The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “It is a victory, then,” I murmured, sadly.

  But as I thought of these things, the clamor of the battle made the forest tremble more violently; then, the warriors reappeared from every direction, with cries of distress, fleeing toward the frontier of Safety.

  Then I saw the Xipehuz emerge from the edge of the forest, no longer separate from one another but united in 20-strong circles, their fires turned inwardly. In that formation, invulnerable, they advanced upon our helpless warriors and massacred them frightfully.

  It was a defeat, and a terrible one. Even the boldest combatants thought only of flight. In spite of the grief that grew in my heart, though, I patiently observed the fatal incidents, in the hope of finding some remedy in the very depths of misfortune—for a venom and its antidote often exist side by side.

  For that confidence in the power of thought, fate gifted me with two discoveries.

  Firstly, I noticed that in places where our tribes were multitudinous and the Xipehuz few in number, the killing, initially incalculable, gradually slowed down, and that the enemy’s blows were having less and less impact, many of the victims getting up after being briefly stunned. The strongest ended up being completely resistant to the shocks, continuing to flee after numerous strikes. The same phenomenon being reproduced at various points on the battlefield, I boldly concluded that the Xipehuz were becoming weary, and that their power of destruction did not exceed a certain limit.

  The second observation, which complemented the first marvelously, was furnished by a group of Khaldes. These poor men, surrounded on all sides by the enemy and losing confidence in their short daggers, ripped up bushes and used them as clubs, with the aid of which they tried to clear a passage. To my great surprise, their attempt succeeded. I saw Xipehuz losing equilibrium by the dozen, and about half the Khaldes escaped through the gap thus made. Singularly enough, though, those who made use of bronze weapons instead of shrubs—as a few chiefs did—killed themselves in striking at the enemy. It must also be noted that the blows of the clubs did no appreciable damage to the Xipehuz, for the ones that had fallen righted themselves promptly and resumed the pursuit. Nevertheless, I considered my double discovery to be extremely important with respect to future battles.

  Meanwhile, the rout continued. The ground reverberated as the vanquished fled; before nightfall, no one remained within the Xipehuz limits but our dead and a few 100 combatants who had climbed trees. The fate of the latter was terrible, for the Xipehuz burned them alive by bringing a thousand fires to bear on the branches that sheltered them. Their frightful cries resounded for hours beneath the vast firmament.

  III. Bakhoun the Chosen

  The next day, the tribes made a count of the survivors. It transpired that the battle had cost about 9000 men; a modest estimate put the Xipehuz losses at 600—with the result that the death of each enemy had cost 15 human lives.

  Despair entered into many hearts, crying out against the chiefs and talking about abandoning the frightful enterprise. Then, amid the murmurs, I advanced into the middle of the camp and began loudly reproaching all of them for the pusillanimity of their hearts. I ask them if it were preferable to let all men perish or to sacrifice a fraction; I demonstrated to them that, within ten years, the entire Zahelal country would be invaded by the Forms, and the lands of the Khaldes, the Sahrs, the Pjarvanns and the Xisoastres within 20 years. Then, having thus awakened their consciousness, I made them recognize that a sixth of the endangered territory had reverted to humans, and that the enemy had retreated into the forest on three sides. Finally, I told them about my observations; I made them understand that the Xipehuz were not indefatigable, and that wooden clubs could knock them down and force them to expose their vulnerable points.

  A great silence reigned over the plain; hope returned to the hearts of the innumerable warriors who were listening to me. Then, to increase confidence, I described a wooden apparatus that I had conceived, appropriate for both attack and defense. Enthusiasm was reborn; the tribes applauded my speech and the chiefs laid their emblems of command at my feet.

  IV. Metamorphoses of the Armaments

  In the days that followed, I had a great many trees felled, and I provided a model of light, portable barriers of which this is a summary description: a frame six cubits long and two wide, connected by bars to an internal frame one cubit wide by five long. Six men—two porters, two warriors armed with stout wooden lances and two others similarly armed with wooden lances but with exceedingly sharp metal tips, and also provided with bows and arrows—were able to position themselves inside it comfortably and circulate within the forest, protected from immediate contact with the Xipehuz.

