The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  Atwood marched blithely on ahead, and the rest of them followed.

  Shortly after noon, one of the sleds turned over for the third time and bounced into a ditch. Payne cried out as the rope skinned his hands. Vaz stumbled and fell on his back. Then he rolled over and scrabbled after the sled on hands and knees, muttering excitedly. He reached down into the ditch and picked up a rock.

  “Look.” He got to his feet.

  “Bloody thing turned the sled over,” Payne said.

  “Yes, yes—but look! See, Mr Shaw? Atwood! Lord Atwood! Come look!”

  Arthur took the rock from Vaz’s outstretched hands. It was pinkish, and roughly the size of a house brick.

  “See, Shaw?”

  “I don’t—”

  Atwood snatched it away. “Thank you,” Atwood said. He was grinning like a madman. “Well done, Mr Vaz. A sharp eye. See, Mr Sun? Mr Shaw?”

  Arthur and Sun both peered at the rock.

  On one side it was smooth, almost glazed, with jagged flinty edges. It resembled pottery as much as it resembled earthly stone.

  Atwood turned it over. On the other side there was a neat right-angled corner.

  “A fortunate discovery,” Sun said.

  “Manufacture,” Atwood said. “Clear evidence of manufacture.”

  “One can’t be certain,” Arthur said. “It might be a product of natural forces we don’t understand.”

  “Admirable scepticism, Mr Shaw. But you lack vision. Can’t you see it, can’t you simply see it: the tremendous column of which this was once merely a corner of a plinth, rising steeply into the Martian sky, an ornament to a great Martian temple?”

  “Where are they, then? Where are its makers? Where’s the rest of the temple?”

  “Gone. Dead. As if we walked among the sepulchres of the Valley of Kings. Perhaps even Mars has its Egypt.”

  Then Atwood handed the rock back to Vaz, and told him to put it on his sled.

  * * *

  Sun bandaged Payne’s skinned hands. Payne cursed and grunted, while Sun remained silent. Later Payne grumbled to Arthur that it was like being treated by a veterinarian, as if one were a carthorse.

  Arthur and Vaz got the sled righted and loaded again, then they each took a rope over their shoulder and began to pull. Their route took them uphill, and into a zone of sharp little pebbles. No further evidence of architecture appeared.

  “Together again, Mr Shaw.”

  “We are indeed, Mr Vaz.”

  They went some way in silence. It was an effort to speak.

  Arthur quickly began to see why the sled kept tipping over so easily. It was the weird weightlessness. The damn thing bounced and wobbled at the slightest disturbance. It was like a child’s toy.

  They moved on, bringing up the rear. Nothing behind them but the far horizon, the black clouds. Best not to look back at all.

  “You know, Mr Vaz—I rather think you might have saved my life, that night in the fire. I always wanted to thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it, Mr Shaw. Besides—we are in worse danger now.”

  “Dimmick—might have—if you—if you hadn’t … well.”

  Arthur’s breath ran short. He thought back on the incident at Dr Thorold’s house in Bloomsbury. Blood all over the doctor’s study, blood on Dimmick’s boots. Long ago now, a long-forgotten horror. He’d seen worse since. A certain wolf-like aspect to the black clouds streaming overhead. Getting faster now. He decided it was better not to tell that story. No doubt Mars had nightmares enough of its own; no need to trouble it with London’s.

  “Misunderstanding,” Arthur said. “Won’t happen again, I’m sure.”

  Vaz glanced at Dimmick’s back. He did not look entirely convinced.

  “Shaw. May I ask a question?”

  Arthur nodded.

  “Mr Gracewell’s Work.”

  “Yes. We built another one, you know. Another Engine. Near Gravesend. Would have hired you on if I’d known.”

  “It was for this, the Work?”

  Arthur thought about how to explain Gracewell’s Engine. He couldn’t find the strength. “Yes,” he said.

  The sled’s runners shrieked over stone. Up ahead Payne was grumbling about his feet, and beyond that someone—Dimmick, Arthur thought—was rather improbably whistling a cheerful little tune. Atwood was so far ahead that he could be seen only as a distant shadow, flickering in the haze like a black candle flame. Sun walked along beside him. The two of them were talking. They appeared to be arguing.

