Dreaming Again

by Jack Dann

  ‘So,’ Magdalena continued, ‘Jack Bissel does not know what he is talking about. We are not going to be harvested. We are going to live. We have not gone through all that we have gone through so the Martians can take us. It is not God’s will, I am telling you, and it is not my will.’

  Isaac and Leonard both knew God’s will was irrelevant — how else could the Martians ever have invaded the Earth and caused so much death and destruction? — but the will of Magdalena was a natural force, like the wind and sunshine. For the first time he could remember, Isaac started believing he would survive, that he had a life whose course ran so far into the future he could not read it.

  He returned to his sewing, and the glimmer of elation he had felt was reduced by the knowledge that he was now cannibalising his last spare pair of pants to keep his best pair in decent order. Soon Magdalena would have to spend some of their hard-earned coins to buy material from the looters and scavengers who searched through the ruins in the red wasteland for things that were no longer produced, such as cloth and fabric and kitchen utensils and even coal for heating and cooking.

  Isaac dropped the sewing, stood up and went to the window and looked out over London. It had rained an hour before, but now the sky was clear and the sun shone on a city that shimmered. He thought London looked like a glittering diamond set in red velvet, and for a moment he realised the Martian landscape held a soft and muted beauty of its own. Almost immediately he felt guilty, as if he had betrayed his own race, his own planet, by admitting such a thing. But it was true, and he sensed he understood a small part of how the Martians saw the universe.

  What if this is God’s will? he wondered. What if the Martians were His Chosen People and the rest of us the chaff to be winnowed from His creation?

  He heard Leonard say in a thoughtful voice, ‘You are right, Mama, Jack Bissel is lower than a Martian’s petsl’

  Isaac could not help laughing again.

  And cut it short as the Machine they had heard before returned suddenly, its shadow falling across the window. It was a dreadnought. It had come so quietly he had not heard it. The Machines did that sometimes, stalking through the city as silent as silver spirits as if to prove a point to their prisoners, that death can be as unexpected as lightning from the sky. The dreadnought seemed to hover outside their tenement for a long moment, and brought one leg down so hard the whole building shook. Then it was gone.

  ‘Did you ever go over the wall? Outside of London?’ Erin asked.

  Isaac sucked his lower lip. His yellow teeth looked like thick tortoise shell pegs. ‘Well, once,’ he said after a while.

  ‘With Leonard?*

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Just you and Leonard?’

  ‘Nope. One other, a boy who did the act before us. He was a couple of years younger. Cleverest boy I ever met. Tiny bugger, but as agile as a monkey.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Charlie Hawkes.’ He wheezed as he remembered. ‘Poor fucking Charlie Hawkes.’

  ‘What happened.’

  ‘Jesus, it goes everywhere,’ Charlie said. ‘All the way to Timbuktu, I bet.’

  ‘Not over seawater,’ Isaac said. ‘None of that red stuff goes near the ocean.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Heard it from others who saw it first put down,’ Leonard said.

  ‘Well, who’s to say the Martians didn’t land in Sudan and Siam and all the way to Mexico?’

  Isaac and Leonard didn’t want to think about that, so they shut up.

  The rolling red hills of England spread out before them. The landscape stank like old seaweed and dead squid.

  Leonard sneezed.

  ‘Cat,’ Isaac joked.

  ‘What?’ Charlie said.

  ‘He always sneezes when there’s a cat around.’

  ‘Do not,’ Leonard protested.

  The air thrummed. All three boys stared at each other. You only got that sound when they were real close …

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Leonard said, almost squealing.

  Isaac looked over his shoulder to the hole in the London wall. If they were real quick, maybe the hole wasn’t as far as it looked.

  ‘We have to run!’ he said to the others. ‘Now!’

  Leonard didn’t wait, but scooted faster than a rat down a drainpipe with Isaac only a tenth of a second behind. Charlie, though, he was braver.

  When the two brothers got to the hole, Isaac saw Charlie still hadn’t moved an inch.

