A quantity of documents of every sort, on which I recognized the handwriting of the other—my own handwriting deformed by the Martian soul—was yet another source of pleasure, and reassured me slightly as to the consequences of our premature reincarnation. Thanks to the mania for taking notes transmitted by my body to the Great Leader, I would find what I needed in these manuscripts to document myself and replace the projected study of our characters.
Another discovery was less agreeable—that of “tenancy damage.” Our bodies, having been in perfect condition two months before, when the others took possession, had been obliged to support the exigencies of tyrannical and unbridled souls, and we found them in a pitiful condition, aged by ten years. Raymonde was distressed by countless flaws inflicted upon her beauty, less by a real usury of the tissues, fortunately, than by a total neglect of the most natural concerns of cleanliness and hygiene. For my part, I saw myself condemned to wear a hideous collar-length beard; I had a stomach wrecked by the scandalous regime to which that brute R’rdô had subjected it; and a violent nervous tic agitated my lower left eyelid. Both our sets of vocal cords had been frayed by the abominable Terromartian accent—which we would nevertheless have to conserve, for fear of exciting suspicion, along with the new gestures and attitudes that the “regulation” of the usurping souls had inflicted on our limbs.
It was soon necessary for us to brave the presence of the senior staff. Raymonde, with a marvelous feminine intuition, allowed herself to be guided by the habits inculcated in her body, and played her character to perfection; the two or three lapses that she made were attributed to the upset she had suffered by virtue of my fit. Much less sure of myself, I offered the excuse of a violent headache and limited myself to listening, only replying in monosyllables.
The expedition of current affairs was, in any case, suspended; there was no longer any subject for discussion than the death of the Sovereign Pontiff Egregore XII—“Saint Egregore,” as the leaders were now saying. Although it was a hard knock to the party of the Magi—our party—the national mourning could be exploited, and might even gain us adherents, provided that the funeral arrangements were sufficiently splendid.
They evidently had to take place the following day. Following the ancient custom, the mortal husk of the Magus was presently plunged in a galvanoplastic bath of gold chloride, being entirely coated with a thick layer of precious metal; transformed into a golden statue, it would be ready to enter eternity.
The opinion of the chiefs, however, was that a simple deposition of the statue inside the Monument would not be sufficient. The popular imagination must be struck by some new rite, the unprecedented splendor of which would add to the cyclopean pomp of the ceremony. As to its form—they had decided the matter between them—the chiefs asked me whether I would approve the canonization of Egregore being crowned by his ascension, in the presence of everyone.
“Certainly,” I replied, without daring to say any more.
“And would Your Excellencies deign to administer the solemn unction yourselves, the one surviving Magus having agreed to cede you that privilege?”
“Willingly,” said Raymonde, at the same time as me.
“It will reflect the greatest possible honor on to the Party...and on your two selves, Excellencies! There—your victory will henceforth be assured! The shaggies are sunk! A round of applause, gentlemen!”
And the triple-time applause of the chiefs gave us a foretaste of the anticipated popularity.
Raymonde and I spent the hours that passed before the ceremony turning the problem over and over. How could the Unction of the Magus—or, rather, his galvanoplastic statue—procure his final “ascension”?
We were no further advanced than we had been in the morning when a deputation of overseers came to find us, and took us—by helicopter, in spite of the short distance—to the first terrace of the monument.
Dazzled by the floodlights and dazed by the acclamations of the crowds swarming on the immense esplanade of the Pyramids, we were given little time to collect ourselves. Then the blinding beams of searchlights, aimed at us from all directions, prevented us from seeing anything beyond the scene in which we were acting, on the huge ledge caved into the flank of the mountain of light. On the summit of the mount—looming vertiginously, high above our heads—floated the Shell and the luminous Magus, whose arm had interrupted its gyratory movement to direct all gazes to the ceremony that was about to take place.
