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

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  And yet, Targ believed he saw manifested there the same cosmic will that had condemned the Oases.

  His sorrow did not render him inactive. He studied the ruins. They did not reveal any vestiges of human activity. Machines to store energy, machines to excavate, to drill, to cultivate, to crush, gliders, motocruisers, houses, all had disappeared beneath a formless mass of rocks and stones. Where were Érê and the children buried? The calculations allowed only a rough approximation, which was possibly misleading; he had to act according to chance.

  Targ assembled, toward the north, the machines to be used for clearing rubble and excavating, then, having focused the protoatomic energy, he started digging out the huge cavity. For an hour the machines hummed. Jacks lifted the blocks and rejected them automatically. Cobalt paraboloids cleared out the loose rubble, and as they did so, the pile-drivers, with slow, irresistible blows, stabilized the walls. Once the trench reached a length of twenty meters, a glider was revealed, then a large planetary with its granite foundation and accessories, finally an arcum house.

  Their location confirmed Targ’s calculations. Assuming that the disaster had surprised the family near their home, it was necessary to dig toward the west. If Érê or the children had been able to reach the planetary that Dune Equator used to communicate with the Red-Lands (as Arva’s accident led him to believe), then it was toward the southwest that he would have to make his search.

  The watchman installed his tools near the two probable locations, and resumed work. “Humanized” by the incalculable effort of generations, the vast machines allied the power of the elements with the dexterity of delicate hands.34 They lifted rocks, they gathered up dirt and small stones in a steady manner. Only the touch of a finger was necessary to direct them, to make them work faster or slower, or to stop their functioning. They represented, in the hands of this Last Man, more power than a whole tribe, or people, had possessed in primitive times.

  An arcum roof was uncovered. It was twisted, dented, and here and there a block of stone had cleaved it. But precise signs made it recognizable. It had sheltered, since the landing at Dune Equator, all the tenderness, the dreams and hopes of this supreme human family. Targ halted the machines that were starting to lift it, he contemplated it with dread and gentleness. What enigma did it conceal? What drama would it reveal to this poor man, already replete with sorrow and fatigue?

  During many long minutes, the watchman hesitated to continue his work. Finally, prying open one of the tears in the wall, he let himself slip into the dwelling.

  The bedroom he found himself in was empty. A few blocks of stone littered it, and had ripped a bed from the wall and crushed it. A table had been pulverized and several vases of soft aluminum flattened under the stones.

  This spectacle revealed the indifferent nature of material destruction. But it suggested more moving scenes. Targ, all trembling, entered the next room; it was empty and in disarray like the first. One by one, he visited all corners of the house. And when he found himself in the first room, a few steps away from the entrance door, his stupor turned to anxiety.

  “It is natural enough though,” he whispered, “that at the first sign of danger they would have fled outside . . .”

  He tried to imagine the manner in which the first shock took place, and also the mental picture Érê might have had in reaction to the peril. All that came to him were sensations and contradictory ideas. One impression alone remained fixed: it was that instinct must have driven the family toward the planetary of the Red-Lands. It was thus logical to proceed in that direction. But how? Did Érê reach the Great Planetary, or did she succumb along the way? The words muttered by Arva came back to the watchman’s mind. This event gave those words meaning. Érê, or one of the children, or perhaps all of them, had almost surely reached it. It was thus necessary to resume the work as fast as possible, which would not stop him from beginning to dig a tunnel that might lead there.

  His decision made, Targ raised up the front door, and attempted a rapid reconnaissance. But the blocks and rubble before him posed an impenetrable obstacle. He exited through the roof, and restarted the machines in the southwest. Then the positioned his northern machines, and had them begin digging the tunnel. He also looked after Arva, whose lethargy took on, little by little, the appearance of normal sleep.

