The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  “I see. Or?”

  “Or we go in search of the natives, and seek their counsel.”

  “What natives?”

  “Keep a level head, Shaw. Remember that we caused one to materialise in Mayfair. They’re around somewhere. We have simply had the ill-fortune of arriving in a desolate area. If you woke up one cold misty morning on a Yorkshire moor, would you conclude there was no life in London?”

  “That one didn’t seem inclined to assist us.”

  “Well. We have rifles.”

  Arthur stared out into the night. “And Josephine?”

  Atwood shrugged. “Ask the natives.”

  “Where, then? North, south, west? Where is north? I suppose we’ll have to mark our route by leaving bread-crumbs, or get lost going in circles.”

  “Hmm. I thought we might cut markings in the rocks, but the principle is sound.”

  Sun opened his eyes again.

  “While you were tallying our supplies,” Sun said, “His Lordship and I performed the Rite of Mercury. We inquired of the spirits of the air where we might wander, to and fro and up and down on the face of Mars, in search of shelter. They did not answer us. And so, either the spirits of this world are silent; or dead; or they do not hear the voices of men, and will not obey our call. Isn’t that right, Lord Atwood?”

  “You know everything that I know, Sun.”

  In the distance, there were signs of dawn. It was cold, and blue, and electric. It lit the edges of a tremendous cloud that swept up over the far mountains and poured up into the sky, like ink swirling in water. Dust; a thousand tons of it, a thousand miles away; dust and lightning and needle-sharp mountains, ten times taller than the Alps.

  “Good God,” Arthur said.

  Atwood put a hand on his arm and smiled. “Think of this, Shaw. You have seen Mars. And whatever befalls you, you will always be a man who has seen Mars. And you’re worried about counting matches!”

  “Yes. Well. I don’t like the look of that cloud; I vote we go another way. Sun—what do you say?”

  A horrible wailing broke through the silence. The haze muffled it, made it seem to come from all directions at once. It was some moments before Arthur was able to recognise it as human.

  Sun was already on his feet and running back into the camp. Atwood and Arthur followed.

  They found Ashton lying on the ground, wailing and thrashing. Vaz held one of his arms and Payne held the other, while Dimmick restrained his head, none too gently. Frank had retreated to a distance of about ten feet and stood there pale and shocked, with a rifle in his hands. Ashton’s face had gone bright red. His eyes were bloodshot, and staring wildly at nothing. He was quite clearly hallucinating. It was very hard to make any sense at all out of what Ashton was shouting: for the most part, he was simply shouting No or Stop or For God’s sake!

  Sun knelt, shooed Dimmick away, and held Ashton’s head in his hands. Instantly, Ashton went still, though he continued to whimper and moan: Please, please no. Sun inspected Ashton’s eyes and appeared to be listening to his breathing.

  “The effect of our translation, no doubt,” Atwood said. “Disturbed the brain. I blame myself—he clearly wasn’t up to the challenge. Poor fellow. We should all be glad that we survived unscathed.”

  Sun placed a hand on Ashton’s forehead. The whimpering grew quieter and quieter. Then, even that ceased. A thin trickle of spittle emerged from the corner of Ashton’s mouth. Sun closed the dead man’s eyes.

  Atwood gestured at the corpse. “Mr Vaz, Mr Dimmick—please bury the fellow, and find some way to mark his grave with appropriate honour. First martyr of the first expedition to Mars! Then, please prepare to march.”

  “Where?” Payne said.

  “Homewards, Mr Payne. Rest assured. Mr Sun and Mr Shaw and I have consulted on the matter, and determined our destination.”

  Sun glanced at Atwood, then at Arthur. Then he folded Ashton’s arms, and stood. The suspicious exchange of glances did not appear to be lost on Vaz.

  Atwood went and sat on the ground some distance away, and closed his eyes. The wind spun dust at his feet.

  Arthur approached him. “What destination?” he whispered.

