Armies were organized, in a puerile fashion, as far away as the lands of the Far North. It was like a general awakening of the survival instinct, a last desperate spasm of the civilizations of old towards immortality, the hope of an inaccessible tomorrow. Cadavers piled up around the Great Central Laboratory, pulverized or liquefied by projections that volatilized them, single rays scything down entire armies.
Then, little by little, discouragement set in and a strange sort of madness took hold of all the combatants. In every city there were cases of collective delirium: mystical conversions wrought en masse; a sort of domestication of the will; a general enslavement meekly accepted, as if with pleasure; a respectful and almost joyful submission to the unknown and mysterious desires of the Great Central Laboratory.
Evidently, the Absolute Savants had acted directly upon their minds by some occult means. Perhaps they had discovered the ancient secrets of the mastery of the will and suggestion at a distance. It was understood that an absolute empire of immortal savants had now been established, crushingly and irredeemably, upon the entire, brutally tamed Earth.
It was a period of boundless triumph for the Great Central Laboratory. The Absolute Savants no longer died. They lived on, always the same, and 1000 years went by in this fashion without any apparent modification. Then, one day, the first death in the Great Central Laboratory was announced—and then another. They were initially thought to be accidents, but it was soon necessary to yield to the evidence. The oldest Savants were allowing themselves to die without appearing to take any precaution against it. It was understood, given their incomparable science, that such acts could not be involuntary.
What strange weariness of life had contrived taken possession of these men, who had seen everything, known everything, explored everything and for whom life was no more than a perpetual recommencement devoid of interest and the unexpected?
It was learned, with even more astonishment, that births were taking place in the Great Central Laboratory.
Attempts were made to justify these events in the eyes of the crowd; it was claimed that certain savants had judged it preferable, for the future of humanity, to renew their being entirely, assuring a line of descent that was merely, in sum, a simple prolongation of their personality.
Was it a protest of nature, an irresistible return to the normal course of things? Did scientific immortality not bring with it an unnatural fatigue and an infinite lassitude? It is permissible to think so, but the Great Central Laboratory never admitted it. It was only much later that the total absurdity of that quantitative immortality was perceived, when people understood that true immortality only exists qualitatively—by means, so to speak, of the creation of immortal masterpieces of beauty or bounty, the only things that can attain infinity.
XXXIX. The Rat
The satisfaction that the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory felt when they were sure they had discovered the secrets of life—and, in consequence, of immortality—was nevertheless legitimate, but for other reasons.
Since the remotest eras of the world, humankind had vaguely sensed the utter ridiculousness of death, the total absurdity of that annihilation of the body at the very moment when human beings were able to gather the fruits of their experience and labor. For a long time, people had consoled themselves for that absurd lapse by inventing poetic fictions about a future life. Then, these primitive fables having been smashed and obliterated by the positive discoveries of science, the entire world had been abandoned for centuries to the darkest neurasthenia. Why make any effort? What was the point of having admirably reshaped life and transported paradise to Earth if one could not profit from it—if, after a few years, one was bound to disappear like the most primitive and most abject of animals? Mechanisms were reparable; their life could be prolonged indefinitely, but no one was capable of doing as much for the human body, even though it was composed of simple elements and only required to be quite naturally renewed in perpetuity! After a period of about seven years, all the parts of the body were naturally renewed; why, then, could that renewal not be ensured indefinitely?
Proud of their discovery, the Savants of the Great Central Laboratory initially had only one thing in mind: to subject the world to their domination, to become masters of the life of the entire Earth. I have explained how they succeeded, by simple magnetic methods, in calming the exasperation of the crowds that rushed the Great Central Laboratory after the conquest of immortality—how, by suggestion, they subjected to their will, joyfully and without restriction, a multitude whose rage had taken it, the day before, to the limits of madness.
In the years that followed, this domestication of the masses became even more complete. The whole world was already nothing but an immense, infinitely delicate mechanism composed of an inextricable network of wires, controls, conduits and radiant effluvia, and there was an evident necessity for an absolute order, an exceedingly powerful authority to maintain equilibrium in that vast overcomplicated social machine.
This complexity increased further when the crowd was domesticated, classified into different specialisms by the Savants of the Great Central Laboratory. Masters of the sources of life, the scientists at the Laboratory gradually modified the traditional forms of the human body. The slaves employed in forced labor had their muscles specially developed, while their brains, reduced to an indispensable minimum, were complemented by helmet-meters obedient to the slightest directions issued by the Laboratory. Other individuals, charged with intellectual labor, were, so to speak, disarmed entirely, from the physical point of view, and reduced in advance to powerlessness should they ever attempt—however improbable it might be—to rebel.
These specializations, multiplied to infinity, were, moreover, welcomed joyfully by the people, who felt completely reassured by this state of dependence. They understood that they were part of a social whole; they found themselves less isolated and better maintained—and, in their new functions, they exaggerated the joys of specialization to the point of folly.