  On arrival within range of the enemy, the warriors provided with blunt lances would strike, tipping the enemy over and forcing them to expose themselves; then the archers would take aim at the stars, either with their bows or their lances, according to circumstances.

  As the average height of the Xipehuz was little more than a cubit and a half, I designed the barriers in such a manner that, when on the move, the external frame did not exceed a height above the ground of a cubit and a quarter. For that it was sufficient to incline the supports linking the internal frame by about a hand’s width. As the Xipehuz were unable to pass over steep obstacles, nor make progress other than in an upright position, the barrier, thus constructed, was sufficient to shelter its occupants from their immediate attack. They would certainly make an effort to burn these new weapons, and might well succeed in more than one instance, but as their fires were scarcely effective beyond the reach of an arrow, they would be forced to expose themselves in order to attempt that incineration—which, not being instantaneous, would also permit the employment of displacement maneuvers, which would, in many cases, take them out of harm’s way.

  V. The Second Battle

  On the 11th day of the eighth month of the year 22,649, the second battle against the Xipehuz took place, and the chiefs made me commander-in-chief. I divided the tribes into three armies. Shortly before dawn, I launched 14,000 warriors against Kzour, armed in accordance with the barrier apparatus. The attack was less confused than the one on the seventh day. The tribes moved slowly into the forest, in small troops arranged in an orderly manner, and the engagement began.

  The advantage lay entirely with the humans for the first hour, the Xipehuz having been completely disconcerted by the new tactic; more than 100 of the Forms perished, scarcely avenged by the death of a dozen warriors. Once the surprise had been overcome, though, the Xipehuz began to attempt to burn the barriers. In certain circumstances, they were able to succeed. A more dangerous maneuver was the one they adopted toward the fourth hour of daylight. Taking advantage of their speed, groups of Xipehuz, tightly massed together, began rushing the barriers, and succeeded in turning them over. A very large number of men perished in that fashion, to the extent that a part of our army lost heart as the enemy gained the upper hand again.

  Toward the fifth hour, the Zhelal, Khemar and Djoh tribes, and parties of Xisoastres and Sahrs, began to retreat. Wanting to avoid a catastrophe, I dispatched couriers protected by strong barriers to say that reinforcements were coming. At the same time, I prepared the second contingent to attack. First, though, I issued new instructions: the barriers had to be maintained in groups as tight as movement within the forest would permit, and be arranged in compact squares as soon as they approached a substantial troop of Xipehuz, without abandoning the offensive in so doing. Having said that, I gave the signal.

  In a short time, I had the joy of seeing that the victory was reverting to the tribal coalition. Eventually, toward mid-day, an approximate count—which estimated our army’s losses at 2000 men, and those of the Xipehuz at 300—revealed in a decisive fashion the progress we had made, and filled all our hearts with confidence in a conclusive triumph.

  Even so, the proportion varied slightly to our disadvantage toward the 14th hour, the human losses then amounting to 4000 individuals and the Xipehuz 5000. I
t was then that I launched the third corps, and the battle attained its greatest intensity, the enthusiasm of the warriors increasing by the minute until the hour when the Sun was about to set in the west.

  As that moment approached, the Xipehuz went on the offensive again to the north of Kzour. A retreat by the Dzoums and Pjarvanns made me anxious. Judging, in addition, that darkness would be more favorable to the enemy than our own troops, I ordered the sounding of the general retreat.

  The troops’ return was accomplished calmly and victoriously; a large part of the night was spent celebrating our success. It had been considerable; 800 Xipehuz had been killed and their sphere of action reduced to two thirds of Kzour. It is true that we had lost 7000 of our men in the forest, but those losses were far inferior, in proportion to the result, to those of the first battle.

  So, filled with hope, I began to formulate a plan for a more decisive attack on the 2600 Xipehuz that still survived.

