The Cat Wore Electric Goggles by Ian Hutson

Author:Ian Hutson [Hutson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Diesel-Electric Elephant Company
Published: 2014-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

The SSS Rorke’s Drift was a rocket ship of immodest, but nonetheless quite elegant proportions. She had been styled as though travelling through the aether required the streamlining of yacht hydrodynamics, and she bore a sporting rake from her cast-iron nose cone right back to her riveted-plate atomic-reaction jets. Her Marconi radio array lay back at an angle of thirty degrees, giving her the impression of speed even when at rest. Huge shatter-resistant glass structures covered the orangery decks, the promenade decks and the formal gardens and box-hedge mazes, while classic brass-rimmed portholes gifted more intimacy to the private cabins and suites. The Red Ensign fluttered at her stern.

Patrolling like a deep shadow on the glazed Upper Promenade Deck, the Bishop Jefferies rather gave the impression of some dog-collared middle rank of a Christian Army marching onwards as to war. In point of fact, he was quite lost, being unable to recall the distinction between clockwise and anti-clockwise. He was buried in worry and praying that he was perambulating in a clockwise direction, since that sounded so much more inoffensive than anything beginning with anti. He didn’t want to be anti anything, except maybe the Devil. After about an hour of quiet, pedestrian panic it occurred to him to venture to what would be either his left or his right, had he known the difference, through one of the doorways into the body of the vessel. Unfortunately, this then only added to his woes, since he was immediately presented with doors requiring a decision in regards to his being either a Ladies or a Gentlemen. He felt he was really neither, being first and foremost a Bishop. Even had he felt confident enough to make such base categorisation, he knew he would then be faced with solving the mysteries of buttons and suchlike while recalling the necessary functional parts of his anatomy. It was all too much for him. Why could there be no third doorway, unequivocally marked “Lamb of God”?

Those parts of the ship not either mightily confusing Bishops or devoted entirely to ship’s functions, such as lavatories, propulsion and navigation, were comprised, in the main, of two chambers, and they had been placed in the vessel like two vast lungs to dominate all other social entrails. One of these was a cathedral complete with vaulted nave, transepts, pulpit and marble tombs. The other chamber was an art gallery filled to the gunwales with examples of all of the treasures of artistic Creationism.

Ranged in two lines to one end of the Art Chamber were the twelve originals of Michelangelo’s series of David, each one on a plinth. On the distant bulkhead wall between each statue hung the twelve originals of Leonardo da Vinci’s series of La Gioconda; the Mona Lisa. Only experts in their fields could differentiate the statues one from another, or separate the paintings into chronological order, there being only the minutest of differences in a brush stroke or paint mix here, a tap of a chisel there.

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