  “Go away, Shaw. I need to think.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Josephine was lost for a long while, adrift in the extraordinary sensations of this new body. There was a strong, steady pulse in her breastbone, where she supposed her heart was. It was slower than a human heart. At each cycle of the pulse, the wings—her wings—throbbed with something like electricity, something like the pressure of an approaching storm. The things that a Martian tongue could taste were for the most part simply indescribable in the English language. Sweetness—something like brackish rose-water—their thick resinous wine—other things she couldn’t name. She was confused at first by the sensation of hunger, mistaking it for sorrow. Her long legs were unsteady. Her fingers were quick and sensitive but weak. Her vision was all colours and motion.

  The body, she learned, holds its own memories. She’d never had cause to notice that before, her body and her memories having previously been well fitted to each other, like the sort of husband and wife who finish each other’s sentences. Now she saw how the legs remembered how to walk, tottering at first, like an infant—she was so tall and thin and top-heavy!—and how the wings knew that it felt good to unfold, to stretch, to let whatever electric forces played across them have their way. Her first experiments with flight were a failure. Well—it would come. The body had quite definite opinions, expressed in the gut and in the skin, about what was good to eat; and about good and bad manners, and who had a trustworthy look to them and who did not; and who was handsome and who wretched, who to pity and who to bow to. Most important—and this occupied all her thoughts for who knew how long—the body remembered language.

  The language of the Martians had three parts. The ground-note of it came from the motion of the wings, in whose whir and thrum she could now perceive subtle variations: this carried crude meaning. The shifting colours of their wings and the motions of their long expressive fingers carried accents, tones, commands, subtleties, and ironies she never fully mastered. Lastly, their telepathic expression served somewhat the same purpose as shouting, or pounding the table, or harrumphing, and was considered rather bad manners in ordinary conversation.

  The body held its old habits. She babbled, over and over, repeating words and signs she didn’t understand—until, slowly, she began to understand them. Names came to her, unbidden, forming themselves on her hands—the names of people and places, the names of concepts that she didn’t yet comprehend. She watched her own hands moving, as if they were performing a Punch-and-Judy show for her, or they were a conjurer’s hands, performing arcane passes. Sometimes a wave of horror passed over her, and it seemed to her that those hands were an alien thing, something like an insect’s waving legs. That was less frequent as time went by. They came to seem like the strong and elegant and expressive hands of a healthy young woman; like her own clear and pleasant voice. She hardly recalled what Josephine Bradman’s fingers had looked like. Short. Pink. Rough from needlework, callused from typing. Always black with ink or red from cheap soap. Impossible to picture.

  She’d been moved to a room in a tower on the edge of the city. She didn’t quite recall how she’d gotten there—it had been during her strange second infancy, when it had been hard to understand what was sense-data and what was a dream. There were no crowds, and few visitors. She vaguely recalled that Piccadilly had visited her once, when she was still mute, still confused; he’d seemed sad. Now he was gone. She supposed that visitors were kept away at Clotho’s orders, to spare her from poking and prodding and gawping. Seven tutors lived with her, and fussed over her, and worried about her health, and taught her what the body couldn’t about language, and bothered her with questions about the Blue Sphere—which was what they called the Earth.

  Time passed. She didn’t know how long. She told the tutors that the
days of the moon seemed longer than those of Earth—and they thought that was very interesting, but they could devise no experiment for testing the proposition.

  The tutors measured time primarily by the shape and size of the red moon. They explained that the white moon Angel and the red moon Abyss both revolved around the Countenance of Mars, but they followed different courses: Angel was slow and steady, while Abyss followed a wild elliptical orbit. At times, Abyss was so utterly distant as to be almost invisible; but it slowly came closer and closer, until it overtook its twin and dwindled again. Nine revolutions around Mars completed this cycle and began it again. Since the exodus from Mars and the settling of the lunar city, this had happened some thousand times, or one thousand one hundred, or more—the tutors fell to squabbling over the precise number. To the Martian philosophy, in which there appeared to be little distinction between a thing’s motions and its meaning or essential nature, the revolutions of those heavenly bodies were of great astrological significance.

