A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction

by Jack Fennell

  So there are two great beasts! Neither the traveller nor the newspaper nor my father, until this moment, had hinted at that!

  ‘The she-beast is much the smaller and has no horns. This my old man makes clear to me, drawing her with the point of his fish-spear on smooth mud. She is very sick the last time my old man has seen her. Her great moon-eyes are dim, and the stinking spume dribbles from her jaws. She can only float in the trough of the wave that her mate makes with his wallowings, her long scaly neck lying like a dead python on the oily black water. My old man thinks she was then near death. I ask him how long ago that is? Twenty times have the blue lake-lilies blossomed since, the lilies with the sweet seeds that the Badanga make bread of. And the great bull has twice been heard bellowing, but never has he been seen of man since then.’

  My father folded his great arms upon the black-and-white cascade of beard that swept down over his shirt of homespun and went on –

  ‘Twenty years. Perhaps, think I, my old man has lied to me! But we are at the end of the last day’s journey. The sun has set and night has come. My old man makes me signs we are near the lakes and I climb a high mahogo, holding by the limbs of the wild fig that is hugging the tree to death.’

  My father spat into the heart of the glowing wood ashes, and said –

  ‘I see the twin lakes lying in the midst of the high grass-swamps, barely a mile away. The black, shining waters cradle the new moon of January in their bosom, and the blue star that hangs beneath her horn, and there is no ripple on the surface, or sign of a beast, big or little. I am coming down the tree, when through the night comes a long, hollow, booming, bellowing roar that is not the cry of any beast I know. Thrice it comes, and my old man of the Badanga, squatting among the roots of the mahogo, nods his wrinkled bald head, and says, squinting up at me, “Now you have heard, will you go back or go on?”

  ‘I answer, “Al recht uit!” For something of the hunting spirit has wakened in me. And I see to the cleaning of the elephant-gun and load it carefully before I sleep that night.’

  I would have liked to ask a question but the words stuck in my throat.

  ‘By dawn of day we have reached the lakes,’ went on my father. ‘The high grass and the tall reeds march out into the black water as far as they may, then the black stone beach shelves off into depths unknown.

  ‘He who has written up the story for the Buluwayo newspaper says that the lake was once a volcano and that the crumbly black stone is lava. It may be so. But volcanoes are holes in the tops of mountains, while the lakes lie in a valley-bottom, and he who wrote cannot have been there, or he would know there are two, and not one.

  ‘All the next night, camping on the belt of stony shore that divides lake from lake, we heard nothing. We ate the parched grain and baked grubs that my old man carried in a little bag. We lighted no fire because of the spirits of the dead Badanga that would come crowding about it to warm themselves, and poison us with their breath. My old man said so, and I humoured him. My dead needed no fire to bring her to me. She was there always …

  ‘All the day and the night through we heard and saw nothing. But at the dawn of the next day I saw a great curving ripple cross the upper lake, which may have been a mile and a half wide; and the reeds upon the nearer shore were wetted to the knees as by the wave that is left in the wake of a steamer, and oily patches of scum, each as big as a barn floor, befouled the calm water, and there was a cold, strange smell upon the breeze, but nothing more.

  ‘Until at sunset of the next day, when I stood upon the mid-most belt of shore between lake and lake. With my back to the blood-red wonder of the west and my eyes sheltered by my hand as I looked out to where I had seen the waters divided as a man furrows earth with the ploughshare, I felt a shadow fall over me from behind, and turned … and saw… Alamachtig!’

  I could not breathe. At last, at last, it was coming!

  ‘I am no coward,’ said my father, in his deep resounding bass, ‘but that was a sight of terror. My old man of the Badanga had bolted like a rock-rabbit. I could hear the dry reeds crashing as he broke through. And the horned head of the beast, that was as big as a wagon-trunk, shaking about on the top of a python-neck that topped the tallest of the teak-trees, seemed as if it were looking for the little human creature that was trying to run away.

