The Revolutions (35 page)

Something was wrong. She hadn’t understood the Martians or the city at all.

There was nothing cosily domestic about the Martians, nothing comprehensible. There never had been. Loneliness and longing for home had confused her. They were a legion, a riot, a swarm, a host of angels or devils. The city bristled and roiled beneath her, and its inhabitants hardly seemed like
people
at all, but like one enormous animal; like a hive of maddened bees, terrifying and terrified in equal measure; or like some horrible eruption of nature, a whirlwind or a tidal wave.

Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars; Terror and Panic, the sons of War. Which one was it she’d landed on? Either way, it was well named.

Eve leapt from the top of the pillar, gliding down in a wide circle out over the water, then curving in again, north of the river. She was nearly gone from sight before Josephine could think to follow her. A sudden headlong plunge, a reckless acceleration no locomotive on earth could match, and Josephine was down amongst the towers, crowded on all sides by Martians, all of them tensely alert for whatever it was they were alert for. Ahead of her, Eve was distinguishable from the crowd only because of the speed and purpose with which she moved. Eve cornered sharply, then dropped to the ground, running at full tilt, long-legged, north and then left and then right, then leaping up to the window of her school—or what Josephine had foolishly thought of as a school; God knows what it really was! The infants were there, running and fluttering about in a panic, and Adam was there already, trying to herd them. They were trying to protect their children from her.

It was terribly, touchingly human. She looked at the Martians again and once again saw ordinary men and women and children. What sort of monster did they think she was?

In a fit of frustration, Jo soared up onto the schoolroom’s little stage and sent all the brightly coloured beads in the room flying, a chaotic explosion of red and black and gold and white, shooting off the walls in a hundred thousand different directions. Then, as Adam and Eve led the infants out to safety, she sank down in despair. Outside, she could still hear that strange sharp rustling, the sound of a thousand terrified and angry Martians.

*   *   *

Despairing utterly, she ceased to perceive anything at all, not even the passage of time.

*   *   *

The next thing she knew, she was still in the schoolhouse, and a single Martian was creeping towards her.

She’d expected a furious mob; or possibly that the anxious and panic-stricken creatures might simply declare the schoolroom haunted, taboo, and never enter it again. This was an unexpected approach.

It came in through the door at the far end of the room and approached the stage where she waited. It moved slowly, patiently, cautiously, pausing repeatedly to look all about the room, as if it thought it might spot her hiding in the eaves, like a spider in its web.

This creature was very old—the Martians were human enough that she could be sure of that. Its wings had a dry and brittle look to them. Its colours were faded. Its long face was wrinkled like a monkey’s, or a hobgoblin’s, with a narrow dark mouth. It was scarred, too. The elderly ones were generally scarred—because of that horrible fighting, she supposed—but this one had had an unusual run of bad luck, or was unusually clumsy. One of its eyes was the black of tarnished silver. Its wings were frayed. Its back and chest looked as if it had been whipped.

The name Piccadilly popped into her head, and she thought of that as the old creature’s name from then on. She had to call it something, after all.

It quite clearly wanted to talk to her.

She let herself feel cautiously hopeful. Perhaps this was a leader or a wise man; a wizard or a king or a scientist; or a policeman, at the very least.

It crouched, elbows on its knees. It was very still, except that its gaze sometimes shifted about the room. It quite obviously didn’t know where she was, or, for that matter,
what
she was.

She wasn’t at all what it had expected. It was surprised by her. Its fear was subsiding, and now it was intrigued.

How did she know that? She certainly hadn’t read all of that from its eyes, those silver spoon-like discs with their tiny slitted black pupils, or from the quivering of its shoulders and its ragged wings. But she knew it.

She realised that it was
talking
to her. Telepathically, as the psychical researchers of London would have said. It was putting thoughts in her mind. She recoiled. It was an unwelcome intrusion—a violation. There was nothing left of her but her thoughts.

