“Clause Two: Any aforesaid foreigners who persist in residing within the Territory for more than 12 hours, which are accorded to them as a final concession, will be taken to the Soviet’s frontier and, in the case of resistance or recidivism, forcibly expelled.
“Clause Three: Under no circumstances may nourishment be given to the aforementioned foreigners.
“Clause Four: However, those who express an irrevocable desire to join the community will be sovietized, in their persons and property, and will enjoy the privileges accorded to effective members, the former citizens of the ex-commune.
“Article Three, Clause One: All previously private property, fixed or movable, situated within the Territory, is established as the common property of all the members of the Soviet.
“Clause Two: The equitable division of victuals, clothing and other essentials will be effected at the discretion of the Committee of the Soviet.
“Clause Three: Every individual of the male sex, without age limit, will be employed according to his aptitudes in agricultural or other labor, in guarding the territory or in the manufacture of weapons.
“Clause Four: Every individual of the female sex, aged between 18 and 35 years, will be requisitioned for the special service of the Soviet Fraternity.
“Article Four: Any infraction of the above-announced dispositions, or any further regulations which facilitate their application, will be punished by death.
“Made and promulgated at Cassis, on July 20 of the old era, day one of year one of the Soviet of Cassis, by the Committee:
“Marius Bizoard, President
“Paul-Emile Cougourdan, Secretary
“Joséphin Malmousque, Chief of Soviet Defense.” 9
Applause burst out, with an enthusiasm nourished by cries:
“The Soviet forever!”
“Cassis forever!”
“Yes, yes—out with the foreigners!”
“We’ve seen enough of them!”
“Fraternity forever!”
“All for all; everything for everyone!”
Cackling laughter, like that of little girls when tickled, broke out here and there, mimicked by wags. There were a few indignant exclamations too, but the efficacy of the blasters was only too well-known, and any open rebellion against this cynical tyranny imposed upon several thousand men and women by a handful of sectarians would have been in vain.
Bourgeois refugees from Marseilles, seemingly well-to-do, gathered around us, planning a general retreat to the harbor. The armed force had disappeared; the members of the crowd raised their heads and gradually made their sentiments manifest. A group of young mariners, who were keeping familiar company with two or three willing girls, talked about retaining Raymonde and the prettiest of the refugees, but the latter were a dozen strong and resolute in their attitude; we passed without hindrance.
It was impossible to flee that inhospitable burg by sea! Militiamen, blasters in hand, were standing guard along the quay. To leave the commune’s territory required an authorization from the Soviet—an authorization to carry out its formal instructions! The imprudent refugees trooped off to obtain one from the town hall. For myself, I did not want to offend the gentlemen of the Committee in company with Raymonde.
The crowd in the distance soon recovered from its initial surprise. It decided to put the new state of things to the test and exercise its “rights.” A brawl had already broken out at the entrance to the square; there were feminine squeals, blows, cries of rage and pain. Within five minutes, disorder and violence had spread throughout the entire town.
Vibrant with impuissant revulsion against this odious tyranny, shocked by the horror of the face of humanity, like Lot and his wife fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, we went past the last houses on the waterfront, heading westwards. O joy—the road was not yet under guard. The way to Salvation was open!
Our hearts beating with hope and blind resolution, we decided to follow it until its end, and then turn right, despite all obstacles, to cross the rocky wilderness that separated us from Marseilles by 15 kilometers or so.
We met other pedestrians, including a band of half-drunken quarrymen, against whom I set myself to mount a desperate resistance—but these people were still ignorant of the establishment of the new regime of “All for all” and limited themselves to hurling filthy remarks and ironic greetings in our direction.
After crossing a little plateau wooded with ancient pines, the road descended into the depths of a steep gully and skirted a sort of arm of the sea forming a narrow and sinuous cul-de-sac: the first cove. Within this sunlit fjord the solitude was complete. We passed alongside an abandoned quarry—the one that was still being exploited was on the other shore—then slackened our pace. A mere path, now, climbed the calcareous slope like a ledge, wooded to the right, bare to the left, save for the occasional bush projecting from a cleft plunging steeply down to the somber indigo of the waters that extended, a few 100 meters away, into the sea.
