The Revolutions (46 page)

*   *   *

Over the rest of the long lunar night, and through the following day, there were countless feasts, and celebrations, and speeches and debates, and rituals she was hard-pressed to understand, both solemn and wild. The city was drunk on red wine, on survival, on stories and boasting and honour, Martians danced, wrestled, argued, swarmed, laughed, made love openly in the skies overhead. Josephine was questioned, flattered, embraced, propositioned. She was drunk too; she couldn’t stop herself talking. She told the story of how she’d given chase to the retreating pirates perhaps a hundred times. Her feat was considered daring, mad, hilarious, absurd. This unexpected motion—this deviation from the settled course—was rich in philosophical and artistic implications. It was either a stroke of genius or such a remarkable and prodigious idiocy that it was worth talking about anyway. There was a school of thought that what she’d done was cruel and depraved, a sign that the Blue Sphere was a place of uncivilised monsters. She was both feted and condemned. The Martians debated her act as if it held the key to a total understanding of the Blue Sphere and its inhabitants. They argued, as disputatious and quarrelsome as dons or priests or poets or spiritualists. Before the next night fell—a month of days and nights might have passed in London—half a dozen different schools of thought had emerged regarding the significance (spiritual, military, or artistic) of her feat. She was called on to speak, to write, to defend herself. Soon she found herself drawn into the quarrels and politics and life of the lunar city so thoroughly and so pleasantly that there were times when she could almost forget about London.

*   *   *

The red moon dwindled rapidly. The feasts came to an end. She went looking for Orpheus.

THE

EIGHTH

DEGREE

{
Vast Countenance
}

Chapter Thirty-two

The sun rose. A sharp little disc of blue, unthinkably remote. The angle of its motion was peculiar, and somewhat vertiginous. There was something chemical about its faint light, as if the sun had been subjected to some hitherto unknown industrial process, burned out, and then discarded. Behind it, the sky was a dome of rust. Beneath it there was gloom. Vast dust-clouds massed on the horizon.

Now that there was sun, they had orientation, of a sort. The expedition left camp and set off north-by-north-west. A mountain range visible on the horizon rose higher and higher as the hours went by, and then became clouds, which became a mere haze in the air. The expedition pressed on through.

Atwood led the way. He’d started the march with a dip into his supply of cocaine and was full of energy. The men followed, labouring under packs that would have crushed them under the conditions of Earth. To the eye of any observer (and they both longed for and dreaded encountering any such observer) they might have resembled a procession of ants carrying leaves. Dimmick pulled one of the sleds. Vaz and Payne and Arthur took turns pulling the other. The things made an awful unearthly racket, the steel runners scraping over stony ground and striking sparks; and from time to time a sled got turned over or suddenly hit a rock and jerked to a halt, causing Vaz and Payne and Dimmick to swear, and tins of ox-tongue to go rolling all over the surface of Mars, or get punctured on sharp rocks. There were sharp rocks everywhere. Hard to spot them in the gloom; impossible not to think of them as wilfully malevolent.

The sun achieved its zenith. The cold persisted regardless. It had been twilight on Mars for ten thousand years, it seemed, and the sun was too distant to have much say in how Mars did things. Frank lit one of the lanterns, as much for comfort as for light. He tried to start a sing-along, something from his military days, but nobody had much heart for it. It was bloody hard work to make a noise that could travel in the thin cold air of Mars; and then there was the awful sense that nothing was listening, anywhere, in all that vast unfriendly sky—or, worse, that something might be.

Something in the atmosphere irritated the throat. It smelled faintly metallic. Sometimes there was a sound rather like the noise on a telephone line when no one was speaking. Occasional gusts of wind rushed past them, carrying odd whispering—or, not quite whispering, because it was soundless: a mere ghost of sound, a motion in the air …

They marched across stony ground, up and down occasional rills or ripples or dunes of dirt; they manhandled the sleds across cracks and ditches. They encountered no trace of life; not so much as a scattering of moss or lichen; not a trickle of water. Nothing to look at but that strange violet light, glimmering from behind dust-clouds as vast as oceans, slowly streaming and shifting. A haze hung in the air, obscuring vision. God knows what might come lumbering out of it. Impossible to judge distances, or to distinguish shadow from shape. No wonder poor Ashton had started to hallucinate.

