The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  One of the flying creatures, as large as an eagle, alighted on a rocky ridge a hundred meters from the aeronauts.

  “It has at least six eyes!” the young woman exclaimed.

  “Seven to be exact, Violaine,” said Jean, “and three feet—but here come the quintupeds.”

  There were three of them, at the foot of the slope. One seemed to be a caricature of a leopard, in spite of its rectangular maw, its multiple eyes and its five feet. The other two, brick-red in color, were more reminiscent of bears, although they had some kind of felt instead of hair. All three animals were about the size of Nordic wolves.

  “Carnivores or herbivores?” Antoine muttered.

  Each of the animals had six eyes of different shades—sapphire, ruby, emerald, amethyst—gleaming even more brightly than the eyes of our felines in semi-darkness.

  “Our insects also have multiple eyes,” Violaine remarked.

  “Yes, but their sight is so limited that they’re hardly aware of it.”

  “Except in their own way, which permits them, in all innocence—lice, fleas, bugs, mosquitoes—to exploit us as prey. That’s their good luck.”

  “No more than it is ours! I think that if insects could see us clearly, as we see them, they would have exterminated humans a long time ago, along with many other mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.”

  At that moment, Violaine exclaimed: “Oh—they’re herbivores!”

  The three animals had, indeed, begun to browse, strangely, with the horny arcs that served them as teeth.

  “Hey!”

  The herbivores were running away. An apocalyptic animal had just appeared, the size of a rhinoceros, with a head like a truncated pyramid and the eyes of an octopus scattered over a giant face. Its pelt was blue and silky, similar in texture to the tall silk hats of yesteryear.

  “It’s frightful and magnificent!” Violaine exclaimed.

  Its immense eyes had just perceived the humans—who, having emerged from the Stellarium, had advanced to the edge of the plateau. It uttered a roar—you might have mistaken it for a blast from a trombone—and then bounded up the slope.

  “I believe it intends to devour us,” said Antoine, placidly. “Let’s see about that, comrades.” He pointed his ray-gun at the wild beast and fired a beam of radiation. The brute stopped in alarm, took two or three steps forward, then retreated and fled with meteoric speed.

  “It bounds as well as a tiger!” remarked Jean, admiringly.

  “Six meter leaps.”

  The carnivore had already covered the best part of a mile when other beasts came into view, one about the size of a wolf, the color of sulfur, with a muzzle like a huge seashell and a helical mouth, the other as black as night, with a long parabolic body and five spatulate feet, which seemed to be crawling and walking at the same time. The latter was chasing the former. Both stopped at the sight of the blue colossus, which reached the sulfur-colored beast in three bounds.

  “It puts me in mind of a prehistoric scene,” said Jean. “In fact, these monsters are no more surprising than the fabulous monsters of the Secondary Era, or even the fauna of the virgin forests that, until recently, humans permitted to grow over vast territories.”

  “If Mars didn’t have other kinds of life than that of animals and plants of which this location offers us specimens,” said Antoine, “as well as the Tripeds, who represent a pseudo-humankind, the originality of the planet would be meager—but with its Zoomorphs and Ethereals, I reckon it to be a creation superior to our sublunar bubble.”

  “Temporarily, if Earth follows a slower and more ample progress, as it almost certainly will.”

  “We shall have equivalents of the Zoomorphs and Ethereals in time.”

  “Us!” exclaimed Violaine, laughing. “I believe it!”

  After a hesitation, the black beast had retreated in the face of superior force, and the leviathan had just opened up its victim, from which a golden liquid was spurting.

  “All things considered, and in spite of my grudge against the Zoomorphs,” said Jean, “their manner of nourishing themselves at the expense of the weak is less gross than that ferocious devouring.”

  “And among the Ethereals, there’s probably no contest for elements or energy.”

  “In that case, old tapir, progress has a direction in this small world?”

  Raising his arms in a gesture of uncertainty, Antoine replied: “Let’s try to make contact with our friends the Tripeds.”

