The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  He turned to them for the first time, and interrupted before they could start to squabble. ~ I have seen the face of Mars, he said. I have cast my shadow on it. I have seen the ruins, and I know what we were, and what we lost.

  Josephine said ~ You have seen Mars?

  ~ I am not clever, or beautiful, or learned, and I do not even say that I am especially brave. But my wings are strong. I fly well. Some say I fly the way we did when we flew over Mars. Once, long ago, our great-great-grandparents came here, across the dark. Now only a scattering of us are strong enough for that. We are not what we were. We have forgotten how to fly, because we have nowhere to go, except round and round in our little rooms, talking and talking.

  The tutors took offence.

  Josephine said ~ How?

  ~ There are ways. A better question is: how do I come back? I’m strong. One day I won’t be strong enough, maybe.

  ~ Is it dangerous?

  ~ Yes. But we go only when our moon is closest to Mars. We go to learn the things that we have forgotten; to bring back what we can.

  Privately she named him Orpheus.

  The tutors interrupted to say that this fellow’s work was of course very admirable, in a way that seemed to suggest that he answered to them, that he was a sort of go-fetch-it for the scholars of the lunar city, dispatched in their service to bring back fragments of the old world, sights and sounds and memories, curios and bits of old rock …

  Orpheus ignored them, and continued to stare at Josephine. ~ Is it dangerous? Yes. There are terrible things down there. Are you one of them?

  ~ I don’t know what you mean.

  ~ The way you move is strange. The way you speak is strange. What are you? You are not her. She stopped, you started; moving in her body, but not her.

  ~ Who was she?

  ~ A dead woman. They haven’t told you who she was? They should tell you. Did you ask? Is this a normal occurrence on the Blue Sphere?

  ~ Certainly not.

  ~ I would have forbidden it, if anyone had asked me.

  ~ Do they have to ask your permission?

  ~ No. But I would have stood in their path. You frighten me. I have survived sixteen crossings, there and back again, and I know when to be afraid.

  ~ What is it that you’re frightened of? You come here and you jump in through the window and you tell me you’re afraid of me—as if I asked to be here! And they keep me shut up here on the edge of the city and they won’t tell me anything—

  ~ I hear that you worship a ghost, you people in the Blue Sphere—that you have an invisible god, who watches from above and casts people into fire—a horrible thing!

  ~ No—you have it wrong.

  ~ You walked on the ground, and looked up at the stars, and made a god out of nothing. We looked down and saw the face of God beneath us. But now it is dead.

  He hopped down from the window, scattering the tutors, and settled on the floor in the middle of the room. He began to tell a story.

  * * *

  A half-dozen generations had come and gone since the flight from the Countenance of Mars. They were long-lived, and slow to breed; slower, since their exile. On the Countenance, things had been very different.

  There were no cities there. There were vast red plains and sharp, cloud-piercing mountains; there were black forests of tower-tall trees, whose roots fed on subterranean lakes a mile deep. You could sleep in the heights of those trees, curled up among the vines. You could lose yourself in a maze of mountain peaks and be alone with your thoughts for years at a time. The people of Mars crossed the red plains in flights, in flocks, in tribes and families and great shifting nations-on-the-move, their shadows streaming far beneath them. They flew, on sunlight and wind and aetheric currents.

  (The tutors interjected, to debate the nature of aether all over again).

  They were always in motion. They had no settled abodes, and needed none. Their nations had no borders. A nation of the people of Mars was not a place, but a route across the world, a pattern of migration. Each nation was an idea, an argument, a philosophy. The people came and went as they pleased. There were a hundred nations, a thousand flocks and tribes, uncounted millions of lives.

  They built. They were nomads, but not primitives. They beautified the face of Mars. They made lodges, temples, libraries. They left signals, markers, border-stones, records of their constant travels. They built with their minds, with their hands, with clever tools and lost arts. A nation that migrated through the cold north built factories. The Nation of the Eye—migrants between the deserts of the equator and the great western mountain—carved stone, and carved the mountain-tops. The Nation of the Strong Lungs, who hunted through the forests of the south, worked trees and vines, roots and fungus.

