I gave in. “For you and your book, then,” I said to Defoe. “For I do believe all the rest is nonsense.”
“Good man,” Defoe said, and he started to move. “Come on. Help me out of this damn ditch before I freeze in place.”
* * * *
So Defoe and I crept out of the ditch.
In the abandoned luggage that littered the road we found much that was useful—clothing, blankets, flagons of beer, victuals like cheeses and salted meats—and much that was not. I was startled to discover what people will carry with them when they flee for their lives: we found a trunk entirely full of hat boxes; and we found a spinet, carefully wrapped up in a blanket. Well, the fond owners of these pieces were learning to get by without them now.
Defoe watched me working through this stuff. “You have a ruthless way about you with other people's possessions, Jack.”
Having had my conscience poked by Swift, I wasn't in the mood for any more. “I have never been a thief to any great degree. A wastrel, a faithless lover, and a coward, yes. But I cannot believe that the owners of these items will ever return to collect them.”
“Quite right. So we have a moral right to make use of them, do we not?” That sounded like sophistry to me, but I did not remark on it. “Come. Let's lug our haul back to the scholars.”
For all their elevated intellects, both Newton and Swift fell on the meat and cheese readily enough, and spread blankets over their legs. Swift in fact had used a pocket flint to start a fire, of timber from a smashed-up trunk. I fretted over this, worrying that the smoke might give away our location, but Swift sneered at me. “You aren't dealing with highwaymen, boy; you must set your instincts aside. The Phoebeans are another order of creature entirely. You might as well try to hide from the Eye of God.” I had no convincing counter-argument.
And Newton sat upright like an elderly bear waking from hibernation, and he pointed. “In this changed world, even a scrambled-together bonfire has lessons for those with eyes to see.”
I looked where he was pointing, and saw there was an ice crab in the ditch with us, only a few inches high, like a milking-stool built for a doll. It was stuck in a kind of gully in the frozen mud, and to emerge it would have had to pass by the fire, and this it was remarkably reluctant to do. When at last it inched toward the flame it grew sluggish and then immobile. But when, at a gesture from Newton, Swift shielded the beast from the heat with his hat, it quickly revived and scuttled away.
“It doesn't like fire,” I breathed.
Swift snorted. “Nor would you if you were made of ice.”
Newton said, “Indeed it seems to suffer a kind of heat paralysis—a calenture, if you like.”
Defoe mused, “Yet they arrive in heat, in those steaming projectiles that fall from the sky.”
Newton said, “You, sir, entered this world through a birth-passage of flesh and bone; if I were to stuff you back there now it would surely kill you.”
“And my mother,” Defoe murmured, but the point was made.
Swift declared, “Sir Isaac has shown us the way by example. We must observe, observe! That is our task.” He glanced at the sky. “There is light yet for the two of you to return to the road and study our visitors—whatever they are up to in their pit.”
Defoe and I glanced at each other. Defoe asked, “And why not you, Jonathan?”
“I have the fire to attend to. Besides, Defoe, spying comes naturally to you, does it not?”
Defoe glared at him. But he turned to me. “Are you game for a bit more adventure, lad?”
I was reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire, but I grabbed a handful of cheese and a small keg of beer, and led the way out of the ditch.
* * * *
V
Despite Swift's theorizing, we followed our instincts and crept out of sight along the road until we came to a tipped-over coach. We hid inside its carcass, thus sheltering from the raw wind, and feasted on cheese and beer while we peeked out through broken slats at the Phoebeans. To inspect them we used my father-in-law's Pocket Perspective, which we passed from one to the other.
The pit their latest bolus had dug out was a nest of industry. Phoebeans from miles hence were sliding across the country to converge on this place, which appeared to be of importance to them, and many of them already stood over the crater. Some were wider than they were tall, if you can picture it, like immense tables with that characteristic lenticular shape to their tops, but a few towered over the others. When they were at rest they were entirely still, with no signs of life, and the gang of them together gave you the impression of some fantastic city, with those tall fellows like the water-towers you see in some dry countries. But others moved, even clambering in and out of the pit, as if engaged on some vast construction work.
