The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  As for the probability of humankind acquiring some knowledge, superficial or profound, of the nature of its successors, that was one of Luc’s gentle chimerical torments. Undoubtedly, if one thinks about the inevitable reversibility of things, it is legitimate to induce that our scientific acquisitions contain, at the least, fragmentary information about the vertiginous future—but the difficulty lies in disentangling it from so many complex phenomena, obtaining an irreducible remainder or an ensemble of notions worthy of synthesis. On the other hand, if, in the matter of tangibility and visibility, the problem seems reasonably facile, how such conditions multiply if one admits that a future being might be composed of lines of force, rendered stable for the duration of a life—save for the inevitable balance of increase and decrease—which move through matter while preserving their individuality, form, intensity and velocity.

  At any rate, in order to build at least a humble scientific hypothesis regarding a fourth kingdom, Luc imagined the realization of a series of organo-scientific hypotheses, such as: planetary physiology, double life, a new sense and cerebral penetration…

  3. Planetary Physiology

  If Luc granted some generative priority to planetary physiology over bipolar life,18 a new sense and cerebral penetration, it was not because he intended a strict ordering of these phenomena. Imbued with principles of reversibility and correlation, they appeared to him as a cluster, with enigmas and lacunas that rendered uncertain the original demarcation of the Animal and the Vegetable, which often encroached upon one another in the sciences in which he specialized. Contemplated from that angle, planetary physiology lent elements to double life and cerebral penetration, whose circulation nourished it further even though the analytical sum weakened the preferred classification.

  A pleasant reverie, for Luc, was the thesis of a “physiological tissue of heavenly bodies,” of stellar anastomoses19 concomitant with gravitational modalities, but much frailer and finer. Is there a circulation through the astral Being as different from orbits and emissions of light as protoplasm from quartz? Is there, in virtuality, a physiological auscultation of the infinitely large?20

  Firstly, Luc recapitulated gross examples, ancient and modern: the Sun as the father of life, the losses and gains of heat and pressure at aphelia and perihelia, the planetary conjunctions taking our globe further away from or nearer to its hearth, tidal disturbances, the magnetic distortions linked to the course of a solar flare of sunspot. Then, dominated by the ideas of the decadence of Floras and Faunas attributable to large-scale phenomena, and migrations of population in accordance with magnetic currents, in a direction opposite to the Earth’s rotation,21 he soon plunged fully into the Chimerical. In the same way that an electric current produces an acid taste in the mouth, should not the arrival or departure of large inductive bodies like our companions in celestial migration in some sense acidify or alkalinize the Earth, affecting the accelerations and decelerations of plants and acting on animal nervous systems, independently of any gravitational influence?

  In order not to have the character of “power,” do these phenomena not act in the depths of being, as do so many ideas apparently supplementary but actually determinative? Besides, by virtue of their more psychic character, are they not delayed, emitted in nuances, only becoming massive long after their passage and, by virtue of that fact, confused with immediate characteristics?

  If the approach of a planet, a cometary presence, or a traversal of the hyperaeolithic medium developed some floret in the depths of the woods, if the stages of Jupiter’s progression aborted some insect generations and multiplied others, affecting diseases, the coloration of plumage or petals, that would be an influence of planetary physiology. The marvelous charm that operates on the melancholy of oxen, the fever of ewes or donkeys, the recrudescence of bees and the depression of spiders will doubtless one day be attributed to cosmic pulsations as precise and as sustained as a mathematical series.

  The soul is doubtless gently stirred by the thought that sidereal causalities are echoed in the annelid worm, and that, to the effects of the frightful influence of certain microbes in the human Fatum, will be added the demonstration of the Martian and Saturnian influence of the life of those same microbes and on the arrival of new species. A profound delight accompanies the hypothesis that ancient astrology, its confused prescience of the perturbations of the whole upon the part, will be reborn by analysis, clarified and rationalized; that the obscure notions of hesitant brains, the lies of the Mage and the Fortune-Teller, and the principal features of the necromantic grimoire, will appear as the symbols of profound verities, as the disturbed prophetic instinct of that which will gather the sons of man into the entrails of the Infinite.