At an order from the surviving Magus—who was seated in an armchair, with his wings tremulously folded and his cephalic appendices sustained by protective steel wires—a kind of awning parted, like the entrance to a tent, and the defunct Pontiff appeared, cast in his gleaming carapace of galvanoplastic gold, with his arms and wings outspread and the rigid antennae standing up on his forehead in a superb gesture of boldness and defiance. The acclamations of the crowd were drowned out by the thunderous fanfare of the electric orchestra lodged inside the Monument and projecting its sonorous waves through the loudspeakers of enormous amplifiers distributed on the level of each terrace. Seven salvoes of heavy artillery set on the bank of the Nile accompanied the seven measures of a barbaric hymn.
Then, suddenly, there was a deep silence, and 300,000 pairs of eyes religious followed the rite of Supreme Unction. Twenty-one chiefs ranged on either side of the Pontiff knelt down while Raymonde and I came forward in response to a summons from the old Magus, into the dazzling glare of the floodlights.
“Take the sacred sprinklers,” stammered the expiring voice.
Bewildered, but forcing ourselves to put on a brave face, we each took hold of a sort of thick paint-brush that was soaking in a bowl full of thick paste, the color of egg-yolk, with a metallic gleam. Solar! What were we supposed to do with it?
“On the head, the arms and the wings,” breathed the ancient master of ceremonies.
And, with Raymonde standing to the left and me to the right, we conscientiously set about painting the upper parts of the statue.
That was what the crowd was waiting for, because its members burst into enthusiastic and frantic applause, interminably prolonged, while the orchestra in the Monument discreetly resumed the Canonization March.
Our role was complete, it seemed. Two chiefs came forward respectfully to take the sacred paint-brushes from our hands. As if in a nightmare we received the blessing of the old Magus, and the helicopter took us back to the Palace.
Alone! Alone, at last! One more hour in that atmosphere of mystic madness and we might have lost our minds! The memory of that crazy Unction and the fact that the noise of the celebration was continuing outside were already more than enough. All night long the redoubtable sonority of the Martian music continued to rage, along with the clamor of the crowd and the hymns howled by the megaphones in front of the galvanoplastic statue of the defunct Magus, the solar our unconscious hands had painted on to it glistening in the beams of the spotlights.
A dose of chloral finally put an end to our intellectual disturbance, and we obtained the rest necessary to face the second part of the funeral ceremony—the mysterious Ascension!
The radiant Egyptian Sun was already shining down on the 300,000 Martians on the Esplanade. Physically exhausted by the sleepless night, their barbaric souls were no longer good for anything but expressing the fury of their coarse mysticism, and the murmurous drone of their morning prayers rose up toward the Star towards which the arm of the titanic Magus dominating the Pyramid of Babel was once again pointing. On the first terrace, the folds of the tent had been closed, hiding the statue of Egregore from the gazes of the crowd, while the old Magus, slumped in his armchair, and the two neatly-aligned cohorts of leaders continued to look on.
The Sun had just reached the face of the Monument where the apotheosis was to be effectuated, when a fanfare burst out, brutally triumphant, reinforced by a battalion of “noise-makers” of every sort—hooters, rattles, cracklers, whistles, buzzers, gurglers—not to mention the artillery along the Nile
and all the sirens in Mars Central. A dozen helicopters, made up as bats better to symbolize the pontifical ascension, and carrying the privileged spectators, including us—flew low over the Esplanade where the breathless crowd ducked.
All gazes were fixed on the level of the first terrace, on the hermetically-sealed awning. In a sudden silence, it collapsed all of a piece, and the statue of Egregore appeared. A stifled “ah!” escaped from 300,000 throats, immediately suppressed by religious respect and attentive anxiety. There was no longer any sound but the monotonous throbbing of rotor blades.
Then, struck by the full glare of the solar radiation, the dazzling statue appeared to quiver, to begin a musical vibration, on a note that was low at first, but then became increasingly shrill. The amplified voice of the Magus pronounced the final words: “Holy son of Egregores, rise up to the eternal glory and precede us into the bosom of the Beatitude!”
