The Revolutions (24 page)

Martin Atwood held the title of Mercury. The scar the creature had given him healed quickly, and within a week he seemed rather proud of it, as if he’d won it in a duel. At the meetings of the Company he counselled investigation, exploration, analysis.

He owned properties all over London, each of them handsomely furnished, empty, and rather lonely. After Arthur left his house, taking Josephine with him, Atwood graciously put them up in his flat off Piccadilly. He promised that the place was warded against evil influences, which was more than could be said for Rugby Street. He lent Arthur the services of the maid, Abby. Arthur shook his hand and said thank you; but he was still not inclined to trust or forgive him.

III. VENUS

The Company had made a few tentative explorations in the direction of Venus, but had found the experience terrifying. In that direction the astral space became rapidly hotter and faster and brighter until one’s thoughts began to burn.

If Venus had inhabitants, they might resemble Adam and Eve in the Garden; they were likely hermaphrodites, or shape-changers. Their homes would resemble forests in their elegance and complexity and vibrant living energy. Among the symbols of Venus were ivy, ambergris, and tin, and the fifty-forth and fifty-eighth Hexagrams of the
I Ching
. Its hours were favourable for the learning of secrets and the resolution of mysteries—and for love, of course, though “love” as the Company’s philosophy conceived of it was a rather severe and mathematical thing, involving combinations of certain psychic energies.

In Josephine’s absence, the role of Venus fell to Arthur. He thought that it was hard to imagine a less likely Venus. But Atwood assured him, smiling, that in magic the union of male and female was a very powerful principle.

IV: TERRA MATER

The title of Terra Mater belonged to a man called Samuel Jessop, who in everyday life was a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. He was solid and square and bowler-hatted. Once a month he went by train to the seaside, where he tested his strength against the ocean by swimming out as far as he could until he could swim no more. “A little farther each time, Shaw. One day, who knows?” Apart from that, and of course his membership in the Company of the Spheres, he appeared to have no obvious eccentricities, and struck Arthur as surprisingly level-headed. He was a Methodist. Arthur liked him.

It was Sergeant Jessop who conducted Arthur’s initiation into the inner circle of the Company, such as it was. A tap on the shoulder, hood on the head, and turned thrice around; afterwards, whisky and a cigar.

“In deference to your wound, Shaw, incurred in the line of duty, we’ll excuse you the ordeals.”

“Decent of you, Jessop.”

“Don’t tell Atwood. Something of a stickler, that one.”

Sergeant Jessop gave Arthur a gift: a book, John George Hoffman’s
Pow-Wows, or Long Lost Friend,
which he said was a very old American book, full of honest and old-fashioned Christian magic.

“Charms for healing the sick, and driving out evil spirits, and finding lost sheep. That sort of thing.”

“I don’t know what to say, Jessop.”

“Atwood says it’s a mean little thing, a waste of paper. But I’ve found it worth the study. Atwood’s a clever chap, but there are things His Lordship doesn’t know; up there and down here.”

“Not so long ago, I thought I knew
down here
well enough. Now I wonder. Thank you, Jessop.”

“I know that feeling, old chap. I know it well.”

V: MARS

Mars, Atwood explained, had been selected as the Company’s first destination not because of any particularly appealing feature of the planet itself, but because every journey had to start somewhere, and it was easier by far to go
down
than
up.
Nevertheless, Atwood was an attentive student of all the latest scientific discoveries regarding the red planet. He and Jupiter subscribed to
Nature
and to
Astronomer
, and collected sketches and photographs of the planet’s surface. They considered their own methods of investigation to be very superior to mucking about with telescopes, but they were not too proud to borrow.

“Take Flammarion,” Atwood said. “Do you know him?”

“The French astronomer?”

“None other. Flammarion holds now that the waters of Mars—he thinks he can see them—might be a different sort of thing from our water. A
sixth state
, he calls it, a
dense vapour
,
viscous, sombre, and dark.
”

“And?”