  Nevertheless, the disentangling of these threads linking human flesh to astral contingencies, to some slight degree, was not for Luc a science conceived, but merely its prolegomena. In the utmost depths of his dream, he calculated the probability of vital reactions organizing the Milky Way via threads of nervous conductivity, rules determining that the beings living on their surfaces had a direct effect on one another, that being one of the causes of transformations, and that if these calorific vibrations and pressures had an ontological geometry, the influences in question were the differential and integral calculus. By their continuity, by the exquisite receptivity of all their components, by the infinite variety of their form, these directive forces employ ponderous dynamics, as a mechanism puts immeasurable power in the hand of a frail human animal. Thus, the universe actually reflected itself in every individual world, and although the flora and fauna of space must have the infinite variety dictated by their environments, a harmonic repercussion unified them, the evolution of each one summarizing the evolution of the whole.

  Let it be clearly said that Luc dismissed any idea of lucid communication of mechanisms constructed by more-or-less similar creatures, similarized by the general laws of intellect eventually creating an intercosmic intermediary, an interstellar telegraphy.

  Anyone imagining a sidereal telegraphy, in fact, from the contemporary era on, can hope for the good fortune of an identity between our abstractions and those of a planetary fauna. Far from there being any unknown force or any substantial novelty involved, one may deem it infinitely probable that success is dependent on a fairly broad convergence, that the signals will be imprinted on elements less complex than our knowledge. In sum, the problem has some analogy with the relationship between explorers and islanders, in which all the ingenuity on both sides is concentrated on the most obvious and most commonplace notions common to human beings. As regards planetary physiology, it must, by necessity, arise independently of any individual communication and any dialogue, its role being to integrate the “animal vibrations” or “organic lines of force” of Space: vibrations varying in intensity but included in a unique phenomenon, as the rays of the spectrum are in the formal identity of lumino-calorific undulation.

  To put it briefly, astral telegraphy will probably never furnish any information regarding planetary physiology, and vice versa. The former rests on a notion within our immediate reach, soluble by our most rudimentary sciences, the latter on a hypothesis transporting the imagination toward infinity and unknown forces; one is almost scientific, the other suggestive of the most profound mysticism.

  So Luc, his soul in torment, in a singular and vertiginous delight, enclosed himself perpetually in “directions” of experience, with the confused intoxication of indefinables that seemed to be perpetually coming into contact with definables. They were edifications of electrometer-nerves, receptors traced in animal tissues, but reinforced by automatic scales; it might well take hundreds of thousands of years to extract, from the bosom of perturbations of a merely electrical, luminous or gravitational order, any clearly cosmo-organic perturbation isolated from terrestrial influences.

  “Oh, sometime in the mystery of the ages, such an apparatus will be constructed, whether it be an anesthetized animal or a network of fibers still en
dowed with life, while luminous balances, balances of induction, pressure and gravitation will have neutralized every effect of known phenomena, every torsion and every polarity determined by infinitesimal measures.

  “Constructed and reconstructed, willed by successive generations, each of its microscopic elements, simultaneously due to prodigious probes and extraordinary intuitions, the moment will finally come when the apparatus, in the darkness, during a determined phase of the moon, will have captured the physiological force of the cosmos, the first feeble tremor that will whisper the great secret of things. Oh well! Even then, might it not be necessary to wait thousands of years before the manifestation is duplicated, before the slightest complementary evidence is added to the initial experiment? How long, alas, was the magnet known to peoples who integrated its magic into some legend or Oriental tale; how long did the compass guide Chinese, and then European, ships; how many prehistoric children had vague electroscopes, before the era arrived in which the exterior notion sprang forth from profound science!”

