The Revolutions (38 page)

Wind buffeted him. He stood firm.

Sand. Sand and dust tickled his face, blew about him, getting into his mouth and his nose.

He coughed, spat out dust. He opened his eyes.

A red plain stretched before him.

A jumble of images assaulted his vision. Inkblots—no, clouds of violet dust on the horizon. Rocks underfoot. Cold wind. A vast sky. Alien light. Some of the clouds were mountains, impossibly tall and thin.

No Josephine. Of course not, of course not, of course not. No smile, no welcome at all—in fact nothing, nothing as far as the eye could see. A dead world, an empty world.

Somewhere behind him, someone was saying,
It exists, it exists
. It sounded like Atwood.
It exists!

He rubbed at his eyes.

His eyes! His hands, for that matter!

He patted at his arms, his chest. Solid. Flesh and bone. He was still wearing his tweed jacket. He didn’t know quite why the jacket should seem so extraordinary to him, but it did.

His head spun. He swayed and stumbled. Atwood’s voice called out
Look out there!
and Vaz called out something that sounded like
Hey!
It had hurt when he landed, knocked the breath right out of him. His breath! Arthur laughed. He lay on his back and looked up into an impossible sky, a deep dark inky starless violet, shifting and turbulent with dust-clouds. The moon—no, two moons, one red and one the other marble-pink—it was dizzying to think of them—two moons chasing each other around and around that sky—a sky that was a thousand times wider and darker and wilder than any sky that was ever seen over London—a vastness as huge and as terrifying as the face of God.

THE

SEVENTH

DEGREE

{
Angel and Abyss
}

Chapter Twenty-seven

If there had been newspapers in the ivory city, they would have been utterly preoccupied with the Earthwoman Question. One day there would have been editorials urging that she be investigated, the next that she be deported; demanding that she be vivisected, or given the keys to the city, or exhibited on stage, or hauled before the courts, or condemned by the Church, or prohibited by Act of Parliament, or sent off on a tour of the provinces. She’d have been mocked in cartoons. (How does one caricature a invisible ghost? They’d have found a way.) All the experts would have weighed in; and even the common Martian in the street would have had his say, writing letters calling for Something to Be Done. Or, at least, that was how it all seemed to Josephine. What was certain was that the Martians of the lunar city were fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the news that they had a ghost in their midst, a spectral interloper from the mysterious Blue Sphere.

Now that old Piccadilly had shown her how, she couldn’t help but hear their thoughts. There were so many of them, and they were so loud, like a swarm of crickets. She sensed emotions, images, longings, fears. She couldn’t help but try to communicate, sending images of the Earth and London to and fro across the city, causing confusion, ecstasy, panic, and sometimes fits of agitated swarming that might be what passed for riots on the white moon.

Her—what was the word? her
ghostliness
—had some special meaning for them, something that was horrifying and revolting and compelling in equal measure. It had something to do with their flight from Mars, and with whatever horrible evil Piccadilly had feared. And apparently Martian newspapers—if they had them—were no more reliable than terrestrial ones, because the news quickly got around that
all
Earthpeople were ghosts. Frightened crowds demanded answers, pointed up at the sky, at the tiny blue dot that was the Earth. She tried her best to correct their misunderstanding, but without a great deal of success. She tried to describe the human body, but they appeared to think that she was making a joke.

The crowds urged her this way and that, and important-looking people came to lead her here, or there, or elsewhere, to be studied and talked to and threatened and cajoled. She demanded that Piccadilly be allowed to go with her. In part, that was because she had begun to trust him. In part it was because she pitied him, and she didn’t care for the way he’d been treated, and she felt that if there was fame and honour to be won among the Martians for subduing the Earth ghost, it properly belonged to Piccadilly. In part it was because he was the closest thing she had to a friend. He went before her into the crowded squares, shouting as if he were her prophet or holding up a red light to clear a path, like a philosopher in the marketplace. Squabbles arose around him, squalls of argument and excitement and motion. She had no clear idea what he was saying, but the role seemed to agree with him: as time went by he stood a little taller, his wings shone brighter. She felt drunk. She kept wanting to laugh.

*   *   *

By the time she was presented to their Parliament, the thrill of it all had worn off. She was tired of being prodded with questions, tired of being the object of fear and wonder, tired of understanding nothing, and rather afraid that she might simply disappear under the crush of attention. She wondered if that was what being famous was like back on Earth, and if so, why anyone would want it. All she could say to the Elders of Parliament was that she wanted to go home.

Parliament
was her own word, of course. She didn’t know precisely what they were, this little roomful of elderly Martians. All she knew was that Piccadilly was eager to impress on her their tremendous, paramount importance and dignity. So far as she could tell, most decisions in the lunar city were made by the
demos
as a whole, by casting of beads after the Athenian fashion—subject, no doubt, to the influence of certain great orators or generals or philosophers. Meanwhile, decisions of great importance were reserved for a caste or class or council of leaders, consuls, dictators—who were, perhaps, chosen for excellence of birth, not by the popular vote, and who therefore resembled Lords more than Commons … She didn’t know. She suspected it was hopeless to try to understand the Martians in terms of terrestrial institutions—not least because she didn’t understand those terribly well either. She certainly hadn’t been able to explain Parliament to Piccadilly.

Regardless of what one might choose to call it, the highest authority of the city took the form of nine mostly elderly Martians. There was nothing obviously grand or powerful or dignified or important about them. They wore beads and scraps of silk, just like everyone else; in fact, it seemed to Josephine that they were, if anything, a little shabbier than the average. It seemed to her that they were mostly women. She couldn’t quite say why—something about their manner suggested that they were matrons of their kind.