“So you see, the conditions, Shaw, may be very different. It’s a different sphere of being.”

“I know Flammarion. He says there’s canals on Mars. Civilization. Is that true?”

“I doubt it. Remember, Mars is beneath us in the ordering of things; if it has inhabitants, they will be slower than us. Simpler, colder, stupider, and less energetic. Their recreations are likely primitive.”

“So Josephine may be—”

“The Martian year,” Jupiter interrupted, “is six hundred and eighty-seven days; astronomers have calculated it. So we may take that as a sign that the Sphere of Mars experiences time at roughly half the Earth’s rate.”

“A sign?”

“A sign.”

They were like Humpty-Dumpty, Arthur thought. Words meant what they said they meant.

Thérèse Didot held the position of Mars. She was middle-aged, petite, pretty, and French. She appeared one sunny afternoon at the flat off Piccadilly, breezed past Arthur with a smile into the hallway, and told him that she had decided to make it her business to teach him a thing or two. In return she said that she wanted to know all about Josephine, and their engagement, and their plans for their wedding, and their hopes for their children. She said she was very fond of children.

“I’m afraid I’m not in a mood for conversation, Miss Didot.”

Thérèse sat daintily on the sofa. “Then perhaps I will talk and you will listen.”

Miss Didot smiled and looked around the flat. Her eye landed on the little shaving-mirror on the mantelpiece, which Arthur had purchased after discovering, to his irritation, that Atwood’s flat had no mirrors. She
tsk-tsked
.

“I advise you to dispose of that, Arthur. All sorts of wickedness may be done by means of mirrors.”

“Mirrors?”

“Please. Sit. I would like to help you, Arthur. It’s been too long since I had the pleasure of teaching the young.”

Arthur sat down on a chair by the table, in somewhat ungracious silence.

“How do you suppose I come to know Lord Atwood?”

“I have no idea, Miss Didot.”

“I was his governess, when he was just a tiny thing. His mother was dead, poor creature.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t have guessed. Hard to imagine him as a child.”

“He was a very sweet boy.”

“I don’t see that this is any of my business.”

“So, you see, I am a teacher. I am not the greatest or wisest of teachers. I cannot teach you enlightenment. I do not have it, and I do not know if you want it. But I can teach you some things that will be helpful in this world. May I tell you a story? It concerns mirrors.”

“I suppose so.”

“It also concerns a young man—no older than you are today. And I suppose this was not very long ago—not quite ten years, which does not seem so very long at my age. This young man was a talented magician—but then, his father was a talented magician, too; in fact, he was one of the stately old magicians of England. This young man’s father lived in a big house in the country, which was very old, and had belonged to his father, and his father before him, and he knew every stone, and he knew every tree in the woods, and he knew every man and woman in the village of which he was the lord; and he believed in fairies in the woods, and devils abroad at night, and was very old-fashioned, in the way of English magicians.”

She paused to smooth down her skirts. Then she glanced over Arthur’s shoulder at the mirror behind him and tidied away some stray hairs. Then she smiled.

“And so the young man learned magic the way other boys might learn the alphabet, or playing with a ball. And because he was proud, and his father was proud, they struggled, and they grew to hate each other. And when he was a young man he fled; to London first, then to Paris. But Paris was not far enough to escape from his father’s shadow. Because the young man wanted to be a magician, and in that world his father’s shadow was very great, and very wide. Other young men in a similar predicament might have struck their fathers, or shot them. But that was not how this young man had been raised.”

“You refer to Atwood, I take it.”

“I am telling you a story, Arthur. He sent letters. From Paris, first, then from Berlin, then from Morocco. At first those letters were quite ordinary; he sent stories of his travels, just as any loving son might; stories of his studies, the libraries that he visited. He wrote that he had visited Rome, and that he thought he might become a Catholic, and sought his father’s blessing—which was denied—and so on. Then the young man began to write of nightmares. He wrote that he had contracted a fever, and that ever since, he had been followed on his travels by nightmares. In those nightmares he woke under a night sky—no stars, moon-lit—and all around him were black men: a crowd of them, black as ebony, and black-eyed, and silent as statues, and the moon also was black. The old man, as it happened, had a peculiar horror of Africans; he did not like those stories at all!”

