The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  That’s very distinguished, Luc thought.

  Indeed, it was an aristocratic condition of the entire system, the refusal of atomic artisans to work freely. The thousand collisions of Light, Scent and Sound seemed half-colored, like October mornings. Shape, anti-crystalline and flexible, acquired a vegetable slackness. Thought ploughed ahead with unrestricted expressions of tenderness, scarcely making contact, enemies of sensuality and noise.

  That was at the outset, in the morning. Luc tottered from one item of furniture to another, sometimes sunk into an armchair, sometimes dragging himself along like a tortoise. His head, a trifle heavy on his neck, seemed to him to be his carapace.

  These cerebral and sensory ramblings took firmer hold toward mid-day. Quite involuntarily, effortlessly, as if by a mechanical disposition, the preludes of the morning combined to recreate Luc’s old state of ill-health, in a mnemonic process similar to that of a drunkard who can only find a hidden object while in a similar state of drunkenness. The weak joints and problems of articulation he had suffered in his sixth year reappeared, the hardness and excessive softness of a bed during bouts of malarial fever.

  Delicate migraines revived, refined states of existence in which the dorsal spine and the chest attained the charm and melancholy of superhuman and plaintive organs. He also reverted to the days of dilated and tired pupils, when shapes and colors are gently monstrous and cruel. Oh, the torment of nature assailing a poor organism, the fluid, ferocious and angelic play of complementary colors and electrical potentials on morbid flesh, and senses slightly deviated to the right or left along planes of unknown polarization!

  Above all, the memory reappeared of times when Luc grew too rapidly, when his arms weighed heavily upon his shoulders, or, after a short walk, he felt a weariness between his shoulder-blades. In those days he had lain down on the ground, stepping himself in complete sadness. At the slightest spring breeze he had felt cold.

  The Universe seemed very long, very narrow and quite unsteady. He felt the fever in blades of grass, in his clothing, in the feathers in his pillow, and especially in the odor of water, the stirring of aquatic animals. On July evenings, he got up in the night, suffocating, and opened his window, to feel the fresh air on his naked body—but the coolness quickly became icy, and cold fever flowed over his horizon, over the trees in the orchard. If he covered himself up again then, the heat returned more ferociously, and the fever was as heavily warm as the vapor of a Turkish bath.

  The night felt sharp, the croaking of the frogs was sharp, the stars were threatening, the perfume of the orchard injurious. He was afraid; he would have liked to hide but could not do it, for in a corner or underneath his bedclothes he was immediately overtaken by the black fear of asphyxia…

  Melancholy scenes were intimately connected with these memories of adolescence:

  The evening when his father died, the whisperings, the sound of doors, perhaps other things, all alerted him; a breath of horror shoved him out of his room and set him prowling along the stairs. Then, having seen his mother and the nurse come out, he went down on tiptoe, and went into the mysterious room. Someone had begun, and then stopped, dressing him; the cadaver lay half-naked, with a stony smile, the eyelids closed, the funereal arms folded across his broad chest, in the spectral flickering of candlelight. Luc fled outside, toward the corner of the sky in which the red crescent was descending.

  Oh, the funereal grandeur of that night, the oscillation of the solitary heart, the information of sobbing, voices whispering in the meadow, and on the pale shore of the sky, between two mounds, obsession with the pale bed, the pale candles, the pale cadaver. When he was weary and drained of strength, sitting in a corner of the path, for a long time he saw two eyelids lifting over the gleam of two dead eyes, for a long time he saw the dead man rising up on the horizon, the smile on the blue lips wandering amid the stars, the funereal arms folded over the bright breast of the Milky Way…

  Once, even as a human being, Luc had loved a certain corner of the earth, a sickly wrinkle on the face of Pan, so sad, so personal. Bushes tormented by necroses grew there, with anemic trunks, yellowed leaves and worm-eaten branches dying of ulcers. Alburnums with pitted bark and frightful vermin everywhere, cancers and vegetable farcies. Holed and tattered leaves, hordes of parasitic fungi, plaintive chloroses—and yet it was life, a painful effort in the midst of implacable fatality!

