The Map of the Sky (Trilogía Victoriana #2)(160)

After breakfast, the Martians led them back inside the pyramid. The other prisoners in his work detail were all suffering the effects of having been exposed to the green liquid the previous day. Scarcely looking at one another, ashamed, perhaps, of their deplorable condition, or for fear of seeing their own wraithlike appearance mirrored in the others, they began trudging down the familiar long tunnel, though at one point Charles thought they took a different turning, which seemed to lead them deeper into the bowels of the Earth. He felt terribly weak and dizzy, but he knew this was not entirely due to the nosebleed or the occasional stabbing pains in his damaged lungs. The atmosphere inside the pyramid polluted his soul as well as his body. But he must conserve what little strength he had to keep walking, to stay in the line with his wretched companions as they marched forward in gloomy silence. Charles wondered where the Martians could be taking them now, what fresh atrocities awaited them after the terrible vision of the day before, an example of pure evil, of insane cruelty. What fresh nightmare of ingenious aberration could the Martians show him today to batter his benumbed soul further?

They reached the room at the end of the tunnel, and once more the green light flooding it forced them to close their eyes. When at last they opened them, shielding their smarting eyelids with their hands, they saw tanks that stretched up to the dark, distant ceiling, like those they had seen the day before. But the bodies they contained were not those of babies. This was when Charles understood that the nightmare was unending.

Floating inside the tanks, stacked one on top of the other in rows and columns like human bricks, were the bodies of hundreds of women. They were mostly young and tightly packed together to form these macabre layers, their heads brushing against the feet of the women in the next column. They looked as if they were sleeping, suspended in a disturbing limbo, their hair floating like seaweed in the abominable fluid, their flesh spongy and pale, their eyes closed. Their mouths were slightly open, yet he saw no sign of breathing to suggest a flicker of life. The most ghastly aspect of all was the tubes snaking out from between their legs, which seemed exactly like the cables he had seen sprouting from the babies’ navels and descending into the holes in the base of their tank. This was where those cables ended up, he now realized, snaking between the legs of these women and defiling their sex, until they reached their dormant bellies. Hundreds and hundreds of cables descended from above, undulating in the infernal ocean like monstrous sea snakes wriggling their way into the silent interior of these slumbering women. O Lord, why hast thou forsaken us? Charles whispered, overwhelmed with horror as he stumbled toward the awful tanks. The women were floating motionless, their bodies rigid and pale, as though ready for embalming. He felt as though he was going to black out and made a superhuman effort to collect himself. He refused to let them send him to the funnel, not until he’d finished his diary, or at any rate until his heart burst, unable to take any more horror. He managed not to collapse as he listened to the Martians who had begun giving orders.

From what he could gather in his confusion, they were to carry out the same task as the day before: changing the liquid in the tanks. Driven on by the Martians’ cries, the prisoners began trudging toward the storeroom containing the barrels. The hours passed with exasperating slowness. Working mechanically for what seemed like an eternity, Charles felt so dizzy and confused he kept thinking he was seeing himself from the outside. At one point he had a violent coughing fit and everything momentarily went black, making him fear he’d lose consciousness and collapse in front of the monsters’ impassive faces. When he recovered, he stood contemplating a pool of greenish blood at his feet with two more of his teeth floating in it.

One of the guards ordered him to resume working with a sharp push that almost sent him flying. He took the barrel he had begun moving and rolled it down the passageway. But the coughing had left him weak and he felt feverish, and as he pushed, random thoughts began to assail him: snatches of memory, fragments of dreams, bizarre images that flashed through his delirious mind as in a half sleep. A chance connection in his subconscious transported him to the Chicago World’s Fair, which he had visited in his youth, during the so-called Battle of Currents between Edison’s General Electric, which advocated direct current, and Westinghouse Electric, whose founder believed passionately in the superiority of the alternating current as conceived by Nikola Tesla. The thrilled young Charles had marveled at the generators and engines that would illuminate the world, banishing forever the empire of darkness.

Electricity, Charles said to himself, pausing beside the tank, another of the great scientific advances that was to make Man master of all Creation. He gazed dolefully at the cables in the tanks reaching up to the ceiling and wondered whether this room really was beneath the one containing the babies’ tanks. Were these women hooked up to their offspring in a kind of insane electrical circuit, transmitting energy-charged particles from one to the other like a diabolical multiple human dynamo? Had the Martians created a gigantic human battery, using the energy supposedly transmitted by their brains, by the age-old maternal bond, to drive their machines? Charles choked back sobs as he realized that what he had been thinking during his delirium might be true, that these parasites were robbing them of their purest essence. The Martians were forcing human women to conceive and give birth, then submerging mother and baby in this green liquid, locking them into an eternal cycle of flowing particles that might poison the world with its corrupt love. He wept silently as he worked the levers that emptied out the tanks, unaware that the tears rolling down his cheeks were green.