  Since she’d begun watching the moon, it had grown from a blood-red pin-prick, like a match struck in the room next door at night, to a flickering flame like the light of a red lantern.

  * * *

  The language of the lunar city could be described, without too severe a confusion of concepts, as a sort of lingua franca. That is, it was a common tongue—but tongue was itself a confusion!—made up of the hundred languages of Old Mars. There’d been more Martians back then: a hundred nations, instead of one lonely city. In various different languages, the names of her tutors were Blessed One, Morning, Mercy, Strength, Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon, and Beloved. The other two were named for a kind of plant that didn’t grow on the moon, and a kind of mythical creature that was simply impossible to express in English. She privately dubbed them Hyacinth and Silenus.

  They cohered slowly in her understanding. They were frightening, at first—a numberless swarm encircling her, prodding her with questions, with incomprehensible signs. It was a long time before she could see them as tutors—as seven fussy old men and women who delighted in language-games, grammatical quibbles, antiquarian trivia, mathematics, arid philosophical puzzles. They were tall and stately, thin and stooped, their wings like glorious Byzantine robes. Like most Martians, they found it hard to keep still. At any given moment during their lessons, two or three of them would be pacing around and around the edges of the room, circling one another in quarrelsome orbits, sometimes bumping into one another, distracted by their own lecturing. Several of them drank to excess at times, and fell asleep leaning in a corner of the room. Scholars were the same everywhere throughout the universe, she supposed. They questioned her constantly regarding the Blue Sphere, and they took notes, but their attitude suggested that they knew best, that the things she told them were interesting curiosities, but not strictly reliable; rather the way a roomful of missionaries might politely but not respectfully listen to an African describe his theories regarding the cause of thunderstorms. And sometimes she thought that perhaps they did know best. Her own memories of London were starting to seem very strange to her.

  The floor of the room and all the shelves that lined the white stone walls were cluttered with heaps and towers and pyramids of red and black and golden beads, each of them a book or a hundred books of philosophy or poetry or science or tactics, all of them buzzing or shifting from time to time as the stray thought of a passing tutor set them in motion. There were no mirrors, much to Josephine’s annoyance. They didn’t have mirrors on the moon. In fact, the very idea of a mirror upset them—they seemed to see it as a form of black magic, the separation of soul from body. They questioned her on the subject for hours.

  They started to go for long walks, the eight of them drifting through empty streets out on the edge of the city, under the light of the red moon. They travelled in long, looping circles with no particular destination in mind, arguing and debating, questioning, refining grammar. Sometimes the tutors came to blows—leaping and fluttering up to perch on windows and clatter their wings in outrage. As the days went by—and as the second moon approached—the tutors seemed to grow agitated. They became more quarrelsome. The ones who drank too much drank more. Josephine felt it too. The room felt confining. They yearned to fly.

  Her continued inability to take to the air worried them. It struck them as unhealthy, insane, infantile; a form of paralysis. She protested that she needed more time. In fact, the thought terrified her. To fly, to respond to the urgings of her wings and take to the air, would be too utterly inhuman; it would be a way of going native. It would be to accept, once and for all, that she would never return to London.

  She asked them, again and again, if there was a way of going home. They pled ignorance. In fact, they pled ignorance when it came to more or less all the questions that interested her. What was the red moon, and what would happen when it came closer? They wouldn’t say. What had happened on Mars that had driven them to exile in the lunar city? What had they all been so afraid of when she’d first shown herself—what were the devils Piccadilly had feared? They changed the subject to matters of philosophy. They corrected her grammar, fell to squabbling over linguistic obscurities, and then, when their squabble was over, they pretended to have forgotten her question. Finally they told her, frankly, that she wasn’t ready, that there were things she simply wasn’t prepared to understand. As if they thought of her as a child, or an invalid. Or as if they feared she was a spy, and they were keeping secrets; on Clotho’s orders, no doubt.