  Then he waited, vigilant, his eyes fixed on the tractable mechanisms. From time to time, he readjusted their workings with a furtive gesture; now and then, he halted a pickaxe, a blade, a propeller, a turbine, in order to examine the terrain. Finally he spied, twisted and dented, the tall shaft of the planetary and the sparkling shell. From then on, he did not cease to marshal their energy. On their own, their subtle organs were functioning; according to the situation, they lifted heavy stones, or scooped up small debris.

  Then he uttered a lugubrious wailing, like the cry of a dying man . . . A glow had just become visible, that same supple and vital glow that he had seen, the day of the Disaster, among the ruins of the Red-Lands. His heart froze; his teeth were chattering. His eyes filled with tears, all his movements slowed, he left the work to those metal hands alone, more adroit and gentle than the hands of man.

  Then, he halted everything. He lifted up against his chest, with violent sobbing, the body he had so passionately loved.

  At first, a ray of hope traversed his state of shock. It seemed to him that Érê was not yet cold. Feverishly, he held the hygroscope to her pale lips . . .

  She had disappeared into the eternal night.

  For a long while, he contemplated her. She had revealed to him the poetry of ancient times; the dreams of an extraordinary youth had transformed the sad planet; Érê was love itself, in all that is vast, pure and nearly eternal. And, whenever he held her in his arms, he seemed to see reborn a race that was new and without number.

  “Érê! Érê!” he murmured, “Érê, freshness of the world! Érê, the final dream of mankind!”

  Then, his soul steeled itself. He placed on the hair of his companion a bitter and fierce kiss, he returned to work.

  One by one, he brought all of them back. The mineral world had shown itself less vicious to them than to the young woman; it had spared them the agony of a slow death, the intolerable dispersion of vital energy. Blocks had crushed their skulls, smashed open their chests, crushed their torsos.

  Then, Targ collapsed to the ground, and cried endlessly. Pain filled him, vast as the world itself. He bitterly repented for having struggled against inexorable fatality. And the words of that dying woman, in the Red-Lands, echoed through his pain like the death knell of the immense universe.

  A hand touched his shoulder. He started up—it was Arva, leaning over him, livid and unsteady. She was so overcome that no tears came to her eyes; yet all the despair possible in weak human creatures dilated her pupils. She muttered in a toneless voice:

  “We have to die! We have to die!”

  They stared into each other’s eyes. They had loved each other deeply, every day of their lives, throughout all things real and all things dreamed. They had passionately shared the same hopes, and in this infinite misery their suffering was again fraternal.

  “We must die!” He repeated it like an echo. Then they embraced, and for the last time, two human hearts beat one against the other.

  And thus, in silence, she took to her lips the tube of iridium that she always carried with her . . . As the dose was massive and Arva’s weakness so extreme, the euthanasia took only a few minutes.

  “Death, death,” the dying woman stammered. “Oh, how could we have been so afraid of it!”

  Her eyes clouded over, and a blessed torpor relaxed her lips; her thoughts had already completely vanished, when her last breath passed from her bosom.

  There was now only one single man on Earth.

  Sitting on a block of porphyry, he remained buried in his sadness and his dreams. He made, one more time, the grand voyage back toward the beginning of time, which had so passionately enflamed his soul .
. . And first, he saw again the primeval sea, still warm, swarming with life, unconscious and unfeeling. Then came the blind and deaf creatures, bursting with extraordinary energy, and limitless fertility. Sight was born, the divine light created her tiny temples; and those beings born of the Sun knew their existence. And solid ground emerged. Thereupon the peoples of the waters, vague, confused, and silent, spread their dominion. For three thousand centuries, they generated complex forms. Insects, batrachians, and reptiles knew the forests of giant ferns, the proliferation of calamites and arrowheads.35 At the same time trees put forth their magnificent torsos, the giant reptiles also roamed the Earth. The Dinosaurs had the size of cedar trees, the Pterodactyls soared above vast swamps . . . During these ages the first mammals, puny, awkward and stupid, are born. They roam about, miserable, and so small that a hundred thousand of them would be needed to equal the weight of an iguanodon. Through endless millennia, their existence remains imperceptible, pathetic almost. And yet they grow. The hour sounds and their turn comes, their many species arise in force from all corners of the savanna, from all the dark places of the mature forests. It is they, now, who are looked on as colossi. The deinotherium, the ancient elephant, the armored rhinoceros with hide like old oak, the hippopotamus with insatiable maw, the urus, the aurochs, the machaerodus, the giant lion and yellow lion, the tiger, the cave bear, and the whale as huge as several diplodoci, and the sperm whale whose mouth is a cavern, all compete to breathe in the scarce energies of life.36

