And I would have done it. But there wasn’t one man who stood out above the others. Uranian love is lifelong (said Plato-through-Christopher). So I couldn’t accidentally shackle myself to a dullard. I’d been flitting about and fantasising, dithering over who to honour with my constancy.
The Waterloo platform was white with steam and swarming. Valets crowded the train corridors. Gentlemen sat in silent rows in every compartment, spines stiff with nerves. Nobody spoke. Half the Uranians of London were on the train.
Christopher’s energy was spent, but I was exhilarated by our flight. I wondered: should I make a speech? Brothers! We are travelling together. Once we reach Paris, must we disperse, like droplets in the ocean? Is this the greatest gathering of our kind since Athens? Surely, we should... We must...
I stood in the corridor by an open window, getting my nerve up. I looked into the starry night and told myself that the dark was as homelike and wholesome to me as the day. My brothers were beautiful (although not, I thought, all equally beautiful, and some couples shockingly mismatched). And somewhere up above us was our planet: gorgeous, mysterious Uranus. Pale blue, glowing from within, winding around the sun once every eighty-four years (Chris owned a small book on the subject). Unknowable, remote! My ruling celestial body!
“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”
He spoke like a steward, but his bottle-green velvet suit put the lie to it.
“One shouldn’t have all one’s satisfactions satisfied,” I spluttered, failing to be Wildean.
His face was sly and his nose was broken. Edward Carpenter, the socialist said (via Christopher) that love may exist most purely between men of different classes. I wondered: who buys this lad’s clothes? Who bought his ticket for this train? His arm pressed mine as the train jolted. It was all very sudden. Were we both under the influence of our heavenly patron?
“Sir,” he said. “Can I kiss you?”
The last trace of my cynicism boiled away. I gave my passionate assent.
He pulled back and smirked. “That’s handy to know,” he said, and hopped off up the corridor, to boast to his chums.
I crept back to my compartment. I didn’t make a speech to my fellow travellers.
On the ferry to France, I felt my purpose renewed. My lustful body was lost property. In Paris, I would be pure. No more self-deception. No more frittering my time looking for noble minds at tennis clubs. I’d been a terrible Uranian – we should be scholars, but I’d never stuck to any kind of study. I turned to Christopher.
“I didn’t bring anything to read. Do you...?”
I wondered if he would produce A Problem in Greek Ethics and the deck would ring with cries of recognition. But he pulled out a slim tome from the Theosophists. I winced at the opening sentence: Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit... But then the tone altered. The author was speaking of something termed the astral plane. He assured me that the astral plane was absolutely real. As real as Charing Cross. I missed Charing Cross already. I was persuaded of his common sense.
I read about the astral body, a thing apart from the fleshly body. The concept gripped me. (Of course it did: I had more-or-less eloped with a man I didn’t desire, and I wished to be so spiritual that his hairy hands wouldn’t distress me.)
I read that my astral body could fly through the air, if I desired it. No, if I put my mind to it.
At our Parisian hotel Christopher slept. In my room, I prepared to make a further, audacious journey.
The book on astral travel had frustratingly little in the way of instruction. I lay on my bed, conscious of my sweating back. The boy from the train drifted into my mind, and I pushed him away. I pushed away all fleshly things – I pushed myself out of my body.
I left. I lifted. It had worked. I hovered.
I feared to look down on my own fleshly body, so I passed on, up, through the ceiling of the hotel room. I was naked. I was naked of myself, without a body. I wasn’t cold. I could hear, faintly, the horses and the music of the Paris street. But my only crisp sense was sight. I saw Paris – a glittering mosaic. I took it in at a glance and then looked up to the stars. Could I go up, I thought, until the lights of the stars and the lights of Paris were of equal size, constellations above and below me?
How to move? Against what could I push? Should I flap my arms? I had no arms. I saw the moon. I thought: there! And leapt.
Such a pace would have made my stomach sick but I had no stomach. I was gleeful at my lightness and speed. Nevertheless, I quailed at the prospect of the void between the planets. I’d forgotten most of what I’d read in Christopher’s small book. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpetual storm? It was calm as a millpond and almost empty. Dust, small rocks, passed through me.
The pockmarked face of the moon grew closer, whiter. I thought the surface would become less stark, but it remained without colour, and without grey shades; it was all white planes and black shadows. I was dazzled – I blinked – I did not blink, having no eyelids. Then why was I dazzled, having no eyes? I found that if I opened every part of myself to perception, I could see-perceive with other-eyes, and look straight at the sheets of lava, shiny as a japanned table, which had previously blinded me.
No living world, this. No greenery in the crevices and crevasses (and no plants of other colours, either, Mr Wells). Severity everywhere in form as well as palette: sharp lava fragments piled like spillikins. I saw soundless avalanches rush down from the summits of volcanoes. I tried to listen with other-ears, and heard instead a great growling, like arguments shouted between nations.