She glanced at the mirror over Arthur’s shoulder, smiled, and adjusted her hair.

“Still the letters came. This young man was on the Grand Tour: they came from Madrid, from Switzerland, from Jerusalem and Istanbul. He wrote of his visits to the old libraries, the bath-houses, the mountains—and he wrote of his dreams. Each time a new detail added to the dream: a crow, a black lion, a crack across the moon, a man who held a horn in his hand. And the old man was no fool; of course he understood by now that magic was being worked against him, but it was too late, you see. Once you see, it is too late; because then if you were to stop reading, and the words kept coming, you would not know what was in them, and wouldn’t that be worse? You would have no defence against them. They would continue in your dreams.

“The old man could not sleep. He paced. He wrote back, and his letters were full of hate and spite and the blackest curses. Because he was old-fashioned, he invoked the names of devils and angels; there was magic in them to singe a postman’s fingertips! But not this young man, who put them directly into the fireplace, and then wrote of his travels in Italy. He left Rome—he wrote—and he went up into the mountains. On a path across a stream one evening he saw a man who was as black as a crow and had but one eye in his head. He fled. On the train that took him away from Turin, he saw the man again, from the window, at a station. Please, Father, please help me. Mockery! The old man went red in the face with fury, and clutched his heart. Mockery! The young man wrote of his dreams: a black eye, a veiled face, the sky itself like a black veil being pulled aside, to reveal the true stars beyond! He wrote that he was consumed with fever, and that he was writing from a hospital bed. He wrote in such a trembling hand that the old man had to get out his spectacles and pore over the pages to read them, as if he were reading the oldest of grimoires, made of ancient parchment that might crumble to dust if he breathed on it. The old man held his breath.
Father, help me, please
, he read.
A voice spoke to me in the mountains, and it will not stop whispering. It will not stop. Its voice is as black as the night.
And then one night the old man cried out, and when the servants came running they found him dead, stretched out on the floor, lying in a corridor beneath a black mirror.”

She seemed to be waiting for Arthur to say something. He wasn’t sure what to say. Her story struck him as revolting.

“But of
course
it was black,” she laughed. “Do you see? It was night!”

She stood, looking pleased with herself, and straightened her skirts.

“Atwood killed his father; is that what you’re saying?”

“That is one version of the story. There are others. I want you to understand what a magical war is—what it can be.”

“That didn’t sound terribly magical, Miss Didot. It sounded like an unpleasant trick to play on a confused old man.”

She sighed.

Arthur stood to see her out, and observed to his shock that the shaving-mirror had fallen from the mantelpiece, and now lay shattered at the foot of the fireplace.

“Every mirror is an eye, Arthur; every eye is a door. Please do not replace it.”

“Miss Didot,” he said. “How did you do that?”

“Glass
wants
to shatter! The things of this world tend towards decay; the trick is keeping them whole. But since you ask, perhaps I will teach you a thing or two—since we must go to war together. Abby! Abby, my darling, will you fetch us some wine-glasses? Not good ones! Now, Arthur, sit, sit.”

She reclined smugly on the sofa. “The shattered mirror, as it happens, is one of the symbols of Mars; so too are blood, and sand, and rust, and the sword. By these signs, Mars makes itself known in our sphere.”

VI: JUPITER

The Company had never explored as far as Jupiter, and it was likely that no human consciousness could survive at those depths. Imagine a vastness of ice and storms, Atwood said. Something like a polar wasteland, something like an ocean, formless and always night. The waters, before God moved upon them and gave them life. Probably only very simple creatures lived in those vast ink-blue depths. They would be slow and ugly giants, like the dinosaurs, built to endure terrible cold and endless pressure.