View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction
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Geŕard Klein
carried away by the soft winds of Mars. Never once has he discovered
a more achieved fossil, the remains of a larger, more powerful (and
more fragile) creature. I have seen him battling the evidence. I have
seen him sweep his eyes over the hills of Mars, silently thinking that it will one day be necessary to turn over these millions of tons of sand in
the hope of discovering, at the heart of the planet, the bleached fetus
of a forgotten species. I don’t think he talks enough. It is not good for a man to say nothing on Mars. Nor in space. He remains mute, as if
the millions and millions of pounds of sand weighed down on him.
Like La Salle and myself, he sought in space a way out, a means of
escaping Earth, but he expected something else of it. He was hoping to
encounter in it something other than himself; he thought to en-
counter the total stranger, he believed he would read on the cliffs of
Mars the history of a world absolutely new for Earth. No doubt he had
listened attentively, in his childhood, to the stories of the man in the
moon.
Otherwise, he was just like La Salle and myself. There are things,
you see, which we could not bear unless we were sure of discovering,
one fine day, around the bend of space or between two hills, a
glistening city and ideal beings. But La Salle and I, we know that
this dream is not for today, or even for tomorrow, while Ferrier can
no longer wait.
There are three of us, and that’s an awkward number for playing
cards. Sometimes we read. We also listen to the radio from time to
time. But above all, we sleep. It is a way of economizing on oxygen. It
is a way of projecting ourselves in time. We never dream.
When evening comes, we descend from the tractor, we unpack our
apparatus. We proceed to take certain measurements. We forward the
results. We start the catalytic stove; it functions tranquilly under its
transparent bell glass, glowing red in the dusk like a hothouse flower.
We eat. We unfurl the parasol-like thing that serves us as a tent,
which prevents the mortal cold of Mars from freezing us to the bone,
and we try once again to sleep. But it’s no use—we’ve been sleeping
nearly all day, you see, lulled by the jolting of the tractor, each taking his turn at the wheel; and when night comes, our respirator chafes us,
we stifle, we’re suddenly thirsty, and we lie there with our eyes open,
staring at the milky dome of the tent, taking in the irritating faint
gnashing of sandgrains blown against the plastic by the wind, the
patter of insect feet.
Sometimes it happens, during these nights, that we ponder on what
space might have been, on what these planets might have been. The
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thought comes to us that man, one day, will endow Mars with an
atmosphere and with oceans and forests, that cities will rise here,
fabulous, taller than all the cities of Earth, that spaceships will unite this planet and other worlds, and that the frontiers of the unknown
will be situated elsewhere in space, always pushed back beyond the
visible horizon. Our anguish is eased by the thought, and we know
that man today is steering a false course in asking of this planet what
it cannot give, in turning towards the past, in desperately sifting
through the sieve of memory in hopes of finding once more the traces
of an ancient downfall. We feel then, tremulously, that it is in the
future that an answer lies, and that it is into the future that we must
throw ourselves.
And we occasionally take stock of the paradoxical nature of our
situation. We are at once the past and the future. We are included in
the mad dreams of generations dead in the not distant past and we are
going to way of infants yet to be born. Anonymous, we were myths;
forgotten, we will be legends.
We do not go abroad at night because of the cold. The extreme
tenuity of the atmosphere makes for great differences of temperature.
But in the morning, around nine o’clock, we set out again.
Today we entered a zone of grey sand, then discovered a stretch
littered with flat black stones, Aeolian pebbles, strangely fashioned at
times, and finally reached the extreme border of the reddish stretch
that touches the Martian equator at certain points. Eroded mountains
rise gently over the horizon. The dunes have thinned out and
dispersed. The worn mesas that circumscribe the eye shelter this
plain from the wind. Our tracks come to breach the hazardous
irregularity of the desert. They will survive us.
The surface of the planet descended gently, as if we were plunging
into the bosom of some dried-up sea, into the illusory depths of an
imaginary littoral. And suddenly, we saw surge up and grow on the
horizon translucent needles of rock, so thin and so high, with such
sharp contours, that we did not believe our eyes. Ferrier, who was
driving, gave a cry. He pressed the accelerator, and the sudden
irresistible jolt of the tractor threw La Salle and myself from our seats.
‘It’s incredible.’
‘What a fantastic peak.’
‘No, it’s a cliff.’
But it was none of all this, as we saw later on in the day. It was a
massif, probably crystalline, an accident that had spurted in ages past
from the entrails of the planet, or perhaps even fallen from the sky,
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Geŕard Klein
and some inconceivable tremor had cleaved it, so that it had the
appearance, on this immutable plain, of a chipped yet tremendously
sharp tooth.
‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen an acute angle on Mars’, said
Ferrier. ‘That’s not erosion. Neither wind nor sand have managed to
cut into this rock. Maybe it’s just a giant crystal that has grown slowly, a gradual concentration of like atoms, or perhaps . . .’
We looked at each other. There was one word on our lips. Artefact.
Was this, at last, the evidence for which Earth had waited so long?
There is nothing worse, I think, than being deceived by an object.
Because one cannot reproach it. We had suddenly put our trust in
Mars. Like children.
And we were deceived. It was not an artefact.
But we did not want to accept what that meant. It had been crazy to
hope. But we couldn’t help it.
*
*
*
*
*
We spent the night at the foot of the crystalline mountains, and we
experienced even more difficulty in getting to sleep than on previous
days. We were both disappointed and satisfied. Our journey had not
been in vain, and yet its secret goal was completely unfulfilled.
When morning came and the temperature became endurable, we
adjusted our respirators and went out. We had decided to explore the
rocky massif, to leave the tractor behind us and to carry only a light
baggage of supplies and instruments.
The crystalline cliffs were not overly escarped. They contained
faults and openings which permitted us to ascend. The rock was the
colour of ink, with here and there a murky transparen
cy which
reminded us of those blocks of ice that wander in space, the relics
of incredibly ancient oceans, fragments of shattered ice packs, debris,
finally, of pulverized planets.
We were trying to reach the largest fault, hoping to thus discover
the very depths of the massif and to understand its structure. Perhaps
a lake of mercury awaited us there, or engraved rocks, or even some
creature, a door to another dimension, the traces of previous visitors,
for this rock had survived for millions of years the slow burial by sand
that lies in wait for all things on Mars. It had escaped the tide of dust that flows over the surface of the red planet, and the movement of the
dunes that are incessantly shifted by the light winds, and in a way it
was a witness to past ages, epochs in which men did not dare as yet to
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lift their faces to the sky; even less did they dream that one day they
would voyage, weary, through these constellations.
But when it came, the thing took us unawares. La Salle, who was
walking ahead, cried out. We heard him clearly and hurled ourselves
headlong after him. Ferrier, who was following us, urged me ahead.
Rounding a block, we saw La Salle, who seemed to be giving some
object his utmost attention.
‘Listen’, he said to us.
We heard nothing at first; then, as we advanced another step, from
those borderlines that separate silence from sound, we heard a
gnashing noise arise.
We remained immobile. And this was neither the voice of the wind,
nor its singing, nor even the light clatter of a stone or the cracking of rock split by frost. It was a steady ssh-sshing, like the accumulated
noise of millions of superimposed signals.
The air of Mars is too thin for our ears to perceive the sounds that it
transmits. Moreover, our eardrums would not have withstood the
difference of pressure which exists between the external milieu and
our respiratory system. Our ears are entirely masked, and minuscule
amplifiers allow us to hear the sound of our voices and to make out
the noises of Mars. And this, I can vouch for it, was different from
anything that I had heard up to that moment on the red planet. It was
nothing human, and nothing mineral.
I moved my head slightly, and suddenly I perceived something else
that dominated this ssh-sshing, reduced it to an insignificant and
endless background noise. I perceived a voice, or rather the murmur
of a million voices, the tumult of an entire race, uttering unbelievable, incomprehensible words, words I could never transcribe with any of
the phonetic signs current on Earth.
‘They’re there’, La Salle said to me, his eyes shining. He took a step
or two forward, and I saw him hastily change the setting of his
earphones. I followed him and did the same, for the murmur had
become a tempest, the insect voices had been transformed into a
strident and intolerable howling, a muffled and terrifying roar.
We were progressing along a narrow fault between two cliffs of
rock. And the sound assailed us in successive, eddying waves. We
were drunk on it. We sensed, we knew that at last we were about to
find what we had come to see on Mars, what we had in vain implored
space to give us.
Contact with another life.
For as the sound grew louder, we did not have the slightest doubt,
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Geŕard Klein
not once. We were not easy men to deceive, nor were we liable to let
our imagination run wild. This incredible richness in the modulation
of the sound could only be the doing of live beings. It mattered little
that we understood nothing; we had faith that Earth could solve
problems of this sort, by its minds and its machines. We were merely
the ambassadors of Earth.
At the last turn in the fault, the valley finally appeared. It resembled
the basin of a dried-up lake, closed in by tall smooth cliffs which
became more escarped the higher they rose. The opposite end of the
valley narrowed and ended in a rocky bottleneck, finally coming up
against a terminal wall.