  “How,” Luc murmured, “in examining these memories of morbidity or heartbreak, which are so clear, can I avoid attributing to some enemy—some interval of semi-dyspepsia, some prolonged dazzle during weeks of divine toil—a creation of knowledge and poetry, to every order of malady or state of disequilibrium, a very particular development of the art of metaphysics, a development that neither threatens nor is threatened by other factors if the disease passes a certain level of oscillation? The ecstasy of imagining little cells laboring in the depths of the organism! The condensers and minuscule piles, at every deformation, continually inducing the passing blood and forcing the deposition of certain basic or acidic atoms, according to whether the lesion affects a positive or negative form! Even in the most inorganic corners, the aggregations are minimally affected by the precise idiosyncrasy of the disease. In the nervous and vascular centers, there is not only the aggregation, the synthetic architecture of the edifice, but a torsion of every atom—a modification that will, perhaps, subsist!”

  2.

  For several days the illness remained composed by slight migraines and Luc’s joints still echoed the fragility and cramps of a growing and malnourished adolescent: a slight anguish in the hips, an uncertainty in the vertebrae, the taste of fruit and shellfish. When he had stretched out or curled up for a quarter of an hour in the depths of his rocking-chair, it seemed when he got up that his sensitivity was cured. The atmosphere became charged with delight. Then, pain in the lower back, moistness in the palms, and every hair distilling a bead of sweat at its root. At the same time, a mercurial glow, with a sort of grey-green tint, settled over everything.

  Luc felt that his connecting nerves were losing their equilibrium, furnishing contradictory thermal currents with disharmonic extensions and contractions of his muscles. He tottered, he was exceedingly miserable, but delights and etherizations of his flesh consoled him, like summer breezes on an arid plateau.

  “What is it that the atoms are creating?”

  In that curiosity, he thought he could perceive the arrival of currents of pain in the encephalum: this one a depressor of energies; this one an awakener of old ideas torpid beneath the strata of the grey matter; this one a confuser of logic, this other a provoker of prescience, together producing some sonorous phenomenon and some luminous phenomenon which would otherwise never have been fused; this one discovering confused analogies; this one predisposing the cells to adopt a perception of the external world impossible in any other state of equilibrium.

  A mystery equal—and superior, in its delicacy—to that of a monk dreaming of spirits and angels, which transported Luc into the utmost depths of matter and force, where human flesh is, so far as we are concerned, the maximum of complication.

  Slumped in his chair again, his heartbeat accelerated, its jolts torturing him, he persevered nonetheless in pursuing his dream of panmetamorphosis—except that, weary of imagining magnetic currents and molecular evolutions, he preferred to observe the passage of impressions:

  Violet colored patches float above the floor like raindrops, eventually uniting in a sheet. The sheet quivers like a fluid in the wind, then like a gulf from which an amber vapor is rising. Then the sheet or gulf is clarified, transmuted into pale sulfur-yellows and indecisive off-whites. Winglets appear, in billions, tremulous columns of tiny insects flying above the pale and dark patches.

  Luc murmurs: “The violet transforming itself into yellow, and the black into white, is the physical play of complementarities…but I’m evidently deceived, and it’s no longer my illness that is evoking these trichoceres, but the simple memor
y that, in the family of Tipula,33 the columns of some species like to float over white surfaces, and others over black surfaces, by virtue of the profound philosophy of preferences, against which our abstract logic struggles eternally.”

  Forms circulate before him, rising up and descending in curved trajectories, without relief, painted on empty space like Assyrian symbols on stone. He ends up discovering their regular movement in the quivering of an agitated weather-vane on a roof facing him, which, set before the Sun, is casting its shadow on the window-sill.

  For other phenomena, metallic noises, tapping noises, sudden whiffs of odors not present in his surroundings, insipid tastes on his tongue, he can find no immediate application, but he takes note of them anyway, hoping to discover therein the psychology of his illness.

  3.

  Luc’s suffering grew worse.