Some of the lava and stones of this uninhabited land resembled ramparts and amphitheatres. I thought it an unsettling coincidence. Then I couldn’t be sure: soaring over one plane, I saw beneath me a shape like a fortress, perched over a riverbed. I thought I saw arches, pillars, fallen columns, an aqueduct, even? But perhaps they were spat out by the thousand local Etnas, or whittled by lunar hurricanes.
I longed to know but I found I couldn’t stoop or stop. I was exhausted. As soon as my efforts slackened, I felt, attached to me, a sort of silver cord that I somehow knew connected me to my fleshly body. It tugged me like the kind hand of a good friend on my shoulder: Come along, old boy, you’ve had enough.
I flew home. The moon was plucked from me, dwindled, became a coin in the sky.
The silver cord hauled me in. A good thing, too, I thought, as I approached the rooftops of Paris: I’d not remembered where in the city I was lodged.
Snap! I woke breathless and chilled. In my murky brown bedroom, the memory of that austere landscape was like a slap. It had been the most terrific experience of my life.
“Sounds like Verne,” Christopher said, ripping open a pastry.
“Like what?”
“That story by Jules Verne. Griffiths read it to us, at a picnic at college. In translation, of course.”
I nodded. I blew across a bowl of hot chocolate. I was enjoying, supremely, being back in my body. Knowing it as only one of my bodies. It took me a while to think through the implications of Christopher’s suggestion.
“Without eyes...” I began.
“What?” I’d interrupted him.
“Sorry – without my eyes, when I was travelling, I was perceiving through some other sense.”
“And?”
“I was perceiving things too far from my own experience for me to understand them. So I translated them into familiar forms. Perhaps with practice, I could see more truly...”
“I expect you were lucid dreaming!” he cried. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dream state...”
“One travels in a dream state?”
He rolled his eyes.
“One thinks one travels. You make things up, you direct your imagination while you’re asleep.”
He was impressed how much I’d controlled my dream state, how far I had pulled the wool over my own eyes. He urged me to “travel” again.
I never had a firm opinion as to whether Christopher or I was right. But I didn’t travel again.
After a year, he was calling himself Christophe. I slunk back, treacherously, to England. “Oscar isn’t even released from prison, yet!” objected Christopher. But I missed Charing Cross. Christopher had made friends with French men, but I hadn’t: my sense of universal brotherhood had ebbed, and I couldn’t manage the vowels.
I thought, often, whether it would have been different if I’d made my speech on the train. If I’d allowed sincerity to conquer cynicism. I became, without meaning to, cold and distant. I was on a fixed path, unable to intersect with warmer men.
Christopher forgave me enough to take me, once or twice a year, on a trip. Each expedition had a fraction of the exhilaration of our Parisian exile: trunks packed, the funnel of a boat steaming. We looked for communities of Uranians in Sweden, India, Turkey, and (endlessly) Greece. My feelings of guilt towards my friend were as hefty as my luggage.
So now, as we found our cabins on the Carmania setting out for America, I bowed the knee to him again.
“I’ve forgotten to bring anything to read. Could I borrow something from your excellent little library?”
He drew out a pile of books. Amazingly, amongst them was the volume from our French trip, on astral travel. For sentimental reasons?
Once more, the book drew me in. I went to my bed as eagerly as a bridegroom. I would slip the bonds of earth. I would touch the face of heaven.
It wasn’t my wrath at Mr. Wells alone that set my destination. I knew – I believed – that I had once travelled to the moon. I could reach, surely, for our nearest planet?
A moment of hyperawareness. My itching nose. The crisp sheets.
Then, up! This time, I was flying in daylight. The ship underneath me was a white toy on a blue sea, and when I climbed – and I did so confidently – the stars came out. Towards the great white face of the moon and past it. Its dark side was the first thing that really frightened me: craters the size of countries, with shadows so dark that I hallucinated things that squirmed and sparkled.
I marshalled all I remembered from Christopher’s small book and located the Red Planet. A red dot like a hot star. I set my course towards it and leaped.
And Wells was wrong! He was wrong entirely. I didn’t even need to get close enough to see the surface of the planet before I knew he was mistaken. The red of Mars wasn’t caused by a weed, or any kind of plant. Instead, it was – as far as I could tell – a property of dust. A hot and howling crimson mist, caused by ceaseless sandstorms. Like the haunted landscapes in the largest rubies: demon-chasms, their walls collapsing in, but never filling them, as debris is always boiling up out of them.
I sought a quieter spot: the long canals of Mars. I swooped down and hid in their cool, geometric shelter.
And there were others there with me.
They were near to my shape, seeming to be seated in a ring, but on no visible ledges or stones. I thought them inhabitants of Mars, at first. They were not tripod machines, nor had they oily tentacles – they were beautiful! Then I saw, trailing behind them, the silver thread that could take each of them home (so much more flimsy than it felt when embedded in one’s own guts). Then I knew them to be thoughtforms, visitors like myself, gathered here. Possibly they lived too far apart on Earth to meet through ordinary means, or perhaps they wanted secrecy. I drew close and, under the howling of the storms, I heard them speak faintly to one another.
