The Fiery Wheel

by Jean de La Hire

  FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE

  Yesterday, at nine forty-five p.m., the Venusian machine blew up, destroying itself, shattering the hangar that surrounded it and ravaging Verrières wood around the Carrefour de l’Obélisque. Thirty-four soldiers are dead and twenty-two wounded.

  Ahmed Bey, Jonathan Bild, Arthur Brad and Messieurs Torpène and Brularion have been killed.

  The cause of the catastrophe remains a mystery. It has, however, been attributed to the special gases with which the Venusians nourish themselves. These gases were, it appears, stored in containers under formidable pressure. There is no way of knowing how and by what the explosion was provoked.

  More details this evening.

  The promised details, however, contained no new information. The only interplanetary voyagers to have escaped the tragedy were Paul de Civrac, Lolla and Francisco. Fortunately for them, they had remained at the Gravelle laboratory during the first day of the investigation; they were only due to go to the machine the following day.

  It was impossible to recover the bodies of the victims, celebrated or unknown. The formless and bloody fragments of human flesh and limbs that were collected throughout the extent of the wood were not identifiable. All those who had disappeared were reported dead—and it was an irreparable loss for human science. All the irritating questions that the world was asking with regard to facts and events were to remain unanswered.

  Of the Fiery Wheel itself and its supposed destruction on Venus, nothing was known, Brad having said nothing about it before being authorized by Bild. All the fine projects of interplanetary communication were abandoned. In fact, Paul attempted to send messages to Venus by means of the radiotelephonograph at Gravelle, but he did not receive any, even though the astronomical positions of the two planets were favorable, perhaps because none of the Venusian scientists of the mysterious planet had any knowledge of human forms of the expression of thought. Bild was no longer on Venus to listen and reply, nor were the six Venusian scientists who had worked with him on the radiotelephonograph.

  After several months of discussion in scientific societies and journals, silence gradually fell on the extraordinary adventure of the Fiery Wheel was the point of departure and Ahmed Bey the most extraordinary hero.

  Impenetrable mystery enveloped everything: the Fiery Wheel, the disincarnation of souls, Venusian life. There was only scant discussion of a book in which Paul de Civrac recounted his adventures and those of his companions, in the Fiery Wheel and on the planet Mercury. And in the abandoned Gravelle laboratory, the useless radiotelephonograph gradually rusted.

  In any case, sometime after Paul de Civrac’s book appeared, the world was distracted from interplanetary preoccupations. A frightful war erupted between the people of the white race and those of the yellow race, which lasted for ten years. No definitive victory was won by either side, but the political geography of the world was changed dramatically. A United States of Europe was established, in opposition to a Asiatic Confederation. South and North America formed a single nation, mistrustful and abrasive, positioned between Europe and Asia, and while Asia gradually completed the conquest of Oceania and Europe annexed Africa, America, immense and isolated, strove to augment its power and internal wealth, in a terrible egotism of which it was eventually to perish.

  Paul de Civrac and Lolla witnessed that transformation of the Earth, but took no part in it. They were living on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where the last sages of Benares and Calcutta had taken refuge. They were uniquely occupied in researching, from the mouths of Brahmins and in the sacred books of the temples, the secret of the disincarnation and reincarnation of souls, which had been lost with Ahmed Bey. Captain José Mendès and Francisco had died, in quick succession, soon after they had taken up residence on the island.

  Nothing any longer attached Paul and Lolla to the Earth. Indifferent to the agitations of their fellows, they devoted themselves entirely to researching the marvelous secret that would permit them to return to Mercury, to go to Venus, and to voyage without peril in the interplanetary realm where they had suffered so much but for which, by virtue of a very human contradiction, they were now nostalgic. Perhaps that was because it was a long way from Earth that they had begun to love one another. A prisoner who has fallen in love in prison forgets the horrors of captivity, only recalling the felicities of love.

  In fact, Paul and Lolla died without having found the secret of the disincarnation of souls, but at least they had acquired, by means of their research, the wisdom of the ancient Brahmins, which taught them this precept, within which their material existence was conformed:

  The Earth is, for human beings, a point of transition between two infinities.

  Afterword

  Which consists of a few brief notes

  on Alien Physiology and Ecology

  as imagined in La Roue fulgurante

  It was always common practice for writers of feuilleton serials to make them up as they went along—a method that could easily lead to narrative difficulties, even in sentimental and historical melodramas in which ready-made pieces of plot could be slotted together jigsaw-fashion to maintain dramatic tension and provide denouements. In a serial whose entire raison d’être was to feature the unprecedented, the astounding and the mind-boggling, however, it was a strategy that was, in essence asking for trouble. It is a great deal easier to imagine spectacular events and bizarre circumstances than it is to produce rational explanations for their occurrence and appearances. In an ideal world, of course, a writer of roman scientifique would work out the possible explanations before making up the events, but in reality, things are rarely done that way, even nowadays, and it would have been almost unimaginable in the world of popular feuilletons.

