“It is a prouder honour than a mere human could ever conceive,” said the dull-toned voice as the Martian pulsed and moved in its tank, “to meet the great writer. The reputation for ugliness is well deserved I think.”
“We Homo sapiens all look ugly to you Martians,” laughed Morgan. “Come now.”
“Even so,” said the Martian. “The ugliness of this sample, by a human standard, is noticeable even to me.”
“I say,” murmured Eliot.
“O Eliot! O thou greatest of writers!” the speaker said. “Hear me, for I am Fs’Bk’lula-bu, warrior of Mars! Ulllaaa!”
“Delighted to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” said Eliot.
“Plenty of time for you two to become acquainted,” said Morgan, sliding his hand down from Eliot’s shoulder to his elbow, and steering him towards the door. “But now I’m conscious of the lateness of the hour. I’m sure you’re about ready to turn-in for the night, my lad.”
Out in the corridor again, with the heavy door shut and locked behind them, Morgan said. “Quite a sight, no?”
“Astounding. Amazing. Really a sight without...’ he reached for the right word. “Analogue in any bestiary.”
“We can talk tomorrow. I’m sure you’re tired.”
“General Morgan,” said Eliot, “I assure you, sleep is the last thing on my mind at the moment. After seeing—that—I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again.”
“He is a picture, though, ain’t he, our Flobbo? Tell you what: come along to my quarters, have a night-cap. A dram. It’ll settle your nerves, and it’ll give me a chance to explain what’s going on.”
O City city, I can always hear
Beside a barricade in Lower Thames Street,
The stomp-foot coming of the war machines
Passing the angle at which Big Ben leans
Where soldiers lurk at loopholes, where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr lie
In inexplicable fragments on the road nearby.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
Warships founder
With the turning tide
Red weed
Wide
On bankside as
Tripods swing their heavy spars.
The waters wash
Drifting bodies
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Ulllaaaaa leia
Ulllaaaaa leialala
HMS Leicester
Firing guns
The stern was targeted
Sharp explosion
Red and gold
The swift sinking
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried downstream
The screams of men.
White tripods keen
Ulllaaaaa leia
Ulllaaaaa leialala
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the defeat
He wept. He promised revenge.
I made no comment. What should I pretend?”
“On Margate Sands.
We can regroup
Nothing with nothing.
The scattered infantry of dirty bands.
My soldiers broken soldiers who expect
Nothing.”
ul
la
To Docklands then I came
Burning burning burning burning
MORGAN, CLEARLY AN individual for whom generosity blurred into excess, poured whisky like it was apple-juice. Two cylinders the colour of terracotta tiles rose, solid-looking, one after the other until both glasses were completely filled. Eliot, usually an abstemious man, took the glass with gratitude. “He’s an unnerving beggar, our Flobbo, no?” Morgan chuckled.
“Grotesque,” agreed Eliot. He sipped the whisky, scowled, took another sip.
“Surely, surely. But loves your poetry, sir! Loves it! Which is tantamount to saying that all the Martians love it, because, as of course you know, they operate according to a mode of shared consciousness. Somewhere between a true hive-mind and a group of individuals, like us.”
“My poetry?” boggled Eliot. “My poetry?”
“Gracious!” exclaimed Morgan, apparently in agreement, and swigged a quantity of whisky from his glass.
“I’m honestly not sure, General...” Eliot began. Morgan talked across him.
“They’re alien, see? That’s the thing to hold on to. That’s the Rosetta stone. Now, we humans know what science is—technology, physics, all that—and we know what art is. The two are separate enterprises, what?”
Eliot coughed as the whisky scraped his throat.
“But,” said Morgan, “it seems the Mars-monsters don’t see exactly square with us on this matter. They don’t distinguish between art and science. Their technology is an expression of their artistic impulse, and their culture, back on their homeworld—so far as we can figure it—is developed with a scientific rigour. Take their cry, that infamous cry.”
