Of course, the question on all tongues at the time, including Lucien’s and his comrades’, concerned the origin of the mystery weapons. Soon, the public was treated to the whole glorious story.
Ten years prior to the Battle of the Marne, Professor Rene Blondlot had been a simple teacher of physics at the University of Nancy when he became intrigued by the newly discovered phenomenon known as X-rays. Seeking to polarize these invisible rays, Blondlot assembled various apparatuses that seemed to produce a subtle new kind of beam, promptly labeled N-rays, in honor of the professor’s hometown of Nancy. At the heart of the N-ray generator was an essential nest of prisms and lenses.
In America, a physicist named Robert Wood had tried to duplicate Blondlot’s experiments and failed to replicate the French results. He journeyed to Nancy and soon concluded, quite erroneously, that Blondlot was a fraud. Seeking, in the light of his false judgment, to “expose” the Frenchmen, Wood had made a sleight-of-hand substitution during a key demonstration, inserting a ruby-quartz prism of his own construction in place of Blondlot’s original. When, as Wood expected, Blondlot continued to affirm results no one else could see, the American planned to step forward and reveal that a crucial portion of the apparatus was not even consistent with the original essential design.
Ironically and quite condignly, the ravening burst of disruptive violet energy that emerged from the modified projector when it was activated incinerated Wood entirely, along with half of Blondlot’s lab.
Accepting this fortuitous modification, the scorched but unharmed Blondlot was able to swiftly expand upon his initial discovery. Over the next several years, he discovered dozens of distinct forms of N-rays, all with different applications, from destructive to beneficent. Eventually his work came to the attention of the French government. When hostilities commenced in June of 1914, the French military had already secretly been embarked on a program of construction of N-ray weapons for some time. Under the stimulus of war, the first guns were hastily finished and rushed to the Marne by September.
Now, forty years later, N-rays technology, much expanded and embedded in France’s vast navies, armies, and aerial forces, remained a French monopoly, the foundation on which the ever-expanding empire rested, and the envy of all other nations, which waged constant espionage to steal the empire’s secrets, spying so far completely frustrated by the DGSE. Not the Russian czarina nor the British Marxist cadres nor the Chinese emperor nor the Ottoman pashas nor the American president had been able to successfully extract the core technology for their own use. And as France’s dominion grew, so all these aforenamed nations shrank.
So much did every schoolchild of the empire learn. Although not many of them could claim, as Camus could, that their fathers had been present at the very first unveiling of the world-changing devices.
Camus’s ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of Céleste at his table. The plump proprietor coughed politely, then tendered a slip of paper to his patron.
“A gentleman left this earlier for you, m’sieur. Please pardon me for nearly forgetting to deliver it.”
Camus took the folded sheet of note paper and opened it. Inside was a simple message.
Dear Sisyphus,
Meet me tonight at the dance hall at Padovani Beach. I have a proposition that will change your life, and possibly the world.
Camus was dumbstruck. How did some stranger come to address him by his unrevealed sardonic nickname for himself? What unimaginable proposition could possibly involve Camus in world-altering events?
Camus summoned Céleste back to the table.
“What did this fellow look like?”
The restaurant owner stroked his mustache. “He was an odd duck. Completely bald, very thin, with odd smoked lenses concealing his eyes. But most startling was his mode of dress. If he’s wearing the same clothes when you see him, you won’t be able to mistake him. A queer suit like an acrobat’s leotard, made of some shiny material and covering even his feet, poked out of the holes of a shabby Arab robe that seemed like some castoff of the souks. At first I thought him part of the circus. But upon reflection, I believe that no circus is in town.”
Camus pondered this description. This stranger was no one he knew.
Camus thanked Céleste, folded the note into his pocket, paid his bill, and returned to the office.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a stuporous fog. Camus consumed numerous cups of coffee while attending in mechanical fashion to the never-ending stream of paperwork that flowed across his desk. All the caffeine, however, failed to alleviate the dullness of his thoughts, the dark befuddlement that had arrived with the stranger’s note. Merseault called on the televisor once. The governor-general wanted to ensure that his counterpart from the French Congo was bringing all the native women he had promised to bring during the upcoming festivities. Merseault had a weakness for Nubians. Camus promised to check.
