by David Brin
Beauchamp grunted. It seemed to make as much sense as any other proposal to explain the aliens’ sudden, strange behavior. While smaller tripods roamed about, dealing destruction almost randomly, the three great ones hopped and flopped like herons in a marsh, gesticulating wildly with their flailing legs, all this in marked contrast to the demure solidity of Eiffel’s needle.
For a time we stared in silence at the prisoners, whose projectile had hurtled across unimaginable space only to shatter when it struck an unlucky hard place on the Earth, shattering open and leaving its occupants helpless, at our mercy. Locked inside iron, these captives did not look impressive, as if this world weighed heavy on their limbs. Or had another kind of languor invaded their beings? A depression of spirits, perhaps?
“I have pondered one thing, while standing here,” Beauchamp mumbled. “An oddity about these creatures. We had been told that everything about them came in threes... note the trio of legs, and of arms, and of eyes –”
“As we have seen in newspaper sketches, for weeks,” I replied.
“Indeed. But regard the one in the center. The one around which the others arrayed themselves, as if protectively... or perhaps in mutual competition?”
I saw the one he meant. Slightly larger than the rest, with a narrower aspect in the region of the conical head.
“Yes, it does seem different, somehow... but I don’t see –”
I stopped, for just then I did see... and thoughts passed through my brain in a pell mell rush.
“Its legs and arms... there are four! Its symmetry is different! Can it be of another race? A servant species, perhaps? Or something superior? Or else...”
My next cry was of excited elation.
“Beauchamp! The Master Tripods... I believe I know what they are doing!
“Moreover, I believe this beckons us with opportunity.”
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The bridges were sheer madness, while the river flowing underneath seemed chock-a-block with corpses. It took our party two hours to fight our way against the stream of panicky human refugees, before the makeshift expedition finally arrived close enough to make out how the dance progressed.
“They are closer, are they not?” I asked the lieutenant assigned to guide us. “Have they been spiraling inward at a steady rate?”
The young officer nodded. “Oui Monsieur. It now seems clear that all three are converging on Eiffel’s Tower. Though for what reason, and whether it will continue…?”
I laughed, remembering the thought that had struck me earlier – a mental image of herons dancing in a swamp. The comparison renewed when I next looked upward in awe at the stomping, whirling gyrations of the mighty battle machines, shattering buildings and making the earth shake with each hammer blow of their mincing feet. Steam hissed from broken mains. Basements and ossuaries collapsed, but the dance went on. Three monstrous things, wheeling ever closer to their chosen goal... which waited quietly, demurely, like a giant metal ingénue.
“Oh, they will converge all right, lieutenant. The question is – shall we be ready when they do?”
My mind churned.
The essential task in envisioning the future is a capacity for wonder. I had said as much to journalists. These Martians lived in a future of technological effects we could but imagine. Only through such visualization could we glimpse their Achilles heel.
Now was the crucial moment when wonder, so long merely encased in idle talk, should spring forth to action.
Wonder... a fine word, but what did it mean? Summoning up an inner eye, which could scale up the present, pregnant with possibility, into...into...
What, then? Hertz, his waves, circuits, capacitors, wires –
Beauchamp glanced nervously around. “Even if you could get the attention of the military–”
“For such tasks the army is useless. I am thinking of something else.” I said suddenly, filled with an assurance I could not explain. “The Martians will soon converge at the center of their obsession. And when they do, we shall be ready.”
“Ready with what?”
“With what lies within our – “ and here I thought of the pun, a glittering word soaring up from the shadowy subconscious “– within our capacitance.”
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The events of that long night compressed for me. I had hit upon the kernel of the idea, but the implementation loomed like an insuperable barrier.
Fortunately, I had not taken into account the skills of other men, especially the great leadership ability of my friend, M. Beauchamp. He had commanded a battalion against the Prussians, dominating his corner of the battlefield without runners. With more like him, Sedan would never have fallen. His voice rose above the streaming crowds, and plucked forth from that torrent those who still had a will to contest the pillage of their city. He pointed to my figure, whom many seemed to know. My heart swelled at the thought that Frenchmen–and Frenchwomen! – would muster to a hasty cause upon the mention of my name, encouraged solely by the thought that I might offer a way to fight back.
I tried to describe my ideas as briskly as possible... but alas, brevity has never been my chief virtue. So I suppressed a flash of pique when the brash American, following the impulsive nature of his race, leaped up and shouted –
“Of course! Verne, you clever old frog. You’ve got it!”
– and then, in vulgar but concise French, he proceeded to lay it all out in a matter of moments, conveying the practical essentials amid growing excitement from the crowd.
With an excited roar, our makeshift army set at once to work.
I am not a man of many particulars. But craftsmen and workers and simple men of manual dexterity stepped in while engineers, led by the Italian and the American, took charge of the practical details, charging about with the gusto of youth, unstoppable in their enthusiasm. In fevered haste, bands of patriots ripped the zinc sheets from bars and brasseries. They scavenged the homes of the rich in search of silver. No time to beat it into proper electrodes – they connected decanters and candlesticks into makeshift assortments. These they linked with copper wires, fetched from the cabling of the new electrical tramways.
