The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  He had fallen in love with a delightfully beautiful young woman, as dreamy as himself, ardent and passionate, whom he had suddenly lost after three months of adoration. And during the two years since the blow had struck him, he had thought of nothing but her, scarcely succeeding in forgetting her for a few moments in the scientific work that absorbed all his strength and energy.

  Life without her was sad and colorless, and he had often wanted to die. He hoped to die soon, and in fact, his health, once so flourishing, was deteriorating insensibly. He believed in the survival of the soul and wondered incessantly where his beloved might be. Several times, he had told me that he thought he had sensed her presence nearby, and heard some kind of internal voice speaking to his soul. I had tried to deflect him away from these ideas, which seemed to me to be dangerous to his mental health, and I had believed that he was no longer thinking about them when he arrived that morning, so troubled and agitated by his vision.

  He explained that at about 2 a.m., while he was examining through his telescope a region of the Milky Way very rich in stars, he had, so to speak, swept the beautiful constellation of Cygnus with his instrument, and had paused on the admirable double star Albireo, composed of two suns, one golden yellow and the other sapphire.

  While he trained a very powerful ocular lens on the blue star, and was preparing to observe it with a spectroscope in order to make a special study of its curious light, he had experienced a sort of dazzling in his eye, which he had initially attributed to the bright glare of the star, and had also felt a slight electric shock on his shoulder. He continued the observation nevertheless and fitted the spectroscope to the telescope. Either in consequence of the fatigue of the night’s observation, however, or simply a to rest momentarily, he had sat down in the large armchair in which, occasionally, after long observations, we had the habit of stretching ourselves out and going to sleep briefly.

  The rays of moonlight entering through the cupola, forming a light streak of blue-tinted light, were caressing the apparatus, the globes and he maps. He tried to get up to carry out his spectroscopic observation, but very close to him, he had seen, with his naked eyes, the adored form of his beloved standing in the moonlight, and had simultaneously felt nailed to the armchair by a superior magnetic force.

  I shall, however, leave it to André to tell the story, for what follows is exactly what he told me.

  Dora was standing there before me. Above her shone Albireo. My beloved was even more beautiful than before, idealized and as if made translucent by a celestial clarity.

  My first impression was amazement. I was not in the least afraid, and yet I felt a glacial frisson run from my feet to my head and I began to tremble. I remained sprawled in my armchair, as if my body were made of lead. She didn’t come closer to me, and it seemed to me at first that I didn’t want to approach her.

  She looked at me tenderly with her large azure eyes, which always seemed to be opening on some new astonishment, and said to me eagerly: “Why haven’t you come? I’m waiting for you. We haven’t yet known love!”

  The tone of her voice was the same as before, and as soon as I heard it, the apparition lost its strange character and became—for want of a better word—natural.

  At that mild reproach, that regret and that avowal, all our hours of happiness reappeared before me, animatedly: our passionate intoxications, our delightful ecstasies, our endless kisses—and the very extravagance of our sensuality, all those enchanting scenes suddenly resuscitated in my brain, went through me like a lightning-flash of radiant joy.

  I couldn’t help replying: “What! We haven’t known love?”

  “Certainly not,” she replied. “We’ve only had its gross sensations.”

  “Oh, how exquisite!”

  “Yes, for the Earth. But how different it is here!”

  “Where’s here?”

  “In the system of Albireo’s azure star.”

  And she told me that she lived there, in the midst of a sort of angelic population. While I listened, I seemed to be living that new life with her. It was no longer death; it was life. I found myself with her again, as before.

  “Yes,” she added, “what a difference there is between the love one knows here and that which we tasted on Earth!”

  I confess that I experienced a disagreeable expression on hearing that confession.

  “How do you know that?” I cried, piqued by a sudden bizarre resurgence of the thorn of jealousy.

  “Foolish! Still foolish!” she replied, with her adorable smile. “Jealous of a dead woman!”