This innermost sanctum, this deepest penetralia of the lunar city, was a crowded little room that Josephine had initially taken for just one more of the hundreds of the bead workshops that could be found all across the city. In fact it
was
a workshop: there were tools, and work-tables, and scraps, and shavings, and clutter. There was an intense red fire in one corner of the room.

Three of them came shuffling forward, staring in various directions, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The rest continued bead-making, working drills and needles with their fingers and their minds. First among bead-makers, Josephine thought, or stewards of the Bead-Makers’ Union. Or perhaps the beads had some greater significance than she’d guessed—something military, something sacred.

She let them feel her desire to go home.

The matrons wanted to know all about Earth, and she told them what she could. By now, she’d conjured up the same images of Earth so many times and for so many questioners that they no longer seemed quite real, even to her. Under the endless pressure of questioning, questioning, questioning, she was starting to forget what was real and what wasn’t—if anything here were real—if indeed there even
was
a
here.
Sometimes London seemed like something she’d read about in a book, or recalled from a dream. Were there
really
green trees, and blue skies, and a black and sooty city of pink wingless apes?

She felt herself drifting again, into one of those states of vanishing in which hours or days or months might pass in the blink of an eye. She willed herself to remain present. This room, these ancient old dried-flower Martians, were real and solid things. She concentrated on one in particular, the foremost and perhaps the most ancient of the three, a creature whose wings were little more than withered petals, and whose face—unusually broad and round for a Martian—was etched with wrinkles like veins in quartz.

Piccadilly stood in a corner, shifting nervously from foot to foot, like a pigeon.

They bombarded her with questions that were at first confusing, but which she soon began to sense were of a military nature. They wanted to know about the military capacities of Earth. They seemed to have in mind an alliance between the forces of Earth and the forces of the white moon against a common enemy. She supposed it had something to do with the red moon of Mars, and with their exile from the face of Mars itself. She was rather terrified by this responsibility, and tried her best to explain that she had no power whatsoever to commit Earth to anything. They found that hard to believe, or perhaps to understand. Their military line of inquiry was confused by the fact that they appeared to have London mixed up with the Earth, and policemen mixed up with soldiers, and they had no concept of a rifle or a cannon or a gunboat, or even of swords or cavalry. Her thought of
cavalry
confused them even further, as they seized on the image of an armoured knight out of Arthurian legend; and then Josephine thought of dragons, and then of “Jabberwocky.” That caused the matrons great consternation. Suddenly, their images of London were full of dragons coiled around Big Ben, and Jabberwocks running wild in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, while horses rode gleaming knights into battle …

Jupiter, she was sure, wouldn’t be making such a terrible mess of things.

The matrons’ next question came so clearly that she almost heard it as words:
Who is Jupiter?

A hard question to answer. She tried to tell them about Jupiter, and about Martin Atwood, and Sun and Sergeant Jessop and all the rest of them, and about Atwood’s house in Mayfair and the Company of the Spheres. She called up an image of Atwood’s library, the lamps on the table and the star-maps and the mad symbols painted on the floor. That excited the matrons greatly. They wanted to know all about the Company’s methods of travel. The notion of
leaving the body
fascinated and appalled them. For the first time, she thought they clearly understood what had happened to her.

They wanted to know if more Earth people would come, or if she was alone.

Well, would they? She didn’t know. In recent days she’d stopped hoping that Atwood and Jupiter would appear to rescue her. Perhaps they’d never intended to rescue her at all. Perhaps they’d tried but couldn’t find her. She still held out a vague hope, contrary to all reason, that Arthur might somehow find out what had happened to her and follow her; but that hope was fading. She’d begun to accept that if she was to find her way home, she’d have to do it herself. In fact, the thought of Atwood and his Company suddenly descending from the heavens was rather worrying. One ghostly Earthwoman had created a panic—what might the Martians do if nine of them appeared in their midst?

An image of the Company at war with the lunar city entered her mind. The matrons tensed.

She uttered a quick silent prayer. That set off a further round of shock and alarm and questioning. They appeared to take her prayer for a sort of magic spell. They found her notion of God highly distasteful, and, once again, her attempts to explain only seemed to make things worse: the Holy Ghost alarmed them; Hell seemed to confirm some deep and awful suspicion; the incarnation of God in a mortal body was half-comic, half-fascinating.

The matrons started to argue. She left them to it, trying to think of nothing at all. The three conversed among themselves, fingers fluttering and wings flickering, for a very long time. Meanwhile, the rest continued shaping and drilling and inspecting beads, threading them or moving them from one pile to another, and only occasionally pausing to express agreement or disagreement with this or that. They weren’t a Parliament, or bishops or lords—they put Josephine more in mind of the Fates, weaving while they dispensed the destiny of kings and queens and nations. She named them accordingly: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; spinner, measurer, cutter.

With a sudden clatter of wings the Fates reached a decision.

Piccadilly stiffened, as if readying for a blow. Then he approached the table where the Fates worked. He had been summoned to testify. His wings were tightly furled and his back was bent. If he’d been an Englishman, he would have been on his knees.

He stood at the foot of the table, by the fire. He spoke quietly—that is, his motions were subdued, the colours of his wings faint. Josephine understood none of their questions to him, or his answers.

At last, Clotho reached out her fingers and entwined them in Piccadilly’s. A gesture of peace—a benediction. Piccadilly ceased trembling. Josephine thought he would have wept if he could; laid his head in Clotho’s lap like a child, weeping in gratitude, and love, and fear. Clotho, still and crystalline, glittering by firelight, resembled a pagan idol, carved from gemstone.

A moment ago, while they were getting confused about London, the matrons had seemed a little ridiculous. Now, in their own sphere again, among their own subjects, they moved Josephine to awe.