The Germans on Venus

by Brian Stableford

  At that moment, Truphemus and Aloysius burst out laughing.

  Netty looked around. All these new objects were extremely confusing: nothing but carboys, cylinders, long-necked flasks; the most bizarre mixtures filling glass vessels; then immense stove on which new preparations, amalgams and as-yet-incomplete compounds were simmering….

  She ran to the console whose indicator buttons were connected to the motors operating the chains. She put out her hand, then withdrew it, then finally ran her fingers rapidly over the various buttons, as she might have done on the keyboard of a piano…

  Immediately, she recoiled uttering a cry of fright.

  All the mechanisms were brought into play simultaneously. The chains grated; the pulleys turned madly; the system of counterweights, losing its equilibrium, no longer worked; the boxes were descending with vertiginous rapidity, then rising up again with vigorous leaps, as if they had acquired a new strength.

  Netty ran—and, like a bird that has flown into a room through an open window, she bumped into every jutting object and every corner. She stumbled, grabbed hold of something…it was the motor of the large electrical machine…and off went the immense glass disk, gliding between its cushions…!

  A torrent of sparks flew into the air like a shower of stars, with an increasingly powerful crackling sound.

  Netty was terrified. She wanted to flee; she wanted to get to the door, but she bumped into everything as she went. Retorts, flasks, alembics and carboys shattered. Liquids flooded out; gases regained their liberty.

  The most unexpected compounds were realized then. The chemical elements were confronted with one another. It was a conflict of the fundamental forces of nature.

  The boxes were still going upon and down, shaking the three unfortunates, one of whom had come to Quiet House in search of happiness.

  In a strange glow that was incessantly changing color, Netty was still running…

  Asphyxia seized her by the throat and cast her down…

  Then there was a frightful explosion…

  And everything collapsed.

  Thus perished the inhabitants of Quiet House, and that is why Frank Kerry never found the happiness of which he had dreamed.

  Rémy de Gourmont: The Automaton

  (1889)

  Rémy de Gourmont (1858-1915) was born into an aristocratic family whose fortunes had been much reduced, not so much by the 1789 Revolution as by the depredations of the English during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1876, he went to Caen to study law, but when his father gave him permission, the following year, to continue his studies in Paris, he followed a primrose path very familiar in the annals of French literature, abandoning his studies in order to devote himself to “livres et l’amour” [books and love]. He observed, in a typically methodical fashion, that the former would develop his intellect and the latter his sensuality, thus completing his personality in an appropriately holistic fashion. He remained permanently preoccupied with the ideas of self-development and personality and with contrasting dichotomies: male/female; thought/ emotion, body/soul, materialism/idealism and so on. His exploration of such complementarities guided him into all manner of philosophical and moral heresies, but he retained the aristocratic aloofness communicated by his early upbringing.

  In order to make ends meet, de Gourmont applied for a post at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1881, and many of his early publications were educational works produced in that context, but he gradually built up a successful career in journalism, primarily as a literary critic. He became the principal theorist and chronicler of a movement first labeled “Decadent” and then rechristened “Symbolist,” but his first novel, Merlette (1886) was undistinguished. In 1887, he met Berthe Courrière, who had formerly been the mistress of Joris-Karl Huysmans and had served as the latter’s guide to the occult underworld that was chronicled in such graphic detail in Là-Bas (1891). She captivated de Gourmont far more powerfully than she had contrived to do with the misogynistic Huysmans, and he incorporated modified images of her into much of his subsequent work.

  Symptoms of the fact that de Goumont’s relationship with Berthe soon ran into trouble are probably visible in “L’automate: conte philosophique” (1889), although he subsequently published much more clinical analyses of her character and of the relationship’s inevitable breakdown in his first successful novel, Sixtine (1890; tr. as Very Woman) and the novella Le fantôme (1891). De Gourmont never included “L’automate” in any of his collections, presumably because he was dissatisfied with its relative unsubtlety, but it was reprinted in a 1982 omnibus of Histoires magiques et autres récits. It is one of the most graphic examples of the contes cruels he wrote under the influence of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom he first met in 1888 and with whom he formed a friendship based on their mutual distress at having fallen so far in a world that would not recognize their intrinsic nobility. Like “Quiet House”—but in a very different fashion—the story probably owes something to the example of Villiers’ L’Eve future.

