(The commonality of the hominid form across the worlds remains a puzzle, by the way. Some argue for a convergence of form to similar environments, just as a dolphin, a seabound mammal, has come to resemble a shark, which is a fish. Others posit older migrations, long preceding the Martians to the earth; perhaps the Jovians – or even the inhabitants of lesser but still older worlds, Saturn or Uranus or Neptune - have visited our young planets before, and left a kind of imprint of design. But the deeper differences, even of the use of different structural materials for the skeletons, seems to argue against that. A wistful mystery! Are we interplanetary cousins, or not?)
Venus, according to Arrhenius, is warm and dripping wet: a world of swamps, full of water in the sky, on the land. It is not a world so much as a vast lagoon. The surface temperature is probably twenty or thirty degrees hotter than the Congo, and the humidity six times the earth’s. This heat creates immense stacked clouds, piling up miles above the surface and laden with water vapour. We cannot see through the clouds to the surface of the world, and the Cythereans can never see the stars. But Venus is a bright world; the sky must shine uniformly when it is day.
The Cythereans are ideally adapted to their world. Their aquatic modifications are more than superficial – more than the webbed fingers and toes, the neatly streamlined coat of hair. They have strong voluminous lungs which can store air even when collapsed under the pressure of a weight of deep water. They have gills, which I had observed on my first encounter with Charlie. And, more subtly yet, they have three hearts, one to circulate the blood around the body and two supplementary organs which keep the blood flowing through the gills, where oxygen is extracted from the water to feed the blood. I am told the octopus on the earth has a similar adaptation.
So thick is Venus’s cloud bank that the heat must be spread uniformly from equator to pole – and, say some of Arrhenius’s followers, so must the vegetation types be uniform. On a world without geographic or seasonal variation, evolutionary innovation, they say, must be deterred. Venus may be a world of simpler, duller types than our own – fern swamps inhabited by slow-moving herbivores, perhaps, across a changeless world. But others point to the evident intelligence of the Cythereans themselves - they are perhaps as intelligent as Neanderthal Man, some have opined. They are hunters and tool-makers, though the latter behaviour is inhibited by the available raw material; on Venus, stones that might have made Mousterian hand-axes are buried beneath miles of rotting vegetation in the swamp. Some commentators have suggested that they are essentially aesthetes: their intellect focused not on the striving that characterises humanity, but on the sheer athletic pleasure of the swim, and the competition and company of others.
Stapledon has even speculated that, so fecund and moist and warm is Venus, there may be other varieties of Cythereans, on scraps of dry land in that watery sphere perhaps, or even flying in the clouds, which are thick and dense and perhaps rich with aerial game – and if so, those happy flyers may have been beyond the reach of the Martian hunters when they came.
However, as I was to observe myself, some characteristics of the Cythereans’ behaviour and their physical adaptations are reminiscent not of hunters but of prey animals. Their pregnancies are brief compared to ours; the babies emerge active and alert and fast-growing – ready to swim, and flee the predators attracted by the scent of birthing fluid, perhaps. And then there is the fear they will sometimes display before manifestations of the large: they will cower from Zeppelins, flee even from the shadows of gasometers. Perhaps great beasts like tyrannosaurs or Owen’s pliosaurs patrol the swampy lands and oceans of that world. And perhaps it has been fear and flight that has driven their evolution to intelligence, rather than aggression: a need for cooperation with each other, perhaps, as was so evident in my brief witnessing of them.
Certainly the Cythereans became prey when the Martians invaded.
As Verity pointed out, ‘Of course every adult Cytherean on the earth must have been brought by the Martians in their cylinders. Can you see how many of them are wounded? The fur hides it unless it’s a grievous injury, but there are lumps and contusions and badly healed scars, and some have their ears bitten, or even fingers missing: injuries they brought with them from the cylinders – so we think, anyhow.’
‘Injuries inflicted by the Martians?’