  Now the planet favored man’s ascension. His reign was the most ferocious, the most powerful of all—and the last. He became the prodigious destroyer of life. The forests died alongside their hosts without number, all beasts were exterminated or enslaved. And there was a time when the subtle energies and obscure minerals themselves seemed man’s slaves; the conqueror harnessed everything right down to the mysterious power that bound together the atoms.

  “This frenzy itself announced the death of the Earth, the death of the Earth for our Kingdom!” Targ murmured softly.37

  He shivered in his suffering. He thought that whatever remained now of his flesh had been transmitted, in an unbroken line, since the origin of things. Some thing that had once lived in the primeval sea, on emerging alluvia, in the swamps, in the forests, in the midst of savannas, and among the multitude of man’s cities, had continued unbroken down to him. And here, the end! He was the only man whose heart beat on the face of the Earth, once again vast and empty!

  Night fell. The firmament displayed the lovely stars that had shone for the eyes of trillions of men. There remained only two eyes to contemplate them! Targ counted out those stars he had preferred to all others, then he saw the star of disasters rise once more in the sky, the star riddled with holes, silvery, the stuff of legend, toward which he raised his hands in sadness . . .

  He uttered a final sob; death entered into his heart and, refusing euthanasia, he left the ruins, he went to lie down in the oasis, among the ferromagnetics.

  Then, humbly, a few small pieces of the last human life entered into the New Life.

  *In the high regions of the atmosphere water vapor has, since time immemorial, been decomposed by ultraviolet light into oxygen and hydrogen: the hydrogen escaped into interstellar reaches. [Rosny’s note]

  Notes

  Introduction: Rosny’s Evolutionary Ecology

  1. Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 7.

  2 Robert L. Forward, “When Science Writes the Fiction,” in Hard Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 1–21; quotation from epigraph, 1.

  3 Amy Louise Downey, “The Life and Works of J.-H. Rosny aîné, 1856–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1950), 18–28.

  4 Cited in Rosny aîné, Portraits et souvenirs (Paris: Cie française des arts graphiques, 1945), 22. Jean Perrin won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1936. The introduction to this posthumous work was written by Robert Borel-Rosny, the son of Rosny’s eldest daughter, Irmine Gertrude, who was raised by Rosny and his second wife, Marie Borel. The family of Robert Borel is the executor of Rosny’s literary estate.

  5. Philip José Farmer and J.-H. Rosny, Ironcastle (New York: DAW Books, 1976). Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film La Guerre du feu was released in 1981. A new English mass-market edition of the Harold Talbott translation: The Quest for Fire (New York: Ballantine Books) was released in 1982.

  6. See Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 64, 681–82 (January–February 1986), a special issue partly devoted to the Wells-Rosny comparison. Most interesting are the essays by Roger Bozzetto, “Wells et Rosny devant l’inconnu”; Daniel Compère, “La fin des hommes”; and Daniel Congenas, “Prehistoire et récit préhistorique chez Rosny et Wells.”

  7. In his Origin of Species, however, Darwin did consider what he called “pangenesis” as a hypothesis, that is, the hypothetical existence of “pangenes,” some sort of microscopic somatic cells or particles that contain information, respond to environmental stimulus, and—in the form of germ cells in the bloodstream—pass on acquired information from parents to the next generation.