  “But you’re not dead, since you’re talking to me about love, and claiming to experience joys unknown on Earth. No, I’m not jealous—but I still love you. Well, I’m capable of being reasonable. Explain yourself.”

  “On Earth, we only have five senses: sight, hearing, smell and touch each play a role in our sensations, although true love resides essentially in the attraction of souls toward one another. We only have five senses, or even four.”

  “How many more have you today, then?”

  “Seventeen. And I repeat, I’m waiting for you. And of those 17, there’s one that surpasses all others, worth as much as the rest put together, which on its own might be called the sense of love.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s the electrical sense. In love, electricity plays a preponderant role, even in terrestrial organisms, which are so gross and obtuse. The human soul is a substantial entity, electrical in nature, which radiates far beyond our visible material body. That electricity emits invisible waves, which are very different from those of light.”

  “Yes, I know,” I replied, my mathematical mind taking over. “Luminous waves are three ten-thousandths on a millimeter in length, while electrical waves are 30 centimeters.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I understand perfectly well what you’re saying to me, therefore—that there’s a radical difference between the magnitude of the vibrations that give birth to electrical or luminous effects.”

  “None of the five senses of the terrestrial body can perceive electrical waves. Among us, by contrast, it’s the first of our 17 senses. It’s much more important than sight itself. Why does one love? Why does one experience sympathies and antipathies? Why does one remain different? That’s a mystery unknown to you, although it’s very simple for us, who perceive it so directly by means of a special sense.

  “The soul, which is an electrical substance, emits into its surroundings electrical waves invisible to you but perceptible to us. You might compare these waves to the sound waves that emanate from the vibrating string of a violin, a harp or a piano. If these sonorous waves encounter in their passage another string able to vibrate harmonically with the first, the second string will emit a sound without anyone having touched it. It’s an experiment that you can make at any time.

  “If two souls vibrate in unison; or sometimes, better still, in harmonic accord, their mutual waves, one encountering one another, associate and fuse, and the two beings are united with one another by a chain more solid than iron. It’s not only their gazes that are knotted, it’s their entire being. All that one might do to oppose that union would be wasted effort. It will be accomplished, if necessary, after death.

  “If a cacophony results from the encounter of the vibrations, antipathy is the result, and the most beautiful reasoning can do nothing about it. That man is antipathetic to me; that woman gets on my nerves. Don’t seek to correct the first impression; it will be wasted effort.

  “Well, on Albireo, we see these vibrations of the soul, these etheric undulations, as you see by means of light; we perceive them by means of our electric sense, while they remain foreign to you. These electrical vibrations, which are like the very atmosphere of love, are unknown to you on Earth. You experience love much as the deaf experience music.”

  “Oh!” I said. “How ungrateful you are!”

  “No my adored one, I remember everything. But remember that love i
s the intimate union of two beings. In terrestrial amours, there is no entire melting into one another. But here, where the electric sense is entirely developed, our etheric bodies are like two electric charges that annihilate one another in lightning. The combination is so intense that of two beings who embrace, only one remains—like oxygen and hydrogen, which, in combining, lose their individuality to form a drop of water, a limpid pearl that contains the entire rainbow and summarizes the universe.”

  “But what happens afterwards?”

  “Well, afterwards, one can recover oneself! I don’t know how it happens, but one is resuscitated.”

  “That’s not impossible. Electricity can dissociate a drop of water and separate once again the oxygen and hydrogen whose union formed it.”

  “You know how to explain everything scientifically.”

  “So,” I added, “one goes as far as losing consciousness of one’s existence—really dying—and being reborn?”

  “Do you understand now that our 17 senses, governed by the first among them, provide sensations compared with which the most vivid joys experienced on Earth are merely the coarse impressions of mollusks? And what light inundates us! What flowers! What perfumes! It’s like a perpetual ecstasy. Of, if you came, if you were here!”