  * * *

  One evening she had a visitor. She sat in the window of her room, looking out on white stone stained red by the light of Abyss. Hers was the highest tower for some distance around, and so she had a view of an expanse of rooftops, domes, arches, buildings that looked unfinished, buildings that had begun to slowly crumble. All empty. Behind her, the tutors were engaged in philosophical disputation. Silenus and Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon were at the point of coming to blows over a difference of opinion regarding the distinction between the accidental and essential properties of substances. She’d started the dispute by mentioning Atwood’s theories regarding the aetherial composition of the heavens, but it had long since turned to realms of Martian philosophy that she could no more comprehend than a cat could read Greek. She was staring out the window and recalling, vaguely, the monograph she’d been typing at the moment of her—her translation. One hundred and fifty pages of metaphysical hair-splitting, for a Mr Potter, a railway clerk. Had she put it in the safe before setting out for Atwood’s house, or was it still on her desk—three-quarters typed and likely never to be finished—on the corner of her desk that caught the morning sun, beside the typewriter, beneath Mr Borel’s stationery shop, on Rugby Street in London in England on Earth?

  Lost in these thoughts, she didn’t at first notice the shadow of wings approaching over the rooftops. Then she recoiled, jumping back from the window as suddenly her visitor rudely appeared in it, closing his wings with a snap that silenced the tutors, who turned as one to stare.

  It was a male; he was small, dark, with a still and inexpressive face and exceptionally large and beautiful wings. He was obviously unexpected. It was equally clear that her tutors knew who he was, and that he was something of a celebrity. It was rather as if the Duke of Sussex had suddenly walked unannounced into a dining-room full of disputatious dons, or as if a group of village deacons had received an unexpected visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  He opened his wings again and said ~ Peace. Be still.

  The tutors all buzzed at once. Josephine couldn’t understand what they were saying, except that it seemed that some of them were expressing their respect, and some of them their displeasure at the interruption, and some of them demanding to know the stranger’s business.

  ~ Peace, he repeated.

  A conventional greeting, made with the hands alone. It meant little more than hello. He was ignoring the tutors, and studying Josephine. His expression was unreadable. Something about him suggested tha
t he was the sort of person who expressed himself through action.

  ~ You are the woman from the Blue Sphere.

  ~ I am.

  ~ I didn’t believe it. I had to see it for myself. You are very strange. The Blue Sphere! A harder journey than any I have ever dared. You don’t look strong enough.

  Silenus clamoured for his attention, telling him he had no business there, threatening to summon the authorities.

  ~ I go where I will, he said.

  Josephine gestured into the room. ~ Come in. Be my guest. Please. No one comes here.

  He remained very still, and continued to study her.

  ~ What are they teaching you? He gestured at the tutors.

  ~ Philosophy, Josephine said. And words.

  ~ You speak well enough. What do you make of our philosophy?

  ~ I don’t know.

  ~ Is that what you’ll tell them in the Blue Sphere, when your way takes you there again?

  ~ I don’t know the way back.

  ~ Stupid to come here, not knowing the way back.

  She turned to the tutors and asked, ~ Who is this?

  They told her his name—it meant something like Second Child. An odd name. The way they said it suggested something rather dashing. Here in the lunar city, where children were scarce, perhaps it meant that he was lucky, or at least improbable. It carried connotations of a heavy and rare duty. A hero’s name.

  ~ But who is he? What does he do? In their language, the words for doing were also words for going. The tutors started talking about great journeys, from which she understood that he was a sort of explorer.

  ~ I am of no great distinction, he said. None of us here are of great distinction. I was born on this grey moon, many hundreds of revolutions after the flight from Mars. We are not what we were.

  Some of the tutors agreed with this sentiment, expressing what appeared to be quite conventional lamentations for their fallen state. A couple of the tutors patriotically objected on behalf of the lunar city, which, though falling far short of the lost glories of Mars, nevertheless prevailed, resolutely, against all adversity.