The Revolutions (34 page)

What she needed was to find someone clever to speak to among the city’s inhabitants. Someone who might be able to see her, and understand her, and help her find a way home. Their equivalent of an Atwood, then, or a Jupiter. She went looking.

*   *   *

She’d been so amazed by the sight of the Martians that it only belatedly occurred to her how few of them there were. Most of their towers were empty, and none of them were crowded. London could have swallowed the population of the city twenty times over. They could all have packed into Limehouse, quite possibly without coming to the attention of the police. And the rest of the moon, for all that she could tell, might be uninhabited. At the edge of the city rose the grey-white walls of the crater; beyond that was wasteland, nothing but rocks and red moss as far as she dared to venture.

There was nothing in the city that particularly resembled an observatory, or a telescope, or a university.

It slowly dawned on her that each and every one of the Martians was a magician, or would have been considered a magician on Earth. They rarely touched anything with their hands, using their long fingers mostly for gesturing; but each of them could move objects with a glance, by will alone. The
Occult Review
would have called it
telekinesis.
Perhaps that was why they had so little in the way of tools, or furniture, or pots and pans, or other bric-a-brac. Man relied on tools made to fit his hand. The Martians did not.

She was delighted by that discovery for a while—the first few times she saw them do it, she thought she was imagining it. Then she began to despair. It was one thing to fling a few white rocks or orangey moss-flowers about, and another entirely to project a person from the Martian moons to Earth. And if
everyone
was a magician, that would only make it harder to identify the few truly powerful ones—if there were any.

They
did
have an army. She discovered that one long gloomy afternoon, when the red moon was unusually large in the sky—a sharp half-disc of red light that made the rest of the sky seem darker, as if it were threatening to storm.

The largest gathering of Martians she had ever seen formed in the mossy space that she’d dubbed Piccadilly Circle. That was a wide circular expanse of white stone, with a tall wave-like spire at its centre, roughly where the Angel would have been if it were the real Piccadilly. Martians streamed in from all sides, fluttering down from the tower-tops. She didn’t know what signal had summoned them. Perhaps it was the red moon itself.

At first she thought they were gathered for sport, but she’d been watching them long enough to detect something grim in their manner.

Half a dozen Martians fluttered up and perched on ledges on the spire. They made wide gestures, as if conducting the activity of the others. The rest—hundreds of them—formed what appeared to be two battle-lines. Then they tore into each other. They had no weapons; instead they fought with their hands, and with their sharp-edged wings—which were complex and multi-segmented, like fans or ferns, so that they could strike with one part while the rest remained in dizzying motion. She supposed they were striking with their wills, as well, their
telekinesis
. The battle was impossible for her to follow—it was too fast, too chaotic, too alien—partly because all the Martians were the same bright colours, and partly because they didn’t form
squares
, the way a human army might, but arranged themselves as halves of a circle, the front between them constantly moving around the circle like a clock-hand. They spun up into the air, a fluttering column over the square, like a whirlwind of leaves. Nobody seemed to be winning. They drifted out of the circle when they were hurt or too tired, and they drifted back in again, around and around. They bled pink. She was surprised; she’d rather expected blue.

It went on through the whole afternoon, and into the middle of the night, which seemed to stretch out for a week. It was every bit as futile and ugly and disappointing as terrestrial violence.

The red moon was big again the next day—in fact, it seemed to be getting slowly bigger. The fighting happened again. They seemed to be training; preparing for war.

*   *   *

She went back to the place where she’d first—what was the word? Awoken?

For no particularly good reason, she thought of that district—if you could call it that—as London Bridge. It was a patch of towers on the edge of a hillside that sloped down to the river, extending into a small peninsula that rather resembled a miniature Isle of Dogs—in fact, she might have called it that if she hadn’t already used the name for a bend upriver.

