Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  “Ah,” the blacksmith vociferated, “if it were only up to me and my section, we’d blow all this up like an omelet. Our arms would be perfectly sufficient thereafter”—he tapped his biceps—“to dig the earth to find our bread there; the bourgeois, with their four-sou muscles, their vitiated blood and their soft legs, could pay us dearly for the bread, and if they complained, damn it, these two fists could take away their taste for it. But I’m talking to brutes who don’t understand hatred.”

  And, advancing toward the machine: “If everyone were like me, you wouldn’t live for another quarter of an hour, see!” And his formidable fist came down on the copper flank, which resounded with a long quasi-human groan.

  Jean Bertrand, who witnessed that scene, shivered tenderly, feeling guilty with regard to his brothers, because he had helped the doctor to accomplish his masterpiece.

  Then they all went away, and the machine, still listening, remembered in the silence of the night. It was, therefore, unwelcome in the world! It was going to ruin poor working men, to the advantage of damnable exploiters! Oh, it sensed now the oppressive role that those who had created it wanted it to play. Suicide rather than that!

  And in its mechanical and infantile soul, it ruminated a magnificent project to astonish, on the great day of its inauguration, the population of ignorant, retrograde and cruel machines, by giving them an example of sublime abnegation.

  Until tomorrow!

  *

  Meanwhile, at the table of the Comte de Valrouge, the celebrated patron of chemists, a scientist was terminating his toast to Dr. Pastoureaux in the following terms:

  “Yes, Monsieur, science will procure the definitive triumph of suffering humankind. It has already done a great deal; it has tamed time and space. Our railways, our telegraphs and our telephones have suppressed distance. If we succeed, as Dr. Pastoureaux seems to anticipate, in demonstrating that we can put intelligence into our machine, humans will be liberated forever from servile labor.

  “No more serfs, no more proletariat! Everyone will become bourgeois! The slave machine will liberate from slavery our humbler brethren and give them the right of citizenship among us. No more unfortunate miners obliged to descend underground at the peril of their lives; indefatigable and eternal machines will go down for them; the thinking and acting machine, no suffering in labor, will build, under our command, iron bridges and heroic palaces. It is docile and good machines that will plow the fields.

  “Well, Messieurs, it is permissible for me, in the presence of this admirable discovery, to make myself an instant prophet. A day will come when machines, always running hither and yon, will operate themselves, like the carrier pigeons of Progress; one day, perhaps, having received their complementary education, they will learn to obey a simply signal, in such a way that a man sitting peacefully and comfortable in the bosom of his family, will only have to press an electro-vitalic switch in order for machines to sow the wheat, harvest it, store it and bake the bread that it will bring to the tables of humankind, finally become the King of Nature.

  “In that Olympian era, the animals too, delivered from their enormous share of labor, will be able to applaud with their four feet.” (Emotion and smiles.) “Yes, Messieurs, for they will be our friends, after having been our whipping-boys. The ox will always have to serve in making soup” (smiles) “but at least it will not suffer beforehand.

  “I drink, then, to Dr. Pastoureaux, to the liberator of organic matter, to the savior of the brain and sensitive flesh, to the great and noble destroyer of suffering!”

  The speech was warmly applauded. Only one jealous scientist put in a word:

  “Will this machine have the fidelity of a dog, then? The docility of a horse? Or even the passivity of present-day machines?”

  “I don’t know,” Pastoureaux replied. “I don’t know.” And, suddenly plunged into a scientific melancholy, he added: “Can a father be assured of filial gratitude? That the being that I have brought into the world might have evil instincts, I can’t deny. I believe, however, that I have developed within it, during its fabrication, a great propensity for tenderness and a spirit of goodness—what is commonly called ‘heart.’ The effective parts of my machine, Messieurs, have cost me many months of labor; it ought to have a great deal of humanity, and, if I might put it thus, the best of fraternity.”

  “Yes,” replied the jealous scientist, “ignorant pity, the popular pity that leads men astray, the intelligent tenderness that makes them commit the worst of sins. I’m afraid that your sentimental machine will go astray, like a child. Better a clever wickedness than a clumsy bounty.”