  “Let’s hope that we haven’t mistaken their habitat. They might cook us.”

  “Do you think so?” said Jean. “Our legend has surely spread throughout Tripedy; I think we’ll be made welcome everywhere. The real reason for preferring our friends to others is that we’ve created a language that they alone understand. Anyway, they’re nearby.”

  “Over there, behind the agamic forest.”

  A few moments later, we were flying over the forest whose enormous vegetable structures sometimes resembled mushrooms as big as oak trees, sometimes trees like mosses or fabulously magnified lichens.

  “The clearing,” Jean announced.

  It was, indeed, the clearing in which I had stayed while Jean, having gone into the forest, had been captured by Tripeds.

  “We thought you were lost here,” I murmured, putting my hand on our friend’s shoulder. “We didn’t suspect that it was the threshold of the promised land.”

  “Let’s go down,” said Antoine.

  The Stellarium landed in the middle of the clearing, between four enormous blocks of red and green stone, one of which was vaguely reminiscent of a sea-lion.

  Jean, Violaine and I disembarked, while Antoine remained on watch in the Stellarium.

  “It was over there, Jean, that you disappeared, between those two rocks.”

  Jean started laughing. “I shall disappear there again,” he cried.

  “Not without us,” Violaine begged.

  “I want to!” said Jean. “There’s no danger.”

  “Let’s be careful just the same,” I said. “It’s possible that our friends have moved away.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We advanced as slowly as possible, for as soon as we adopted the rhythm of terrestrial walking we began to take huge bounds.

  “Tortoise pace, eh?”

  All three of us stopped, almost simultaneously.

  “There they are!” cried Jean. “Our friends—or some of them, at least.”

  “Are they really the same ones?” asked Violaine.

  “I recognize one of them,” I said.

  “And I recognize three,” Jean added.

  There were six, who had taken a step back when they first saw us—but they were immediately reassured, and one of them was already “talking” to us—by which I mean that he was expressing himself by means of signs created by the Tripeds and ourselves.

  Violaine examined the fantastic creatures avidly. She recognized them easily; we had brought a great many photographs back to Earth. Her astonishment was no less keen for that, and increased as the Tripeds came to meet us.

  “What beautiful eyes!” she exclaimed. “They’re ornamented with them all over! Their complexion is admirable; our most beautiful petals hardly manifest shades as delicate.”

  We continued going forward to meet the Tripeds and soon reached them. Jean had entered into conversation with one of them. We learned that nothing had changed since our departure, but that the invasion of the Zoomorphs was continuing, albeit slowly, in various parts of the territory occupied by the Tripeds, animals and plants.

  “But have they crossed our barriers?”

  “No, and we’ve succeeded in constructing others for our brothers in the most endangered regions.” But he added, in a melancholy fashion: “We’re going to disappear!”

  Shivering, Violaine watched the Triped’s gestures, and her brother’s, with a passionate delight. She confessed to me that she was disorientated by the strange limbs and the absence of those fragments
of flesh, the nose and ears, that are graceless in themselves and often ugly, comic or baroque, not to say repulsive, in our fellow humans.

  “I shall get used to it very quickly, though,” she added. “The form of the cheeks is as exquisite as their hue, and the entire head seems as harmonious as a beautiful amphora from Athens or Corinth. Lit by the magical fire of their eyes, I think I’ll end up finding them beautiful.”

  “You’ll find their females more beautiful still,” I said.

  “I know that they’re quite different.”

  “As you’ve been able to see in our photographs: taller, with thinner faces. You’ll recognize them immediately, although they don’t have signs as visible as breasts.”

  The conversation between Jean and the Triped was continuing. As it was mute, I could follow it fairly well while listening to Violaine.

  “You already know that our friends’ dwellings are underground. It’s a domain of warm and well-lit caves and tunnels. They’re able to live there secure from Zoomorph invasion, but they need a rather extensive surface area because of their plant nourishment. They find water in the caverns.”

