No one will ever know.
Opening against one another, salvos of fire resonated all the way to us the most frightful detonation that had ever shaken the heavens. And under the watch of the age-old witness to the fratricidal conflicts of humankind, the two fleets hurled themselves at one another, disappearing into a cloud of smoke.
And that was the end, the abominable apotheosis of the spectacle; all the remaining ships perished in that supreme surge: the torpedoed battleships were torn apart; the disemboweled cruisers sank; all the powder remaining in the ammunition magazines exploded; the horizon was colored with every shade of red, from crimson to pink. Black and yellow smoke veiled from our eyes the horror of that supreme minute, in which the species of madness that immobilized us in hypnotic contemplation finally ceased.
The Parisian crowd, breaking that detestable charm, started to flee in all directions. People closed their eyes, blocked their ears, in order no longer to see and no longer to hear, but the power of the revelatory wave was still sufficient for the vision to be imposed on closed eyes, pursuing the most resolute into the dark corners in which they tried in vain to take refuge, far from the vision of murder and dementia.
Like the others, I had fled, going back in haste to my empty house; and into my room, the curtains closed, shreds of images pursued me. I saw the wounded debris of the battle trailing over the waters, millions of little black dots still dancing on the crests of the waves, and—a hideous conclusion, the epilogue of the imbecilic massacre—I watched two enemy cruisers run aground on a vast sandbank off the coast of Newfoundland.
They were the Roon and the Colorado, whose grounded hulls, tilting sideways, poured their exhausted and overexcited crews out on to the strand, gilded by placidly glorious sunlight. What should they have done, those wretches who had miraculously escaped the fate of so many of their innocent brethren, except fall to their knees to thank the god of their beliefs and embrace one another in an explosion of gratitude and love? So powerful still in the bestial hearts of our races is the destructive instinct whose blossoming is assured therein that those men still found the means of prolonging, on that silent and deserted isle, the combat of which they were the only survivors.
Under the tyranny of that spectacle, I confess, I ended up bowing my head before the power that seemed to be bending me beneath its yoke, as if to say to me: I want you to see, and to know; afterwards, you will judge. The old instinct of the human being terrified by nature rose up again within me, and without really knowing what I was doing, I eventually fell to my knees, addressing myself to that unknown power, divining it, attempting to soften it by prayer, and murmuring, having been humbled and become child-like again: “Have pity on me!”
Dusk fell; gradually, the hideous images faded from my eyes; invaded by a bizarre torpor, I dragged myself to me bed. Overwhelmed by lassitude, I fell into a death-like sleep.
XII
When I woke up from that cataleptic sleep, I remained still for several hours, without making a movement, vaguely lending an ear to the sound of the rain, which was falling with the force of a torrent. It was streaming down so hard that I began to fear for the solidity of the house.
That lasted for three hours without a pause, and it required all my physical weakness to prevent me from getting up and going to the window to assess the results of the inundation, which must, eventually, fill up the drains and submerge the city.
Abruptly, the rain stopped, and again, a deathly silence floated around me. My stomach, racked by hunger, was causing me pain, but once again, I went to sleep.
The chirping of sparrows battling outside the windows of my bedroom extracted me from that further annihilation. I raised myself up on my elbow; I was weak but I had no difficulty ringing. The cook appeared almost immediately.
From her, I learned that the whole of Paris had, after the appalling spectacle of the battle, succumbed to the crisis of sleep that had kept me unconscious for thirty-six hours. Life had stopped, and when my hunger appeased, I was able to go downstairs in order to go out in search of news. I discovered that the torpor had been general throughout the zone submissive to the telepathic influence.
By a remarkable coincidence, the telegrams that were beginning to arrive from everywhere after that abnormal suspension of activity signaled an interruption in the transmission of images and thoughts. Since the apparitions of that frightful slaughter in Newfoundland, everything seemed to have reverted to the previous order, and, it must be said, everyone, in that personal liberation, began to hope for a return to individual isolation.
Had we finished with the anxieties of telepathic perspicacity? Everyone ardently hoped so, and in the meantime occupied themselves with healing the consequences of an adventure that they wanted to believe exceptional, with neither precedent nor recurrence.
In the wake of an unusual expenditure of energy, cases of general paralysis were revealed to be so numerous that no one hesitated to see it as a consequence of those three months of hypernervous existence. By virtue of a strange logic, people deemed that the person designated to remedy that situation was the one who had been the observer of the first manifestations, and people came to me from all directions in search of a cure for the results of the crisis. Not all the cases were irreparable; temperament and age modified its gravity, but how many people would have to pay for their lives for those three months of overexcited consciousness?
One of the first to be afflicted, alas, was my poor master, Saint-Denis. So self-composed before, so perfectly equilibrated, in what excesses of overloaded sensibility I watched him die in two days, in his little house at Ville d’Avray, overlooking that beautiful lake where he had once followed me in my exaltation of observation.
It required nothing less to console me than a letter from Madame Forbe asking me, without bitterness, to come to see her.
The thought of reconstituting my domestic hearth, destroyed by the scourge, caused me to abandon my patients for a day, and I left for Angers, where my wife, also enfeebled and deeply affected by the repercussion of events, embraced me tearfully and forgave me a few hours of irresponsible folly.
