The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  She did not understand; she thought that he was thinking about death and the eternal soul. “You mustn’t think about that, my darling. You need to live with us!”

  So distant as she was from Abel’s reality, she would have been vainly and sadly burdened by a confidence. Embracing her with a gentleness mingled with considerable anguish, he acquiesced in an ambiguous manner. “I don’t have to think about it,” he said.

  The human evening returned, with its stars, its infinity lost in other infinities. Abel was still awake, his heart in tumult, when the other members of his family had gone to sleep.

  In spite of his revelation, Abel only had a confused consciousness of his own cycles, similar to that which we have of our bodies, whose innumerable functions are only known to us, very imperfectly, by virtue of the experience of thousands of ancestors. Just as we know that we are human, however, he knew that he was a Variant.

  There was nothing to indicate to him the species—if one can speak in terms of species in this instance—to which he belonged. Was he one of those whose intelligence could not communicate with others, or could only communicate in the elementary fashion in which it is transmitted between our higher animals? Or had he received the gift of communicating his ideas to other Variants—a gift that did not seem, as it is on Earth, to be the prerogative of a single species?

  While he sought to discover this, his terrestrial life passed through the essential crisis; for several seasons it dominated his Variant life to such an extent that the latter, without ever ceasing to be perceptible, sank into a kind of torpor. Still a child among the Variants, he became an adult among humans, submissive to the sparkling folly of puberty.

  Woman, becoming the redoubtable principle of his two existences, saturated him with visions that were tragic, by virtue of their sharpness, centralized around the savage receptacle of generation, the image of which is, for so many young humans, an Eden that they despair of ever attaining.

  Because he was timid to the point of dementia, he lived in a storm of desires exasperated by the fictions that our ancestors have accumulated around the Act, already fabulous in the darkness of primal instinct. He was the insect ready to die for the sake of fecundation, the wild beast maddened by the hectic pursuit through the desert, the savage prowling around the female with a club or spear, the barbarian warrior raping the wives and daughters of the vanquished, the poet assembling the reflections of Earth and sky, the morning light, the beauties of vegetation and the innumerable elementary sensations sublimated by centuries of dreams.

  From brutal desire, already magnified by an extraordinary primitive legend, and from instinct brought down to and concentrated in sex, emerged the mystical grace in which the adolescent, prostrating himself before a sacred creature, fears the Act as a sacrilege…

  The woman of instinct surged forth initially, with her brutal face, her thick jaws and a man as coarse as that of thoroughbred mares. Merely in seeing her walk, revealing her strong ankles, parting her legs, he knew the vertigo of forests, and glimpsed the cave ready to seize him…22

  He thought of her frenetically during the nights of August; he extended his arms, he begged, moaned, wept. He encountered her every day, and everywhere. How near she was!—and so distant, at the other end of life, ungraspable and inaccessible. Overwhelmed by his timidity, in spite of many contacts, in spite of his loneliness, he had never made the gesture…

  One day, sitting next to her, the others having departed one by one, his audacity went so far as to let him remain there, trembling and shivering, until dusk fell…

  She did not put on the light. They said nothing. Intolerable fever tortured them. Finally, despairing of seeing him take action, she moved closer to him with the slowness of the minute-hand of a clock. She took possession of that young intoxicated body and gave him a mute dream, boundless joy, glory and triumph. She saturated him with a wild happiness, for which he retained an eternal gratitude, which did not impede the other dream of emergence.

  There was almost as much difference between the two adventures as between a female gorilla and the whitest and most delicate human female…

  When he recovered the woman with the coarse hair, the trees, the grass and the Earth exuding a phosphorescent scent, he immersed himself in the caress as in a river of flesh—but when he arrived next to the other, whom he never possessed, he knew the miracle of every form, every sound, every odor, of the cloud floating over the hill and of that other cloud, made of stars without number, which throws a milky veil over the estival night.

  Thus passed six seasons, during which, an adult on Earth, he remained a child in the twin world.

  Then the woman with the coarse hair left him to pursue other adventures; replete, he scarcely missed her. The other, taken away by her family never to return, was lost in one of those lands that the Assassins of Humankind have stolen from red-skinned people.

  In the era that followed, the world of the Variants began to dominate the human world within him, and he finally recognized his species—one of those that was able to communicate thought.

  After six more seasons, he finally approached adulthood there, and began to be moved by the legend of their generation. It differed strangely from our animal legend. The sexes had no definite existence. A Variant could be male relative to some of his own kind, female to others. At the limits, however, rare beings existed who were purely male, and others purely female.

  Abel had not yet experienced the union that presentiment announced by way of the disturbance caused by certain Presences, especially those belonging to the purely feminine category. While he completed his radiant increase he linked himself with Variants toward which he was attracted by a predilection they showed for him. Incapable of perceiving his double nature, they were surprised by his appearance; linked to his human body, his variant body was confined to a limited sphere in which it moved very rapidly. He dared not offer any explanation, and the Variants did not ask him for one. Gradually, he came to understand them almost as well as he understood human beings.