  De Gourmont also formed a friendship with Alfred Vallette, and helped him to found the Mercure de France in 1890, which went on to become the primary vehicle of literary Symbolism, and for which he did much of his finest work—although one of his early political articles got him the sack from the Bibliothèque Nationale and forced him to make a living thereafter from his pen. Through Vallette, de Gourmont met the young Alfred Jarry, who ploughed his inheritance into a short-lived avant-garde Symbolist periodical L’Ymagier, which he and de Gourmont co-edited, but de Gourmont could not follow the literary course towards surrealism followed by the younger writer, his style remaining much more staid and polished. De Goumont’s reputation soared—Anatole France described him as “France’s greatest living writer”—but his ambitions were rudely undermined when he contracted what was then known as “tubercular lupus,” although it is actually an auto-immune disease. Its early effects are often seen in the skin of the face, and de Gourmont was horribly disfigured by that phase of the disease, forcing him to become a recluse. He continued to write voluminously, and successfully, but he endured a painful martyrdom in parallel, which colored his attitudes to life and love deeply.

  The forced detachment of his subsequent interest in erotic matters eventually resulted in the production of the remarkable Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903; tr. as The Natural Philosophy of Love, although a more accurate rendition would be “The Physics of Love: An essay on the Sexual instinct”). There is a sense in which that work was the ultimate culmination of the thought-process whose first graphic illustration was “L’automate:” the extensive contemplation of the possibility that we are all automata, especially in respect of our sexual behavior. When he wrote the conte cruel, de Gourmont probably knew little about the science that features in the story as a kind of malevolent haunter—he dedicated the tale to “Théodore Ribot”—although the forename of the principal French pioneer of clinical psychology was actually Théodule—but he made up for that lack thereafter, and achieved a dramatic sophistication of the perspective here presented in casually brutal terms.

  Like Ulbach’s “Story of a Naiad,” this story is not a scientific romance in the usual sense of the term, its speculative element taking on no material form, but it supplements such stories as “Perfectibility” and “Quiet House” in providing a particularly graphic example of the philosophical horror that the scientific world-view induced in some of those who reacted against it—and also of the fascination that it exerted upon them simultaneously.

  “There you are!” concluded Laube. “Do you understand? Vaguely. Oh well, imagine two clocks; one chimes, the other doesn’t. Both keep equally good time. In the one that chimes there are two sets of works: one controls the hands, the other the chimes. Stop the works controlling the chimes, and you have a clock exactly similar to the first, which tells the time just as perfectly; we think them both perfect. The chiming mechanism is, therefore, a superfluity, an embellishment.

  �
�It’s the same for consciousness—I mean psychological consciousness.

  “In the human clock, consciousness is the chimes. Hold on, I’ll extrapolate my comparison. We’ve supposed that our two clocks work with equal perfection—that’s the term we’ve employed and we are, indeed, dealing with ideal clocks, demonstrative instruments as superior to marine chronometers from Liverpool as those same chronometers are to a trinket-watch from the Rue de la Paix—but it’s quite evident that whichever of our two clocks has the simpler mechanism will also be the better one, the less vulnerable to imperceptible derangements, the less sensitive to atmospheric influences. You’ll admit, therefore, that the clock without chimes is mathematically superior to the one that’s complicated by an extra series of works. If you’ve followed my reasoning, you’ll reach the conclusion yourself: take away man’s chimes—which is to say, his consciousness—and you’ll have lessened the probability of his going wrong.”

  “So you’re being serious,” Mérillon replied, after a pause. “You expect me to believe…”

  “Have you understood, yes or no?” Laube resumed, not without impatience.

  “It’s absurd, my dear chap, completely absurd. So the ideal for man would be to lose his consciousness, to act without knowing he is acting, and, in consequence, no longer to think! Automatism, therefore, would be a superior state for humankind!”