  “Fog,” Arthur said. “Damn fog. That thing—Milton, isn’t it?—darkness visible.”

  Vaz shuddered.

  Ahead of them rose a dune. Atwood struck a heroic figure atop it: a silhouette of black velvet, limned with cold violet light, field-glasses in hand. Then he was gone again, replaced by Sun, and shortly afterwards by Dimmick. They had a dreadful time getting the sled over the dune, but after that it was downhill, and easier going for a while.

  “You are a Christian, I presume?”

  “I am, Mr Vaz. A fairly bad one, I suppose. Given all of this, I mean. Atwood and his magic, that is.”

  “Why did you…?”

  “All this? A woman.”

  “A woman? I would like to see that woman. Does the Bible say anything about Mars? I don’t recall. Do you think God watches Mars? I can’t stop myself from thinking these things, Mr Shaw.”

  “God? I took you for a Hindu, Mr Vaz.”

  They’d never discussed religion back in Deptford, but here the subject seemed inescapable.

  “A Roman Catholic. Not a very good one.”

  “Ah. Well, well. I wouldn’t know, anyway. Perhaps he does. There’s a red star in the book of Revelation, isn’t there? I suppose that must be Mars. But other than that, I don’t recall. We may be outside God’s bailiwick, one fears.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Vaz nodded. “That is what I fear.”

  They walked for a while longer.

  “Listen, Mr Vaz. I want to ask you a favour.”

  “Ask.”

  “I told you when we worked in Mr Gracewell’s Engine together that I was engaged to be married.”

  “Yes. I recall.”

  “She’s—unwell. If we—if you should ever happen to meet her, but I am … well, if things haven’t gone well for me here … Would you give her a message for me? Tell her that I’ve made arrangements. If … when she wakes.”

  “Of course.”

  He gave Vaz the name of a lawyer, and the address of his office in Gravesend.

  “It’s all my fault, you see. All my fault.”

  Vaz maintained a diplomatic silence.

  Up ahead, a cloud formed on the horizon. It resembled the smoke of a great fire.

  “Will you do me a favour in response, Mr Shaw?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me truthfully: Does Lord Atwood know where he is leading us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They walked for a while in silence.

  Vaz grunted. “Which would be worse, I wonder? If he doesn’t, or if he does?”

  * * *

  The march stopped at intervals of roughly an hour, so that Dimmick could take out an ice-pick and a hammer and carve a number into a suitable rock: 1, 2, 3, and so forth. This was to ensure that they could retrace their steps, and also to be sure that they weren’t going in circles. Roughly once an hour, whatever that meant on Mars. No doubt by the time they got to 9, 10, 11 they were far off from the true hour. They kept going. 12, 13. It was as easy to keep walking as to stop, as easy to stand as to lie down. That must be what it was like to be a ghost, Arthur thought. 14 and then 15. He began to think that they might walk for ever, leaving meaningless signs that would never be read, watched only by the black clouds overhead. 16 …

  Shortly after the sixteenth marking, Payne announced that he’d had enough, and was damn well going to sleep. He snatched a blanket from the back of Dimmick’s sled, and sat on the ground with it wrapped around his shoulders,
shivering.

  At first Atwood looked annoyed. Then he smiled and said, “Quite right! A rest. I’ll go one further, gentlemen. A feast. We shall have a feast on Mars. A celebration of our triumph.”

  Frank lit a second lantern. They set up the tents, then shared out cigarettes and cold soup.

  “A wondrous thing,” Atwood said. “Soup. Every sensation on Mars is to be treasured for what it can teach us.”

  Payne prayed, but without a great deal of enthusiasm, and nobody joined him. One never knew what might be listening, Vaz observed.

  At last they all went to sleep—except Sun, whose energies appeared boundless, and who sat down cross-legged beside a lantern, apparently deep in thought.

  Sleep on the surface of Mars was not terribly different from waking. In fact, Arthur passed from sleep to marching again without quite noticing it. Before he knew it, he was walking along beside Vaz, the sled rattling along behind him, and Dimmick was carving 2—4 into rocks as they went, and then 2—5, and 2—6, and so on.