Discipline. That was the thing. The same techniques that disciplined the mind for the rigours of Gracewell’s Engine would work for the surface of Mars. It was the same problem, when you got down to basics. Things that the human mind was not meant to think. Things that the human eye was not meant to see.

Atwood marched blithely on ahead, and the rest of them followed.

Shortly after noon, one of the sleds turned over for the third time and bounced into a ditch. Payne cried out as the rope skinned his hands. Vaz stumbled and fell on his back. Then he rolled over and scrabbled after the sled on hands and knees, muttering excitedly. He reached down into the ditch and picked up a rock.

“Look.” He got to his feet.

“Bloody thing turned the sled over,” Payne said.

“Yes, yes—but look! See, Mr Shaw? Atwood! Lord Atwood! Come look!”

Arthur took the rock from Vaz’s outstretched hands. It was pinkish, and roughly the size of a house brick.

“See, Shaw?”

“I don’t—”

Atwood snatched it away. “Thank you,” Atwood said. He was grinning like a madman. “Well done, Mr Vaz. A sharp eye. See, Mr Sun? Mr Shaw?”

Arthur and Sun both peered at the rock.

On one side it was smooth, almost glazed, with jagged flinty edges. It resembled pottery as much as it resembled earthly stone.

Atwood turned it over. On the other side there was a neat right-angled corner.

“A fortunate discovery,” Sun said.

“Manufacture,” Atwood said. “Clear evidence of manufacture.”

“One can’t be certain,” Arthur said. “It might be a product of natural forces we don’t understand.”

“Admirable scepticism, Mr Shaw. But you lack vision. Can’t you see it, can’t you simply see it: the tremendous column of which this was once merely a corner of a plinth, rising steeply into the Martian sky, an ornament to a great Martian temple?”

“Where are they, then? Where are its makers? Where’s the rest of the temple?”

“Gone. Dead. As if we walked among the sepulchres of the Valley of Kings. Perhaps even Mars has its Egypt.”

Then Atwood handed the rock back to Vaz, and told him to put it on his sled.

*   *   *

Sun bandaged Payne’s skinned hands. Payne cursed and grunted, while Sun remained silent. Later Payne grumbled to Arthur that it was like being treated by a veterinarian, as if one were a carthorse.

Arthur and Vaz got the sled righted and loaded again, then they each took a rope over their shoulder and began to pull. Their route took them uphill, and into a zone of sharp little pebbles. No further evidence of architecture appeared.

“Together again, Mr Shaw.”

“We are indeed, Mr Vaz.”

They went some way in silence. It was an effort to speak.

Arthur quickly began to see why the sled kept tipping over so easily. It was the weird weightlessness. The damn thing bounced and wobbled at the slightest disturbance. It was like a child’s toy.

They moved on, bringing up the rear. Nothing behind them but the far horizon, the black clouds. Best not to look back at all.

“You know, Mr Vaz—I rather think you might have saved my life, that night in the fire. I always wanted to thank you.”

“Think nothing of it, Mr Shaw. Besides—we are in worse danger now.”

“Dimmick—might have—if you—if you hadn’t … well.”

Arthur’s breath ran short. He thought back on the incident at Dr Thorold’s house in Bloomsbury. Blood all over the doctor’s study, blood on Dimmick’s boots. Long ago now, a long-forgotten horror. He’d seen worse since. A certain wolf-like aspect to the black clouds streaming overhead. Getting faster now. He decided it was better not to tell that story. No doubt Mars had nightmares enough of its own; no need to trouble it with London’s.

“Misunderstanding,” Arthur said. “Won’t happen again, I’m sure.”

Vaz glanced at Dimmick’s back. He did not look entirely convinced.

“Shaw. May I ask a question?”

Arthur nodded.

“Mr Gracewell’s Work.”

“Yes. We built another one, you know. Another Engine. Near Gravesend. Would have hired you on if I’d known.”

“It was for this, the Work?”

Arthur thought about how to explain Gracewell’s Engine. He couldn’t find the strength. “Yes,” he said.

The sled’s runners shrieked over stone. Up ahead Payne was grumbling about his feet, and beyond that someone—Dimmick, Arthur thought—was rather improbably whistling a cheerful little tune. Atwood was so far ahead that he could be seen only as a distant shadow, flickering in the haze like a black candle flame. Sun walked along beside him. The two of them were talking. They appeared to be arguing.

