The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “They seem exceptionally stupid to me,” said Jean.

  At any rate, they were very fearful, for they were literally swaying on their five feet.

  “It’s astonishing that their species has been able to survive!” muttered Antoine.

  We were close to them now; we would probably have been able to knock them down without their trying to defend themselves.

  Finally, abruptly, as if the animals were waking from a dream or a trance, they fled at great speeds into the depths of the forest.

  “Good!” said Jean. “I can explain their existence a little better. Alternations of passivity and alertness…that’s found, less obviously, in many terrestrial animals.”

  We did not take long to get back to the Stellarium.

  V.

  The next day, we received a visit from the Implicit Chief. He came to talk about the Zoomorphs, and he added precise details to the previous day’s revelations.

  “I propose a general tour of inspection,” said Antoine.

  “Beginning with the limits of the Triped domain?”

  “With a few incursions into the interior?” asked Violaine.

  “Naturally! After a first tour of inspection.”

  “The Implicit Chief can accompany us if he wishes.”

  When consulted, the Chief accepted enthusiastically. “Can we take a second passenger?” he asked. “My daughter, whom you know, has a surer and more rapid vision than mine. No one understands you better; she has been a great help in preparing the defensive apparatus.”

  My heart had begun to beat faster, and I turned away to hide my disturbance from Violaine. It was absurd, of course, since my love for Grace had no relationship to terrestrial love, being further removed therefrom than my friendship for Jean and Antoine. Pure as it was, though—purer than the purest of human sentiments ever is—sexuality was mingled within it, in a sublimated and quasi-supernatural form, and Violaine would have been jealous if she had understood. Was it possible that she did understand? Not directly, undoubtedly, not really, but by transposition, by false analogy. In any case, she should not suspect anything immediately.

  Meanwhile, Jean had replied to the Implicit Chief: “There would even be space for several extra passengers.”

  When the Chief had gone, Violaine murmured: “His daughter…the most brilliant of the Tripeds, whom we saw in the caves?”

  “The most brilliant, yes.”

  “I found her very charming!”

  That exclamation seemed soothing, which was also absurd. What revelation might rise up in Violaine’s soul, what kind of jealousy? Could a woman be jealous of a rose?

  An impression persists, however, which no amount of reasoning can destroy. The example of the rose is specious, anyway. Does not an excessively intimate friend, an excessively pampered pet, dog or cat, without there being anything equivocal about it, often arouse jealousy in an impassioned woman? After all, even a predilection for roses may create umbrage, when it absorbs the soul of the beloved too extensively.

  I am getting lost in the void. Violaine will never divine what there is between Grace and me, and the rest is fiction.

  Since yesterday, the Stellarium has sheltered Grace and the Implicit Chief. Grace is delighted to see us constantly as we are, free of our respiratory apparatus. Outside the Stellarium, she has only seen me like that at intervals, during our first sojourn.

  Naively, she says:56 “Humans are much more beautiful than we are. What poor creatures we are in comparison to you, especially to her. The Earth that produced her is divine!”

  I repeat these words to Violaine, who is coquette enough to be delighted by them. She replies: “Tell her that I find her very beautiful.”

  Grace’s eyes become dazzling; there is a symphony of multicoloured fire, which puts one in mind of a sextet in light.

  “By comparison with those eyes,” Violaine murmurs, “ours are mere guttering candles.”

  It is understood aboard that we shall make a voyage of exploration in all directions, not only above territories occupied by animals, plants and Tripeds, but above the much more numerous regions where the Zoomorphs reign. These regions save for their edges, are completely unknown to the Tripeds; they have only been able to go into them at continual risk to their lives.

  The progress of the Stellarium is extremely slow, and pauses are frequent. Sometimes it hovers motionless in order to give our guests a better view of the landscape.

  “It’s true, alas, that we have been exiled from the greater part of our planet,” said the Implicit Chief, sadly. “For vast numbers of years, no Triped has been able to travel through immense territories. The entire Earth belongs to humans, doesn’t it?”