Eventually she found what was probably, so far as she could tell, the room where she’d begun. It was small, curved, with a peaked ceiling. Creeping red flowers grew in the window. There were neat rows of beads on the floor in a corner. Narrow doorways led to three small side-rooms behind curtains of black beads, the kind she imagined one might find in an opium-den.

Two Martians lived in those rooms. They were the two she’d seen embracing when she first arrived. There was nothing particularly special about them, so far as she knew. It seemed to her that they were young, and she thought of them—for want of a better word—as married.

Both had long elfin faces, eerily beautiful, with narrow mouths and inscrutable silver eyes. Both had long thin arms tight with corded muscle. One was very slightly larger than the other, and had more vivid colouration. The other had somewhat more extravagantly complex wings. She supposed that one was male, and the other female, but she had no firm idea which was which. Rather arbitrarily, she dubbed the more-purple one
Adam
and the complex-winged one
Eve.
And then she settled in to haunt them.

*   *   *

For the most part the Martians ate communally, like schoolchildren or soldiers—and sparingly, picking at fruit and fungus and the sharp spines of red leaves. Meals fit for hummingbirds. They argued vigorously as they ate, about God knows what. Like Athenians; a disputatious people. They drank a red wine—there was no other word for it—which had the scent of a stronger and fiercer wine than any Josephine had ever encountered on Earth, a wine that poets might write about, that might drive Bacchae to flesh-rending frenzy. Adam and Eve drank it, then fell about in what might have been ecstasy or laughter or dancing—and what quite often turned into playful fighting, or possibly mating. It was hard to be sure—their wings touched, the frilled edges shimmering and trembling, forming a discreet curtain. The first time it happened, Josephine fled at once. Afterwards she peeked—at first with a mixture of fascination and deep embarrassment, then with a certain scientific detachment. If she was to understand them, she had to know everything. They were, after all, not human. She remembered following her father about on his visits to the farmers of his parish and glimpsing the coupling of farm animals. Strange, the things that could make one homesick.

*   *   *

One day she panicked, waking from memories of London, to find that Adam and Eve were both gone. They’d left while she was drifting—but only to move to some upper rooms of their tower. They had few neighbours, and few possessions, and appeared somewhat nomadic.

*   *   *

Another thing Josephine learned was that the rows of beads on the floor, which she’d taken for a chess-like game, were writing; or rather, something half-way between writing and a sort of psychic phonograph. Martian language was mostly motion. They moved the beads with their wills, imparting to them patterns of motions that could be repeated endlessly. It was rather like automatic spirit-writing, or a medium’s planchette. She learned that there was a particular pattern of floating motions that Eve liked. Martian scripture, perhaps, or music, or a favourite novel.

*   *   *

Day by day, Adam and Eve grew less strange to her. She recognised their habits, their little courtesies to each other, their signs of affection or irritation. She learned their quirks of personality. Eve was passionate and quick to anger. Adam was slower, cooler-headed. She began to think of them rather the way one thinks of the couple who live at the end of the street, who one doesn’t know by name, but who must surely be rather the same sort of person as oneself.

Their routines were erratic, by the standards of Londoners. They had no fixed or regular employment. A day on the white moon was like at least a dozen days in London. Sometimes one or both of them went to work: sweeping some patch of street, or tending flowers, or making and sorting beads in a low-ceilinged workshop next to a red fire. Sometimes they had tremendously long fits of inertia, and what she took to be melancholy. Sometimes they went to a place just across the river, where they stood for ages in a long low building shaped like a wave of white stone, in front of twelve smaller Martians. These were the first children Josephine had seen; they reminded her irresistibly of large butterflies. Adam and Eve stood on a low stage and talked to them all day. Teachers, then, or possibly priests. Like priests or like scholars they seemed to talk a lot, and argue constantly, about nothing in particular. A disputatious people. Sometimes they fought. Their arguments seemed to get fiercer and more bitter as the red moon steadily grew larger.

*   *   *

After a while, it seemed to Josephine that she’d learned all she could from them, and perhaps it was time to haunt some other household.

