The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  What a strange spectacle the first few steps offered to our gaze! Lying on the sidewalks, in doorways, in the middle of the street and even on leaning on windowsills, the entire population was sound asleep; they were wherever the sudden lassitude had taken them by surprise, on the moving sidewalks, in the electric cars that had continued on their way, humming, until the order had been given to the central stations to cut off the current. In the public baths there were accidents, for the desire to sleep paralyzed the moments of swimmers in the pools, and more than one person drowned in a mere bath, without their being anyone awake who could rescue them.

  Through the mouths of drains and orifices open at intervals in the middle of the public highways, the soporific vapor by means of which Rassmuss had put an entire city to sleep was still fuming.

  It was after traversing this singular scene that we arrived at the house that served as our residence. It was an 18-story building with a garden terrace on top, from which one could see the whole city and, in the abyssal depths, the deserted countryside of Champagne at the foot of the tower. Magnificent sunlight illuminated the prodigious panorama above which, alone at that moment, we remained awake and conscious, but indecisive, still uncertain as to what the moment when the people sleeping before our eyes woke up again had in store for us.

  “What do you intend to do now?” I asked Goldfeller. “The covetousness of these thousands of men that you have brought here, gorged with well-being and promises, will overflow if you leave them idle.”

  “It’s necessary to occupy them,” said Kositch. “The war…”

  “What?” Dr. Hartwig put in. “Those down below are afraid. Since we’ve stood up to them so forcefully, they’ll leave us in peace…”

  The Gem King imposed silence with a gesture. “Perhaps, he said. “At any rate, our food-supplies have been cut off for a week, and my bankers inform me that my operations have been shackled on the steps of the Bourse, by order of the government. There’s no cause for alarm, since our reserves are immense and our resources infinite.”

  “Well, in that case,” Kositch resumed, excitedly, “what are you afraid of? The old world is attempting to starve us; let’s show them that we’re the stronger—let’s crush them.”

  Goldfeller shook his head. “My strategy is to defend myself,” he declared. “Defensiveness doubles our strength. In the meantime what are we going to do with this unoccupied rabble?”

  “Let them sleep,” Rassmuss proposed.

  Surprised to find these violent men, whom I had thought so strong, irresolute, I raised my hand to ask to speak. Goldfeller gave me a sign to do so.

  “Personally,” I said, “I’m astonished that you haven’t thought about this. You wanted to found a city, a world above the old world , but you’ve neglected an entire half of humankind. You’ve summoned thousands of workers to populate your city, but you can scarcely count a few hundred women among that number. Love, family, the bonds of tenderness and habit—that’s what these unoccupied men lack.”

  I shall pass over the considerations I developed subsequently; I put into the task the ardor of the sentiment that was beginning to overwhelm me confusedly, to the point of bringing smiles to the faces of those men driven uniquely by ambition and the need to fight recklessly against a world that had rejected them all. Only Goldfeller listened to me attentively, and my reasoning did not seem at all contemptible to him.

  “There’s truth in what you say, Bayoud. We need women here. So be it! We shall have women.”

  In the bold brain of the Gem King, my simple words had planted the seeds of a plan whose extravagant audacity would have deterred anyone else. The preparations were made in secret and I only learned of its imminent execution 48 hours later, when the cataleptic sleep imposed by Rassmuss upon the entire city in revolt came to an end.

  From the height of our terrace observatory I and my companions witnessed the slow reawakening of the sleeping streets. It was a comical spectacle at first; with lazy stretchings, yawns and stupefied gazes, all the men got to their feet, opening bewildered eyes and looking at one another interrogatively before exchanging their reflections and recovering their memories. At that moment, newspaper-sellers began to invade the streets at a run, shouting the titles of all the usual papers and those of Paris, which al announced in gigantic headlines the news that had impassioned public opinion since the day before.