  “Apart from the reactions of nature, which are sometimes terrible—but our aircraft can carry us everywhere, and settlements have been founded in the most hostile regions. The last conquest, in the twentieth century, was that of the continent and islands surrounding the South Pole.”

  “What grandeur is yours!”

  “It will come to an end, alas. And I don’t believe that it will be very distant. Perhaps a million years.”

  The Stellarium floated slowly over locations where desert regions and magnificent vanished civilizations were displayed. All of it was now completely occupied by Zoomorphs. Immense monuments sometimes made us think of an amalgam of the ruins of Angkor and Luxor, without the resemblance surpassing a certain analogy, and sometimes comprised strange heaps in which artificial rocks alternated with giant termitaries, parabolic dwellings arranged in spirals, contorted pyramids and serpentine towers without definable forms. Sometimes, we might have believed that we were looking at a colony of giant corals.

  “Mysterious!” muttered Jean. “How did they live in those?”

  The Zoomorphs were swarming in the cities, especially the smaller Zoomorphs.

  The massive vestiges of ancient civilizations were succeeded by deserts in which the ruins had ended up being confused with the soil of deserts that were utterly bare or deserts of sinister-seeming red rocks and vertiginous mountains.

  The Implicit Chief and Grace contemplated the ruins and primitive surfaces with equal avidity, but the mountains excited them most of all. They were much higher and more varied than those visible in the Triped regions.

  “It’s frightful and splendid,” said Grace. “Are you also the masters of your mountains?”

  “We have observatories and dwellings on the highest.”

  “Higher than these?”

  “Perhaps the summits of the Himalayas and the Cordilleras are a little higher—and all white, covered in eternal snows.”

  She read our explanations, marveling like a child at a fabulous fairy tale. “How happy I am!” she said, her eyes shining.

  The Implicit Chief also seemed happy. His movements and his gaze were livelier.

  “It’s the pressure,” said Antoine. “It’s causing them to experience a kind of euphoria. There’s a danger of eventual fatigue. For them, the Stellarium is a tank of compressed air.”

  It cannot be said that the Implicit Chief and Grace were listening to us, since they could not hear anything, but they deduced that we were talking about them—and when the Chief spoke, in slightly exaggerated gestures, his speech fitted in strangely with Antoine’s.

  “Do you always have as much air, on your world?” Grace asked.

  “Yes,” Antoine replied. “This is our average pressure.”

  “That explains your superiority,” said the Chief, “and that of our distant ancestors.”

  “When the pressure becomes too tiring, don’t hesitate to tell us—we’ll go outside.”

  “I don’t think that it will tire us overmuch; we have a considerable adaptive ability; we can regulate the rhythm of our breathing and ration our intake of air. At this moment, we’re no longer breathing as rapidly; if we begin to feel ill, we’ll breathe even more slowly.”

  “Without having to think about it?”

  “Mechanically.”
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br />   Having passed over the high peaks, we flew over a bleak plain where the dry bed of a great river was still visible; then came a deeper depression where the waves of a sea had once danced. Thanks to the Stellarium’s slow speed and occasional pauses, the Implicit Chief and his daughter were able to contemplate their ancestral patrimony, now forever lost to the Tripeds, at their leisure.

  They gazed at the scenery with a passionate interest, especially the Zoomorphs in incalculable numbers, grazing the energy of the ground or sliding at various speeds, sometimes as slow as the slowest tortoises, sometimes more rapid than eagles in full flight.

  “They will take everything that remains to us,” said the Implicit Chief. There was an unaccustomed rebelliousness and anger in his attitude and his expression.

  “He’s less resigned,” Jean observed.

  “An effect of the pressure.”

