to the moon?
Sir Thomas did not look at Father Dowd.
—Father, he said to the rector, I have not come four thousand miles to satisfy the idle curiosity of... of anyone. I am here as a private citizen, on personal business.
He gestured up to the windows of the dormitory. They were startling devices, his hands: large, long-fingered, smooth and nimble, with an unnerving suggestion of self-sentience.
—I wish to see my nephews and then be on our way. We spotted heavy weather off Biloxi. My weatherman believes it to be headed this way. I should like to avoid it if I can.
—You do not plan to pass even one night . . .
—Indeed I do not.
—But sir, Mrs. Drake . . .
—Naturally I intend to visit my sister before I leave New Orleans. Though I confess I fail to see that whether I do so or not is any affair of yours. Father.
—Sir Thomas. I regret that I must inform you. Mrs. Drake is dead.
Father St. Malo turned to his secretary as if to have him confirm this information or to solicit further details, though the provost of the Hotel-Dieu, Dr. Legac, was a boyhood friend. The rector knew as much as anyone about the death, that morning, of the traitor Cuya-hoga Drake's wife.
—She suffered . . . she underwent a stroke, Sir Thomas. I am told that her end was swift and painless.
—Swift, perhaps, Sir Thomas said. Not painless. Oh, surely not.
—You have condolences of this house, sir, of the city, and of the whole Empire, I am sure.
Sir Thomas nodded. He took a handkerchief from his vest and dabbed at the corners of his eyes. Then he put the handkerchief away.
—Now I have less reason to tarry in this place than I had five minutes ago, he said.
He consulted his pocket watch, gold, fat as a biscuit, inscribed with tendrils and leaves that entwined the initials V.R.
—The storm may be here in an hour, he said, snapping the watch case shut. Time is short.
—I don't understand.
—It isn't necessary that you do.
—Do you not wish to see—? The, that is ... the remains? And the arrangements, do you not—
—The arrangements have already been made. I made them by wire before I sailed from England, when it was made known to me that my sister might not survive.
—I see, the rector said. I suppose your work with engines has schooled you to be thorough in your plans.
—You satirize me.
—Not at all, I merely observe. . . .
—You exhibit considerable interest in my affairs, Father. I take it that when I leave New Orleans, you will be careful to report each of my least little actions and statements to the gossips of the town.
—You do me great injustice, Sir Thomas.
—When you do so, Father, make sure you do not fail to report my wishes for the disposition of the second set of remains.
—The second . . . ?
—Say that I wish that the body of Henry Hudson Drake be strung up as food for kites and buzzards, and that crows peck out his eyes.
He took out his handkerchief again, and dabbed a fleck of saliva from his lips.
—Sir Thomas.
—Will you not take that down, Father? Will you not forget?
—No, sir.
—Don't misquote me.
—I will not.
—Good, Sir Thomas said, turning toward the door. Now, take me to the boys.

7.

