The Mysterious Force

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “In the letter that you sent me,” Ironcastle remarked, “you said that you didn’t know whether your plants’ actions emerged from intelligence. It seems to me, however, that all this requires it.”

  “Perhaps—and perhaps not. There’s a certain logic to the plants’ actions, but that logic corresponds so closely with circumstances that it’s almost identical, in quality and quantity, when it has to ward off identical perils—in sum, it’s so lacking in caprice that I can’t compare it, in itself, to human intelligence.”

  “It must be a sort of instinct, then?”

  “Nor that. Instinct is crystallized; its foresight produces repetitive actions, while the actions of the dominant plants often manifest a diversity of effects. They respond to stimuli, whatever the stimulus might be, provided that it is a threat. In a sense, the vegetal reaction resembles a chemical phenomenon, but with a spontaneity and a diversity that resembles intelligence. It is, therefore, an unclassifiable phenomenon.”

  “You believe, without qualification, that the role of plants infallibly dominates that of animals and humans?”

  “I’m certain of it. Here, everything is subservient to the needs of the sovereign plants. Animal resistance would be futile. For myself, I haven’t discovered any means of escaping that norm.”

  “But what if a race as energetic and creative as the Anglo-Saxon were to establish itself here?”

  “My conviction is that it would be obliged to submit. Besides, as you’ve been able to deduce, even from partial observation, the reign of the superior plants does not have the destructive character of human rule. Animals are not brutally threatened; they may live in accordance with the laws, and are not constrained to any kind of labor.”

  “What about its evolution?”

  “You have seen that it differs a great deal from evolution elsewhere. For instance, the reptiles aren’t inferior to the mammals. They’re almost viviparous, often intelligent and often furry. As for the pseudo-humans, they present some analogy with the marsupials. The women possess a pouch in which the children conclude their development—but that pouch is different in origin from the marsupial pouch. As you’ve observed, the body of these creatures is both scaly and hairy. They have a sense that we don’t have—I call it the spatial sense—which completes the eye. Their anatomy doesn’t permit articulate speech, but they express themselves perfectly with the aid of the modulations of their whistling, which involve the pitch of the sound, the harmonics, certain alternations and repetitions, and also long and short notes. The number of combinations they have at their disposal is, to tell the truth, indefinite, and would surpass the combinations of our syllables if that were necessary. They don’t seem to have any sense of plastic beauty; the men and women, if I may use those terms, are only seduced by one another’s sonorous qualities.”

  “So it’s music that presides over selection?”

  “A strange music that has no significance to our ears…and would have none to those of birds. However, it must have beauties that we cannot suspect—rhythms without analogy with ours. I’ve tried to form an idea of it—some notion, however vague—but I had to give it up. It was impossible for me to discover anything resembling a melody, a harmony or a measure. As for their degree of social development, it doesn’t exceed the level of the tribe—tribes composed of several district clans. I haven’t been able to discover any trace of religiosity. They can fabricate weapons and tools, subtle poisons and powerful soporifics, and mineral textiles more analogous to flexible felt than cloth; they live in the rocks, where they hollow out extremely elaborate cave cities.

  “You can converse with them?”

  “By means of gestures. Our senses are too obtuse to be able to adapt to their language. I’ve perfected a vocabulary of signs, with the aid of which we can exchange all practical ideas, but it has been impossible for me to surpass pre-abstraction—I mean, abstraction that relates to everyday events. As for ‘ideal’ abstraction, nothing.”

  “Are you safe among them?”

  “Completely. They have no concept of crime—which is to say, the infraction of the rules of the race or accepted conventions—which gives rise to a singular honesty, as sure and infallible as the action of gravity. Any alliance with them is irrevocable.”

  “They’re better men than we are, then!” Guthrie declared.

  “Morally, without a doubt. Moreover, the general morality of the environment is superior to the morality of our world, for there’s a sort of automatic morality in the Mimosan hegemony, thanks to which all destruction is limited to what is strictly necessary. Even among the carnivorous beasts, you won’t encounter any wastage of flesh anywhere. In any case, many carnivores are merely sanguinivores; they take blood from their victims without killing them or draining them completely.”

  There was a pause, while servants brought unknown fruits, which were reminiscent of strawberries—but strawberries as big as oranges.

  “All in all,” Philippe said, “you haven’t been unhappy here?”

  “I haven’t thought about happiness or unhappiness. A permanent curiosity keeps my thoughts, sentiments and impressions alert. I don’t think I’ll ever have the courage to quit this land.”

  Hareton sighed. An avid curiosity was awakening in him too, but his eyes turned toward Muriel and Philippe; the destiny of those young creatures lay elsewhere.

  “You will be obliged to keep me company for four months,” said Darnley. “The rainy season begins in a few weeks; it will render travel impracticable.

  Partially consoled, Hareton thought that he could make precious observations and carry out incomparable experiments in four months.