“Ulla,” muttered Eliot.
“It’s song. It’s how they communicate, by song, and poetry. Now to me it all sounds alike, one ulla exact as to another. But to a Martian’s exquisite ears each call communicates subtle varieties, strategic military communication in the form of aesthetic appreciation of the landscape, or the beauty of a sunset. I can’t say I entirely understand.”
“Indeed not,” said Eliot.
“And it’s a weapon. It’s not a rallying cry, which is what we used to think. It’s a weapon—in itself. There are forms of life, Martian forms, who would literally be struck dead by an ulla screeched at exactly the right pitch. Do you see?”
“Song as weapon.”
“Now, when it comes to human art they’re very picky, rather exactingly so. Their tastes are abstruse, rather sharp to my ears. There’s an asperity to it. They like atonal music, for instance. But when they find something they do like—like your poetry, you know—they adore it. It has a potent effect upon them. And in that we have an opportunity.”
“To reach out to them? To build a bridge to peace?”
Morgan winked one eye. “To hurt them. I’m told by our best boffins that it will be possible to embed artistic combinations in your verse, combinations of sound, tangles if signification, that actually target the Martian mind. Bindweed their thought-process, catch them as a snake is caught by flute-music by a Bombay streetmarket performer. You see? Take Flobbo, our fat friend in the room back there. Some combinations of sound and meaning make him relax and improve his wellbeing. We can easily measure it. Other combinations upset him, degrade his health, and would, if we pressed it hard enough, certainly kill him.”
“You’ve been torturing him,” said Eliot, in an amazed tone, “by reading him poetry?”
“Testing his limits. And they aren’t robust, as a matter of fact. We’ve been using an invention of a Scottish scientist called Fleming to keep the beast from dying of infection, but he’s been ill for a long time. Entre nous, my lad, I don’t think he’ll last much longer. So I say: let’s work it. Take that poem for which you’re so famous—the Martians Make a Wasteland of London one.”
“A Martian Waste Land,” said Eliot.
“Quite so. Oh, they love it, though.”
“It’s unfinished,” said Eliot. “I only managed to write three sections—it’s supposed to have five. Like a Jacobean tragedy.”
“Unfinished, eh? You can tell I think,” confided Morgan, as though he were an expert in literary criticism. “All a bit chippy-choppy, what? But vivid! Most vivid. I was there. I remember it. And you only imagined it, with your mind’s eye! But you capture something of the ruin and the chaos. Very clever.”
“And the Martians like it? I find that rather hard to believe.”
“So it goes, my boy. They want you to go to Mars and recite it!”
Eliot positively coughed with startlement at this. “Me go to Mars?”
“A peace envoy. You would stand before some manner of Mart
ian council and declaim your whatnot, and they in turn would sing a song, and that would help bind a peace treaty. But we’ve a different sort of plan I don’t mind telling you. We’ve a sly plan. Mix your words, the music of which pleases the Martians, with some words we know—from our researches—have the opposite effect. Do you know a chappie called Pound?”
“Pound?”
“That’s the Johnny.”
“John Pound?”
“No, no, some Biblical name. Uzziah, I think. American, like you, though rather more flamboyant. He’s made a name for himself with our present administration, I don’t mind telling you. We tried some of his poems on our Flobbo and the old brute nearly expired on the spot! So what we’re thinking is: mix some of this Pound wallah’s words in with your ones, and when you recite the resulting combination to the Martian, at the great, crumbling amphitheatre of Arcadia Planitia, they will quail and fall back, and we can push forward and finish them off.”
Eliot kept blinking. He couldn’t take it all in. “Adulterate my,” he said, “my poem? Mix it with this—with these other words, this other music?”