And the miracle was accomplished! Solicited by the irresistible attraction of the light acting on its sheath of solar, the statue left the ledge upon which it was resting, floated gently into the air, and rose up like a balloon towards the Sun, slowly at first but gradually accelerating in its flight.
It was crazy, contrary to all the laws of weight and gravitation. I refused to believed my eyes; the brute fact was there, however, and the delirious acclamations of the Martian multitude, along with the newly-unleashed fanfare of the electric orchestra, noise-makers, cannons and sirens, saluted that prodigious apotheosis—which no Roman emperor ever achieved when a living eagle was launched from his funeral pyre to symbolize his divinized soul! The mortal husk, the dazzling galvanoplastic effigy, of the Sovereign Pontiff of Mars, Egregrore XII himself, with wings deployed, rose up and continued to rise into the limpid azure sky of Egypt. He passed the summit of the cyclopean pyramid, from which the Titan’s gesture indicated his route, moving ever more quickly, higher and higher, becoming tiny and eventually disappearing, absorbed into the dazzling radiation of the Sun. The crowd howled frenetically, to the orchestral strains of a triumphal hymn—which bore a strange resemblance, in our impious ears, to the chorus of an old popular song:
Bon voyage, Monsieur Dumollet, Prenez vos bottes….37
But a hurricane of mystical delirium was shaking the ranks of the Martians beneath us. Whipped up by the example of the apotheosis, their desire for the supreme solar paradise, which they would only reach themselves after two further avatars and unknown labors, burst forth in anguished moans: “The Sun! The Sun!”
Hypnotized by the blinding disk, they waved their arms, begging its paternal rays to carry them away too, to receive them as it had just done for Saint Egregore, in his glory! Nailed to the ground by weight, they wanted at least to draw nearer to him, to feel his burning kisses, to bathe in his paradisal effluvia. Jostling one another, crushing one another and trampling one another, a powerful surge of their serried ranks demolished the barriers, invaded the Monument’s broad stairways and flooded the successive terraces. Within a few minutes, the Babelesque pyramid was garnished from top to bottom with a maddened swarm.
In broad daylight, on the Esplanade and on the seven terraces, all the Terromartians, in human and simian form, male and female, stripped off their clothes and stamped their feet in unison. The music was still playing. The artillery thundered. The sirens howled. The helicopters, intoxicated by the contagion, climbed vertically upwards with their rotor-blades going full tilt.
And while Egregore, anointed with solar, followed a continuously-accelerated course into the interplanetary void, 300,000 Martians celebrated his apotheosis, dancing in the nude in the ecstatic glory of the Sun.
Part One: Beneath the Imperial Mask
I. Facing the Martians!
Through the upper windows of the Red Palace; on the terraces of the Monument, where I presided, with the last old Magus, over religious ceremonies; on tours of inspection—several times a day, the Camp of the Cylinders extended before my eyes, with its humming machines, its enormous crucibles of liquid steel, the vapors of castings not yet cooled, its shells protruding from their sandy matrix or standing up right, finished, in the middle of their pits with sparkling walls.
No cannons, no munitions! The problem was resolved for me by the Ascension of Egregore. I knew as much about it as the Martians busy in the steelyard. And, doubtless like them, my imagination, vastly multiplying the few rows of finished shells, covered them with propulsive solar and saw them launched into space like the golden statue in serried battalions, one after another, at intervals of a few minutes, extending a chaplet of calamities, one bead at a time, ready to fall upon innocent Venus.
It was certainly necessary for me, in arriving at that vision, to overcome the repugnance of my reason, to vanquish inveterate mental habits, to cross out my memories of terrestrial physics. It was necessary for me, above all, to repeat on a smaller scale, but with my own hands, the experiment of apotheotic levitation: a simple matter, given that I had a wooden box full of solar manufactured in the workshops of Mars Central.
Alone with Raymonde, far from any indiscretion, I first exposed a pinch of the enigmatic substance on my palm. In daylight, the egg-yolk-yellow grains began to vibrate, seized by a turbulent sort of “Brownian motion,” which tickled my skin. A ray of sunlight reached them, and they sprang instantaneously towards the star, like iron filings attracted by a magnet, and pattered against the window, to which they remained stuck with such force that I could not detach them.