  Fruits and shellfish became repulsive to him, then even the slight perfume of lime and orange, and the taste of sugar. He wished for tastelessness and odorlessness, a clear atmosphere devoid of sunlight, the immobility of the landscape. The pallor of his face became earthen, his back became weaker, breaking out in sweat at the slightest movement.

  Luc felt a part of what he had originally been disappearing—something delicate and refined. His sluggishness, his slow, painful respiration, the feverish taste in his mouth, were remaking his substance, a diseased dynamic as forceful as full health. The electric flux, at first gently disturbing, was transformed into the gross charges and discharges of poles and condensers. Congestions were perpetually warming some part of his body, chills appearing in others, then, abruptly, a boiling sensation, a great equilibrating effort that made his heart and spine shiver.

  Through this distress, however, Luc persisted in interrogating his brain, in observing the history of these crises and drawing it out of very distant and infinitesimal phenomena. It was a time of great hope and great despair, the immersion of his soul in more ardent invocations of the mystery of forces. The earliest times of his scientific life reappeared, when he had hoped to reform laws, construct a new theory of the Universe, discover the essential nature of things. He saw once again his immature theoretical book, the vague immensity of formulas, the peremptory tone of demonstrations. As the stages of his fever progressed, the smile that these memories brought forth transformed itself into a return of certainty, a reinflation of the soul. He thought then that, perhaps, with a little more meditation and a little more patience, those large hopes might be resolved, revealing the reformation of universal theories to him. He forgot his delicate work, his work on physiologized physics, on extrasubtle chemistry, the illness beginning to rob him of the supreme qualities of his being.

  The stages of the disease continue to progress. From sluggishness and dullness he progressed to intoxication. After long writhings a drastic increase in temperature occurred, his periphery shivering, his skin livid and glacial, the roots of his hair coming out while hot flushes ran beneath the dermis. His eyes bulging, his breath harsh and gasping, his teeth clenching in vain, and chattering, Luc imagined himself prey to an organic phenomenon analogous to the spheroidal state.

  Then came all the phenomena provoking chills: radiation, evaporation, chemical mixtures swelling in abscesses where the nerves and human blood capable of dividing temperature into zones, according to the direction of vibration, according to positive and negative undulations, were refined into mere torsions and relaxations.

  Soon, the increased chill imposed an impression of Crypts on his poor flagellated body, a glacial and violent intoxication and an insatiable thirst, and delirium displayed him to himself as a symbol of the Earth. In the same way that his health was like a fine season in which the surface is mild and warm, and a slight illness like the anemia of days when vegetation perishes, now he was a wintry symbol, a surface of ice extending through space while the terrestrial bosom heats up and broods, volcanoes rumbling beneath the glacier snows. This was no longer, for him, some allegory but a sharp truth, almost the certainty that a human being, not only in the brain but throughout the body, is an imitation and reduction of his habitat, reflecting the phases of the planet moving through space.

  In consequence of these crises, he was afflicted by a fear and an immense desire for full health, the combination of which brought back all the periods in which he adored movement, especially certain extreme scenes that marked the summits of his corporeal life, like these:

  Over the plateaus of his homeland, where the vegetation is hard and slow, in the black declivities through which glacial waters flow, the light body of twenty-year-old Luc bounded untiringly. An entire winter of ancestral shadows awoke within him, making his soul bellicose, eager to brave perils. He went up, therefore, to the crests where the glacial snows are treacherous; he filled his arteries with magnetic blood; he stung his flesh with nocturnal storms and precipitated himself, naked, into icy torrents. His hair grew over his shoulders, the fire of the Sicambri34 lit up in his pupils; he lived with the spirit of the forests, the rude psyche of meadows, the dialogues of caverns; the alacrity of his muscles made up for their slenderness.