  ‘Voor den donder! how the water rises up in columns of smoke-spray as the great beast lashes it with his crocodile-tail! His head is crocodile also, with horns of rhino, his body has the bulk of six hippo bulls together. He is covered with armour of scales, yellow-white as the scales of leprosy, and he has paddles like a tortoise. God of my fathers, what a beast to see! I forget the gun I hold against my hip – I can only stand and look, while the cold, thick puffs of stinking musk are brought to my nostrils and my ear-drums are well-nigh split with the bellowing of the beast. Ay! and the wave of his wallowings that wets one to the neck is foul with clammy ooze and oily scum.

  ‘Why did the thing not see me? I did not try to hide from those scaly-lidded great eyes, yellow with half-moon-shaped pupils; I stood like an idol of stone. Perhaps that saved me, or I was too little a thing to vent a wrath so great upon. He Who in the beginning made herds of beasts like that to move upon the face of the waters, and let this one live to show the world of today what creatures were of old – He knows. I do not. I was dazed with the noise of its roaring and the thundering blows of its huge tail upon the water; I was drenched with the spume of its snortings and sickened with the stench it gave forth. But I never took my eyes from it, as it spent its fury, and little by little I came to understand.

  ‘Het is jammer to see anything suffer as that beast was suffering. Another man in my place would have thought as much, and when it lay still at last on the frothing black water, a bullet from the elephant-rifle would have lodged in the little stupid brain behind the great moon-eye, and there would have been an end …

  ‘But I did not shoot!’

  It seemed an age before my father spoke again, though the cuckoo-clock had only ticked eight times.

  ‘No! I would not shoot and spare the beast, dinosaurus or brontosaurus, or whatever the wiseacres who have not seen him may name him, the anguish that none had spared me. “Let him go on!” said I. “Let him go on seeking her in the abysses that no lead-line may ever fathom, without consolation, without hope! Let him rise to the sun and the breeze of spring through miles of the cold black water, and find her not, year after year until the ending of the world. Let him call her through the mateless nights until Day and Night rush together at the sound of the Trumpet of the Judgment, and Time shall be no more!”’

  Crash!

  The great hand came down upon the solid locust-wood table, breaking the spell that had bound my tongue.

  ‘I – do not understand,’ I heard my own child-voice saying. ‘Why was the Great Beast so sorry? What was he looking for?’

  ‘His mate who died. Ay, at the lower end of the second lake, where the water shallows, her bones were sticking up like the bleached timbers of a wrecked ship. And He and She being the last of their kind upon the earth, he knows desolation … and shall know it till death brings forgetfulness and rest. Boy, the wind is fallen, the rain has spent itself, it is time that you go to bed.’

  The Sorcerer

  CHARLOTTE MCMANUS (1922)

  In the early twentieth century, old

  traditions became a topic of heated

  discussion for Irish republicans. To some,

  the issue boiled down to a question

  of how much of its old culture Ireland

  would be willing to cast aside to join the

  modern world. This question is central to

  much of the work of Charlotte McManus,

  who is best known as the author of The

  Professor in Erin (1912), set in a parallel

  universe where Hugh O’Neill defeated

  the English at the Battle of Kinsale (1601).

  The following story explores the sam
e

  theme on a more intimate scale, with a

  sly nod to Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan

  to signal McManus’s intent.

  THERE WAS A MAN living in one of the Congested Districts Board’s new houses – those ugly houses with thin cold slate roofs and big windows – who had a charm. No one cared to cross him because of it. He lived there alone with his brother, and Anthony wanted to get a wife. But no girl would marry Anthony because of William’s charm. There were farmers who looked at his land, thirty acres of tillage and pasture, who would have given him their daughters. More than once there had been embassies, and negotiations, and dowry-fixing in the match-room of the town; but everything had fallen through when the girls were told.