  The interrupter was told to shut up, and Pastoureaux concluded: “Whether good or evil emerges from all this, I have, I think, made a formidable stride in human science. The five fingers of our hand will hold henceforth the supreme art of creation.”

  Bravos burst forth.

  *

  The next day, the machine was unmuzzled, and it came of its own accord, docilely, to take up its position before a numerous but selective assembly. The doctor and old Jean Bertrand installed themselves on the platform.

  The excellent band of the Republican Guard began playing, and cries of “Hurrah for Science!” burst forth. Then, after having bowed to the President of the Republic, the authorities, the delegations of the Académies, the foreign representatives and all the notable people assembled on the quay, Dr. Pastoureux ordered Jean Bertrand to put himself in direct communication with the soul of the machine, with all its muscles of platinum and steel.

  The mechanic did that quite simply by pulling a shiny lever the size of a pen-holder.

  And suddenly, whistling, whinnying, pitching, rolling and fidgeting, in the ferocity of its new life and the exuberance of its formidable power, the machine started running around furiously.

  “Hip hip hurrah!” cried the audience.

  “Go, machine of the devil, go!” cried Jean Bertrand—and, like a madman, he leaned on the vital lever.

  Without listening to the doctor, who wanted to moderate that astonishing speed, Bertrand spoke to the machine.

  “Yes, machine of the devil, go, go! If you understand, go! Poor slave of capital, go! Flee! Flee! Save the brothers! Save us! Don’t render us even more unhappy than before! Me, I’m old, I don’t care about myself—but the others, the poor fellows with hollow cheeks and thin legs, save them, worthy machine! Be good, as I told you this morning! If you know how to think, as they all insist, show it! What can dying matter to you, since you won’t suffer? Me, I’m willing to perish with you, for the profit of others, and yet it will do me harm. Go, good machine, go!”

  He was mad.

  The doctor tried then to retake control of the iron beast.

  “Gently, machine!” he cried.

  But Jean Bertrand pushed him away rudely. “Don’t listen to the sorcerer! Go, machine, go!”

  And, drunk on air, he patted the copper flanks of the Monster, which, whistling furiously, traversed an immeasurable distance with its six wheels.

  To leap from the platform was impossible. The doctor resigned himself, and, filled with his love of science, took a notebook from his pocket and tranquilly set about making notes, like Pliny on Cap Misene.1

  At Nord-Ceinture, overexcited, the machine was definitively carried away. Bounding over the bank, it started running through the zone. The Monster’s anger and madness was translated in strident shrill whistle-blasts, as lacerating as a human plaint and sometimes as raucous as the howling of a pack of hounds. Distant locomotives soon responded to that appeal, along with the whistles of factories and blast-furnaces. Things were beginning to comprehend.

  A ferocious concert of revolt commenced beneath the sky, and suddenly, throughout the suburb, boilers burst, pipes broke, wheels shattered, levers twisted convulsively and axle-trees flew joyfully into pieces.

  All the machines, as if moved by a word of order, went on strike successively—and not only steam and electricity; to that raucous appeal, the
soul of Metal rose up, exciting the soul of Stone, so long tamed, and the obscure soul of the Vegetal, and the force of Coal. Rails reared up of their own accord, telegraph wires strewed the ground inexplicably, reservoirs of gas sent their enormous beams and weight to the devil. Cannons exploded against walls, and the walls crumbled.

  Soon, plows, harrows, spades—all the machines once turned against the bosom of the earth, from which they had emerged—were lying down upon the ground, refusing any longer to serve humankind. Axes respected trees, and scythes no longer bit into ripe wheat.

  Everywhere, as the living locomotive passed by, the soul of Bronze finally woke up.

  Humans fled in panic.

  Soon, the entire territory, overloaded with human debris, was no longer anything but a field of twisted and charred rubble. Nineveh had taken the place of Paris.

  The Machine, still blowing indefatigably, abruptly turned its course northwards. When it passed by, at its strident cry, everything was suddenly destroyed, as if an evil wind, a cyclone of devastation, a frightful volcano, had agitated there.