  It was shortly after 2—10—the tenth hour of their second day on Mars—that they sighted the ruin.

  * * *

  At first, in the far distance, it resembled one of the bent tin cans they’d left behind, dented and leaking, hours and miles ago. A tiny black shape on the distant horizon, too oddly shaped to be a rock, butte, or mountain. It was not quite in the direction they were travelling, but close enough that when Atwood pretended that it was, no one argued.

  A sign of civilization.

  Frank started up another song, and this time everyone joined in, even Atwood—everyone but Sun, who continued to march in silence, hands folded behind his back, an odd smile on his face.

  Arthur, remembering the Martian in Atwood’s library, made sure that the rifles were loaded.

  It was clearly a structure, the product of Martian architecture. Any doubt on that score quickly faded as they got closer. Within half an hour it was quite clear that it was a sort of tower. It rose up out of the flat dead plain, tall and slender, in splendid isolation. It had something of the look of a fortification, but there was nothing around worth fortifying for as far as the eye could see.

  It was made of red stone, it was circular, and it was unornamented, save for a spiralling set of windows. Beneath each window jutted something a little like a drainpipe. Perches, perhaps, for winged visitors.

  It had shattered long ago, like a lightning-blasted tree. It seemed to have broken roughly in half; the upper stories had toppled sideways, leaving a long snaky mound of rubble half-buried by dust. What was left upright was still tremendously tall—more so when seen from its foot, because its thinness played tricks with perspective, so that it seemed almost as if it hung from the sky.

  “Bloody thing’s got no doors,” Frank said.

  “See,” Atwood said. “The Martians come and go by the windows.”

  “It’s a ruin,” Arthur said. “No one’s come or gone from here in years—centuries.”

  “They fly. Remember the creature in my library? Winged. It was trying to fly.”

  “Not too well, as I recall.”

  “Why would they be endowed with wings if not to fly? Perhaps it was too heavy on Earth. Or perhaps it couldn’t fly indoors—perhaps it needed wind and air and light. Imagine it. A race of flying men. Their feet might never touch the ground. Imagine what we might learn from such a people, Shaw. Their sciences, their arts, their magic; imagine how they must see the world! This must be a temple. A sacred place. They go down to the surface to pray.”

  He was practically standing on tiptoes, as if he hoped he might grow wings of his own, by sheer force of will.

  Arthur felt a faint hope. Clearly the structure was empty, and abandoned; but if Josephine had been lost on Mars all this time, surely she would have sought out landmarks such as this, and possibly left some sign of her whereabouts.

  No doors. The closest window was twelve feet off the ground, too far to jump even in the feeble Martian gravity. Payne had the bright idea of taking the ropes from the two sleds, tying them together, and throwing them up over the perch beneath the lowest window, so that if two men stood on the ground holding one end of the rope, another could climb up to the window.

  Sun went first. Then Atwood, then Arthur.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The windows of the tower were tall, but narrow, and they all had a devil of a time squeezing through, even Atwood. Inside it was dark.

  Arthur called down to Vaz, who tied one of the lanterns to the end of the rope. He raised it hand-over-hand to the window, where he and Sun and Lord Atwood waited, wary of venturing farther into the dark interior.

  The lantern revealed that they were standing on a narrow semi-circular platform. Another step farther and Atwood would have fallen to the tower’s floor—though he would have sustained no great injury, because the years had filled the tower, like an hourglass, with so much dust and dirt that the floor was now only a foot or two down from the window. Atwood smiled and hopped down. Hard-packed, the dirt held his weight.

  The lantern’s light flickered yellow and black on smooth glazed walls. The tower was made of the same odd ceramic substance as the fragment Vaz had discovered in the wasteland—not stone, precisely, nor brick. Overhead, a series of perches and struts and narrow beams spiralled up into the darkness. No cobwebs; no bats or owls or scurrying mice. Silence, and a smell of metal.

  “Ancient,” Arthur said. “It feels older than the hills, somehow.”