  “Get the Réveil, the Jour, the Plein-Air, the Vérité, the Echo du Monde…latest detail of the Festival of Gems…”

  These newspapers were not being sold; they were distributed in profusion, and, at the same time, immense posters were plastered on every wall, informing the inhabitants of Aeria that the following evening, the city would be open to all women who cared to make the ascent. It was recommended that these voluntary visitors should be accorded the courteous and deferential welcome due to their sex; all of them would be admitted to visit the treasure of gems fabricated by the Gem King, who would make, in honor of the occasion, a distribution of diamonds, rubies and sapphires, which he knew the secret of making as perfectly as nature.

  For two days, said the Paris newspapers, luminous projections of a previously-unknown power playing upon the sidewalks and walls of houses have been announcing this fantastic news of M. Goldfeller; millions of printed prospectuses have been flying through the air, falling in clouds into all trembling hands. The reading of these mad promises has disturbed the minds of all women, and it’s said that there are thousands of them already on their way, from every corner of France, to the tower that the Gem King seems to have made into the pandemonium of extravagance and perversity…

  It was true. In 48 hours, the news had run from telephone to telephone, from one end of France to the other, and the rough plan imagined by Goldfeller seemed to be succeeding beyond all expectations.

  The sudden delight that exploded within the city at the announcement of these events was indescribable. In the blink of an eye, the crazed violence of two days previously was forgotten and everyone as occupied in preparations for the Festival of Gems. Directors briefed by Goldfeller supervised the work; in two days, everything was ready. It was to be a festival in which light would play the principal role; nothing comparable had ever blazed beneath the earthly night sky.

  From what reserves of electricity did Goldfeller extract the current necessary to feed the prodigious Pharos that the tower of Aeria would become at 9 p.m.? I still don’t know, the center of that metallic column having remained secret from me until the end, and his infinite resources always being for me as mysterious as they were amazing. I only knew the laboratory, the vast center in which all the simplified contacts of all the apparatus conceived by Goldfeller and his acolytes terminated. For two days, moreover, the Gem King was invisible to me; Rassmuss, Kandy, Kotisch and Dr. Hartwig disappeared too, and I had reason to suppose that in the core of that enormous metal tower, other collaborators that I was never to meet were, from then on, working on the accomplishment of the disastrous events of which the illumination of the Festival of Gems as to be the prelude.

  That light was visible in Paris. In a few seconds, the metallic mass was garlanded, girdled and decked out with fire; ribbons of green and blue light began to blaze around the immense cylinder, which seemed to be enlaced by fiery serpents. At intervals, sprays of red sparks simulated monstrous hooks responsible for holding those necklaces of fire in place around the flanks of the tower. Thus, in the beautiful summer night, the edifice was like a beacon of joy whose supreme flame shone on high, in the form of a pyramid of light, which was nothing other than a prodigious mountain of gems of every color.

  Yes, a mountain of gems. In the central plaza of Aeria, raised on a terrace planted with trees, so as to overlook the rural expanse, Goldfeller had transported his reserves of gems by the cartload, which we was ready to throw as fodder to feminine curiosity—and in the center of the precious heap was an electric lamp of unprecedented power, which projected its light through all those riches, making them
sparkle with all their multiplied gleams.

  Imagine the avid rush of a disorderly crowd, mad with greed, toward this beacon of splendor and opulence. The exodus had begun the previous evening; in tightly-packed ranks leaning over the outer balustrade that divided the limit of the city from the void, the inhabitants of Aeria saw troops of women of all ages and all conditions running through the fields. Old ones and young ones came, even little girls whose soft hair floated over their shoulders; there were poor women in rags who had come on foot, and timid seamstresses still clutching the embroidery frames they had not had time to abandon in order to run toward luxury and fortune; there were also elegant women in visiting hats, and society women in evening dresses, deposited by automobiles at the foot of the tower long before the hour fixed for entry.

