The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  As for Raymonde, the sagacity of her feminine intuition served her better than me in that respect, and she became the Great Leader’s consort without further ado, to a degree that amazed me and made me anxious for the conservation of her human personality. She sometimes had occasion to warn me about faults presented by my discourse or my conduct, with respect to the viewpoint of our entourage, but I had no similar advice to give her. On the contrary, I had to make her party to my anxieties concerning the over-perfection of her simulation, anxiously pointing out turns of phrase—without mentioning the obligatory frightful accent—and Martian gestures that she employed even when we were alone.

  Without our love, without our absolute union, these reciprocal and indispensable observations would quickly have degenerated into acrimony—and the slightest division between us might have been our ruination. We needed every minute of the few hours of each evening in which we had the liberty to converse without witnesses to check the progress of this slow Martianization, and maintain the worthiness of our souls for a human future.

  We were alone—along against the whole Martian society! The least suspicion with regard to our real identities would have resulted in our being massacred pitilessly or, worse still, being delivered to the Solenoids of Reincarnation—but the thought of our distant friends on their way to Tahiti, and our sacred duty to the Earth, prevented us from losing our footing and plunging into despair.

  In addition, the Venusian Master visited my dreams. He chided me gently for having neglected his counsels of prudence and assuming too soon roles for which we were not ready. He exhorted me to be patient, and promised me his aid when the moment came for decisive action. Almost every night, I saw him seated before a sort of crystal egg, in which his supernaturally lucid gaze discovered scenes of Martian agitation in miniature, and made myself meeker and more attentive while he imposed himself upon me. Every morning, I recounted my vision to Raymonde, and that occult and distant sympathy was the greatest comfort of our miserable gilded existence as spies and traitors for the cause of good.

  II. The Last Magus

  I almost blush to admit—and this concession indicates better than all the rest what an empery the Martian atmosphere eventually exercised upon us—that the last Magus treated me with an affection that I was almost ready to return.

  This illusory Pontiff, the last representative of the authentic Martians, remained a manifest religious authority to the common people, their race’s supreme guide towards the solar paradise. Although Leduc and his shaggy followers had respected, to a considerable degree, the veto that his predecessor had imposed on the “Mechanist heresy,” however, that party considered the last Magus as an anachronism. They regarded his prohibitions as null and void, attributing them to the opposing part of Old-Martians. For their part, the Old-Martians treated the “Son of the Bat” as a docile but cumbersome instrument.

  At any rate, the old fellow was touched to find me asking for his advice and showing him an unexpected deference. My attentions were certainly not disinterested; I was, first and foremost, trying to obtain information from him that I dared not demand from my entourage. His mediocre knowledge of French, while importing a certain obscurity into his statements, seemed to me to be a useful veil for my ignorance of certain fundamental notions, and to authorize more direct questions by way of clarification.

  It did not take me long, however, to recognize that I had before me, in the form of this “old wreck,” an unusual intelligence, superior to all those I had previously seen incarnate in human form. In spite of his physique, hideous to our terrestrial conceptions, but in which the Martians saw the prototype and exemplification of Beauty—his membranous wings, his red-brown skin with a metallic sheen—old Egregore inspired a sincere respect in me. I hesitated to use any subterfuge with him other than the necessary dissimulation of my true personality, and I treated him as an equal. I had no need to simulate deferential attention. His gilded eyes, with vertical pupils like a cat’s, sunk beneath the vast forehead with its luminous protuberances, shone with the full glare of genius, and I never tired of listening to him.

  Beneath his awkward diction, warmed by an ardent fire, the little I knew of the Martian dogmas of transmigration was clarified by new light. The egotistical salvation pursued by the vulgar souls of the Terromartians became the noble aspiration of a race to attain its supreme destiny, in harmony with the evolution of worlds.

  From their origins in the outer planets, incarnated for the first time on the frozen ground of Saturn—or Uranus, according to more ancient traditions—the presently-Martian souls had been subject ever since to the attraction of the Sun, forced to draw closer to its glorious fire. Liberated by the deaths of their initial envelopes, they had to pass on to the next planet inwards, to experience a new avatar there and earn the right to take another step on the triumphal Way. Jupiter, Mars, the Earth, Venus and Mercury were, therefore, their successive residences, and after that series of metempsychoses they would return to the flamboyant bosom of the original Star, there to know the unprecedented delights of fusion with the primordial All—Nirvana, as Earthly Buddhist doctrine expresses it.

  For generations without number, the sublime pilgrimage had proceeded; millions and millions of souls had passed through the planetary sequence, cultivating en route the wisdom and the merits of which each one would make a gift to the Supreme Being, the Sun. And if things had followed their natural course, the souls would have continued, until the end of time, to undertake the long but facile voyage marked out by their ancestors, under the peaceful direction of the Magi….