  “Can’t you take me?” I exclaimed, launching myself toward her.

  “Come!”

  I seized her in my arms, stuck my lips to hers, and suddenly saw, in the heart of a very soft and tender blue light, that Dora was bearing me away on immense wings. I was clinging to her body, lost in delight. Numerous beings, drifting like us in the atmosphere, had the form of dragonflies, with antennae, palps and aerial organs, which doubtless represented the new senses that she had mentioned to me.

  I understood that I had been suddenly transported on to one of the planets of Albireo’s azure sun. Cascades of blue water fell from the rocks and ran through an immense garden carpeted by brilliant flowers. Birds with bright plumage, seemingly luminous in themselves, filled their air with their songs.

  “Let’s go through this light,” she said, “toward the evening horizon and descend into the palaces of night.”

  Having moved out of the illuminated hemisphere, we arrived in semi-darkness. All the rocks, all the vegetation and all the animals shone with a blue, green or roseate light, phosphorescent or fluorescent. The rocks undoubtedly possessed properties analogous to those of phosphates and sulfates of barytes, which store solar light received during the day and radiate it during the night. The flying creatures were similarly luminous, in the fashion of fireflies. Darkness, on this world, is never complete, firstly because of that curious phosphorescence of everybody, secondly because of Albireo’s second, golden sun, the distant light of which is almost never absent, and also because of a ring analogous to that of Saturn, which, lit by these half-suns of different colors, is sometimes blue, sometimes yellow and sometimes green, and distributes the strangest gleams through the semi-darkness.

  How small a thing is our poor and minuscule terrestrial world, which we imagine to be everything, by comparison with those ultra-terrestrial marvels!

  My beautiful and beloved Dora carried me lovingly between her wings, and we descended toward the shores of a lake, beneath an immense arborescent foliage, the vast leaves of which extended like a cradle of verdure over a carpet of moss strewn with a thousand little flowers.

  “This is where I live,” she said. “Let’s rest.”

  In my delight and ecstasy, I wanted to seize her in my arms and savor on her lips the exquisite happiness of being loved by her—but scarcely had she touched the ground than her terrestrial form was instantly transformed into another, similar to the beings that we had encountered flying in the atmosphere. She was no longer my Dora. She was, however, even more beautiful and more radiant, and compared with her, I felt like an earthworm.

  “To love me still, to love me forever,” she said, “it’s sufficient to die! Quit the Earth. Here, you will be mine.”

  “Have I not quit the Earth, then?” I replied, astonished.

  “No—look.”

  She touched my lightly on the forehead with the tip of an antenna and I felt a sharp electric shock. I opened my eyes and found myself alone, sitting in the large armchair. My beloved had disappeared.

  I no longer have any doubt that she really is living on that star in Cygnus. She is calling me there and I shall soon recover her. I love her more than ever!

  Such was André’s story. That apparition had had such a powerful impact on him that, from that day onwards, his mind appeared to be wandering far from the Earth. His poor health declined rapidly, but he lived happily in his dream, with the desire, the obsession to see it realized.

  I was not surprised when, a few months after the adventure that has just been reported, I was told of the sudden death of my dear comrade.

  On a beautiful summer night, perhaps haunted by the same vision, he had stretched himself out in the same armchair, next to the great equatorial telescope, aimed at Albireo, and, in the morning, he was thought to have fallen asleep there—but his cadaver was completely cold.

  To his right, a little bottle containing hydrocyanic acid—one drop of which is sufficient to dissolve the bonds attaching the soul to the body—had fallen on to the floor.