  These failures troubled Anthony, yet heightened his respect for his brother. Once he had wondered what measure of sorrow he would feel if he were to see William’s coffin carried down the boreen, and a wife come tripping up. Sorrow sank the scale at one moment as he gazed into the airy fields of possibility; then he saw the comely figure of a woman, and he thought of the comforts her presence would bring.

  The thought stood waiting for him on the threshold as he entered the house after a girl’s refusal. He took it, and sighed. The silent kitchen had invited the light in through the staring panes of the windows. Its width and length were shamelessly exposed. All that should have been softened or hidden, the light had touched; the disorder, the dust, the unwashed delph on the dresser, the rent in the coarse red quilt that covered the sleeper’s figure. The fire had faded before it. It had thrust itself into the throat of the chimney. It had wiped up the shadows in the sooty corners. The silence, in which sound seemed encamped, the hard unsparing light, gave the man a cheerless feeling, an irritation beyond the comfort of an oath. He filled his pipe, drove the bowl into a coal, gave some angry puffs, and looked towards the bed.

  The sleeper’s lips were pressed together. He breathed through a long straight nose without sound, like a child. The face and head of the man belonged to the dolichocephalous type, and a lock of black hair streaked with grey hung over the forehead. His brother’s head was the other type, broad and round.

  When Anthony had made up the fire, put on the kettle, and laid the soda-cake on the table, the man on the bed opened his eyes. They were blue, set in deeply wrinkled flesh. He got off the bed, and as he limped across the room, asked if the match were made. It was not, Anthony said; there had been a dispute over the stock. The man took off his hat, blessed himself, and ate in silence. When they had finished the meal, a woman came to the door.

  Her face was half hidden in a brown shawl, and she spoke in a nasal drawl.

  ‘Good evening, sirs,’ she said. ‘Is it here that the gentleman, Mr William Carney, lives?’

  Anthony looked at his brother. Many visitors came to William, seeking help through his charm. Some came openly; some went out silent and mysterious from their homes and asked for the cure. The shrouding shawl over the woman’s face suggested mystery, and her voice said she was what Connacht calls ‘a Yank’.

  ‘Is it me you’re wanting?’ William asked. He sat without moving, looking at the wall in front of him. There was a remoteness in his manner and air.

  The woman came in. She pushed the shawl a little from her face. It was thin and colourless. A movement of the hands showed a blue silk blouse and a white neck. She sat down on the chair Anthony placed for her.

  ‘I’m told you have a charm,’ she said.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘I guess it’s good for most things.’

  ‘Do you want it done over you?’

  ‘You are real smart, Mr Carney, I do, but I don’t like to speak before the other gentleman.’

  Anthony went towards the door. William rose and followed him. ‘This is the wife for you,’ he said when they stood outside.

  ‘She’s too old,’ Anthony objected.

  ‘She’s a returned Yank, and has a fortune.’

  ‘Well, I might.’

  ‘Say if you will, or you will not, before I do the charm.’

  ‘Well I might, but I must see the money first – if we can settle the match.’

  William called the woman. ‘If you come out, I’ll do the charm,’ he said, and went over to the wall, and sat upon it.

  She came from the kitchen with an unhesitating step, her face uncovered. The only beauty left her in her fight with the seasons and hard work was her red-brown hair. But she had the confident air of success; of one whose life has been widened by the knowledge of New York kitchens; by the freedom of her evening; by the money that enabled her to buy finery. The man asked what was wrong with her.

  She told him in a clear business-like way. She had returned home from the States three months before, and if her friends there knew she was asking him for a charm they would joke her ’til she died. They didn’t believe in charms; neither did she, but it would be real clever of him if he could make a girl look like herself again.

  ‘Do you want to be made young?’

  ‘I guess I am young enough, but I want to look as I did when I went to the States,’ she said.

  The man picked three blades of grass, measured them, and got off the wall. ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity, and in the name of the saint of the muscles of the body. Amen,’ he said. ‘Now do you walk three times after me round the little bush over there.’