  The Stellarium moved more rapidly. We saw a city—what else can I call it?—appear: a mass of helical towers, spiral houses, sinuous pyramids, spires that might have been Gothic in their contortion and quasi-cyclopean ruins that was both chaotic and ordered. The whole had a decorative harmony that reminded me of drawings made by mediums, which are sometimes fantastically seductive.57 We did not have to wonder whether it had any inhabitants; they emerged from everywhere, pointing at the Stellarium and making signals to us that we knew to be welcoming gestures—for the Stellarium, which had already gone everywhere during our first sojourn, was familiar to the entire Triped population. It had become legendary, as we soon learned; although not much inclined to mysticism, the Tripeds had devoted a cult to it. They all knew that we had been victorious in fighting the Zoomorph invasion of our friends’ territory and the frontier cities; our arrival awoke vast hopes.

  “Let’s stop here,” Jean proposed. “These citizens are showing signs of agitation; I’d like to see them at closer range.”

  “Oh, me too!” exclaimed Violaine.

  The Stellarium landed on a hill overlooking the city.

  It was agreed that I should stand guard. The Implicit Chief went out, and I was left alone with Grace.

  The agitation of the crowd that gathered at the foot of the hill contrasted with its absolute silence. In addition, the Tripeds moved around with a lightness that, in combination with the rarefaction of the air, muffled the sound of their progress. They surrounded Jean, Antoine, Violaine and the Implicit Chief, gesticulating frantically. I would have been anxious had I not been familiar with the gentleness of the Martians. There was a moment when our people were so tightly surrounded that I could hardly see them. Then, in response to a signal from the Implicit Chief, the crowd moved off toward the city and vanished between the houses and monuments.

  When there was no longer anyone at the foot of the hill I was gripped by a great emotional disturbance; born of reality, the dream became real again, but remained fantastic. Grace’s magical eyes enveloped me with a “tender” light, a marvelously variable light of love. It was a song of light, as soft and penetrating as a female choir heard on a crystalline night beneath a cloudy sky beside the strangest of Oriental lakes.

  “I love you, charming daughter of Mars,” I said, “so different from my human sisters.”

  “I’m so happy to be with you,” she replied. “How I’ve longed for this moment!”

  Chimerical, impossible love exalted my every fiber. Grace had drawn closer. Her atmosphere enveloped me, magnetically, and for the first time since our arrival I hugged her to my bosom: a prodigy; an inconceivable magic; an indescribable creative youth; an intimate revelation of another universe than the human. And the miracle was complete. From bodies trembling like grass in the wind emanated a sensuality devoid of gesture, a superhuman sensuality that rendered the grimacing sensuality of human love derisory. It required nothing but an embrace, the chastest and most innocent imaginable, to create that happiness, beyond all the dreams and beautiful mirages created over time by perishable creatures desperately attempting to surpass their destiny.

  What did the duration that limited the miracle matter? It left no lassitude—nothing but an exceedingly gentle and tender languor. I was “bathed” in mystery and I did not try to mingle it with conjectures regarding my privilege; what is certain is that something within me was in accord with Martian nature, and something in Grace a reflection of terrestrial life.

  When Violaine came back with her companions, she remarked, after having scanned me with a rapid glance; “That’s strange. I’ve never seen you with that dreamy expression.”

  “Dreamy expression?” I became slightly—very slightly —anxious under that frank gaze.

  “Yes,” she said. “Hallucinated, in some way. It’s not unappealing, though.”

  “An otherworldly expression!” said Jean.

  “But we are on another world,” Antoine put in. “Here, faces have six eyes and heads have no ears.”

  Violaine stood very close to me and asked, in a low voice: “Do you love me?” She was more than usually attracted.

  “Ardently,” I said. It was not entirely true. I loved her calmly—but I did love her. The ardor would come back later.

  In the days that followed, we visited several cities, as many on the Martian surface as in the underground caverns. The life of the caverns was predominant, though; the caves were ingeniously fitted out, linked together in hundreds by corridors and provided with ventilation systems created by distant ancestors.

