Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Targ and Arva resolved first to go as far as the Red-Lands. Their souls hurled themselves toward the ultimate sanctuary of their kindred, with a passionate desire, in which was mixed fear, distress, a deep love, and sorrow. As long as human beings would endure there, some form of subtle and tender promise would remain. When they would finally all be gone, the planet would appear more lugubrious yet, the deserts more hideous and more vast.

  After a short night spent on one of the relay stations, the travelers had, by means of the planetary, a conversation with Érê and the children: it was less to reassure themselves than to rejoin their family across a great distance. Then they sailed on toward the oasis. They reached it before midday.

  It seemed fixed in time. The way they had left it was the way it stood out in the lenses of their eyeglasses. The houses of arcum shimmered in the sun; they saw the sound wave receivers on their platforms, the hangars housing gliders and motocruisers, the energy transformers, the machines colossal or delicate, the pumps that long ago drew water from the earth, and the fields where once the last plants grew. Everywhere the mark of human power and subtlety remained. At the first command, incalculable forces could be unleashed, then enslaved, vast works accomplished. So many resources that remained as useless as the vibration of a beam of light in infinite ether! Man’s powerlessness was itself a function of his structure; born of water, he was vanishing along with it.

  For a few minutes, the gliders sailed above the oasis. It seemed deserted. No man, woman, or child could be seen on the thresholds of the dwellings, on the roads, or in the uncultivated fields. And this solitude chilled the souls of the travelers.

  “Are they finally all dead?” Arva murmured.

  “Perhaps!” Targ answered.

  The gliders swooped down until they almost touched the tops of the houses and the platforms of the planetaries. The place had the silence and immobility of a necropolis. The air, somnolent, did not even stir the dust; alone, groups of ferromagnetics moved about slowly.

  Targ decided to land on a platform, and caused the transmitter of a sound wave receiver to vibrate: a powerful call echoed from shell to shell.

  “Men!” Arva cried suddenly.

  Targ took off again. He saw two people at the entrance of a house, and, for a few minutes, hesitated to call to them. Even though the inhabitants of the oasis now comprised but a pitiful handful, in them Targ venerated his Species, and respected the law. This latter was engrained in each fiber of his being; it seemed to him as deep as life itself, formidable and protective, infinitely wise, inviolable. And because that law had exiled him forever from the Red-Lands, he yielded to it.

  Thus did his voice tremble when he spoke to those who had just appeared.

  “How many are still alive in the oasis?”

  The two men raised up their pale faces, which revealed a strange serenity. Then one of them answered:

  “There are still five of us . . . Tonight we will be delivered!”

  The watchman felt sick at heart. He recognized, in the gazes that met his, the hazy glow of euthanasia.

  “Can we land?” he said humbly. “The law has exiled us.”

  “There is no more law,” the second man murmured. “It disappeared the moment that we accepted the Great Cure . . .”

  At the noise of the voices, the three other living beings appeared, two men and one young woman. All of them stared at the gliders with a look of ecstasy.

  Thus, Targ and Arva landed.

  There was a short silence. The watchman examined with intensity the last of his kinsmen. Death was upon them; no remedy could reverse the delightful poisons of euthanasia.

  The very young woman was by far the palest of the five. Yesterday still, she carried in her the future, today she was older than a centenarian. And Targ exclaimed:

  “Why did you wish to die? Is the water all gone?”

  “What use is water to us!” the young woman whispered. “Why would we live? Why did our ancestors live? Some inconceivable madness made them resist, over millennia, the decrees of nature. They wanted to perpetuate themselves in a world that was not their own. They accepted to live an abject existence . . . simply so as not to vanish. How is it possible that we have followed their pitiful example? It is so sweet to die!”

  She spoke with a slow, pure voice. Her words caused Targ horrible suffering. Each atom of his flesh revolted against such resignation. And the peaceful joy that burst out on the faces of these dying people remained incomprehensible to him.

  Yet he kept silent. What gave him the right to attempt to introduce the least bitterness to their end, as this end was now unavoidable? The young woman half-closed her eyes. Her feeble exaltation was fading, her breath slowed down from moment to moment, and supporting herself against a wall of arcum, she reiterated:

  “It is so sweet to die.”

  And one of the men whispered:

  “Deliverance is near.”

  Then, all waited. The young woman had stretched out on the ground, she was barely breathing. A growing pallor invaded her cheeks. Then, she opened her eyes an instant, she looked at Targ and Arva with tenderness full of pity.

  “The folly of suffering abides in you,” she stammered.

  Her hand lifted, then fell slowly. Her lips trembled. One last spasm shook her body. At last, her members went limp, and she expired as softly as a small star on the low horizon.

  Her four companions contemplated her with happy tranquility.

  One of them whispered:

  “Life has never been desirable . . . Even during the time when the Earth favored the power of mankind . . .”

  Struck with horror, Targ and Arva remained silent a long time. Then they solemnly covered the one who, as last woman, had represented the Future for the Red-Lands. But they did not have the courage to remain with the others. The absolute certitude of their death filled them with terror.

  “Let us leave, Arva,” he said softly.

