by Theo Varlet
“…come, we humans of Earth, to your planet, which we call Eros...”
It is not only the empty words that the voice with the sibilant inflections has repeated phonographically; this time the linguist has understood; he uses the sounds acquired to choose the vocals he needs in order to begin a first embryonic conversation. After a brief meditative silence, pointing at the four of us with his dainty reptilian index finger, he pronounces for a second time, with application:
“You…humans…of Earth.”
And while we shiver, astounded by that scientific prodigy, penetrated to the core by admiration, he addresses to Zilgor the falsely modest and self-satisfied smile of a scientist who has just presented the elegant solution of a difficult problem to the Academy.
The nineteen in green capes applaud discreetly.
Between the people of Eros and us, communication has been established...
XVI. “Berlitz Lessons”
Our sojourn on Eros having lasted nineteen months, there is probably no point in reporting every detail of our existence in chronological order. It would even be tedious to reproduce the contents of three notebooks that I brought back, so I shall limit myself to reporting the principal facts.
They are divisible into two major periods, during the first and shorter of which we remained prisoners—at first all four of us, for ten days, and then Aurore alone, for four and a half months—and during the second of which we all recovered a relative liberty.
In order not to have to come back to it, I shall note here that a difficulty presents itself in the notation of events. We had to make a new calendar. In addition to the fact that a year on Eros is equivalent in length to slightly more than 21 terrestrial months—278½ days—it requires four Eros days to make up one Earthly day of 24 hours. For the sake of clarity, therefore, I shall employ a notation by means of terrestrial dates, which will situate the facts within a few hours; that is an approximation sufficient for a narrative that does not claim the exactitude of a chronometric report.
The pivot of these essential events having been the linguistic communication sketched out during our introduction to Zilgor and the assembly of the Twenty, it is appropriate for me to say something about its consequences.
As mentioned above, the apparatus I call the psychic lens permitted the lacertian examiner to read the meaning of words pronounced by a human “subject.” The functioning of the apparatus was not reversible, however, and it only provided unilateral communication. By virtue of the absence in us of a third eye, it remained impossible for us to decipher the lacertian language.
Now, the first explanations given by my wife in public session about human knowledge had excited Zilgor’s curiosity tremendously. It was not sufficient for him to understand what we were saying spontaneously; he wanted to be able to question us and converse with us. He therefore began by learning French—or rather, according to material appearances, he had his linguist, the Academician Styal, learn it.
From the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth of April, for forty Erotian days, almost from dawn to dusk—which is to say, two and a half hours a day—we were placed in his hands.
These “Berlitz lessons,”30 as my nephew called them—he also called our pedagogue-cum-pupil Polycarpe, for some reason unknown to me31—took place regularly in a small overheated from situated two floors above our prison, in the same wing of the Palace but on the façade opposite the one overlooking the grand plaza. From the window, which we were forbidden to approach too closely, the view over looked an immense landscape of disaster, a chaos of burned and decapitated buildings and broken walls looming over the ruins of an entire metropolis lying there, deserted and abandoned, in the sunlight, beneath the black sky of the atmospheric void, at the foot of the armored steel walls that had protected the Palace in which we were resident.
Like some of his colleagues, the linguist Polycarpe seemed to have a singular fear of us. He never neglected to take our four individual jailers with us into the schoolroom, armed with their sticks, who kept watch on us in order to prevent any attempt at rebellion. Then he lined all four of us up, separated from him by a low table on which the psychic lens was set, and addressing one of us by name—most often Aurore—he ordered: “You talk…improvise…unimportant what.”
Provided that we were thinking clearly about what we said, it was sufficient to pronounce a new word for the term to be immediately repeated, grasped and conclusively retained, with its meaning, by the prodigious brain of the polyglot lizard. He was not content to enrich his vocabulary; he initiated himself into the mechanics of sentences and gradually disentangled the rules of grammar. He only needed three or four lessons to cease to express himself in pidgin.
As you can imagine, there was little pleasure for us in this kind of sport. Once, in order to break the monotony, Oscar, when invited to speak, took it into his head to talk nonsense, mocking the lacertian to his face, treating him as a carnival mask—but Styal did not find that sort of comedy to his taste. He whistled an order and the wrestler assigned to watch the young reporter soon recalled him to politeness by paralyzing his tongue with the tip of his magic wand.
Ida similarly tried to thwart our pupil by virtue of her sly ill will and continual obstruction, improvising an impossible jargon, a salmagundi of Russian and German that defied all translation. Styal did not persist, and, without punishing her, temporarily stopped interrogating her.
As for me, I did my best, describing in the style of a Joanne guide the landscapes of the Côte d’Azur or the monuments of Paris, in order not to leave the chore entirely to my poor Aurore.
After three lessons, the linguist’s verbal baggage, acquired by listening to the sentences pronounced before him on the subjects improvised at whim by his subjects and analyzing them by means of the psychic lens, became sufficient for him to permit himself to interrogate us fruitfully himself and point his enquiry in a desired direction, which was most often scientific in character.
