The Revolutions (33 page)

The sun set behind the rooftops. The fires went out.

Podmore sighed and put the lantern back on the hook. By its light Arthur watched the boat approach. The rower was a nondescript middle-aged man with sandy hair and spectacles. Gracewell sat in the stern. Josephine sat beside him. For a moment, Arthur thought she was awake. He ran forward to meet the boat, splashing in the mud, until he came close enough to see that her eyes were closed, and she was leaning against Gracewell’s shoulder.

“Podmore,” said the man on the boat. He let go of the oars and rested his hand on the pistol beside him on the bench. “Podmore, what’s the meaning of this? Is that—good God, is that—”

“Yes, yes,” Podmore said.

“Shaw,” Gracewell said. He seemed distracted.

“Please, sir,” Arthur said.

“Hmm? Oh.”

Gracewell passed Josephine over the side of the boat into Arthur’s arms. Her skirts trailed in the muddy water.

“Good evening,” Gracewell said. “It’s good to see you again, Mr Shaw. I’ve had some thoughts. Very enlightening. A period of uninterrupted thought was just what I needed. Thank you, Mr Podmore.”

He reached out and shook Podmore’s hand, to Podmore’s obvious surprise.

Arthur slumped down by the water’s edge, with Josephine in his lap. His eyes were clouded with tears; he closed them, and for a moment he felt as if he were back on Rugby Street.

“Bloody mess you’ve made, Your Lordship,” said the rower.

There was some sort of altercation then, or argument, or negotiation, between Mrs Archer and Podmore and the rower, but Arthur didn’t listen to it. It ended with Podmore getting into the boat.

Arthur sat on the ground and held Josephine close, watching as they rowed off. Soon they were no more than a speck in the firelight, and then he couldn’t see them at all.

“Greedy,” Archer said. “Greedy old fool. Thinks London’s all his, and nothing for the rest of us. Well then, why shouldn’t my son seek his fortune in the colonies?”

She laughed and poked Arthur’s shoulder. “Thinks all of England is his, his money and his newspapers and all of that. Thinks all its magic is his too. Well, there’s older magic in England than his, and stronger. And perhaps one day your Lord Atwood will see that too. You just see that I get what you promised me. Young man? You just see.”

Josephine felt thin and frail, underfed and unwashed. Arthur whispered her name, over and over, but she didn’t hear him. She was faintly smiling.

Chapter Twenty-three

The lunar city was a beautiful vision. Josephine had never seen India, or China, or Greece or Rome, or, for that matter, Scotland or Wales … or even very much of England, really—but she
had
seen the ivory city on the rosy moon of Mars. If she found her way home—if she woke—
when
she woke—it would be her duty to describe it, to somehow find words for its sights and sounds and scents. Or would it fade on waking, like so many beautiful dreams? Would it tarnish?

She haunted every inch of it, hungry for experience. She could go anywhere, and see anything, and listen to whatever she wanted. She moved by pure will, pure perception. She had only to look at a place to be there. She explored every winding street, she drifted along the banks of the red river, she hovered at the fluted tops of towers. She became quite brazen about spying on the Martians, and soon she thought nothing of drifting in and out of their bedrooms, their churches, their business meetings (if that’s what they were), or their Houses of Parliament (if you could call them that).

The lunar city lay inside a tremendous crater. In the west—sunsetwards—rose towering grey-white walls of rock. A rose-red waterfall plunged down the crater’s edge, dwarfing the city’s tallest towers, and a river ran through the city. In the east there was a lake. Flowers floated on it, so large that at first she took them for ships. Close by the waterfall there were quarries where the Martians hacked red gems from the white rock.

The city somewhat resembled an illustration Josephine had once seen in a magazine. It wouldn’t surprise her if it had been
The Monthly Mammoth,
in which case the words beside the picture might well have been Arthur’s. The illustration—which seemed to have very little to do with the words, which were about telescopes—showed the civilization of the canal-builders of Mars, as the artist imagined it, all spires and domes and wise bald men in robes. In fact, the city resembled that illustration closely enough—apart from the bald men—that she now wondered if the artist had somehow been granted a vision of it, or if the city existed only in her imagination, built from her memories.