  “Today,” the watchman said, as his plane flew alongside that of Arva, “we are truly, we and our offspring, the last and final chance for the human species.”

  His companion turned to him a face covered with tears.

  “Despite everything,” she stammered, “it was a great sweetness to know that people were still alive in the Red-Lands. How many times this consoled me . . . And now, now!”

  Her gesture swept across the implacable expanse, and the huge mountains to the west. She uttered a cry of abandon:

  “All is finished, my brother.”

  He himself had lowered his head. But he resisted the pain, he exclaimed, his eyes sparkling:

  “Death alone will put an end to my hope.”

  For several hours, the gliders followed the line of the roads. When the country Targ was seeking appeared, they slowed. Arva choose the relay where she was to wait. Then, once the planetary had brought him the voices of Érê and the children, the watchman set off alone toward the solitary lands. He already knew the region, in a rough manner, for an area that extended twelve hundred kilometers away from the roads.

  The more he advanced, the more the landscape became chaotic. A series of hills appeared, then, once again, the ragged plain. Now Targ was sailing in fully unknown territory. Several times, he flew down to ground level; a dizziness drove him to push on to new stopping places.

  An immense reddish wall blocked the horizon. The aviator flew over it, and soared above the abyss. Huge chasms burrowed into the earth, pits of darkness, whose depth could not even be fathomed. Everywhere marks of immense convulsions were apparent; entire mountains had crumbled, others were twisted, ready to plunge into the measureless void. The glider inscribed long parabolas above this impressive landscape. Most of the chasms were so large that planes could have flown into them by the dozen.

  Targ lit his searchlight, and began to explore randomly. First, he entered a crevasse that opened at the bottom of a cliff. The light seemed to dissolve as it reached the depths, which showed themselves to be without issue.


  A second chasm seemed at first more favorable for exploration. Several galleries plunged into the earth; Targ explored them without result.

  The third voyage was vertiginous. The glider descended more than two thousand meters before touching ground. The bottom of this enormous hole formed a trapezoid, the smallest side of which was two hectometers. Caverns opened out everywhere. It took an hour to explore them. Except for two, all were bounded by straight walls. The others, in contrast, had numerous fissures, but all too narrow to allow a man to pass.

  “No matter,” Targ murmured, at the moment he decided to abandon the second cavern, “I will come back.”

  Suddenly, he felt that same strange feeling he had experienced twelve years ago, the night of the great disaster. Quickly drawing out his hygroscope, he looked at the dial, and uttered a cry of triumph: there was water vapor in the cavern!

  XV. The Enclave Has Disappeared

  For a long time Targ walked in the semidarkness. All his thoughts were scattered; a boundless feeling of joy filled his fleshly being. When he came to his senses, he thought:

  “Nothing can be done for the time being. In order to reach the mysterious water, I must find a passage somewhere other than at the bottom of the chasm, or make a passage: it is a question of time, or a question of work. In the first case, Arva’s presence would be infinitely useful; in the second case, it would be necessary to go back to Dune Equator, and bring back the machines necessary to harness the energy, and cleave the granite rocks.”

  As he was making these reflections, the young man had taken off again. Soon, the glider had inscribed the helical curves that were to bring him to the surface. Within two minutes, the watchman left the chasm, and immediately, directing his portable sound wave receiver, he sent out a call.

  No one answered.

  Astonished, he sent stronger signals. The receiver remained silent. A slight anxiety took hold of Targ. He sent out a circular call that, one after another, probed in all directions. And as the silence persisted, he began to fear some disagreeable consequence. Three possibilities came to his mind: an accident had happened; or Arva had left the refuge; or, finally, she had simply fallen asleep.

  Before sending out a final call, the explorer marked his present position, with exact precision. Then he boosted his signals to their maximum intensity. These would reverberate against the receptor conches with such force that, even asleep, Arva would have to hear them . . . This time, once again, the vast spaces sent back no reply.

  Had the young woman really left the refuge? Certainly, she would not have done so without a serious reason. In any case, he had to rejoin her.

  Already, he was in the air and speeding back toward her.

  In fewer than three hours, he covered a thousand kilometers; the relay came into view in the lens of his ship’s eyeglass. It was empty!

  And all around, Targ saw no one. Arva must have left then. But where? But why? She could not have gone far, as her glider was still moored there.

  The final minutes were intolerably long; it seemed as if the rapid vessel were no longer moving forward; a mist covered the young man’s eyes.

  At last, the refuge was there. Targ landed at the middle, secured his glider, and rushed forward. A cry arose in his chest. On the other side of the road, against the vertical embankment—that had made her invisible at first—lay Arva. She was as pale as the woman who, earlier, in the Red-Lands, had succumbed to euthanasia; Targ saw with horror a swarm of ferromagnetics—the Tertiaries of the largest sort—moving around her.

  Swiftly, Targ attached his arcum ladder, and then, descending to the level of the young woman, he took her on his shoulder, and climbed back.

  She had not moved; her body was inert, and Targ, kneeling down, tried to locate the beat of her heart. In vain! The mysterious energy that imparts rhythm to existence seemed to have vanished.

