The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(155)

XXXV

THE FOLLOWING DAY, FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE Martians sent Charles and a small group of other men to work deep inside the pyramid. Until then he had always worked on the outside, transporting and soldering the heavy girders that took it skyward with the slowness of a stalagmite. A few months before, he might have felt a thrill at the prospect of seeing inside the structure, but that morning, all Charles could feel was a vague unease about the effects that being exposed to the poisonous interior of the machine might have on his precarious health. Going in there would certainly accelerate the disease and perhaps prevent him from finishing his diary. Those working in the bowels of the pyramid usually died within a few days, and so, in order not to squander the workforce, the Martians would employ prisoners who already showed signs of carrying the disease. If his neck shackle, which apparently registered the state of prisoners’ blood through the tendrils embedded in their flesh, considered him ready to work inside the machine, that meant he was doomed. This came as no surprise to Charles; he knew he had the mark of death on him the moment he coughed up onto the floor a clot of blood that gave off a greenish glow.

They entered the pyramid through circular hatches in the floor next to its base and climbed down ladders bolted into the wall. They emerged into a cramped tunnel, the walls of which glowed a phosphorescent green, and followed one of the Martians in an orderly file. Ashton, the prisoner who had obtained his precious notebook for him, was in front of Charles, and although he tried to walk with the deliberate swagger with which he had no doubt once paraded down his neighborhood streets in some filthy East End slum, Charles thought he saw beads of sweat trickling down Ashton’s grimy neck. Behind Charles was young Garvin, a boy of about fourteen, still a child when the invasion began. Hearing his troubled breathing, Charles looked round to find Garvin’s innocent little face, weirdly cadaverous in that ghostly light, eyes open wide with fright, cheeks moist with tears, as if he were the ghost of a boy wandering through the corridors of what had once been his home, unaware that he was already dead. Without so much as a smile or a word of encouragement, Charles turned back, staring ahead at Ashton’s filthy neck. After all, what could he do to console the boy? Consolation was another of the many things the Martians had eradicated from the planet.

After walking for several minutes past rows of secondary passageways, the procession finally seemed to reach the end of the tunnel. In the distance, they could see an archway, and behind it a room that had the same phosphorescence emanating from its walls, only much more intensely. Charles tried to get his bearings, wondering how far they had come. Was the room they were approaching at the center of the pyramid? He couldn’t tell, just as he couldn’t tell whether they were still underground, or, as it had seemed at one point, if they had walked up a slight incline and were now on one of the higher levels. And yet, although his footsteps echoed as if the ground beneath him were hollow, he felt as if he were buried deep below the Earth’s surface, breathing in a dense, acrid air that seemed thousands of years old. As they approached the archway linking the tunnel to the phosphorescent room, he had only one thought in his mind: what could be in there?

Yet, no matter what he had seen over the past two years, or how close to insanity he had come as he struggled to understand and accept the impossible, Charles realized none of it had prepared him to face what was inside that room. The prisoners crowded in the doorway, nervous and hesitant, pressing against one another as they held their hands up to shield their eyes from the green light, which was so intense they could almost hear and smell it. Once their eyes grew accustomed, they glanced about, blinking, half dazed. For a long while they were unable to grasp what it was they were seeing. It was as though their eyes were confronted with a dreadful conundrum, the horror of which would only become clear to them after they had spent centuries contemplating it.

The room was empty and cylindrical, no more than fifteen yards in diameter, with a ceiling that must have been as high as a cathedral, for they were unable to see the top. Lining its walls were rows of tanks made of a semitranslucent material, similar to glass, which ascended like organ pipes to the darkened ceiling. These transparent vats were filled with a syrupy green liquid, from which the dazzling light filling the room seemed to emanate. And inside these immense tanks, bobbing gently in the liquid, were bodies. Hundreds of tiny, soft baby bodies. Charles’s face twisted in a horrified grimace. More than stupefied, he contemplated the flock of newborns submerged in the infernal fish tank, like pieces of fruit suspended in green jelly. They all still seemed to be attached to their umbilical cords, but on closer inspection, Charles realized these were not organic, but had been replaced with tubes made from some strange material, which emerged from their navels and disappeared down the drainlike holes covering the floor of the fish tank, making the little baby bodies look like buoys tethered to the floor of this gelatinous sea. The babies rocked gently, their tiny limbs twitching almost imperceptibly, as if they were dreaming about running. But the most macabre thing of all was to see that their skulls had been cut open, exposing their soft brains, which were pierced by a mass of fine threads floating around their heads like clumps of hair blown by a nonexistent breeze. At regular intervals, the tips of these snaking strands emitted flashes of gold-colored light that traveled upward through the unspeakable liquid, vanishing into the murky darkness above like shooting stars.

Faced with this vision, the prisoners began vomiting, watched impassively by the two guards, who waited patiently for them to empty the contents of their stomachs, as no doubt always happened with each fresh group. When the humans had finished soiling the floor, the Martians barked their orders. The prisoners’ job was to bring in a large number of barrels from a nearby storage room, rolling them through the tunnels. They would then connect the barrels to a machine at one end of the tanks, which was apparently responsible for renewing the fluid the babies were floating in. Supervised by the Martians, the prisoners went about their task in stunned silence, only occasionally daring to exchange anxious or terrified looks. Every now and then, Charles would cast a furtive glance at the sinister glass cases in an attempt to grasp what he was seeing. Something told him he ought to understand what it all meant, and so, as he shifted the barrels mechanically from one place to the other, he struggled to draw some conclusions. Apparently, the babies weren’t being bred to renew the workforce in the camps, as he had always assumed. It struck him as painfully obvious now that the pyramid would be finished long before these children would be old enough to do the kind of work he and his fellow prisoners did. No, the Martians were forcing them to procreate because they needed the babies to power the pyramids scattered around the world. Or was he misinterpreting this horror? Clearly the Martians were extracting something from the babies through the undulating threads inserted in their brains, something that floated upward with a faintly golden glow. But what? Their souls? Was the Martian pyramid powered by children’s souls? Charles did not know what to think, yet clearly something was being sucked out of them. And whatever that was, the Martians could be refining it in another part of the pyramid and using it to run the machine. He remembered Mary Shelley’s novel, in which Dr. Frankenstein uses a stroke of lightning to breathe life into a monster concocted from several dead bodies. Did the human body contain such a force, a force that could be extracted and used in a similar way, a force that could breathe life into an inanimate object? Apparently his soul, the abstract idea that embraced everything he was, all his thoughts, dreams, and desires, in short, everything death snatched from his body, could be used as fuel by the Martians.