The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “Irrefutable, for them!” I muttered, thinking about their deficit of initiative.

  Antoine pointed at a group of prostrate Tripeds. “Do you think they’re dead?” I asked the Implicit Chief.

  A bleak sadness lit up in our ally’s gaze. “I think so—but among those who were able to flee into the fissure, many will be saved.”

  “Do you have remedies?”

  “Against this kind of injury, none. When victims don’t die, they emerge from unconsciousness sooner or later, and the recovery is complete after a few hours or days.” He lowered his head and added, shivering: “My daughter!”

  Devastated, I demanded to get out of the Stellarium.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Antoine. “We must help these poor devils.”

  I dared not interrogate the chief; I examined the bodies in terror.

  “She isn’t among these,” he said. “She was able to cross the limit.”

  My emotion—oh, how profound it was!—was mingled with the fear of that very emotion. That small existence, previously lost in the depths of the heavens, in the droplet of red fire that trembles by night among the minuscule solar night-lights, that creature so dissimilar to human beings and all the living creatures that surround human beings, how much anguish and distress she caused me! Crushing impatience and violent hope combined with terror—all the drama of love and death!

  Meanwhile, I followed the Implicit Chief, and we arrived at the edge of the long ravine that had been a river when there were still rivers in that condemned world.

  Bodies were lying pell-mell: a hectic crowd, like a population of ants forced to flee by a flood; a few Tripeds were trying to care for the injured.

  Already I was next to Grace, motionless and seemingly breathless, her body rigid. I remembered the morning when my sister Clotilde died, when the abysms of nothingness had swallowed up the universe.

  The Implicit Chief guessed what I was thinking. “She isn’t dead!” he said.

  Leaning over, he studied his daughter attentively. His eyes, darkened by sadness at first, radiated more lively gleams. Reassured, and because he was the Animator, he began examining other bodies.

  How long did I remain alone next to Grace? Less than a quarter of an hour, I think—but the duration, full of a tumultuous flux of sensations, was indefinitely dilated. Then Tripeds came, who transported her into a shelter warmed by a radiator not unlike our allies’ weapons.

  Time resumed its normal rhythm; the emotions ceased their tumult; I believed in Grace’s resurrection, and the Implicit Chief increased my hope every time he visited.

  Nevertheless, when she opened her eyes, I was so affected that I remained paralyzed. The beautiful eyes were initially reminiscent of a constellation veiled by the vapors that rise from ponds in autumn; then the light sprang forth like a nascent dawn. She looked at me with an astonished affection that became increasingly tender.

  Eventually, she said: “The monsters are vanquished, since you’re beside me.”

  “Yes, they’ve been driven back.”

  Joy radiated like the perfumes emanating from the odorifier, and Grace’s sentiments became focused, metamorphosing, expressed by gestures so slight that we were communicating almost directly from mind to mind.

  There was a pause, which would have been a silence between beings using speech. Things that could not be said were in the air, mysterious migratory birds of the soul.

  Then she said: “I’m very glad to see you beside me now. It’s as if your presence has caused me to be reborn. I’m so happy that you can understand me.”

  At these words, an unknown exaltation lifted me up. “I too am singularly happy,” I said. “With a happiness as new as the morning of my life!”

  I had leaned forward; our shoulders touched; Grace put her arm delicately around my neck. I then had the prescience of a sensation that surpassed all human sensations…

  But the Implicit Chief came in, accompanied by Antoine.

  “There’s no longer any danger,” the Implicit Chief said. “She will have recovered all her strength by nightfall.” As Antoine and I looked at one another interrogatively, he added: “It’s always the way. The recovery is never incomplete.”

  He was not mistaken. From the next day onwards, Grace no longer felt any malaise. I saw her again every day, while the hostilities resumed. They were soon brought to a conclusion.

  In the interim, more barrage devices had been constructed. To obviate any lack of initiative on the part of the Tripeds, we carefully anticipated all the circumstances that might arise, and enumerated the measures that it was necessary to take in each case.