‘Perhaps not directly.’ She faced me. ‘Imagine how it was! The Martian humanoids seem shaped by their slavery – they seem to have evolved to its conditions, so long have they been suppressed. Not so the Cythereans, squat, strong, stocky, and used to freedom – and with a will to live. If you were in that pen on the cylinder, suspended in interplanetary space – when the Martians came to bring out the next one for the crew’s supper treat – would you not fight to survive? The battles in the dark of space, to stay at the back of the pack, must have been brutal and desperate.’
‘Even so, some evidently lived to reach the earth.’
‘And perhaps that was the plan all along,’ Verity said. ‘The Cythereans probably have a better chance of surviving on our earth than the spindlier Martian humanoids. So they have been released, to breed and for the hunting in the future.’
I smiled. ‘Like rabbits in Australia.’
‘That’s the idea.’ She looked out at the Cythereans at play. ‘But it’s to be hoped that they don’t prove as much of a pest as the rabbits, or the prospects for them on this earth – well, they won’t get much of a welcome.’
As the light of day slowly faded, the cubs napped, snuggling against their mothers. And the adults started pairing off. It was an unplanned process, a languid swimming to and fro, a matter of jostling, nudging with the nose, a caress with a webbed hand. Then, not yards from their neighbours – and within full sight of us – the coupling began. The most basic method was face to face in the water, with the male and female clinging to each others’ upper torsos to give anchorage, while the male thrust and the female pushed back. Sometimes they would go front to back, the male on top, the female’s face lifted above the water so she could breathe noisily, and with an absent expression on her small face. And sometimes, before or after, even instead of a full coupling, they would play, exploring with their hands and mouths.
I dared not look at Verity.
She laughed at me. ‘You get used to the sight. They are quite without shame.’
‘Are we to regard them as animals, then, for all their cleverness? Animals have no shame because they can’t conceive of it.’
‘Not animals. They have a kind of language, you know – you hear it in the night sometimes when the world is quiet, a kind of continuous babbling, like a brook. Perhaps it’s just that they haven’t had thousands of years of priests telling them that their bodies and their natural functions are sinful.’
‘And what of Charlie’s crucifix?’
‘As I said, you can thank the Vicar at Abbotsdale for that,’ she murmured. ‘He has become rather obsessed by such speculations. Are the Cythereans fallen, or not, as we are? And what of the Martians? Was there a Martian Messiah, a Cytherean Christ? Or must the message of our Jesus, Christ the Man, be taken to these other worlds? Not trivial questions, you will agree. So the Vicar tried to engage with the Cythereans on that topic. I saw him wade out into the muck of a mill-pond to give Charlie that crucifix! He liked the sparkly bauble, I suppose.’ She looked out at the water, the shadowy shapes still gently paired, and winked at me. ‘Between us, I think our good Vicar was rather too interested in the Cythereans’ healthy sexuality than is good for him. Come on, I’m exhausted just watching them . . .’
Exhausted perhaps, but I was also charmed. I admit that I always felt a certain repulsion at the sight of a Martian humanoid – not so much from the physical form as the evidently evolved abjectness of the race. The Cythereans were new to that game, and in them I saw something of the Noble Savage, I thought. But that is only my partial and prejudiced perception. The Cythereans were animals – people– with a cultural and biological heritage o
f their own, indeed as the Martians had once been, and had no need of my approval. But I offer these reflections honestly, for what they are worth.
We returned to the house. We banked down the stove on which we’d boiled the rainwater for our tea, and made our toilet, and retired to bed.
I think I slept well enough, once again. I don’t recall that we’d made any specific plans for the next day. We had food enough, even tea, and we were both getting over the trauma of our arrival, and myself the strain of the days of travel even before that. I think we had vaguely intended to stay at least a day or two, to gather our strength and plot our next step – which would have involved getting off the island and out of the Misbourne flood, for a start.
Whatever we had intended, it never came to pass. For we were both woken in the small hours by the Cythereans’ unearthly screams.
26
A HARVESTING
In our borrowed night gowns, we met in the gloom of the landing.
Verity said, ‘You heard it.’
‘Yes. We dress and leave.’
