20 Million Leagues Over the Sea (52 page)

They finally looked up at each other again,
and he felt a tug inside of him at the pained expression on her
face.

"I'm glad she had you," he continued, "just
as I am glad that she had Mr. Davies. I wish I had known her. I
would have liked to have had a sister." With a shyness he had not
felt in many years, he took one of Gemma's hands in his own larger
one and held it lightly. "Would you tell me about her? Tell me
about my sister?"

They talked until the darkness in the Gardens
faded into the ship's artificial dawn. When they heard Herr Knopf
muttering his way through the cabbage patch, they winked at each
other like conspirators and slipped onto their separate paths to
the day that awaited them.

~~~~

Gemma

"I just don't think I was meant for this,
that's all," Gemma said as the crochet hook glared at her in the
flickering firelight.

She tossed it onto the low table in the
middle of their circle. She tugged at her brown lab jacket, feeling
grateful that her ribs had healed enough to wear her own clothing
again. The pirate blouse -- freshly laundered by Frau Knopf -- had
long since found its way into the depths of Old Dependable.

Gemma glanced across the table at Maggie, the
seventh member of the circle seated at last, who was working her
way through a massive pile of wool. With one pair of tentacles, she
stitched the last few rows of the scarf that Gemma had seen back in
the nest, its calligraphic "M" fluttering as she moved. Yet another
pair of limbs had started a completely separate piece in the same
colour, with the roots of a "G" scrolling out of her needles. Every
so often, yet another tentacle would slip in a third needle to
twist the yarn and form the letters.

"Space is cold," was the only explanation
Maggie would give for it as she worked and swayed to the velvet
sound pouring out of the gramophone. In Wallace's absence, the
unlabeled albums had slipped out of their hiding place and onto the
shelves, resting in the light. They had enjoyed more than one
airing during tea time.

"Nothing against Vivaldi," Frau Knopf had
said as she had lowered the needle onto the record just after Gemma
had arrived, "but a little bit goes a long way. But the blues? The
blues sings about life, what goes wrong, what we do to each other.
You cannot fix what you do not know is broken,
Ja
? I think
any
Volk
that can sing the blues about itself, that
Volk
is going to be all right, in the end. This music will
be out in the open back home, and soon. You'll see."

Caroline chirped at Maggie. "So you were the
ghost, all along!" The Boolean sat next to Knopf, who was winding a
skein of yarn about the young lady's outstretched hands. "You were
the one always skittering about."

"I'm afraid so."

Gemma was pleased that Caroline had taken to
Maggie's means of communication so quickly. All those scientific
romances the girl was fond of reading must have prepared her for
it.

The Boolean frowned. "What shall I report
back to the Psychical Society, then? I surely can't tell them about
Maggie. Do I tell them there weren't any ghosts, after all? Or that
it was bugs from the Garden creeping about in the air ducts?"

Frau Knopf stopped winding for a moment and
fingered the cameo at her throat. Her gaze was focused somewhere in
the distance. "There are always ghosts, Fraulein. Even on
Mars."

"That would really be something to report!
Ghosts on Mars. But whose ghosts, I wonder?"

"You could have your own lecture tour with
that," Gemma replied. "Like Nellie Bly after her trip round the
world."

Caroline gasped with excitement. "And you
could do it with me! Wouldn't it be grand?"

"Oh, it would," said Maggie. "'To Mars and
Back'. But from a woman's point of view!"

"
Ja
," said Frau Knopf. "
Ja
, we
can't rely on the men to say anything important."

Gemma rubbed her chin. It would certainly get
Brightman's attention, which might or might not be deliciously
wicked. A lecture by Gemma Aronnax, doubly so.

Gemma said, "Perhaps we should start with a
journal. Let's be proper scientists about this."

"And proper journalists!" Caroline
replied.

The pipephone speaker crackled to life, and a
tinny version of Christophe's voice emerged.

"Attention all hands. We have a visual on
Mars. We should enter orbit within forty-eight hours."

Maggie reached for Gemma's hand with one
snaky limb and held it tightly.

"Planet, ho!" she sang.