The creature started to its feet. Its wings expanded. Suddenly it was poised to flee again.

She tried to calm herself. Its mode of communication was strange and unexpected, but that was all. She could hardly expect it to have the manners of an Englishman. It meant her no harm. She felt that very strongly—or rather, it was
telling
her that it meant no harm. It was very afraid of her.

She was suddenly terrified at the thought that it might flee, leaving her alone again.

It was asking her what she was. There were no words in what it said, just the question. It had expected her to be something different. Something awful. What had it expected? She asked it:
What did you expect?
In answer, she got a jumble of incomprehensible images: something night-black, vast, a cloud of dreadful smog, a black eye, a crack in the earth, the darkness of Hell itself.

A devil of some kind.
The
Devil, perhaps. A disembodied spirit, here on the Martian moon, was not an amusement for spiritualists or a thrilling ghost story or fairy tale; it was a real and vivid horror. She felt certain that this was not a mere superstition, that the Martians feared something that they had actually experienced, something as real as a tiger.

Piccadilly was shaking. She did her best to communicate that she was peaceful, that she was not an enemy to Piccadilly or his kind—and suddenly she found herself thinking of him as
him
. He wasn’t a monster. The thing he feared, the thing he’d mistaken her for, that was a monster. He was a frightened old man.

There were things Josephine could sense that Piccadilly didn’t mean to tell her, but revealed anyway. The first thing she read in his mind was that he wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of others, waiting outside. They were perched all along the spine of the roof like crows on a wire. They were waiting outside the door like a besieging army.

She reached out her mind and listened for them, for their thoughts, as they waited out there in the dark. It wasn’t hard; in fact, as soon as she tried, they crowded in on her. There were so many of them that they made a racket. They were ready to hurl themselves at her and destroy her, even if it meant their deaths, if she turned out to be the devil that they feared. They had sharpened their minds for battle.

Atwood and Jupiter had said she was
sensitive
, but the intensity with which she sensed the mob outside and her communication with Piccadilly were quite unlike anything she’d experienced before. An effect of her current disembodied condition, perhaps, or something in the air on the Martian moon; or just one of the things in her dream.

Her more pressing concern was that an army was waiting to destroy her, if she didn’t quickly convince Piccadilly that she was harmless. A mob, waiting to bludgeon her with their thoughts; what would that be like?

Another thing she read in Piccadilly’s mind was why he’d been chosen to confront her. He wasn’t a scientist, or a leader, or a policeman. He wasn’t especially wise, or clever, or strong, or brave. It was just that he was old—it seemed to her that he was
unfathomably
old, by the standards of human beings. He was dying. His mate and his children were dead, lost to war, or disease, or bad luck, or time. He was expendable. He hadn’t wanted to confront her—he hadn’t volunteered. It had been
proposed
that he should go, and he hadn’t wanted to say no. It would have been embarrassing for a Martian of his age to say no. He would rather face the Devil itself than face embarrassment in front of his neighbours. Not so different from an Englishman after all, she thought; and she felt a pang of genuine sympathy for the poor old creature. He must have sensed it, because his eyes widened in surprise, and then his shoulders and wings relaxed a little.

Quickly, she tried to tell him what she was. She tried to communicate an image of herself, of her body and her face, but that seemed merely to confuse him, as if she were babbling nonsense. She tried to tell him where she was from. She called up images of London, fragments of the city: a view of the Thames, the house on Rugby Street, Regent’s Park, factories and trains and stations, meat-markets and Atwood’s mansion and Mr Borel’s stationery shop and her typewriter all jumbled up together. Piccadilly was alternately alarmed and delighted, appalled and amused, impressed and confused.

He was on surer footing when she tried to tell him about
space
, and about the stars. He knew—the Martians knew—that they weren’t alone in the universe. They knew that moons and planets other than theirs were inhabited, and if they’d never encountered an Earthwoman before, that was merely an accident, rather the way Josephine had never encountered an Egyptian. He was confused by her mode of transport, but not incredulous.