Unfortunately, this formidable organization supposed the Great Central Laboratory’s total dominion over the entire Earth, for the smallest unexpected speck of dust might be sufficient to block the movement of that colossal clockwork. In the beginning, this autocratic organization of the world did not proceed without a few catastrophes. First of all, as you might remember, there was the frightful vegetable conspiracy that put science in peril. As a result of playing with the sources of life, transmitting the essential fluid, by way of experiment, into inanimate objects, then into plants, there were certain losses that escaped the strict attention of the Great Central Laboratory. Nothing was more frightful than the abrupt increase of newly-conscious plants, invading the cities and the countryside, getting hold of the transmission wires and diverting the electric current—a crisis that could only be brought to an end by propagating a microbial disease in the nascent forest.
Distress, at that moment, reached its maximum. The historic dangers once presented by wild beasts or earthquakes were still remembered, but the profound mystery of the antediluvian forests that liberated the oxygen on which we live, the invasive madness of fevers, and the troubling enigma of animate plants was unknown. There were also, in that era, a few resurrections in the ancient cemeteries, which made a considerable impact on opinion.
Those were, however, merely beginners’ mistakes. Much more perilous, a few decades later, when the scientific world seemed conclusively organized, was the appearance of a simple rat, forgotten in the general destruction, which emerged from some unknown hiding place and which roamed the conduits tranquilly for six months, causing unexpected short-circuits, the destruction of mobile machines and interminable interruptions to transport, postal and supply services.
Once, in the times when the world was not yet civilized, the destruction of the rat would have been quite simple. It would have been sufficient to take up a gun, bait a trap with a little lard, or hunt it down with a ratting dog. In the admirable world of scienc
e, such procedures had become completely impracticable. The brains, deprived of bodies, could not be risked in such an adventure because of their physical inferiority. The colossi with aluminum brains were equally incapable of carrying out a so complicated a hunt. All their movements were regulated in advance, all their actions determined electrically; their personal initiative would have been insufficient in confrontation with the thousand whims, the unforeseen leaps, disappearances and unexpected movements of one conscious and independent rat.
It required 18 months of continual work in the Great Central Laboratory to put an end to that formidable enemy, which put the order of the entire world in peril and which thwarted, by means of its natural instinct, the cleverest schemes of the scientists. The security of the Great Central Laboratory itself was at stake, had certain communications been interrupted, certain wires cut.
It was necessary, little by little, by means of unprecedented prodigies of science and skill, to tame the rat, to suggest human ideas to it, to commence its education, to make it understand the rudiments of science—and that was certainly the most admirable project that the Great Central Laboratory ever attempted.
When that was done, when the mentality of the rat had been elevated to the complexity of a scientific brain, its capture was child’s play and its annihilation saved the mechanical world from the greatest peril it had ever run.
XL. The Woman-Specimen
With the autocratic development of Absolute Science, the feminist question was no longer even posed. Life was prolonged indefinitely by the progressive replacement of different parts of the body. Human beings no longer died, as they once had, unless they wanted to, and diseases were henceforth unknown.
The very ancient sense that had once been called instinct in animals and the survival instinct in humans—which is nothing more than an interior awareness we have of different phenomena occurring in our bodies, a certain prescience of dangers that might be posed by various foreign germs—had, in fact, been developed in a particular fashion. While that internal awareness was developed to the highest possible degree, the deadliest diseases were nipped in the bud. For the first time, when there were no more physicians, medicine became something other than charlatanism and there was no longer any recourse to the vague indications of unconscious empiricism, as in olden times.
Quite naturally, the question of the reproduction of the species became equally uninteresting. Women were no longer distinguished from men by their work and their occupations, or even by costume. Human beings resembled the primitive androgynes described by antique religions. Suffice it to say that the mere idea of maternity no longer crossed anyone’s mind.
Furthermore, thanks to energetic measures take in that respect by the Great Central Laboratory, all of what had once been the principal preoccupation and joy of humankind became something definitively unknown and profoundly scorned by scientific beings who had no personal understanding of what the word meant and considered love as an historic memory, an animal lapse, interesting only in the contexts of natural history and simple anatomical investigations.
What the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory did not say at that time, in order not to attract unnecessary attention, was that they had thought it a good idea to conserve, in a laboratory annex prohibited to the public, a curious couple representing a man and a woman as they had once existed on Earth.
This special laboratory had been furnished in a very particular fashion with fetishistic objects in an obsolete style. The chairs there, instead of being made of articulated iron to support the arms while reading or carrying out laboratory research, were formed out of curious multicolored cushions representing flowers or birds, supported by fragments of natural wood similarly cut in the form or flowers or arabesques. There was no scientific apparatus in the entire house; instead of a physical recreation laboratory, there was a large room in which the couple ate as people had in the past, without discernment, toxic pieces of dead animals cooked over a fire, or vegetables not yet decomposed. On the walls, instead of diagrams of energy-distribution, there were more flowers and imitation animals, cast in bronze or painted, which attempted to reproduce, as in the time of human naivety, natural scenes.