At eight o’clock Camus bade his equally hard-working secretary goodnight, and left the palace. Two streetcar rides later, he arrived at Padovani Beach.
The famous dance hall situated in this location was an enormous wooden structure set amidst a grove of tamarisk trees. Jutting with awnings, the building’s entire seaward side was open to the maritime breezes. With the descent of darkness, the place came alive with the violet-tinged N-ray illumination from large glass globes. (Suitably modulated, N-rays could be conducted along copper wires just like electricity.) Couples and single men and women of all classes streamed in, happy and carefree. Notes of music drifted out, gypsy strains recently popular in France. Camus wondered briefly why the intriguing “jazz” he had heard at a reception at the American embassy had never caught on outside America, but then realized that Rhinebeck’s tirade about the unidirectional flow of culture from France outward explained everything.
Inside, Camus went to the bar and ordered a pastis and a dish of olives and chickpeas. Halfheartedly consuming his selections, Camus wondered how he was to meet the writer of the note. If the stranger remained dressed as earlier described, he would be immensely out of place and immediately attract notice. But Camus suspected that the meeting would not occur so publicly.
For an hour, Camus was content simply to admire the dancers. Their profiles whirled obstinately around, like cut-out silhouettes attached to a phonograph’s turntable. Every woman, however plain, swaying in the arms of her man, evoked a stab in Camus’s heart. No such romantic gamine occupied his life. His needs were met by the anonymous prostitutes of the marine district, and by the occasional short-term dalliance with fellow civil servants.
Finally Camus’s patience began to wear thin. He drained his third pastis and sauntered out to a deck overlooking the double shell of the sea and sky.
The stranger was waiting for him there, sitting on a bench in a twilit corner nominally reserved for lovers, just as Céleste had depicted him.
The stranger’s voice was languorous and yet electric. His shrouded eyes disclosed no hints of his emotional state, yet the wrinkles around his lips seemed to hint at a wry amusement. “Ah, Albert, my friend, I was wondering how long it would take you to grow bored with the trite display inside and visit me.”
Camus came close to the stranger, but did not sit beside him. “You know me. How?”
“Oh, your reputation is immense where I come from, Albert. You are an international figure of some repute.”
“Do not toy with me, m’sieur. I am a simple civil servant, not an actor or football hero.”
“Ah, but did I specify those occupations? I think not. No, you are known for talents other than those.”
Camus chose to drop this useless line of inquiry. “Where exactly do you come from?”
“A place both very near, yet very far.”
Growing impatient, Camus said, “If you don’t wish to answer me sanely, please at least keep your absurd paradoxes to yourself. You summoned me here with the promise of some life-altering program. I will confess that I stand in need of such a remedy
for the moribund quandary I find myself in. Therefore state your proposition, and I will consider it.”
“So direct! I can see that your reputation for cutting to the heart of the matter was not exaggerated. Very well, my friend, here it is. If you descend to the beach below and walk half a kilometer north, you will encounter a man sleeping in the dunes. He looks like a mere street Arab, but in reality he is a trained Spanish assassin who has made his laborious covert way here from Algeciras and on through Morocco. He intends to kill the emperor during your ruler’s visit here. And he stands a good chance of succeeding, for he is very talented in his trade, and has sympathizers in high places within your empire.”
Camus felt as if a long thin blade were transfixing his forehead. “Assuming this is true, what do you expect me to do about this? Do you want me to inform the authorities? Why don’t you just go to them yourself?”
The stranger waved a slim hand in elegant disdain. “Oh, that course of action would be so unentertaining. Too pedestrian by half. You see, I am a connoisseur of choice and chance and character. I believe in allowing certain of my fellow men whom I deem worthy the opportunity to remake their own world by their existential behavior. You are such a man, at such a crucial time and place. You should consider yourself privileged.”