  Charles Recolin: The X-Ray

  (1896)

  Doctor Cornelius Schwanthaler had not slept for a week. He had god reason. To have discovered an inoculable substance endowed with the astonishing power of making the eyes accessible to Roentgen rays—the famous rays then impassioning all Europe—was more than sufficient, it must be admitted, to trouble the nights of the only possessor of such a secret. So exclusive is the love of science, on occasion, that he had even completely forgotten the blonde fiancée who, a few days earlier, had accepted the homage of his heart. But might he be mistaken? Were the innumerable guinea-pigs into which he had injected the new serum really seeing the interior of objects and creatures, to the exclusion of their exterior forms? Might he not simply have impaired their brains, in trying to change their natural vision? The answer was doubtful—and Dr. Schwanthaler continued to observe his guinea-pigs tirelessly.

  The little animals seemed singularly disconcerted. They could be seen turning in their cages, then suddenly launching themselves against the bars, which were made of wood, in the manner of flies when, unaware of the obstacle, they precipitate themselves into windows. The doctor transferred them to another cage made entirely of iron, and they remained tranquil; the experiment was in accordance with the theory.

  Nevertheless, Dr. Schwanthaler knew that he would have to attempt a supreme trial. Its result was uncertain—but had he not consecrated his entire life to science? Ought he to hesitate to sacrifice his sight too, if necessary? Could he refuse, or leave the admirable opportunity to others?

  To see inside everything, to penetrate to the very center of matter, to scrutinize the framework that sustains the human membrane and perhaps discover, in those depths, the secret of the soul and the prime movement of thought was a double dream of medicine and philosophy well worthy of some risk in order to make it a practical reality. What operation would he not be able to undertake on the day when his gaze, neglecting deceptive surfaces, would guide his infallible hand to a seat of disease invisible to anyone else? It was glory—and, to begin with, an assured revenge against his colleagues at the hospital, where his talents as a surgeon had recently been disputed, following an operation that had, it is true, left the patient alive, but which had failed completely.

  Dr. Schwanthaler did not hesitate any longer. He filled a little syringe with the photographic serum, fitted the platinum needle, then went to the window to see whether the liquid had conserved the desired limpidity.

  At that moment, Sunday bells resounded in the distance. There was a bright dawn that gradually enlivened the colors of the surroundings, where, bathed in pink light, frail bushes were swaying and all of nature was reawakening in spring. The perfume o
f nascent flowers rose up in light waves. Birds were singing amid the first leaves of the linden trees. Beyond the garden wall, a young girl was going to the well, rapidly and gracefully, with her pitcher on her hip.

  Dr. Schwanthaler passed his hand over his forehead and reflected momentarily, deliberating. All things considered, he would only offer a demi-sacrifice. One eye would suffice for science. He would conserve the other to complete his vision.

  He chose the left for his experiment. Bravely, he plunged the needle of the syringe into the cornea, as he had done with his guinea-pigs, and injected the serum. Then he lay down on his bed, having covered the injected eye with a kind of monocle whose glass he had coated with a platinum-based yellow substance impenetrable to the new rays.

  The next day, a familiar knock on his door woke him up. The faithful Gertrude had brought him his breakfast: an excellent opportunity to carry out an initial trial. Rapidly, he unmasked the left eye and closed the right one.

  Surprise! Instead of the old serving-woman whose red face and opulent flesh excited the hilarity of his pupils, he saw advancing toward him, with a comical waddle, a squat skeleton from which a few transparent viscera were suspended. The whole was covered by a sort of floating gauze, a trifle green-tinted, like the gelatinous envelope of a medusa but even more diaphanous, without any precise form, like a mist about to dissipate. As for the bones, he could distinguish them with perfect clarity. He even observed slight deformities, incorrect apophyses and misaligned ribs—and the heart, suspended in the middle of the carcass, like the clapper of a bell, seemed to be afflicted with a worrying hypertrophy. There was no more doubt: the experiment had succeeded!

  He got dressed rapidly. It was the very day on which operations were carried out at the hospital. Oh, his colleagues would see! With his head held high, and the monocle covering his eyes, he went through the wards, while the interns nudged one another as he passed by, whispering: “Look! Dr. Schwanthaler’s wearing a monocle, and a funny monocle at that!”