  “Besides,” Samuel went on, addressing himself to Sydney, Sir George and Philippe rather than Hareton, of whose disinterest he was aware, “you won’t go back ruined. There’s enough gold and precious stones in this red earth to make a thousand fortunes…”

  Guthrie liked the perishable things of this world too much to be insensible to riches. Sir George had dreamed for a long time of restoring his country houses at Hornfield and Hawktower, which were threatened by imminent ruin. Philippe was thinking of both Muriel and Monique, created for a luminous life.

  “I’ll show you the vain treasures that geological convulsions have formed in the ground,” said their host. He summoned one of the men and said: “Bring the blue boxes, Darnis.”

  “Isn’t that exposing the brave lad to temptation?” asked Guthrie.

  “If you knew him, you wouldn’t ask that. Darnis has the soul of a good dog and that of a good servant united in the same creature. He knows, too, that if I ever return to America—he’s from Florida—he’ll be as rich as he desires. That doesn’t cast a shadow of doubt in his mind. In the meantime, he’s perfectly content with his lot. Here are the specimens!”

  Darnis had reappeared, with three rather spacious caskets, which he placed on the cleared table. Samuel opened them nonchalantly, and Guthrie, Farnham and Maranges shivered. The boxes contained immense fortunes in diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and virgin gold. These treasures were not shiny: the raw gems looked like any minerals, but Sydney and Sir George recognized them, and Philippe did not doubt Darnley’s competence.

  After a brief pause, while all his dreams were dazzling his imagination, Guthrie burst out laughing.

  “We have a magic wand!” he said.

  Hareton and Samuel Darnley considered the stones with a sincere indifference.

  Afterword

  “Le Cataclysme” must have seemed distinctly odd to its initial readers, who had not yet had a chance to read “La Légende sceptique,” in which the seed of the idea is contained in the chapter translated as “Planetary Physiology” in volume one of this series. In that essay, Rosny had not yet developed the notion of the “fourth universe,” in which the universe we observe is merely one of a vast number, each composed of its own system of mass/energy, but he was already prepared to suggest that the heavens might be full of bodies composed on an essentiall
y alien matter, capable of interacting with ours by way of exotic forces. The idea is further extrapolated in La Force mystérieuse, in which there is no meteor shower to advertise the possible presence of the alien matter as it moves through our solar system, and in which the effects of the interaction are much more varied and extensive.

  The notion of a shared life that features in “The Mysterious Force” was to be echoed again in “Dans le monde des Variants” (tr. in vol. 2 as “In the World of the Variants”), but in the latter story it is represented as something enduring rather than transient, albeit so tangential to the human world that only one exceptional individual participates in the duality. That participation enhances the fleeting Utopian—or, strictly speaking, eupsychian—element of the story told in “The Mysterious Force.” The notion that human physiology is ill-adapted to the quest for happiness, especially in a sexual context, was to become increasingly exaggerated in Rosny’s speculative works once it had been broached in “The Mysterious Force.” The eupsychian modifications he subsequently attached to alternative relationships and ways of being were not counterbalanced by such terrible costs as the “carnivorism” inflicted on the gestalts featured in “The Mysterious Force.”

  In one of the footnotes to “The Mysterious Force,” I called attention to the slight peculiarity of the list of mushrooms said to be cultivated in the farm featured in the plot, and, particularly to the fact that the species singled out to play a crucial role in the physicists’ subsequent experiments is the highly toxic fly-agaric—a fact subject to some slight concealment in the text by virtue of the choice of an alternative name (fausse oronge). Although fly-agarics would not be cultivated as food in the same way as porcinis and other edible varieties, however, there is one motive that might inspire their cultivation: their hallucinogenic quality, due to their production of an alkaloid called (in consequence of its source) muscarine. Given that the phenomena associated with the temporary interaction of the two forms of energy include various psychotropic phenomena, Rosny’s choice of agaric mushrooms as a potential explanatory link might be significant. If so, it might also be relevant to note that the genus Mimosa, which features so significantly in “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure,” and whose hypothetical members are there imagined to be capable of inducing exotic psychotropic effects akin to those featured in “The Cataclysm,” includes Mimosa tenuiflora, the source of a powerful hallucinogen long used in shamanic rituals, initially named ayahuasca after the ritual but nowadays known as DMT.

  As none of this is explicit in the texts, it might be a coincidence—but if so, it is surely a remarkable one. It is worth noting that many of Rosny’s other scientific romances contain passages that would be more plausible if they were hallucinatory, and that it would not have been very surprising had the imaginative content of such stories as “Nymphaeum,” “The Voyage” or “The Treasure in the Snow” (all in vol. 2) been revealed, in the conclusion of the relevant narrative, to have been a stress-induced vision. In fact, Rosny never did that, evidently feeling that apologetic endings in which characters wake up to find that they have been dreaming were beneath contempt—and characters in such stories as “The Young Vampire” and “The Supernatural Assassin” (both in vol. 6) are extremely adamant in declaring that their suspect experiences were completely real, and not hallucinatory at all. If nothing else, however, the insistent evocation of agaric mushrooms in “The Mysterious Force” suggests that Rosny was not unaware of the kinship between his work and the tradition of visionary fantasy.