  They were thoroughly familiar now with the manufacture of radiators, and—as I have said—their skill, promptitude and exactitude far surpassed ours; they were planning to construct enough machines to defend all their frontiers.

  “We shall learn from our neighbors all that you can teach us,” said the Implicit Chief, on the day when he began sending back the bulk of his army to their native caverns. “They will teach others. Your science will provide our species with increasingly better protection against invasions. The Envoys of the Earth will have saved their humble Martian brothers!”

  Epilogue

  And the days went by. We met other groups of Tripeds. On a vast plain we established a luminous generator so large and so intense that it had to be perceptible on Earth. On a clear night, we sent the first call-signals, according to the dot-and-dash system that the men of the previous century used for transmission—a system so perfect and so simple that it could translate human language in as many different ways as there are senses and forms of energy.52

  We were immediately understood, for we were repeating signals already employed by explorers of Earth. Ten radiogenic stations replied to us; we had, in brief, news of the Earth as precise as that exchanged by means of radio-waves from city to city and continent to continent. Antoine and Jean received “stellar radiograms” from their families and I—who had lost mine—received a few friendly messages.

  Our voyage excited a frenetic enthusiasm over the entire planet. The newspapers declared it the greatest event of the century, some the greatest event in human history…

  My predilection for Grace increased further. I saw her for longer periods every day, and my sentiments became so strange that I was afraid to analyze them. How could I define those beautiful frissons, those prodigious waves? There was nothing resembling them in my humble pilgrimage. The idea that it could be love, in the human sense, seemed absurd to me, and even repulsive. The poor sensation of our sensuality was completely numbed; its wakening with respect to Grace would, I think, only have filled me with disgust and shame.

  However, it was certainly desire that I felt in her presence; every time our bodies made contact I felt that marvelously pure tenderness that I had felt on the day of her resurrection. Might it be love, all the same? If so, it is as foreign to our pitiful love as Grace is to human femininity.

  Because no words could express it, and because Grace undoubtedly would not have understood it, I contented myself with experiencing it, and we wandered like happy shadows through the forest, along the shores of silent lakes and in the subterranean depths.

  One day, we came into a spacious cave in which an aquamarine light rose from the ground and ran along the walls. The legend of Mars had been inscribed in the stone, at the time when the young planet had created the first thinking beings.

  We were sitting on an ancient stone, whose substance, one dispersed in innumerable tiny creatures, no longer formed anything but a heavy and melancholy block, in which obscure energies vacillated and whirled interminably.

  It was there that I felt, with a dazzling certainty, that Grace had become dearer to me than any other living creature, and could not help telling her so.

  She shivered from head to toe, like foliage; her beautiful eyes filled with enchanted gleams, and she placed her head gently on my shoulder. Then—oh, how can I describe it? It was an embrace, n
othing but an embrace, as chaste as the embrace of a mother picking up her child—and all the joys of yesteryear appeared as poor crooked things: the sudden joys blowing on the wind, the perfumes on a hill, the resurrection of the morning, the divine lies of sunsets, and the entire fable of Woman, so patiently constructed over the millennia, and Woman herself, at the time when I thought her the greatest intoxication in the universe…

  Nothing remained of it. It all disappeared in that miracle, which seemed the very miracle of Creation.

  Editors’ Note

  As this text goes to press, we hear that the second voyage of the Stellarium has been completed and that the fabulous explorers have visited their friends in the Other World again. The volume relating the observations and experiment of a scientific order will appear soon. It will be followed by the narrative of the second voyage, this time transmitted from Mars itself.53

  THE ASTRONAUTS

  I.

  Memories float in an atmosphere of fable. A nostalgia as charming as the September evening carries me “into the eternal night, through the dead expanse” toward the red star on which I once lived for several seasons.

