The Navigators of Space Page 19

  “A few lines, however, much paler than the others, are not engendered by centers; they remain isolated within the system and grow without changing color. These lines have the ability to move around within the body and to vary their curvature, while the centers and the lines connected to them remain stable in their respective situations.

  “As for the colors of my Moedig, I must renounce any attempt to describe them to you, none of them being in the register perceptible to your eye, and none of them having any name for you. They are extremely bright in the networks, less so in the centers, and very faint in the independent lines—which, in compensation, are highly polished, with an ultra-violet metallic quality, if I might express it thus.

  “I have assembled a few observations on the mode of life, nutrition and autonomy of the Moedigen, but I don’t want to show them to you for the moment.”

  I fell silent. The doctor had the recorded words repeated twice over by our impeccable intermediary, then remained silent for some time. I had never seen him in such a state; his features were rigid, mineralized; his eyes vitreous, cataleptic; an abundant sweat was running down his temples and moistening his hair. He tried to speak, but could not. He made a tremulous circuit of the garden, and when he came back his expression and mouth expressed a violent, fervent, religious passion. One might have thought him a disciple of a new faith rather than a placid hunter of phenomena.

  Finally, he murmured: “You’ve overwhelmed me! Everything you’ve just told me seems perfectly lucid—and have I any right to doubt it, after all the marvels you’ve already shown me?”

  “Doubt!” I told him, hotly. “Doubt fervently…your experiments will be all the more fecund for it!”

  “Ah! He went on, in a dreamy voice. “It’s prodigy itself—and so magnificently superior to the vain prodigies of Fable! My poor human intelligence is so small by comparison to such knowledge! My enthusiasm is infinite. Something within me, however, doubts…”

  “Let us work to dispel your uncertainty. Our efforts will be rewarded a hundredfold!”

  X.

  We worked. A few weeks sufficed to dispel all the doctor’s doubts. Ingenious experiments, undeniable concordances between each of my affirmations, and two or three fortunate discoveries regarding the influence of the Moedigen on atmospheric phenomena left no room for equivocation. The assistance of Van den Heuvel’s eldest son, a young man with the greatest aptitude for science, further increased the fecundity of our labors and the certainty of our discoveries.

  Thanks to the methodical mentality of my companions, and their skill in investigation and classification—faculties that I gradually assimilated—it did not take long for my presently-uncoordinated and confused knowledge of the Moedigen to be transformed. The discoveries multiplied, the rigorous experiments gave firm results, in circumstances that would, at most, have suggested a few seductive diversions in ancient times, or even in the last century.

  We have now been conducting our researches for five years; they are far—very far—from reaching completion. An initial account of our findings will not be ready for quite some time. We are, in any case, strictly determined not to do anything in haste; our discoveries are too important in kind not to be revealed in the greatest possible detail, with the most sovereign patience and the most careful precision. We do not have to get in ahead of any other researcher, we have no patent for which to apply, nor any ambition to satisfy. We are at a height at which vanity and pride fade away. How can we reconcile the delightful joys of our work with the wretched lure of human renown? Besides, is not the mere accident of my constitution the sole source of these things? How petty it would be, therefore, to glorify ourselves?

  We live passionately, always on the verge of marvelous things, and yet we live in an immutable serenity.

  I have had an adventure that has added to the profound interest of my life, and which, during my hours of leisure, completes my infinite joy. You know how ugly I am, and stranger still, liable to frighten young women. I have, however, found a companion who can accept my affection to the point of enjoying it.

  She is a poor hysteric, neurotic girl, whom we found one day in a hospice in Amsterdam. She is considered to be wretched in appearance, as pallid as plaster with hollow cheeks and wild eyes. To me, she is pleasant to behold, and her company is charming. My presence, far from astonishing her, like everyone else’s, seemed from the outset to please her and comfort her. I was touched, and wanted to see her again.

  It did not take long to perceive that I had a beneficial effect on her health and well-being. On further investigation, it seemed that I influenced her magnetically; my proximity, and especially the imposition of my hands, communicated a veritably curative gaiety, serenity and mental equilibrium to her. In return, I found pleasure in being with her. Her face seemed pretty to me; her pallor and thinness were merely delicacy; her eyes, capable of seeing the glow of magnets, like those of sufferers from hyperesthesia, did not seem to me to have the quality of wildness of which others disapprove.

  In a word, I found her attractive, and she returned the sentiment passionately. Soon, I decided to marry her, and easily attained my goal, thanks to the good will of my friends. The marriage has been a happy one. With my wife’s health restored, although she remained extremely sensitive and frail, I tasted the joy of being, in the most important aspect of life, like other men. My destiny has been especially enviable for six months; a child was born to us, and that child reproduces all the characteristics of my constitution. In terms of color, vision, hearing, extreme rapidity of movement and nutrition, he promises to be an exact replica of my physiology.

  The doctor is watching him grow with delight; a delightful hope has been born in us: that the study of Moedig life, of the kingdom parallel to ours, which requires so much time and patience, will not come to a stop when I die. My son will doubtless pursue it in his turn. Why should he not find collaborators of genius, capable to take it to further extremes? Why should there not be born, to him also, seers of the invisible world?