  But the Spirit of Darkness was watching. Bestowed on souls during each of their avatars in order to help them improve the adaptation of their planetary domiciles to their corporeal existence, Intelligence had become, by virtue of the Spirit’s interventions, a two-edged sword. The animal instincts had monopolized its produce, exacted ever-more extensive services from it, and finally contrived to impose their domination upon it and draw it into wild adventures…

  Intelligence fought back, and won—on Mars, at least—a temporary triumph. The wars of extermination to which people devoted themselves, by means of ever-more-advanced and murderous armaments, gave victory to the Sons of the Bat over the Sons of the Plesiosaur and Diploodocus. The Magi reigned alone, and for several centuries, Mechanization, under their guidance, was their humble servant, contributing to making the planet a pleasant abode for its passing guests.

  Alas, old Egregore said—unconsciously parodying one of the fundamental laws of terrestrial paleontology—the perfection of a race does not long precede its irremediable decline. Material progress, especially, incorporates within itself an accelerating necessity that obliges it to surpass its normal and legitimate goals, exciting and corrupting the minds of its possessors and precipitating them towards their ruin…

  The ambition of the “Mechanist” Martians increased inordinately. The planet became too narrow a field for their activity, multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold by the vertiginous momentum of industry. They dreamed of formidable adventures, titanic conquests. They undertook to overturn the eternal laws that regulate the destinies of planetary souls. The slowness of usual transmigrations seemed derisory to them. Dragging their unanimously impatient adherents behind them, they resolved to storm the Heavens, skipping one of the links in the planetary chain by landing in their Martian bodies on the next planet: the Earth.

  In the name of the outraged religion, the Pontiff of the time, Egregore II, anathematized their plans, whose frightful consequences he foresaw—but the people of Mars, blinded by their desire, rose up in the name of the divine Sun, and he had to give in, for fear of seeing the formidable engines of industry ravage the sacred soil of the planet. He consented to turn their blows against the brothers in Space.

  Reluctantly, in order to avoid greater evils, the Magi had to associate themselves with the enterprise whose goal was the conquest of the Earth. After that, the series of catastrophes had unfolded, without r
emedy. The only concession they had been able to obtain was that the systematic bombardment of the Earth would consist of successive daily shells.

  To begin with, I tried to get the old fellow to tell me what reasons could have been invoked for putting such a brake on the Mechanists’ impatience, but I could not grasp his explanation. I simple had to admit that it was a matter of one of “those reasons which reason knows not” 38—a religious motive analogous to the sabbatical prescriptions of Judaic law, or the Catholic observance of Friday…

  The threats of Jupiter had provoked the most complete incredulity. The engineers denied that the sentence could be executed. The Magi thought it incompatible with the well-known wisdom of the Jovians. It had, in fact, been folly on the part of the latter to destroy the population of Mars, given that a considerable fraction of the inhabitants of Jupiter belonged to the race of Saturno-Martian souls, and that the successive avatars of their transmigration towards the Sun were supposed to follow an ideal sequence requiring the integrity of the planetary sequence. With Mars destroyed—or its inhabitants, and its soil deprived of all life—the souls originating from the outer planets would accumulate there without the slightest possibility of reincarnation, reduced to the miserable condition of souls in torment, until the distant day when the seeds of life scattered through infinite space would inseminate the sterilized globe anew and gradually produce organisms there sufficiently elevated to serve as temporary shelters for the pilgrims of the Sun.

  While he explained the logic of the situation to me, the old Magus burst into desperately bitter laughter. “Justice!” he added. “The Jovians claimed to be serving Justice and Fraternity, while they swept the unfortunate planet of my ancestors clean with their thunderbolt! On the contrary, they were committing an unforgivable sin, in depriving the souls of two or three planets of their habitual issue. Thanks to their intervention in this quarrel, in which the Earth alone was guilty of refusing us hospitality—and perhaps our Mechanists too, a little, of presumptuous hatred and pride—Saturn and Uranus, not to mention Jupiter itself, are henceforth deprived of their habitual communicative link with the solar paradise. Millions and millions of souls condemned to the Limbo of Martian Purgatory for an indefinite lapse of time!”

  A profound emotion altered the quavering voice of the old Pontiff. I perceived, with astonishment, that he was the true defender of planetary Fraternity, and I measured the distance that separated his generous dogmas from the sinister application to which the religion of the vulgar Martians had put them...an inevitable schism, alas—similar on all planets—between the intuitions of Seers guided by the Universal Spirit and the trivial superstitions of peoples dragged down by their egotism and their vile material instincts!

  Thunderstruck by Jupiter, Mars was no more than a globe of ashes and the souls of its inhabitants, surprised by the devastating scourge, had emigrated en masse to the Earth. A small percentage of those souls had been reincarnated. It was therefore important, above all else, that the Earth should live; it was vital that the human race survived, in order to furnish bodies, in due course, for all of the Martian souls. That is why, Egregore admitted to me, the Council of Magi had resolved to limit the influence of the Perfume to the Old World. That is why his predecessor had pronounced an anathema upon the Technical Director, because of his man-hunts on the American continent—which had been set aside as a “reservation” for humankind by the Magi. That is why it was necessary that the cylinders should take off as soon as possible, in order to avoid providing any pretext for a further Jovian intervention, and to spare the Earth the fate to which Mars had been subject.

  “Ah,” concluded the old Magus, “if suicide were not an outrage to God and Eternal Life, how infinitely preferable it would have been to realize the direct flight into the Sun that a few fanatical illuminates recommended!

  “We would not have sinned involuntarily against sidereal Fraternity and induced Jupiter to commit its crime. We would not now be preparing, on a devastated planet, this new folly of an attack on Venus. We would not have furnished a pasture for those monsters, hatred and vengeance, which, immeasurably grown and fortified, have now reached the point of contemplating a sin equal to that of Jupiter, but more abominable still, since it has no justification: the destruction of the Earth! Yes, my friend, they’re hiding it from you, but I know, personally, that these vile Mechanists, blinded by the delirium of the unlimited forces they have learned to manipulate, are thinking of applying them to this globe that supports us. Devoid of pity for the millions of souls that their flight aboard the cylinders will leave behind here, they not only want to capture every last Terran, but they intend to create an irremediable breach in the planetary chain. Jupiter has sterilized Mars for centuries? They will deprive the outer planets of their access route to the solar paradise forever—what does it matter to them that the souls of their brothers are caught up in the same catastrophe? They will destroy the Earth! ”

  But when he arrived at these invectives against Leduc and the Mechanists, old Egregore became incoherent. I could no longer extract any precise explanation from him. He mixed everything together: the Great Central Tunnel; the man-hunts and the new flying machines—volvites—designed for that purpose, and capable of flying speeds of 700 kilometers per hour; the daily excesses of the shaggies in respect of Terromartian women and the monstrous procreations resulting therefrom; the blasphemous priesthood instituted by the Technical Director in order to justify himself in the eyes of the people, against the reproaches of lukewarm religion; the superstitions introduced by these new priests, the maki-mokokos…

  III. The Inauguration of the Drilling-Machine

  They will destroy the Earth! These fateful words hammered within my skull; they vibrated within me, with the exact intonation that old Egregore had given them, and replied like an interior echo to the external braying of the loudspeakers announcing the results of the day’s endeavors.

  More than ever, I felt like a plaything in the hands of the chiefs. For two hours they had kept me in the Council Chamber directly above the fully-active Hall of Reincarnation, in order to persuade me of the necessity of an alliance with the Technical Director—“the Boss,” as he was commonly known. All the shaggies, and an increasingly large proportion of the people were on his side, won over by his inexhaustible propagandists, the maki-mokokos. If we were not to find ourselves conclusively abandoned, a compromise was indispensable.

  “Consent to everything,” whispered Raymonde, enthroned beside me beneath the armchair in which the Sovereign Pontiff, with his wings folded and his eyes staring into space, maintained his indifference in these futile agitations. “Pretend to give in. The most important thing of all is to keep the semblance of authority attached to your title. Later, perhaps, we might find a way to avert the peril. Resistance can only ruin us and remove any chance of helping our friends on Earth and Venus.”

  Through the wide-open bay window, high in the bright blue Egyptian sky, at the very summit of the cyclopean Monument, I could see the Magus of the Shell extending his arm towards the Sun, and I could hear explosions of joy from the crowd massed in the Esplanade greeting every new concession wrung from my weakness.

  “The Great Leader has given his approval to the clearance of America!” trumpeted the loudspeakers from the heights and base of the Monument. “Go and see the flying machines that will hunt the Terrans—the prodigious volvites! 700 kilometrers per hour…departure of the first official squadron in five minutes!”

  “Hurrah for the Great Leader! Hurrah for the Boss!” howled the raucous throats of the Terromartians.

  “Adoption of the Great Central Tunnel! Hurrah! Mars avenged on Jupiter! Blockade of souls in the outer planets! The Great Leader consents to inaugurate the works! He will go to the pithead of the Great Central Tunnel. Shaggies, Terromartians, workers not on shift, go and see the meeting of the Great Leader and the Technical Director! Three hundred helicopters at the disposition of travelers in airports B, C, D and F.”


  Supposedly to honor us, but actually in order to show off Leduc’s triumph, my general staff and I made the journey—Raymonde was feeling ill and did not come—aboard a volvite. These machines, perfected and constructed in secret by the Technical Director, were of an absolutely new type, marvelously adapted to their reconnaissance role and for the direct capture of human prey. Devoid of rotor-blades, shaped like an arrow and powered by atomic fission, they flew like a bullet, with the same characteristic speed and whistling sound. Their much-reduced fins made them almost invisible at a distance of a few kilometers, and it took a machine traveling at full speed less than two minutes from its appearance over the horizon to arrive directly above a determined point.

  It was the first time that I had seen a volvite at close range, and the explanations the pilot gave me before departure plunged me into a painful reverie. Unfortunate Terrans of America and Oceania, dear Last Men, what will become of you? It was necessary for me to conceal this poignant emotion and to present a cheerful face to the chiefs sitting beside me in the narrow and uncomfortable cabin, while the sands of the Libyan desert fled beneath us—for the famous pithead opened forty minutes flight away from Mars Central, in the heart of the Sahara.

  Conscious of his position as master of the moment, Leduc was waiting for us there confidently. The gross familiarity of his greeting—he received us with his pipe in his mouth and his hands in is pockets—was one more insult, which my associates swallowed with fixed smiles on their lips and I consumed in silence.