Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “O Sacred times, O prodigious dawns, when plants covered the young planet!”

  As the Great Planetary stood at the confines of the oasis and the desert, Targ could see a sinister landscape of granite, silica, and metals, a plain of desolation that stretched to the base of bare mountains, without glaciers, without springs, without a blade of grass or plaque of lichen. In this desert of death, the oasis, with its rectilinear crops and its villages of metal, was nothing more than a miserable spot.

  Targ felt the weight of the vast solitude and implacable mountains; he raised his head in melancholy manner toward the conch of the Great Planetary. This conch spread a sulphurous corolla toward the indentation of the mountains. Made of arcum and as sensitive as a retina, it captured only those pulsations from afar that emanated from the oases, and, according to how it was regulated, silenced those to which the watchman was not authorized to respond.5

  Targ loved this object as an emblem of those rare adventures still possible for human beings; in his fits of sadness, he turned to it, he drew from it courage and hope.

  A voice made him start. With a faint smile he watched as a young girl, whose forms were rhythmically proportioned, climbed toward the platform. She wore her sable hair free; her breast undulated with the litheness of a stalk of long grain. The watchman contemplated her lovingly. His sister Arva was the sole creature in whose company he recovered those instants, fleeting, unexpected and charming, when it seemed that at the heart of the mystery, there were forces still that slumbered, ready to rescue mankind.

  She exclaimed, with restrained laughter: “What lovely weather, Targ . . . How happy the plants are!”

  She filled her nostrils with the consoling odor that issued from the green flesh of the leaves; the dark fire in her eyes sparkled. Three birds came sailing over the treetops, and roosted on the edge of the platform. In size they resembled condors of old, forms as pure as those of beautiful female bodies, huge silvery wings, glazed with amethyst, the tips of which emitted a violet glow. Their heads were large, their beaks very short, very flexible, as red as lips; and the expression in their eyes resembled the expression of humans. One of the birds, raising its head, uttered articulate sounds; Targ anxiously took Arva’s hand.

  “Did you hear?’ he said, “The earth is shaking!”

  Though no oasis since a very long time ago had perished from seismic tremors, and though the magnitude of these had significantly diminished since the dark period when they had shattered the power of mankind, Arva shared the concern of her brother.

  But a frivolous idea passed through Arva’s mind:

  “Who knows,” she said, “whether or not, after having done so much damage to our brothers, these earthquakes might not begin to work in our favor?”

  “And in what way?” Targ asked indulgently.

  “By causing some of the water to reappear.”

  He had often dreamt of this, without ever having spoken of it to anyone, for such a thought would have appeared stupid and almost blasphemous to a fallen humanity, to whom all such terrors evoked the planetary upheavals.

  “You also are thinking of this?” he said exaltedly. “Don’t tell it to anyone else. You would offend them to the depths of their souls!”

  “I could only tell it to you.”

  From all directions bands of white birds surged forth: those that had rejoined Targ and Arva stamped their feet impatiently. The young man addressed them, using a special form of syntax. For these birds, as they had developed their intelligence, had learned to use language—a language that only allowed for concrete terms and image-phrases.

  Their notion of the future remained obscure and shortsighted, their foresight instinctive. Ever since men had stopped using them for food, they lived in a state of happiness, unable to imagine their own individual deaths, and even more the end of their species.

  The oasis had raised about twelve hundred of them, whose presence was very comforting and most useful. As mankind had not been able to recover its instincts, lost over the ages of its domination, the present nature of its milieu forced it to grapple with phenomena that its machines, inherited from its ancestors, as sensitive as they were, could barely detect, and that the birds could foresee. If these latter, the last vestige of animal life on Earth, had disappeared, an even more bitter desolation would have beset the soul.6

  “The danger is not immediate!” Targ whispered.