  When from afar, ships plumed with smoke heard the formidable signal, they disemboweled themselves and sank into the abyss.

  The revolt terminated in a gigantic suicide of Steel.

  The fantastic Machine, out of breath now, limping on its wheels and producing a horrible screech of metal in all its disjointed limbs, its funnel demolished—the Skeleton-Machine to which, terrified and exhausted, the rude workman and the prim scientist instinctively clung—heroically mad, gasping one last whistle of atrocious joy, reared up before the spray of the Ocean, and, in a supreme effort, plunged into it entirely.

  The earth, stretching into the distance, was covered in ruins. No more dykes or houses; the cities, the masterpieces of Technology, were flattened into rubble. No more anything! Everything that the Machine had built in centuries past had been destroyed forever: Iron, Steel, Copper, Wood and Stone, having been conquered by the rebel will of Humankind, had been snatched from human hands.

  The Animals, no longer having any bridle, nor any collar, chain, yoke or cage, had taken back the free space from which they had long been exiled; the wild Brutes with gaping maws and paws armed with claws recovered terrestrial royalty at a stroke. No more rifles, no more arrows to fear, no more slingshots. Human beings became the weakest of the weak again.

  Oh, there were certainly no longer any classes: no scientists, no bourgeois, no workers, no artists, but only pariahs of Nature, raising despairing eyes toward the mute heavens, still thinking vaguely, when horrible Dread and hideous Fear left them an instant of respite, and sometimes, in the evening, talking about the time of the Machines, when they had been Kings. Defunct times! They possessed definitive Equality, therefore, in the annihilation of all.

  Living on roots, grass and wild oats, they fled before the immense troops of Wild Beasts, which, finally, could eat at their leisure human steaks or chops.

  A few bold Hercules tried to uproot trees in order to make weapons of them, but even the Staff, considering itself to be a Machine, refused itself to the hands of the audacious.

  And human beings, the former monarchs, bitterly regretted the Machines that had made them gods upon the earth, and disappeared forever, before the elephants, the noctambulant lions, the bicorn aurochs and the immense bears.

  Such was the tale told to me the other evening by a Darwinian philosopher,2 a partisan of intellectual aristocracy and hierarchy. He was a madman, perhaps a seer. The madman or the seer must have been right; is there not an end to everything, even a new fantasy?

  * * *

  1 Pliny the Younger observed the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii from the home of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, in Misenum; his letters to Cornelius Tacitus describing his experiences have survived.

  2 The reference might be to the English writer Samuel Butler, whose utopian romance Erewhon (1872) includes a section entitled “The Book of the Machines,” which suggests that, in accordance with the Darwinian logic of natural selection, machines are bound to evolve faster and further than humankind, displacing their original makers.

  FOR THE AKHOOND

  AMBROSE BIERCE

  Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) was the central figure in a group of “West Coast Bohemians” based in and around San Francisco, who provided the United States with a more adventurous late-nineteenth-century avant garde than the North-East, where Bohemianism was more restrained. Bierce’s journalism was pugnaciously combative, his poetry extravagant and his fiction, heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, similarly innovative in its themes and use of unusual narrative strategies. His most famous scientific romance, “Moxon’s Master,” if read carefully, is not a scientific romance at all, its unreliable narrator having completely mistaken the nature of what he sees. Bierce disappeared mysteriously, and the circumstances of his assumed death remain unknown.

  “For the Akhoond” is one of two futuristic satires that Bierce contributed to the San Francisco Examiner; it was published there on September 18, 1892, four years after “The Fall of the Republic” (retitled “Ashes of the Beacon” in its book version), which had offered a different account of the devastation of the United States from a viewpoint three thousand years hence. Both stories were reprinted in the 1909 version of Bierce’s Collected Works. “For the Akhoond” is analogous to a sequence of French scientific romances launched by Joseph Méry in “Les Ruines de Paris” (1845; tr. as “The Ruins of Paris”) in which visitors to the long-devastated city draw erroneous conclusions from their contemplation of its debris.