  The hundred nations of Mars made war—ceaselessly, joyfully, for sport or to settle philosophical differences. They were long-lived, restless, energetic, fearless. Airborne migrant nations clashed over the plains and the mountains, seizing prisoners and trophies. The Nation of the Three Questions fought the Nation of the Pinion for a thousand years, around and around the cool and windy southern pole. At first, they fought to resolve a difference of linguistics. Soon it became a matter of honour, and then something that defined them. Neither nation could win. Families, flocks, and tribes changed sides, learned new languages and ideas, switched colours, maintained the balance of power.

  That was the world Orpheus’ great-grandparents were born into. They had belonged to the Nation of the Pinion, and the Nation of the Breath, and the Nation of the Broken Claw, and other nations that no one now remembered. They had been warriors, thinkers, explorers, migrants, artists of flight. Some of them survived the flight; not all.

  The tutors now began to show off, reciting their own hybrid and tangled ancestries, recalling the names of ancient Nations of Mars, like the Liars and the Hindwing and the Heart, and their attributes. It quickly became clear that there was hardly a single fact that they could all agree on, except that among all the nations of Mars, it was the Nation of the Eye that was most extraordinary. For example, the people of the Eye were the most jealous of their territory; the highest mountain of Mars was theirs. Their scholars cared little for philosophy and hardly at all for art, but instead studied the stars, watching the skies from their cold high peaks. It was their scholars, looking sunwards, who discovered the existence of the Blue Sphere; and whose investigations in the other direction, out into the dark, revealed the vast Purple Sphere, and beyond that the distant and dreadful Black Sphere.

  What precisely was wrong with the Nation of the Eye? On that, the tutors and Orpheus couldn’t quite agree. They diagnosed a variety of philosophical sicknesses—some of which Josephine thought she understood, and some of which would seem wicked only to a Martian. As Orpheus talked, she pictured the princes of the Eye, sometimes as a single one-eyed giant, and sometimes as if they were the grey sisters in the old fable, who shared one eye between them. They were scholars: they studied the spheres and wished to move as they did, in perfect revolutions about a still centre. They ceased their migration, settled on the peak of the great western mountain, and remained there for years. Those who would not settle were driven out—a wicked thing—or held prisoner—a wickeder thing—or killed, which on the whole the tutors seemed to consider the least wicked possibility.

  They built fortifications. They closed the mountain to outsiders.

  There was war, of course. This unnatural and depraved conduct aroused, as was right and proper, the outrage of other nations. The nations of the Pinion and the Three Questions came all the way across the red desert from the south to go to war over the foothills of the mountain.

  In time, the war grew bitter. The Nation of the Eye could not be fought, could not be reasoned with. Their warriors had a terrible new strength. They had new weapons, new techniques, that could strike armies from the sky.

  The great western mountain was the tallest thing on Mars by far, and because they held it for themselves, the Nation of
the Eye declared themselves the natural rulers of Mars. They began to conquer. They made their scholars into generals, into princes. They destroyed the armies of the Pinion. They claimed authority to direct the migration of lesser nations. Something more than an insult; almost an atrocity. They razed the forests that were the hunting-grounds of the Strong Lungs. They seized the factories of the cold north.

  They built prisons.

  On the top of the great mountain, where the air was thin and the currents weak and only the strongest could fly, the Nation of the Eye built strange towering structures—temples, perhaps, or weapons, or devices for observing the night sky. Heroes of the nations of the Hand and the Pinion raided them, razed them; they were rebuilt.

  What was the cause of this strange behaviour, this national sickness of soul? Some of the tutors attributed it to sin, or to an unfortunate side-effect of excessive study of the natural world, unleavened by spiritual pursuits. Two of the tutors attributed it to the influence of the stars, or unfriendly entities that dwelled among them. Orpheus said it didn’t matter.