  A rumor spread through the oasis. Men emerged from around the villages and sown fields. A stocky man, whose massive skull seemed to be directly placed on his trunk, appeared at the foot of the Great Planetary. Lidless and dull eyes looked out of a face the color of iodine; his hands, flat and rectangular, swung back and forth at the end of short arms.

  “We will witness the end of the world,” he growled. “We are the last generation of mankind!”

  Behind him was heard a hollow laugh. Dane, the centenarian, stepped forward with his great-great-grandson and a woman with long eyes and hair the color of bronze. She walked as lightly as did the birds.

  “No, we will not see it!” she affirmed. . . . “The death of mankind will be slow . . . the water will dry up until there will be only a few families left around a single well. And it will be even more terrible.”

  “We will witness the end of the world,” the stocky man persisted.

  “So much the better!” said Dane’s great-great-grandson. “Let the Earth, this very day, drink up all the remaining springs.”

  His sinewy face, very narrow, expressed a sadness beyond limits; he himself was astonished that he had not already put an end to his existence.

  “Who knows whether there may not be some hope!” muttered the ancestor.

  Targ’s heart pounded. He lowered toward the centenarian eyes in which the spark of youth burned.

  “Oh! Father . . . !” he exclaimed.

  Already the old man’s face had become immobile. He sank back into that silent dream that made him appear to be a block of basalt; Targ kept his thought to himself.

  The crowd was swelling at the confines of the desert and the oasis. Several gliders that came from the Center rose into the air. It was the time of year when men were rarely needed for work; all they had to do was wait for harvest time. For no insect, no microbe, had survived. Enclosed in narrow confines, outside of which all “protoplasmic” life was impossible, the ancestors had carried out a successful struggle against parasites. Even microscopic organisms had been unable to survive, deprived of those random factors that come with dense populations, huge expanses, constant transformations and perpetual movement.

  Moreover, as masters of the distribution of water, mankind wielded an irresistible power over those beings it wished to destroy. The disappearance of old strains of domestic and wild animals, constant vectors of epidemics, had further advanced the hour of triumph. Now, mankind, the birds and the plants were forever free of infectious diseases.

  They did not live any longer: because many good microbes had disappeared along with the others, maladies proper to the human machine had developed, and new maladies had broken out, maladies that people were able to believe were caused by “mineral microbes.” Consequently, men found inside their bodies enemies that were analogous to those that had menaced them from without, and although marriage was a privilege reserved for only the fittest, the human organism rarely reached an advanced age.7

  Soon several hundred men found themselves gathered around the Great Planetary. There was only a feeble uproar. The tradition of misfortune had run in the veins of these men for too many generations not to have dried up those reserves of fright and suffering that are the price mankind pays for powerful joys and vast hopes. These Last Men had limited sensibilities and little imagination.

  Nevertheless, the crowd was anxious: some of the faces were tense; a sigh of relief was heard when a man in his forties jumped from his motocruiser,8 and shouted: “The seismographs9 haven’t registered anything yet . . . the tremor will be weak.”

  “
Why are we so worried then?” shouted the woman with long eyes. “What can we do, what can we foresee? For ages now all possible protective measures have been taken. We are at the mercy of the unknown: it is horrible foolishness to ask questions about peril that is inevitable.”

  “No, Hele,” the forty-year-old man answered, “it’s not foolishness, it’s simply life. As long as men still have the strength to worry, their days will still bring some comfort. When that is gone, they will be dead the day they are born.”

  “Let it be so then!” Dane’s great-great-grandson snickered. “Our wretched joys and feeble sorrows are worth less than death.”

  The man in his forties shook his head. Like Targ and his sister, he still held a future in his soul and the force of life in his large chest. His limpid gaze met the shining eyes of Arva, a delicate emotion caused him to breathe more rapidly.

  In the meantime other crowds gathered at various places on the periphery. Thanks to the sender-receivers,10 set up every thousand meters, these groups communicated freely.