Only one invention appeared genuinely new and practical: that of simple cotton wicks steeped in mineral oil, which, ignited at the end, procured light without wires or generating-stations—in a word, without any social disposition. That was a veritable masterpiece of invention by the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory.
The couple who lived there comprised two handsome specimens of the human race. The Absolute Savants had named the woman-specimen the Queen, to serve as a reminder, by analogy with bee-hives, of the reproductive role that she was intended to play. As for the man, by reason of his favorite occupation, he had been given a quaint and ancient name; he was called the Poet.
These two beings had a strange life, completely isolated from the new scientific paradise, having no relationships with anyone but the Great Absolute Savant who directed the Central Laboratory.
To maintain the woman-specimen in her primitive state, the attempt had been made, by laborious research, to reconstitute her environment exactly and to put at her disposal everything that might delight her age-old tastes and irresistible penchants.
Firstly, around the palace in which she lived, beyond the ditches, an admirable complex of mirrors had been established, which reproduced exactly everything that took place within the palace and the images of the people therein. The woman-specimen was thus able to spend long hours on the terrace, contemplating her own image within the image of her own palace from a distance—and she went back in every evening sadly, to recount all the beauties that she had seen, passionately jealous of the happy woman who lived in the magnificent palace across the way, and who, in spite of her frightful ugliness, had someone with her, who remained kneeling before her all day long, who loved her, was preoccupied with her and thought of nothing but saving her from the slightest fatigue and the most minor annoyances. The poet, who had spent entire days at the woman’s feet without being able to attract her attention and without daring to interrupt her reverie, protested a little, for form’s sake, when the question of the ugliness of the neighboring princess was raised. That was a continually-renewed source of quarrels between the poor man-specimen and his tyrannical companion.
The scientists of the Great Central Laboratory, through the intermediary of homunculi—which is to say, insignificant and automatic little beings created by science—sent the woman new presents every day, designed to satisfy her most secret passions. They offered the woman-specimen ankle-boots in which it was impossible to walk, hats in which one was unable to see one’s surroundings, clothes too small for the body they were supposed to contain, or books of ancient philosophy that were impossible to understand, but whose presence on the surrounding tables flattered her ignorance.
Similarly, to promote her role as a queen bee, they had taken the trouble to create in the palace, outside the bedroom designed according to an ancient model, dangerous and unexpected places where she might meet the poet: cluttered lofts sown with traps, romantic caves furnished with oubliettes garnished with scythes an swords, and a place that no one could exactly locate in the darkness.
There was also, for the purposes of reproduction, a bush in which everyone knew, from a reliable source, that several venomous serpents were always coiled up, and a very tell greasy pole terminating in a carefully-balanced little nest. By this perpetual variety, the scientists of the Great Central Laboratory had gone to great lengths to satisfy the young woman’s taste for adventure.
In spite of all these kindnesses, however, the Queen remained sad and melancholy; she often summoned old Hydrogen, the doyen of the Absolute Savants, and chattered to him for a long time. She explained that the Poet did not understand her, that she was made for life with a man of action. Hydrogen’s visits multiplied, and that was the commencement of an unprecedented scientific scandal, which spoiled the beg
inning of the Second Scientific Era.
XLI. The Poet-Type
It was in the third year of the Second Era (old style) that the scandal burst which nearly brought down the 12 stages of science in a definitive fashion.
A restaurateur who happened to need to put in an important order for formic acid, addressed himself to his supplier by radiophotogram, in order to interrogate his correspondent’s face directly as to what his commercial intentions might be. The radiophotogram having, by virtue of an unfortunate glitch, traversed the walls of the secret Palace where the woman-specimen was kept in company with the poet-type, the astonished restaurateur saw a scene on the screen of his apparatus that he had scarcely expected. In company with the woman-specimen, Hydrogen, the Absolute Savant of the Great Central Laboratory, was reconstituting ancient actions of animality, of a sort that history textbooks depicted in times past, without a thought for the frightful prohibitions and rigorous laws that he himself had enacted on that subject.
As might be imagined, a few of the restaurateur’s clients happened to be there, curiously surrounding the screen; then a crowd of homunculi interrupted their slave labor so that they too might study the strange spectacle. An entire disorganization of minutely-regulated work throughout the entire city soon ensued; this interruption had repercussions in distant cities, and frightful complications were momentarily feared.
When the Great Central Laboratory was hastily alerted, there was an unprecedented scandal, and all the doors were immediately closed, with an absolute prohibition against anyone coming near it.
Meanwhile, in the palace reserved for her, the woman-specimen was greatly amused by the idea of the terrible scandal that would break when her husband, the poet-type, was surprised by it.
Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension Page 18