“You must be exhausted, my poor darling,” I said, pointing to a large block of limestone shaded by a stout juniper. “Let’s sit down. The Sun’s already going down; nightfall will overtake us…”
“Bah! We’ll make camp at the bottom of one of these pretty coves, of which we have seen so many. We have your nutriment pills to eat—they must be very nice!”
“And tomorrow, we’ll have all day to walk, in sight of the sea. There’s no danger of our getting lost, but I’m afraid you’ll get very tired.”
“It’s an excursion in the mountains, that’s all! And with you, my beloved… Now we’re far away from our charming human brethren, I can breathe! What does a little tiredness matter to us, hey? I don’t think I’d be able to sleep, so I could go on all night. Do you remember the story in Herodotus? A king of ancient Egypt, perhaps a Psammetichus, to whom the oracle revealed that he would die within a year, ordered that his palace be illuminated round the clock, and he lived by day and night alike in perpetual feasting, in order to double the time remaining to him. I would willingly imitate him…with you, and in this beautiful solitude—for we have no need of round-the-clock illumination.”
“We’ll have the stars,” I said, heartened by the courage of my adorable companion.
We went on along the path on the ledge overlooking the cove, facing the open sea. The Sun set, invisible to us behind the rocky crest. There were tufts of pink cirrus cloud in the fading azure. Cool gusts of wind caressed our right cheeks.
The excited intoxication of rebellion that had surrounded us like a cloud since we left Cassis gradually diminished. The serene majesty of the landscape infected us without our being aware of it. Our deflation had not lasted long, however, when we suddenly found ourselves at the extremity of a point with no exit, behind which was another cove, less steep but much larger than the first.
“Yes, it’s annoying,” said Raymonde, when I expressed my disappointment. “We’ve reached the end of a useless path…but then, since night is falling and we won’t be able to go much further today, wasn’t it a stroke of luck that brought us here, to make camp in sight of such beautiful landscape, sheltered from human turpitude!”
We were on a natural terrace surrounded by a chaos of calcareous rocks, which sloped gently downwards. Their base was bathed by the languorous lapping of the waves in the sumptuously blue bay, which extended its peaceful solitude to the marine horizon and the long cliff of the far shore, which was reddening like a wall of brass in the last rays of the setting Sun.
“See, my love!” she continued. “There are still shelters for our love, even in this era of catastrophe and madness: the countryside, as we used to call it. Despite the Martian torpedoes, revolutions in the cities, and Soviets in the towns, we shall have had our holiday!”
Fugitives though we were, dogged by threats from Heaven and Earth, and destined to plunge back into the maelstrom of calamities—even sooner than we imagined—those few hours of grace in the midst of eternal Nature were the supreme consecration of our spousa
l ideals. The marvelous conversations of the preceding days—how many had there been? Four, five…or years?—had revealed our terrestrial pasts. The whirlwind of the panic and the dangers we had run together proved to me the nobility of her fraternal soul. That evening, for the first time, she and I revisited, and not in any imaginary sense, a scene from our previous life…
We had prepared a bed of pine-needles—they were more abundant on the other slope of the point—and juniper branches, in order to be as comfortable as possible. By way of a repast, one tablet each of the Jovian nutriment procured us the sensation of immaterial euphoria and lightness of spirit that must have led other people astray, but which delighted us from that first experience. They we lay down on the edge of the terrace.
The stars came out one by one. The landscape around us lost its color in the increasing darkness. The sea scarcely made a sound.
Terrestrial nature no longer solicited our senses; the egotistical aspect of our being was asleep, its duty accomplished, in the absence of immediate anger, and our spirits, absorbed all day by the tyranny of colors and forms and drowned in the imperious terrestrial light, became gradually detached, in the manner of constellations veiled by day by a screen of cloud or the blue of the sunlit atmosphere.
