The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  They entered the pyramid through circular hatches in the floor next to its base and climbed down ladders bolted into the wall. They emerged into a cramped tunnel, the walls of which glowed a phosphorescent green, and followed one of the Martians in an orderly file. Ashton, the prisoner who had obtained his precious notebook for him, was in front of Charles, and although he tried to walk with the deliberate swagger with which he had no doubt once paraded down his neighborhood streets in some filthy East End slum, Charles thought he saw beads of sweat trickling down Ashton’s grimy neck. Behind Charles was young Garvin, a boy of about fourteen, still a child when the invasion began. Hearing his troubled breathing, Charles looked round to find Garvin’s innocent little face, weirdly cadaverous in that ghostly light, eyes open wide with fright, cheeks moist with tears, as if he were the ghost of a boy wandering through the corridors of what had once been his home, unaware that he was already dead. Without so much as a smile or a word of encouragement, Charles turned back, staring ahead at Ashton’s filthy neck. After all, what could he do to console the boy? Consolation was another of the many things the Martians had eradicated from the planet.

  After walking for several minutes past rows of secondary passageways, the procession finally seemed to reach the end of the tunnel. In the distance, they could see an archway, and behind it a room that had the same phosphorescence emanating from its walls, only much more intensely. Charles tried to get his bearings, wondering how far they had come. Was the room they were approaching at the center of the pyramid? He couldn’t tell, just as he couldn’t tell whether they were still underground, or, as it had seemed at one point, if they had walked up a slight incline and were now on one of the higher levels. And yet, although his footsteps echoed as if the ground beneath him were hollow, he felt as if he were buried deep below the Earth’s surface, breathing in a dense, acrid air that seemed thousands of years old. As they approached the archway linking the tunnel to the phosphorescent room, he had only one thought in his mind: what could be in there?

  Yet, no matter what he had seen over the past two years, or how close to insanity he had come as he struggled to understand and accept the impossible, Charles realized none of it had prepared him to face what was inside that room. The prisoners crowded in the doorway, nervous and hesitant, pressing against one another as they held their hands up to shield their eyes from the green light, which was so intense they could almost hear and smell it. Once their eyes grew accustomed, they glanced about, blinking, half dazed. For a long while they were unable to grasp what it was they were seeing. It was as though their eyes were confronted with a dreadful conundrum, the horror of which would only become clear to them after they had spent centuries contemplating it.

  The room was empty and cylindrical, no more than fifteen yards in diameter, with a ceiling that must have been as high as a cathedral, for they were unable to see the top. Lining its walls were rows of tanks made of a semitranslucent material, similar to glass, which ascended like organ pipes to the darkened ceiling. These transparent vats were filled with a syrupy green liquid, from which the dazzling light filling the room seemed to emanate. And inside these immense tanks, bobbing gently in the liquid, were bodies. Hundreds of tiny, soft baby bodies. Charles’s face twisted in a horrified grimace. More than stupefied, he contemplated the flock of newborns submerged in the infernal fish tank, like pieces of fruit suspended in green jelly. They all still seemed to be attached to their umbilical cords, but on closer inspection, Charles realized these were not organic, but had been replaced with tubes made from some strange material, which emerged from their navels and disappeared down the drainlike holes covering the floor of the fish tank, making the little baby bodies look like buoys tethered to the floor of this gelatinous sea. The babies rocked gently, their tiny limbs twitching almost imperceptibly, as if they were dreaming about running. But the most macabre thing of all was to see that their skulls had been cut open, exposing their soft brains, which were pierced by a mass of fine threads floating around their heads like clumps of hair blown by a nonexistent breeze. At regular intervals, the tips of these snaking strands emitted flashes of gold-colored light that traveled upward through the unspeakable liquid, vanishing into the murky darkness above like shooting stars.

  Faced with this vision, the prisoners began vomiting, watched impassively by the two guards, who waited patiently for them to empty the contents of their stomachs, as no doubt always happened with each fresh group. When the humans had finished soiling the floor, the Martians barked their orders. The prisoners’ job was to bring in a large number of barrels from a nearby storage room, rolling them through the tunnels. They would then connect the barrels to a machine at one end of the tanks, which was apparently responsible for renewing the fluid the babies were floating in. Supervised by the Martians, the prisoners went about their task in stunned silence, only occasionally daring to exchange anxious or terrified looks. Every now and then, Charles would cast a furtive glance at the sinister glass cases in an attempt to grasp what he was seeing. Something told him he ought to understand what it all meant, and so, as he shifted the barrels mechanically from one place to the other, he struggled to draw some conclusions. Apparently, the babies weren’t being bred to renew the workforce in the camps, as he had always assumed. It struck him as painfully obvious now that the pyramid would be finished long before these children would be old enough to do the kind of work he and his fellow prisoners did. No, the Martians were forcing them to procreate because they needed the babies to power the pyramids scattered around the world. Or was he misinterpreting this horror? Clearly the Martians were extracting something from the babies through the undulating threads inserted in their brains, something that floated upward with a faintly golden glow. But what? Their souls? Was the Martian pyramid powered by children’s souls? Charles did not know what to think, yet clearly something was being sucked out of them. And whatever that was, the Martians could be refining it in another part of the pyramid and using it to run the machine. He remembered Mary Shelley’s novel, in which Dr. Frankenstein uses a stroke of lightning to breathe life into a monster concocted from several dead bodies. Did the human body contain such a force, a force that could be extracted and used in a similar way, a force that could breathe life into an inanimate object? Apparently his soul, the abstract idea that embraced everything he was, all his thoughts, dreams, and desires, in short, everything death snatched from his body, could be used as fuel by the Martians.