  They escape the worst animal necessities—including the necessity of nourishing themselves at the expense of other lives—and possess no means of destroying one another; disease and fatal accidents were unknown in their world. None of the terrestrial cataclysms disrupt the rhythms by which they live; death only occurs by virtue of an exhaustion whose cause is unknown to them; it is a slow and gentle decline into unconsciousness.

  Their existence involves some suffering, but tolerable ones. Their lives are not without chagrin or adventures, nor without sexual love, but the mysterious universal distribution has spared them ferocious tragedy, the immolation of the weak by the strong, frightful tortures and monstrous deaths.

  Their nutrition is primarily energetic; their physiology is economical and maintains itself at the expense of inanimate substances, although their activity requires a perpetual collaboration with the environment. They obtain their nutrition by the absorption and incessant transformation of radiations of every sort.

  It seems that their sense of beauty is more complex, more intense and more constant than those of human beings, and involved in all their actions. The kinds of rudimentary art that involve a taste for nutriments, vegetal perfumes, the forms of certain plants, flowers or animals, are replaced in them by an indefinite number of esthetic sensations, much more intense than those known to humans. To “assimilate” phenomena they have a legion of senses, which form harmonic series that have a “grasp” of the environment that is both powerful and subtle.

  Love attains an incomparable splendor there; all the powers and sensibilities of creatures participate in it. It escapes the repugnant servitudes of terrestrial love, the odious mixture of vital functions and grotesque movements. Physical contact is no more necessary than it is for us to have physical contact with a melody, a painting, a statue, a flower or a landscape, and yet no contact can awake sharper or more subtle sensations. It is, in sum, an exchange of rhythms and imponderable fluids. It can
last longer, without any fatigue, only ceases by virtue of the extinction of a superabundance of energy, and is not long delayed in resumption. It requires the absolute acquiescence of the two beings. Possession by violence is impracticable among the Variants; desire cannot develop unless it excites desire; the idea of egoistic enjoyment is scarcely conceivable.

  Apart from a few obscure instincts to which nothing responded, Abel remained ignorant of Variant love for some time. He only began to understand when he encountered the individual whom he named, in terrestrial language, Liliale.

  Entirely feminine, she was more sympathetic than any of her peers to Abel’s latent strangeness. In spite of her considerable youth, she had a superior perception of her universe; among the Variants, experience depends much more on the perfection of persona cycles than the duration of circumstances. An individual like Liliale absorbed the variations of ambient life with an extreme intensity, rapidity and surety.

  Although surprised by the limitation of Abel’s movements, she did not see it as an infirmity, sensing a composite nature strangely different from and strangely comparable to Variant existence. Also perceiving that only he revealed himself partially, not for reasons of duplicity but out of some mysterious dread, she refrained from interrogating him; it was he who finally understood that a confession was inevitable.

  It was one morning in terms of the mortal Earth, but in the world of the Variants, where time is not measured in terms of the motion of a central star, there are no mornings, evenings or seasons, only variations due to the interactions of worlds. Abel was simultaneously aware of the earthly morning, which was a morning in spring, and the complex phase of his other life. His double nature was subject to an excitement full of charm.

  “What’s the matter?” his friend had asked. “You seem to be somewhere else.”

  “It’s just that there’s a harmony within me more vibrant than my two lives,” he replied.

  “Your two lives?” she queried, less surprised than he might have expected.

  “It’s time you knew, Liliale. I’m different from all the other beings in this world we all inhabit…and those of another world, to which I find myself bound. Or rather, I am bound to both at the same time.”

  “That’s a fearful mystery,” said Liliale, “and so dolorous! I sense that it’s true…everything about you speaks of existences beyond my own, a world incomparable with ours…and I love you more because of it, in spite of the fear—which will never cease—of losing you!”

  “Ah!” he said. “In spite of their melancholy, those words are sweeter than all the joys of the other world…where, however, I have known marvelous joys…”

  A profound disturbance began to overtake them, which was already changing the nature of their tenderness and could not be hidden—for although the Variants have their secret life, which none may penetrate without consent, it is impossible for them to hide their love from beloved individuals as soon as the latter love in their turn. Reciprocal love is a mutual penetration of two consciousnesses, although there is a period of growth during which each may guard the secret, always with increasing difficulty. Then the communication becomes perfect, and when the lovers are in one another’s presence, nothing that happens in the mind of one can be concealed from the other.

  That moment had arrived for Liliale and Abel; almost abruptly, they found that they were a single being. All speech became unnecessary. Liliale understood Abel as directly as he understood himself. Terrestrial love, for Abel, was no longer anything more than an exceedingly poor sentiment, for which he felt pity…

  That lasted until the time when Liliale began to bear the being that she had conceived with Abel. Like the creative act itself, maternity did not have the repulsive aspects that it assumes in humans; the child comprised subtle rhythms added to Liliale’s rhythms, and rendered the mother more harmonious and more beautiful. Then Abel experienced strange moments in which the world of the Variants was almost completely effaced by the world of human beings, and other moments in which humans were no more than the shadow of a dream. Then he was extraordinarily happy in the two existences.