  Although it is quite usual for Rosny’s longer narratives to seem fragmentary and to undergo sharp changes in narrative direction, “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” gives rise more than most to the suspicion that it might have been cobbled together from fragments of different stories. In the introduction I suggested that part three might have been intended as a third item of hackwork for Flammarion’s Une heure d’oubli series, but had to be reprocessed, although it is odd, if that is the case, that there is not a single mention in parts one and two of the objective of the characters’ journey. It is not implausible that the preface might have been tacked on belatedly, in order to connect the story told in parts one and two with the one told in part three, and that those two stories were initially independent, although that hypothesis does not fit well with the keen attention given in the preface to the mysterious Monique, who plays no further part in the narrative.

  Whatever the process of the story’s composition might have been, however, the fact remains that both of the stories making up the patchwork narrative of “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” duplicate the basic plot-formula of “Nymphaeum” (in vol. 2), the first one in a version much closer to the one subsequently redeployed in “The Boar Men” (in vol. 2) and “Adventure in the Wild” (in vol. 5), with a stubbornness suggestive of near-obsession. The explanation for the recurrence of the plot-structure might not be significant of anything more than Rosny’s general lack of interest in plotting, his story formulae being regarded merely as convenient wrapping for his speculative ideas, but its essential incongruity—one aspect of which is brutally exposed in “The Boar Men”—is surely suggestive of a peculiar idée fixe, which becomes even more peculiar when it crops up yet again in a very different narrative context in “Companions of the Universe” (in vol. 6).

  The two versions of the abduction story reproduced in “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” are reflective of a trend by which the relatively handsome and gentle alternative humans of his earliest stories gave way by unsteady degrees to extremely ugly and brutal ones, although the apologetic case made on behalf of the Scaly Men reflects a parallel trend attributing unorthodox beauty and moral rectitude to beings further removed from the human norm. In that respect, part three of the novel picks up a notion introduced in “The Wonderful Cave Country” (in vol. 2), that vampirism is at least potentially morally superior to more brutal “carnivorism,” because it is not necessarily fatal to its victims. That notion is also broached, albeit tentatively, in “The Young Vampire,” which originated as one of the Une heure d’oubli booklets; the latter story entangles consumption and intimacy in a fashion markedly different from, but nevertheless akin to, “The Mysterious Force.”

  From the viewpoint of the connoisseur of speculative fiction, “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure” is bound to seem unsatisfactory, by virtue of the cursory treatment it gives to its key speculative motif—the notion of an ecosystem dominated and regulated by capable plants. If that section of the narrative really was the first to be written, the disappointment would be increased by the fact that it was supplemented by such a stubbornly unimaginative melodrama, which merely recapitulates a formula that the author had used before and would use again. If, however, part three of the narrative did start out as an independent exercise in “scientific marvel fiction,” that strategy of adaptation might well be reflective of exactly the same despair that overwhelmed Maurice Renard at the same period: a conviction that the literary marketplace, at least in France, was utterly and implacably hostile to speculative material, and would only tolerate its produce in a conspicuously underextrapolated form in the context of the crudest pulp fiction.

  The trajectory of Renard’s and Rosny’s careers provides a stark illustration of the fact that the window of opportunity in which such complex and challenging works as The Blue Peril and “The Mysterious Force” could actually achieve publication was always a narrow one, and that it became narrower as the two writers grew older. When one considers the difficulties that must have afflicted Rosny in securing publication for such early works as “Tornadres” and the even greater ones facing such later ventures as the story told in part three of L’Etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle, the wonder is not so much that such material was forced into story-formulas in which they seem rather incongruous, but that any form could be found to render them acceptable to contemporary publishers and readers. The fact that “Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Advent
ure” is, in essence, pure pulp fiction of a bizarre sort, should not entirely distract attention from the fact that the speculative notions that its third part attempts to embody and convey are far from uninteresting. Indeed, of all of Rosny’s attempts to reconstruct the fundamental principle of Nature in such a way as to render them less cruel, the idea of dominion by wise plants is the most intriguing.

  Rosny was doubtless aware that the family to which the genus Mimosa belongs also includes the carnivorous Venus fly-trap, but he did not want to represent the reign of plants as a mere reversal of the existing relationship between plants and animals. It would have been interesting to see, had he felt free to grant himself more space for that sort of extrapolation, how he might have developed the briefly-broached notion of the dominant plants’ periodic willingness to surrender themselves for partial consumption. As the narrative stands, he obviously felt it necessary to stop short of Utopian fantasy, leaving such endeavor as the merest twinkle in Ironcastle’s eye, but there is still a sense in which the real goal of the story’s amazing journey was the glimpse of an unfortunately-unpromised land, in which the flow of milk and honey equivalents would be sanely regulated rather than subject to the ravages of insatiable gluttony, and all the myriad corollaries of that primal sin.