  A muffled noise broke his chain of thought. Glancing down the far end of the tunnel, he saw that Garvin had collapsed from sheer exhaustion, so that the barrel he was transporting had rolled over his poor legs. All of them heard the crunching sound of his bones breaking in several places. The guards exchanged glances, and a few moments later, the boy’s shackle emitted a sound that was so familiar to all of them. The unconscious Garvin began rising grotesquely to his feet. Once he had stood up, his head swinging from side to side like a pendulum, he began marching on impossibly twisted legs toward the exit. Charles watched aghast as he left the pyramid, praying the boy would not regain consciousness before falling into the funnel.

  That night, back in his cell, his diary open on the table, Charles could not help remembering the lithe, cheerful boy Garvin had been during his first months of imprisonment. He recalled how he had volunteered to form part of the resistance group Captain Shackleton was trying to assemble, for he was proud of having been the only survivor of a tripod attack on his building and was eager to avenge the death of his parents. He was convinced that, in time, he could even become the brave captain’s right-hand man. But above all Charles recalled, with a rueful smile, the boy’s laughter, that melodious experience they had been deprived of for so long in there, the uplifting sound of children’s laughter. Yet Garvin’s was not the only laughter he recalled.

  DIARY OF CHARLES WINSLOW

  16 February, 1900

  We had been walking for a couple of hours in the sewers when, echoing down the dank tu
nnel, we heard the last sound we would have expected to hear in such a place: children’s laughter. We walked on, glancing uneasily at one another as the ringing sounds filled the air. Their laughter echoed in the distance, awakening in us a familiar and forgotten sense of well-being. These children, with their happy, fragile laughter, had dared to defy the Martians, had refused to accept the end of the world. Increasingly excited, we quickened our pace, smiling at one another, guided by the laughter—so incongruous in our present situation—which, with the burble of the water, seemed to compose a delicate and magical symphony.

  We soon saw them: there were at least a dozen aged between four and eight, busy playing on the narrow walkway, illuminated by the faint lamplight. Most of them wore modest, grubby garments, but three or four of them were neatly dressed, as though they had just left their nanny sitting on a park bench. And yet these differences didn’t seem to bother them: they played together in the natural way children do, without making the distinctions we adults make, sometimes unconsciously. Bunched into small groups, they resembled characters in a diorama: a few of the younger children were holding hands and turning in a circle as they sang nursery rhymes; next to them, two older girls had chalked lines on the grimy floor and were playing hopscotch; farther away, a pair of girls turned a skipping rope while a third jumped, her long braids flapping in the air; three or four boys suddenly hurtled from the dark end of the tunnel chasing a hoop with a stick, charging past another group playing spinning tops.

  They were so absorbed in their games that they didn’t notice us until we were about a dozen yards away. Then they all stopped playing and gazed at us suspiciously, even with a hint of annoyance, as if we were nothing more than eight grown-ups who might threaten their enjoyment and who had appeared as if by magic in a place they had perhaps begun to think was exclusively their own, where the only rule was to take pleasure in the moment. Yet it was enough to look at them to see that once the novelty of their newfound freedom had worn off, they would be suddenly vulnerable, afraid to find themselves alone there, without any adult to watch over them. For a few moments the two groups stared at each other, visibly bewildered, each finding the other’s presence there absurd. Then, like a pair of experienced nannies, Emma and Jane approached the children cautiously, as though afraid they might take off, stooping so they were at the same level. The children watched them mistrustfully.

  “Hello, children,” Wells’s wife said, smiling at them amiably. “My name’s Jane and this is my friend, Emma.”

  “Hello!” Emma said in a singsong voice. “Don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you. We just want to say hello, that’s all, isn’t it, Jane?” she said to Wells’s wife, who nodded enthusiastically, still smiling at the little ones.

  The children stood motionless on the brick path staring at them unblinkingly. Then one of them moved suddenly, scratching his head vigorously so that the hoop propped against his leg rolled away slowly, spinning in a silvery spiral until it collapsed with a clatter at Jane and Emma’s feet. Emma took the opportunity to pick it up gently and pretend to admire it.

  “Goodness, what a pretty hoop,” she said. “I had a wooden one when I was small, but this one’s made of . . . iron, isn’t it?”

  “It’s from a barrel, miss. They roll much better than the wooden ones, and they’re sturdier,” replied a skinny child, a mop of curls falling over his eyes, who looked like the eldest among them.

  “Is that so?” Emma said. “Well, I didn’t know that. And where did you get it from . . . er, what’s your name, young man?”