She tried to describe her fall, out of the darkness of space and towards the great dark face of Mars. She sent him an image of the two moons, white and red. In response, he sent back a jumble of confusing images. In his mind, the ivory moon was light, with welcoming wings. The red moon was Hell.

As soon as she thought that, the name
Angel
came into her mind for the ivory moon. A moment later, the name
Abyss
—the red moon—made itself known. She was quite certain of the names, as if she remembered them from a book she’d read in childhood.

Piccadilly was tense. If he were an Englishman, he would have been frowning.

Abyss. Was that where their enemies were from? Was that what they’d thought she was—a devil from Abyss? She probed his mind further. No, there were two kinds of enemy. A war on two fronts. The twisted folk of Abyss, and the devils that ruled the face of Mars. That was how he thought of Mars: a huge face, the face of one of his people, solemn as a saint’s, but bloodied and scarred and blinded. The name in his language for Mars:
Vast Countenance.
God and home and mother and father all at once. They were exiled from it—driven to the moons by some unimaginable disaster, some incomprehensible atrocity. Flight; a fall. They were out of their proper place, driven from their proper course. The inhabitants of Angel were exiles, refugees, flotsam; driven from the surface of Mars, exiled from the Vast Countenance. Josephine reached for more, bombarding the old man with questions, hungry for names and words and history and explanations. She realised, almost too late, that she was terrifying him—that he’d got to his feet and was crouching, ready to leap—that the army on the roof was about to throw itself at her.

She withdrew from his mind, retreated, made herself small and quiet and harmless.

Slowly he settled himself again, drawing in his wings. The army outside relaxed. Cautiously, they resumed their conversation.

After a long while, a few of Piccadilly’s fellows came creeping in—frightened at first—to discover what she was. Soon she had an audience.

Chapter Twenty-five

When Arthur finally tracked down what was left of the Company, he got a cold reception. They were hiding—
planning
, Atwood said—in Sun’s house. It was a nondescript building near the Albert Docks. Inside, it was finely appointed, full of odd statuary that looked, to Arthur’s eye, only half-finished. He tracked it first by memory—he recalled Thérèse mentioning a visit to Sun’s house by the docks; and then by asking after a well-to-do sort of Indian gentleman—a merchant, perhaps, or a nabob, or something of the sort; and lastly by means of Mrs Archer’s inquiries among the pigeons, the rats, and the crabs. He went alone. It was Dimmick who answered the door, and the next thing Arthur knew, he was being wrestled through the hall and thrown onto the uncarpeted floor, where Atwood and Jupiter stood over him and accused him of various forms of treason, oathbreaking, vile cowardice, and desertion.
Gracewell,
he said.
Gracewell …
Dimmick—without malice, but in a professional sort of way—gave his leg a kick.
I have Gracewell
 … Sun put a hand on Dimmick’s shoulder and said,
Hear him out.

Atwood helped Arthur up. “Gracewell?”

“I have him.”

“By God. You’re not joking, are you, Shaw? Well, well. Perhaps I’ve misjudged you. For Gracewell, one can forgive a little treason.”

“Podmore and I—well, I saw to it that Podmore let him go.”

“How? Why?”

“More to the point,” Jupiter said, “where
is
Gracewell?”

He was in the care of Archer and her son, in a boarding-house. That sent Atwood into a rage all over again. Dimmick, who’d started rolling himself a cigarette, put it behind his ear and waited for instructions.
Archer! Shaw, are you mad?
And that wasn’t the worst of it.

Arthur explained what he’d promised her for her assistance. Atwood positively exploded when he heard her terms: nothing less than full membership in the Company, access to its books and records, a full one-ninth share in all profits and proceeds of any expedition to Mars—

“How dare you, Shaw? How dare you—who do you think you are to make such a promise?”

—and full participation in any such expedition, should there ever be one.