  VI. The Extermination

  On the 15th day of the eighth moon of the year 22,649, when the red star rose over the oriental hills, the humans were in battle formation before Kzour. My heart swelling with hope, I finished talking to the chiefs, the horns sounded, the heavy hammers resounded on the bronze, and the first army marched into the forest.

  The barriers had been strengthened and slightly increased in size, enclosing 12 men instead of six, save for about a third, which were constructed on the old model. Thus, they became more difficult to burn, or to turn over.

  The first maneuvers of the battle were favorable; after the third hour, 400 Xipehuz had been exterminated, and we had only lost 2000 men. Encouraged by this good news, I launched the second corps. The fury on either side became terrible then, our combatants becoming accustomed to triumph, and the antagonists manifesting the obstinacy of a noble Kingdom. From the fourth to the eighth hour, we sacrificed no fewer than 10,000 lives, but the Xipehuz paid 1000 of theirs, with the result that only 1000 remained in the depths of Kzour.10

  From that moment on, I was certain that Humankind would have possession on the world; my last doubts disappeared.

  At the ninth hour, however, a great shadow was cast over our victory. By that time, the Xipehuz were only showing themselves in enormous masses in clearings, hiding their stars, and it had become almost impossible to knock them over. Excited by the battle, many of our men would charge these masses. Then, with a rapid movement, a company of Xipehuz would separate from the mass, knock down the reckless attackers and massacre them.

  A thousand perished in this manner without the enemy sustaining any perceptible losses. On seeing that, the Pjarvanns cried that all was lost; a panic set in that put more than 10,000 men to flight, a great number even being sufficiently imprudent to abandon the barriers in order to run more rapidly. It cost them dear. A hundred Xipehuz set off in pursuit, and slew more than 2000 Pjarvanns and Zahelals—and terror began to spread through all our ranks.

  When the couriers brought me this awful news, I realized that the day would be lost if I did not succeed in regaining the lost positions by means of some swift maneuver. Immediately, I sent orders to the leaders of the third army to attack, and announced that I would take command of it. Then I took these reserves rapidly in the direction from which the fleeing men were coming. We soon found ourselves face to face with the pursuing Xipehuz. Drawn on by the ardor of their slaughter, they did not re-form very quickly, and in a few moments I had them surrounded. Very few escaped. The immense acclamation of our victory restored the courage of our troops.

  From then on, I scarcely had to reorganize the attack; our maneuvers were limited to continually separating segments of enemy groups, then surrounding these segments and annihilating them.

  Soon, understanding how unfavorable to them this tactic was, the Xipehuz resumed attacking us in small groups, and the massacre of two realms, one of which could only survive by annihilating the other, increased terribly. All doubt as to the final outcome had, however, disappeared even from the most pusillanimous souls. Toward the 14th hour, scarcely 500 Xipehuz remained, fighting against more than 100,000 men, and that small number of antagonists was enclosed within increasingly narrow boundaries—about a sixth of the forest of Kzour—which greatly facilitated our maneuvers.

  The dusk was sending streams of red light through the trees, however and fearing ambushes in the gloom, I called a halt to the combat.

  The immensity of the victory swelled all our hearts; the chiefs talked about offering me the sovereignty of the tribes. I advised them never to confide the destiny of so many people to one poor fallible creature, but to worship the Unique, and to adopt Wisdom as their earthly ruler.

  VIII. The Last Chapter of Bakhoun’s Book

  The Earth belongs to Humankind. Two further days of combat annihilated the Xipehuz; the entire domain occupied by the last 200 was razed; every tree, every plant and every blade of grass was destroyed. And for the benefit of future tribes, aided by my sons Loum, Azah and Simho, I finished inscribing this history on stone tablets.