Camus tried to think calmly and rationally. But the next words out of his mouth were absolute madness. “You are from the future then.”
The stranger laughed heartily. “A good guess! But not the case. Let us just say that I live in the same arrondissement of the multiverse as you.”
Camus pondered this response for a time, striving to reorder his very conception of the cosmos. At last he asked a broken question. “This multiverse is ruled—?”
“By no one. It is benignly indifferent to us all. Which makes our own actions all the more weighty and delicious, wouldn’t you say?”
Camus nodded. “This is something I only now realize I have always felt.”
“Of course.”
“Can you give me a hint of the alternate outcomes of my actions? Will one decision on my part improve my world, while its opposite devastates it?”
The stranger chuckled. “Do I look like a prophet to you, Albert? All I can say is that change is inescapable in either case.”
Camus contemplated this unsatisfying response for a time before asking, “Do you have anything to aid me if I choose to accept this challenge?”
“Naturally.”
The stranger reached beneath his robe and removed a curious gun unlike any Camus had ever seen.
“Its operation is extremely simple. Just press this stud here.”
Accepting the gun, Camus said, “I need to be alone now.”
“Quite understandable. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, like a work of art.”
The stranger arose and made as if to leave. But at the last moment he stopped, turned, and produced a book from somewhere.
“You might as well have this also. Good luck.”
Camus accepted the book. The faint violet light reaching him from the dance hall allowed him to make out the large font of its tide, The Myth of Sisyphus.
The author’s name he somehow already knew.
After the stranger had gone, Camus sat for some time. Then he descended to the sands and began walking north, carrying both the book and the pistol.
Just where the stranger had specified, Camus found the sleeping man. His hands were pillowing his head as he lay on his side. The waves crashed a maddening lullaby. In the shadows, the sleeper’s Iberian profile reminded Camus of his mother, Catherine, who boasted Spanish ancestry herself, a blood passed down to her son.
It occurred to Camus that all he had to do was turn, walk away, and think no more about this entire insane night. His old life would resume its wonted course, and whatever happened in the world at large would happen without Camus’s intervention. Yet wasn’t that nonaction a choice in itself? It crossed his mind that to fire or not to fire might amount to the same thing.
The assassin stirred, yet did not awake. Camus’s grip on the pistol tightened. Every nerve in his body was a steel spring.
A second went by. Then another. Then another. And there was no way at all to stop them.
I think of this story as a cousin to my novella about Whitman and Dickinson, Walt and Emily, to be found in The Steampunk Trilogy. Poets—at least the majestic icons of the past—offer such perfect ready-made protagonists, full of weltschmerz and other high emotions. Grab a poet as your leading man or woman, and you’ve instantly got a wealth of human feeling, and likely also some ditzy, unconventional lifestyles to play with.
Even when you plunge them into a milieu of penny-a-word pulp fiction.
A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled
“Life is an after-thought …”
—Robert Frost, “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled” (written when he was eighteen)
Up the steep ascent of College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, in March of 1924, at a wintry, shadow-thronged hour long past midnight, labored the attenuated, castoff-swaddled form of the horror writer.
He had been tramping about through both city and countryside since 10 a.m. of the previous day, seeking to quiet his tumultuous brain, where thoughts raced like chips in a millstream. That selfsame morning had seen the dawn of his natal day, marking his fiftieth year of existence on this cursed globe. The intense self-reflection occasioned by this portentous milestone had immediately overwhelmed all the makeshift defenses of sanity he had erected over the past twelve years, since that tragic day in 1912 when his life went so radically off course. In anticipation of this sad anniversary, unable to pen either new fiction or correspondence, his wonted reading materials bleached of interest, the horror writer had hastily donned several layers of moth-eaten sweaters atop his omnipresent union suit, wool trousers, and broadcloth shirt. Against the exterior cold (hardly any worse than that in his cheap rented rooms; would spring never arrive?), he completed his outfit with the long tatty cloth coat kindly passed down to him by two of his few local friends, the similarly impoverished poetess Muriel Eddy and her husband, a fellow Weird Tales contributor, Clifford Eddy. Thus accoutered, with less than thirty cents in change to supply his nourishment for the day’s exertions, he plunged out of his grim widower’s flat.