What the city didn’t resemble, in any way at all, was what Martin Atwood had expected to see. He’d spoken of slow-moving primitives, warlike savages, mere brutes. He’d imagined a spiritual realm slower and simpler and colder in every way than Earth, and ripe for conquest. None of that appeared to be true. Rather an alarming thought—she’d hoped Atwood’s Company knew what they were doing, at least a little.

The city was built in stone, and for the most part in straight sharp lines, or in sharp-edged curves that resembled sails, or something carved by the wind. Between the towers and the domes, the streets were cluttered with buttresses and archways and uneven stone channels, as if they were an afterthought, merely spaces between the buildings, an unavoidable architectural necessity. Everything was built as if its makers did not take much account of gravity, or the ordinary rules of proportion or balance. The city’s makers built sharp narrow spires where a London architect might rely on squares; and where the Londoner might embellish with pillars or gargoyles there were odd rills or flutings in the stone, or ornaments for which Josephine had no names—it was like listening to a foreign language that resembled English just enough to confuse and disorient. She kept seeing shapes in the stone that were momentarily familiar, that reminded her of staircases, or balconies, or, for that matter, leaves or faces or wings; a tower-top like a ram’s horn or a parrot’s crest; bone-white ghosts of pelvis or rib-bone, or wheels or ploughshares or windmills or sewing-machines …

Was this—the stuff this vision was made of—what Atwood’s Company had called the
aether
? There was something a little insubstantial about it, a little alien. The city’s stone was a little like marble in its richness of colour; a little like snow, glimpsed at sunset.

Everywhere there were flower-gardens—or perhaps they were farms—full of mossy, fern-like, tendrilly plants, red and gold and ochre and violet. Creeping plants, well suited to arid soil. A thin red gorse or furze grew on the walls of the towers, etching tremendous shadow-shapes into the stone. Occasionally, long flowering stalks or vines or sturdy tendrils sprouted from the walls, sometimes stretching from tower to tower to make hundred-foot-high bowers. All the flowers of the lunar city were pale, as if the city were a faded watercolour painting, or as if the city were always in twilight. In fact, everything in the city was pale, except for its vibrantly purple inhabitants. There was something oddly out of place about them.

They lived rather the way one imagined the Spartans had: in buildings of clean stone, without luxuries or clutter. Their city was pristine. No dirt, no rubbish in the streets. No horses. The city felt either terribly new, or terribly old, like something in a museum. They might have lived there for ten thousand years, or arrived yesterday.

They wore little in the way of clothes, just thin shifts of a rosy-white silk-like material. It did not seem immodest. She realised that it was those scraps of silk that she’d mistaken for fish-like scales on the poor creature back at Atwood’s house. In fact, their skin, though blue, was otherwise not wholly inhuman. Earth people and Martians were clearly the work of the same Creator, except that It had seen fit to give only one of them wings.

She had no way of knowing how much time had passed. The days and nights seemed longer than on Earth, but she knew too little of astronomy to make sense of this. Free of the body and its needs, time passed slowly; but when her attention wandered—because she was nothing here
but
attention—great stretches of time could slip by in an instant. Sometimes that happened when she was thinking too deeply, or because she was struck by some odd moment of beauty; sometimes it was because she was afraid, or despairing, or homesick. The fits of vanishing terrified her. Who knew how many days passed on Earth each time? Each time hope of rescue grew fainter.

*   *   *

She’d caught only a brief glimpse of the unfortunate creature that had fallen into Atwood’s séance. Its wings had looked to her like the leaves of ferns, or like silk ribbons—limp and tangled and helpless. On the ivory moon they looked very different.