‘Agreed.’
I hurried back to my room. Last night, lucky for me, I had been compos mentis enough to lay out my travelling clothes, a bag to hand mostly packed – it was a shoulder bag I had found, for I had left my beloved rucksack in Marriott’s inn. I threw on my clothes, crammed the rest of my gear into the bag, pulled on my boots, and even so I was out later than Verity, despite her broken arm.
We hurried downstairs and through the kitchen – even in that moment of peril I snatched the tea caddy from the table and shoved it in my pocket – and we emerged on our veranda, where we had spent the last evening. This faced west, and the sky was clear, still grey before the dawn light came, and the swampy flood water lay before us, its surface eerily still where the red weed lay on it in great lily-like sheets. And not a sight of the Cythereans, and their screams were no longer to be heard. It was as if they had never existed.
‘Gone!’ I said. ‘But I suppose they had even less packing to do than us -’
‘No.’ She pointed with her good arm, into the murk. ‘Look! There’s one.’
I saw a swimming form, just under the surface, darting with remarkable speed and with scarcely a visible motion of hands or feet. This figure raced towards us, and then reared up out of the water, droplets spraying all around. I saw that it was Charlie, the crucifix still sparkling on his chest, just as before. Even as he rose he yelled, a weird ululation, and, in mid-air at the peak of his leap, he tapped his temple with his fist, and pointed beyond us, pointed to the east. Then he flopped on his back, hit the water, and vanished.
‘Head,’ Verity murmured. ‘He was trying to say – head. He’s warning us. For that is the Cythereans’ word for -’
Then the long shadow cast by the dawn light swept over us, and I saw its detail spread across the mere in front of me: the peculiar shape of the cowl, the three long legs, the blunt gun, the dangling net within which something squirmed.
Head. What is a Martian, but a disembodied head? The Cythereans had it right, I thought. And they had it right to flee.
Now the fighting-machine itself rose up above the house, gaunt and black against the dawn sky. We could only stand and stare. It was in a mood for collecting rather than killing, I saw; people had already been gathered up into its net where they lay like so many fishes, one on top of the other, some lying passive, others struggling, pulling at the net as if to climb out of there or to rip it open. I could hear their voices, sobs and cries and yells of rage, from high in the air, faint.
And now I saw there was another net, dangling below the hood itself a hundred feet in the air, just below the seat of the controlling Martian. Not a feature I recognised from previous images of the fighting-machines, it looked like a lobe of spittle, from a drooling mouth.
I had a hunch about that second net. I tried to hold my nerve as the thing bent towards us, and one long tentacle uncoiled from the hood, metallic, glinting, supple, like no mechanical device made by human hands.
Verity raged, ‘Stupid! Lazy! I’ve been here long enough to know. We should have kept watch, as the Cythereans must have; we should have taken it in turns. Well, no point running now. Unless you’d prefer the Heat-Ray to the exsanguination -’
I grabbed her hand. ‘No. Wait,.’
The tentacle descended further, as the Martian machine bent down with a kind of eerie grace; top-heavy as it was, it never looked like toppling. That tentacle! It was only yards over our heads now. I could see the rings that made up its articulated structure, the gaps between; there were faint puffs of green smoke as it reached for us. Its sinuous gestures looked almost tender.
And I peered again at that lesser net that dangled from the hood. Now was the time to throw the dice. I yelled, as loud as I could, ‘Cook! Albert Cook!’
Verity stared at me, astonished.
‘Albert Cook!’
The tentacle stopped, ten fighting-machine itself seemed feet above our skulls. The frozen. Even those already caught in its net seemed distracted now; I saw them shift and squirm, curiosity working - and perhaps they had a grain of hope, which my calls did not deserve to evoke.
That second net, the spittle-drop, began to descend, silently, smoothly, on a lengthening cable. Soon I could see that a single man rode in it, and not cast in like a landed fish; he sat in a cushioned seat, like the pilot of a biplane in his cockpit. He wore peculiar garments, what looked like an expensive leather coat, a white wig like a judge’s, and a heavy gold medallion like a mayor’s around his neck.