  ‘Damn you, Charlie, get your arse over here!’

  Too late. The Machine first appeared around the corner of the wall and one triple-step later was standing over Charlie Hawkes. No argument this was a dreadnought, Isaac thought. Clear hundred and fifty feet straight in the air with a cabin on top shaped like the head of a beetle, four heat rays under and four on top in twin turrets, legs three-jointed and splay-footed, and around the front of the cabin were clumps of metal tentacles like the whiskers of a catfish. It reflected red in the red landscape except for Charlie’s oblong face all distorted and gigantic in the concave underbelly of the thing. Two of the tentacles extended out, fell down and wrapped themselves around Charlie, then whipped him up to the cabin. And he was gone.

  At first Isaac thought it was Charlie screaming, heard all the way from inside the cabin, but then his brain recognised the clear bell tone of Leonard’s sweet, sweet eleven-year-old voice.

  ‘Shut up, Leonard! Fuck’s sake, shut up!’

  Another of the tentacles slithered down, but this time it didn’t wrap around anyone, just pointed at Leonard as if it was seeing him and sniffing him at the same time, then was gone.

  Leonard shuffled backwards until he was back behind the wall, then dragged Isaac back after him

  ‘We can’t leave Charlie!’ Isaac said.

  Before Leonard could say anything, there was a slurping sound from the machine, and out of the cabin dropped a small red bundle with bones sticking out of it.

  ‘And you think that was Charlie?’ Erin asked.

  ‘Don’t know what else it could have been. Anyway, he was never seen again, poor bastard.’ Isaac wrung his hands. ‘Had to tell his mama and that was hell. Never seen anyone cry so much as Charlie’s mama. It drove her mad in the end.’

  ‘Did you get in trouble?’

  ‘Nope. Everyone was so relieved the Machine only took Charlie they never minded us, except ordering us never to go near the wall again. We were happy to oblige.’

  Isaac was kissing Mary Ester’s pink ear lobe while his hand fumbled in the top of her dress. He had just managed to cup her left breast when Leonard barged into the dressing room and said, ‘Oh, there you are!’

  Mary yelped, pulled away from Isaac and ran out, straightening her neckline as she went.

  ‘She’s nice,’ Leonard said approvingly. ‘I saw her with Oliver Mark the other day.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Be nice or I’ll tell mama. She thinks you’re holier than Moses.’

  ‘What’d you want to come in and spoil things anyway?’

  ‘We’ve got a date.’

  ‘Date for what?’

  ‘For HMS Minotaur! Five days from now!’

  Isaac grinned. ‘Really?’

  Leonard grinned back. ‘Yup. Mama told Cochrane he can change our names, so Cochrane told mama we were in, and mama told me, and now I’m telling you.’

  ‘Zac and Lenny Feelgood,’ Isaac said, trying the billing out loud.

  ‘Lenny and Zac,’ Leonard said. ‘Things should be done alphabetically.’

  When the nurse came to test Isaac’s blood pressure, Erin looked out the window, but the sigh of the trees depressed her. They were the fast growing species that had been planted almost everywhere else in the world over the last century, like Monterey Pine, Karri and Yellow Box, in their way all reminders of what had come before and of everything that had been lost. So she turned away from the view and pretended to study the painting on the wall above Isaac
’s bed while the nurse pumped and pumped the wrap around Isaac’s poor thin arm.

  The painting was one of Munch’s Scream Series Two with a woman’s face distorted into a silent, consuming shriek with a Martian walker striding over the bridge behind her. The background comprised swirls of red weed, their rootlets extending off the edge of the painting’s borders. She remembered red weed from her childhood; some had been preserved in her local Museum of Conciliation. Well, pink weed then because of the formaldehyde, and getting paler year by year. It was nothing, really, a specimen as pointless as the jars filled with fetuses and two-headed lambs. But seeing Munch’s painting, Erin could almost feel what it must have been like living in those times.