  Now here I am, alone, on the edge of Kzour, in the wan night. A copper half-moon is suspended in the west. Lions are roaring at the stars. The river wanders slowly through the willows; its eternal voice speaks of times past and the melancholy of perishable things. And I have buried my forehead in my hands, and a lament is rising from my heart—for, now that the Xipehuz are extinct, my soul regrets their loss, and I ask the Unique what Fatality dictated that the splendor of Life should be spoiled by the darkness of Murder!

  THE SKEPTICAL LEGEND

  A Fictionalized Essay

  I. Luc

  Luc lived in a dream of the 20th century. A creature of mysticism, essentially responsive to the beauty of things, a spiritual brother of Mesopotamian contemplators in the abysm of science, he drank to excess of a mystery more profound than the vanished religions and visions refined by the sentiment of forms and forces conceived by the people of Europe. The natural quality of his sensitivity, his vibrant nerves, and the youth of a brain whose amplitude stored thought without effort, ensured that he would not be rigidified by the study of things that would be the life of art, poetry and ecstasy of future humankinds. For him, the artistic and religious terror of his contemporaries in confrontation with the splendors of discovery was merely the incomprehension of an infidel confronted by the Parthenon. To have enlarged the sense of nature, and revealed the charming transformations of matter in elements tinier that those contained in ponderous ancestral thought, did not seem to him to be the decadence of the Ideal but a widening of frontiers, the blossoming of more complex and more polished dreams.

  The ancient and infantile conceptions of being—the universe populated by gross hieratism, the Ptolemaic firmament rotating in its cycles and epicycles, the waters of the abyss separated by the hand of Jehovah, the gods of Aeschylus and Phidias, Krishna and Christ broadcasting vague parables, the symbols of Ahriman and Agni, the enigmatic metempsychoses, the voyages of the Egyptian soul, the Occidentals hunched in the gloom of cathedrals and the dreamy Semites of the holy city—retained a retrospective charm, but the mainspring of his being, the breath of the unknown, the bliss and the frisson of all the Beyonds, he only found in the gnosis of the modern era. Is the grace of a beech-tree standing on a hill any less proud and svelte to the dreamer who plunges into the invisible work of vesicles, osmosis and the capillary ascendancy of fluids, into the leaf weaving the light, into the labor of love in the minuscule tabernacle of the sexes? Will the dawn be less divine to the mind and the senses for knowing about the spectrum of radiation, for being aware of the potentials varying with light and heat, the fabrication of electricity linked to the formation and disappearance of clouds, for sensing oneself living in a current of indefinitely nuanced forces and abandoning oneself to the dream of knowing more? Would not the mystery that is blended therein, the religious sensibility that emanates from it, the vertigoes and the adorations of being have been unapproachable quintessences for the ancients?

&n
bsp; Ill-adapted to social life, a stranger to the gross movements of human beings, gone astray in the disputes of the struggle for existence, and not understanding their ponderous logic, built of frail timidities and excessive tactilities, Luc lived in dread of contacts, even fearful of love, having a particular horror of conversations into which hatred, brutal joys and base vanities were poured. His soul, however, went out to people with the desire for their happiness and offerings of timid affection. To individuals as delicate as himself, in amities that were few and far between, he eventually confided his thoughts and his mysticism. An ideal of life in a muted voice, whispers alternating with long silences, was combined with a slight intolerance of his solitary life and its meager quality.

  His days were passed in patient study, with an extreme preference for the nooks and crannies of science, in which exceedingly delicate phenomena were revealed: the polarization of light, electromagnetic induction, electrolysis, diffusion, spheroid bodies, the physiology of nerves, hypnotism. It was more than study, however, captivating him in long ecstasies of futurition,11 prostrations before the unknown, his entire substance being perpetually drawn to unscientific, nebulous creations, the hope for prodigious futures, hypotheses regarding the utmost depths of things. There, he was no longer in the realm of knowledge, nor invention, but in a state of mysticism that suited his nature, in the intimacy of his ascetic brain. And he dreamed in two ways: one still investigative, deductive and logical, the other in invocations, prayers and great harmonious hymns, running between his meninges. He named the former lucid dreams, the latter obscure dreams.