“Don’t take this personally, Mr Habbakuk, but from what I’ve read of it it’s pretty adulterated already. All a soup of quotations and snatches of speech, what? What? And we’re talking about making significant advances in this war! Pushing the beasts back, perhaps destroying them entirely there. Who knows what new technology we’ll uncover once Mars is fully ours! Then we can concentrate on their Venus base, and make the solar system as a whole safe for democracy! You can’t say no, my friend. There will be a medal in it—and of course fame, money, preferment. A title I daresay.”
If Eliot was trying to think of a way of saying no, he wasn’t doing a very good job. “I’m not sure I see what good it would do to have me travel all the way to Mars...” he tried.
“They’ve asked for you! They’ve asked for you by name! Don’t you see? It means we’ll be able to get close. To lull them into a false sense of security.”
It sounded dangerous to Eliot. Likely to prove specifically dangerous to his person: to find himself reciting his own poetry to an audience of unearthly monsters as a firefight broke out all around him. But the whisky was warming his stomach and giddying his head, and beyond the danger was the prospect of something else. A glory, perhaps. A recognition. Or maybe a simpler truth, the one that all poets nurse in their hidden hearts—the desire that one day he would truly be able to write a poem so potent it would literally wound and kill those who heard it.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Good cove,” said Morgan, leaning forward and patting Eliot on the back. “You’ll be a hero, my friend. A hero!” And Eliot, quite uncharacteristically, let out a little laugh. It was as if he could see, in an access of that hierophantic futurity Shelley claims as the special genius of poets, what the future would bring—two weeks’ intensive training at the base, readying him for space-flight. Sessions in the armoured room with the Martian warrior they called Flobbo, reading him poetry—although Flobbo would, in the event, prove too weak to survive the programme designed for him. The hideous being expired, the victim of Earthly infections that Earthly doctors had only ever been able to keep at bay, and never quite cure. His corpse was sunk in a vat of formaldehyde. Not that Eliot grieved for him. He had too much on his plate: being fitted for a space suit, being flown by helijet to Dartmouth and then being squeezed through the hideous winepress of rocket launch high-g up into orbit, before being slotted into a hibernation pod for the long flight to the red planet—to Mars—to Ares himself. The poet as weapon of war.
Flobbo the Martian, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the winds of home, and the deep sand swell
And the profit and loss.
A microbe from the Earth
Consumed his flesh in whispers. As his breathing fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Monster or Man
O you who aim a gun and look to win war,
Consider Flobbo, who was once handsome and tall as you.
ELIOT KEPT OVERBREATHING. He’d been trained, and he knew better, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. It fogged up the interior of his helmet. He was on Mars! On Mars! And behind him was the delegation of the twelve Earthly nations, in spacesuits all bearing the designs of the flags of their countries. Behind them were the various honour guards, and polished-and-waxed vehicles of war. And in front of him was a phalanx of Martians, in their fighting tripods—but with the hoods open, in this, their native air, and the hideous bulbous presences clearly visible.
It smote Eliot abruptly that Morgan’s plan was crazed. Recite a poem and kill an alien being? How could one even begin to think such a thing was possible? Yet here he was, and there was no backing out now. He had memorised the piece—the new finale to his Martian Waste Land—and in mere minutes would say the words. And watch the aliens quail and die before his very eyes. The German specialists who had helped him prep for this mission had wanted to call this new weapon of war the Blitzgedich: the Lightning Poem. But, ever the pedant, Eliot had insisted that lightning was a visual, and his poem an aural, experience. Not lightning, then, but thunder. Not a Blitzgedich, but what the Thunder said.
And what it said was die.
DIE. DIEANDBURN. DAMNYOUTO—
To Hell, of course. But here was hell already: as cold as Dante’s final circle, as red as hellfire. They were on the Arcadia Planitia, inside a huge saucer-shaped indentation, perhaps an adapted impact crater, at least a half a mile in diameter. An outdoors theatre on an epic scale. Pillars, some tall as ship’s masts, others mere broken stumps, circled the rim. And inside: the honour guard and the twelve ambassadors, with various armoured cars and half-a-dozen tanks. Union flags hanging limp in the thin air. And facing them, a dozen varieties of Martian machine, tentacles waving like seaweed in the stream, those unnerving broad pale eyes all focussed on him—Thomas Stearns Eliot. “The King himself will present you your medal,” Morgan had told him, “when you return victorious. He even suggested changing your middle name to Thomas Starkiller Eliot, in honour of your inevitable victory.”