  Through this network one could hear, at will, the sounds of a district, or even of the entire population. This communion fused together the soul of the multitude and acted to stimulate their energy. And there was a sort of exaltation when a message from the oasis of Red-Lands sounded in the conch of the Great Planetary, and echoed from receiver to receiver. The message revealed that there, not only the birds, but the seismographs were warning of subterranean disruptions. This confirmation of peril at hand brought the groups together.

  Mano, the forty-year-old man, had climbed to the platform; Targ and Arva were pale. And as the young girl was trembling a bit, the newcomer murmured:

  “The very narrowness of the oases, and their small number, should reassure us. The probability is minimal that they would be located in one of the dangerous zones.”

  “They are all the less in danger,” Targ added, “as it is their location itself that saved them in the past.”

  Dane’s great-great-grandson overheard this. He laughed his sinister laugh:

  “As if faults don’t shift from period to period. What is more, wouldn’t one weak but well-centered quake suffice to cut off the flow of water?”

  He moved away, full of gloomy irony. Targ, Arva, and Mano had shuddered. They remained mute for a moment. Then the forty-year-old man continued:

  “The faults shift with extreme slowness. For two hundred years, all the heavy tremors have occurred well out in the desert. Their repercussions have not affected the springs. Only three—Red-Lands, Devastation, and Occident—are adjacent to the danger zones.”

  He contemplated Arva with gentle admiration, in which stirred the bloom of love. A widower for three years, he suffered from loneliness. Despite the fact that his energy and tenderness were in revolt, he had resigned himself to it. The laws rigorously governed the number of marriages and births.

  But a few weeks ago, the Council of Fifteen had inscribed Mano on the list of those who could reform a family. The health of his children justified this consideration. Thus the image of Arva underwent a transformation in Mano’s soul, the dark legend, once again, emerged into the light.

  “Let’s mingle hope with our worries,” he continued. “Was not the death of each individual man, even during the marvelous epochs of the Water, for him the end of the world? Those who live at this moment on the Earth run many less risks, individually, than did our ancestors from before the radioactive age!”

  He spoke with firmness. For he had always rejected the lugubrious resignation that devastated his peers. No doubt, a too deeply rooted atavism allowed him only intermittent freedom from this gloom. Nonetheless, he had known, more than any other, the joy of living the shining moment as it passes.

  Arva listened to him approvingly, but Targ could not understand how one could neglect the future of the race. If it happened that, as with Mano, he was suddenly seized by a passing moment of sensual delight, he always mingled with it the grand dream of Time that had driven the ancestors.

  “I cannot disinterest myself in the fate of our lineage,” he retorted.

  And extending his hand toward the solitary vastness:

  “How beautiful life would be if our kingdom occupied these horrible deserts! Don’t you ever dream that once upon a time there were seas there, lakes, rivers . . . plants without number, and before the Radioactive Age, virgin forests? Yes, Mano, virgin forests! . . . And now, an obscure life form devours our ancient heritage . . .”

  Mano quietly shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s wrong to think of such things, insofar as, outside the oases, the Earth is as uninhabitable for us, perhaps more so, than is Jupiter or Saturn.”

  A clamor interrupted them; heads looked up, attentively: they saw a new flock of birds appear. They announced that over there, among the boulders, a young girl who had fainted had fallen prey to the ferromagnetics. And while two gliders rose up above the desert, the crowd had thoughts of these strange magnetic creatures that multiplied over the planet as mankind’s presence waned. Long moments went by; the gliders returned: one of them carried the lifeless body of a girl everyone recognized as Elma the Nomad. She was a strange girl, an orphan, and little liked, because she had the instincts of a wanderer, whose wild nature frustrated her fellow men. Nothing could stop her, on certain days, from running off into the wastelands . . .

  They had laid her out on the platform of the planetary; her face, half-hidden in her long black hair, seemed livid, even though it was dotted with scarlet spots.

  “She’s dead!” Mano declared, “the Others have drunk her life.”

  “Poor little Elma!” Targ exclaimed.