Astronomy, geology, natural history, the history of peoples and the geography of the Earth, physics and chemistry, mechanics, mathematics, philosophy and metaphysics: he introduced and took stock of all the domains of knowledge. Needless to say, with that new method, my efforts to take turns with my wife soon became broadly ineffective. Increasingly often, she was the one subjected to the torture of interminable questioning before the lens.
“Tell me how steel armor-plating is manufactured?”
“Tell me about cathode rays?”
“What do you know about ultra-X radiation?”
Most of the time, only Aurore was capable of informing him, and our torturer knew it—which did not prevent him from demanding that all four of us be present. He felt the need to keep his entire documentary personnel on hand, if only to check the pronunciation of a word or the construction of a sentence from time to time. It was, in any case, sufficient for us to reply “I don’t know” and, without persisting, he would return to his favorite victim.
Once, forgetting Styal’s progress and believing myself to be safely out of range of the fateful lens, I risked whispering the advice: “Just tell him that you don’t know, so that he’ll give you a little peace.” But the diabolical Polycarpe understood, and darted such a ferocious glance at me that I refrained from persisting.
It was forbidden to leave the room before the end of the lesson. For having attempted to break that rule, Ida received a thrust of the paralyzing wand from her jailer after taking two steps toward the door—and when, shaken by a hysterical rage, she began to heap insults upon him, a second thrust at the larynx rendered her speechless for an hour.
By the twelfth lesson, Styal thought himself sufficiently informed to do without the psychic lens henceforth. After the fourteenth, one morning, instead of having us taken up to the usual room, he took us to Zilgor, escorted by our guards.
The lacertian of genius, whom we already considered as the ruler of Eros, was lodged in the heart of the Palace. To get to his apartment, we went up three floo
rs and along a corridor, at the end of which an open door allowed a glimpse of the ocular lens of an enormous telescope in a rotunda. In Zilgor’s apartment, which was tidy but devoid of any useful furniture, we saw a speaker and a projection-screen. On the walls there were innumerable pigeon-holes for disks and films.
We expected that Styal would serve as an intermediary in the conversation between Zilgor and us, and that is indeed what happened, but in an entirely unexpected fashion. Instead of playing the role of interpreter, to receive Zilgor’s questions in the lacertian language and repeat them to us in French, our pupil put himself, so to speak, at his master’s physic disposal, like a sort of living repertory…an annex of his brain.
Placing themselves in front of one another, heads lowered, Zilgor and Styal united their intellects by means of their pineal eyes. Without pronouncing a word, Zilgor thought his questions in lacertian; Styal “intuited” them in that form and rethought them in French, in order to “telepsyche” them in French to Zilgor, who addressed them to us aloud in our language. The whole process of translation and double transmission took place mutely, and almost instantaneously. Zilgor seemed to be drawing inspiration from Styal’s fluorescent eye.
Although I had assisted in the latter’s autoeducation, in his laborious acquisition of French, it did not appear to me to be any less marvelous that Zilgor, who had learned nothing, was able to use that knowledge just as well, by virtue of the simple exercise of the supplementary sense located in the third eye, which terrestrial evolution had refused to humans. I felt doubly inferior to that individual of genius; I almost envied his animal form, which endowed him with such a privilege.
And it was then that we obtained the first indication of the true intellectual role played in the civilization of Eros by that venerable lizard with the enormous gold-laminated skull.
Let it be said in anticipation that Zilgor was the complete knowledge of his species incarnate in a single individual. He centralized the accumulated results of n + 1 centuries of research. He concentrated in a single skull the collective ensemble that we on Earth call Science, and which is divided, in practical terms, between hundreds of thousands of learned books and an entire community of specialists. On Eros, the community of scientists exists, but as simple subordinate annexes to the central brain of which they furnish, so to speak, the external prolongations. Their presence only serves to spare him psychic fatigue and protect his precious existence. Strictly speaking, as we eventually realized, he could dispense with them.
Thanks to the preliminary interrogations carried out by Styal, Zilgor found himself in immediate possession of a complete knowledge of our language and a rudimentary general knowledge of terrestrial science. A further series of daily sessions began in the apartment of the master of Eros, assisted by his linguist, and the questions succeeded one another, more numerous, methodical and searching, with a relentlessness that demonstrated an inexhaustible curiosity on Zilgor’s part.
But our quartet only spent a few whole days in the room next door to the observatory. The elimination of the superfluous, already sketched out during the Berlitz lessons, was rapidly accentuated. Zilgor acquired the habit of addressing himself solely to Aurore. She alone, of the four of us, had not only the requisite education, but also a scientific mind, and was able to present her responses in a form that was directly assimilable without any waste of time.
My mind, on the contrary, and Oscar’s, irritated the examiner; we were doubtless too “literary.” Even with regard to the questions that one or other of us was competent to answer, he would no longer count on us. I was distressed primarily because of the continual suffering inflicted upon my wife, but the young “ace” journalist was excessively mortified in his professional vanity.
“I can express myself clearly in modern French!” he complained, when we found ourselves alone, far from the indiscreet hearing of Styal. “That was the opinion of Monsieur Schmidt himself! That old fellow is even more cretinous than Polycarpe!”