The electropotentials of the silver with the copper, in the proper conducting medium, would be monstrously reminiscent of the original “voltaic” pile of Alessandro Volta. In such a battery, shape does not matter so much as surface area, and proper wiring. Working through the smoky night, teams took these rude pieces and made a miracle of rare design. The metals they immersed in a salty solution, emptying the wine vats of the district to make room, spilling the streets red, and giving any true Frenchman even greater cause to think only of vengeance!
These impromptu batteries, duplicated throughout the arrondisement, the quick engineers soon webbed together in a vast parallel circuit. Amid the preparations, M. Beauchamp and the English scientist inquired into my underlying logic.
“Consider the simple equations of planetary motion,” I said. “Even though shot from the Martian surface with great speed, the time to reach Earth must be many months, perhaps a year.”
“One can endure space for such a time?” Beauchamp frowned.
“Space, yes. It is mere vacuum. Tanks of their air – thin stuff, Professor Lowell assures us from his observations – could sustain them. But think! These Martians, they must have intelligence of our rank. They left their kind to venture forth and do battle. Several years without the comforts of home, until they have subdued our world and can send for more of their kind.”
The Englishman seemed perplexed. “For more?”
“Specifically, for their families, their mates... dare I say their wives? Though it would seem that not all were left behind. At least one came along in the first wave, out of need for her expertise, perhaps, or possibly she was smuggled along, on the ill-fated missile that our forces captured.”
Beauchamp bellowed. “Zut! The four-legged one. There are reports of no others. You are right, Verne. It must be rare to bring one of that kind so close to
battle!”
The Englishman shook his head. “Even if this is so, I do not follow how it applies to this situation.” He gestured toward where the three terrible machines were nearing the tower, their gyrations now tight, their dance more languorous. Carefully, reverentially, yet with a clear longing, they reached out to the great spire that Paris had almost voted to tear down, just a few years after the Grand Exhibition ended. Now all our hopes were founded in the city’s wise decision to let M. Eiffel’s masterpiece stand.
The Martians stroked its base, clasped the thick parts of the tower’s curving thigh – and commenced slowly to climb.
Beauchamp smirked at the English scholar, perhaps with a light touch of malice. “I expect you would not understand, sir. It is not in your national character to fathom this, ah, ritual.”
“Humph!” Unwisely, the Englishman used Beauchamp’s teasing as cause to take offense. “I’ll wager that we give these Martians a whipping before your lot does!”
“Ah yes,” Beauchamp remarked. “Whipping is more along the lines of the English, I believe.”
With a glance, I chided my dear friend. After all, our work was now done. The young, the skilled, and the brave had the task well in hand. Like generals who have unleashed their regiments beyond recall, we had only to observe, awaiting either triumph or blame.
At dawn, an array of dozens and dozens of Volta batteries lay scattered across the south bank of the Seine. Some fell prey to rampages by smaller Martian machines, while others melted under hasty application of fuming acids. Cabling wound through streets where buildings burned and women wept. Despite obstacles of flame, rubble, and burning rays, all now terminated at Eiffel’s tower.
The Martians’ ardent climb grew manifestly amorous as the sun rose in piercing brilliance, warming our chilled bones. I was near the end of my endurance, sustained only by the excitement of observing Frenchmen and women fighting back with ingenuity and rare unity. But as the Martians scaled the tower – driven by urges we can guess by analogy alone – I began to doubt. My scheme was simple, but could it work?
I conferred with the dark Italian who supervised the connections.
“Potentials? Voltages?” He screwed up his face. “Who has had-a time to calculate? All I know, M’sewer, iz that we got-a plenty juice. You want-a fry a fish, use a hot flame.”
I took his point. Even at comparatively low voltages, high currents can destroy any organism. A mere fraction of an Ampere can kill a man, if his skin is made a reasonable conductor by application of water, for example. Thus, we took it as a sign of a higher power at work, when the bright sun fell behind a glowering black cloud, and an early mist rolled in from the north. It made the tower slick beneath the orange lamps we had festooned about it.
And still the Martians climbed.
It was necessary to coordinate the discharge of so many batteries in one powerful jolt, a mustering of beta rays. Pyrotechnicians had taken up positions beside our command post, within sight of the giant, spectral figures which now had mounted a third of the way up the tower.
“Hey Verne!” The American shouted, with well-meant impudence. “You’re on!”
I turned to see that a crowd had gathered. Their expressions of tense hope touched this old man’s heart. Hope and faith in my idea. There would be no higher point in the life of a fabulist.
“Connect!” I cried. “Loose the hounds of electrodynamics!”
A skyrocket leaped forth, trailing sooty smoke – a makeshift signal, but sufficient.