  8. “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” in Darwin: A Critical Editon, edited by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), 103.

  9. For the sake of clarity, we will use the term “alien” to refer to extraterrestrials only.

  10. Marie-Hélène Huet, L’Histoire des Voyages extraordinaires: Essai sur l’oeuvre de Jules Verne (Paris: Minard, 1975).

  11. Allen A. Debus, “Reframing the Science in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Science-Fiction Studies 33, 3 (November 2006), 405–21.

  12. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977).

  13. An example of how Wells introduces new perspectives of evolutionary science into this middle-class world is the story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.” At the height of England’s colonial empire, adventurers scoured uncharted places like Borneo seeking new species of flora, such as rare orchids. In Wells’s tale, however, such rarities are little more than things displayed and sold in London’s orchid market. The protagonist, Winter-Wedderburn, is a “shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employment” (343). A bachelor, he lives with his cousin-housekeeper. His sole passion is collecting orchids. He buys an orchid with a particularly violent history: it was found under the crushed body of Batten the explorer: “Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by jungle leeches” (346).

  Wedderburn fancies himself a Darwinist as he ponders his plant: “Darwin studied their fertilization. . . . Well it seems there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilization” (348). He speculates that his orchid may reproduce through its tubers. But if that is so, then what purpose do its flowers serve? This he learns firsthand. Day-to-day contact with his “new darling” in his hothouse culminates in an apparent liebestod. When the orchid blooms, it apparently emits a scent that overpowers Wedderburn’s senses. Wary (or jealous) of the plant, his cousin finds him in the nick of time, “lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid.” What ensues seems a struggle between rival lovers—the cousin tears him from the plant’s “embrace” and kills it.

  The reader’s first reaction is that the plant is a vampire. This reaction of horror, however, is meant to suggest another explanation, a scientific one certainly more shocking to a Victorian audience. Recovering from his encounter, Wedderburn is a new man. Tired and vapid before, he is now “bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his strange adventure” (351). Darwin’s question may have an answer: the purpose of the orchid’s flower is reproductive, and in a quite shocking way. What has taken place could be some form of transspecies fertilization. The
reenergized Wedderburn could have undergone a possible mutation. The reader knows, however, that in civilized London, such a mutation, if it occurred, could have no consequence. The bourgeois actors, and their readers, may be shaken, but they remain safe in their domestic world.

  14. H. G. Wells, Julian S. Huxley, and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life (London: Literary Guild, 1934), 63.

  15. “The Empire of the Ants” (1906) sheds light on the previous story. We have the same skeptical narrator, who recounts a tale told by the explorer Holroyd of murderous, intelligent ants that threaten human dominion over the Earth, according to Holroyd. The narrator at first dismisses this as the story of a paranoiac. The difference here is that the narrator seems won over in the end by the paranoia: “By 1920, they will be halfway down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or ’60 at the latest for the discovery of Europe” (285). Just as Columbus discovered America, now these ants reverse this journey, bringing destruction back to the place from which it formerly came. In contrast with Rosny’s observers, “facts” rarely get through to Wells’s Everyman narrators. When they do get through, as here, they plunge these narrators into the irrational. This narrator displays the insanity of Gulliver returned from the Houynhmhms, or Prendick in London after Moreau’s island in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1897). If Elstead’s story has plausibility in scientific terms, this account is “without detailed information,” a response to alternate evolution more like that of Maupassant’s protagonist in “Le Horla.”

  16. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1948). Leverkühn’s cantata offers a terminal vision, a Götterdämmerung brought about by the Nazis’ attempts to use science to annihilate all that is human on Earth: “Then nothing more: silence and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is no more. It changes its meaning, it abides as a light in the night” (491). Again there are obvious Pascalian overtones. The note, because it alone in the empty universe is heard by the human spirit, somehow abides in the void: silence and night.