  How long did this war last? On that point, there was general disagreement, which quickly turned into a squabble. A matter of years, said Born-on-the-Quiet-Moon—things changed swiftly on Mars. Generations, said Silenus—the nations did not surrender easily to the Eye, and the Eye was not easily defeated. According to Hyacinth’s mother’s tradition, the decline of Mars had taken a thousand years.

  What was the secret of the Eye’s strength? On this point, the tutors were uncharacteristically close to agreement. The scholar-princes of the Eye had called down aid from the stars. Or perhaps it was better to say that they had called something up from the lower and darker spheres of the Cosmos—from the Purple Sphere, that vast world of storms and oceans and great proud beasts—or more likely from farther down in the Black Sphere—a world of cold and dark and howling ghosts—or perhaps from farther still, from indescribable and incomprehensible depths. In the fortresses of the Eye (so reported the heroes of the nations who’d escaped them) there were ghosts, darknesses that moved and whispered, chained shadows, freezing fogs, moods of sorrow and despair and hate that stalked the halls looking for a body to take hold of, rooms that held nothing but disembodied pain, thrashing at stone walls. All these dreadful things powered the Eye’s engines of war. Who was master, and who was servant—the scholar-princes of the Eye, or the things they’d called up? It was hard to say. Perhaps the question had no meaning.

  All the nations of Mars united against the Eye. All their disputes were set aside, for the first and last time in the history of Mars. In the end, they threw themselves in their millions at the mountain, and they drove the Eye back, and they destroyed the Eye’s fortifications and temples, and they littered the mountain’s slopes with ten thousand dead. Slowly—or quickly, depending on which of the tutors was right—the Eye’s power faded. One by one the scholar-princes were hounded from their fortresses and put to death; and Mars died not long after.

  What happened, in the end? The tutors were uncertain. In the last days, the survivors had made few records, and what they had made was mostly lost. Orpheus, who’d seen the aftermath, said that perhaps it was better not to know. It was likely that the ghosts that the scholar-princes had called up had escaped. Perhaps, having opened the way to the deeper spheres, worse things now came boiling up, eager to remake Mars in the image of their own hells. Or perhaps the scholar-princes themselves had learned, as their empire fell, to take leave of their bodies, to become pure spirit. In any case, the darkness that had hovered over the mountain of the Eye now spilled down onto the plains below. Great rivers of fog and ash and shadow ran slowly but implacably across the plains, devouring whatever they touched. They poisoned the water, they blackened the sky, they turned forests to ash, laying waste to whatever had survived the war. Those who crossed their path went mad with fear, with hunger; or fell from the sky dead. They were too heavy, too terrible. Mars could not tolerate their presence.

  There was nowhere to run from them; you could flee twice around the world and still run into them. Those who survived turned inwards instead. Refugees of a hundred scattered nations came together under a black and choking sky and pressed forward into what had been the territory of the Eye. In Orpheus’ opinion, they hoped only to hasten their deaths. Silenus was of the opinion that they had been seized by a holy wisdom.

  ~ What they found there, Hyacinth said, is best not spoken of. But since our guest has begun the story, I will end it as well as I can. In the abandoned fortresses of the Eye they found the secret of the crossing, and they set out from their tower-tops into the dark and the space between worlds, where there was nothing for their wings to drift on but moonlight. Some died, and some were lost, and some came to the white moon. This city was here when we came, and it was empty. We do not know who built it.

  * * *

  ~ I have seen dead Mars with my own eyes, Orpheus said. I have seen the storms and the darkness. I have heard the whispering. I have fought with the few savages that still exist in the ruins living a half-life of madness and hunger; fought them for scraps. I have felt the fingers of ghosts clutch at my soul.

  The tutors watched warily. The light of the red moon was very bright.

  ~ I thought that if I told you, I might see—I might see what you are, Orpheus concluded. But I still don’t know.

  Josephine said nothing.