Down by the river and underneath a hundred ruins, scores of gaps and switches closed. Capacitors arced. A crackling rose from around the city as stored energy rushed along the copper cabling. I imagined for an instant the onrushing mob of beta rays, converging on –
The invaders suddenly shuddered, and soon there emerged thin, high cries, screams that were the first sign of how much like us they were, for their wails rose in hopeless agony, shrieks of despair from mouths which breathed lighter air than we, but knew the same depths of woe.
They toppled one by one, tumbling in the morning mist, crashing to shatter on the trampled lawns and cobblestones of the ironically named Champs de Mars... marshaling ground of the god of war, and now graveyard of his planetary champions.
The lesser machines, deprived of guidance, soon reeled away, some falling into the river, and many others destroyed by artillery, or even enraged mobs. So the threat ebbed from its horrid peak... at least for the time being.
As my reward for these services, I would ask that the site be renamed, for it was not the arts of battle that turned the metal monsters into burning slag. Nor even Zeus’s lightning, which we had unleashed. In the final analysis, it was Aphrodite who had come to the aid of her favorite city.
What a fitting way for our uninvited guests to meet their end – to die passionately in Paris, from a fatal love.
Story Notes
Greg and I had a good time with this one – our contribution to a quirky anthology called War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. That book’s daring premise? Suppose the Martian invasion portrayed in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds actually took place!
Moreover, what if this interplanetary conflict were reported from the viewpoints of other famous authors of the day – for example Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, or Mark Twain? We were among the modern scribblers recruited to make this concept come alive, trying to emulate the individual viewpoints and styles of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jack London, when each of them found himself confronted by invaders from another world.
Greg and I had the good luck to draw from the most direct competitor and colleague of Wells, Jules Verne, co-inventor of modern science fiction and master of the can-do problem-solving tale, invoking the master’s style and inherent positivity of spirit… along with some of his now-archaic ways of viewing the world.
Naturally, it was loads of fun.
About some of those archaic patterns of speech etc… may I offer an aside?
I am well-known for believing in progress and an ongoing expansion in our “horizons of otherness”… our willingness to include ever-more kinds of being within civilization’s circle of protection and appreciation. Indeed, I have a book called “Otherness!” Those who push this process forward are definitely right, far more often than those who cling to ancient, frightened prejudices… and yet…
… yet there is a tendency to declare “I invented tolerance and diversity and social justice!” And to dismiss writers of an earlier age, because their patterns of assumption or speech do not pass modern litmust tests. That’s silly. Judge past people by their efforts in the context of their time! Did they push the conversation forward? Were they several standard deviations better than their era? Did the feminists, civil-libertarians and environmentalists of those days call our authors of speculative literature allies?
Are we - who keep pushing otherness horizons outward - standing on their shoulders? By that standard, even Robert Heinlein – whose works read rather sexist today – comes out better than expected. A majority of past Hugo winners do rather well in fact, according to that measure.
Moving forward does not require proclaiming “WE invented fiction that’s about tolerance!” No, you are only another link in our chain to the future, using great What-If stories to help humanity to self-uplift, out of darkness and into light.
And now let’s polish off this section with a piece of meta-fiction based on “Paris Conquers all.” We weren’t quite finished with Verne, after all. He kinda took over our skulls, for a little while.
A little lagniappe…
A Retrospective by Jules Verne
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(as told to Gregory Benford and David Brin)
In reflecting back on the terrible year described in these accounts, it may come to be seen as a fulcrum in time. The pivot, indeed, of modernity. That is if we, the thinking beings who stride under a common sun, learn to rise above ourselves.
About that single
turn of an orbit, there tipped the fate of two worlds, two darkly different destinies. With the balm of three decades to heal the pain, one can perceive benefits – though bought at dear cost – in the tragic way that Mars first encountered Earth. Indeed it may have led to a better fate for humanity than might have been, had the tripods never come. For by uniting our genus against a shared foe, the Martians deflected those festering nationalist energies that had seemed aimed toward a Twentieth Century in which our finest tools would be used for beastly ends. Instead, the invaders forced us to join together, redirecting all ingenuity and will toward a common cause.
So we now have the world of marvels that you, dear reader, and I your humble editor, now inhabit. We blink in fulsome awe at palatial floating airships, at Cunard’s ornate tourist-submersibles, at pneumatic tubes carrying mail rapidly from town to town – while our still-muddy roads thwart the steam-buses and cable lorries – so that even in the worst winter storms we all remain linked in a united world.
And of course there are the Great Cannons of Canaveral, Sumatra, Kourou and Kenya – those behemoths of iron who regularly bellow loud enough to be heard even in distant lands, filling the sky above with useful mirror-semaphores and other delights of the modern age.
A further benefit lies in literature – in a resurgent conviction that the world is illimitable and will obey reason, so that Man can improve upon it. This is remarkable in light of the waning decades of the 19th century, which saw futuristic thinking, in the hands of Mr. Wells and others, that leaned darker in texture and implication.
So it is in a reflective mood that I enter these very words onto the clicking kinetiscope array of my tabula rasa – the latest of modern wonders. It is two weeks before my hundredth birthday. Never would I have thought that I could reach the fantastical year of 1928!
