The Revolutions (47 page)

It was shortly after
2—10
—the tenth hour of their second day on Mars—that they sighted the ruin.

*   *   *

At first, in the far distance, it resembled one of the bent tin cans they’d left behind, dented and leaking, hours and miles ago. A tiny black shape on the distant horizon, too oddly shaped to be a rock, butte, or mountain. It was not quite in the direction they were travelling, but close enough that when Atwood pretended that it was, no one argued.

A sign of civilization.

Frank started up another song, and this time everyone joined in, even Atwood—everyone but Sun, who continued to march in silence, hands folded behind his back, an odd smile on his face.

Arthur, remembering the Martian in Atwood’s library, made sure that the rifles were loaded.

It was clearly a structure, the product of Martian architecture. Any doubt on that score quickly faded as they got closer. Within half an hour it was quite clear that it was a sort of tower. It rose up out of the flat dead plain, tall and slender, in splendid isolation. It had something of the look of a fortification, but there was nothing around worth fortifying for as far as the eye could see.

It was made of red stone, it was circular, and it was unornamented, save for a spiralling set of windows. Beneath each window jutted something a little like a drainpipe. Perches, perhaps, for winged visitors.

It had shattered long ago, like a lightning-blasted tree. It seemed to have broken roughly in half; the upper stories had toppled sideways, leaving a long snaky mound of rubble half-buried by dust. What was left upright was still tremendously tall—more so when seen from its foot, because its thinness played tricks with perspective, so that it seemed almost as if it hung from the sky.

“Bloody thing’s got no doors,” Frank said.

“See,” Atwood said. “The Martians come and go by the windows.”

“It’s a ruin,” Arthur said. “No one’s come or gone from here in years—centuries.”

“They fly. Remember the creature in my library? Winged. It was trying to fly.”

“Not too well, as I recall.”

“Why would they be endowed with wings if not to fly? Perhaps it was too heavy on Earth. Or perhaps it couldn’t fly indoors—perhaps it needed wind and air and light. Imagine it. A race of flying men. Their feet might never touch the ground. Imagine what we might learn from such a people, Shaw. Their sciences, their arts, their magic; imagine how they must see the world! This must be a temple. A sacred place. They go down to the surface to pray.”

He was practically standing on tiptoes, as if he hoped he might grow wings of his own, by sheer force of will.

Arthur felt a faint hope. Clearly the structure was empty, and abandoned; but if Josephine had been lost on Mars all this time, surely she would have sought out landmarks such as this, and possibly left some sign of her whereabouts.

No doors. The closest window was twelve feet off the ground, too far to jump even in the feeble Martian gravity. Payne had the bright idea of taking the ropes from the two sleds, tying them together, and throwing them up over the perch beneath the lowest window, so that if two men stood on the ground holding one end of the rope, another could climb up to the window.

Sun went first. Then Atwood, then Arthur.

Chapter Thirty-three

The windows of the tower were tall, but narrow, and they all had a devil of a time squeezing through, even Atwood. Inside it was dark.

Arthur called down to Vaz, who tied one of the lanterns to the end of the rope. He raised it hand-over-hand to the window, where he and Sun and Lord Atwood waited, wary of venturing farther into the dark interior.

The lantern revealed that they were standing on a narrow semi-circular platform. Another step farther and Atwood would have fallen to the tower’s floor—though he would have sustained no great injury, because the years had filled the tower, like an hourglass, with so much dust and dirt that the floor was now only a foot or two down from the window. Atwood smiled and hopped down. Hard-packed, the dirt held his weight.

The lantern’s light flickered yellow and black on smooth glazed walls. The tower was made of the same odd ceramic substance as the fragment Vaz had discovered in the wasteland—not stone, precisely, nor brick. Overhead, a series of perches and struts and narrow beams spiralled up into the darkness. No cobwebs; no bats or owls or scurrying mice. Silence, and a smell of metal.

“Ancient,” Arthur said. “It feels older than the hills, somehow.”

Sun lowered himself gently to the floor, and looked up. “Isn’t that always the way with ruins, Mr Shaw? The things of Man are measured in years; the things of God in millennia.”

“True enough.”

Arthur leaned out the window.