  “Precisely. You’re an engraver, and in your business you don’t just have the hand, you have talent. Here’s a Dante, after Raphael’s Dispute,64 which is proof enough. Well, be sincere: aren’t the etchings with which you’re most content, in general, those that you’ve dashed off in a frenzy of inspiration, in a state of mind in which, carried away and overwhelmed by fever, far from calculating each stroke, you’ve put them together with an unconscious precision?”

  Mérillon admitted that, as any artist would have done; there were instances of his work, the best, that he scarcely remembered having executed. “My Dante is one of those—but that’s not automatism; it’s inspiration.”

  “Yes, artists and poets, the most automatic people on Earth, would be quite astonished if one demonstrated to them, piece by piece, the mechanism that they call Inspiration. Inspire me O Muse! Sicelides Musae…!” And Laube, pitilessly, burst out laughing.

  “Let’s see,” he continued. “Let’s take a poet. He imagines writing a sonnet to his mistress on this theme: You’re cruel to me, but you’ll grow old. When you have white hair, I’ll tell you that you made me suffer, and then your regrets—your belated regrets—will ameliorate my pain slightly. You’ve identified, haven’t you, one of Petrarch’s sonnets—it’s sufficiently well-known, thanks to the imitations that Ronsard, Voltaire and even Béranger made, the latter two stripping away the mysticism that gave it its charm. The argument crops up again in many verses, many letters from unknown lovers: You’ll be sorry one day, but it will be too late. That’s it, fundamentally. And the poet imagines what he’ll suffer: images come into his head, immediately translated by the various verbal representations of pain. She’ll grow old: weak eyes, silver hair, dark clothes, faded complexion. Hence no feminine pride; he’ll no longer be afraid; she’ll be disarmed; he’ll tell all; the martyrdom of each moment—and, as an analytical representation of the time elapsed, the words years, days, hours surge forth. Here, quite naturally, an association of sad ideas: it will be too late. Then the bitter joy of a bitter revenge: You’ll feel it yourself, and I’ll suffer less (for you’ll have sympathized with me)—that last thought remains unexpressed, the poet allows his dream to die in an irony.

  “All these ideas or images, as you see, link together perfectly, and, after having thought for two or three hours, the poet—who thinks in verse as soon as the thought becomes precise—will sense inspiration and write his sonnet as if under dictation. And take note that all of this preliminary mechanism will have escaped him, all the more so because his mistress is a habitual, if not constant, object of his thought.” Laube got up and took up a book, riffling through its pages briefly. “You can verify my analysis, reproduce it yourself. It’s the 11th sonnet: Se la mia vita dell’aspro tormento.”

  “All right,” replied Mérillon, stuffing his pipe. “I believe you, but if the analysis applies to me, goodbye graver. My intelligence is in my hands, my muse is my pipe.”

  “Fool!” Laube cried. “You’re giving me arguments against yourself. Just repeat your sentence, which I’ll put into my thesis. My intelligence….” He had caught hold of a piece of paper and wrote on it, while tapping his heels feverishly on the ground—one of his characteristic actions. “….is in my hands and my muse…she’s a show-off, your muse.”

  “Don’t make fun of Helicon!”

  Laube, very cheerful, raised his head again and swept back his long blond hair with a stroke of his hand. His face was lit up, as if he had found a treasure. “Did you have a brainwave? Let’s see…and my muse is my pipe. Nice, to be sure, that’s nice. My dear chap, if you were only in the Institut or an influential critic, I could use that as your epigraph. Damn! You’re a superior being, though—you’re making rapid progress towards the ideal, absolute automatism.”

  “Thanks,” said Mérillon, polishing his fine chestnut-colored moustache with his thumb and forefinger, “I think I know what I’m doing, feeling alive. It’ll be fun, your automatism!”

  “He’ll never understand. Neither fun nor depressing—nothing. You’ll do what you need to do without knowing it; you’ll eat, sleep, walk like a mechanism, without stomach-aches, without nightmares, without embarrassing mistakes. You’ll love….”