  The illumination of the city was the signal agreed for the admission of all to the elevators. The formal instruction was that only unaccompanied women should be admitted, and that gave rise to scenes, for there were husbands, fathers, brothers and anxious friends who, until the last moment, made supreme efforts to deflect from a dubious adventure the cherished individuals who were sacrificing them to the lure of easy riches.

  The overexcitement of desire, however, and the intoxication of the light—everything, including the concurrent folly of uninhibited appetites, was to contribute to the success of the rough plan imagined by the Gem King.

  The elevators, full to overflowing and garlanded with light, began to climb up toward the city. When they reached the superimposed platforms that constituted the height of the tower, loud fanfares saluted them as they passed, and when the women set foot on the soil of Aeria, orchestras hidden in the gardens and under the quincunxes of plazas greeted the crowds of visitors with voluptuous concerts.

  The glare of the illumination was blinding. The facades of the houses, polychromatic in the play of little luminous bulbs, aligned ramps of fire as far as the eye could see. The fountains and public drinking-fountains in the parks, emitted fiery sprays and dazzling cascades, alternately blue, green, red and saffron, like molten gold. Above our heads, the silvery moon and the stars had lost their glamour in the overwhelmed heavens.

  Then, in the tranquil air of the beautiful evening, long trails of odiferous vapors were seen to emerge from the ground, whose enervating action was not long in making itself felt. Numbed and intoxicated by these perfumes, in which the artistry of Rassmuss and Kandy was detectable, the women seemed to lose all hesitation and all memory; they breathed forgetfulness, as they had to do in order to drink the beverages dispensed in the depths of bars and the cafés of the city, transformed into buffets for the evening of folly. All these means were employed to prolong the kind of stupefied ecstasy in which they advanced through the city on fire, to the hypnotic center of that head of light.

  In the largest plaza in Aeria, at the summit of a kind of labyrinthine garden, was the flamboyant pyramid of gems around which the members of the crowd crushed one another under the pressure of desire and curiosity. A simple luminous ribbon protected the treasure, a powerful electric wire in which, at a signal from the governmental palace, the current was suddenly cut off, thus delivering to the avidity of that overexcited population the mass of gems, which flowed through shaking hands.

  In a matter of minutes, the streets were streaming with sapphires, rubies and fabulous stones radiating red fire in which Goldfeller had succeeded in imprisoning the crimson gleam of corundum in the glacial purity of diamond. Exposed throughout the evening to electrical rays, these stones were phosphorescent in the darkness and conserved their gleam long after the lights of that unprecedented festival were extinguished.

  From the height of our terrace, we contemplated this spectacle, whose details were attenuated in a whole of quasi-fabulous grandeur. I saw the grey eyes of the Gem King gleaming with pride at the unison of that splendor, of which he was the master. As for his acolytes, the wild and violent expressions on their delighted faces, at the sight of scenes of greedy and bestial frenzy precipitated by so many unchained appetites, were indescribable. The drunken laughter that succeeded in spreading the contagion of its intoxication all around was the laughter of these silently contemplative maleficent geniuses.

  As for me, I watched that bacchanal without saying anything, my eyes turned in the direction of the distant dwelling where I delighted myself by evoking the image of Yella. What was she doing? I blushed at the thought that she might be able to see what we were seeing; but, by virtue of studying the sea of phosphorescent light before our eyes, I ended up noting the relative obscurity of the quarter in which the Gem King’s secret residence was situated, and I was pleased to interpret that as a mark of foresight on the part of that strange man. I imagined the frail and precarious child asleep at that moment, out of range of the orgy, and her beauty and charm appeared to me more perfect still.

  VIII. Fulgurite

  The next day, a stupefying calm—a kind of torpor—reigned over the entire city, while at the foot of the tower, an immense crowd was muttering in the surrounding countryside. A confused buzz rose up toward us, and the service elevators that were used for the routine provisioning of Aeria were almost taken by storm by those exasperated people who were demanding the return of the women abducted the night before and retained as prisoners, in defiance of all human rights.