“Fog,” Arthur said. “Damn fog. That thing—Milton, isn’t it?—
darkness visible.
”

Vaz shuddered.

Ahead of them rose a dune. Atwood struck a heroic figure atop it: a silhouette of black velvet, limned with cold violet light, field-glasses in hand. Then he was gone again, replaced by Sun, and shortly afterwards by Dimmick. They had a dreadful time getting the sled over the dune, but after that it was downhill, and easier going for a while.

“You are a Christian, I presume?”

“I am, Mr Vaz. A fairly bad one, I suppose. Given all of this, I mean. Atwood and his magic, that is.”

“Why did you…?”

“All this? A woman.”

“A woman? I would like to see that woman. Does the Bible say anything about Mars? I don’t recall. Do you think God watches Mars? I can’t stop myself from thinking these things, Mr Shaw.”

“God? I took you for a Hindu, Mr Vaz.”

They’d never discussed religion back in Deptford, but here the subject seemed inescapable.

“A Roman Catholic. Not a very good one.”

“Ah. Well, well. I wouldn’t know, anyway. Perhaps he does. There’s a red star in the book of Revelation, isn’t there? I suppose that must be Mars. But other than that, I don’t recall. We may be outside God’s bailiwick, one fears.”

“Yes. Yes.” Vaz nodded. “That is what I fear.”

They walked for a while longer.

“Listen, Mr Vaz. I want to ask you a favour.”

“Ask.”

“I told you when we worked in Mr Gracewell’s Engine together that I was engaged to be married.”

“Yes. I recall.”

“She’s—unwell. If we—if you should ever happen to meet her, but I am … well, if things haven’t gone well for me here … Would you give her a message for me? Tell her that I’ve made arrangements. If … when she wakes.”

“Of course.”

He gave Vaz the name of a lawyer, and the address of his office in Gravesend.

“It’s all my fault, you see. All my fault.”

Vaz maintained a diplomatic silence.

Up ahead, a cloud formed on the horizon. It resembled the smoke of a great fire.

“Will you do me a favour in response, Mr Shaw?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me truthfully: Does Lord Atwood know where he is leading us?”

“I don’t know.”

They walked for a while in silence.

Vaz grunted. “Which would be worse, I wonder? If he doesn’t, or if he does?”

*   *   *

The march stopped at intervals of roughly an hour, so that Dimmick could take out an ice-pick and a hammer and carve a number into a suitable rock:
1, 2, 3,
and so forth. This was to ensure that they could retrace their steps, and also to be sure that they weren’t going in circles. Roughly once an hour, whatever that meant on Mars. No doubt by the time they got to
9, 10, 11
they were far off from the true hour. They kept going.
12, 13.
It was as easy to keep walking as to stop, as easy to stand as to lie down. That must be what it was like to be a ghost, Arthur thought.
14
and then
15.
He began to think that they might walk for ever, leaving meaningless signs that would never be read, watched only by the black clouds overhead.
16 …

Shortly after the sixteenth marking, Payne announced that he’d had enough, and was damn well going to sleep. He snatched a blanket from the back of Dimmick’s sled, and sat on the ground with it wrapped around his shoulders, shivering.

At first Atwood looked annoyed. Then he smiled and said, “Quite right! A rest. I’ll go one further, gentlemen. A feast. We shall have a feast on Mars. A celebration of our triumph.”

Frank lit a second lantern. They set up the tents, then shared out cigarettes and cold soup.

“A wondrous thing,” Atwood said. “Soup. Every sensation on Mars is to be treasured for what it can teach us.”

Payne prayed, but without a great deal of enthusiasm, and nobody joined him. One never knew what might be listening, Vaz observed.

At last they all went to sleep—except Sun, whose energies appeared boundless, and who sat down cross-legged beside a lantern, apparently deep in thought.

Sleep on the surface of Mars was not terribly different from waking. In fact, Arthur passed from sleep to marching again without quite noticing it. Before he knew it, he was walking along beside Vaz, the sled rattling along behind him, and Dimmick was carving
2—4
into rocks as they went, and then
2—5,
and
2—6,
and so on.