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

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “We have provisions enough for five years. The people of the Red-Lands can request a fourth of these. We are also bound to take in two thousand refugees, if it cannot be avoided. But they will only have reduced rations, and will be forbidden to reproduce. We ourselves must limit our families, because we must, before fifteen years pass, reduce our population to the traditional number.”

  The Council approved this reminder to obey the laws, then Bamar shouted to the crowd:

  “The Council will now designate those who will leave for the Red-Lands. There will be no more than nine. Others will be sent when we will know the needs of our brothers.”

  “I request to go,” Targ implored.

  “I do also,” Arva added immediately.

  Mano’s eyes sparkled: “If the Council permits, I also wish to be among those sent.”

  Omal cast a favorable look on them. For long ago, like them, he too had known such impulsive movements, so rare among the Last Men.

  Except for Amat, a frail adolescent, the crowd passively awaited the decision of the Council. Subjected to age-old laws, accustomed to a monotonous existence, troubled only by changes in the weather,12 these peoples had lost all desire to take initiatives. Resigned, patient, endowed with a great passive courage—nothing excited them to adventure. The vast deserts that engulfed them, void of any means of supporting human life, weighed on their acts as on their thoughts.

  “Nothing stands in the way of the departure of Targ, Arva and Mano,” said the old Bamar, “but the road is long for Amat. Let the Council decide.”

  While the Council was deliberating, Targ pondered the sinister wasteland. He felt the burden of a bitter sorrow. The disaster of the Red-Lands weighed far more on him than on his brothers. For their hopes were focused only on the slowness of an eventual end, while he persisted in dreaming of fortunate metamorphoses. Yet the circumstances bitterly confirmed the wisdom of The Tradition.

  II. Toward the Red-Lands

  The nine gliders flew toward the Red-Lands. They barely strayed from the two roads the motocruisers had followed for a hundred centuries. The Ancestors had built large relay stations of unalloyed iron, each with its planetary resonator, and numerous less important relays. The two roads were in good condition. Because motocruisers rarely passed here, and as their wheels were outfitted with very elastic mineral fibers; and as, on the other hand, the men of the two oases still knew how to make partial use of the enormous energy sources their ancestors had tamed, the maintenance of these roads required more surveillance than work. The ferromagnetics were rarely seen there, and caused only negligible damage: a person on foot could have walked there all day without feeling the slightest harmful influence; it would not have been wise, however, to make stops that were too long, and especially to fall asleep; many sick people had, like poor Elna, lost all of their red corpuscles in this manner, and had died of anemia.

  The Nine Voyagers ran no such risk. Each flew a light glider that, in fact, could have carried four men. Thus, even if accidents happened to two-thirds of the machines, the expedition would not be compromised.

  Endowed with a nearly perfect elasticity, these gliders were built to withstand the most violent shocks, and to defy hurricanes.

  Mano had taken the lead; Targ and Arva flew almost in convoy. The young man’s agitation only continued to grow. And the story of the great catastrophes, handed down faithfully from generation to generation, haunted his memory.

  For five hundred centuries, men have occupied, on the entire surface of the planet, ridiculously small enclaves.13 The shadow of their decline was cast long before the catastrophes. During these very distant times, during the first centuries of the radioactive era, it was already noticed that the waters were receding; numerous scientists predicted that Mankind would perish by drought. But what effect could such predictions have on people who saw glaciers covering their mountains, rivers without number flowing through their dwellings, immense seas washing up on their continents?14 And yet, the waters were receding, slowly, inexorably, absorbed into the ground and volatilized into the heavens.* Then came the great catastrophes. One witnessed extraordinary shifts in the Earth’s crust; now and then earthquakes, in a single day, destroyed ten or twenty cities, and hundreds of villages; new chains of mountains were created, twice as high as the ancient chains of the Alps, the Andes, or the Himalayas; from century to century the waters dried up. These enormous upheavals grew worse yet. On the surface of the Sun, changes were detected that, obeying laws that were imperfectly understood, redounded on our miserable planet. A terrible series of catastrophes occurred: on the one hand, they caused high mountains to rise to altitudes of twenty-five to thirty thousand meters; on the other, they caused immense quantities of water to disappear.

  It is told that on the eve of these sidereal upheavals, the human population had reached twenty-three billion individuals.15 This horde of people had at its command unlimited energy. They derived it from protoatoms (as we still do ourselves, however imperfectly), and they barely worried about the retreat of the waters, for they had perfected farming techniques and the science of nutrition to such a great degree. They even flattered themselves that they would soon be able to live on organic elements synthesized in the chemist’s laboratory. Several times this old dream seemed close to being realized; each time, mysterious maladies or accelerated degeneration decimated the groups subjected to these experiments. Out of necessity they had to content themselves with the foods that had nourished Mankind since its earliest ancestors. In truth, these foods were themselves undergoing subtle changes, due as much to ways of raising livestock and farming as to skillful human manipulations.16 Reduced rations now sufficed to feed mankind; thus its digestive organs had undergone, in less than a hundred centuries, a notable diminution, while its respiratory system expanded in direct proportion to the increasing rarefaction of the atmosphere.

