Part 18 (1/2)

Instead, Arthur imagined Josephine, lost in theirs. A horrible thought.

Good shot, Atwood mumbled, well done, still, what a waste.

”It was dying anyway, Atwood. I think it-it started to fall before I shot it. It was...”

Could it breathe on Earth? Could it fly? He tried to take into account the atmosphere of Mars, surely thinner than Earth's, its gravity, the physical difficulties a native of Mars might experience here. He was too tired. Besides, was it from Mars? Or Venus? Or the Moon? Or none of those places, but from some other realm separated from London by more than mere distance? He didn't know. He knew nothing, and understood nothing.

”It looked wild,” he said.

Atwood had found a little folding hand mirror, and was examining the gash on his cheek. He was mumbling still, swearing and venting his frustrations. Arthur didn't give a d.a.m.n. The wound in his side had started to hurt again. He supposed he'd probably torn something.

He went to the desk and put the rifle back on its hooks.

”I'm going to bed,” he said. ”We can plan tomorrow. But I will not have Josephine spend another night in this G.o.d-forsaken house; do you hear?”

Chapter Seventeen.

The Company maintained their learning in a dozen or more hand-written journals, which Arthur was permitted, under an oath of utter secrecy, to study. Jupiter referred to them as the notes, and Atwood called them the Liber Ad Astra, or A.A. for short, or the Book.

It was a hodge-podge of Masonry, Greek myth, Egyptian fantasy, debased Christianity, third-hand Hinduism, and modern and ancient astronomy, promiscuously and nonsensically mixed. Some of it was in Atwood's handwriting, some of it in Jupiter's. Parts of it were in Latin. SAPERE AUDE was written on the frontispiece: DARE TO KNOW. Atwood's notes hinted that the parts of the Book that had been entrusted to Arthur were merely the outer learning, and that certain other books might contain higher and deeper and more exclusive principles, and the ident.i.ties of the Hidden Masters from whom those principles derived. Arthur took that to be a sort of bluff. Josephine had told him the way this sort of odd little occult fraternity generally operated: the esoteric knowledge that was not shared with initiates and therefore could not be questioned; the rumour of hidden sages in Tibet or Russia or Paris or other places more interesting and romantic than the Edgware Road, or Bromley, or Surbiton, where the ancient knowledge had almost certainly been cobbled together last Tuesday.

The Book was riddled throughout with paradox, and absurdity, and contradiction. Thinking too long or too hard on it caused something like vertigo; it was as bad in its way as Gracewell's Work. But after a week or two of study, Arthur began to enjoy it. He felt guilty about enjoying it, but he did. There was some satisfaction to be had in learning the secret rules that governed the universe. It was like being in a rather important and exclusive sort of club. He even developed a sneaking suspicion that he was rather good at it, despite what Atwood said. He supposed there were worse things to be good at.

I: SUN.

First: the Company imagined a sort of Copernican cosmos of invisible concentric spheres, which carried the visible planets in their rotations through the heavens. Of course these spheres were not mechanical things-nothing so crude-but nor were they mere metaphors. They were made of something that was not quite like earthly matter, but not quite nothing either: aether. They were best understood as states of energy, or consciousness, or vibration, or perhaps spirit, whatever spirit meant. Atwood was fond of quoting Corinthians: Not all flesh is alike ... There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial another. It was in their nature to move in endless, perfect circles.

The Sphere of the Sun stood at the centre and apex of Creation. It turned endlessly, and each atom of it was like a rose of ten thousand angels endlessly revolving-and yet it was unchanging. In the lesser spheres, Atwood believed, time was circular; the centre of things was timeless, or alternatively time moved so rapidly there that it might as well be timeless. If the Sun had an inhabitant it was G.o.d: singular, and self-sufficient, like the G.o.d of the Jews.

The Company had also discovered (or hallucinated) a complicated system of occult correspondences between the heavenly spheres and the things of the Earth. Among other things, the Sun corresponded to the colours gold and white; to fire, diamonds, musk, and the lion; and to the Ouroboros and Kether, the Crown of the Sephiroth. The manipulation of these signs and correspondences was at the heart of the Company's magic.

The man who occupied the role of Sun refused to give Arthur any other name. One was enough, he liked to say. The Company sometimes called him Mr Sun, as if it were the name he'd been born with. He was stocky, white-haired and bearded, with dark intelligent eyes. He dressed in the English manner, in dark suits, but always with a touch of vivid aestheticism: a bright tie, a golden tie-stud, some fine fur. The golden ring on his index finger depicted the Ouroboros. He clearly knew some doctoring. He carried himself like a man with important business interests. He was muscular despite his age: wrists thick and powerful, hands callused and square. Atwood said that Sun was an importer of antiquities-he made it sound shady. At the Company's meetings Sun spoke little, listening thoughtfully while Atwood and Jupiter argued and paced and argued again, and Therese Didot made sarcastic interjections. When he spoke, his deep voice startled everyone, and demanded attention.

He counselled patience. In matters of magic, your enemies will destroy themselves, he said, and storms will exhaust themselves on a strong roof, and if you wait long enough by a river the bodies of your enemies will float past you. Shorn of poetry, Arthur understood that to mean that Sun thought the Company should dig in, defend, and wait for its enemies to overreach themselves. Well, Arthur thought, that was all very well for Mr Sun. He didn't have to feed and wash Josephine every night. He didn't have to listen to her every heartbeat and breath, afraid that it might be her last.