  Now, through the pride of age, through the labyrinths of his studious life, he had retained from that epoch a barbarous pride in the following incident. In the middle of a gorge in that Realm there was a ledge jutting out toward the other edge, leaving a gap of about 20 meters. At the thought of jumping across it, Luc experienced a frisson, perhaps an instinctive memory of an ancestral herdsman who had attempted the adventure. One morning when cirrus clouds were chilling the firmament, and an angry wind bounded toward the Sun, with the intoxication of the cold and the vertigo of the snow at his temples, Luc marched toward the Realm. When he got there, he stepped back to prepare for the jump, bracing his slender calves. He set off in a rush, and reached the ledge. There, standing over the abyss, as his heart thrilled with delight, the cry of victorious nomads, the cry of massive warrior spirits rose to his lips; he would never forget the profound joy of it, the sensation of spending animality…

  One day, he wandered for 12 hours among oak trees. The leaves silently filtered the rays of sunlight. Humble, in the moist bosom of the Mother, the cryptogams were borrowing the shade. Luc sat down, and at first his heart beat rapidly, following labor with inertia. Then a gentle weight, in accord with the susurrus of foliage, and a subtle light between his meninges, warm and pale and his bones becoming fluid, his forehead dipped and his flesh took on the unconsciousness of plants…

  Meanwhile, through the filtering branches, a kind of speech fell upon him, an insinuating breath lifted up his hair. The Earth had moved on, the forest plunged into its nocturnal cone. A window opened above Luc’s head, framed with trembling lace, in the wall of an oak. Through it slid a sidereal traveler, a pink Arcturian arrow, pure and fresh, after such a peregrination through the Expanse! All around, the opaque wood was traversed by a faint vegetable phosphorescence. A psalm wept on the branchiate cords, the twisted boles, the silky cymbals of the leaves.

  Luc walked on, sometimes bumping into trees, hatching a thousand little active, palpitating dreams, amorously mingled with the roots of his hair. His blood traveled, vividly red, from his breast to his brain, alimenting his being; the divine tenebrous forest was like an incarnation of his nervous system, a syllabication of Pan, evocative of hamadryads…

  The things that inhabit us and wish to live, the atoms that sigh the canticle of Love, rose up one morning all together, growling in Luc’s breast. The orchard was displaying its spring Greenery, the petals of the great Sacrifice, the snows of germination and the tips of branches everywhere. Harmonious pollens were flying in the Light, the male birds singing their triumphant battle-songs, the rivers bearing ovules, and the old earth was trembling with the laughter of sunlight. Then, Luc went out beneath the stamens, into sunken paths where the nave of hedgerows concealed adventures, and met the other.

  Little virgin, he knows the cashmeres of your throat, your confidence like the whispers of rivers, your grace s
haped by myriads of human generations, your hair spun on the wheel of the ages, the threats of your sex-appeal; he has no fear of Death, of long months attentive to the folds of your dress, the slave of your gestures.

  He submits to you until the end of May, when the manifold arborescence grows heavy, when the beetles are more dazzling on the undersides of corollas, when the light feet of the breeze settle on the edges of storm-clouds, on the crests of precipices, when the litanies of Eros drift, and the growling fluids of the Earth espouse those of the Firmament, generating the rapid rains, fabricators of incense and intoxication!

  The fevers eased; an extreme debility of the muscles succeeded them. In Luc’s brain, after the gross turbulence of the malady, there was calm, but also a diminution of intellectual vitality. Reduced to thoughts of a secondary order, he descended further into infancy. Soon, impressions of the age of the desert island held exclusive sway in his brain.

  He forgot his scientific preoccupations, or, rather, retained only the elements that he had possessed when he had dreamed of Rafts, Voyages and Oases. If, sometimes, fragments of complex problems still haunted him, he was almost immediately wearied by them. Shreds of his memory tore away like the bark from the trunks of plane-trees. The world appeared to him as a simple mystery, the marvels of which were as they should be, and the blessings and sadnesses of which existed without motive and without measure.

  It seemed that the elegance and distinction of the early phase of the malady returned then, but thinner in complexity. He resavored the timid awakenings of the charming young dreamer that Luc had been at the age of ten, amorous of shelter amid moist vegetation, kind to the frogs that fled from the edges of fountains, not inclined to “material appropriation,” and thus ignorant of the ferocious joys of little owners of insects and fledglings.