  Level with the occident, a timid glimmer of light increases and rises toward the stars. Earth’s minuscule companion, the Moon emerges, the color of copper, immense, ten times higher than the Eglise Saint-Michel, seeming to hold the entire village of Mièvres in its lap. As it does so, it blots out colossi lost in the depths of the stellar expanse, although the paltry Mars, a microbe of space, is brighter, seen from here, than the triple Sirius.

  My old garden, with its twisted trees, its coarse grass and its wild flowers, becomes a witches’ heath.

  The atmosphere has shivered; the Albatros, Antoine’s blue rocket, descends in a spiral and lands as lightly as a dragonfly on the terrace of the orchard.

  Antoine, Jean and Violaine, with whom I shall soon resume travel through interstellar space, get down.

  Politely but imperiously, Jean has imposed Violaine upon us. It is not his will that spoke, but rather that of the beautiful daughter of men. She does not resemble her brother. You would think her the offspring of a hot country, with her serpentine black hair, her eyes of black fire and her harmonious body, while Jean manifests the appearance that we confer on the blood and red-haired warriors of Celtic Gaul. For the sake of principle, Antoine and have I resisted for a month, but Violaine’s determination will triumph tonight. Deep down that doesn’t displease us. During the interastral journey and life on Mars, we lacked feminine input—the small attentions that that add grace to everyday life.

  “Your garden looks good in the moonlight,” Jean says. “It’s alive; nature has bestowed the royal gift of joy upon it.”

  Antoine raises his eyebrows, verifies Jean’s affirmation with a circular glance, and says, indifferently: “That’s true. The moonlights suits it.”

  “It’s delightfully old,” Violaine puts in, turning her charming face toward the stars. She points at Mars. “I shall see it at close range, then.”

  “Good,” says Antoine. “You’ve made our final decision.” He does not laugh, but his smile grows broader, to the point of seeming hilarious, and he mutters: “You’d be wrong to think that you’re going to amuse yourself. First, there’s the voyage shut up in the Stellarium.”

  “In the world of stars.”

  “Around the Sun! For monotony, one can’t do better. As for Mars itself, it’s not a very enjoyable spectacle.”

  “No, but an exciting one!” she retorts, vehemently. “Go on—you’re all in a hurry to see it again, each in your own way: Jean with exaltation, Antoine with insatiable curiosity, and you, Jacques, with love.”

  “True,” I say.

  “And for me, I know that it will be a voyage to enchantment.”

  This time, Antoine bursts out laughing, in his hollow and dry manner. “You’re Jean’s sister all right, in spite of appearances, you young African!”

  II.

  The time has come. The Stellarium is about to carry us into the unsoundable depths. It’s not the furtive departure of the last time. Our workmen have talked, and a multitude has arrived by land and by air. It is surrounding and flying over the enclosed field, and occupying all the neighboring roads, emitting a rumor like a herd of livestock.

  At intervals, a shout goes up, which is echoed, frantic, enthusiastic and also vaguely threatening.

  The Stellarium is ready. The last checks have been carried out. We say our farewells to the Earth. A few tears, embraces, words…and the astral vessel is sealed upon us.

  Antoine has taken out his watch. Jean and I are at the controls.

  “Ten o’clock!”

  That is the signal.

  Through the indestructible but elastic walls we can hear the howls and roars of the crowd, and see its frantic eddies—but not for long. Soon, there is no more than a confused agitation of airborne and terrestrial insects…then countryside and cities; then a blurred surface and a few last aviators.

  “That’s it!” Antoine murmurs. “Space has us in its grip.”

  “And we have it in ours!” retorts Jean the Bold.

  Violaine, who is slightly pale, adds: “Slaves and masters.”

  Days, and more days. It’s strange, after all, that we have so little fear. Alone in the wilderness—and what a wilderness! There are no resources in this vast environment, which is, for our material lives, absolute emptiness.