II. MERCURY.

As the nearest world to the Sun, Mercury was also the fastest-moving; for each second on Earth, a thousand years flashed past on that blazing star. If it boasted civilization, and it likely did, then it could be home only to the golden cities of angels. An Italian astronomer had discovered in recent years that one side of the world was always turned towards the Sun, and was always in light; what better home, Atwood argued, for angels? It was doubtful that any human spirit could survive there. If the heat and the light didn't drive one mad, then surely the wit and beauty and insight of its inhabitants soon would.

Mercury corresponded to Hermes and to Nishubur, to the Archangel Gabriel, to elephant-headed Ganesh, to the eagle, to topaz, to the bow and arrow; to wit and laughter and pure reason. The hours governed by Mercury were favourable to rites of projection, seeking, and clairvoyance. Its symbol was ”,” which Arthur recognised from his time in Gracewell's Engine. It stood for an open and a closed circle: receiving energy from above, ordering it for the benefit of the spheres below.

Martin Atwood held the t.i.tle of Mercury. The scar the creature had given him healed quickly, and within a week he seemed rather proud of it, as if he'd won it in a duel. At the meetings of the Company he counselled investigation, exploration, a.n.a.lysis.

He owned properties all over London, each of them handsomely furnished, empty, and rather lonely. After Arthur left his house, taking Josephine with him, Atwood graciously put them up in his flat off Piccadilly. He promised that the place was warded against evil influences, which was more than could be said for Rugby Street. He lent Arthur the services of the maid, Abby. Arthur shook his hand and said thank you; but he was still not inclined to trust or forgive him.

III. VENUS.

The Company had made a few tentative explorations in the direction of Venus, but had found the experience terrifying. In that direction the astral s.p.a.ce became rapidly hotter and faster and brighter until one's thoughts began to burn.

If Venus had inhabitants, they might resemble Adam and Eve in the Garden; they were likely hermaphrodites, or shape-changers. Their homes would resemble forests in their elegance and complexity and vibrant living energy. Among the symbols of Venus were ivy, ambergris, and tin, and the fifty-forth and fifty-eighth Hexagrams of the I Ching. Its hours were favourable for the learning of secrets and the resolution of mysteries-and for love, of course, though ”love” as the Company's philosophy conceived of it was a rather severe and mathematical thing, involving combinations of certain psychic energies.

In Josephine's absence, the role of Venus fell to Arthur. He thought that it was hard to imagine a less likely Venus. But Atwood a.s.sured him, smiling, that in magic the union of male and female was a very powerful principle.

IV: TERRA MATER.

The t.i.tle of Terra Mater belonged to a man called Samuel Jessop, who in everyday life was a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. He was solid and square and bowler-hatted. Once a month he went by train to the seaside, where he tested his strength against the ocean by swimming out as far as he could until he could swim no more. ”A little farther each time, Shaw. One day, who knows?” Apart from that, and of course his members.h.i.+p in the Company of the Spheres, he appeared to have no obvious eccentricities, and struck Arthur as surprisingly level-headed. He was a Methodist. Arthur liked him.

It was Sergeant Jessop who conducted Arthur's initiation into the inner circle of the Company, such as it was. A tap on the shoulder, hood on the head, and turned thrice around; afterwards, whisky and a cigar.

”In deference to your wound, Shaw, incurred in the line of duty, we'll excuse you the ordeals.”

”Decent of you, Jessop.”

”Don't tell Atwood. Something of a stickler, that one.”

Sergeant Jessop gave Arthur a gift: a book, John George Hoffman's Pow-Wows, or Long Lost Friend, which he said was a very old American book, full of honest and old-fas.h.i.+oned Christian magic.

”Charms for healing the sick, and driving out evil spirits, and finding lost sheep. That sort of thing.”

”I don't know what to say, Jessop.”

”Atwood says it's a mean little thing, a waste of paper. But I've found it worth the study. Atwood's a clever chap, but there are things His Lords.h.i.+p doesn't know; up there and down here.”

”Not so long ago, I thought I knew down here well enough. Now I wonder. Thank you, Jessop.”

”I know that feeling, old chap. I know it well.”

V: MARS.

Mars, Atwood explained, had been selected as the Company's first destination not because of any particularly appealing feature of the planet itself, but because every journey had to start somewhere, and it was easier by far to go down than up. Nevertheless, Atwood was an attentive student of all the latest scientific discoveries regarding the red planet. He and Jupiter subscribed to Nature and to Astronomer, and collected sketches and photographs of the planet's surface. They considered their own methods of investigation to be very superior to mucking about with telescopes, but they were not too proud to borrow.

”Take Flammarion,” Atwood said. ”Do you know him?”

”The French astronomer?”

”None other. Flammarion holds now that the waters of Mars-he thinks he can see them-might be a different sort of thing from our water. A sixth state, he calls it, a dense vapour, viscous, sombre, and dark.”

”And?”

”So you see, the conditions, Shaw, may be very different. It's a different sphere of being.”

”I know Flammarion. He says there's ca.n.a.ls on Mars. Civilization. Is that true?”

”I doubt it. Remember, Mars is beneath us in the ordering of things; if it has inhabitants, they will be slower than us. Simpler, colder, stupider, and less energetic. Their recreations are likely primitive.”

”So Josephine may be-”