  He contemplated her with pity, and, as passive as it was, the crowd grumbled with hatred against the ferromagnetics.

  But the resonators,11 booming out striking sentences, drew attention away:

  “The seismographs detect a strong tremor in the sector of the Red-Lands . . .”

  “Oh! Oh!” wailed the plaintive voice of the stocky man.

  His cry vanished in the void. The faces were turned toward the Great Planetary. The multitude waited, shivering with impatience.

  “Nothing,” exclaimed Mano after several minutes of waiting. “If the Red-Lands had been hit, we would know it by now . . .”

  A strident call cut him off. The conch of the Great Planetary blared out:

  “A terrible shock . . . the entire oasis is rising . . . a catastr . . .” Then, confused sounds, a dull colliding sound . . . silence.

  All, mesmerized, waited for more than a minute. Then, the crowd uttered a harsh sigh. The least emotional among them stirred.

  “It is a massive disaster!” announced old Dane.

  Nobody doubted his words. The Red-Lands had ten planetary shells for communication across great distances, which could be pointed in all directions. For all of them to fall silent, they would all have to be uprooted, or the disarray of the inhabitants would have to be extraordinary.

  Targ, tuning his transmitter, sent out a prolonged call. No reply. A dark horror weighed on their souls. This was not the acute turmoil earlier humanity experienced, it was a slow distress, wearying, corroding. Strong ties united High Springs and the Red-Lands. For five thousand years the two oases had maintained constant contact with each other, either by means of resonators, or through frequent visits, by gliders or motocruisers. Thirty relay stations, equipped with planetary reflectors, dotted the road, seventeen hundred kilometers long, that linked the two peoples.

  “We must wait!” Targ exclaimed, leaning over the platform. “If panic is preventing our friends from responding, they will not be long in regaining their composure.”

  But no one could believe that the men of the Red-Lands were capable of such panic; their race was even less emotive than that of High Springs: capable of sadness, they were hardly capable of fright.

  Targ, reading disbelief on all faces, continued:

  “If all their transmitters are destroyed, before a quarter of an
hour is up messengers can reach the first relay station . . .”

  “Unless,” Hele objected, “their gliders were damaged . . . As for motocruisers, it is unlikely, until some time passes, that these can go across a wall reduced to rubble.”

  Nonetheless, the entire population converged on the southern zone. Within a few minutes, a thousand men and women arrived by glider or motocruiser near the Great Planetary. Murmurs arose, like long breaths, interspersed with silences. And the members of the Council of Fifteen—interpreters of laws and judges of community actions—gathered on the platform. The angular face, the coarse salt-white hair of old Bamar stood out among them, as did the dented skull of her husband Omal, whose tawny beard had not been whitened by seventy years of life. They were ugly, but venerable, and their authority was great, for theirs had been a lineage without blemish.

  Bamar, verifying that the planetary had been well directed, took her turn sending out a few waves. When the receiver remained silent, her face became more somber yet.

  “Till now, Devastation is out of danger!” murmured Omal, “and the seismographs announce there are no tremors in the other inhabited zones.”

  Suddenly, the sound of a call came through shrilly, and, as the crowd rose up, as if hypnotized, the Great Planetary began to rumble:

  “Calling from the first relay of the Red-Lands. Two powerful quakes have destroyed the oasis. The number of dead and wounded is huge; the crops have been wiped out; the waters appear to be in danger. Gliders are on the way to High Springs.”

  It was a stampede. Men, gliders and motocruisers poured forth in torrents. Excitement unknown for centuries stirred these apathetic souls: pity, terror and anxiety rejuvenated this multitude of the Last Age of Man.

  The Council of Fifteen was deliberating, while Targ, all atremble, responded to the message from the Red-Lands, and announced the immediate departure of a delegation.

  In times of tragedy the three sister oases—Red-Lands, High Springs, and Devastation—had pledged to help each other. Omal, who had a perfect understanding of tradition, declared: