“Here,” a loudspeaker proclaimed in the silence, while the Magus of the Shell at the top of the Monument stopped indicating the Sun and pointed its fateful index-finger at me, “is our Emperor and Sovereign Pontiff henceforth. Like us, he is of the sad race of Terromartians. He is not an Egregore, but the last representative of that sacred dynasty, the defunct Magus—whose ideally pure form continued to remind us of the Beauty that once flourished on our beloved planet—has designated him as his successor. Egregore XIII has conferred his religious dignity and all his powers upon him; it is to R’rdô that the august task will fall of guiding us to the conquest of Venus, on the road of the Sun!”
The statement produced its extraordinary effect, and the fanaticism of the Martians burst forth in a storm of acclamation. An overseer advanced towards us, carrying sacred ornaments—but Leduc, with a decisive gesture, held him back. With an affected humility, well-calculated to make the glory of the ceremony reflect upon him and more clearly to affirm the nature of the alliance made between the religious and technical powers, he took possession of them, and dressed me in the imperial helmet and the artificial wings that I was the first to wear.
I understood in a flash what dependence would result from that coronation, but did not attempt to imitate Napoleon’s gesture of snatching the diadem from Pius VII to put it on with his own hands. It was at Leduc’s invitation that I conferred on Raymonde the insignia of her own power, equal to mine and, so to speak, doubling that authority in the eyes of the feminine fraction of the assembly.
The continuing acclamations rose up, followed by hymns accompanied by music, while I accomplished the first act of my pontificate, receiving the homage of two colleges of priests, one composed of chiefs, the other of maki-mokokos. I have to admit that the stink given off by the latter was almost intolerable, and that I promised myself never to attempt to usurp my Technical Director’s guard of honor. The popular manifestations revived my courage, though, by proving to me that the authority of Egregore XIII lived on in my person, and that, even if the Great Leader R’rdô’s role had been effaced, he would, as Emperor and Pontiff, become necessary to the government of the fierce and exacting mysticism of shaggies and Terromartians.
I feared, at first, that Leduc might make me into a kind of decorative idol, a Grand Lama, purely religious, through which he would dictate his orders, but he judged it more apt to “democratize”—as it used to be termed—my dignity and to accustom everyone to seeing me continually at his side, thus giving all his enterprises the irrefutable sanction of religion. It was even more convenient, from his point of view, that the public ceremonies of the solar cult had lost their initial frequency, because of the loss of time that they—and especially their consequent orgies—occasioned among the workers, and it suited him to take the troubled mysticism of the Martians in another direction. Without daring to infringe on religious functions that he felt it inappropriate to perform himself, he had already instituted the college of maki-mokokos. Almost incapable of any other mechanical occupation, these minuscule shaggies spent their days on the terraces of the Monument worshipping the Sun; their incessant prayers “gained merit” for their fellow citizens and thus brought some alleviation to their scruples. The Terromartians, however, like the shaggies, whose mystical needs were singularly developed, could only be satisfied by seeing the head of their religion—the Sovereign Pontiff and Emperor—involving himself in their laborious life and adding the encouragement of his presence to the Technical Director’s tours of inspection.
Raymonde, for her part, had to respond to analogous solicitations. The absolute “feminism” practiced by the Martians on their native planet had been further reinforced, since their arrival on Earth, by the admission, in increasing numbers, of shaggies into the phalansteries of Mars Central. The uncontrolled appetites of the habitants of simian origin had, from the outset, caused acute problems for the good organization of the work, and it had been necessary, in order to obviate them, to group the Terromartians in separate units. The majority specialized in aviation, and when she was humbly implored to grant her patronage to the Amazons of the Sphinx, Raymonde thought it only politic to accept. Since then, for her as for me, everyday existence was a continual round of reviews, inspections and tours of every sort, to which we submitted by necessity at first, but also in the hope of solidifying our authority and discovering, somewhere or other, some means of coming to the aid of our friends on Venus or our Terran brothers—for the Amazons of the Sphinx carried out man-hunts, and their volvites were exploring America while waiting to go on to Oceania. I was hoping that an opportunity might arise to discover the secret of steering the Cylinders.
The necessity of keeping company with Leduc, however, inevitably sharpened my anxieties. He seemed to take a malicious pleasure in reminding me of details of our Martian past, and enjoyed my embarrassment when I eluded his questions by means of evasive answers. He never persisted, to begin with; it was all limited, for the time being, to a kind of game, like those that cats play with mice. Was his interest in these reminiscences only slight? Or was he secretly collecting material for a crushing indictment? A mystery. In any case, I took care only to be with him in the company of my associates. Quite happy to have conserved their privilege of a life of idleness and gluttony instead of being reduced to the status of mere workers by the death of Egregore XIII, the latter saw Leduc as their savior, and the true holder of power—as, indeed, he was, to a greater extent than me. They would have kissed his footprints. I abhorred their baseness, but their fawning had an invaluable effect: it flattered Leduc’s gross vanity, and deflected his attention away from subjects more perilous to me.
The company of machines reassured me even more.
The animation of an airport, a glassworks or a machine-shop, the activity of a steelyard, the mere sight of a motor in rotation, produced in my enemy, as in all his peers, a strange fascination. The electrical wires, tubes and conductors of every sort, hollow and solid, whose inextricable network obstructed the sky, seemed to communicate something of their insensate energy to Leduc, as if by induction. The spirit of machines seemed to effervesce within him, contagiously, making him violent, haggard, agitated, trepidant, automatic. Drawn into the round of brutal forces, drowning his animality and intelligence within them, drunkenly, his eyes fixed and wild, forgetting everything else, he enjoyed their methodical rage, the forced turbulence of matter tamed by equations, and he only woke up from these dark Cabirian40 ecstasies to absorb himself in the examination of some technical detail, muttering calculations, caressing the greased steel of a crank-shaft or scrutinizing the contours of a buzzing machine, with the solicitude of a father for his favorite child.
In this fashion, therefore, the central power stations and refrigeration plants, the glassworks, the abattoirs, the volvite factories, the airports, the generators, the radioactive batteries and workshops of every sort received my visits, as well as the port of Alexandria, the Camp of the Cylinders, the Equatorial Alternators at Khartoum and the Solar Accumulators at Aswan. Everywhere, the racket of metal, the hammerings and enraged drones of Machinery; everywhere, the avid ardor of furnaces and the blinding glare of floodlights; everywhere, the abominable stink of shaggies with simian bodies and quasi-human bodies, their eyes reflecting a sinister mixture of atrocious egotism, bestial passions and mysticism—and the rebellion of my nerves, which habit normally permitted me to conceal, but not to avoid, was redoubled by a horror that sometimes extended as far as terror, as the goals to which all these efforts were directed revealed themselves more clearly to my mind, or materialized before my eyes in the Cylinders lined up as far as the eye could see in their infernal dockyard—or, worse still, in the Tunnel, which was visibly deepening with a fantastic rapidity.
In the evening, after these mortal days—Raymonde had been subject to similar adventures among the Amazons of the Sphinx—we sometimes had to attend cinematic propaganda sessions on the balcony of the Red Palace, in company with the general staff
. The apparatus was set up on the ancient pyramid of Cheops, and the screen extended between two terraces on the Monument. Captured by the televisor though the rare gaps in the clouds that shrouded the white plant, scenes of Venusian life—marvelous idylls of the Golden Age, unfolding amid landscapes of dream—drew nothing from the barbaric Martians of the Esplanade but cries of triumphant joy and anticipated triumph. Venus was nothing to them but a future field of carnage, and they rejoiced perversely in seeing its gentle inhabitants crowned with flowers, ready to bend their heads beneath the pitiless yoke of the invader. Hurrah! The way to the solar paradise was wide open!
But it was necessary to hurry! And the equatorial zone of Jupiter appeared on the screen: the formidable battery of Solar Accumulators capturing luminous-calorific energies, and, on the circular railway, the Projector that would transform those energies, on the day of the next opposition, into the jet of the annihilating Thunderbolt, if the Cylinders were not ready in time!
And the hatred, the cowardice, the lust for vengeance became delirious in the darkness, and the furious clamoring of Terromartian throats roe up from the Esplanade, mingled with the raucous yelps of shaggies and maki-mokokos—while Raymonde and I, leaning on the balcony of the Red Palace, lowered our heads, quivering, under the suspicious gaze of the Technical Director.
V. News From Panama
The American raids furnished an abundance of new recruits to the services of the Reincarnation, but the spectacle of the Hall had changed since the days of the Perfume. Only simian volunteers went to the Solenoids with confident expressions. The Martian souls had no need for any additive to dominate the feeble animal mentalities and expel them from their bodies. Because all species of monkeys—not just the anthropoid apes, as in the beginning—were admitted without distinction, the souls took full advantage of that license, and all the monkeys brought by the volvites were now, without exception, complete shaggies avid to receive the official stamp.
The Terrans went in a very different fashion. The atmosphere of the Perfume, whose occult properties had sufficed to slacken the spiritual bonds of the unfortunate humans, had earlier permitted the Martian souls to take possession without difficulty of all the survivors, black, yellow and white, of Africa, Asia and Europe. Since the passing of the sole custodians of the secret, the Magi, however, the Terrans no longer let themselves be vanquished as easily, and the majority of those who were now led into the hall still conserved their human mentality intact.
I witnessed horrible scenes on several occasions: unfortunates, captured by force and resistant to the last second, when the psychostatic currents of the solenoids left them at the mercy of souls competing for their prey of choice. A superb huge devil of a Canadian trapper, among others, left me the memory of his desperate struggle against two gigantic orangutans, and of his stentorian voice calling down the vengeance of Heaven upon his executioners…
Such occasions became increasingly rare, though. The Old World had been completely emptied since the reign of the Perfume, and the Terrans of the New World had, for the most part, taken refuge in the jungles of the equatorial rain-forest, from which the volvites did not always succeed in extracting them.
Despite our repugnance and disgust, Raymonde and I did not miss any opportunity to cast our eyes over the hall on the days when the presence of humans was signaled in a convoy of “volunteers.” We reviewed these unfortunates while affecting an idle curiosity, but were profoundly moved by pity, and the dread of discovering, among those hirsute and desperate faces, one that was familiar.
We had certainly told one another that, in all probability, our friends from Mont Blanc would have arrived safe and sound in Tahiti; that no danger threatened them there yet; that the raids might perhaps go no further than America—but presentiments of disaster wrung our hearts when we thought of them…
Among the numerous services accessory to the Reincarnation there was one, newly instituted, which excited our curiosity: the hypnotic school. The influence of the solenoid ensured each Martian soul a conclusive accommodation in its host body—human or simian—and the re-education of actions operated for the most part, spontaneously. Sometimes, because the mechanism of language only existed in a rudimentary state in the cerebral lobes of monkeys, the Martian souls that had invested themselves with bodies of this sort experienced real difficulties in speaking. Baboons, among others, and spider monkeys and marmosets even more so, could only express themselves, after a month, in a frightful jargon that was difficult to recognize as the patois of shaggies, let alone as academic French. In order to overcome this lacuna—which the increasing profusion of “pithecoids” rendered more and more serious—a school of hypnotic instruction had been annexed to the Hall of Reincarnation, and, thanks to a method invented by Professor Landru and applied by his pupils to the neo-Martian monkeys, the latter were able to acquire, in seven or eight one-hour lessons, the means of expressing themselves intelligibly.
Two months in Mars Central and the daily company of shaggies had not sufficed to make us entirely accustomed to them. Their skill as mechanics did not surprise us overmuch, but hearing coherent speech emerging from their bestial mouths still caused us an insurmountable frisson, and a sort of unhealthy curiosity attracted us of the hypnotic school. One evening, I met Leduc there. Holding forth excitedly in the middle of a group of leaders, he called me over.
“Ha ha! R’rdô! Here’s some news! That little bastard Moreau has had a finger stuck in his eye, after all! The Mont Blanc lot aren’t all resting in the ruins of the bunkers! At least fifteen escaped, and took abrupt leave of our Admiral of the Air! Incredible, no? But true…this marmoset-shaggy has seen Abbé Romeux with his own eyes, in Panama!”
I felt myself go pale, and to hide my distress I leaned over the little animal, which was perched on a chair, huddled up in its fur, studying me with eyes as intelligent as those of the Martians surrounding us.
“Yes, I saw Abbé Romeux in Panama…Abé Romeux!” said the shrill nasal voice of the marmoset.
I stood up straight again, as if outraged by this diabolical denunciation. Raymonde, who had maintained her calm appearance, shook her head with well-feigned skepticism.
“And you’re prepared to believe this beast, Leduc?”
“No more a beast than you or I, Excellency, He’s passed through the solenoid. He’s a Martian. But in addition to his psychic Martian memory, he’s conserved his monkey memories in his monkey brain, of which we have given him the use…and the means of expressing the memories. Does that astonish you, R’rdô? But you know full well that all sensations remain stored in the memory, like a collection of photographic prints. Our will isn’t always sufficient to extract them from their drawers, but hypnotism will do that…go on, brother shaggy, talk! And tell the truth—or it’ll be detrimental to your matriculation!”
And the vile little animal, which I could cheerfully have strangled, spoke.
“When I be in the forest…I have found this body…not pretty, not strong, but nothing else…. O Majesty! Other souls say to me that you carry away to Venus with cylinders all good worshippers of the Sun, two-hands and four-hands alike. O Majesty! Souls they tell me the truth?”
Seeing me hesitate, Leduc said: “Yes, shaggy. But for that you would have come out of the solenoid electrocuted instead of Martianized. Go on.”
“Then I follow footprints of brother-Martians, in forest, long time…I arrive at great River-of-two-Oceans, at the place where there be opened, four moons ago, by thunder-work of humans….”
“The Panama Canal,” Leduc interjected. “The lock at Culebra was blown up.”
“But all Martian brothers they be gone, before me arrive, with bird machines. Then me wait for other bird-machine to come. Stay two days, eat sugar-cane, worship Sun. Then a boat come far from North…big fishing-boat, with many two-hands on its back. I believe them Martian brothers, I show Sun to them, for them to take me away, for me not know how to talk then. But them two-hands not Martian brothers, them Terran
s, them not worship Sun, not understand me. Then them see passage blocked and stop boat, and leader talk to them…”
“What was he called, their leader?” Leduc asked.
“Abbéromeux,” said the marmoset, emphatically. “Ab-bé-Ro-meux! Him talk all alone to them, then them all together, long time. Then them get off boat, and boat sinks, see boat no more. Then them go forest, far south. But me stay river, me wait for Marian brothers come with bird-machine. Me worship Sun good, you make me four-hands just like two-hands, O Majesty?”
“Enough,” Leduc cut in. Then he turned to me. “It’s as clear as crystal. That damned Romeux had got away in a submersible and counted on passing through the canal—but he found it blocked, so he scuttled his boat to put us off the track. In fact, he and his pals are stuck in the vicinity of the canal with no other means of transport than their legs. Tell me, shaggy, how many are they, exactly? Did you count them?”
The marmoset rolled its eyes in embarrassment. “No, me not count—but them many. More than all in here.” And it made a circular gesture with its pink-palmed hand to indicate the twenty or so monkeys—guenons and squirrel-monkeys—respectfully sitting on the other side of the room, holding their tails, in front of their hypnotist instructor, the seven or eight leaders, the two of us and Leduc himself.
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