  And Luc, saturated by silent hypothesis, standing beneath the nocturnal mantle, turned toward the nearest planetary body, the beautiful satellite plowing its course among the asterisms, and from which the initial stammers of cosmic physiology undoubtedly emanated.

  “Moon, once almost equal to the Sun for the peoples of the world’s infancy, as for those of the adult period of Hellenic times and those of the Medieval fever! Then, having established your actual smallness, your role as a celestial mirror, at the same time as science attributed Life and its complications to the solar hearth, to thermal and luminous play and the infinity of their variations, you fell into scientific discredit as a ‘creator of beings.’ Even so, satellite, compensating by nearness for your smallness, to the point of becoming the conductress of oceans, will you not, in the planetary psyche of tomorrow, be the counterbalancing agent of the sun? Infinitely variable in gravitational phenomena all our blood and every one of our nerves is subject to your phases, and the millions of ancestral human generations that have been subject to them have incorporated them in order to protect themselves against them and make use of them. Evident electrical inductrice, varying our potential every day, colossal Electromagnet whose syzygies and quadratures express the coefficients of forces, whose rapid course through the firmament symbolizes the ruptures and closures of currents, nurturer of nocturnal animals and plants, of which the former are our ancestors and the latter our fodder, your light varies the polarization of the terrestrial surface infinitely, transmuting minerals and flowers. Oh, raiser of tides, if all littoral zones feel the power of your metamorphoses, all subject to the mechanical variations that your force imposes on ours, if you administer the plethoras, is it not infinitely probable that you engrave harmonies in the foundations of the nerves and that your fauna—for it exists—whispers confidences to ours?”

  Then, descending to the simple poetry of the Earth:

  “Oh, with what charm one reposes in some vale where meadow and forest grow together, where there are springs and fecund streams, when a great lunar segment is rising or setting… The leaves have resumed a little of their diurnal activity, languishing, like spinners dreaming of love…sharp-eyed animals prowl in the grass or beneath the arborescent plush… The Star pours forth its electro-luminous life…its inappreciable chemical currents, while over there, beyond the horizon, the cliff roars, sending a thrill of emotion into the entrails of the rocks, bringing forth phosphorus colossi armed with a hundred thousand hammers, combating the mobile stones impelled by the waves against the inert frontiers of the bank. Oh, Lunar creator, floating over the Imponderable, it seems that one can perceive you toiling in the Abyss as you progress, and that your rays are merely the forerunners of your force, as the spark flies faster than the shell!”

  4. Bipolar Life

  Will the inertia of sleep always be the mode of repose adopted by nature? Luc, being frail and nervous, fervently desirous that every minute of his brief terrestrial sojourn should be conscious, had a horror of the moment when normal life has palpitated in the brain for too long and the vanishment of consciousness abruptly interrupts the currents of the muscles and the nerves. Thus, he found great consolation in building the hypothesis that nature is working to replace the present oscillation with a system in which repose will simply consist of dynamic antitheses, of distortions of life rather than its mysterious suspension.

  On the blessed evenings when the firmament is disseminated over the earth, while the portals of the sunset hollow out a moving carillon of light, Luc pursued his chimera into the Infinity of Ontology. For a long time, he preferred recourse to Intuition, to the bliss of reflections of thoughts and shadows of sensation. They were the unstable impulses of being, the hope of a hope, figurations of life in two dimensions, or in one dimension. On the taciturn meadows, an exceedingly slow, diminishing fanfare, a confidential voice of insect flight, the curling up of petals, all the tender luxuries of last light, whispering discreetly, like the arts of a very ancient civilization, accompanied in Luc a course and discourse of Eternities and Postulates of final causes…

  In that gentle voyage beyond the tangible, in which the Abstract bordered on Instinct, Luc wondered whether there might be an indication therein of the other Repose. One evening, when his conceptions were becoming ever more uncertain, he attained a state of mind similar to that of a Fakir and perceived that he was collapsing into an ecstatic brutalization, in an immobilization of sensitivity and, finally, into “true sleep.”