The universal Spirit incarnate in our ephemeral forms forgot its excessively human quotidian interests, and revealed itself in sole concern with the Eternal.
The Spirit reduced our insignificant parcels of life, intricately engaged in the extremely complicated game of the struggle for existence—for the possession of terrestrial matter—to our true importance; it overcame those infinitesimal bodies of flesh, confounding them with the vital flourishing of the Earth…the immense Earth, whose globe is surrounded by our conscious atoms…the globe of the planet Earth floating—in the mysterious snare of gravity!—more and more distantly, minuscule in the infinite space whose absolute and undeniable reality we were contemplating…
The infinite space of the Universal Heavens, whose real Presence enveloped us with its sovereign vertigo…
And my soul, spreading its wings, familiarized by long nights of solitary contemplation of sidereal profundities, drew its twin soul in its wake, in an ever-more-expansive flight, balanced by the two wings of Science and intuition….
Resting her cheek on my shoulder, however, in an anxious voice, she pointed.
“Mars! And that star there, very close to Mars and almost as red, in a fan of four stars spreading westwards-tell me, my love, what is it?”
“Antares…Antares in Scorpio.”
“Scorpio! That’s strange. You’ll think I’m silly, but I’ve never been able to look at that constellation, for as long as I can remember, without shivering. It’s a mystical, superstitious horror, an irresistible and insensate dread, which stirs me to the very depths of my soul like the memory of a frightful past of pain…even now, the enemy planet Mars, which has sworn to exterminate terrestrial humankind, only inspires a human dread, limited to my present existence. My soul must once have lived an unhappy existence on Antares in Scorpio, whose distant memory still haunts its new avatar—even with you by my side, my beloved, and in the certainty that the force of our love will reunite our souls beyond our present life…”
There was also the unforgettable bath we took, that night, in the lukewarm and phosphorescent water—that bath where her young and slender body, as luminous as some divine siren of yesteryear, drew in its wake a trail of blue sidereal lace…
There was…but what would be the point?
IX. In the Skies of Marseilles
Midnight had passed. In anticipation of the next day’s long march, I was resigning myself to talk about the necessity sleep, when all of a sudden…
“Oh! Quickly, look at that beautiful falling star!”
The Martian torpedo, whistling as it fell, slow and red, from the zenith burst over Marseilles, into 100 artificial tears. The rippling explosion was followed by another, almost as powerful, then a third, dull and prolonged.
Marseilles delivered to the red gas! Would the Palais de la Garde escape? At a stroke, we became once again the civilized collaborators of Gideon Botram.
I had put my arms around Raymonde’s shoulders. Her teeth chattered; her hands came together; by the light of the stars I made out her wide-open eyes. Eventually, she spoke first: “The cosmogram from Jupiter! It was true, then? Why wasn’t Marseilles evacuated, then? Why have so few airplanes and helicopters flown past?”
“Because the Directorate gave the lie to the rumor and no one budged, except perhaps the common people. The coincidence can only have saved a few lives: our Master, with the best brains that remain to humankind.”
“We can’t stay here any longer. What’s happening over there? Oh, my love, curiosity’s devouring me—it’s not just feminine weakness!”
“Yes, we have to get going. But the night’s too dark…and go where? The Soviet of Cassis behind, Marseilles too far ahead…”
“Far? But look—that fire is close by!”
“That’s a pine-wood burning. Marseilles is out of sight. The sky’s already red over there—and look at those moving stars coming towards us: the lights of those who are fleeing by air.”
She got up and surveyed the narrow terrace, a dark form set against the vague whiteness of the rocks and the luminescent sky. The throbbing sound of a helicopter passed directly over our heads, 200 meters up; we were able to discern two fugitives and two vacant seats through the hyaline walls of the illuminated cockpit. Then there was a stout and noisy airbus, further to the left, over the sea. A vague sound like an invasion of gigantic crickets filled the darkness, which was speckled with the red and green positional lights of aircraft and striped in every direction by long searchlight beams. They passed to the right and the left, and directly overhead.