  Orpheus moved back to the window in a single, elegant open-winged leap, and crouched there. He stared; she felt him probing at her thoughts. ~ We came here as strangers—lost. We care for the lost. That was always our way.

  ~ Thank you.

  ~ But if you are our enemy …

  He leapt from the window, and as Josephine staggered back, he swooped on her. She had no time to be afraid. She lashed out in anger, with her will, and he spun aside, striking his wings against the wall and landing crumpled in a corner.

  The tutors scattered to the corners of the room and readied themselves for further violence.

  Orpheus stood. ~ You’re strong, he said.

  She was. She was clumsy, perhaps, and she was lost, but her mind and her will were strong. She was too angry to be surprised. Hadn’t Atwood said she was strong? Hadn’t Jupiter?

  Orpheus paced, muttering to himself.

  ~ But what does that mean? I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid. Something must be done. I can’t stand still.

  He rushed to the window.

  ~ Wait, she said.

  He turned back to her.

  ~ Yes?

  ~ Wait. The fortresses of the Eye—do they still exist? Have you seen them?

  ~ A dangerous question.

  ~ Have you?

  ~ Of all the dark places on Mars, those are the worst. We do not go there.

  ~ They knew how to travel between the worlds. Perhaps they had a way to travel to the Blue Sphere.

  ~ If they had, they would have already laid waste to it.

  ~ Let me go with you.

  The tutors rushed forward and began to interrupt and argue and panic. She swept them aside.

  ~ You’re strong, he said. But I doubt you are strong enough. And I don’t trust you.

  ~ But—

  ~ Perhaps when we know what you are. When another revolution has come and gone; or a hundred of them.

  ~ That may be a long time in my world. I think we are shorter-lived than you. Everything may be gone.

  ~ In time, everything will be gone.

  He leapt from the window, spread his wings wide, and rose into the night.

  Chapter Thirty

  Orpheus was gone before she could think of chasing him. Josephine rounded on the tutors. ~ I must go with him.

  Impossible, they said, fluttering around her, enclosing her, patting and stroking her wings to soothe her.

  ~ You can’t hold me here. A prisoner. It’s wicked—it’s wrong—you said so yourselves.

  They argued. Silenus seemed hurt, outraged; Hyacinth, amused. They explained to her
all the reasons why it was very important for her to stay where she was, for her own good, and for the good of others. A buzz of motion and colour. She closed her eyes and they continued to argue in her head. She pushed past them, knocking Born-on-the-White-Moon to the floor, and fled, out of the room and up narrow winding staircases (too narrow and too steep; made for whoever or whatever had built the city) into the upper empty rooms of the towers. She wanted to weep in frustration, to stamp her feet. She wanted to laugh. She felt like a child.

  * * *

  She paced the room. It was empty, dusty. White stone was lit pink by the light of the red moon. The ceiling was arched in an odd off-centre way. Two arched windows looked out over empty buildings. An empty room in a ruin. The tutors, wisely, didn’t come after her—if they had, she might have thrown them downstairs. She knew now that she was strong—stronger than them. Not that it had done her much good; it was her strength that had brought her into Atwood’s Company, and it was her strength that had brought her out here, but she was still lost. Strength outstripped wisdom. She felt both powerful and helpless; she felt furious.

  She thought of the story Orpheus had told her. The scholar-princes of the Eye—she pictured a nation of Atwoods, a nation of Jupiters. The ruins of their fortresses—she pictured Atwood’s house in Mayfair, the books on his wall, the paintings, the star-charts, all the paraphernalia of his magic. She couldn’t imagine the danger being worse than what she’d already faced.

  Hours went by. The light of the red moon waxed. It was coming very close now. It seemed to accelerate as it approached—an illusion, no doubt, the way dawn seems so slow at first and then so sudden. She could feel its approach: in her bones, in her fingers, in her wings. Contradictory sensations, wild tidal forces pushing one way and then the other. One moment there was a sense of horrible impending pressure, the next a sense of lightness, as if you might take off, pulled into the sky towards the moon. One moment there was fear; the next, anticipation.