As he came closer, he could see my face, and I could see his.
‘You!’ I said.
‘You!’ said the artilleryman.
27
A FIGHTING-MACHINE’S PILOT
‘What are you doing ’ere?’
I shouted up, ‘I might ask you the same question.’ Verity must have been as terrified as I was to be so close to the Martian machine – feet away! And up close, as anyone with experience of active Martian technology will tell you, there was an ineffable sense of life about it, even though at rest it was more still than any living thing. Yet Verity stood there with one hand on hip, her bad arm in its sling, defiant. ‘Julie, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’
Cook glared down at her. ‘Don’t get lippy with me. I know you. You’re with that crew at Abbotsdale, aren’t you?’
‘What if I am?’
‘You want to be more respectful. Or else, the next time I’m a striding across the country on my fine steed ’ere, I might attract ’is attention to you, rather than make ’im look the other way.’
‘I don’t believe you have that much control – though you’ve evidently sold your soul for that seat.’
He shrugged; he seemed genuinely indifferent to that barb. ‘Believe as you like. You, though,’ and he turned again on me. ‘I ’aven’t seen you since –when was it? That dead astronomer’s gaff, before the cylinders started falling again. Came to find me, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said bluntly, and that layer of truth held up, at least. ‘I’ve got a message.’
‘Who for?’
‘The Martians. You evidently have some kind of – relationship with them.’
He grinned at that. ‘Well, given as ’ow they ’aven’t killed me yet, or sucked out my blood, I suppose you could say that. A message? From ’oo?’
‘From Walter Jenkins.’
And from a grin, his face twisted immediately into a snarl. ‘That liar.’
I tried to suppress a laugh, incongruous as it might seem in such a situation. Here was a man dangling from the cowl of a Martian killing machine, and he was still smarting at the slights he perceived Walter had delivered him in the pages of a book, years ago. ‘Are you that petty, Bert? Even now? Even here? Maybe we deserve to lose this war if we’re all so small as that.’
‘Oh, we deserve to lose the war all right – or most people do. Walter Jenkins does, anyhow. He’s such a weak fool. All that stuff
about utopias, and a cleansing of society, before “moral advancement” becomes possible. Can’t you see, this is what ’e longed for? And other comfortable fools like ’im. An apocalypse to smash everything up. Well, I’m not so soft. I don’t look beyond the destruction and dream of golden cities full of, full of fairness. I embrace the apocalypse. It’s not a phase, it’s a destination. It’s an end. Ilive in it. I inhabit it.’ He grinned. ‘I’m ’ere, now, ain’t I? Look at me!’
I couldn’t deny it. ‘But will you help me? I’ve come a long way for this, Bert – all the way from Berlin, if you want to know. To see you. And we’ve known each other for – what, fifteen years?’
‘Well, that’s true.’ He grinned again, his mood mercurial as ever, and adjusted his judge’s wig. ‘This is a step up from those days, though, ain’t it? Fine. You want to talk, we’ll talk. Do you know West Wycombe, the caves?’
‘I do,’ Verity said.
‘Very well. Go there. You’ll be on Shanks’s pony, for I can’t offer you a lift. This Martian’s hardly a London cabbie.’ His joke seemed to amuse him, and he cackled. ‘I’d cut across country if I was you, and keep to the ’edgerows.’ He jerked a thumb at the fighting-machine above him. ‘The lads are ’ungry, and they’re on the prowl for fresh blood – well, as you’ve seen. That’s why we came ’ere. Them fish-men like the flood, nice big stretch of open water for them to frolic about in. Easy pickings, and there’s always a fat old beggar amongst ’em who’s got too slow to swim away . . .’ He glared at us. ‘How did you get ’ere, anyhow?’
I looked at Verity. ‘Can’t be any harm telling him. Marriott won’t try it again for a while. Bert, we came because the local franc-tireurs thought they could blow the dam and flood the Redoubt, the big Martian pit.’
The Massacre of Mankind Page 29