There was a fat white boy named Zebedee who sat on your head and broke wind into your mouth and nostrils, and a black boy named Hob Pistorus, all of whose modicum of unreasoning love was lavished on the shiv he had crafted from an iron bedslat. It could flay a live pig before the squeal was out the mouth, as he liked endlessly to repeat. Some of the so-called boys had rasp chins and hairy loins and were mean as Ohio keelmen. They drank themselves blind on cloudy stuff concocted from rainwater and sawdust, and boasted of having poisoned the predecessor of Father Dowd with rat bait. To the boys of St. Ignatius, Her Majesty the Queen-Empress was a fat, ancient she-toad who gaped from the wall with Jesus and Loyola as Father de Tant-Malodeur laid a whistling switch across their backs; her Empire was nothing more to them than the back of a constable's hand, the gates of the debtor's prison, the news that your father had succumbed to cholera with his entire troop in a cantonment on the Red River. Nonetheless the boys used the excuse of her betrayal by Cuyahoga Drake to plague the disgraced man's sons with taunts, blows, and wretched tricks, and with constant allusions, enigmatic and stark, to ropes, neck bones, hangman's hoods. Falling asleep at night, if it were not to be a fatal error, must be a work of forbearance and discipline; Jeff learned to distinguish and await the several snores and the varied nocturnal mutterings of every one of the twelve other boys who were locked into C Ward with him and Frank each night. After an early bad surprise from Zebedee Louch, Jeff schooled himself to tell the pattern of that boy's imitation snore from the more erratic trend of his real one. And yet if Jeff had been on his own—if it had been either one of the Drake boys left alone with the toughs, cranks, and arabs of St. Ignatius—he might have suffered a much harder fate than, as befell Frank, encountering with the ball of his naked foot the soft dead rat that someone had placed in his boot or, in Jeff's case, dwelling for an unbearable minute in the hot stench of Zebedee Louch's crotch. Each brother scouted the other's perimeters, stood picket on the other boy's flank, kept vigil, whistling outside the shit-house, as the other underwent his lonely tribulations in the sweltering hell of the Jakes. They had been assigned to bunks at opposite ends of C Ward, but every night, as soon as the porter snuffed the lamps, Frank would make his way down the long row of iron bedsteads and climb in to lie, tensed, listening to the darkness, alongside Jeff. This was an infraction punishable by a jaunt on the strapping horse. Frank was obliged to rouse himself every morning before light showed in the sky, and creep back in the half-light to his own bare bunk.
The brothers felt themselves and their behavior scrutinized by the priests with a greater than usual degree of intensity, and to the extent that they attempted to baffle or elude inspection they might well have been pleased had they known that the weekly reports on their conduct sent by the Fathers of St. Ignatius to the military tribunal at Sulla were replete with puzzled apologies. Though their conversations were indeed diligently monitored, both by the priests and by Hob Pistorus, the usually reliable C Ward telltale, neither of the Drake whelps was ever heard to make reference—not once—to their parents, let alone to any other conspirator, putative accomplice, or hitherto unknown plan of the mutineers. This all-but-inhuman regimen of silence was broken only on Monday mornings at nine, as if according to some privately evolved protocol on the treatment due prisoners of war, when the older brother would appear before Father de St. Malo, shoulders back, head high, and make what he termed a formal petition that he and his co-captive be permitted to visit their mother in hospital, a request that each week, for a different arbitrary reason, was always denied. Beyond this weekly ceremony, however, it was as if the fate and disposition of their imprisoned and ailing parents meant nothing to them at all.
It was Jeff who had recalled reading, in the Boys' Own Paper, a ripping yarn, set in the time of Vortigern and Boadicea, in which shadowy druids spoke without speaking by means of a manual alphabet; it was Frank who had diagrammed their hands, assigning four letters to the tip, phalanges, and base of the thumb, five to each of the fingers, and Y and Z to the pair of knobby hinges at the heel of the palm. By this cumbersome, intimate means, lying beside each other on Jeff's cot in the gray eternity of a night on C Ward, they communicated slow and feverish plans of escape, itemizing careful lists of necessary materiel, alternate routes, means of creating disruptions. With great difficulty they' consolidated geographic information gleaned from other boys to sketch on the flats of their bellies a map of New Orleans, locating at the navel the Presbytere where their father languished and just under the left breast the mournful pile of the Hotel-Dieu. Against the skin and bones of their hands the boys dwelt constantly, if never at great length, on the physical and emotional state of their mother, and speculated, with urgent jabs of their forefingers, on the chances of their father's obtaining, and the likelihood of his accepting, the mercy of the court-martial. They remembered what they could of the history of Raleigh's first acquittal, and attempted to derive a kind of grim comfort from the stoical grace with which earlier rebels of the frontier, Jackson and Crockett and Clay, had gone to their deaths. If the boys fell asleep too soon or too deeply, they knew, they would be set upon, and so each labored to keep the other awake, quizzing him on the colors and orders of Imperial regiments; the stages, battles, and commanders of the great Yukon and Ohio campaigns; the names of dogs and horses their family had owned over the years; the genealogies of Morddens, MacAn-drews, Evanses, and Drakes as far back as either could stretch them. They spoke and fretted and argued far into the stillness of the morning. They lay together on Jeff's narrow cot, holding hands.