“When they move,” Defoe said, “that sound—I have met travelers who have visited the Frozen Sea, and chill Tartary. They describe the groan of the ice that plates the sea, and of the ice rivers that pour down from the mountains. Swift mocks my interest in such fellows and their tales—he says he is planning a travel book of his own, entirely mendacious, that will spite my Crusoe and the whole genre—let him! If not for such interviews I would not know of the sound of ice en masse, which is just that noise the Phoebeans make.”
“But nothing more purposeful,” I said.
He glanced at me. “What do you mean?”
“They have no voice I can hear. They do not even bellow like oxen, the calls of the dumb animals. They are silent save for the grind of their icy limbs.”
“That's a good observation,” Defoe said. He fumbled for a battered journal and, with a bit of charcoal, made a note. “No apparent communication. Look, though.” He passed me the Perspective. “Can you see a sort of light playing about their limbs when they move?”
In the darkling light, I discerned a sort of sparking about their tall legs when the creatures were in motion, and especially the seamless joints where the limbs slid under the icy carapaces. “I have seen such sparks before,” I murmured.
“You have?”
“It is a kind of Electrick. If you rub a bit of amber with a cloth, it might spark, and will pick up scraps of paper.” I used to perform such tricks in my classes, trying to induce an interest in the world's phenomena in the generally cloddish minds of my students. I felt an odd pang, then, for those rows of innocent faces in Edinburgh and Jedburgh—more dependents you have abandoned, Jack, in a lifetime of selfish flight, and think too of Verity in Jedburgh with her unborn child, and poor Millie in Edinburgh with hers born dead—think on and have done with it!
Defoe made more notes. “Old Newton will pat our heads for this.”
I ventured, “The Dean said you were suited to life as a spy.”
Defoe snorted. “Spiteful old fool. It's true it's an adventurous life I've had, lad—perhaps you know something of my biography?”
“Not a thing.”
He looked offended, and while we were stuck in that broken box he whispered to me more than I wanted to know about his life: his birth to dissident Presbyterians, the dowry he gambled away, his career as a merchant that ended up with him arrested for debt, and then his pamphleteering that got him pilloried and put in prison, from whence he was hoiked out by a Tory minister on condition he spy for the English government. His greatest triumph had been in Scotland, where he had spread doubt and division in the Scottish parliament during the negotiations that led up to the Act of Union with England.
“If I'd been exposed the Edinburgh mob would have torn me apart! I'm nervous enough in going back there now. So you see, Jack, yes, I have spied, Swift is right about that. But life has a way of compromising one. Few of us have the luxury he does of indulging his damnable Augustan superiority from his seat in Saint Pat's in Dublin....”
On he went, dissecting the flaws in the Dean's complicated character, while the Phoebeans built their city in the dirt, and I wondered whether such rivalries ever raged in a termite hill before a human boot came alo
ng to crush it.
* * * *
We returned to the ditch, where Newton and Swift had made a merry nest before the fire with blankets and coats spread over them, while Defoe and I had been shivering on the road.
Defoe eagerly reported our observations, stressing the evidence of Electrick, but Newton seemed unimpressed. “It might be so. Electrick is related to an effluvium in the body, which may be removed by friction. If there is an opportunity to dissect one of these Phoebeans, small or large, we may detect the flow of that effluvium in its veins. Perhaps there is some analogy of the circulation of the blood in a man, which Harvey mapped. And indeed perhaps heat induces some calenture in them that impedes that flow.”
I said, “Sir, I do not understand why you refer to the beasts as ‘Phoebeans.’ What have they to do with the moon?”
“Nothing!” Swift declared for him. “But the head of the Comet that brought the Phoebeans to the earth sailed past the moon. Some ignorant astronomers believed it originated there and labeled it accordingly, and that is the name that reached the court of King George—and stuck.”