No two Martians had wings of quite the same pattern or colour or shape. They were typically blue or purple or rose-pink, and thickly veined, and faintly translucent, like cloudy glass or a fine silk. They might come in three pairs, or four, or five or six or more; they might be straight as knives, or curved, or more complexly shaped. One could never quite grasp their shape or pattern, partly because they were rarely still, partly because they grew more and more complex the closer one looked. In repose, they might fold away like a fan. In flight, they resembled butterfly wings, or in another way a peacock’s tail; at full extension the wings might dwarf the lithe and elfin Martians to which they were attached. The wings were beautiful—far more expressive than the Martians’ thin faces. But they were wings only in the loosest sense, and for want of a better word. They didn’t beat. They rippled and shifted. She didn’t understand how they worked.

*   *   *

For the most part, Josephine had the highest tower-tops to herself: room after ghostly echoing room, and chasms of empty air. No birds roosted there. The flowering tendrils entered through the windows, but no insects attended them. There was no Martian pigeon, and for that matter no Martian rat or cat or fox. There was no life in the city except for the Martians themselves, the moss and the tendrils and the flowers, and one ghostly Englishwoman.

She saw everything, but she understood nothing. Did they really have bedrooms, churches, business-meetings, Parliament? She didn’t know. Their principal industries appeared to be flower-farming and bead-making, the latter of which took place in a multitude of hot little workshops. She studied this as if she were preparing to make a report to Parliament on the progress of an African mission. She supposed that they made the beads out of the gems they quarried from beneath the waterfall, though she never did quite understand the process; at least, any more than she had ever understood how coal got to London, or how steel was made.

She gave their buildings names. She called one squat tower
Big Ben
; she named a
St. Paul’s
, and an
Embankment
, and a
Shaftesbury Avenue
. A circle of red dirt with a white stone spire in it she christened
Piccadilly Circus.
A row of empty stone structures reminded her of the Egyptian Avenue in Highgate Cemetery. Something somewhat castle-like reminded her of St. Pancras.

For the most part, the Martians were silent. Their language, it seemed, was in the motions of their hands and fingers and wings, which they used like semaphore-flags. They were always in motion, never still even for a second. It was rather exhausting to look at, like a carnival. If a Martian were to walk down the Edgware Road, flapping his wings and waving his arms, he’d be committed to a hospital for the insane.

She wondered what had happened to the creature that the Company of the Spheres had caught in their library. Poor thing! Atwood and Jupiter and Sun and Sergeant Jessop must have looked like the most terrible monsters to it. She resolved that she would on no account let herself be captured that way.

As a matter of fact,
capture
seemed not to be a very great danger. Her greater concern was that she might never be able to attract their attention at all; and that without their aid, she would remain a ghost indefinitely.

At dawn and dusk the city’s inhabitants stretched their wings, gathered on the highest perches they could find, and stared up at the vast face of Mars—which, viewed from the moon, was a disk the size of a cannonball, dark purple and dimly glowing, deeply etched with long dark lines. That appeared to be their one expression of what one might call religious feeling. To Josephine’s eye there was still something menacing and terrible about the face of Mars, but these moon people looked up at it with longing.

There were other lights visible in the sky. There were stars, and at certain times, the second moon was visible, livid and furnace-red. The Martians averted their eyes from it.

Perhaps one of the visible stars was Earth. Josephine rose up to the domed top of the tallest tower in the city, stared at the stars, and willed herself to rise up and travel towards them. She couldn’t. Gravity held her in the ivory city. Or perhaps she was just too scared to face the void again.

All her education had suggested to her that, should one find oneself granted a vision of the heavens, one might expect great spiritual revelations, poetic or romantic ecstasy, profound peace, brilliant insight. For a while she entertained the idea that she was in fact in Heaven; or possibly in Hell. It didn’t last. Fear passed, ecstasy faded, and yet she didn’t wake. The vision implacably persisted. She was less confident of the meaning of life or the nature of Creation with every passing hour. She was not enlightened or transfigured; she was merely lost.

Was she mad? Was it all a hallucination, a dream brought on by Atwood’s incense (God knows what had been in it—
hashish
or opium or worse). It made no difference. It was real enough for her.