On the day when the dogfish shadow came snuffling over the housetops of the Vieux Carre, the Drake boys took the extreme liberty of appearing for morning inspection as they had slept, side by side, sitting on the younger boy's bunk. This was grounds for caning but on this awful morning they sensed that for once they might be excused and if not then rules be damned and it would suit them to be caned. They had dressed themselves in the cadet's uniform and the broadcloth suit, laundered by Jeff and patched by Frank, in which the troop of Cajun Fusiliers had first dragged them onto the ward. Drawers, comb, stockings, and two suits of gray shoddy provided by the home lay rolled with regimental precision into a worn duffel on the floor.
The bolt was thrown back and the door to C Ward swung open. The brothers' gazes remained fixed on the tall windows opposite the younger boy's bunk. These windows overlooked the rector's garden but years of salt breeze and soot and some inherent light-denying property of the glass precluded a view of anything but an ashy residue of the morning. Frank sat perfectly still; Jeff swung his skinny legs back and forth, making a swishing sound with the tips of his boots against the rough canvas top of the duffel.
—Franklin, Jefferson, said the rector. Sir Thomas is here.
Jeff started to look toward the doorway but felt or rather struck against his brother's inertness, the inflexibility of his gaze on that impenetrable gray window. He stopped kicking at the duffel and just sat.
—He has come all the way from England to fetch you. That is far more than either of you deserves.
One of the boys snickered and Jeff could feel the steady hard examining stares of the others. The two men came down between the ranks of cots and stood before them. The black bulk of the uncle eclipsed the gray windows. His watch chain dangled before Jeff's eyes. Frank had met the uncle a few times before, at Tir-Na-Nog, but Jeff only once, and that when Jeff was an infant in a dress. Frank said that their father and the uncle had quarreled, then, over the murder of John Brown by the Kansas Separatists. They had come to blows, and parted with rancor and finality.
—Nephews. It is hard to be so ill-met after so long a separation.
Jeff's right hand crept across the blanket of the bunk and sought the fingers of his brother's left. They felt rough and cool and dry.
—Well, the rector demanded, have you nothing to say?
Have you? Jeff worked the words with his fingers against Frank's.
Not to a Tory bastard like him.
—Well? said the rector again.
Jeff looked up into the bony florid face of his mother's brother. The eyes were grave and held pity and fatigue. The lower lip of the mouth was like their mother's, full and sorrowing. The sight of it, the memory of her, of his failure to kiss her that night in the coach, filled Jeff with an obscure anger.
—God save the Ohio Rebellion! he cried.
The boys of C Ward whistled and hooted and crowed. There was the whiz of a hornet at Jeff's ear and then its sting. Jeff pitched forward and the hand he slapped to his temple came away shining with blood.
—Good heavens, the rector said.
The uncle caught hold of Jeff with his left hand, by the shoulder, and set him back upright on the bed, keeping a tight grip on him. He held out his big right hand, closed in a fist. The pale eyes were pink-rimmed, their whites stained yellow as if from exposure to some poisonous reagent or fumes.
—God save you, my boy, he said.
He opened the great white anemone of his hand, palm upward, revealing a smooth red stone.
—I assure you, Sir Thomas, the boy who threw that shall be punished, the rector said. None of them will eat today until he comes forward or is named.
There was a groan from the boys, and then silence. The rector worked at the silence with his glare and the twitching of his jaw. It would not give.
A damp cloth and a wad of bandage were found and applied to the jutting bone behind Jeff's ear, and then the uncle applied a plaster. His ministrations were brusque but patient and in the care he took Jeff sensed or perhaps even remembered a vein of tenderness.
—On your feet, the uncle said, both of you.
They went out of C Ward for the last time, followed by the rector, and stood in the great echoing central stair. It seemed dark for this hour. Jeff looked up to the ceiling of the stairwell, where an iron-ribbed skylight generally let in a portion of the fair sky that mocked, or the foul one that suited, the unvarying gray weather of an orphan boy's day. It was filled with something that Jeff took at first to be the shadow of the bell tower but which then moved—floated—to one side and seemed, ever so slightly somehow, to ripple.