“Quickly, quickly! They have to see us, to take us away…the signal…let’s light the aviators’ distress signal!”
It was our only chance, very slight, but which we had to try. Our mass of resinous branches and pine-needles was divided into three lots, distributed about the terrace in the form of an isosceles triangle, and set on fire with the aid of my cigarette-lighter. Their flames now illuminate the two of us at their center. There was no possibility of keeping the fires going; they would only last for a few minutes. But the bulk of the aerial fleet had passed over; the lights and buzzing sounds were thinning out.
One of our torches was already dying when the dazzling beam of a searchlight picked us out, causing us to close our eyes. When we were able to open them again, a millionaire’s super-silent helicopter was hovering a few meters above our heads. At the porthole was the reflector of a blaster and a hook-nosed face, plump and clean-shaven, which examined us suspiciously.
“Who are you?” a curt and imperious voice enquired. “What are you doing there? What assistance do you need?”
I replied just as laconically: “Two employees of the Directorate, on a trip. We were obliged to flee Cassis, which is in the power of communists…”
“Have they confiscated my château?” asked the millionaire, phlegmatically.
“Without a doubt,” I said, “and sovietized women between the ages of 18 and 35.”
A little cry of alarm was audible in the cockpit, but the man with the hooked nose did not wince. “You haven’t told me what you want.”
“To be taken to the Director, if he’s escaped.”
“He escaped, thanks to the steadfastness of Ladislas Wronsky. The false news—or, rather, the premature news—released by the revolutionaries, was contradicted at 4 p.m., and very few people left the city…unfortunately. The anticipated pillage thus became impossible. But at 10 p.m. the entire population of the proletarian quarters marched forth under the leadership of the Black Guardsmen, to cries of ‘Death to Gideon the Antichrist!’ They were about to surround the Palais when Wronsky forced the Master, who wanted to resist, to flee with the Government in helicopters. They should have arrived at the La Crau air
field an hour before the destruction of Marseilles.”
“Take us to the camp at La Crau, then.” I was about to add: “The Directorate will compensate you”—but I simply said: “You’ll be safer there.”
“Than in my château in Cassis? And our wives too. That’s settled—climb aboard, both of you.”
As delicately as a dragonfly, the helicopter touched down on the rocky terrace, which had never been subject to any similar contact since its emergence from the waters. The cockpit door opened and we climbed into a luxurious cabin, where an excessively plump woman with peroxide blonde hair and a discouraged expression, dressed in a pink silk kimono, welcomed us with a wan smile. The man with the hooked nose placed us in the vacant seats, closed the cockpit again, and the machine rose up, without any unsteadiness and hardly any noise.
“Not too fast, Isaac, I beg you,” murmured the blonde woman, nervously sniffing a bottle of smelling-salts, “and don’t go too close to the fire!”
“Don’t be afraid, Rachel,” growled Monsieur Isaac, manipulating the little control levers on a control panel not much larger than a typewriter.
The noise of the engines was so discreet, the resonant voices so sharp, and the cabin so well-appointed, that one might have thought one was in a drawing-room. At first, the contrast between that plush interior and the solitude of the marine rocks where we had been preparing to spend the night claimed our attention—but the interior lighting was distracting our pilot, who extinguished them abruptly. The spectacle of the night became visible through the transparent walls of our aerial vehicle. The silhouette of the heights that still hid Marseilles from us now stood out against the vast reflection of the fire, while out to sea, on the surface of the waves, a single isolated flame was writhing like a red firework.
“A satanite generator that fell into the gulf,” said the guttural voice of our driver. “Well, it’s not the only one.”
Gradually, the entire sea-lane revealed itself to our eyes, strewn with fires that illuminated everything like a nocturnal festival. Between these improvised lighthouses, an entire fleet of ships was visible—coasters, tugs, even a great transatlantic liner—fleeing in disarray, lit up in red on the bloody waters.
The Martian Epic Page 10