  Inevitably, therefore, writers of imaginative feuilleton serials often found themselves, as their works progressed, accumulating an increasing burden of exotic puzzles for which solutions had to be vaguely promised, even though they could not ultimately be delivered. If one adds to that problem the conventional assumption that stories set in the “imminent present” will, in the end, leave the world more-or-less unchanged, so that it can tacitly continue to masquerade as the world in which its readers are actually living in (give or take a nine-day-wonder or two), it is easy to understand why the temptation for writers to cut through their self-created Gordian knots simply by blowing everything to kingdom come, as La Hire did at the end of La Roue fulgurante, often became irresistible. In all honesty, what practicable alternative did La Hire have? He was, of course, chickening out on his artistic responsibilities, but any modern reader, long accustomed to the kinds of idiocies that an overly prompt imagination is inclined to commit when stretched, will appreciate only too well that so much imaginative clutter had accumulated in the plot of La Roue fulgurante, most of which makes no sense whatsoever, that any attempt at pretended explanation would only have served to increase its manifest absurdity.

  On the other hand, there is a sense in which some of the seeming paradoxes contained in the plot of the novel might be able to serve as useful stimuli to further imagination and ingenuity, by prompting attempts to explain the seemingly-inexplicable. It is also worth noting that some of the ideas tentatively expressed in the early chapters of the novel, before La Hire ran out of inspiration and began freewheeling on an empty imagination-tank, were ideas that proved to have a lot of mileage in the melodramatic currency of what eventually became known as “science fiction,” and in the curious modern mythology of “flying saucers.” Some of those ideas might, therefore, warrant a little further thought and attention.

  It should also be emphasized that the author’s attempt to wrap the plot up and put it away with a bang is—like all such attempts—a blatant fudge. The ending of a story based in speculative science can never leave the world unchanged, because any invention credited to the scientific method can always be replicated by that method, even if the invention and its inventor have both been blown to smithereens. We might not have d
iscovered exactly what the Fiery Wheel was within the narrative as it is written, but in the world within the text, that information would have been bound to come out eventually, because it is a stone cold certainty that, even if the one featured in the story was the only one in existence at the time, its clones would undoubtedly follow eventually where it had led.

  With the aid of the wisdom cultivated by a hundred years of science fiction writing and reading, we now know perfectly well why the Fiery Wheel abducted five people from the surface of the Earth: scientific curiosity. The Saturnians, individuals made of exotic matter and living in a vaporous environment, had become intensely interested in the bizarre nature of the Earth’s ecosphere, in which the role of gases and vapors is so extensively supplemented by liquids and solids, and wanted to try to figure out what could possibly be going on inside those weird squidgy things running around on the surface. Unfortunately, their relative ignorance of the highly esoteric science of solid state physics had left them ignorant of the likely effects of people shooting bullets aboard their nifty spacecraft—which, although as shatterproof as the Saturnians themselves, was obviously not immune to high-velocity-solid disruption.

  Will the curious Saturnian scientists in the world of the text allow the loss of their prototype Wheel to put them off further exploration? No way. They will be back, not necessarily tomorrow, but some day, more eager than ever, but taking more precautions. They will come back to Earth, to Mercury, and to Venus, not just for a second time but again and again, until they find out what there is to know. Throughout the solar system, things will never be the same again—and our piddling little world wars are of little or no consequence in that ongoing story, any more than the Mercurians’ strange internecine conflicts or the Venusians’ mysterious breathing difficulties.

  It is, inevitably, difficult for us to deduce very much about the ecology of Saturn and the ethnology of the Saturnians on the basis of the observations made by the five humans abducted aboard the alien craft, and the feeble attempts they made at self-education before losing their heads completely and starting shooting (thus proving the essential insanity of human nature to their inquisitive hosts) soon ran into contradictions that even they could see. Nevertheless, the speculations in question have since sprung to a lot of other human minds, with the result that the notion of creatures of “pure energy” or “pure mind” eventually became a sciencefictional cliché, partly because of its paradoxical echoing of the traditional notion of the human “soul” as a kind of detachable entity, possibly resembling a quasi-electrical spark in its “pure” state.

  We must, of necessity, follow the example of the skeptics in the novel in bowing to the manifest evidence and accepting that, whatever the case might be in our world, human beings really do have detachable personas in the world within the text, which really are capable of independent superluminal space travel and serial incarnation, in the fashion previously mapped out by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Camille Flammarion. Although the issue does not come up explicitly within the novel, we must also accept, logically, that the same is true of the Mercurians, who must have the vacatable “slots” into which such entities may fit, or Ahmed Bey and Arthur Brad would not have been able to reincarnate themselves on Mercury. The principle of mediocrity encourages us to believe that the same is probably true of the Venusians and Saturnians as well.

  Even within the scant discussion that the kidnap-victims conduct aboard the Wheel, the point is made that the Saturnians cannot possibly be “pure souls,” because they would not need a spacecraft if they were, but the description of their quasi-electrical character does suggest, strongly, that the state of matter in which their natural bodies exist is more closely akin to the quasi-material state of detachable “souls” than it is to the vulgar lumpen envelopes in which terrestrial and Mercurial souls are clumsily wrapped. The Venusians, although solid, also must partake of an exotic material state, or they would not have decayed so spectacularly on exposure to Earth’s atmosphere, so the possibilities of organic organization are obviously far more complicated and prolific than our limited knowledge of the narrow range of terrestrial organic chemistry has led us to conceive.