~~~~

Christophe

The last of the debris had been cleared, and
the floor of Gun Control shone as brightly as it had the day they
had launched. Only a few stubborn patches of char remained here and
there, and they would soon be gone. The controls of Hui's new
weapon occupied the space that once housed the now-ravaged heat
ray.

Christophe rested his palm against the new
steel panel on the wall and tried to sense what lay underneath; he
tried to detect where the ship had absorbed Cervantes into its very
bones. Miguel had seeped into the ship that he had cared for and
shepherded since before her maiden voyage. It had been as dear to
him as the
Kiwi Clipper
was to Christophe. He understood
that now. The
Thunder Child's Fury
no longer felt like a
stranger.

"All is quiet here," he whispered. "We have
heard neither hails nor calls from the Red Planet." Christophe
stroked the wall with the tips of his long fingers. "You've done
well, old sport. You've gotten us this far. Just hold us together a
little while longer. Just a little while. We'll do what we need to
do, and then we'll go home."

He leaned his forehead against the steel's
welcoming but unyielding coolness. With closed eyes, he listened to
the hum of the Oberths and let the sound wash over him like the
tide flowing its way towards shore. Until Maggie came to fetch him,
Christophe strained his ears to hear an answer in the
Fury
's
enduring song.

~~~~

Gemma

"It certainly looks peaceful," remarked
Bidarhalli.

"Where are they?" asked Hui.

Along with the rest of the Cohort, Gemma
gazed down at their destination from the orrery observation window.
After forty long days and forty even longer nights, the
Thunder
Child's Fury
had reached her goal at last, on the second day of
October. With all that had happened on the way, they had almost
forgotten where they were going. But now it was here, in front of
them and undeniable. The ship had sidled up to the planet like a
child ready to nurse from its many-times-greater mother.

The rest of the crew were at battle stations.
The tension was so thick that Frau Knopf could have sliced it,
toasted it, and served it for tea. Captain Moreau had drilled them
over and over again in preparation for any number of conceivable
scenarios. They had prepared, in fact, for anything but this.

They had prepared for anything and everything
except for...
nothing
.

From the soft semi-darkness of the orrery,
the Cohort watched the polar caps glisten as the ship slipped by
through the quiet sky in a near-polar orbit. Craters and canyons
pocked the face of the planet, and vast dry plains of soil and rock
stretched out beneath them like an Arean Danae. As they passed over
the North Pole and sailed towards the South Pole over the Martian
equator, they saw no oceans. There were no rivers, no Martian
version of the Nile. Lowell's famous canals were nowhere to be
seen, and the red circles on the conference room maps were reduced
to so much wasted ink. Taking photograph after photograph with
Alfieri's telescope, for once pointed down at the ground instead of
at the sky, they had found neither roads nor cities. Nothing moved.
There was more life in the
Fury
's Garden than on the Red
Planet entire.

Nothing.

As they orbited the planet, they chased day
into night, looking for any lights that might pierce the darkness.
They crossed into day again, still alone, and saw fresh landscape
that had rotated into the sunlight. Dust storms larger than Great
Britain scoured the surface. A deep scar cut across Mars' face, a
deep wound that, if it had been any deeper, would have cleaved that
world in two. Even practical Gemma felt that some great hand had
reached out from the stars and clawed the very heart out of the
rusted rock.

There was no sense of menace. There were no
angry nests of Invaders threatening to break loose upon them. There
was simply a scarred pearl hanging in the heart of the night. The
only people that Gemma could see were the reflections of her
fellows in the observation window, peering round each other like a
clutch of nervous hens straining to see a fox in the bushes.

But the hens saw no foxes. There was nothing
but dust and rust.

"So beautiful!" Gemma said.

Once the shock of not being attacked had worn
off, she had opened a blank journal and started scribbling about in
it. She was lost in a fever of sketching each view of the planet as
they plowed across the Martian sky.