  Isaac was swearing at the nurse, but he ignored the language and when he was finished helped Isaac back into his wheelchair, thanked him politely for cooperating and walked out, nodding sympathetically to Erin before closing the door behind him.

  ‘It’s not my fucking heart they should worry about,’ Isaac spat, and jabbed at his skull. ‘It’s the fucking blancmange in here. I can feel it oozing out of my ears. I tell you, Erin Kay, I won’t have anything left soon. I will be all skin and bones and spit and in the middle my heart beating like a clock but no brain anywhere. They’ll scoop me up and put me in a bin, and that’ll be the end of Isaac Finkel, all the way from Danzig, and Zac Feelgood and Bubble and Squeak and all the stories. No one will remember the Martians any more. The Committee of Conciliation wants us to forget any of it ever happened because that way none of them can be hanged for what they did when they were the Committee of Collaboration. History gets stuck in their gullet like … like …’

  He coughed and slumped in the wheelchair. He waved his right hand in the air, signalling Erin to invent a metaphor for him.

  ‘Like a fishbone,’ she said weakly.

  ‘Jesus, no. Like shit made from cement.’

  ‘So tell me, Isaac, so I can tell everyone else.’

  ‘Tell you what? I’ve talked myself into a stupor. I feel like I’ve got nothing but slag in my lungs.’

  ‘We’re not finished yet. What happened on that night? The opening night of HMS Minotaur?’

  Isaac closed his eyes. ‘So long ago. You know, it isn’t the grease paint and the lights I remember?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Never was. Never is for anyone in music hall. That’s just for the songs and the memoirs, you know, “I remember the smell of the grease paint, the heat of the stage lights”. It’s all bullshit. When you’re working on the stage all the time it’s just background.’

  ‘Then what do you remember about it?’

  ‘I remember the women, Erin Kay.’ His eyes opened and his mouth curled into a smile. ‘I remember being around twenty women or more, all taller than me and done up and sweating in their costumes, and the glass beads, and the powder on their breasts like flour on rising bread, skin so pale it was almost blue, and the pins and broaches and parasols and the way they let me look at them because they thought I was a kid and it was kinda cute, but Jesus I wanted them. I wanted Mary Ester and Lorna Dixon and Jane Fremont, all at once, and Annie Beaumont and Victoria Denny. All of us crammed into the wings waiting our turn to tumble out and entertain all the poor sods waiting their turn to be turned into fertiliser. You know, all that dying around us made us horny as the devil. I was fourteen when I first did it; that was with Annie, during the third act. My first time. It was over so quick we didn’t have time to clean up and then we were on and afterwards mama looked at me like she knew.’

  Erin swallowed. She had not expected these confessions and did not want to hear any more; still, she could not help wondering what Annie had thought of it. Had she seduced him? Or was sex like alcohol for people who had no other way to relax, or maybe even to relate to each other? Maybe Isaac was right, that all that dying made everyone horny as the devil. How many conversations can you have when you know the world is dying around you? In the end, perhaps that was the only thing you could talk about, so maybe sex was a way to avoid it and a way to remind yourself you were still human when so much around you was not.

  ‘Not that mama minded, I think,’ Isaac went on. ‘With everything else going on. Besides, I reckon Cochrane was right. He and mama now and then. You know.’

  ‘The opening night,’ Erin prompted. ‘Tell me about the opening night.’

  Running up from the dressing room, Isaac and Leonard caught their breath in the wings. The stage manager glared at them disapprovingly, but they didn’t care. There was no way they were going to miss the spectacular opening number, and when Cochrane walked onto the stage the entire audience, the biggest ever seen in the Empire, fell silent as if all were struck dumb by the hand of God. Cochrane knew exactly how long to speak, how far he could build up their expectations before losing them, and when he had finished he lifted his hand in a flourish and the curtains behind him rose as he left the stage.

  And then the orchestra in the pit started up. Lime lights swung across the stage as if searching for the cast, and then the prow of HMS Minotaur was pushed into view and the audience erupted in cheers.

