The Revolutions (50 page)

“Discipline? Discipline? Atwood, you’ve ruined us, you bloody—”

Dimmick struck Frank in the back of the knee with a rifle-butt, knocking him to the ground. Then he beat Frank about the head and shoulders until he started to sob. Vaz, pale and sick, turned away. Arthur closed his eyes. Eventually Atwood said:
Enough.

Chapter Thirty-five

The Martians’ flight was erratic. They were half-starved, half-dead, half-mad. Some of them had been wounded in the fight. Some were dead. The survivors—there were five of them—were burdened by the things they’d seized from the interlopers. Unfamiliar things, things they had no names for in any of the old languages of Mars. Food, they hoped.

They had no destination in mind. They didn’t know where they were. The skies were not the skies they remembered from before their long sleep; the face of Mars below was so hideously blighted that they could hardly bear to look down at it.

None of them remembered the world they’d gone to sleep in more than dimly. They were of various nations and of various philosophies and faiths. Once upon a time that would have mattered, but now their colours were faded, their names forgotten. They were already half-dead, and they expected to die soon.

They remembered the end of things: storm-clouds swallowing the skies, driving them out of the air and onto the ground; nonsense words screamed into the wind; shadows that crawled and laughed and pounced; men and women struck down by madness; the rivers sucked dry by some tremendous and bodiless hunger; the forests turned to ash. None of them knew the cause. Sometimes it seemed to have happened in an instant and sometimes it seemed to have been a thousand-year decline. They remembered rumours of its cause—nothing more. There was no point in talking about it now. At the end they’d all come to the same place: alone, separated from their dying nations, they’d found some corner of a ruin somewhere to hide in; and there they’d dreamed, stiffening and withering and becoming like stone.

Something had prowled the edges of their dreams, screaming and murmuring, driving them mad. Now that they were moving again, it was only a matter of time before something found them, and ended them.

*   *   *

One of them remembered a little more than the rest. She was their leader, in so far as they had one. The first to awaken, she’d had more time to think. How long had she slept, in a remote corner of some meaningless ruin? She forgot what that ruin was, or who’d built it, or why. Perhaps she’d never known. She’d lain tangled with—who? A lover? A child? A parent? Some stranger who’d fallen there with her? She couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she struggled. She’d been asleep for so long, and she’d had such terrible dreams, and she was so hungry.

Then someone had moved her—a mind had touched hers. In that moment she’d woken, screaming with fear and hunger. Whoever had slept at her side had woken too. The thing that had moved her was a sort of monster: huge, square, heavy-footed, wingless, an awful mixture of pink and white and brown. At first she took it for a new sort of nightmare. There’d been a struggle, in the course of which her sleep-mate died. Then one of the monsters had spoken to her in a language she half-remembered: the language of the Eye, a language of pride, and command, and power. Though she didn’t fully understand what he was saying, she felt compelled to obey. At the monster’s command, she fled.

When night fell, still following that command, she circled back and found the monster and its companions, and watched them from a distance.

She could hardly believe what she was seeing. These extraordinary, ungainly, heavy-footed creatures, trudging across the blasted face of her world; dragging behind them a nonsense of clutter, as if they meant it as some sort of offering—but for whom? They passed through hungry dust-clouds and weathered storms unharmed, as if the ghosts of Mars had for some incomprehensible reason decided to spare them, or had found them too strange and too foul to eat. Even their leader, the one who’d spoken, was hideous—yet there was something about him that compelled her to follow, to watch him. He might speak again. He might tell her what had happened.

She was afraid of him. He had power; his followers had strange and deadly weapons. She hung back, drifting high above them. They didn’t seem to notice her.

From time to time they passed ruins, and in some of them she found others like her. She woke them from their sleep. Because she’d been awake longer, and her hunger had been sharpened to a finer point, she was able to subdue them and make them follow her.

*   *   *

At night she circled closer, confident that she was unseen. Some nights the creatures marched on by moonlight; some nights they gathered around a fire, and slept.

One night their leader got up from the fire, after all the others were asleep. He walked some way, until he was separated from the rest of them by a tall dune, and then he lit another, smaller fire—he had carried it with him somehow—and placed it at his feet. Then he looked up into the sky, as if he knew she were there watching him, and began to speak. The way he spoke was horrible—ugly and unsubtle, clumsy and lurching, colourless and crude, empty of everything but power and command. Like last time, it spoke to her on some deep level she couldn’t quite understand; something drilled into her by centuries of fear and hiding responded, and she fled.

*   *   *

In the morning she returned. The others came with her. They attacked. She felt compelled to do so—as if the insult these creatures represented could no longer be tolerated.

It went badly. The creatures were slow and stupid-looking, but dangerous. Nevertheless, they killed one of them, a squat dark thing with a white fuzz on the top of its head and under its ugly mouth. After that, their fury vanished, replaced by fear. They fled, snatching up a few things they hoped might be food.

*   *   *

They found a high tower-top to perch on. They sliced the tins open and found that some of what was inside was vile but nourishing, while some of it was vile and poisonous. They gnawed on the rope and the creature’s severed hand. She began to feel stronger. Faintly, she felt memory returning. More urgent than remembering her own name was remembering the name of her sleep-mate; but she couldn’t. She began to feel shame at her own degraded state. She trembled and scraped at her own faded withered skin. A fight broke out over the creature’s hand and she killed one of her fellow survivors. She never knew or asked his name. She snatched what she could and fled. One other came with her.