  She obeyed, and they went thrice round the hawthorn, going by the left to the right. Then he got a bowl with clean water, and put the pieces of grass into it, and told her to look into the bowl. The grass floated slowly on the surface. He took a little stick from his pocket and stirred the water, and said the prayer of the saint of the muscles in Irish. ‘Take out the blade that comes nearest to you.’ he said.

  She drew out the short blade.

  ‘As long as you keep that bitteen of grass, you will look young to any man wanting a wife. It will be eighteen you’ll look – a slip of a girl.’ He emptied the bowl, walked back to the house, and slammed the door.

  Anthony heard steps drawing near as he sat on a bank. He had discreetly turned his back on the rite, bending his gaze on the ground. The closing door told him that the charm had been done. He sat modestly motionless.

  The woman stopped before him, and the scope of his gaze took in a thin white hand with a pound note. ‘Give that to your brother,’ she said.

  She was two yards away as he still stared at it, and a mellow, ruminating look settled on his face. When he raised his eyes she was some distance off, and he thought she walked like a young girl.

  The woman went on her way. She took a shortcut over the fields to the Big House, the semi-derelict grey limestone building, where with two servants, a young man and a little girl, she had kept house for the Experimenter for a month. He had hired the house half a year before; he was a bald-headed, lively little man who had theories.

  He called her from the door of his laboratory as she crossed the hall; she went into the room. Instruments, coils, and jars stood on a table. There was a flow of commingled odours. One coil, attached to a mouthpiece, was fastened to a battery, and a mirror beside it reflected a sunbeam. Not far from the table stood John Naughton and Bridgie, and she was told to join them.

  The Experimenter spoke some words to himself. The three had a value as human units with vocal chords and throats and differences of sound, and this was their pre-eminent interest to him. He was engaged on experiments of light, and sound, and electric waves, and psycho-activities, and was just then experimenting on sound in its relation to the rest. He asked Mary Nally to speak into the receiver.

  She did so readily, and taking observations, he scarcely noticed the child’s snigger. For the woman had said, ‘I am eighteen and beautiful.’

  She spoke the same words three times, and his eyes puckered. It seemed as if something unexpected had happened.

  He told the young man and the child to speak into the receiver in turn. Both said that Mary Nally was eighteen and beautiful. The Experimenter
waved them back, and seized the tube. But the words he meant to say melted into ‘She’s eighteen and beautiful.’

  He examined his instruments; he read the sunbeam on the mirrors; a look of interest showed on his face. He began speaking, to himself more than to the three. Something remarkable had happened. A magnetic field had been created round the receiver, so that they spoke words directed by animal magnetism, or odic force. Miss Nally, he conjectured, had either a powerful magnet about her which prevented the results he had expected from his experiments, or had become a magnet herself, as if she had been subjected to N-rays. These rays exercised a great influence on the nerve centres increasing the activities of muscles and nerves, and were produced by muscular contractions and nervous activity. He would put her to further tests.

  But the woman had backed to the door. The cakes were in the oven; it was time to get the tea. There was a dark poppy-tint in each cheek as she went out of the room. It lasted till she reached the great stone-flagged kitchen. Then she went grey-white; she had dropped the charm. She sat down and thought about where it might be. John Naughton’s and Bridgie’s step came on the stair, and she got up and stood by the fire till they had passed through the kitchen. Then she fled upstairs. Standing by his coil, the Experimenter saw the door open, and his abstracted gaze rested on the woman as she came in and bent over the floor. A blade of grass fluttered from the paper she took up. Her hand swept the air like a wing; she bent again and she seized it. The door opened wider, and closed, and she was gone.

  Mary’s big brass-bound American trunk stood at the foot of the bed in her room off the kitchen. She put the charm in the trinket case with her eight-carat gold bracelets. She dressed herself in her purple suit and re-did her red-brown hair, her mind prepared for any attack. She had words ready, like splinters of an iceberg. She was composed, cold. There was no one in the kitchen when she went back.