The uncle's hand lay heavy on Jeff's shoulder.
—Let those boys not, he said to the rector, be punished for a display of patriotism, Father. I do not desire punishment.
The rector nodded. Then the uncle pushed Frank and Jeff toward the stairs.
—Up, boys, he said. We must hurry.
—Up? said Jeff.
He dug in his heels, gazing in uneasiness at the rippling shadow that filled the skylight. In spite of the gentle attention his cut had received, he felt a violent spasm of mistrust for the uncle now. Perhaps they were to be pushed from the roof, or thrown to a crowd of ruffians, or consigned to some unknown oubliette in the bell tower, like the poor little princes he remembered from his Lamb's Shakespeare.
—We go up?
—Quite a considerable way, the uncle said. As a matter of fact.

8.

Though he was to observe and ship out in dozens of them during the course of his life and career—from the world-spanning, titanic Admiral Tobakoff, with its concert hall and natatorium, to the worlds-spanning Lancet, hardly bigger than a racing scull, from the trim transpacific racer Gulf of Sinkiang to the sturdy, homely freight blimps of the Red Star line—Frank would never entirely lose the sense of melancholy majesty that stirred his heart when he first saw an airship, moored in the troubled sky a hundred feet above the St. Ignatius Boys' Home. He was moved by her delicacy, by her massive silence, by the rich Britannic red of her silk gasbag. She was like a divot, bright as clay, cut into in the dull gray turf of the clouds. There was a wind in the southeast and she strained at the guy that moored her to the campanile, and once tossed her nose like a mare sniffing fire. An oblong car of silver and dark wood dangled from her underbelly, part Pullman sleeper, part clarinet, its windows haunted by dark mustached faces.
—The Tir-Na-Nog, Uncle Thomas said, as if she were a present he had brought along for his nephews. My own design.
He watched them watching his airship, pale eyes crinkling, face flushed. In the presence of the Tir-Na-Nog he seemed fonder of them; he draped his arms across their shoulders.
—There isn't another like her in the world.
A hatch opened in the forebelly of the black gleaming gondola.
Two of the mustached lascars peered out. One raised an inquiring hand and the uncle nodded, and taking his arm from Frank's shoulders signaled, palm downward, twice. The blue-capped dark heads disappeared from the hatch and after a moment a large wicker basket dropped into sight and dangled, slowly falling.
Frank held his breath and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white. He suffered, with erotic intensity, from the signal passion of his age: engineering. He reverenced the men on whom was shed the peculiar glory of the second half of the century, when adventure went forth with gearbox, calipers, level, and chain. Thus he was mad to know the organization and capacity of the Tir-Na-Nog's engines. He would gladly have indentured himself, for long years, to studying the system of cable, flap, and rudder that guided her, the science and finesse that regulation of her buoyancy and altitude required. He longed to subject his uncle to a close and niggling interrogation, as they had used to do on long July afternoons at Tir-Na-Nog, to draw fabulous facts and anecdotes out of Sir Thomas Mordden, pioneering aeronaut, penetrator of the trackless bush of the sky, deliverer, as the Illustrated London News had once phrased it, "of the key to making Britain the queen not merely of the land and sea but of all the vast empyrean girdle of the earth." But gazing up at the wondrous contraption in the sky in which, most wondrous of all, he was now evidently to take ship, Frank maintained a silence as absolute as that of the Tir-Na-Nog herself. Their uncle invited them to marvel; Frank refused. He wanted, if momentarily, then with all his heart, to see their uncle punished. Frank knew that this was unjust of him, that his uncle could not be held responsible for things that had transpired and decisions taken while he was sequestered with his assistants in the famous Mordden Laboratories. Frank knew that in holding his tongue he was only punishing himself.
—Is that the one you flew in to Africa? Jeff said.
—No, I fear the Livingston was destroyed upon my arrival there, Uncle Thomas said. He smiled. Hacked to bits by the Mtabebe.
—Can we fly all the way to England in that? Without even stopping? How high will we go?