Outside, Payne and Frank held rifles at the ready. Vaz held an ice-axe in his hand. Dimmick seemed to have wandered off around the back of the tower.

“It’s empty,” Arthur called. “It’s safe. For God’s sake, stop waving those things about before somebody gets hurt.”

“Empty?” Sun continued to stare upwards, hands folded behind his back. “Perhaps.”

“Shaw,” Atwood called. “Bring that lantern here.”

Atwood knelt in the dirt, inspecting the wall on the far side of the tower.

“There, Shaw. Hold it up.”

The lantern revealed scratches on the wall. A spider’s-web tracery of shallow lines and curves.

“Markings,” Atwood said.

“Hieroglyphics?”

“Perhaps—if you like.”

“They look like scratches, to my eye—the wind and the rocks could have made them.”

“Do they? Well. Look, though.” Atwood scrabbled in the dirt. “Whatever they are, the greater part of them is buried—what a nuisance! Hidden by the years; swallowed by the sands of Mars themselves…”

“Well. We have shovels, don’t we?”

“What a literal mind you have! Yes. I suppose we do. Then let’s have Dimmick and Frank dig. Vaz and Payne should remain outside with the sleds. We may be here some time. Don’t you agree, Sun?”

“I think I will defer to Your Lordship.”

Atwood stood, rubbing his hands together. His palms were red—he’d cut them digging in the dirt. He put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “Who knows what these markings may teach us, about Mars, about the heavens.”

“Will they teach us how to find Josephine, or how to get home?”

“Be patient, Shaw. I said that we would find evidence of Martian civilization. And look: we have.”

“Yes,” said Sun, still staring up into the rafters.

Red dust drifted down and into their little circle of light.

*   *   *

Frank and Dimmick didn’t share Atwood’s enthusiasm for the tower; in fact, they found it positively eerie, and they kept their rifles close at hand as they dug.

After a while, Arthur stopped Frank and took a turn with the shovel. Digging was something to do. Preferable to just standing around. Whatever Atwood saw in the scratches they were uncovering, it was all meaningless to Arthur. Certainly it resembled no language he was familiar with. How could it?

They piled up dirt under the window, and periodically heaved it out and over the side, creating a growing heap next to the sleds. Through some peculiarity of the arid Martian atmosphere, it was possible to work vigorously for hours without ever sweating. It was a strange sensation.

Frank took over again. Dimmick was indefatigable. Sun lowered himself down the rope from the window, and paced around the perimeter of the tower as if marking the boundaries—Arthur presumed there was some mystical purpose to this. Meanwhile, Atwood sat cross-legged on the stone platform, the lantern beside him, making sketches of the tower and its markings.

Every so often, someone’s shovel slipped and made a fresh scratch on the wall. The first time that happened, Atwood flew into such a rage that it seemed he might have someone hanged. After a while, he became resigned to it, and merely sighed. Arthur began to wonder if perhaps
all
the markings had been made that way. Centuries of explorers, digging and scratching, the hourglass refilling after they were gone. Elizabethan mystics, medieval monks travelling to Mars in their visions, Romans and Greeks, Buddhists and Hindus and Aztecs too. Or Moon-men or Venusians, for that matter.

The setting sun found its way in through the windows and filled the tower with sharp angular shadows. Outside, it cast weird shadows across the dunes, which seemed almost to creep and ripple of their own accord. Or so Vaz reported, when Arthur and Frank and Dimmick came down from the tower, having decided, after long discussion, that they would rather sleep outside than in. When Arthur finally fell asleep, the lantern still glowed faintly from the window above. Atwood remained at work. Sun was still pacing the boundaries.

*   *   *

When Arthur woke, his bladder ached. First time since he’d set foot on Mars. The body’s ordinary functions were slower here; or they were a mere illusion, a matter of habit. He ignored the urge, and it went away.

Eventually, reluctantly, he sat up. He ached all over. The aches didn’t go away no matter how long he waited. He appeared to be developing an unpleasant rash on the back of his hands. Too much scrabbling in the dust and the dirt, perhaps.

Sunrise behind the tower. Cold and blue. He watched it for a while.