  The last wild animals vanished; animals raised for food, in comparison with their ancestors, became veritable zoophytes,17 hideous ovoid masses, with members transformed into stumps, and jaws atrophied from force-feeding. Alone, certain species of birds escaped this degradation and experienced a marvelous intellectual development.

  Their gentleness, their beauty and their charm grew from age to age. They rendered incalculable services, because of their instinct, more refined than that of their masters, and these services were particularly appreciated in laboratories.

  The men of this period of great power lived a troubled existence. The beauties and mysteries of poetry were dead. There was no more life in the wild, its vast, almost untamed spaces no longer existed: the woods, meadows, marshes, steppes, the uncultivated places of the Radioactive Age. In the end, suicide became the most formidable illness the species faced.

  In fifteen thousand years the population of the Earth decreased from twenty-three to four billion souls: the seas, having disappeared into the depths, occupied only a quarter of the Earth’s surface; the great rivers and large lakes had disappeared; mountains rose everywhere, huge and mournful. Thus the primitive planet returned—but barren of life!

  Mankind fought back valiantly however. It prided itself in being able, insofar as it could not live without water, to fabricate the water that it needed for domestic and agricultural uses; but the raw materials used in this process became rare, or were found at such depths that their exploitation became absurdly difficult. It was necessary to fall back on processes of conservation, on ingenious means of husbanding the flow of water, and of making maximum use of this life-giving fluid.

  Domestic animals perished, unable to adapt to these new conditions of life; in vain mankind sought to recreate hardier species; two hundred thousand years of degradation had dried up evolutionary energies. Alone, birds and plants resisted. The latter reverted to a few basic ancestral forms, the former adapted to the new environment. Many reverted to the wild state, built their nests on heights where man was even less able to pursue them because rarefaction of the atmosphere, though less si
gnificant, occurred along with the receding of the waters. They lived by scavenging and used ruses so refined that it was impossible to prevent them from surviving. As for those species that remained among our ancestors, their fate was at first abominable. Humans sought to debase them to the condition of food animals. But their consciousness had become too lucid; they fought ferociously to escape their fate. There were scenes as hideous as those episodes of primitive times when men devoured fellow men, when entire peoples were reduced to slavery. Horror penetrated the human soul, little by little we ceased brutalizing our companions on the planet, and feasting on them.

  Moreover, seismic disturbances continued to reshape the Earth and destroy the cities. After thirty thousand years of struggle, our ancestors understood that the mineral kingdom, conquered for millions of years by the vegetable and animal kingdoms, was taking its ultimate revenge. There was a period of despair that reduced the human population to three hundred million, while the seas shrank to a tenth of the Earth’s surface. A respite of three or four thousand years saw the rebirth of modest optimism. Humankind undertook prodigious works of preservation: the war against the birds ceased; humans restricted themselves to placing them in conditions that prevented them from multiplying; they obtained from them in turn invaluable services.

  Then the catastrophes returned. The inhabitable lands shrank even more. And finally, about thirty thousand years ago, the culminating modifications took place: humanity found itself reduced to a few scattered enclaves on Earth, which had become as vast and forbidding as at the dawn of things; outside the oases, it became impossible to procure the water necessary to sustain life.

  Since that time, a relative calm has reigned. Even though the water drawn from wells carved out of the abyss has again diminished, and the human population has dwindled by a third, and two oases have had to be abandoned, humanity manages to survive: no doubt humanity will continue to survive for fifty or a hundred thousand years more. Mankind’s industry has diminished terribly. Of all the energy sources our species commanded in its prime, the men of the oases are no longer able to use any more than a small portion. Communication devices and work machines have become less complex; for many millennia, it has been necessary to abandon the spiraloid flying machines18 that used to carry our ancestors across vast expanses at a speed ten times greater than that of our gliders.

  Mankind now lives in a state of gentle resignation, sad and extremely passive. The creative spark has died out; it rekindles only, in atavistic fashion, in a few individuals. Through natural selection, the race has acquired a spirit of obedience that is automatic, and thus absolute, to laws henceforth immutable.19 Passion is rare, crime nonexistent. A sort of religion has arisen, without doctrine, without rites: the fear and respect of the mineral kingdom. The Last Men attribute to the planet a slow and inexorable will. At first favorable to those kingdoms born from her womb, the Earth let them achieve great power. The mysterious hour in which she condemned them is also the hour when she came to favor new kingdoms.

  At present, nature’s obscure energies favor the ferromagnetic kingdom. One cannot say that the ferromagnetics actively participated in our destruction; at the very most, they contributed to the decimation, fatal in the end, of the wild birds.20 Even though their arrival dates back to a distant time, these new beings have evolved little. Their movements are surprisingly slow; the most agile can only cover ten meters in an hour; and the bismuth-plated walls of native iron that surround the oases are an insurmountable obstacle to them. For them to pose a direct threat to us, they would have to make an evolutionary leap that bears no relation to their earlier development.