Frank applied a furtive knee to his brother's bottom, hard. Jeff crumpled and then turned his traitor's gaze to Frank. For an instant
he looked angry, but the reproach in Frank's eyes banked his fire and he rubbed at his backside with a sheepish air.
—We ain't going anywhere, Frank said.
The basket scraped the tiled cornice, bounced against the galvanized tin of the roof, and settled. Uncle Thomas took hold of Jeff under the arms, and hoisted him over the side of the basket. Frank stood, fighting against the longing to fly. He would not abandon his mother. He would ensure that there remained at least one man in New Orleans, in the Louisiana Territory, in all the vast Crown Colony of Columbia, to mourn the death of Cuyahoga Drake.
—We shall make London easily, my boy, Uncle Thomas said, as if to Jeff. We could make it as far as Istanbul. The Mordden Mark III is a dreadfully efficient engine.
He looked at Frank, fixedly, his womanly mouth curled at one corner, as if reading the hunger to know that underlay his nephew's stoical demeanor. He scattered specifications like crumbs to a reticent deer.
—There are a pair of them, he said. Four-cylinder compound engines. Vertical coil, parallel-flow flash boiler. Firebox above the boiler coils. Honeycomb condenser with vacuum pumps and complete automatic firing. One hundred and twenty horsepower apiece. There was a burst of drum clatter from the yard of the old Pres-bytere, a workman's ragged laugh. Jeff reached for Frank's hand, but Frank would not take it. He did not want his brother distracting him with useless tappings at his palm.
—You won't be abandoning her, Franklin, their uncle said. There is no way that you could.
Frank caught his breath. The laughter of the workmen in the jail-yard became general and merry. Down in the workshops of St. Ignatius he could hear the chiming hammers of a coffin being nailed. —My poor boy, Sir Thomas said. You must accept that I am all the family you have left.
—That's a lie!
—Come aboard the Tir-Na-Nog, Frank. And one day we shall sail her straight to the moon. To Venus or Mars.
Frank craned his head to try to catch a glimpse of the pale Pres-bytere; he envisioned his father waving from one of its stone window ledges, putting on a jaunty smile, saluting him. But all he could see was the high bell tower of St. Ignatius, part of a spike-topped stone wall, a rounded stucco corner of the prison, a dusty brown patch of tamped earth in the prison yard, a pair of colored workmen leaning on the handles of two pickaxes.
—Stay if you will, then, his uncle said curtly. He gave a signal, and with a jerk the basket rose off the pitted zinc of the roof.
—Frank!
Jeff threw himself against the side of the basket and tried to climb out, wild, in tears for the first time since the night of Custer's surrender. He managed to get one leg over the side. Sir Thomas caught him by the collar and hauled him back in.
—Frank!
Frank remembered the promise he had made to his father; surely to have broken it would be the greater abandonment.
The basket dragged, skipping, along the roof, and snagged against the cornice. In the instant before it would have freed itself and started upward, Frank crossed the roof and threw himself headlong into it, landing in a heap at his uncle's feet. He stood up, steadying himself. He wiped his hands against the knees of his patched cadet's uniform, and looked levelly at his uncle.
—You're a liar, he said. There is no atmosphere in interplanetary space.
Then he could see the bare tree, the scaffold, the platform with its neat square trapdoor. Sir Thomas gathered Jeff into his arms, and covered his face, hooding his eyes with his great hands.
—We're all liars, Franklin, he said. We lie, and then we wait and hope for time and hard work and the will of God to make us honest men.
They bumped up through the hatch of the Tir-Na-Nog, into the dark innards of her gondola. Strong arms hauled them from the basket. They were set on their feet in a bright room, trimmed in brass, paneled all around with windows and the glass faces of gauges.
Sir Thomas Mordden took a yachtsman's cap and settled it onto his head.
—London, sah? said the helmsman.
The captain of the Tir-Na-Nog nodded, his smile wistful and aimed curiously at his nephews. He might have been picturing them alighting, one day, on the dark red sand of Mars.
—At present, he said. Yes, London will do for now.

Look for the second installment of THE MARTIAN AGENT, 
"The Indistinguishable Operations Of Empire And Fate," in 
McSWEENEY's Second Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.