  That there is instead, I suspect—or rather, as I believe—a swarm of existences incompatible with ours, only a few indications are beginning to reveal to our most subtle instruments, prolongations of ourselves. There is only an infimal, indirect perception of something.

  The terrestrial atmosphere reveals itself to us perpetually by its resistance and its breaths, from the lightest morning breeze to the cyclones that rise up and sink large ships, uproot trees and knock down monuments. Here, there is nothing—nothing. No resistance, no movement, save for the material movement of planets, no revelation.

  Even so, the four of us retain an impression of perfect security. Violaine, who has not been hardened, as the rest of us have, by an earlier journey, quickly becomes accustomed to it. Perhaps she has even less sensation of risk than her three companions. Familiar, spontaneous, with slight caprices, she is all the youthful and feminine grace of Earth aboard this interstellar vessel.

  III.

  Within three days, we land.

  First we set down in a region occupied by the zoomorph realm. It is a sinister place, like all those from which life homologous to terrestrial life has disappeared: red soil, which was once fertile, but which many thousands of years of dryness have petrified: on the horizon, a chain of mountains, bare and menacing, bristling with peaks: a funereal conclave that renders us thoughtful.

  “It’s admirably melancholy,” Violaine murmurs. “The reign of rock, the realm of sterility.”

  “Oh, no!” Jean ripostes. “On the contrary, a marvelously fecund place. Here the second kind of Martian life abounds. You’ve been alerted, Violaine—open your eyes!”

  We are still inside the Stellarium, but the transparent hull allows all the details of the location to penetrate.

  Violaine looks more attentively. She begins to discern the strange structures that made such an impact on us during our first voyage. By virtue of their color and scant thickness, they are scarcely distinguishable from the ground, but as soon as one pays attention to their forms one no longer sees anything else; a strip of ground close to the Stellarium is literally covered with them.

  The majority are immobile.

  “Oh!” Violaine exclaims, her eyes sparkling. “Over there, though! See how they’re moving!”

  “Pay attention to the principal forms,” Antoine tells her. “The zigzag ribbons with nodes at the angles, the spirals with the bluish centers and the opaque masses from which the linear threads emerge.”

  Hypnotized by amazement, Violaine contemplates these fantastic organisms. “Are they really aliv
e?” she murmurs.

  “There’s no doubt about it.”

  “It’s true that some are reminiscent of flattened cephalopods.”

  “A false analogy! They have no relationship to any terrestrial animal or plant.”

  “Oh, I want to go out.”

  Jean starts laughing. “Calm down little sister. First get used to the weight deficit.”

  “That’s true—I no longer weigh as much. It’s rather disturbing when one moves…”

  “You get used to it,” Antoine remarks. “Taking the mass of Mars into account, and the distance to the center, your weight is reduced by about three fifths.”

  “It’s as if, on Earth, I weighed no more than twenty-five kilos?”

  “Right!”

  Here and there, a Zoomorph moved, without it being possible to discern the mechanism of its progress. The cilia were moving in a strange fashion, but did not give the impression of serving directly for propulsion.

  “Notice, Violaine, that the majority, especially on the terrain where they’re most abundant, are less than a decimeter in length, and that the largest ones are no more than a meter. Their effluvia can’t reach us inside the Stellarium. They have to act together. In any case, within a certain distance, they only project radiation if they’re touched. If they perceive our presence, they must be quite confused.”

  “While the giants seem to perceive it!” said the young woman, laughing. “I haven’t forgotten your stories or your reports, gentlemen. And I’m by no means unaware, even though I was not part of your expedition, that the Zoomorphs are absolutely solid—and that, in consequence, their circulation and their nutrition must be assured either by gases or microscopic particles. We also know that the majority of the Zoomorphs live at the expense of the ground, from which they extract matter and energy, but that others are, in addition, carnivores of a sort, although they neither kill nor injure their prey; they content themselves with removing—by osmosis, I think—an essential complement of nourishment.”