  Awakening beneath a network of branches, clouds and constellations, a desire for the Concrete took hold of him.

  “If Sleep is due to disappear someday—although that duplication must be a consequence of Planetary Physiology, I nevertheless see the problem as more typical of, and restricted to, contemporary animality—by means that the eternal Mother has been preparing since the dawn of time, some definite trace of those means must already exist. To the curious gaze of the analyst, data might well up from the organic mystery and reveal its outline, as a thermal balance measures the approach of a human body.

  A barn-owl brushed the silvery ash of an aspen saturated with starlight. Luc’s soul pursued it into the shadows; the night was magnetized by the mystery of Raptors; charming arguments rose above the level of the meadows. Then, in the gap between a rose-mallow and a laburnum, the admirable tale of nocturnal and diurnal animals appeared to inscribe itself. In the languid waves of Time and Space, the utopian reads the effort of matter haunted by the dream of life, the groping attempts to coexist under all the appearances of day and night.

  “Those creatures which wake up in the shadow of a marine rock, the inferior creatures that make their own light and drift in the depths like the stars in the sky…those which wake up in the borders of deserts on moonless nights and go forth with eyes gleaming like glow-worms…those which burrow in subterranean melancholy, blind and velvet-furred, patient laborers and destroyers of larvae…have they, in the formation of their sensitivities, some molecular orientation that, subsequently acquired by the human animal, can contrive the doubling of life by suppressing sleep?”

  And Luc wandered through the patient zoological research of our century, through penetrating dissections and profound explorations of the primitive cell, into the caverns of physiology, where the plant-animal prowls, where the primordial menstrual flow hesitates to divide the realm of life.

  “Ah! Humus of poetry, obscure metaphysics of origins, so similar in uncertainty to the birth of a Thought…are you not, then, a Sign, a diffuse delineation that is favorable to my Dream…from which it is necessary to rise again to superior life, free to return to you, in the final analysis?”

  There was a frisson, like the tremor of a cashmere scarf, and Luc saw the barn-owl—or another—pass by again, the first link in the chain of his current fantasy:

  “Beautiful bird of prey, subtle incarnation of so dark a Dream, of such sad and moving annals born in the nocturnities of the skull…and young qu
adruped brothers, the lynx, the jaguar, the Lord with the huge head of Atlas…aristocrats of Darkness…aristocrats with luminous eyes…with pupils dilating in the play of light and shadow as a river broadens in the plain and shrinks between hillsides…”

  On the plain, amid the diffuse islands of foliage, phosphorescent eyes seemed to be scattered like fireflies, lying in ambush in every covert. Luc glimpsed the yellow eyes of tigers, the vertical slits of their pupils, contrasting with the horizontal slits of herbivores—one doubtless adapted for flight, for the circular exploration of plains, for the vague perceptions searching for an infinite number of perils in every direction, the other for ambushes, for the sudden, direct bound, in which it is necessary to set aside all sideways vision to concentrate entirely on the perpendicular direction of the target. Then, recalling the gaze of a cat—the gaze of a superior creature, so foreign to our own gaze, whereas the gaze of a dog understands and absorbs ours—he was able to wonder whether the elements of the double life might not lay there, as the secret idiosyncrasy of a powerful animal lies dormant in a few spermatic vesicles, and whether the differentiation of a feline pupil and a herbivore pupil might embody the secret of abolishing sleep.

  With a powerful wing-beat, Luc’s mind made a rapid survey of animal sight: the stemmata of insects, the appendices of crustaceans, pigmentary stains, the frigid pupils of fish, the pink eyes of albinos, the troubled gaze of oxen, the enormous pupils of owls, the swift and sinister lucidity of falcons—a resplendent world, gentle and terrible, formidable in the subtlety of its tints, the genius of the flesh in creating receptacles for the most rapid of phenomena, weaving micronervous tissue to measure the reports of etheric vibrations!