  Sun lowered himself gently to the floor, and looked up. “Isn’t that always the way with ruins, Mr Shaw? The things of Man are measured in years; the things of God in millennia.”

  “True enough.”

  Arthur leaned out the window.

  Outside, Payne and Frank held rifles at the ready. Vaz held an ice-axe in his hand. Dimmick seemed to have wandered off around the back of the tower.

  “It’s empty,” Arthur called. “It’s safe. For God’s sake, stop waving those things about before somebody gets hurt.”

  “Empty?” Sun continued to stare upwards, hands folded behind his back. “Perhaps.”

  “Shaw,” Atwood called. “Bring that lantern here.”

  Atwood knelt in the dirt, inspecting the wall on the far side of the tower.

  “There, Shaw. Hold it up.”

  The lantern revealed scratches on the wall. A spider’s-web tracery of shallow lines and curves.

  “Markings,” Atwood said.

  “Hieroglyphics?”

  “Perhaps—if you like.”

  “They look like scratches, to my eye—the wind and the rocks could have made them.”

  “Do they? Well. Look, though.” Atwood scrabbled in the dirt. “Whatever they are, the greater part of them is buried—what a nuisance! Hidden by the years; swallowed by the sands of Mars themselves…”

  “Well. We have shovels, don’t we?”

  “What a literal mind you have! Yes. I suppose we do. Then let’s have Dimmick and Frank dig. Vaz and Payne should remain outside with the sleds. We may be here some time. Don’t you agree, Sun?”

  “I think I will defer to Your Lordship.”

  Atwood stood, rubbing his hands together. His palms were red—he’d cut them digging in the dirt. He put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “Who knows what these markings may teach us, about Mars, about the heavens.”

  “Will they teach us how to find Josephine, or how to get home?”

  “Be patient, Shaw. I said that we would find evidence of Martian civilization. And look: we have.”

  “Yes,” said Sun, still staring up into the rafters.

  Red dust drifted down and into their little circle of light.

  * * *

  Frank and Dimmick didn’t share Atwood’s enthusiasm for the tower; in fact, they found it positively eerie, and they kept their rifles close at hand as they dug.

  After a while, Arthur stopped Frank and took a turn with the shovel. Digging was something to do. Preferable to just standi
ng around. Whatever Atwood saw in the scratches they were uncovering, it was all meaningless to Arthur. Certainly it resembled no language he was familiar with. How could it?

  They piled up dirt under the window, and periodically heaved it out and over the side, creating a growing heap next to the sleds. Through some peculiarity of the arid Martian atmosphere, it was possible to work vigorously for hours without ever sweating. It was a strange sensation.

  Frank took over again. Dimmick was indefatigable. Sun lowered himself down the rope from the window, and paced around the perimeter of the tower as if marking the boundaries—Arthur presumed there was some mystical purpose to this. Meanwhile, Atwood sat cross-legged on the stone platform, the lantern beside him, making sketches of the tower and its markings.

  Every so often, someone’s shovel slipped and made a fresh scratch on the wall. The first time that happened, Atwood flew into such a rage that it seemed he might have someone hanged. After a while, he became resigned to it, and merely sighed. Arthur began to wonder if perhaps all the markings had been made that way. Centuries of explorers, digging and scratching, the hourglass refilling after they were gone. Elizabethan mystics, medieval monks travelling to Mars in their visions, Romans and Greeks, Buddhists and Hindus and Aztecs too. Or Moon-men or Venusians, for that matter.

  The setting sun found its way in through the windows and filled the tower with sharp angular shadows. Outside, it cast weird shadows across the dunes, which seemed almost to creep and ripple of their own accord. Or so Vaz reported, when Arthur and Frank and Dimmick came down from the tower, having decided, after long discussion, that they would rather sleep outside than in. When Arthur finally fell asleep, the lantern still glowed faintly from the window above. Atwood remained at work. Sun was still pacing the boundaries.

  * * *

  When Arthur woke, his bladder ached. First time since he’d set foot on Mars. The body’s ordinary functions were slower here; or they were a mere illusion, a matter of habit. He ignored the urge, and it went away.