"I agree," said Shaw as he mopped the sweat
from his forehead with his kerchief. "Unfortunately, we are not
here for the Cook's Tour. Where could they be? Maggie, have you any
theories?"

"No," Maggie mumbled into their heads. She
chewed on the end of a trembling tentacle with the side of her
beak. "I haven't the foggiest."

The pipephone on the wall squawked, and Gemma
picked up the handset. "Llewellyn."

Dr. Pugh's voice crackled over the line.
"Seeing anything from down there yet, lass?"

"All's quiet here, Dr. Pugh."

"How's Maggie?"

Gemma cast a sidelong glance at her new
friend. "All right, aside from a touch of the jitters. How is
everyone on the bridge?"

"Feeling like Maggie. We haven't seen a
thing, either. Any thoughts from our resident geologist?" There was
no mistaking the teasing edge in his voice.

"Pffft," she sputtered back. "Perhaps
underground? The surface seems rather bleak. I don't even see ruins
of where things
used
to be."

"I agree with you. But what about launch
facilities for the cylinders? Or factories to produce the Black
Smoke? Where do they cultivate the Red Weed? Where did they
manufacture the weapons they used against us? Could all that be
underground?"

"What about that great scar of a canyon?
Could they have facilities built into its walls?"

"It's a possibility." The rest of what he
said was muffled, as if he were addressing someone on the bridge.
"The captain has requested that you and Maggie join us in his ready
room."

"But--"

"I have a feeling that Mars will still be
down there when we're finished."

She replaced the handset. Maggie must have
overheard the conversation, for she stood up on two of her
tentacles and waited. Gemma managed one last glimpse at the waiting
planet below them. She could almost hear the stars whispering to
her again, now that they were here.

"It's just begging to be explored, isn't it?"
Gemma asked.

"It's certainly begging for something,"
Maggie replied.

Christophe and Dr. Pugh joined Gemma and
Maggie in the ready room, where they clustered around one end of
the table.

"Did they leave?" Pugh mused aloud. "Did they
know we were coming? Could our one ship have frightened them
away?"

"I highly doubt that," said Christophe. "I do
remember that not too long after the Invasion, we saw some of them
head towards Venus. Is it possible that they all left?"

"Oh, heavens, I'm not ready to turn around
and hoof it all the way to Venus," Pugh moaned. "I'm out of steam
as it is."

Gemma said, "Even if they did journey to
Venus, wouldn't some infrastructure be left behind? We're not
seeing any ruins or remains. It's like they were never here."

"Frankly," Maggie chimed in, "I am
relieved."

Gemma asked, "What if we did meet some other
Martians like you, Maggie? Ones that would talk to you?"

"Oh, my!" she exclaimed, one tentacle
waggling nervously in the air. "I don't know what I would say. What
would we have to talk about?"

Pugh pushed away from the table and rested
his long legs on a neighboring chair. Folding his arms across his
middle, he rolled his neck back onto the top of the chair and
studied the ceiling. He chuckled, almost giddy in his relief. "You
could always teach them how to knit."

Maggie's laugh felt pleasant in Gemma's
brain. "I do not think we brought that much yarn."

"Knitting," Gemma mused. Her eyes widened as
realizations dovetailed into place. She stood with the force of her
next word. "Knitting!"

"What are you going on about?" asked Pugh as
he rolled a weary face towards her.

"The Invaders. They don't knit."

"I certainly wouldn't expect them to."

"I think the Martians are remarkable for what
they didn't bring," Gemma said with a shiver. "The cylinders in
which they traveled were unadorned. In all the information we've
managed to uncover in their memory Code, we haven't found one ounce
of culture. No art, no music." She picked up a CDV that someone had
left on the table. Christophe's face beamed at them in sepia tones
as she waved it about. "No cards to trade. No tales of great
Martian heroes to inspire them as they went forth. They didn't
bring anything to read or do as we did. No recreational materials
at all! Certainly no Cultural Officers. They didn't need them. They
don't get bored." She slapped the CDV down upon the table. "In our
heady rush to tear apart their technology, we overlooked the most
powerful bit of all: the Martians themselves. They are not
aliens."