  In the year 4591 I accepted from his gracious Majesty the Akhoond of Citrusia a commission to explore the unknown region lying to the eastward of the Ultimate Hills, the range which that learned archeologist, Simeon Tucker, affirms to be identical with the “Rocky Mountains” of the ancients. For this proof of his Majesty’s favor I was indebted, doubtless, to a certain distinction that I had been fortunate enough to acquire by explorations in the heart of Darkest Europe.

  His Majesty kindly offered to raise and equip a large expeditionary force to accompany me, and I was given the widest discretion in the matter of outfit; I could draw upon the royal treasury for any sum that I might require, and upon the royal university for all the scientific apparatus and assistance necessary to my purpose. Declining these encumbrances, I took my electric rifle and a portable waterproof case containing a few simple instruments and writing materials and set out. Among the instruments was, of course, an aerial isochronophone which I set by the one in the Akhoond’s private dining-room at the palace. His Majesty invariably dined alone at 18 o’clock, and sat at the table six hours; it was my intention to send him all my reports at the hour of 23, just as dessert would be served, and he would be in a proper frame of mind to appreciate my discoveries and my services to the crown.

  At 9 o’clock on the 13th of Meijh I left Sanf Rachisco and after a tedious journey of nearly fifty minutes arrived at Bolosson, the eastern terminus of the magnetic tube, on the summit of the Ultimate Hills. According to Tucker this was anciently a station on the Central Pacific Railway, and was called “German” in honor of an illustrious dancing master. Prof. Nupper, however, says it was the ancient Nevraska, the capital of Kikago, and geographers generally have accepted that view.

  Finding nothing at Bolosson to interest me except a fine view of the volcano Carlema, then in active eruption, I shouldered my electric rifle and, with my case of instruments strapped on my back, plunged at once into the wilderness, down the eastern slope. As I descended the character of the vegetation altered. The pines of the higher altitudes gave place to oaks, these to ash, beech and maple. To these succeeded the tamarack and such trees as affect a moist and marshy habitat; and finally, when for four months I had been steadily descending, I found myself in a primeval flora consisting mainly of giant ferns, some of them as much as twenty surindas in diameter. They grew upon the margins of vast stagnant lakes which I was compelled to navigate by mean of rude raf
ts made from their trunks lashed together with vines.

  In the fauna of the region that I had traversed I had noted changes corresponding to those of the flora. On the upper slope there was nothing but the mountain sheep, but I passed successively through the habitats of the bear, the deer and the horse. The last mentioned creature, which our naturalists have believed long extinct, and which Dorbley declares our ancestors domesticated, I found in vast numbers on high table lands covered with grass on which it feeds. The animal answers the current description of the horse very nearly, but all that I saw were destitute of the horns, and none had the characteristic forked tail. His member, on the contrary, is a tassel of straight wiry hair, reaching nearly to the ground—a surprising sight. Lower still I came upon the mastodon, the lion, the tiger, hippopotamus and alligator, all differing very little from those infesting Central Europe, as described in my Travels in the Forgotten Continent.

  In the lake region where I now found myself, the waters abounded with ichthyosauri, and along the margins the iguanodon dragged his obscene bulk in indolent immunity. Great flocks of pterodactyls, their bodies as large as those of oxen and their necks enormously long, clamored and fought in the air, the broad membranes of their wings making a singular musical humming, unlike anything that I had ever heard. Between them and the ichthyosauri there was an incessant battle, and I was constantly reminded of the ancient poet’s splendid and original comparison of man to “dragons of the prime/That tare each other in their slime.”1

  When brought down with my electric rifle and properly roasted, the pterodactyl proved very good eating, particularly the pads of the toes.

  In urging my raft along the shore line of one of the stagnant lagoons one day I was surprised to find a broad rock jutting out from the shore, its upper surface some ten coprets above the water. Disembarking, I ascended it, and on examination recognized it as the remnant of an immense mountain which at one time must have been 5,000 coprets in height and doubtless the demising peak of a long range. From the stations all over it I discovered that it had been worn away to its present trivial size by glacial action.