“I don’t know about that,” Eliot had murmured.
Inevitable, Eliot repeated to himself. It was inevitable. His breathing was shallow. Inevitable. Beyond the scrum of alien monsters, the landscape of this alien world was photographically vivid in the thin air. Amber and buff ridges. Pink sky over ancient rocks. To the west pillars of smoke rose from the sites of an earlier battle, like dirt-track roads into the sky. The sun weirdly tiny, like a silver nailhead. A frosty silence filled the arena.
Turning his head to the right and Eliot could see the solar system’s tallest mountain, Olympus Mons—so wide and shallow in its gradient, and from here so far away, that its true scale was difficult to gauge. The summit rose a touch more sharply from the base, a single carious tooth rising from a bank of inflamed-looking gum. Here, in the Arcadia Planitia. Eliot thought to himself, is no water but only rock. Rock and no water and the dusty arena.
A fizz of sound in his ear: his communicator. “You’re wired-in, Eliot,” Command told him. “Let’s do this.”
“Roger that,” said Eliot, and stepped forward.
The military had placed a bank of speakers, to carry his words to the Martians. The aliens, on their side, had assembled a heap of odd pustule-shaped objects that served the same purpose for their words.
“My friends,” said Eliot, and his words boomed and reverberated. His head, sealed inside his helmet, heard the words only as his earpiece broadcast them back to him, but he found he was able to feel the vibration his words made through the soles of his boots. The volume must be immense! Maybe, he found himself thinking: just maybe these Thunder-words will indeed smite and slay.
DIE.
“Martian friends, and future allies,” he said, and the ground under his feel trembled with the soundwaves.
DIEANDBURN.
&n
bsp; “I am the poet, Eliot, and have come at your request. I shall read you a new poem that I have especially composed for this occasion, to solemnize the new treaty of peace between our two worlds.”
DAMNYOUTO—
“Eliot,” came a voice: mechanical, uninflected. Eliot stopped. The Martians speaking through their own loudspeakers, their words being translated into English by their own strange technology.
“Most humans are dust beneath the heels of our war machines,” the Martian voice said. “You are different. Your art has touched us. You shall bear children inside your body, and pass your genius on to a hundred new Eliots. And so the key shall be spread through the cosmos!”
The key? What key?
Fzz went Eliot’s communicator. “What the devil...?” said Command, and was interrupted by another voice, a woman’s. “They reproduce by budding. They’re hazy on how humans do it, I suppose.”
“I’d best put them right,” said Eliot. “I wouldn’t want them to think they could... you know, insert—” and he switched his feed to the loudspeakers. “A small misunderstanding, my Martian friends,” he said. “I cannot bear children.”
“You are,” boomed the Martian voice, “too old.”
“No—no—only, it is not the way with human beings,” Eliot said, wondering to himself how much detail he would have to supply, “for the male of the species to carry the child to term. That is the role of the female.”
“Precisely,” blared the Martian voice.
Eliot felt a ticklish sense that he was losing control of this situation. He dismissed it. He needed only to speak the words he had memorised, and the Martians would flail and die.
“I have, as I say, a new work to recite, which I trust you will find...”
“Does it contain the key? We wish to be given the work that contains the key.”
“It,” said Eliot, a little uncertainly. “It does have a bit about a key.”
“The key!” the Martian voice droned. “The Key to all Mythologies! To unlock the belief system of myth and religion that underpins all human society!”
Scarlet Traces: An Anthology Based on H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds Page 8