  “Curly,” the boy murmured, somewhat reluctantly.

  “Curtis?” Emma pretended not to have heard, while two of the smaller girls stifled a giggle.

  “Curly, they call me Curly . . . on account of my hair, you see,” the boy replied, shaking his ringlets and proffering his hand in a delightfully grown-up manner.

  “Pleased to meet you, Curly,” Emma replied, shaking his hand.

  Jane repeated the gesture. “Pleased to meet you, Curly.”

  The other children clustered behind the eldest boy, eyeing us suspiciously.

  “My name’s Hobo,” chirped the youngest, a small blond boy whom one of the older girls was holding by the hand.

  The rest of us were huddled behind Emma and Jane, more due to our scant experience at dealing with children than because of the lack of room. We grinned at Hobo in a way that we intended to be friendly, but which he probably found disquieting.

  “And I’m Mallory,” said the girl with plaits who had been playing skipping rope.

  The others felt encouraged and began tentatively introducing themselves. Emma and Jane beamed at each of them as they stammered their names. When they had finished, Emma and Jane began introducing us. The children nodded apathetically as they recited our names, except when Jane pronounced Wells’s name. This elicited a few sniggers, which the author responded to by pulling a face. I assumed their reaction was due to the contrast between Wells and the other men in the group, all of whom were taller, more muscular, and, why not say it, more handsome than he.

  “Good,” Emma declared, once the introductions were over. “Now that we all know one another’s names, and we’re friends, tell me: what are you doing down here on your own?”

  The boy called Curly stared at her in surprise.

  “We were playing,” he said, as though stating the obvious.

  One of them gave a chortle, amused at Emma’s ignorance.

  “What about your parents? Are they up there?” Emma asked, voicing all our curiosity.

  Curly shook his head emphatically.

  “No? Where are they, then?”

  “Near,” the child said enigmatically.

  “Near? You mean they’re down here?”

  Curly nodded, and Emma exchanged surprised looks with us.

  “There are other people hiding down here . . . ,” I heard Murray murmur beside me.

  “It would seem so,” I said eagerly.

  “We must make contact, see how many there are,” Clayton whispered to us, excited, I assumed, at the prospect of meeting up with other people to form a larger group and pool information about the invasion.

  Clayton stepped away from us and approached the children, keeping his artificial hand out of view in his jacket pocket.

  “That’s wonderful, children, wonderful,” he said, gently pushing Emma aside. “So, your parents are nearby. Can you take us to them?”

  The children glanced at one another. Then Curly said, “We can.”

  Clayton turned to us, raising his eyebrows in amazement. “They can.”

  He turned back to the children with a satisfied smile; for a few moments everyone exchanged looks again in silence.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Clayton said at last in a tone of theatrical enthusiasm, as though nothing in the world could have given the children greater pleasure.

  The children began conferring amongst themselves with surprising seriousness, until, with an imperceptible gesture, Curly motioned to them to start walking. They filed higgledy-piggledy into one of the side tunnels. He then invited us to follow them with a nod of his head, which Clayton replicated, like an image in a hall of mirrors. We all obeyed, and for several minutes we walked four or five yards behind the children, who were skipping and hopping and singing songs, as though being guides bored them so much they had to amuse themselves somehow. Their shrill voices ricocheted off the walls of the tunnel, producing a babble as incongruous as it was soothing, a kind of charm evoking the world from which the Martians had evicted us, a world of bustling streets teeming with carriages and parks full of children laughing. Our world. A world we never imagined anyone might covet from outer space, let alone fly across the Cosmos to snatch from us. I tried to cheer myself up with the thought that they hadn’t succeeded yet, that there were many more of us hiding in the sewers, ready to defend ourselves, perhaps waiting for a man who could show us how to fight, and I looked at Shackleton, who was walking glumly
beside me.

  “Isn’t it exciting, Captain?” I said, trying to cheer him up, too. “There are people hiding in the sewers, exactly as you did—I mean will do in the future.”

  Shackleton nodded unenthusiastically but said nothing, and I did not insist. We continued walking in silence until, suddenly, the children told us to stop beside the entrance to a small side tunnel in the wall. To our horror they began filing into it, and we had no choice but to follow, stooping so as not to bang our heads. It seemed like a disused pipe from the old sewer network and turned at right angles, as in a maze. At last, just when we were beginning to think it would never end, we came out in a large storeroom, filled with building materials. At the far end of it, concealed behind some bundles, was a vertical ladder descending into the darkness. The children began clambering down it fearlessly, giggling at their own jokes.

  “Where the devil are they taking us?” I muttered, tired of the endless walking and beginning to feel increasingly sweaty and grimy.

  But no one had the answer. Presently, we came to a dank, cold hall with a vaulted ceiling. The room was lit by a few lamps hanging from the walls and pillars, but they scarcely made a dent in the darkness, and it was difficult to see exactly how big it was.

  “We’re here,” Curly announced.

  We surveyed the gloomy catacomb uneasily. It appeared to be deserted.

  “But . . . where are your parents?” I asked Curly.

  “Here,” the child said, pointing to our surroundings.