  May I, too, not expect more children? May I not hope that my dear wife will one day give birth to other offspring of my flesh similar to their father? And as I think about that, my heart quivers, and I am filled with an infinite bliss, feeling myself blessed among men.

  THE DEATH OF THE EARTH

  I. Speech at a Distance

  The frightful north wind had died down. For a fortnight its malevolent voice had filled the oasis with dread and sadness. It had been necessary to put up the storm-shields and the elastic silica hothouses. Finally, the oasis began to warm up.

  Targ, the Great Planetary’s39 watchman, felt one of those sudden joys that illuminated human life in the divine Time of Water. How beautiful the plants still were! They took Targ back through the ages, to a time when oceans covered three-quarters of the world and humans flourished amid springs, streams, rivers, lakes and marshes. What freshness animated the innumerable generations of animals and vegetables! Life was abundant everywhere, including the utmost depths of the seas. There were meadows and forests of algae, just as there were forests of trees and grasslands. An immense future opened up before all creatures; humans had scarcely any inkling of their distant descendants who would tremble at the approach of the world’s end. Did they ever imagine that the death-throes would last for more than a hundred millennia?

  Targ raised his eyes to the sky, in which clouds never any longer appeared. The morning was still cool, but by midday the oasis would be torrid. “The harvest is almost ready!” the watchman murmured.

  He displayed a swarthy face, eyes and hair as black as anthracite. Like all the Last Men, he had a broad chest and a narrow abdomen. His hands were slender, his jaws small, and his limbs gave more evidence of agility than strength. A garment made of mineral fibers, as supple and warm as ancient wool, was fitted exactly to his body; his whole being was redolent with resigned grace and a fearful charm that emphasized his thin cheeks and the pensive fire in his eyes.

 
He lingered in order to contemplate a field of tall cereals and rectangular trees, each of which bore as many fruits as leaves, and said: “Prodigious dawns of the Sacred Ages, when plants covered the young planet!”

  As the Great Planetary was in the borderlands of the oasis and the desert, Targ could see a sinister landscape of granite, silica and metals: a plain of desolation extending as far as the foothills of bare mountains devoid of glaciers and springs, with not a blade of grass or plaque of lichen. In that desert of death, the oasis, with its rectilinear plantations and its metallic villages, was a miserable patch.

  Targ felt the vast wilderness and implacable mountains weighing upon him; sadly, he raised his head toward the dish of the Great Planetary. That dish was a brimstone corolla in a gap in the mountains. Made of arcum and as sensitive as a retina, it only received the wavelengths emanating from the oasis and, according to the setting, suppressed those to which the watchman need not respond. Targ loved it, as an emblem of the rare adventures still possible to human beings; when he felt sad he turned toward it, expecting to draw courage and hope from it.

  A voice caused him to shiver. With a weak smile, he saw a young woman with a harmonious figure climbing up to the balcony. She wore her dark hair loose; her upper body undulated, as flexible as the tall stems of the cereals. The watchman looked at her lovingly. His sister Arva was the only creature in whose presence he recovered those sudden, unexpected and charming moments when it seemed that a few forces in mysterious depths might still be working for the salvation of humankind.

  Suppressing a laugh, she exclaimed: “The weather’s fine, Targ. The plants are happy!” She breathed in the consoling odor that welled up from the green flesh of leaves; the black fire of her eyes flickered. Three birds flew over the trees and swooped down to the edge of the balcony. They were shaped like ancient condors: forms as pure as those of beautiful feminine bodies, with immense silvery wings sprinkled with amethyst, whose tips emitted a violet light. Their heads were large, their beaks very short and flexible, as red as lips, and the expression in their eyes was almost human. One of them, raising its head, voiced articulate sounds.

  Targ took Arva’s hand anxiously. “Did you understand that?” he said. “The earth is stirring!”

  Even though it was a very long time since any oasis had perished in an earthquake, and their amplitude had greatly diminished since the ominous era in which they had broken human power, Arva shared her brother’s anxiety—but a capricious idea passed through her mind. “Who knows,” she said, “whether, having done so much harm to our kin, earthquakes might not be more favorable to us?”

  “How?” asked Targ, indulgently.

  “By causing some of the waters to reappear!”

  He had often thought of that, without having told anyone—for such a thought would have seemed stupid, and almost blasphemous, to a fallen humankind in whom planetary upheavals evoked all kinds of terrors.

  “You think so too, then!” he exclaimed, excitedly. “Don’t tell anyone! You’ll offend them deeply.”

  “I haven’t told anyone but you.”

  Groups of white birds were coming from every direction; the ones that had joined Targ and Arva were hopping about impatiently. The young man spoke to them, employing a particular syntax—for, as their intelligence had developed, the birds had been initiated into language: a language that only admitted concrete terms and imagistic phrases. Their notion of the future remained obscure and abbreviated, their foresight instinctive; since humans no longer exploited them as nourishment, they lived happily, incapable of imagining their own deaths, let alone that of their species.

