The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(142)

Charles gave a shudder and averted his gaze from the funnel. Not a day went by when the accursed hole didn’t gobble one of them up, dead or alive, and, as he did every morning, Charles wondered whether at some point during the day, the shackle would take control of his legs and he would find himself walking toward the funnel in what might seem like a perfectly natural way, were it not for the grimace of horror that would appear on his face. His eyes wandered toward the horizon. Although the camp appeared to have no perimeter fence, so that any prisoner might feel tempted to flee across country, it was in fact surrounded by an invisible wall of death. No one knew the exact location of the deadly demarcation line, but if a prisoner strayed a few yards too far from the camp’s center, his neck shackle would instantly begin to choke him, and he would be forced to retrace his steps if he wanted to be able to breathe again. This of course did not prevent some prisoners, in moments of deep despair, from forgetting about the invisible fence, or simply from thinking they could run faster than the time it took the shackle to choke them. But during those two long years, Charles had never seen anyone succeed. He, in contrast, had made no attempt to flee since they had brought him there. Where would he go, given the whole world was one big prison camp? As far as he knew, there was no sign anywhere of his longed-for human resistance. And one look at his fellow prisoners filing down the stairs to the camp was enough to convince him that no hidden seed of rebellion would flourish there either.

Charles descended the steps, mingling with the other prisoners as they left the barracks, which from the ground looked like a huge metal box turned on its side. As he did every morning, Charles headed for the food dispensers, situated around the rim of the funnel; in fact, they appeared to grow out of it, so it would have been na?ve to imagine their positioning was entirely coincidental. But Charles had long since chosen not to consider what horrors this implied. With a little imagination, the dispensers could be described as giant mushrooms, ten feet high. They were crowned by a kind of cap made of shiny scales, and their stem was a long cylinder, narrow enough for a man to wrap his arms around it. To complete their similarity with the Earth’s flora, they were equipped with metal roots, some of which plunged into the sand a few inches from the edge of the funnel, while at least a dozen others clung to the stem like metal ivy. These wires contained hundreds of tiny filaments that quivered in the air at waist level, each ending in a kind of serrated mouth. When the prisoners held their bowls close to these hideous faucets that resembled carnivorous plants, the mouth undulated gently before regurgitating a green pap, the prisoners’ only source of nourishment.

After queuing for several minutes, Charles succeeded in filling his bowl and went to sit on a solitary rock. There he began shoveling the contents into his mouth, trying not to taste it. This was the only method he had discovered of not throwing up the putrid Martian concoction. And the only reason why he was still eating it was because he did not want death to take him before he had finished writing his diary. While he was forcing himself to eat the nauseating puree, Charles cast a weary glance at the small clusters of prisoners, but he could not see Shackleton among them, nor was he sitting alone over his breakfast. This meant the captain had probably been taken that morning to the women’s camp, to empty his still potent seed into one of them. They were only given a few minutes to eat before the Martians made them resume building the purification machine, and so Charles scraped the bottom of his bowl and tossed it on the pile. As he headed toward the pyramid, he observed with tired resentment the dozen or so guards watching their every move. Although partially obscured by colorful copper masks strapped to their heads, which covered their mouths and nasal passages and were designed to filter the Earth’s atmosphere, the Martians in the camp generally took on a human form. To begin with, Charles had considered this a thoughtful gesture on their part, until someone told him it was not to avoid terrifying the prisoners, but to make sure they understood the Martians’ commands and insults.

Charles spent the day on one of the upper floors of the tower, transporting the heavy iron girders with a dozen other prisoners. He worked without taking a break, except when a fit of coughing forced him to step away from the group in order to deposit a blob of green phlegm onto the floor. When this happened, the other prisoners would give him a look of sympathy or indifference, although he could not help feeling anything but deep contempt for them. Charles considered himself different from the others, but not because he belonged to a higher social class. Two years had sufficed to reduce rich and poor to the same level, changing them into a downtrodden, evil-smelling throng that could only be told apart by their manners, and sometimes not even then. As time went on, conversation had been replaced by silence, monosyllables, and grunts, such was the weight of their crushing fatigue. If Charles still felt he was different, this was because he had not been captured whilst fleeing through the streets, like most of the others, and imprisoned there without knowing anything more about what was going on than vague rumors they picked up in the camp. No, before being taken prisoner, Charles had formed part of a group of valiant heroes led by the brave Captain Shackleton, which had been on the point of killing the Martian leader of the invasion, even though all this seemed like a dream to him now. It took a supreme effort of concentration for him to dredge up those events from the depths of his memory.

This was what he had to do when he returned to his cell after an exhausting day. He scarcely had an hour before the sun went down, and so despite the dizziness and fatigue overwhelming him, he took the diary out from under his pallet and resumed where he had left off, unraveling the knot of memories hidden in the farthest recesses of his mind.