As for Ida, Zilgor became annoyed with her in the first lesson, and after the third, when she had deployed all her recalcitrance, he refused to see her again. She remained confined in our prison day and night, with a jailer at the door.
At little later, on the first of May, when Styal appeared as he did every morning, only one guard came into the room with him, and he only summoned my wife.
“Aurore, the Master is waiting for you. Come.” And he added, for the other three of us: “Stay here. You’re not needed.”
While I hastily squeezed my wife’s hand and exhorted her to be brave, Oscar murmured softly: “My poor Aunt Rette, you probably wish now that you were a dullard like us, not a doctor in this, that and the other!”
When the door closed, he executed the fantastic entrechat of a man who weighs no more than two and a half kilos.
“Lucky you, Ida! We’ll be able to keep you company. It’s no sort of a job going back to class like a schoolboy, is, it, Tonton?”
XVII. Cinema
I thought it more logical to recount, without interrupting my story, almost all of the episode that constituted the initial phase of our captivity, after which only Aurore remained a prisoner submissive to Zilgor’s pleasure. It is now necessary, however, for me to go back to the other remarkable events that occurred in the meantime.
First of all, as you will have guessed, given that we survived, the problem of our nourishment was resolved, more or less—although not as well as we could have desired. By virtue of further sampling of the trays that our jailers brought us every morning, we had learned that the waffles of synthetic meat that looked like sheets of glue were sufficient nutritious. In addition, although the crystalline fruits that tasted like grass with the pulp like granules of sand were frankly inedible, the fibrous stalks like sticks of angelica lost their taste of turpentine when cooked, and thus became edible. The experiment was made on a small scale on a stove fueled by solidified alcohol contained in our excursion bad. That gave us a vegetable element capable of introducing a little variety into out diet. Contriving to have the pseudo-vegetable brought to us ready-cooked, however, was another story.
That happened on the fourth Erotian day after our arrival. Styal only understood us during the Berlitz lessons, with the aid of the psychic lens, and refused to listen to us at any other time. Nevertheless, as it was a matter of the preservation of the precious documentary personnel that all four of us seemed at the time to be, he lent himself willingly to listen to my wife’s explanations, and at last we were able to win our cause.
It was worse still for the hominine cannibal dish that continued to figure on the menu six mornings in succession and which our jailers were astonished to see us rejecting in horror, in spite of the care that had been taken in the culinary preparation: as a stew, jugged, oven-baked, roasted, boiled, on a skewer...
Our repugnance seemed incomprehensible to Styal. Since, in spite of the intelligence that differentiated us from the hominines, we had accepted the waffles of synthetic meat, a nourishment of vile slaves, in preference to the vegetarian diet, and in particular the sandy crystalline fruits—the aliment of the noble saurians—why would we refuse that hominine meat, which represented the supreme delicacy for our quasi-relatives on Eros?
In the end, however, they stopped trying to impose it on us, and the tray of our quotidian meal nothing figured any longer except rations of synthetic meat, to which was added, a little later, a salad of cooked angelica sticks.
For drinking, we had the water of the sink, very ferruginous but all the healthier in consequence, Aurore affirmed. The most difficult thing was the absence of bread. We thought sadly of the stocks of biscuit stored in the lockers of the Ad Astra.
Such was our dour alimentary regime for thirty-six Erotian days—after which, an unforeseen event permitted us to ameliorate our ordinary fare, as I shall explain shortly...
One of the material facts that gave us the strongest evidence of the scientific heights achieved by the civilization of Ero
s, otherwise so strangely full of lacunae and signs of decay, also dated from the early days of our sojourn.
It was on the twenty-fourth of April, during our fifth night. Since her rant on the first evening, when she had allowed her hatred of capitalist society and her rancor toward my wife and me burst forth, Ida had behaved with a satisfactory politeness, while enticing her fiancé, as much as possible, to constitute a separate group. With a common accord, we had divided our prison into two rooms—or rather, in view of the lack of a partition, two zones of influence, limited by the window, itself considered as a sort of “no-man’s-land.” Everyone used it freely during insomnias, which were particularly frequent in the early days, before we succeeded in adapting ourselves to the new rhythm of the “dwarf days”, which caused alternations of four days and nights every twenty-four hours.
Our prison was situated on the second floor in the left wing of the Palace, rising above the body of the central building, and between the bars of the window—or, rather, the bay—hermetically sealed by an unbreakable and soundproof glass—a considerable part of the grand plaza could be seen. However, the nocturnal spectacle of the sinister deserted expanse surrounded by hideous nickel-steel facades, was not at all seductive. The attraction of the window for us was that we could see the sky therefrom. One could not see it very well, to be sure, because of the metallic network whose wave-barrier imprisoned the atmosphere, but one could see it even so, and “dream of the stars”—and in particular, toward the end of the night, contemplate the Earth. It appeared to us as a bright planet, which rose above the armored cupolas of the buildings to the east of the plaza on the side opposite to the Palace: a star more luminous and larger than I had ever seen Venus, and itself provided with a bright satellite: the Moon.