Everywhere, there was a relaxation. The days passed, and no one had yet observed any alteration in the good human life that had been reconstituted: not the slightest communication, no strange imagery. Telepathy seemed vanquished; people breathed deeply, and rediscovered the joy of living. Friends who had quarreled, couples who had separated, kissed and made up, promising to forget a bad dream. Even the law, appeased, relaxed, and made the judgment of a temporary delirium. Sourbelle’s wife was set free, and she and her husband resumed the course of their miserable existence.
A peace treaty between the United States and Germany was signed by emissaries still bewildered by the fit of disorientation. The President and the Emperor were confined to bed for several weeks, debilitated by nervous exhaustion, and perhaps also by the scruples that made them a trifle repentant.
And yet, in spite of the horrible results of a struggle thus far unique, if it is necessary to believe the universally accepted explanations of the crisis, we still owe them thanks, so much good potentially being born from the excess of evil—for it has been suggested that it required nothing less than such a prodigious number of cannon shots, detonations and explosions to break the fluidic agglomeration thanks to which, for three months, human individuals communicated as intimately as it is possible to imagine. Like rain and hail, telepathic waves are obliged to burst by cannon fire.
May it not reappear, and never reform!
That is the wish I form now, in the midst of the calm of a life whose intimacy is limited to a few dear and reasonably clairvoyant individuals; thus it appears to me to be long again, full of promised joys and an infinite sweetness. An increased notoriety, a numerous and lucrative clientele, a peaceful hearth: if all that only rests on appearances, let us enjoy the appearance and not desire to get to the bottom of things, or too close to consciences that might, like good wines, have their lees.
Sages might sing the praises of glass houses, but can you name a single one who constructed one?
Jules Sageret: The Race that Will Be Victorious
(1908)
I attended spiritualist séances.
Our medium held a pen, which initially channeled Abbé Nonotte, well known as a contemporary, victim and enemy of Voltaire, in a reliable manner.34 At every séance we obtained at least twenty pages, to which the medium made no contribution, except for mechanical movements of the fingers, for he conversed with us incessantly about modern subjects entirely foreign to the Christian apologetics that he drafted with stenographic rapidity. He made use of his left hand to light cigarettes, drink, gesticulate and even draw people. The other hand, meanwhile, did not experience any interruption or deceleration in its frenetic course.
In the middle of the ninth séance, however, it was seen to quit the paper abruptly. It made jerky movements in all directions, certainly contrary to the will of the medium. The poor hand, we all understood, was prey to the disputes of several invisible beings. Antagonistic forces of equal power held it motionless momentarily. Finally, it fell back violently upon the paper, began splashing it with blots in the form of exclamation marks, and then resumed writing. It was not Abbé Nonotte who had gotten the upper hand in the battle, because everything had changed: the style, the subject, the forms of the letters and the punctuation.
I shall transcribe here the medium’s communications in their new phase. I shall transcribe them with neither a title nor a preamble, merely such as they are before me on their original sheets of paper. Know only, by way of preparation that they recount a history of humankind from a future date whose determination is impossible.
Let us now hand the floor to the spirit.
In the year 47 of the second cycle, a young woman was exhibited in fairgrounds, whom the posters called Ertha, the Beautiful Whistler. Only one thing rendered her singular at first: she was ignorant of the art of pronouncing consonants, and whistled marvelously. Physiologists who examined her attributed her faulty articulation to a certain poorly developed apophysis. It appears that it is a similar but more pronounced anatomical conformation that prevents apes from expressing themselves in human languages.
The Beautiful Whistler was considered to be ugly. Her mental state was no more pleasing, although no one had anything for which to reproach her. She was always depressed and mechanical, out of place in all the places to which the traveling fair and her exploiters took her. That she lacked cheerfulness could be attributed to a phenomenon of femininity, but her sadness was antipathetic. Only one value remained to her: her whistling, with which she produced the deepest notes of the bassoon and rose as high as the shrill sonorities of the flute. In addition, Ertha could imitate any wind or brass instrument, thanks to an innate gift, although it was not accompanied by any musical instinct. If she had not been carefully trained, she would have produced an atrocious cacophony, so naturally indifferent was she to the harmony or discordance of the sounds she emitted. Once provided with the necessary education, the Whistling Beauty amused her audience without hurting their ears, but it was necessary to wait until she had a purely mechanical discipline.
In consequence, Ertha excited curiosity. She brought in good returns. However, as society was still living under the regime of competition, it did not take long for Handsome Whistlers and Beautiful Whistlers of both sexes to emerge in fairly considerable numbers. There was nothing surprising in that. The physiologists were, however, surprised to learn that two of these phenomena were perfectly authentic.
Science then conducted an investigation, departing from the sufficiently plausible idea that not all living monsters were in fairground tents. Thus, a hundred Whistlers were discovered scattered throughout the world. Their habitat seemed to be indeterminate. They were remarkable in their specific homogeneity; any of the eleven Whistlers born among Negroes resembled the others as much as, but no more than Whistlers of German or Mongolian origin. The same epidermal coloration appeared everywhere: an olive tint more or less darkened by the sun.