  For Isaac, though, it was the costumes that made his eyes glitter. Cochrane had made sure the cast were decked out in the best costumes the Empire had, many saved from theatres and music halls long gone and never used since. The women wore dresses made from silk and chiffon with satin sashes, and on their fingers wore rings with fake pearls the size of peas, and in their hats wore peacock feathers and pins made from gold and silver. The men wore uniforms so covered in braid and toggles and brass buttons they would have made any real ship top heavy, and the dress swords that swung by their sides were broad and heavy enough to have come from giant Mamelukes. Even Isaac and Leonard, the only children in the cast, carried long knives suspended from their belts with bejeweled hilts and inlaid scabbards.

  The opening number was so spectacular, so loud and audacious and fast moving, Isaac was overwhelmed by the glory of it; he did not think the court of the Sun King could have been half as brilliant. And then he and Leonard heard their cue and from that point on they were a part of it, the whole glittering show, their nerves succumbing to the excitement the whole cast felt, singing with such grace they could see people in the audience leaning forward in their seats to be closer to the sound of it.

  At the end Isaac and Leonard had their duo, the grand finale where the rest of the cast gradually joined in until the piece reached its crescendo, and as the singers filled themselves with air and seemed to stretch on their toes to give the greatest voice they could, the audience stood, pulled to their feet by the music and words stirring inside them, something they had not felt since the invasion.

  And then the last verse, sung like an anthem, rang out.

  I humble poor and foreign born,

  The meanest in the new division —

  Despite the red-tentacled dawn —

  The mark of Harvester submission —

  Have dared to raise my wormy eyes

  Above the dust to which they’d nail me

  In mankind’s glorious pride to rise

  I am an Englishman — behold me!

  When it was done, the last note lifting into the dark sky above, there was a moment of condensed silence as if the whole world had fallen quiet. Then the applause started, rippling towards the stage like waves that grew larger and larger as the cast took their bows, the loudest and most sustained being for Isaac and Leonard. Isaac glanced at the wings and saw his mama there, tears pooling under her eyes, and at that moment, for the first and only time in his life, he felt invincible. Until he looked up and saw the dreadnought. It was almost completely hidden from view, revealed only by the thinnest sliver of silver that outlined its cabin and one of its three legs. It stood before the Empire, towering over the amphitheatre, not moving at all. One by one the others in the cast followed Isaac’s gaze, themselves becoming as still as the Machine, and soon everyone in the amphitheatre was looking up at it.

  Isaac s
aid nothing for a long time. Erin, who had finally reached the climax of the story of how Isaac and Leonard Finkel had saved the world, was torn between wanting to know how it ended and wanting to be suspended forever there at the moment before knowing, filled with a wonderful anticipation and tension.

  In the end she surrendered. ‘Dot told me Leonard sneezed,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘Right on a Martian.’

  Isaac’s gaze settled on her as if he did not know who she was.

  ‘He was allergic to them,’ Erin went on. ‘That’s what Dot says.’

  ‘No,’ Isaac said slowly, the word squeezed out from tired lungs. ‘It was nothing like that. That’s just myth; sometimes we’d go along with it, but mostly we said nothing.’

  ‘Then tell me, Isaac. What really happened?’

  ‘The dreadnought walked away, clumping through the city back to the walls and its own red kingdom. Everyone in the Empire waited and waited for something to happen, not making a sound, half expecting to die, to be picked up and squeezed like a ripe peach. But nothing happened.’

  Isaac coughed loudly, making Erin jump. It was a deep wet sound, almost all phlegm and no air.

  ‘And then the Machines started dropping, one by one. All over the land, all over the world, the Martians died. I saw one crawling out of its machine. A huge grey thing that pulled itself along with its tentacles. It reminded me of a dying cow I’d seen during the invasion, its rear legs burned off and the stumps cauterised, pulling itself through the field with its front legs, a huge sack of dying meat. That’s what the Martians had become — huge sacks of dying meat.’

  ‘They caught a cold,’ Erin said. ‘That’s what all the autopsies showed. Influenza or something.’