They had come to Mars to plan war.
last raid of the campaign, guys
need to synchronise
hell yes
mcneill sets up a bombardment
doing it already
ellis, you send in your divisions to draw the initial attack
why mine
because we all had heavier losses than you last time
yeah, because I’m not an idiot
I had thought war would sound grander.
we agreed it already, ellis
your divisions soak up the hits
ellis you agreed
ellis?
bathroom break
The form that had just spoken melted into translucence
every time
has he got some kind of medical condition
we’ll miss our window
Which of these tired youngsters was the general? Perhaps they were all civil servants. I moved closer. The translucent one became more substantial again.
I’m back but my visuals are weird, anyone else?
ours are fine
your machine’s pathetic, ellis
I can see right down the valley to the encampment
well I’ve got some crappy space theme or a desert maybe
so have I, now
it’s really cheap-ass
One of the men of war turned and noticed me.
someone else just checked in
did you invite him?
god no
it’s a closed group, isn’t it? who invited him?
he’s the one messing up the visuals
this is supposed to be a private room
they’re never secure
jesus get the mods to lock him out
and throw up some earthworks while we’re waiting
A wall of Martian rock reared up in front of my feet. But it had no substance, and I stepped through it.
jesus
The men of war threw their weapons at me. Bombs flew, bullets whizzed through me. When their objects failed to touch me, they sent other, uncanny attacks. They blasted out their knowledge of past atrocities and it crumbled my bones. Like a disorientating cloud, I was surrounded by their indifference to suffering. I stumbled back.
But I also instinctively sent a scathing retaliation: flying barbs, then acid drops falling from the Martian clouds. I saw them flinch.
“I mean you no harm!” I called. Could men of war understand such a sentiment? The sound of my voice sent them into new confusion.
where’s he coming in from
tell the mods to block his account
can’t see who his provider is
this is a nightmare
we could change channel?
why should we have to go anywhere?
tell the mods to push him on
call off the raid?
we’ll miss our window!
we’ve missed it, we’re screwed
The men turned to steam. Their walls and bombs and clouds faded with them.
And my silver cord pulled me back, because someone was shaking my physical body, hard.
Whipped back through thousands of miles of space. It felt like the air was sucked out of my lungs, but I had none.
I opened my eyes and saw a crinkled face, bending down into my own. A hairy hand on my chest, shaking me.
“Oh, thank the Lord, I thought you’d died.” Christopher sat with a thump on the bed next to my feet. “Did you take a sleeping draught?”
I found my mouth and tongue where I’d left them. “Sorry. I sleep deeply, these days.” Should I tell him where I’d been? I couldn’t stand him dismissing me again. “Where are we, please?”
“Fifty miles out of Liverpool into the Irish Sea. Heading for the Atlantic.” His frown had lifted. He’d become more accustomed to exile than to England. We were both going to strange lands, but he was also heading home.
Later that night, as I approached Mars for the second time, I wasn’t alone.
“Christopher!”
He flew next to me, wearing a vivid blue necktie I’d never seen in the flesh.
I was delighted – vindicated! I wondered how I’d brought him along. But his substance was different from mine, and different from
the warmongers on Mars: crisper, brighter. Had he been here before?
“Oh, I’m not Christopher.” He said it with absolute assurance, in his usual nasal voice. It was as eerie as if he’d said: “I’m dead, of course.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a mod, actually.”
“A what?”
“A guide. Keeping the channels secure.”
He made a little dip in the air and took my hand to tow me along. His hand felt warm.
“I don’t...”
“I’m just steering you away from where you’re not supposed to be.” He smiled away my uncertainty. “Come on, I know this place better than you.”
“Why do you look like my friend?”
“I don’t look any way in particular. You’re making me look like this.”
Of course! The explanation I’d given Christopher, years ago – that my mind was interpreting what I could see. “Because you’re the last person I saw? Or because I think of you as my guide?” I’d always been a passive traveller. It was Christopher who booked the tickets and read aloud from the Baedeker.
“It could be that. Or perhaps you’re anxious? You’ve picked something comforting.” He sounded embarrassed for me. “It really all depends on your settings.”
We sailed over a waterfall of asteroids. Christopher’s new necktie glowed in the reflected light of Mars. I was amazed that I’d remembered so many details of him as to make this charming waxwork.
“So do you have any relation to my friend? Are any parts of you him?”
“Well, what parts were you interested in?”
Flying together loosened my tongue. Nothing ventured! Although, perhaps, in this confusing cosmology, nothing could be gained. Could he answer a question to which I didn’t know the answer?
“I’d wondered if you’re happier, these days – and how we stand...”
He laughed again. “How thoughtful!” If I was imagining him, was I mocking myself? “No time to talk, though. You’re being bumped over to the next channel.”
“I don’t...”
Ahead of us reared a clean, silver planet, white caps at its poles.
The Lowest Heaven Page 22