  The child was born, whose cycles were vague and disordered for some time. It was a young chaos; slowly it became a harmony, which resembled Liliale. Abel loved it profoundly, and was loved by it. It had a sense of the human world that its mother lacked, but it did not live doubly, as Abel did. Men, animals and plants were for the child a world fantastic and real, intangible and impenetrable, the life and movements of which it could perceive without understanding their meaning. As it did not possess any organ comparable to eyes or ears, its perception was extremely different from that of its father—as sharp and as subtle but without embracing relatively motionless forms. On the contrary, humans and animals were, from its viewpoint, series of very numerous vortices, with less mobile nodes and centers that corresponded to specialized organs like the heart, the liver, the stomach and the brain.

  That was a happy time, among humans as among the Variants—a time of plenty, in which Abel lived his double life fully.

  However, his terrestrial body was approaching old age while he was still young in his other life. A time of dolor succeeded the time of felicity; Abel’s mother died and his father shortly afterwards, and with his dispersed brothers there was only negligible communication.

  Terrestrial years passed, and the day came when Abel consented to quit the human world. His death was almost voluntary—a renunciation devoid of suffering—and he then belonged uniquely to Variant life, without ceasing to perceive the milieu in which he had lived, but no longer possessing the same senses. His memories being fragmentary, the creatures who had been his kin melted into scarcely-individualized collectives…

  And he had time before him: the centuries that the Variants live, while his descendants increased and multiplied indefinitely…

  Afterword

  “Nymphaeum” established an important prototype within Rosny’s oeuvre, providing a template to which he frequently returned, even though it is an inherently confused work that changes direction several times. The initial encounter between the explorers and the tiger was a confrontation that he was to echo incessantly as a supplier of melodrama, as was the chase after an abducted bride-to-be. Both these devices seem, however, to be mere accessories, awkwardly recruited to impart a measure of narrative drive to what is, in essence, a Utopian romance of how human life might have been, had evolution only worked a little differently. The heart of the story is the Rousseauesque innocence and happiness of the light-skinned Water-People—an exercise in pure Romance that is sufficient in itself to belie Rosny’s hastily-acquired reputation as a Naturalist.

  Given the manner in which the story changes direction several times, it is hardly surprising that Rosny found “Nymphaeum” a difficult piece to continue or conclude; it was obviously planned as a novel, but the story had to be finished off with brutal rapidity in order that it might be sold as a novella. As an adventure story, therefore, it remains direly unsatisfactory, but lovers of speculative fiction are bound to be glad that it did creep into print in some form, for the sake of the vision of the Water-People and their strange way of life.

  The fact that the story, as published, embeds its poetic component within a narrative frame that is not far removed from crude pulp fiction, might reflect the fact that the opening was tacked on at a late stage in composition, not long before the ending, but the greater likelihood is that the piece really was composed in sequence, albeit with at least one substantial break, and that the preface burdened Rosny with a necessity that proved burdensome, of having to bring his narrator back home to tell his story. The character would doubtless have been happier—and the author too—had he not been forced to do that, no matter how inevitable it might have seemed in terms of the literary conventions of the day. Indeed, the story might have worked better, in poetic terms, had it not been forced to continue representing itself as a “real” adventure at all, being allowed an ultimate retreat into the realm o
f dream. Perhaps, after all, it would have been better had the narrator not recovered from his encounter with the tiger, but merely hallucinated the whole Romantic adventure on the point of death.

  There is, undeniably, a similar quasi-hallucinatory quality about “The Depths of Kyamo,” “The Wonderful Cave Country” and “The Voyage,” in which the commitment to an anecdotal format holds the first two stories back from the kind of general conclusion to which the third eventually breaks through. Alglave is only able to hint at his conviction that the life of the advanced great apes of Kyamo is preferable to that of civilized men, and that the scrupulous predation of the giant vampire bats is morally superior to our own use of other animal species, and even Villars, in the third story, is compelled to reflect on the symbiotic relationship of his giant elephants and primitive humans from a vast distance, perhaps spoiling its proto-ecological message with the rather fatuous offhand remark about what elephants might have accomplished had they had two trunks instead of one. In spite of that flaw, however, “The Voyage” deserves recognition as a significant ecological parable, which avoids the mystical excesses of the contemporary works of W.H. Hudson.

  It cannot be a coincidence that the seemingly-anodyne title of “Le Voyage” reproduces that of one of the key exercises in Decadent symbolism featured in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal—a book more frequently quoted by Rosny’s characters than any other. The journey that it features is not only symbolic, but wryly symbolic, in a fashion of which Baudelaire might have approved, as he would surely have approved of the calculated paradoxicality and perversity of the commentary contained in the opening paragraphs. Rosny did not often let the “poetic” side of his conflicted personality show through in the era in which this story was published, but if “The Voyage” was actually written then, it testifies to the fact that the repression of that element of his literary personality was not contrived without rebellion.