The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  For my part, lost in the crowd leaning over the balconies of Aeria, I followed with breathless emotion the unexpected twists and turns of the brief battle that took place before my eyes. After the somewhat contorted efforts of the first minute, the four monsters succeeded to a disquieting rigidity; combining in a spray the four rays of dazzling light that they were each projecting, they lit up the countryside for more than 20 leagues in the direction of Paris.

  From the height at which we were it then became easy to perceive the scattered column of the army whose approach had been signaled by the aeronaut scout; its confused swarming masses could be seen in the implacable light of the four monstrous lanterns motionless in the shadows of the night.

  About five minutes went by, during which the inhabitants of Aeria, impressed by the distant spectacle revealed to their eyes and variously informed as to the reasons for the battle in preparation, became unanimous in admitting the evidence.

  “We’re being attacked…”

  “But why?”

  “They’ll be here tomorrow.”

  In the quarter where I was, it seemed to me that the prospect of a conflict overturned all suppositions. While it was no more than a matter of resisting the government and molesting its agents, the adventure had been able to seem singular, and even amusing. That was no longer the case, as soon as it was a question of declared war and resistance to organized force. However, the brutality of events put an end to the fluctuations of the nervous crowd, which was miraculously presented with the most terribly cruel of all spectacles of carnage.

  Projecting into the distance the immense gaze of their flamboyant pupils, the quasi-living lanterns seemed to be both watching and waiting. Suddenly, the howling of invisible sirens cut through the air, and on that agreed signal, the four luminous monsters opened their globes of opaline glass like muzzles intending to breathe fire; on contact with the air the light caught fire, lighting up everything in its passage, inflaming instead of clarifying, instantly burning everything that it found in its path.

  Beneath the ardor of those projections, the atmosphere caught fire within a radius of 20 leagues; entire villages burst into flames in the front of, behind and all around the army that had been asleep a few moments before, a day’s march from Aeria.

  In front of me an ardent furnace blazed, precisely limited by the straight lines of the spray of light projected by the lanterns. All the way to the most distant horizon, the Catalunian region of France, Brie and the Île de France, lit up and appeared as clearly as the lunar orb on an Oriental night. Against the golden background of the air on fire, a multitude of dots began to agitate, running back and forth; surprised in their sleep, the men and animals attempted to flee, but almost all of them caught fire in their turn, flaming like red sparks, finally falling and disappearing into the furnace.

  The host of men and horses making up the army that was the target of the implacable light gave us the spectacle of a crackling brazier stirred by a poker; the caissons loaded with shells and gunpowder caused a series of explosions whose sound was audible to us and whose light stained with red the glided light of the unprecedented catastrophe.

  Absorbed in the contemplation of the spectacle, I felt a hand slip under my arm. A nearby voice murmured: “Isn’t it marvelous?”

  It was Kositch.

  The former Russian officer advanced his ruddy face closer to mine and extended his arm in the direction of the lanterns.

  “Fulgurite,” he explained, “is our finest invention. You see how simple it is. On contact with that mysterious current, the air simply catches fire and causes death as much by asphyxiation as combustion.”

  “To whom, then, has the maneuvering of those lanterns been entrusted?” I asked. “What savages…?”

  Kotisch emitted a little laugh. “Tee hee! Savages, maybe—but for a first experiment, they haven’t come out of it badly. You can imagine that resolute and cool-headed fellows were necessary for the task. Damn! An error in one line of the projection and the light might have reached us… Fortunately, the boss was alert, and would only have had to cut off the current. See how quickly it’s completed.”

  Abruptly, darkness fell. Deeming the work of destruction sufficiently complete, the invisible dispenser of that murderous force had stopped its surge. A second or two after the extinction of the lanterns, one could see no more in the black extent of the region but a few clumps of trees and houses that were completing their consumption, and the moving patches of wretches who had been able to throw themselves outside the mortal projection by running at hazard into the darkness like errant torches, shaking off the flames that were finishing them off. The latter were uttering terrible screams, whose faint echo just about reached us, like the distant cries of nocturnal birds.

  Meanwhile, Kositch drew me away. “Come on,” he said. “Come to Goldfeller’s study to witness the return of our four fulgurants.”

  By means of the moving walkways we arrived at the governmental palace, and went to the immense gallery from which the Gem King had directed the secret maneuver of the fulgurant lanterns.

  In the latter, the anger of a short while before had given way to a furious delight. He only had Rassmuss beside him. The placid old man welcomed with a patriarchal smile the compliments his master lavished upon him regarding the results of the fulgurite, of which he was the inventor.

  “Prodigious, eh?” said Goldfeller. “Rassmuss, you’re the god of war. Five minutes of light and nothing more: an entire army annihilated, perhaps 40,000 or 50,000 men. Twenty square leagues of terrain charred and rendered desert. And all of that with one gesture, and in silence. Oh, that luminous and murderous silence—isn’t there something magnificent and genuinely new about it?”

  In the midst of that enthusiasm, supported by the warm admiration of Kotisch, the emotion that gripped me might have passed for mute evidence of complicity. In reality, my decision was made, and I was determined to get away as quickly as possible from the spectacle of all these horrors. I was approaching Goldfeller to ask him to grant me a private interview, when the access door to the communication elevator opened, giving passage to four fantastic apparitions.