  One first began to notice the existence of the ferromagnetic kingdom toward the decline of the Radioactive Age. They appeared as strange violet spots on human iron, that is, on iron and iron alloys that had been modified by industrial usage. The phenomenon only appeared on products that had been recast many times; these ferromagnetic spots were never discovered on natural iron. The new kingdom could only have been born, therefore, thanks to a human environment. This crucial fact was a great preoccupation for our ancestors. We had found ourselves perhaps in an analogous situation in relation to some earlier life form that, during its decline, allowed protoplasmic life to flower.

  Whatever the case, humanity early on confirmed the existence of the ferromagnetics. Once the scientists had described their basic characteristics, there was no doubt that they were organized beings. Their composition is unique. It admits only a single substance: iron.21 If other bodies, in very small quantities, are sometimes found mixed with theirs, it is in the form of impurities, harmful to ferromagnetic development. Their organism rids itself of these, unless it is too weak to do so, or stricken by some mysterious malady. The structure of iron, in this living state, is quite varied: fibrous iron, granulated iron, soft iron, hard iron, and so forth. The whole is malleable and contains no liquids. But what particularly characterizes these new organisms is their extreme complexity and a continual instability when in the magnetic state. This instability and complexity are such that even the most tenacious scientists had to renounce all attempts to apply not only laws to them, but even approximate rules of behavior. It is probably in this area that one must seek the dominant characteristic of ferromagnetic life. Whenever a superior consciousness will be discovered in the new species, I think it will especially reflect this strange phenomenon, or rather, will be the flowering of such. In the meantime, if there does exist a ferromagnetic consciousness, it is still in an elementary stage. They are presently at that stage when the drive to procreate dominates everything. Nonetheless, they have already undergone several important transformations. The writers of the Radioactive Age reveal to us that each individual is composed of three groups, with a marked tendency, in each group, toward a helicoidal form. They were unable, at that period of time, to move more than five or six centimeters in twenty-four hours: when one of their agglomerations was destroyed, they took several weeks to put it together again. Today, as we said, they are able to cover two meters in an hour. What is more, there are now agglomerations of three, five, seven, even nine groups, the forms of these groups being greatly varied. A single group, composed of a considerable number of ferromagnetic corpuscles,22 cannot subsist alone: it must be completed by two, by four, by six, or by eight other groups. A series of groups consists, obviously, of a number of energy components, although one cannot tell how these function. For agglomerations of seven or more, the ferromagnetic entity perishes if one of its groups is suppressed.

  On the other hand, a ternary series can reform itself through the help of a single group, and a series of five with the help of three groups. The reconstitution of a mutilated series, to a great extent, resembles the genesis of the ferromagnetics: this genesis retains for human observers a deeply enigmatic character. It takes place at a distance. When a ferromagnetic is born, one invariably notices the presence of several other ferromagnetics. Depending on the species, it takes from six hours to ten days to form an individual; this seems due entirely to the phenomenon of induction. The reconstitution of an injured ferromagnetic functions in an analogous manner.

  Today the presence of the ferromagnetics is for all purposes harmless. It would no doubt be a different story if mankind were to expand its domain.

  At the same time they thought about combating the ferromagnetics, our ancestors sought methods of turning their activity to the advantage of our species. There seemed to be no barrier, for example, to putting the ferromagnetic substance to industrial uses. If this were the case, one would only need to protect the machines (something that, at that time, seems to have been done without too great a cost) in a manner similar to that employed to protect our oases . . . This solution, in appearance elegant, was attempted. The ancient annals tell us that it failed. All iron transformed by this new form of life proves refractory to any human usage. Its very different structure and magnetic properties make it a substance that does not lend itself to forming any compounds, or to
doing any kind of directed work. It is true that this structure seems to change and its magnetic properties disappear when it approaches the temperature of fusion (and, a fortiori, at the moment of fusion itself); but, when the metal is allowed to cool down, the harmful properties reappear.

  What is more, a human being cannot stay for any length of time in areas where there is a ferromagnetic presence of any importance. Within a few hours it becomes anemic. After a day and a night, he finds himself in a state of extreme weakness. He soon faints; if he is not rescued, he dies.

  The immediate reason for this is clear: the proximity of ferromagnetics tends to draw from us our red corpuscles. These corpuscles, reduced almost to the state of pure hemoglobin, accumulate on the surface of the skin, and are, consequently, drawn toward the ferromagnetics, who decompose them, and appear to assimilate them.

  Different causes can counterbalance or retard this phenomenon. If one keeps walking, one has nothing to fear; more effective yet, one need only circulate in a motocruiser. If one dresses in a fabric made of bismuth fibers, one can defy the enemy influence for two days at least; this influence weakens if one sleeps with one’s head pointing north; it fades spontaneously when the sun is near the meridian.

  Of course, when the number of ferromagnetics decreases, this phenomenon becomes less and less intense: a moment arrives when it cancels itself, for the human organism does not let itself be taken over without resistance. Finally, ferromagnetic action weakens most of all along the curve of distance, and becomes negligible at more than ten meters.

  One understands why the destruction of the ferromagnetics seemed necessary to our ancestors. They took up the struggle methodically. During the period that saw the beginning of the great catastrophes, this fight demanded great sacrifices: an evolutionary change had taken place with the ferromagnetics; massive amounts of energy were now needed to stop their proliferation.