The Revolutions Part 30

They found Ashton lying on the ground, wailing and thras.h.i.+ng. Vaz held one of his arms and Payne held the other, while Dimmick restrained his head, none too gently. Frank had retreated to a distance of about ten feet and stood there pale and shocked, with a rifle in his hands. Ashton's face had gone bright red. His eyes were bloodshot, and staring wildly at nothing. He was quite clearly hallucinating. It was very hard to make any sense at all out of what Ashton was shouting: for the most part, he was simply shouting No or Stop or For G.o.d's sake!

Sun knelt, shooed Dimmick away, and held Ashton's head in his hands. Instantly, Ashton went still, though he continued to whimper and moan: Please, please no. Sun inspected Ashton's eyes and appeared to be listening to his breathing.

"The effect of our translation, no doubt," Atwood said. "Disturbed the brain. I blame myself-he clearly wasn't up to the challenge. Poor fellow. We should all be glad that we survived unscathed."

Sun placed a hand on Ashton's forehead. The whimpering grew quieter and quieter. Then, even that ceased. A thin trickle of spittle emerged from the corner of Ashton's mouth. Sun closed the dead man's eyes.

Atwood gestured at the corpse. "Mr Vaz, Mr Dimmick-please bury the fellow, and find some way to mark his grave with appropriate honour. First martyr of the first expedition to Mars! Then, please prepare to march."

"Where?" Payne said.

"Homewards, Mr Payne. Rest a.s.sured. Mr Sun and Mr Shaw and I have consulted on the matter, and determined our destination."

Sun glanced at Atwood, then at Arthur. Then he folded Ashton's arms, and stood. The suspicious exchange of glances did not appear to be lost on Vaz.

Atwood went and sat on the ground some distance away, and closed his eyes. The wind spun dust at his feet.

Arthur approached him. "What destination?" he whispered.

"Go away, Shaw. I need to think."

Chapter Twenty-nine.

Josephine was lost for a long while, adrift in the extraordinary sensations of this new body. There was a strong, steady pulse in her breastbone, where she supposed her heart was. It was slower than a human heart. At each cycle of the pulse, the wings-her wings-throbbed with something like electricity, something like the pressure of an approaching storm. The things that a Martian tongue could taste were for the most part simply indescribable in the English language. Sweetness-something like brackish rose-water-their thick resinous wine-other things she couldn't name. She was confused at first by the sensation of hunger, mistaking it for sorrow. Her long legs were unsteady. Her fingers were quick and sensitive but weak. Her vision was all colours and motion.

The body, she learned, holds its own memories. She'd never had cause to notice that before, her body and her memories having previously been well fitted to each other, like the sort of husband and wife who finish each other's sentences. Now she saw how the legs remembered how to walk, tottering at first, like an infant-she was so tall and thin and top-heavy!-and how the wings knew that it felt good to unfold, to stretch, to let whatever electric forces played across them have their way. Her first experiments with flight were a failure. Well-it would come. The body had quite definite opinions, expressed in the gut and in the skin, about what was good to eat; and about good and bad manners, and who had a trustworthy look to them and who did not; and who was handsome and who wretched, who to pity and who to bow to. Most important-and this occupied all her thoughts for who knew how long-the body remembered language.

The language of the Martians had three parts. The ground-note of it came from the motion of the wings, in whose whir and thrum she could now perceive subtle variations: this carried crude meaning. The s.h.i.+fting colours of their wings and the motions of their long expressive fingers carried accents, tones, commands, subtleties, and ironies she never fully mastered. Lastly, their telepathic expression served somewhat the same purpose as shouting, or pounding the table, or harrumphing, and was considered rather bad manners in ordinary conversation.

The body held its old habits. She babbled, over and over, repeating words and signs she didn't understand-until, slowly, she began to understand them. Names came to her, unbidden, forming themselves on her hands-the names of people and places, the names of concepts that she didn't yet comprehend. She watched her own hands moving, as if they were performing a Punch-and-Judy show for her, or they were a conjurer's hands, performing arcane pa.s.ses. Sometimes a wave of horror pa.s.sed over her, and it seemed to her that those hands were an alien thing, something like an insect's waving legs. That was less frequent as time went by. They came to seem like the strong and elegant and expressive hands of a healthy young woman; like her own clear and pleasant voice. She hardly recalled what Josephine Bradman's fingers had looked like. Short. Pink. Rough from needlework, callused from typing. Always black with ink or red from cheap soap. Impossible to picture.

She'd been moved to a room in a tower on the edge of the city. She didn't quite recall how she'd gotten there-it had been during her strange second infancy, when it had been hard to understand what was sense-data and what was a dream. There were no crowds, and few visitors. She vaguely recalled that Piccadilly had visited her once, when she was still mute, still confused; he'd seemed sad. Now he was gone. She supposed that visitors were kept away at Clotho's orders, to spare her from poking and prodding and gawping. Seven tutors lived with her, and fussed over her, and worried about her health, and taught her what the body couldn't about language, and bothered her with questions about the Blue Sphere-which was what they called the Earth.

Time pa.s.sed. She didn't know how long. She told the tutors that the days of the moon seemed longer than those of Earth-and they thought that was very interesting, but they could devise no experiment for testing the proposition.

The tutors measured time primarily by the shape and size of the red moon. They explained that the white moon Angel and the red moon Abyss both revolved around the Countenance of Mars, but they followed different courses: Angel was slow and steady, while Abyss followed a wild elliptical orbit. At times, Abyss was so utterly distant as to be almost invisible; but it slowly came closer and closer, until it overtook its twin and dwindled again. Nine revolutions around Mars completed this cycle and began it again. Since the exodus from Mars and the settling of the lunar city, this had happened some thousand times, or one thousand one hundred, or more-the tutors fell to squabbling over the precise number. To the Martian philosophy, in which there appeared to be little distinction between a thing's motions and its meaning or essential nature, the revolutions of those heavenly bodies were of great astrological significance.

Since she'd begun watching the moon, it had grown from a blood-red pin-p.r.i.c.k, like a match struck in the room next door at night, to a flickering flame like the light of a red lantern.

The language of the lunar city could be described, without too severe a confusion of concepts, as a sort of lingua franca. That is, it was a common tongue-but tongue was itself a confusion!-made up of the hundred languages of Old Mars. There'd been more Martians back then: a hundred nations, instead of one lonely city. In various different languages, the names of her tutors were Blessed One, Morning, Mercy, Strength, Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon, and Beloved. The other two were named for a kind of plant that didn't grow on the moon, and a kind of mythical creature that was simply impossible to express in English. She privately dubbed them Hyacinth and Silenus.

They cohered slowly in her understanding. They were frightening, at first-a numberless swarm encircling her, prodding her with questions, with incomprehensible signs. It was a long time before she could see them as tutors-as seven fussy old men and women who delighted in language-games, grammatical quibbles, antiquarian trivia, mathematics, arid philosophical puzzles. They were tall and stately, thin and stooped, their wings like glorious Byzantine robes. Like most Martians, they found it hard to keep still. At any given moment during their lessons, two or three of them would be pacing around and around the edges of the room, circling one another in quarrelsome orbits, sometimes b.u.mping into one another, distracted by their own lecturing. Several of them drank to excess at times, and fell asleep leaning in a corner of the room. Scholars were the same everywhere throughout the universe, she supposed. They questioned her constantly regarding the Blue Sphere, and they took notes, but their att.i.tude suggested that they knew best, that the things she told them were interesting curiosities, but not strictly reliable; rather the way a roomful of missionaries might politely but not respectfully listen to an African describe his theories regarding the cause of thunderstorms. And sometimes she thought that perhaps they did know best. Her own memories of London were starting to seem very strange to her.

The floor of the room and all the shelves that lined the white stone walls were cluttered with heaps and towers and pyramids of red and black and golden beads, each of them a book or a hundred books of philosophy or poetry or science or tactics, all of them buzzing or s.h.i.+fting from time to time as the stray thought of a pa.s.sing tutor set them in motion. There were no mirrors, much to Josephine's annoyance. They didn't have mirrors on the moon. In fact, the very idea of a mirror upset them-they seemed to see it as a form of black magic, the separation of soul from body. They questioned her on the subject for hours.

They started to go for long walks, the eight of them drifting through empty streets out on the edge of the city, under the light of the red moon. They travelled in long, looping circles with no particular destination in mind, arguing and debating, questioning, refining grammar. Sometimes the tutors came to blows-leaping and fluttering up to perch on windows and clatter their wings in outrage. As the days went by-and as the second moon approached-the tutors seemed to grow agitated. They became more quarrelsome. The ones who drank too much drank more. Josephine felt it too. The room felt confining. They yearned to fly.

Her continued inability to take to the air worried them. It struck them as unhealthy, insane, infantile; a form of paralysis. She protested that she needed more time. In fact, the thought terrified her. To fly, to respond to the urgings of her wings and take to the air, would be too utterly inhuman; it would be a way of going native. It would be to accept, once and for all, that she would never return to London.

She asked them, again and again, if there was a way of going home. They pled ignorance. In fact, they pled ignorance when it came to more or less all the questions that interested her. What was the red moon, and what would happen when it came closer? They wouldn't say. What had happened on Mars that had driven them to exile in the lunar city? What had they all been so afraid of when she'd first shown herself-what were the devils Piccadilly had feared? They changed the subject to matters of philosophy. They corrected her grammar, fell to squabbling over linguistic obscurities, and then, when their squabble was over, they pretended to have forgotten her question. Finally they told her, frankly, that she wasn't ready, that there were things she simply wasn't prepared to understand. As if they thought of her as a child, or an invalid. Or as if they feared she was a spy, and they were keeping secrets; on Clotho's orders, no doubt.

One evening she had a visitor. She sat in the window of her room, looking out on white stone stained red by the light of Abyss. Hers was the highest tower for some distance around, and so she had a view of an expanse of rooftops, domes, arches, buildings that looked unfinished, buildings that had begun to slowly crumble. All empty. Behind her, the tutors were engaged in philosophical disputation. Silenus and Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon were at the point of coming to blows over a difference of opinion regarding the distinction between the accidental and essential properties of substances. She'd started the dispute by mentioning Atwood's theories regarding the aetherial composition of the heavens, but it had long since turned to realms of Martian philosophy that she could no more comprehend than a cat could read Greek. She was staring out the window and recalling, vaguely, the monograph she'd been typing at the moment of her-her translation. One hundred and fifty pages of metaphysical hair-splitting, for a Mr Potter, a railway clerk. Had she put it in the safe before setting out for Atwood's house, or was it still on her desk-three-quarters typed and likely never to be finished-on the corner of her desk that caught the morning sun, beside the typewriter, beneath Mr Borel's stationery shop, on Rugby Street in London in England on Earth?

Lost in these thoughts, she didn't at first notice the shadow of wings approaching over the rooftops. Then she recoiled, jumping back from the window as suddenly her visitor rudely appeared in it, closing his wings with a snap that silenced the tutors, who turned as one to stare.

It was a male; he was small, dark, with a still and inexpressive face and exceptionally large and beautiful wings. He was obviously unexpected. It was equally clear that her tutors knew who he was, and that he was something of a celebrity. It was rather as if the Duke of Suss.e.x had suddenly walked unannounced into a dining-room full of disputatious dons, or as if a group of village deacons had received an unexpected visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He opened his wings again and said ~ Peace. Be still.

The tutors all buzzed at once. Josephine couldn't understand what they were saying, except that it seemed that some of them were expressing their respect, and some of them their displeasure at the interruption, and some of them demanding to know the stranger's business.

~ Peace, he repeated.

A conventional greeting, made with the hands alone. It meant little more than h.e.l.lo. He was ignoring the tutors, and studying Josephine. His expression was unreadable. Something about him suggested that he was the sort of person who expressed himself through action.

~ You are the woman from the Blue Sphere.

~ I am.

~ I didn't believe it. I had to see it for myself. You are very strange. The Blue Sphere! A harder journey than any I have ever dared. You don't look strong enough.

Silenus clamoured for his attention, telling him he had no business there, threatening to summon the authorities.

~ I go where I will, he said.

Josephine gestured into the room. ~ Come in. Be my guest. Please. No one comes here.

He remained very still, and continued to study her.

~ What are they teaching you? He gestured at the tutors.

~ Philosophy, Josephine said. And words.

~ You speak well enough. What do you make of our philosophy?

~ I don't know.

~ Is that what you'll tell them in the Blue Sphere, when your way takes you there again?

~ I don't know the way back.

~ Stupid to come here, not knowing the way back.

She turned to the tutors and asked, ~ Who is this?

They told her his name-it meant something like Second Child. An odd name. The way they said it suggested something rather das.h.i.+ng. Here in the lunar city, where children were scarce, perhaps it meant that he was lucky, or at least improbable. It carried connotations of a heavy and rare duty. A hero's name.

~ But who is he? What does he do? In their language, the words for doing were also words for going. The tutors started talking about great journeys, from which she understood that he was a sort of explorer.

~ I am of no great distinction, he said. None of us here are of great distinction. I was born on this grey moon, many hundreds of revolutions after the flight from Mars. We are not what we were.

Some of the tutors agreed with this sentiment, expressing what appeared to be quite conventional lamentations for their fallen state. A couple of the tutors patriotically objected on behalf of the lunar city, which, though falling far short of the lost glories of Mars, nevertheless prevailed, resolutely, against all adversity.

He turned to them for the first time, and interrupted before they could start to squabble. ~ I have seen the face of Mars, he said. I have cast my shadow on it. I have seen the ruins, and I know what we were, and what we lost.

Josephine said ~ You have seen Mars?

~ I am not clever, or beautiful, or learned, and I do not even say that I am especially brave. But my wings are strong. I fly well. Some say I fly the way we did when we flew over Mars. Once, long ago, our great-great-grandparents came here, across the dark. Now only a scattering of us are strong enough for that. We are not what we were. We have forgotten how to fly, because we have nowhere to go, except round and round in our little rooms, talking and talking.

The tutors took offence.

Josephine said ~ How?

~ There are ways. A better question is: how do I come back? I'm strong. One day I won't be strong enough, maybe.

~ Is it dangerous?

~ Yes. But we go only when our moon is closest to Mars. We go to learn the things that we have forgotten; to bring back what we can.

Privately she named him Orpheus.

The tutors interrupted to say that this fellow's work was of course very admirable, in a way that seemed to suggest that he answered to them, that he was a sort of go-fetch-it for the scholars of the lunar city, dispatched in their service to bring back fragments of the old world, sights and sounds and memories, curios and bits of old rock ...

Orpheus ignored them, and continued to stare at Josephine. ~ Is it dangerous? Yes. There are terrible things down there. Are you one of them?

~ I don't know what you mean.

~ The way you move is strange. The way you speak is strange. What are you? You are not her. She stopped, you started; moving in her body, but not her.

~ Who was she?

~ A dead woman. They haven't told you who she was? They should tell you. Did you ask? Is this a normal occurrence on the Blue Sphere?

~ Certainly not.

~ I would have forbidden it, if anyone had asked me.

~ Do they have to ask your permission?

~ No. But I would have stood in their path. You frighten me. I have survived sixteen crossings, there and back again, and I know when to be afraid.

~ What is it that you're frightened of? You come here and you jump in through the window and you tell me you're afraid of me-as if I asked to be here! And they keep me shut up here on the edge of the city and they won't tell me anything- ~ I hear that you wors.h.i.+p a ghost, you people in the Blue Sphere-that you have an invisible G.o.d, who watches from above and casts people into fire-a horrible thing!

~ No-you have it wrong.

~ You walked on the ground, and looked up at the stars, and made a G.o.d out of nothing. We looked down and saw the face of G.o.d beneath us. But now it is dead.

He hopped down from the window, scattering the tutors, and settled on the floor in the middle of the room. He began to tell a story.

A half-dozen generations had come and gone since the flight from the Countenance of Mars. They were long-lived, and slow to breed; slower, since their exile. On the Countenance, things had been very different.

There were no cities there. There were vast red plains and sharp, cloud-piercing mountains; there were black forests of tower-tall trees, whose roots fed on subterranean lakes a mile deep. You could sleep in the heights of those trees, curled up among the vines. You could lose yourself in a maze of mountain peaks and be alone with your thoughts for years at a time. The people of Mars crossed the red plains in flights, in flocks, in tribes and families and great s.h.i.+fting nations-on-the-move, their shadows streaming far beneath them. They flew, on sunlight and wind and aetheric currents.

(The tutors interjected, to debate the nature of aether all over again).

They were always in motion. They had no settled abodes, and needed none. Their nations had no borders. A nation of the people of Mars was not a place, but a route across the world, a pattern of migration. Each nation was an idea, an argument, a philosophy. The people came and went as they pleased. There were a hundred nations, a thousand flocks and tribes, uncounted millions of lives.

They built. They were nomads, but not primitives. They beautified the face of Mars. They made lodges, temples, libraries. They left signals, markers, border-stones, records of their constant travels. They built with their minds, with their hands, with clever tools and lost arts. A nation that migrated through the cold north built factories. The Nation of the Eye-migrants between the deserts of the equator and the great western mountain-carved stone, and carved the mountain-tops. The Nation of the Strong Lungs, who hunted through the forests of the south, worked trees and vines, roots and fungus.

The hundred nations of Mars made war-ceaselessly, joyfully, for sport or to settle philosophical differences. They were long-lived, restless, energetic, fearless. Airborne migrant nations clashed over the plains and the mountains, seizing prisoners and trophies. The Nation of the Three Questions fought the Nation of the Pinion for a thousand years, around and around the cool and windy southern pole. At first, they fought to resolve a difference of linguistics. Soon it became a matter of honour, and then something that defined them. Neither nation could win. Families, flocks, and tribes changed sides, learned new languages and ideas, switched colours, maintained the balance of power.

That was the world Orpheus' great-grandparents were born into. They had belonged to the Nation of the Pinion, and the Nation of the Breath, and the Nation of the Broken Claw, and other nations that no one now remembered. They had been warriors, thinkers, explorers, migrants, artists of flight. Some of them survived the flight; not all.

The tutors now began to show off, reciting their own hybrid and tangled ancestries, recalling the names of ancient Nations of Mars, like the Liars and the Hindwing and the Heart, and their attributes. It quickly became clear that there was hardly a single fact that they could all agree on, except that among all the nations of Mars, it was the Nation of the Eye that was most extraordinary. For example, the people of the Eye were the most jealous of their territory; the highest mountain of Mars was theirs. Their scholars cared little for philosophy and hardly at all for art, but instead studied the stars, watching the skies from their cold high peaks. It was their scholars, looking sunwards, who discovered the existence of the Blue Sphere; and whose investigations in the other direction, out into the dark, revealed the vast Purple Sphere, and beyond that the distant and dreadful Black Sphere.