In the ensuing hours he covered much ground. Heading north out of the city, he made for Quinsnicket Park, one of his favorite sylvan locales, where, during temperate seasons, he oft composed his work al fresco. But for once, sight of the massive boulders like Cyclopean monuments, and large, dark, mysterious Olney Lake had failed to raise his spirits. The leafless trees seemed to mock all human ambition, betokening a terminus to life upon the planet, a day when no living thing would stir from icy pole to pole.
From there he sought solace in several of his favorite small villages bordering the park, such as Saylesville and Fairlawn. But the hustle and bustle of factory workers and tradesmen and schoolchildren held no distraction for him today.
Despairing of his old haunts, he struck out for pastures less well trodden, crossing into Valley Falls and thence into neighboring Massachusetts. But even the suggestive, moss-covered, anciently disused rural cemeteries he chanced upon, with their weathered stones listing like drunken sailors, failed to lift his thoughts out of their weary self-pitying maelstrom.
From here, he had little memory of the paths and byroads he took. A vague sensation of having eaten at a lunch wagon—some noxious meat pie swilled down with coffee—remained with him. All he knew was that when dusk fell he was some score miles away from home, in the town of Bristol, on the East Bay. Weary and dispirited, he spent his last five cents on a trolley ride, but got off impulsively some few miles outside Providence. The rest of the hours until his footsore ascent of College Hill were spent at a nighted overlook of the bay, as he revolved the idea of self-destruction in his fatigued brain. The nigrescent tidal waters seemed to whisper alluring invitations to his soul.
But at last he not so much positively decided against such a cowardly way out of his troubles, as he merely acknowledged that today he lacked the initiative to consummate such a frequently considered relief. And so, without having either surmounted or been beaten by his nightmares, but rather merely exhausted them while they exhausted him, he once more turned his feet toward home.
Now, climbing from the sidewalk up the steps to his shabby Waterman Street residence, he fumbled for the key to a place he could hardly distinguish with the term “home,” a place equally meaningless to him as every other place on earth.
Beyond the front door, in the common hall, the smell of early-morning greasy breakfasts cooking on illicit gas burners came to him. Before he could attain the relative sanctuary of his own rooms, a door opened and a burly, shirtless laborer emerged, making for the communal lavatory. Through the open apartment door, the horror writer caught a glimpse of a teeming family scene—slatternly wife and mother, a pack of grimy children—and the mockery of what he himself had lost twelve years ago struck like a knife into his heart.
Pushing past the sleepy, unoffending laborer, the horror writer hurled himself into his own rooms. Still dressed, he fell onto his spavined cot and, mercifully faster than he would have predicted, Robert Frost was asleep.
The thirty-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire, had never provided an authentically agrarian living for Robert Frost and his family: his wife, Elinor, and their children, Carol (the only son), Irma, Lesley, and Marjorie. They had scraped by on loans and various makeshift subsidiary enterprises for twelve years. Owner of the property since 1900 (and even then only thanks to the financial support of his stern Yankee grandfather, William Prescott Frost), the ex-reporter, failed poultryman, eccentric schoolteacher, and would-be poet had ultimately failed to consummate his back-to-the-land dreams, just as he had failed with all the other schemes of his maturity, including that of making his mark on the body of American verse. Oh, yes, a few of his poems had been published, but only in such minor vehicles as the Derry Enterprise, the Independent, and New England Magazine. But as for achieving recognition from the Boston and New York critical establishments; as for having the mass of his unpublished work (all fine material, he was convinced) gathered into book form; as for elevating his name to the same plane as that occupied by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, and Edgar Lee Masters—well, at the despair-inducing age of thirty-eight, he felt himself as remote from these attainments as he had been at the callow age of sixteen, when his first poem appeared in the Lawrence High School Bulletin.
Emperor of Gondwanaland Page 31