Defoe shook his head. “If only its course had differed by a few degrees, and it had struck the moon and not come to the earth!”
I said, “But if the Comet did not come from the moon, then where did it arise?”
“That we do not know,” Newton said. “But the Astronomer Royal sent me observations which, before I was rudely turfed out of London, enabled me to use Halley's methods to figure the Comet's path as a hyperbola; it has come in from the trans-Saturnian dark, and will sail around the sun and return there. I determined that it passed close to the planet Mars; and I consulted recent observations of that planet. You may know that in the Plague Year the Italian Cassini observed caps of white close to the dynamical poles on that world....”
“Really?” I was intrigued; I had not known that the surface of any other world had been mapped.
“In the years since, his nephew Maraldi has seen how these caps wax and wane with the seasons. Maraldi speculates that the caps are made of ice or frost, which congeals in the winter of Mars and melts in the summer. And last year, when Maraldi watched yon Comet sail by Mars, he saw a prickling of light over the north polar cap of that world.”
I was stunned by this. “So perhaps this Italian saw icefalls on Mars, just as here!”
“It is clear that the Phoebeans are creatures of the cold realm beyond the sun, who have come sailing on their Comet to plant their crab-like seeds on the inner worlds.”
Swift was agitated by this talk of the Phoebeans coming from the heights of heaven. “But surely the Phoebeans could be some atmospheric phenomenon—spawned in high clouds of ice, could they not? Surely they cannot have a heavenly origin. For as Aristotle himself observed, ‘Order and definiteness are much more plainly manifest in the celestial bodies than in our own frame; while change and chance are characteristic of the perishable things of earth.'”
Defoe snorted.
But Newton regarded Swift gravely. “It is disturbing indeed to imagine that such disorder as this can rain down on our poor Earth from that celestial realm, the seat of order I myself have figured in my work. And yet it seems to be so; Maraldi's observations prove it.”
“No, no.” Swift stood up in the ditch, trying to glimpse the Phoebeans and their works through the debris on the road. “No, I won't have it. Such giant, beautiful creatures as agents of chaos? A heavenly origin for demons of destruction? Rather they may be an example of the truly rational being, Sir Isaac, that which we degraded creatures only imagine ourselves to be.”
Defoe said, “And what ‘truly rational beings’ go around digging holes in the earth and blowing up carthorses?”
Swift waved an arm. “This may all be a part of a grand design that we cannot discern, any more than a worm comprehends meaning in a man's footfall.”
Defoe laughed at him. “So you dance in your thinking like a maiden at a gavotte, Swift. If they are chaotic they cannot be from heaven; if Newton proves they are from heaven, they cannot be chaotic—despite the evidence of your eyes. Well, if they are so superior as all that, you had better hope that they treat us better than you English in Ireland treat the natives there.”
Swift, growing enraged, would have responded again, but I held up a hand. “It is growing dark. The Phoebeans are more active at night, have we not observed? Listen.”
The scholars fell silent and duly listened. And after a moment they all heard, as I had, a groaning of ice, a crackle like the crushing of an autumn leaf. I risked a slither out of the ditch to see.
That groan was the sound of stressed ice, the crackle the sparking of the Electrick effluvium that might be Phoebean blood. The Phoebeans were on the march.
* * * *
VI
A great convoy of them, pale in the fading light, slid down the Great North Road and the ground around it, heading south toward us.
And behind this marching city, I saw a still more tremendous sight. From the latest crater gigantic pillars shot into the air, mountainous; I had not seen the like before; they might have been a thousand feet high. And a tremendous ice lens of similar dimensions soared up the column of pillars to tower over even the marchers before it; indeed on the back of this new ice behemoth rode more Phoebeans, structures the size of cathedrals like fleas on a dog's back.