  “It’s their water, isn’t it? Which we can only drink after purification?”

  “Transformation, Violaine, for chemical intervention is necessary.”

  There was a pause in the conversation between the Triped and Jean, who had quickly asked to see the Implicit Chief. The Tripeds invited us to follow them.

  We soon arrived at a kind of natural porch. A gently-sloping corridor descended toward the caves. After walking for five minutes there was a bend in the corridor. The Tripeds lit the way for us with the aid of little blocks of stone that emitted a yellow phosphorescence, bright enough to allow us to see. It was a soft light that did not penetrate very far but was quite sufficient for short-distance viewing. Little by little, the wall of the tunnel became phosphorescent in their turn; that light, almost imperceptible at first, became increasingly distinct thereafter.

  In this fashion we reached a cave in which the accumulated light permitted us to see for a long way.

  “Splendid!” Violaine murmured. “A cathedral that could contain St. Peter’s in Rome twenty times over.”

  Regularly-shaped excavations were hollowed out in the walls, from which dozens of Tripeds emerged. Among them was the Implicit Chief—and close behind him was the female who had helped me to discover “a magical delight that exalted me as the goddesses had once exalted mystical Hellenes, and a tenderness with no analogy to any known tenderness.”54

  Would there be the fatal deception of recommencements? Already, an infinitely delicate atmosphere was emanating from her. Violaine lost her prestige; her beauty was dulled and blurred by mist; she was too similar to myself.

  Besides, Grace was hypnotic; she was contemplating me in a dazed manner. “It’s inconceivable,” she whispered.

  As the young Martian female came forward, her atmosphere resumed its “nascent state”—that strange and subtle voluptuousness with no resemblance to any Earthly voluptuousness, which seemed to endow me with a new sense.

  I would search in vain for a comparison; any metaphor would be vain and deceptive. Neither the vegetal perfumes of flowers, leaves or herbs, nor the intoxication of mornings on which it seems that the universe had just been born, nor the purest love has any resemblance to that sensation, much less love in its brutal state.

  Only Grace had made me feel that on the surface of Mars, although she had very beautiful sisters. It is probable that particular affinities and mysterious mutual influences were involved, since nothing similar had been produced in Antoine, or even in Jean, who was more sensitive and emotional than me.

  “I dared not believe that you would come back!” she said. “It’s too great a happiness for us to see one another again!”

  Absence had not caused her to forget any of the sign language created by the Tripeds and us. Her joy radiated around her, and rendered her more fascinating.

  “Only the impossible could have stopped me!” I replied.

  Pure as our affection was, we did not want to say any more, not out of modesty—that word has no meaning here—but because our intimacy was shy. At least, it was for me—but I sensed that it was for her too, either by intuition or illusion.

  A crowd had gathered, wondering and joyful. Its silence—the eternal silence of the Tripeds, for whom sound does not exist—was, however, bizarrely tumultuous. I can find no other term to express the luminous delight that brightened their faces: so many sparkling eyes comprised a kind of astral illumination, reminiscent of a living crowd of constellations.

  The conversation with the Implicit Chief lasted for some time; it was agreed that we would discuss with him and the most learned Tripeds the means of combating the Zoomorph invasion everywhere. This time, it would be necessary to take account of the threatened peoples—in fact, all the peoples of the periphery in contact with the enemy and not yet provided with defensive apparatus.

  We already knew that the domain occupied by the Tripeds and their realm must be equal to twice the area of Europe. The rest of the surface, as vast as Asia and America combined, had escaped them.55

  “Many peoples have already been initiated into the system of defense that you created for us,” said the Implicit Chief, “but they have not yet tried it out. It seems, too, that the dwarf Zoomorphs are becoming more resistant to the radiations. If they adapt themselves completely, the danger they pose will be as serious as the large ones, for they reproduce more rapidly.”

  “Yes,” said Jean, “that’s the rule on Earth, and probably a universal rule.”