  “Perhaps humans will also end up in caves,” Antoine suggested.

  “If, as on Mars, the caves are warmed by radiations whose origin we don’t yet know,” Jean remarked. “A rather sad life, on the whole.”

  “They don’t see to find it so.”

  The Implicit Chief could only give us sketchy information. For a long time, the Tripeds had kept no records, being submissive to regulations that were thousands of years old, resigned to a decadence that was unaccompanied by any individual suffering. Spared all warfare, ignorant of hatred, incapable of murder, their material life is hardly burdensome. There is no overpopulation. The exceedingly slow invasion of the Zoomorphs is compensated by the automatic decrease of the birth-rate. The two phenomena are complementary, for the Tripeds have absolute control over their fecundity. They can interrupt the formation of embryonic lives without any suffering for their women.

  Their entire being participates in their magically pure sexual intercourse; as I have said, there is nothing brutal about it, nothing but an intoxicating embrace. If any substance is involved, it must be in an imponderable state: a radiation of atoms more subtle than the perfume of flowers. We have seen that a mother, after several weeks, is enveloped by an almost invisible light, which slowly condenses, like a miniature cloud. Then, sheltered in a delightful “shell,” a sort of large pale flower, the child gradually takes shape, nourished by an invisible substance. One can imagine how easy it is to interrupt the chain of metamorphoses well before the new individual has emerged from the limbo of sensation.58

  Love among the Tripeds is, therefore, a voluptuous dream, and their sensuality is incomparably superior to ours. Have they always had that privilege? I suspect that it developed in the epoch when their species was in full bloom. Perhaps their ancestors had knowledge that permitted them to perfect their organic functioning, and to transform the organs themselves.

  In spite of their resignation—or, rather, their adaptation to a progressive and conclusive disappearance, the end of life for all—the Tripeds desired to retain the as-yet-considerable part of the surface that the Zoomorphs had left them. Thus, our intervention, during our first voyage, had excited universal enthusiasm. In imitation of our fluidic barriers, other barriers had been created, although with less skill. Some of them, although imperfect, hindered the enemy infiltration.

  To bar the route to the invaders everywhere would take many years, perhaps a century. The perimeter of the domain, almost twice that of our European domain, required vast numbers of machines and colossal supplies of radiation, and, sub
tle as it was, the Tripeds’ industry was far from being adequate to the task—as was their activity. They were not lazy, but their labor had been drastically moderated for thousands of years.

  They all worked, it is true, without distinction of sex, from their youth until an advanced age. None of them avoided their tasks, although their individual liberty was complete. It was a triumph of mutual aid, spontaneously organized, regulated by custom without laws or penal obligations. For the many centuries and millennia that they had been ignorant of murder, and almost of violence, they had not needed a judiciary apparatus, or any kind of social servitude. In sum, there was no intensive labor, their machines being as moderate as themselves. That was not adequate to bring the task that our defensive apparatus demanded to a successful conclusion. It was not sufficient to continue, it was necessary constantly to produce the necessary energy.

  Our dream, therefore, was to create a frontier zone that would stop the invaders by itself.

  Before anything else, it was necessary to create establishments to capture large quantities of energy in various districts, and equipment sufficiently complex for direct combat against the Zoomorphs.

  “It’s a veritable revolution for the Tripeds,” Antoine remarked. “It’s difficult to calculate the global effort that they’ll have to supply. In any case, a continual effort sufficiently considerable to demand an increase in activity.”

  “Which won’t please them,” I said. “Their extinction appears to be proportional to the increase of the Zoomorphs, or very nearly. Those presently alive are scarcely under threat.”

  “In sum,” Jean concluded, “the profit will be for future generations—a profit that might be illusory, since the race might make its exit meekly, by its own means.”

  VI.

  One evening, when we were contemplating the sky, the stars and—most of all—the Ethereals, Jean said: “Who knows whether it might be possible to communicate with them?”