Vaz and Payne and Frank were still asleep. Atwood was presumably up in his tower. Since there were sounds of digging, Arthur supposed that Dimmick was in there too. Mr Sun sat on top of a nearby dune, watching the sunrise. Arthur went to join him.

“Shaw,” Sun said, without turning around.

“Just think,” Arthur said. “Somewhere that same light is shining on London.”

“It isn’t,” Sun said.

“No?”

“It is not the same sun it once was. Nor are we the same men.”

Arthur looked down at Sun. The back of the man’s neck looked burned, as if he were starting to develop the same rash as Arthur.

“In a mystical sense, I suppose you mean. No man can step in the same river twice—that sort of thing? Well, fair enough. But I’m literal-minded, Sun. It’s my refuge against madness.”

“Then by all means believe what you will, Mr Shaw. I would not want to destroy your refuge against madness. Not now.”

“Sporting of you.”

The sun passed behind a dust-cloud. A shadow fell across the dunes. The whispering picked up slightly, as it often did in shadow.

“Atwood plans to keep us here for some time, I think.”

Sun nodded.

“Studying the language. Does it make sense to you, Mr Sun? What he’s finding—is it language?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I have come to think that Lord Atwood knows more about this place than I had expected. Don’t you think?”

“From the way he talks, you’d think we were all just things in his dream.”

“Is it not a fine dream, though? Is it not beautiful?” Sun gestured out at the horizon. The sun now pierced through the black clouds with rays like needles of blue ice. He closed his eyes, and said no more.

“The men don’t like this tower,” Arthur said. “I don’t either. When I said it was empty, you said
perhaps
—what did you mean?”

“I meant nothing, Mr Shaw. I know no more than you do. Do you think I travel to Mars often? Who knows what we may see tomorrow? Ask Lord Atwood. I meant what I said.
Perhaps
. Let me ask you a question. If Josephine is alive, she has been here for a long time, beneath this sun, this sky. Not dead, but changed; what do you imagine she has become?”

Arthur kicked at a rock, sending it skidding across the dust toward the tower. Damn the man! He didn’t like Sun’s insinuations; not about Josephine, nor for that matter about Atwood. If there was to be some rivalry between the two men, Arthur wanted no part of it. He had a job to do.

“You’re right, Mr Sun.”

“Am I?”

“Quite right. Just as you say. There might be anything in that tower. I should explore it for myself. Thank you, Mr Sun.”

“Good luck, Mr Shaw.”

He went back to the foot of the tower, where Payne and Frank and Vaz were waking, and proposed an expedition into the upper reaches of the tower.

“Go to hell,” Frank said, speaking for himself and Payne. “We’re not budging from these sleds, not for you or anyone else.”

“I don’t like the thought of climbing the tower,” Vaz said. “But nor do I like the thought of spending all day with nothing to do but listen to the wind and these gloomy fellows moaning. I’ll come with you. Besides, I am a first-rate climber, and good with ropes; that’s why his Lordship brought me here.”

*   *   *

The tower’s builders hadn’t needed stairs. There were nothing but the beams and ledges overhead, spiralling up into the dark and growing more remote every hour, as Dimmick’s shovel steadily lowered the floor.

They had no ladder, but they had rope. They tied a kettle to the end of a rope, and after several failed efforts, one of which nearly concussed Dimmick, managed to lob the kettle over the lowest of the beams. Vaz, as the lighter and more athletic of the two, went up first, with Arthur and Dimmick supporting the rope’s other end. Then Vaz secured the rope around the beam and Arthur followed him up. Balancing carefully, Vaz flung the rope again, over the next-lowest beam, and so on. They moved in this manner up through the tower’s spiralling interior, pulling the rope up behind them as they went. It would have been quite impossible on Earth, but under the feeble Martian gravity, they made decent time. Within a quarter of an hour, the floor below was gone from sight. Atwood’s lantern was a faint yellow glow. Soon even the sound of Dimmick’s shovel faded.

There were windows every six feet or so, arranged haphazardly around the tower’s circumference; a perch outside, and a narrow ledge inside. A view from the windows across endless plains. No furniture, or none that had survived. No decoration. No further markings. Perhaps the Martians roosted there to sleep, once upon a time. Dust heaped in the corners.