*   *   *

Days and nights swirled beneath her. Then there were wings following her; she didn’t notice until it was too late. Someone swooped down on her out of the clouds. They struck her in the back and grappled with her and bore her down to the ground. A half-dozen of them, more than she could fight, even if she still had strength to fight. She crouched, clutching at her spoils as if they were children to be protected.

They were people like her—winged people—but there the resemblance ended. They were strong, well-fed, and unafraid. Their colours were still bright. She couldn’t understand how that was possible. She hated them terribly for their good fortune.

They paced, and circled overhead, threatening and babbling and asking questions that she couldn’t understand. They spoke some dialect she didn’t know—stiff and formal and grand.

One of them—it was a female—came rushing forward and snatched her trophies from her grasp. She was too weak to resist. The female held up the thing she’d snatched—a metal cylinder—as if it were the most astonishing thing she’d ever seen.

She summoned up the strength to rush at this impertinent stranger, this thief. She raised her wings to strike. Someone cut her down from behind.

Chapter Thirty-six

Josephine held the tin in her hands, turning it around and around. Cold metal; heavy; a squat, functional cylinder. A worn and ragged label, with stiff black markings that were at first strange to her eyes. A form of writing, but how could it mean anything without motion? There was a picture in the middle, familiar, but of wildly fanciful creatures: a lion and a unicorn holding up a shield. Above that were the words
BY APPOINTMENT
; and above those,
CROSSE & BLACKWELL, LTD.
At the bottom, an address, which was as fantastic and as familiar as the unicorn:
No 21, Soho Square
. And above
CROSSE & BLACKWELL
it said
OXTAIL SOUP.

She had the strangest urge to cradle the thing as if it were a long-lost, much-loved doll.

~
These poor wretches
, Orpheus said, indicating the dead Martians at her feet.
These are all that remain. They are better off dead. I wonder, though—what woke them?

~
My friends. My friends—or, if not them, then someone from the Blue Sphere. This—this is theirs.

Not just men of Earth, but Londoners, or at least Englishmen. Atwood had come looking for her, or Arthur, or both of them. At last. Not the fragile psychic exploration that had left her stranded, but an expedition, with food. What other explanation could there be? But when had they arrived, and what had happened to them?

Orpheus reached out with some trepidation and touched the tin. His finger traced the words on the label.

~
In all the times I have made the crossing, this is the strangest treasure I have ever found, and the strangest I ever expect to. What is it?

She tried to explain. Meanwhile, the rest of Orpheus’ party went to investigate the other dead Martian, who’d been killed in the struggle in the air and had fallen among the dunes a little way away.

*   *   *

After the night of the red moon, Josephine had spent a day and a night hunting for Orpheus; but his movements were unpredictable, and he had no fixed abode. If he didn’t want to be found, everyone told her, no one could find him; and it seemed that was that.

She tried to petition for access to the Fates—the moon’s council of matrons—but the bureaucracy of the lunar city proved as confusing and impenetrable as Chancery. She went looking for their courtroom, the little workshop she’d met them in before, and discovered that theirs was a mobile court. The place where she’d met them before was now just an ordinary workshop. They might be anywhere.

She pleaded, cajoled, begged anyone who’d listen:
please help me go down to the surface
. She boasted, in case boasting might help. She tried to trade, promising secrets of the Blue Sphere in return for passage. She began to wonder if she could survive the crossing alone.

She was on the verge of giving up when the Fates sent for her.

She was sitting in a window overlooking the city’s rose-pink river, trying to remember what the Thames smelled like, when she saw a young woman standing by the water’s edge, beckoning her down. She shrugged, opened her wings, and drifted lazily down to the stone embankment. The young woman was already fluttering away, south of the river and deep into narrow streets, stopping sometimes to beckon Josephine after her.

At last she was in the presence of the Fates again. Another workshop, a little crescent-shaped room cluttered with tables and tools and dust and noise. The one she’d called Clotho stepped forward, and touched her hand.

~
You want to go down to the surface
, Clotho said.

~
I do.

~
Why?

~
If I could search the ruins—

~
You will find death. Have we not been kind to you here, treated you as a guest?

~
Wouldn’t you return to your home if you could?

~
We could all return, if we liked. But it would mean death. So we don’t. Perhaps we should.

Clotho moved from one side of the room to another, and sat at a new table, where she began methodically sorting beads, tossing out every tenth or twentieth specimen.

~
Why did you bring me here, if the answer is no?

Clotho stopped her work and spoke.
~ Is that the answer? I didn’t know. I thought I had brought you here to say
yes.
Though you will most likely meet your end down there, and we will be sorry; we could have learned so much more from you. But you are inflexible.

~
Why now?

~
Now, you suspect me? Why not? We are not heavy, solid, inflexible things like you people of the Blue Sphere. One day we say one thing, the next another.

~
I don’t believe that.

~
No?

For a while Clotho went back to working. Then at last she spoke again.
~
We saw your coming. Did you know that? We haven’t lost all of the science of Mars. We knew it when your people first came into our sphere and left you behind. We didn’t know what you
were
, or where, or how, but we knew that something had changed. Our dreamers and sky-watchers tell me that you looked like a falling star. Two days ago they saw it again. Eight stars, falling onto the great face.