It was an interesting problem.
Scientific academies collaborated in order to carry out methodical observations. It was thus discovered, after two generations, that Whistler couples were remarkably fruitful, while unions between humans and monsters only produced rare hybrids incapable of reproduction. Furthermore, those hybrids were only obtained at an exceedingly high price; it was, in fact, necessary to pay a few unfortunates who had lost all sense of dignity very dearly to persuade them to impregnate female Whistlers, who were, moreover, more or less raped. No woman could ever be persuaded to give herself to a male Whistler. Any sexual commerce with the phenomena excited more repugnance and reprobation than bestiality. It was claimed that they did not experience a reciprocal disgust themselves, but it was claimed without proof, because it was seen as a mark of their inferiority. The superior interest of the conversation of the human race caused the world to rise up against them.
They multiplied rapidly, in fact, both by virtue of their own fertility and by their spontaneous appearance in the bosom of the healthiest families. The International Bureau of Statistics, which did not take long to occupy itself with them, published these figures in the year 120: birth of Whistlers: one per 839 human families, one per ten female Whistlers. Thus, officially, the monsters were no longer classified in our species; they were referred to as males and females, not men and women. Instead of giving birth, they “dropped” young, which would one day die rather than “pass on.”
In that, common parlance was only following the observations of science. The latter could no longer treat the emergence of Whistlers as a teratological phenomenon. It found itself in the presence of a well-characterized veritable species. From that, a theory followed that appeared almost immediately.
All species, it was said, passed at certain moments through crises of mutation. Then, instead of continuing to reproduce in a faithfully identical manner, they saw individuals emerging from their bosom much less similar to the previous ordinary type; these individuals were grouped in varieties, and the extreme varieties constituted one or more new species that entered into vital competition with the root species. The mutational crisis was quite short relative to the normal existence of those root species; hence, in a geological period, the existence of a flora or fauna unknown in the immediately anterior period, and the rarity of transitional flora and fauna. It was unnecessary to be surprised that the human species, almost constant since the tertiary anthropoid, was now passing through a mutational crisis.
Such, in summary, was the theory invented by a scientific syndicate knows as the S.S.A.
Scientists set out to test the theory elsewhere. Facts were attached to it that had previously been explained outside it. Thus, the appearance of the Whistlers had been accompanied, and even slightly preceded, by that of humans more abnormal than usual. Some had voluminous brains and stooped shoulders, while others were remarkable because of their short legs, or because of their athletic build and powerful elongated jaws in the forefront of a narrow skull, or because of the abundance of their hair, or baldness, or beauty, or exceptional eyesight, or myopia.
That greater variety of human types had initially been attributed to the combined effects of heredity and the increasing specialization of careers. It was imagined, for example, that aircraft pilots would have atrophied limbs by virtue of no longer walking, and could transmit their atrophy to their children; the latter, less well-adapted to other métiers, would naturally choose a profession in which they remained seated, and so on, all the way to the legless aeromen of the future. The S.S.A. theory appeared far more satisfactory; it was adopted without opposition.
There was then a debauchery of species, varieties and subvarieties within the species Homo sibilans, and there were, in addition, Homo intellectualis, Homo mecanicus, Homo pugnax, Homo glaber, Homo villosus, Homo spectabilis. But the taxonomists were wasting their time because, with the exception of the
initial two, all these categories of the genus Homo proved to be unstable and mercurial, to the extent that the nomenclature was abandoned. The priscus and the sibilans became the only ones established.35 The usage became commonplace of calling the latter “anthropoid” in spite of the qualification Homo.
The unanimous convergence of minds to the S.S.A doctrine did not prevent scientific jealousy from attacking it. J.-B.-J. Sand Arena, an isolated scholar who wanted to deprive it of the merit of the invention showed rare courage. He carried out research on the immense deposits that were still preserved, piously cared for but unconsidered, of books printed from the middle of the nineteenth century, of the so-called Christian Era to the end of the period of Eras.
In that remote epoch when humans had the singular custom of using as temporal reference points the birth of a god or a political revolution, and not, as later, the sidereal revolution of the equinoctial points, they employed a detestable paper for the fabrication of books, which only required a century or two to turn to dust—with the result that Sand Arena was obliged to pursue his research not in a library but in a quarry of chalky powder. He had, however, an unprecedented stroke of luck. After having caused a hundred volumes to disintegrate merely by opening them, he collected a few fragments that were almost intact.
A scientist of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century of the Christian Era had summarized therein the ideas of another scientist named de Vries.36 The theory of the person in question was none other than that of the so-called crisis of mutation invented by the S.S.A. De Vries had cultivated a plant, the evening primrose or oenothera, and had introduced an alteration in the process of spontaneously procreating daughter species that differed from it in several very evident characteristics. From that, by extension to all living beings, emerged an image of past and future evolution to which the S.S.A. had added nothing. What had once happened to the oenothera was now happening to humankind. It ought to have been foreseen. What a striking triumph for the wisdom of the Ancients!
The Revolt of the Machines Page 27