  “Mechanically. Thanks again.”

  Laube shrugged his shoulders. “That’s where you are now: love, women…it’s bound to happen. It’s a phase. After that one goes on to God, the immortality of the soul. Human infirmity always reverts to ratiocination about the only two beings that don’t exist: woman and God!”

  “I don’t know anything about God, but I like to imagine….”

  “God is the Unconscious, the Infinite automaton. I’ll spare you the arguments. A being without limits had no consciousness of itself, sine there’s nothing outside it and, metaphysically speaking, consciousness is the sensation of its own limits. Let’s put such lofty subtleties aside. We’re on the subject of woman. Well, my dear chap, I’ve given woman a great deal of thought, and I’ve suffered in the process—that’s the way to get to know her. Having escaped from her influence, I’ve analyzed her. I’ve thrown the plumb-line into the well and I’ve got to the bottom of her. Listen….”

  His eyes sparkling, his lips apart, his body leaning forward, his right hand extended in a demonstrative gesture, Laube took on an inspired air that was bordering on the fantastic. A blazing coal fire reddened his thin face, his bulbous forehead, his swept-back hair and his long beard. The light of the fire—for the lamp had gone out—projected the shadow of his straight nose between his two eyebrows. He was clad in a brown dressing-gown, like a Franciscan habit, and in that mansard cell he truly resembled some monk of the time of the philosopher’s stone.

  Mérillon took his pipe out of his teeth and looked at his friend with an anxiety tined with fear. He was a decent fellow, impressionable and—according to the guidance of his whim—capable of work or idleness, indifference or passion. His hair, which fell in curls to the collar of his velvet waistcoat made the bourgeois in the street think: “Oho, an artist!” He was proud of that, but, at the end of the day, he cared only for his art, Juliette—a beautiful girl who lived with him—and his friend Laube, a Russian with a German name who had been born in Constantinople, brought up in Italy, received a doctorate of philosophy in Heidelberg and now lived in Paris as a student.

  “Listen,” Laube went on, fire in his gaze, lowering his voice, emphasizing the two significant words in his sentence as if he wanted to unite them into one: “Woman is an automaton.”

  Mérillon submitted meekly to the impression. He went pale, and remained motionless.

  Laube went
on: “Woman is an automaton. I’m sure of it. I’ve proved it. It’s here.” He struck a large pile of papers heaped up on the table with his hand. “It’s here. She lives, she speaks, she thinks, she loves—yes, loves—without knowing that she is living, speaking, thinking or loving. You’ve seen them laugh, cry, faint, scream in pain or pleasure: automata! Ants and bees, which do their work so well, are intelligent creatures that are not conscious of their intelligence, clocks without chimes; many people are the same. Consciousness is only given to a small number, to the degree that we, the others, possess it. There are many steps between the consciousness of a Goethe and that of a shoemaker. You, an artist, have moments of automatism. Among women, one in 100,000 attains consciousness, but the others—all of them—are automata.

  “A woman hangs around your neck, she embraces you, speaks softly to you, then, an instant later, in a bad mood, ignores you, speaks harshly to you, tends towards sarcasm. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. The internal witness is absent. Passion, the all-consuming desire that you see in their eyes, the languor after pleasure that is painted there in such charming colors and subtle tomes, is all unconscious isn’t it? But her love itself is nothing but an automatic movement; she loves you as she hates you, without suspecting it. You talk to her, and she replies, without knowing that she is replying.

  “Oh, my friend, these creatures for whom we suffer and sometimes die, are dolls, playthings. They don’t know that you’re happy with them, they don’t know that you’re suffering, and if you die before the eyes of one who no longer loves you, she won’t know that you’re dying for her. Do you not see them, always dominated by the present impression, pressing on towards the momentary goal without seeing anything beyond, without prejudging the consequences, like a mount that carries its rider, desire, wherever its whim takes it. They’re all desire; the semblance of will that one thinks one sees in them is nothing but the sum of accumulated desires, which advance blindly, like a mass whose weight is its only locomotive mechanism.