  In fact, that is the most obvious inference to be taken from the novel viewed as a spectrum of ideas; without it, the account of Mercurian ecology could not possibly make sense. Ahmed Bey must, in fact, have been having a really bad day, intellectually speaking, when he accepted, even provisionally, that the only food the monopods consumed was each other. It does not require a genius to see the problems that notion produces with regard to the law of conservation of mass-energy. If the only substance the Mercurians consume is each other, how on Mercury could they possibly leave cadavers behind when they die, even temporarily, without suffering a drastic reduction in numbers over time? Given that they are, as La Hire puts it, “pullulating,” something else is obviously happening. Indeed, something akin to that something else might well be happening to the humans too, given that they sweat copiously in the intense Mercurian heat, while Paul and Francisco only consume a cupful of water each and Lolla does not consume any at all. (As a lady, of course, she only “glows” rather than perspiring, let alone sweating, but that does not solve the problem.)

  Clearly, the Mercurians can only obtain a small fraction of their body-building nourishment from ocular vampiric cannibalism—perhaps something more like a vitamin supplement than staple alimentation—and the rest must come from somewhere else. Where? Photosynthesis might seem an attractive hypothesis, given the proximity of Mercury to the sun and the alleged density of its atmosphere, but the monopods, even though they are scared of the planet’s sinister night-side, do not seem to be particularly photophilic, building their cities in the shade and underground and being able to see in the dark; it is, therefore, at least worth considering other possibilities,

  As a big fan of Camille Flammarion, La Hire would have been familiar with the fascination Flammarion had with the idea of aliens beings for whom respiration and nutrition were the same process: aliens living in dense atmospheres who aspire their nourishment along with their oxygen, much as aquatic filter-feeders take in their food along with the water that simultaneously supplies their respiratory needs. Perhaps, therefore, the Mercurians derive the bulk of their nourishment from the atmosphere, with or without the assistance of photosynthetic fixation. That hypothesis becomes more plausible, of course, when one bears in mind that we are explicitly told that the Venusians derive their nourishment by some such means, and it seems a natural assumption that Saturnians, who live in a gas giant and fly vaporous spacecraft, do too.

  That is not the only other possible explanation, however, and it might be with considering at least one more, given that Ahmed Bey, during his brief stroll around Monopodville, is not only puzzled by the problem of monopod postmortal decay but the problem of monopod reproduction. He sees no evidence of sexual differentiation, let alone of pregnancy and childbirth. (The fact that I have elected to refer to the monopods as “it” rather than “he” when not possessed of a human soul was a judgment call, as French pronouns do not work in the same discriminatory fashion as English ones; it does not necessarily imply that they are sexless.) Perhaps, therefore, the monopods do not actually reproduce themselves, but are instead produced by a process of spontaneous generation, perhaps as the end phase of a chain of mutations that convert inorganic substance into a sequence of organic forms. If so, that might help to account for the remarkable apparent dearth of organic species on Mercury, which would be difficult to explain by means of any orthodox evolutionary theory.

  We cannot know which of these hypotheses is true, or even which of them might be true within the fundamental physics and chemistry pertaining in the world of the text—which obviously differs from ours in some salient respects—but it is worth bearing in mind that whatever is happening on Mercury to sustain the indigenous organisms is probably also applicable to some degree to the human visitors, who can obtain some benefit from eating the local
flowers and drink the local blood but obviously need some further assistance, of which they are not consciously aware, in order to be getting by there. Whatever the trick is, it is presumably unknown to the Saturnians, who do not appear to have made any provision aboard their pioneering spacecraft for the care and feeding of captive specimens, but will surely know better once they have had a chance to study squishy-but-solid beings of various kinds at their leisure, and have cultivated a certain expertise in alien husbandry.

  Perhaps these hypotheses are not really alternatives in the sense that they are mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is a certain attractiveness in the possibility of running them together, and suggesting that the kinds of atmospheric nutrition that the Saturnians and Venusians routinely practice are not as similar to our processes of nutrition as we might readily assume, but involve a more subtle alchemy of the flesh more akin to that implied by such concepts as “spontaneous generation” or serial mutation. After all, the nature of the Fiery Wheel, the feeding habits of the Venusians and the puzzling ecology of Mercury all suggest that matter in general is more mutable than it seems to be within the limited range of human terrestrial experience. Perhaps we are the odd ones out in the solar system’s family—and perhaps, in that case, the peculiarly crude relationship that our bodies enjoy with their sparklike passengers is, if not an exception to a more general rule, at least only one kind of liaison within a complex spectrum. Perhaps the secret of disincarnation and reincarnation that Ahmed Bey and his Brahmin predecessors were so churlishly intent on keeping to themselves is only the starting point of an entire new theoretical and practical science, a mere finger-exercise in a potential orchestration of manipulations of the mind-matter relationship that would really boggle the mind, instead of just giving it a little tickle.