What precisely was wrong with the Nation of the Eye? On that, the tutors and Orpheus couldn't quite agree. They diagnosed a variety of philosophical sicknesses-some of which Josephine thought she understood, and some of which would seem wicked only to a Martian. As Orpheus talked, she pictured the princes of the Eye, sometimes as a single one-eyed giant, and sometimes as if they were the grey sisters in the old fable, who shared one eye between them. They were scholars: they studied the spheres and wished to move as they did, in perfect revolutions about a still centre. They ceased their migration, settled on the peak of the great western mountain, and remained there for years. Those who would not settle were driven out-a wicked thing-or held prisoner-a wickeder thing-or killed, which on the whole the tutors seemed to consider the least wicked possibility.

They built fortifications. They closed the mountain to outsiders.

There was war, of course. This unnatural and depraved conduct aroused, as was right and proper, the outrage of other nations. The nations of the Pinion and the Three Questions came all the way across the red desert from the south to go to war over the foothills of the mountain.

In time, the war grew bitter. The Nation of the Eye could not be fought, could not be reasoned with. Their warriors had a terrible new strength. They had new weapons, new techniques, that could strike armies from the sky.

The great western mountain was the tallest thing on Mars by far, and because they held it for themselves, the Nation of the Eye declared themselves the natural rulers of Mars. They began to conquer. They made their scholars into generals, into princes. They destroyed the armies of the Pinion. They claimed authority to direct the migration of lesser nations. Something more than an insult; almost an atrocity. They razed the forests that were the hunting-grounds of the Strong Lungs. They seized the factories of the cold north.

They built prisons.

On the top of the great mountain, where the air was thin and the currents weak and only the strongest could fly, the Nation of the Eye built strange towering structures-temples, perhaps, or weapons, or devices for observing the night sky. Heroes of the nations of the Hand and the Pinion raided them, razed them; they were rebuilt.

What was the cause of this strange behaviour, this national sickness of soul? Some of the tutors attributed it to sin, or to an unfortunate side-effect of excessive study of the natural world, unleavened by spiritual pursuits. Two of the tutors attributed it to the influence of the stars, or unfriendly ent.i.ties that dwelled among them. Orpheus said it didn't matter.

How long did this war last? On that point, there was general disagreement, which quickly turned into a squabble. A matter of years, said Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon-things changed swiftly on Mars. Generations, said Silenus-the nations did not surrender easily to the Eye, and the Eye was not easily defeated. According to Hyacinth's mother's tradition, the decline of Mars had taken a thousand years.

What was the secret of the Eye's strength? On this point, the tutors were uncharacteristically close to agreement. The scholar-princes of the Eye had called down aid from the stars. Or perhaps it was better to say that they had called something up from the lower and darker spheres of the Cosmos-from the Purple Sphere, that vast world of storms and oceans and great proud beasts-or more likely from farther down in the Black Sphere-a world of cold and dark and howling ghosts-or perhaps from farther still, from indescribable and incomprehensible depths. In the fortresses of the Eye (so reported the heroes of the nations who'd escaped them) there were ghosts, darknesses that moved and whispered, chained shadows, freezing fogs, moods of sorrow and despair and hate that stalked the halls looking for a body to take hold of, rooms that held nothing but disembodied pain, thras.h.i.+ng at stone walls. All these dreadful things powered the Eye's engines of war. Who was master, and who was servant-the scholar-princes of the Eye, or the things they'd called up? It was hard to say. Perhaps the question had no meaning.

All the nations of Mars united against the Eye. All their disputes were set aside, for the first and last time in the history of Mars. In the end, they threw themselves in their millions at the mountain, and they drove the Eye back, and they destroyed the Eye's fortifications and temples, and they littered the mountain's slopes with ten thousand dead. Slowly-or quickly, depending on which of the tutors was right-the Eye's power faded. One by one the scholar-princes were hounded from their fortresses and put to death; and Mars died not long after.