  It was necessary to send up the elevators in haste and, in order to disperse that crowd of malcontents, Goldfeller had recourse to the means that he had used to frighten the delegates of the government a month earlier. A frightful cyclone was unleashed, for several leagues around, sweeping everything away, sowing terror and death in its passage. Within a few hours, the vicinity of the tower had been cleared.

  It was then that it was noticed that the usual trains bringing vita supplies were not arriving from Sommesous, and, on following the track that linked out mercantile station to the Châlons line, it was discovered that the rails had been cut. Taking reprisals, the government of the Republic had isolated Aeria, henceforth reduced to its own resources.

  This news did not seem to surprise Goldfeller; it whipped up a ferocious joy in the lieutenants assembled around him.

  “This time, it’s war.”

  “Finally!”

  “Finally…”

  Kositch and Hartwig seemed intoxication with a delirium of destruction. Rassmuss and Kandy manifested the tranquil yawns of tigers. Hatred dilated the cruel hearts of those men, who all seemed to have been granted desires caressed for a long time. The general opinion was to enquire as soon as possible into attacking moves that might be made against the tower. To that end, two dirigibles were sent out as scouts.

  Only one came back. The man aboard declared that, about 30 kilometers away, he had perceived the advance guard of a French army on the march; he and his companion had been attempting to advance, gliding over the troops, when an artillery shell had struck the first aeroscaphe. Its envelope had resisted the impact, but had caught fire in the explosion of the detonator with which the shell was loaded. Turning back, the aeronaut had immediately returned to his home base.

  This news threw Goldfeller into a rage, which he only expressed by a gesture. Pressing a button within arm’s reach, he rang a bell. It was Siam-Si who appeared. A few words pronounced in English were sufficient to convey to the master’s orders to the Chinese. Less than an hour later, the inhabitants of Aeria were able to witness an extraordinary spectacle, of which I will try to give some idea.

  You will remember the gigantic lantern in the form of a seahorse, the contemplation of which had cost me my liberty on the very day of the President of the Council’s visit to the construction-works of the incomplete tower.

  “Our lighting system,” Goldfeller had replied, when interrogated on the subject by the minister.

  Indeed, four monstrous specimens of this monument had raised their forms several weeks ago at Aeria’s cardinal compass-points. In spite of the affirmations of the Gem King, however, I had never seen them illuminated, and un
til that evening their fantastic forms had remained black against the sky. One might have thought them four menacing and gigantic beasts crouching over the void, in the attitude of the arabesque gargoyles sculpted on the balustrades of Gothic cathedrals.

  Scarcely had the Gem King given Siam-Si the orders I mentioned when a tremor agitated the four monsters, the formless and compact masses of which began progressively to metamorphose. The mass of shafts and levers on which they rested dilated silently, advancing each curved and steel-helmeted head into empty space. At the same time, within the enormous glass globe that terminated it like a pale muzzle, a little star of light sparkled like a partly-opened eye.

  Abruptly, with a single bound, in a definitive release of their mysterious organism, the four monsters launched themselves like living beings over the countryside, whose depths they seemed to be sounding with the undulations of saurians of prehistoric times. Almost immediately, an implacable light was projected into the distance by the fire-encircled globes of those quasi-living lanterns, which aimed and twisted in every direction. In the beams that they directed thus at one another, one could see that behind each of the globes, inside a little cage lodged on the head of the monster, a man was seated. To each of these beasts, a living an audacious intelligence had been assigned, for a still-mysterious labor of destruction and death.

  Those at the foot of Aeria who were able to contemplate the descent of these four automatic reptiles, and who saw them writhing in the air, moving silently above the countryside, with their vaguely luminous muzzles and their metallic crests, which sheltered the technicians directing the maneuver, must have thought that they had gone back to the earliest ages of the Earth, to the epoch of great monstrous winged saurians…but of those living beneath the spectacle, how many are still alive?