  Trembling, the watchman placed the hygroscope on the young woman’s lips. The delicate instrument discovered what the human ear had not been able to discover—Arva was not dead!

  But her swoon was so deep, her weakness so great, that she could die from one second to the next.

  The cause of her sickness seemed obvious: it was due, if not solely, at least in large part, to the action of the ferromagnetics. Arva’s unique pallor indicated an excessive loss of hemoglobin.

  Fortunately, Targ never traveled without carrying along medical instruments, stimulants and traditional remedies. He gave her, at intervals of several minutes, two doses of a powerful potion. Her heart began to beat again, though very feebly; Arva’s lips murmured:

  “The children . . . the Earth . . .”

  Then, she fell into a sleep that Targ knew he should and could not resist—a fatal yet salutary sleep, during which, every three hours, he would inject several milligrams of “organic iron.” Twenty-two hours at least were necessary before Arva could support a short moment of awakening. No matter! The greatest worry was gone. The watchman, knowing the perfect health of his sister, feared no serious aftereffects. Nevertheless, he remained nervous. The event, in fact, had no explanation. Why was Arva lying at the base of the embankment? Had she, she who was always so vigilant and so agile, taken a fall? It was possible—but not likely.

  What was he to do? Stay here until she had recovered all her strength? At least two weeks would be needed for her to recover them completely. It would be better to leave for Dune Equator at once. Nothing was pressing, in any case. The adventure Targ was embarked on was not of the kind whose outcome depends on a few days.

  He went to the Great Planetary and unleashed the general call. Just as happened before, when he came from the chasm, he got no answer. Immediately, a terrible emotion shook him. He repeated the signals, he gave them maximum force. It was clear that Érê and the children, for some enigmatic reason, either found it impossible to hear the signal, or were unable to answer. Both alternatives were equally full of menace! There was a clear link between Arva’s accident and the silence of the planetary.

  An intolerable fear gnawed at the breast of the young man . . . With his legs trembling, forced to lean against the pillar of the planetary, he was incapable of making a decision. Finally, he took a step away, dreary and resolute, inspected with anxious attention all the instruments of his glider, placed Arva on the largest seat, and took off.

  It was a miserable voyage. He made only one stop, toward evening, to try another call. As there was no response, he wrapped Arva tightly in a blanket of wool-like silica, and gave her an injection of the potion, stronger than the first. In the depths of her numbness, she was as if barely able to shiver.

  All night long, the plane carved through the starry darkness. The cold becoming too great, Targ circumvented Mount Skeleton. Two hours before dawn, the southern constellations appeared. The traveler, his heart pounding, gazed occasionally at the Southern Cross, occasionally at that brilliant star, the closest neighbor to the Sun, whose light32 takes only three years to reach the Earth. How beautiful this sky must have been, when young humanity gazed at it through the leaves of trees, and more even when silvery clouds blended their fertile promise with the tiny lamps of the infinite. Ah! And to think there will never be clouds again!

  A gentle light pearled the East, then the Sun raised up its enormous orb. Dune Equator was near. Through the lens of his aerial telescope, Targ could see, occasionally, in the folds of the dunes, the walls of bismuth and arcum dwellings, ambered by the morning light. Arva still was sleeping, and a new dose of the stimulant did not awaken her. Nevertheless, her pallor was less livid. Her arteries trembled feebly, her skin no longer had that “translucent tautness” that suggested death.

  “She is out of danger,” Targ reassured himself.

  This certainty relieved his pain.

  All his attention was fixed on the oasis. He strove to locate the family enclave. Two hillocks still hid it from view. Finally, it appeared, and aghast, Targ twisted the rudder of the glider, which plunged abruptly, like a wound
ed bird.

  The enclave in its entirety, with its houses, its hangars and machines, had disappeared.

  XVI. Into the Eternal Night

  The glider was no more than twenty meters from the ground. It was heading for a crash at full speed when Targ, instinctively, pulled it out of its nosedive. Then, deftly, and tracing an elegant parabola, he resumed his flight up to the outer limits of the enclave. Having landed, the watchman remained motionless, paralyzed with pain, before an enormous, chaotic pit: there lay buried, beneath the darkness of the earth, the beings he loved more than his very self.

  For a long time, thoughts churned in disorder in the poor man’s brain. He was not thinking about the causes of this cataclysm, he perceived only its obscure ferocity, he linked it confusedly to all the woes of this last sad seven years. Random images moved through his mind. Constantly, he saw his family, just as he had left them the day before yesterday. Then these tranquil forms were swept away in a nameless horror . . . The ground opened. He saw them disappear. Terror was on their faces. They cried out to him in whom they placed their trust, and who, at the very moment of their death perhaps, believed he had vanquished fate . . .

  When he finally came to reason, the Last Man tried to imagine the catastrophe. Was it another planetary quake? No! None of the seismographs had registered the least problem. Besides, outside of a few acres of the oasis and desert, only the enclave had been struck. The event was linked to prior circumstances: the substratum, fractured, had ruptured. Thus, the disaster that destroyed the last hope of mankind was no great convulsion of nature, but an infinitesimally small accident, of the same magnitude as the feeble creatures it engulfed.33