The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  Two Martians lived in those rooms. They were the two she’d seen embracing when she first arrived. There was nothing particularly special about them, so far as she knew. It seemed to her that they were young, and she thought of them—for want of a better word—as married.

  Both had long elfin faces, eerily beautiful, with narrow mouths and inscrutable silver eyes. Both had long thin arms tight with corded muscle. One was very slightly larger than the other, and had more vivid colouration. The other had somewhat more extravagantly complex wings. She supposed that one was male, and the other female, but she had no firm idea which was which. Rather arbitrarily, she dubbed the more-purple one Adam and the complex-winged one Eve. And then she settled in to haunt them.

  * * *

  For the most part the Martians ate communally, like schoolchildren or soldiers—and sparingly, picking at fruit and fungus and the sharp spines of red leaves. Meals fit for hummingbirds. They argued vigorously as they ate, about God knows what. Like Athenians; a disputatious people. They drank a red wine—there was no other word for it—which had the scent of a stronger and fiercer wine than any Josephine had ever encountered on Earth, a wine that poets might write about, that might drive Bacchae to flesh-rending frenzy. Adam and Eve drank it, then fell about in what might have been ecstasy or laughter or dancing—and what quite often turned into playful fighting, or possibly mating. It was hard to be sure—their wings touched, the frilled edges shimmering and trembling, forming a discreet curtain. The first time it happened, Josephine fled at once. Afterwards she peeked—at first with a mixture of fascination and deep embarrassment, then with a certain scientific detachment. If she was to understand them, she had to know everything. They were, after all, not human. She remembered following her father about on his visits to the farmers of his parish and glimpsing the coupling of farm animals. Strange, the things that could make one homesick.

  * * *

  One day she panicked, waking from memories of London, to find that Adam and Eve were both gone. They’d left while she was drifting—but only to move to some upper rooms of their tower. They had few neighbours, and few possessions, and appeared somewhat nomadic.

  * * *

  Another thing Josephine learned was that the rows of beads on the floor, which she’d taken for a chess-like game, were writing; or rather, something half-way between writing and a sort of psychic phonograph. Martian language was mostly motion. They moved the beads with their wills, imparting to them patterns of motions that could be repeated endlessly. It was rather like automatic spirit-writing, or a medium’s planchette. She learned that there was a particular pattern of floating motions that Eve liked. Martian scripture, perhaps, or music, or a favourite novel.

  * * *

  Day by day, Adam and Eve grew less strange to her. She recognised their habits, their little courtesies to each other, their signs of affection or irritation. She learned their quirks of personality. Eve was passionate and quick to anger. Adam was slower, cooler-headed. She began to think of them rather the way one thinks of the couple who live at the end of the street, who one doesn’t know by name, but who must surely be rather the same sort of person as oneself.

  Their routines were erratic, by the standards of Londoners. They had no fixed or regular employment. A day on the white moon was like at least a dozen days in London. Sometimes one or both of them went to work: sweeping some patch of street, or tending flowers, or making and sorting beads in a low-ceilinged workshop next to a red fire. Sometimes they had tremendously long fits of inertia, and what she took to be melancholy. Sometimes they went to a place just across the river, where they stood for ages in a long low building shaped like a wave of white stone, in front of twelve smaller Martians. These were the first children Josephine had seen; they reminded her irresistibly of large butterflies. Adam and Eve stood on a low stage and talked to them all day. Teachers, then, or possibly priests. Like priests or like scholars they seemed to talk a lot, and argue constantly, about nothing in particular. A disputatious people. Sometimes they fought. Their arguments seemed to get fiercer and more bitter as the red moon steadily grew larger.

  * * *

  After a while, it seemed to Josephine that she’d learned all she could from them, and perhaps it was time to haunt some other household.

  She might drift from house to house for ever. Why not? She might outlast Adam and Eve—bodiless, she might live for ever! That was a rather ghastly vision of eternity. In fact, it made her so afraid and unhappy that she was unable to concentrate her attention on anything for a while, and some great unguessable span of time passed in the blink of an eye, as if she’d ceased to exist. She only knew that time had passed because the city appeared to have undergone some sort of storm, or a small earthquake. Many of the long vines and tendrils that hung across the streets had been cut through, exposing raw pink fibres. Dead flowers lay in drifts. There was damage to the stonework, and quite a number of the Martians sported fresh wounds. Adam’s wings were torn on his left side, and he had been slashed from forehead to mouth, right through one of his beautiful silver eyes. Their classroom was down to ten children. On the other hand, the baleful red moon had dwindled to a pin-prick again, and the fighting in Piccadilly had stopped.

  * * *

  She could see, and hear, and even smell. Why, then, shouldn’t she be able to touch?

  It was faint at first, but after long trial and effort, and deep introspection over the difference between sensation and imagination, she found that she could sense differences between surfaces. The white stone was soft, a little like firm india-rubber. The mossy plants tingled. The wings of a Martian were sharp, and somehow silky and rough at the same time.

  And if she could touch something, then why shouldn’t she move it?

  It took days and nights of practice and study and frustration. It was like learning to walk again, or speak.

  * * *

  Adam and Eve came home, leaping up to the ledge outside their rooms, landing crouched. Adam, wounded, stumbled; Eve helped him. They groomed each other’s furled wings with their long violet fingers. By now that no longer struck Josephine as odd; in fact, it struck her as touchingly domestic.

  When they stepped into their room it was with great joy that she finally lifted up all of the red beads at once, hundreds of them, and set them spinning madly around one another.

  Adam recoiled in horror and stumbled against the wall. Eve shrieked, snapped her wings wide open with the sound of a gunshot, and fled from the window, pulling Adam after her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  For a moment Josephine wasn’t sure what had happened. Then she let the red beads go and moved to the window. Adam and Eve were already almost out of sight, gliding with their wings outstretched high over the surface of the wine-red river, shining in the moonlight—no! Not moonlight, of course—Mars-light. They curved right together, Eve leading the way.

  Following them, Josephine felt for the first time that she was truly flying. The sensation was exhilarating. They couldn’t escape her, turn and wheel however they liked. She pursued them effortlessly. She was stubbornly determined to make herself known to them.

  Adam faltered, slowly descending towards the water. Eve rose higher. Watching Adam settle on the riverbank, Josephine lost sight of Eve for a moment. When she next saw her, Eve was climbing like a squirrel up the side of one of the tall pillars that ran along the Embankment. When she reached the top of it, she stood with her wings outstretched and began a rather eccentric dance. Josephine watched with amusement.

  With Mars-light at her back, Eve cast tremendous shadows over the city below. Martians going about their business looked up in alarm. Blue silver-eyed heads poked out of windows. Then, from a thousand windows, a thousand sets of wings took to the air. Eve’s dance had been an alarm, a battle-signal. Suddenly the city was in a panic.

  Eve! The name was ridiculous now. There was no longer anything familiar or domestic about her—it. In fact, it was rather terrifying, stretched up t
o its full height, jerking frantically.

  Josephine was frustrated, and angry, and frightened, and humiliated. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected them to be pleased to be confronted by a ghost in their house. Even so, this reaction seemed out of all reasonable proportion. The whole city was on the alert now—it had taken only moments. The silhouettes of the towers bristled with winged sentries. There was a terrible sharp rustling noise, as of a field at night filled with a thousand grasshoppers. In the distance, she saw a mob gathering at Piccadilly. A mob, or an army. The silent alarm kept going, as other Martians took to the tower-tops, relaying Eve’s message. Shadows and flashes of light flickered across the city.

  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 poli
ceman. 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.