She might drift from house to house for ever. Why not? She might outlast Adam and Eve—bodiless, she might live for ever! That was a rather ghastly vision of eternity. In fact, it made her so afraid and unhappy that she was unable to concentrate her attention on anything for a while, and some great unguessable span of time passed in the blink of an eye, as if she’d ceased to exist. She only knew that time had passed because the city appeared to have undergone some sort of storm, or a small earthquake. Many of the long vines and tendrils that hung across the streets had been cut through, exposing raw pink fibres. Dead flowers lay in drifts. There was damage to the stonework, and quite a number of the Martians sported fresh wounds. Adam’s wings were torn on his left side, and he had been slashed from forehead to mouth, right through one of his beautiful silver eyes. Their classroom was down to ten children. On the other hand, the baleful red moon had dwindled to a pin-prick again, and the fighting in Piccadilly had stopped.

*   *   *

She could see, and hear, and even smell. Why, then, shouldn’t she be able to
touch
?

It was faint at first, but after long trial and effort, and deep introspection over the difference between
sensation
and
imagination
, she found that she could sense differences between surfaces. The white stone was soft, a little like firm india-rubber. The mossy plants tingled. The wings of a Martian were sharp, and somehow silky and rough at the same time.

And if she could touch something, then why shouldn’t she move it?

It took days and nights of practice and study and frustration. It was like learning to walk again, or speak.

*   *   *

Adam and Eve came home, leaping up to the ledge outside their rooms, landing crouched. Adam, wounded, stumbled; Eve helped him. They groomed each other’s furled wings with their long violet fingers. By now that no longer struck Josephine as odd; in fact, it struck her as touchingly domestic.

When they stepped into their room it was with great joy that she finally lifted up all of the red beads at once, hundreds of them, and set them spinning madly around one another.

Adam recoiled in horror and stumbled against the wall. Eve shrieked, snapped her wings wide open with the sound of a gunshot, and fled from the window, pulling Adam after her.

Chapter Twenty-four

For a moment Josephine wasn’t sure what had happened. Then she let the red beads go and moved to the window. Adam and Eve were already almost out of sight, gliding with their wings outstretched high over the surface of the wine-red river, shining in the moonlight—no! Not moonlight, of course—
Mars
-light. They curved right together, Eve leading the way.

Following them, Josephine felt for the first time that she was truly flying. The sensation was exhilarating. They couldn’t escape her, turn and wheel however they liked. She pursued them effortlessly. She was stubbornly determined to make herself known to them.

Adam faltered, slowly descending towards the water. Eve rose higher. Watching Adam settle on the riverbank, Josephine lost sight of Eve for a moment. When she next saw her, Eve was climbing like a squirrel up the side of one of the tall pillars that ran along the Embankment. When she reached the top of it, she stood with her wings outstretched and began a rather eccentric dance. Josephine watched with amusement.

With Mars-light at her back, Eve cast tremendous shadows over the city below. Martians going about their business looked up in alarm. Blue silver-eyed heads poked out of windows. Then, from a thousand windows, a thousand sets of wings took to the air. Eve’s dance had been an alarm, a battle-signal. Suddenly the city was in a panic.

Eve! The name was ridiculous now. There was no longer anything familiar or domestic about her—
it
. In fact, it was rather terrifying, stretched up to its full height, jerking frantically.

Josephine was frustrated, and angry, and frightened, and humiliated. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected them to be
pleased
to be confronted by a ghost in their house. Even so, this reaction seemed out of all reasonable proportion. The whole city was on the alert now—it had taken only moments. The silhouettes of the towers bristled with winged sentries. There was a terrible sharp rustling noise, as of a field at night filled with a thousand grasshoppers. In the distance, she saw a mob gathering at Piccadilly. A mob, or an army. The silent alarm kept going, as other Martians took to the tower-tops, relaying Eve’s message. Shadows and flashes of light flickered across the city.