As the twilight gathered and the Comet unfurled its spectral sail across the sky, this behemoth ground into motion. It was like a mountain on the move. Where its mighty limbs scraped the ground, ramparts of turf and soil the height of a man were casually thrown up. And from its sharp circular rim ice eggs flew out to arc to the ground, each the birth of yet another Phoebean.
I scurried back into the ditch and described what I saw. “It is like a tremendous mother. The Queen of the Phoebean hive, come to lay her eggs.”
Newton nodded his great head. “I fear you have it. The Phoebeans want the rocks of England for their cold nests, not her people. And we have happened on the heart of the invasion—the Queen herself, as you say, Hobbes.”
But Swift was growing agitated again. “I won't believe it! If the Phoebeans are here to smash up the old human order of corruption, greed, and stupidity, then good! But they will replace it, not with chaos, but a new world order of reason. They need only be convinced that we lowly beasts are capable of reason too, and we will be spared.” And with that he jumped to his feet. He staggered; later I learned that the man was an habitual sufferer of vertigo and hearing loss. But he jumped out of the ditch, and he strode toward the Phoebean procession, arms uplifted. “Master Phoebean! Hear me!”
Defoe called after him, “Don't be a fool, man! Jack—we must bring him back.”
“Not I. If you want to emulate Swift in being squashed like a bug, please do so.”
He glared at me. “Showing your true colors at last, Jack? Despite all you said I thought better of you.”
“Then you're to be disappointed, aren't you? And nor do I believe you will get yourself killed trying to save a clear enemy.”
“Then you don't know me,” Defoe said. And to my great surprise he hopped up and out of the ditch, and was gone after Swift.
Newton eyed me, but did not speak. As we waited in silence, I was brutally glad I had not gone with the others, and stretched out my miserable life a few more minutes.
Defoe returned, alone. He would not meet my eye.
He told us how Swift had approached the Phoebean caravan, arms aloft like a preacher, calling out in English, French, and High and Low Dutch. Defoe tried to pull him away, but Swift would not respond. Finally he settled on Latin, the tongue of better men than us, and stuck to it—stuck to it, Defoe said, as the lead monster in that walking city loomed over him, and its sliding limb erased him in an instant.
That was that for Jonathan Swift. I have never known a man so disappointed in the world he found himself in, and we low humans with whom he had to share it, and it was that disappointment that killed him in the en
d, for it blinded him to the realities.
* * * *
We three sat stunned by this turn. I offered Defoe some of the beer; he did not respond. The rumble of the Phoebean caravan was loud, a grinding of ice that made your teeth ache, and it went on and on.
It was Newton who stirred first, a grave figure, huge in his mound of coats and blankets. “We must fight back,” he said. “If not, and if they continue on their course and that behemoth Queen reaches London, the whole country will be seeded with their eggs.”
Defoe nodded. “And when England is all churned up into crawling ice bodies, where will we be?”
“France!” said I.
Defoe looked at me blackly. Then he asked Newton, “How, sir? How shall we fight back?”
“We must make for Newcastle. If we find a trap and horses, we might yet outrace the Queen's caravan, which is tremendous but slow.”
Defoe said, “We might find a horse or two in Shilbottle. And in Newcastle?”
Newton said, “The city is walled, is it not? And it stands over the Great North Road. We will make our stand. If we can stop the Phoebeans there we may save England. But if we fall then all falls with us, and eternal night for mankind will follow.”
“Then we must not fall.”
“In the morning,” Newton said. “The Phoebeans are relatively quiescent by day. In the morning we will outrace them.” He closed his eyes, and fell into a kind of slumber. He was a very old man, I remembered, and must be exhausted.
Defoe looked me square in the face. “So, Jack?”
“You go to Newcastle if you want. I'm off.”
Defoe pulled a grubby overcoat higher over the great man's chest. “If you won't help us for my sake—if not for the sake of your family, if you have ‘em, or your own unborn children—if you won't do it for your own honor, then do it for him.”
Asimov's SF, September 2008 Page 19