Untiringly, I repeated the experiment in various forms. I smeared a concoction of gum Arabic and solar on to a heavy platinum paperweight, which I took in my pocket to the second terrace of the Monument. The metal mass was lifted like a feather and vanished into the heights of the atmosphere in two seconds.
My box of solar was not yet exhausted when I ceased to consider the heliophilic properties of the new compound—a product of Martian science—as a mechanical heresy. I was too familiar with the mathematical analysis to throw any part of the theory overboard, but I had acquired a material certainty that I shared with my entourage: in spite of their formidable mass, and solely by virtue of their sheaths of solar, the shells would be levitated towards the central star, then deviated in the direction of Venus by means of some unknown apparatus.
But this persuasion, this faith, which was accompanied in the Terromartians by a frenetic desire, awoke in me, by contrast—and in Raymonde, when she understood it—a veritable terror.
The duty that seemed to us to be light and easily accomplishable when the lure of our stolen bodies led us to assume the characters of the Great Leader and his female companion, increasingly appeared to us as a desperate and hopeless enterprise.
Previously, as disincarnate souls, it had been possible for us to protect the Last Men and guide them to their retreat. Now we were as powerless as the least of the shaggies to modify the trajectory of the cylinders, or to hasten or delay their departure—and that departure, whether it was more or less imminent, signified deliverance for Earth and ruination for Venus.
Emperor of the Martians! That prestigious title had contributed, without our being aware of it—along with the ravages of jealousy—to our premature reincarnation, while we shared the prideful intoxication of our “doubles.” But would it be accompanied by effective power? At any rate, I did not possess it yet. The last Magus, almost forgotten by everyone, but alive nevertheless, remained between me and the title; by virtue of the death of his predecessor, he became the Sovereign Pontiff Egregore XIII.
Carried away by their political passion, the chiefs of my entourage had gone too far and added too much solemnity to the funeral of Egregore XII. That glorious and unusual Ascension had convinced the Martian people that the last of the Magi had risen up to the Heavens. The era of magical power seemed to be conclusively over; Egregore XIII was no more than a name, a time-server. In spite of that, he was unable, even if he wished it, invest anyone else with supreme power. Only the death of the last Pontiff would assure the Terromartian
Great Leader the religious functions and the title of Emperor.
In effect, supreme authority was in abeyance, and the effective power belonged to the chief overseers. I soon began to suspect them of involvement with the Technical Director, whose occult projects had seduced them—although I did not discover that until later. What became apparent to me immediately was that I was a plaything in everyone’s hands. At any rate, the difficulties of the adventure into which we had blindly thrown ourselves, prematurely, revealed themselves, one after another, to be much more disconcerting than we had estimated. They were of every sort, material and mental.
The deafening noise of machines, the unpleasant odors of the crowd and the indigestible food were a real and constant persecution, but there was hope that we might accustom ourselves to them, to some degree, and we would have given short shrift to those annoyances were it not for the greater anxieties that plunged us, from that first evening on, into a veritable distress.
The situation of a man who had been condemned, in another era, to live among the most barbarous tribes of central Africa, to share their life, their concepts, their aspirations, their joys and their troubles, was nothing by comparison with ours. The brutal mores and repulsive customs of the true Martian people of the factories and the steelyards would doubtless have inspired more disgust in us, and it would have been more painful to observe them in appearance, but at least horror would have preserved us from any possibility of contagion, and we would never have had to dread for a single instant that we might become like them in a fundamental sense. The milieu of the chiefs, which was ours, seemed much more dangerous to us, because it was more refined.
If I had only had my predecessor’s notes to guide me in playing the role of Great Leader R’rdô, the task would have been beyond my capabilities. Fortunately, I still had the memories left in my cerebral circumvolutions by the Martian soul’s sojourn, and I quickly became able to consult R’rdô’s terrestrial memories without overmuch groping, albeit with many gaps.
The Martian Epic Page 31