  The oasis played host to about 1200 of them, whose presence was exceedingly soothing and very useful. Because humans had not been able to regain the instincts lost during the period of their dominion, the present environmental conditions left them at the mercy of phenomena that even the most delicate apparatus inherited from their ancestors could hardly register, but which the birds could detect. If the birds—the last vestige of animal life—had disappeared, human souls would have been subject to even more bitter desolation.

  “The danger isn’t immediate!” Targ murmured.

  A rumor was running through the oasis; humans were emerging from the edges of villages and cereal-fields.

  A thickset individual whose massive skull seemed to be directly posed on his torso appeared at the foot of the Great Planetary. His eyes were wide open and feeble, in a face the color of iodine; his flat rectangular hands were shaking at the ends of his short arms. “We shall see the end of the world!” he groaned. “We shall be the last generation of human beings.”

  Cavernous laughter was heard behind him. The centenarian Dane appeared, with his great-grandson and a woman with wide eyes and bronze-colored hair, who walked as lightly as a bird. “No,” she said, “we shan’t see the end of the world. The death of human beings will be slow. The water will dwindle away until there are only a few families around a well—and that will be even more terrible.”

  “We shall see the end of the world!” insisted the thickset man.

  “So much the better!” said Dane’s great-grandson. “Let the Earth drink up the last springs this very day!” His exceedingly narrow and sinuous face displayed a boundless sadness; it astonished him that he had not put an end to his own existence.

  “Who knows whether there might not be some hope!” muttered the old man.

  Targ’s heart beat faster; he looked down at the centenarian with eyes sparkling with youth. “Oh, Father!” he cried.

  The old man’s features had already become frozen again; he fell back into the taciturn reverie that made him resemble a block of basalt. Targ kept his thought to himself.

  There was a growing crowd in the borderlands of the desert and the oasis. A few gliders took off, coming from the Center. An era had been reached in which humans had scarcely any work to do; they merely had to await harvest-times, for there were no surviving insects or microbes. Huddled in narrow domains, outside of which all protoplasmic life was impossible, their ancestors had mounted an effective war against parasites. Even microscopic organisms were no longer able to maintain themselves, deprived of the opportunities resulting from dense agglomerations, large open spaces and perpetual displacements and transformations.

  Besides, master of the distribution of water, humans disposed an irresistible power against creatures they wished to destroy. The absence of ancient domestic animals and savages, incessant vectors of epidemics, had brought the hour of triumph further forward. Humankind, the birds and the plants were now permanently safe from infectious diseases.

  They did not live any longer; many benevolent microbes had disappeared with the others, the inherent infirmities of the human machine had increased, and new maladies had emerged that were thought to be caused by “mineral microbes.” In consequence, humans found enemies within analogous to those that had threatened them from without, and, although marriage was a privilege reserved for the fittest, the human organism rarely attained an advanced age.

  Soon, several hundred people had gathered around the Great Planetary. There was only a feeble tumult; the tradition of misfortune had been handed down through too many generations not to have drained the reserves of fear and dolor that are the price of powerful joys and vast hope. The Last Men had a restrained sensibility and little imagination.

  Even so, the crowd was troubled; a few faces were contorted. It was a relief when a quadragenarian leapt out of an electric car and shouted: “The seismic apparatus isn’t showing anything yet. The quake will be weak.”

  “Of what are we afraid?” shouted the wide-eyed woman. “What can we do and expect? All possible measures were taken centuries ago. We’re at the mercy of the unknown; it’s terrible stupidity to ask questions about an inevitable peril.”

  “No, Hélé,” the quadragenarian replied. “That’s not stupidity; it’s life. As long as people have the strength to ask questions, their days will still have some pleasure. Afte
rwards, they’ll be dead as soon as they’re born.”

  “Would that it were so!” jeered Dane’s great-grandson. “Our miserable joys and sickly sadnesses are worse than death.”

  The quadragenarian shook his head. Like Targ and his sister, he was still mindful of the future, and still had strength in his broad chest. His frank gaze encountered Arva’s clear eyes, and a delicate emotion quickened his breathing.

  Meanwhile, other groups were assembling in various sectors of the periphery. Thanks to radiolinks distributed at 1000-meter intervals, these groups could communicate freely; one could hear at will the rumors of a district or even that of the entire population. That communication condensed the mentality of crowds and acted as a strong stimulant—so there was a kind of excitement when a message from the Redlands oasis vibrated in the Dish of the Great Planetary and echoed from radiolink to radiolink. It announced that it was not only the birds but also the seismographs that were advertising distant subterranean upheavals. This confirmation of the danger drew the groups closer together.

  Mano, the quadragenarian, climbed up on to the balcony; Targ and Arva were pale. As the young woman shivered slightly, the newcomer murmured: “The very smallness of the oases, and their restricted number, ought to reassure us. The probability that they’ll be located in the danger-zones is tiny.”

  “Few as they are,” said Targ, supportively, “it’s their locations that have saved them before.”

  Dane’s great-grandson had heard; his jeering laughter was heard again. “As if the zones didn’t vary periodically! Besides, wouldn’t a feeble quake be sufficient, if it struck in the right place, to dry up the springs?” He drew away, full of bleak irony.