There existed no other road that led to this valley except the one
that we had taken, unless one were to let oneself drop from the sky. It
was an arena rather than a valley, moreover: a vast oblong arena. And
deserted.
And yet these incomprehensible voices assailed us.
It was a lake, you see, invisible, a lake of sounds and of dust, an
impalpable dust that the years had laid down in this refuge, a dust
fallen from the stars, borne by the wind, in which nothing had left its
traces, a dust in which those who were calling to us had been
swallowed up, perhaps, buried.
‘Hello!’, La Salle cried, his voice breaking.
He wanted an answer, he hoped for a silence of astonishment, but
the arena was empty and the dense waves of sound came breaking in
on us one after the other. Words whispered, words pronounced,
phrases drawn out in a single breath, sprung from invisible lips.
‘Where are you? Oh, where are you?’, La Salle cried in a mournful
voice. What he was hearing was not enough for him, he wished to see
these unknown messengers, he hoped to see rise up from this lake of
dust who knows what hideous or admirable forms. His hands were
trembling and mine as well, and at my back I heard the short, hissing
breath of Ferrier.
‘Hello’, cried an incredibly weak voice from the other end of the
valley.
It was the voice of La Salle. It stood out, minutely, against the
sonorous background of innumerable voices; it was a bit of wreckage
carried to our shore.
‘They are answering us’, La Salle said to me, without believing it.
And his voice arose from a thousand places in the valley, an insect’s
voice, shrill, murmurous, shattered, diffracted. ‘Hello, hello, hello’, it said. ‘Where are you, where are you-you-you-you-you . . .’
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An echo, I thought. An echo. And La Salle turned again toward me,
and I read in his eyes that he had understood, and I felt the hand of
Ferrier weigh on my shoulder. Our voices, our mingled noises were
grounded in the sound-matter that filled the valley, and created tricks
of interference, returning to us as if reflected in strange mirrors of
sound, transformed, but not at all weakened. Was it possible that such
a valley existed on Mars, a valley of echoes, a valley where the
transparent and thin air of Mars carried forever the sounds reflected
by crystal walls?
Did there exist in the entire universe a place where the fossils were
not at all mineral, but sounds? Were we, at last, hearing the voices of
the ancient inhabitants of Mars, long after the sands had worn away
and engulfed the last vestiges of their passing? Or was it, indeed, the
evidence of other visitors come from worlds of which we were still
ignorant? Had they passed by here yesterday, or a million years ago?
Were we no longer alone?
Our instruments would tell us later, and perhaps they would
su
cceed in unravelling this skein of waves, undo these knots, and
extract from this involuntary message some illuminating sense.
The valley was utterly deserted and dead. A receptacle. The whole
of Mars was nothing but a receptacle that received our traces only to
annihilate them. Except for this spot, except for this valley of echoes
that would doubtless carry the sound of our voices through the ages
to our distant successors, perhaps not human.
Ferrier took his hand from my shoulder, shoved me aside and
pushed La Salle away, and began to run towards the centre of the
valley.
‘Listen to them’, he cried, ‘listen to them.’
His boots sank into the impalpable dust, and it rose about him in an
eddy. And we heard these voices breaking about our ears, in a
tempest that he had raised. I saw him running and I understood
what the sirens were, these voices that whispered in his ears, that
called to him, that he had hoped for all these past years and vainly
searched for, and he plunged into this sonorous sea and sank into the
dust. I wished that I could be by his side, but I was incapable of
making a move.
The voices hammered against my eardrums.
‘The fool’, said La Salle in a sad voice. ‘Oh, the poor fool.’
Ferrier shouted. Ferrier called, and the immutable, the ancient
voices answered him. He imbibed the voices. He drank them,
devoured them, stirred them with his demented gestures.
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Geŕard Klein
And, slowly, they subsided. He had disturbed some instable equili-
brium, destroyed a subtle mechanism. His body was a screen. He was
too heavy, too material for these thin voices to endure his contact.
The voices grew weak. I felt them very slowly leave me, I felt them
go away, in a last vibration I heard them shrivel up and die. And
finally Ferrier fell silent. And in my earphones I made out a last
whispering.
A kind of farewell.
The silence. The silence of Mars.
When Ferrier finally turned around, I saw, despite the distance,
despite the cloud of dust that gradually settled, through his disordered
respirator, tears that ran down his cheeks.
And he put his hands to his ears.
translated by FRANK ZERO
FRANCE
Observation of Quadragnes
J.-P. ANDREVON