  The Implicit Chief spontaneously raised the question of our supplies. Anticipating our return, he had prepared drinkable water—terrestrial water—according to the prescriptions left by Jean, and had sowed some cereals and spores of an edible lichen that we had brought on our first voyage. The cereals had only yielded negligible results, but the lichens had multiplied profusely. That was good news, for, although scarcely substantial, the lichens would at least provide a purified nutriment with which to avoid scurvy. Not that we had omitted to vitalize our condensed nutriments, but, if our sojourn were to be prolonged further than that of our first voyage, our cultures might be “anemiated.” Then again, we would take pleasure in eating fresher vegetable matter; this time, we had brought seeds originating from arctic and mountain regions.

  The conference with the Implicit Chief needed to be prolonged even further. Grace and I agreed to see one another the following day.

  “Who knows whether we might not succeed in growing a few nutritious vegetables?” said Jean, when we were back on the Stellarium.

  “It would be the beginning of the colonization of Mars!” Violaine exclaimed, enthusiastically.

  “Perhaps, one day, Mars will belong to humans,” said Antoine.

  “Oh!” I cried. “I don’t want that at all! The native ferocity of our peers still persists in the 20th century. There are brutes on Earth who would pitilessly exterminate our Triped friends.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “They’d reduce them to slavery, then,” said Violaine, indignantly.

  “A moderate slavery might suit our friends,” Antoine remarked.

  “No, no!” I said, with disgust. “It would be abominable. The Tripeds aren’t unhappy. Their decadence has ceased to make them suffer. Down with the terrestrial colonizers!”

  “What will be, will be,” Antoine retorted, phlegmatically. “In any case, the hour has not come, nor even the century. If humans are to become true conquerors of Mars, it won’t happen for 200 or 300 years.”

  “Well,” said Jean, “I believe that it won’t happen. There’s too little air, and I can’t imagine an entire population rigged out in respiratory apparatus, which would be unbearable on a permanent basis.”

  “Unbearable? Go on! I got used to it before.”

  “Because you spent the better part of the time aboard the Stellarium. But why shouldn’t the colonists buil
d dwellings equipped with air-condensers? The cultivation of the soil, over large areas, would only take up a small part of the laborers’ time.”

  “The colonists would be essentially sedentary, then?” I asked. “A scarcely tempting ideal.”

  “Would it be very different from what happens on Earth, for the majority of people?”

  “Not for children, or for a respectable fraction of adolescents.”

  We paused to watch a herd of animals grazing in a large clearing. You might have thought them strange serpents clad in a sort of orange cotton wool—serpents with feet, five of them, according to the norm—with heads like large beetroots. They did not seem unduly troubled by our presence, although they manifested a keen agitation on perceiving that they were being watched by two enormous Aerians that were hovering over the clearing.

  “The eagles of Mars!” Violaine exclaimed.

  “More like condors.”

  Their five emerald-colored wings were vibrating gently; we could see their multiple eyes sparkling. Instead of beaks they had enormous funnel-like muzzles. The orange animals stopped grazing; they huddled together, tremulously.

  “An old terrestrial scene, in sum, in spite of the differences between the organisms,” said Jean. “Mars has engendered ferocious life, exactly like our world. If the Tripeds had ended up going to war, their ancestors would have massacred one another just like ours.”

  “In that sense, Zoomorphic life will be a progress toward less cruelty, since their prey is merely exploited.”

  “What about the Ethereals?” asked Violaine.

  “We don’t really know anything about them yet, but we assume that they don’t destroy one another,” Jean replied. “How I’d like to find a means of communicating with them!”

  Having described several circles, the Aerians fell like stones. One of them seized a serpentine creature; the other paused at an altitude of a few meters.

  “Let’s play the role of providence.”

  “We only need to move forward,” Violaine affirmed, taking the lead at a run.

  She was not mistaken. On seeing this upright creature arrive, quickly followed by two others, the Aerians resumed their flight, while the herbivores, huddled together, remained motionless, all a-tremble.