  They were the men whom Kositch had called the “fulgurants.” They were dressed in costumes reminiscent of diving-suits, in asbestos fabric, and their heads were protected by glass helmets in the form of a raptor’s beak, in which breathable air had been distributed to them throughout the dangerous maneuver of opening the lantern to contact with the atmosphere, which had rendered it fiery and deadly.

  Aided by Goldfeller and Kositch, the four strange figures began to take off their helmets, which were firmly screwed down on their shoulders, and I saw the expected faces of the subaltern accomplices of the Gem King’s general staff appear: Siam-Si, Moldo, Glubb and Hernu. All four were smiling at the compliments that were not spared, the first two with the silent laughter of brutes, the other two with the slightly grating laughter of street-urchins.

  “We beat them, eh?” squawked Hernu, revealing his discolored teeth in a satisfied manner. Glubb clicked his finger-joints outside the incombustible gloves that he had just taken off and said, nasally: “Hollow! Hollow!”

  No, I could not bear such odious contacts any longer. I drew nearer to Goldfeller. He came to meet me.

  “Just the man,” he said. “I need to talk to you. Wait there.”

  IX. The Secret of Aeria

  Having accompanied Rassmuss, with whom he had had a conversation in low voices, to the far end of the room, Goldfeller came back, rubbing his hands, to place his hand on my shoulder in a familiar manner.

  “The evening,” he said, “there’s a celebration. I’m taking you up—you’ve been invited.”

  Yella. It only required the evocation of that charming image to shake all my resolution. Wouldn’t departure mean never seeing her again? Instinctively, the sacrifice seemed beyond my strength. Goldfeller led me away. I followed him.

  By the same aerial route as before, we arrived in th
e garden. A slight, fine rain was falling, beneath which we hastened to reach the Gem King’s house.

  As we entered, an old black woman ran towards us precipitately and came to murmur a few words in Goldfeller’s ear. He frowned. He signaled to me to wait, disappeared, and came back after a quarter of an hour.

  “We’re dining alone,” he told me. “My daughter is ill.”

  It was not hard to see that his impassivity was feigned. During the meal we both remained silent, because I didn’t dare interrogate the man I judged to be furious and fearful in the face of a difficulty that mastered his despotic will—and yet, I was prey to anxiety. Something soft and ender told me that this sudden illness brought me even closer to the charming and delicate creature imprisoned, like me, in Aeria. In the end, I was unable to suppress that curiosity.

  When the dinner was over, we came to lean on the balcony of the musical pavilion, both of us smoking. From there, our eyes embraced the horizon previously lit up by the monstrous lanterns, and we could see the still-smoking embers of little clumps of trees set on fire by the fulgurite.

  “Aren’t you afraid,” I murmured, “that the spectacle of these horrors, and all those the future has in store, might be more than a nature as delicate as that of your daughter can bear?”

  That violent man had contained himself too long; those few words were sufficient to make him explode.

  “Damn the nerves of these sensitive creatures!” he cried. “Is it my fault if they cut off our food supplies and armies attack us? In sum, I’ve done nothing but defend the integrity of my work, and Yella knows full well that she has the greatest interest in that.”

  I started abruptly at the idea that the person of whom he was speaking was mixed up in any way whatsoever with that work of folly and destruction. But Goldfeller continued: “What connects the sequence of human actions? From the day when a doctor in Lausanne, whom I had consulted about her, told me that Yella would die within a year in the valleys in which the greater part of humankind buries its life, the creation of this tower dated.”

  At the dull exclamation that escaped me, and the air of amazement with which I looked at him, Goldfeller started to laugh—the sardonic laughter with which he took care to emphasize the rare manifestations of a sensibility that he had mastered completely.

  “Oh,” he replied, swiftly, “Don’t cast me too quickly in the role of a good family man who would turn the world upside-down to save the life of his child. No, it’s not as simple as that. What, then? A caprice of nature determined that, in a development generally normal enough, the cellular development of arterial tissue slowed down in that child, with the result that, unless things change, the beating of her heart threatens to break the walls of the channels responsible for ensuring the circulation of the blood. There’s no remedy for that save for circulatory regularization for which Dr. Leroux, feeling his way by virtue of ausculating the patient in various positions, gave the following prescription: to breathe the pure and light air that exists 1900 meters above sea level…”

  “So that,” I said, is the reason for Aeria’s existence.”

  Goldfeller shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. “Pooh! There it is! For, in sum, you’ll understand that it was impossible for me to admit for a single instant that, with the resources at my disposal, I was going to retreat in the face of nature and permit the daughter of the Gem King to be carried off by the most banal of the accidents of human life. In Switzerland, however, there is no lack of locations at the requisite altitude, where I could have built the palace in which I planned to install Yella. My effort would have been limited to that—but I dreamed of something better than that silent and solitary existence among the eternal snows. Instead of a house, to construct a city, no longer isolated above mountains where indolent ruminant-herders vegetate, but in the very heart of civilized activity; to endow this city with all the most recently-imagined refinements of luxury and comfort; to animate it with joy and audacity; to populate it with a busy host, which I would rule with all the ingenious energy that would ensure its existence and well-being, which I would defend against the temptations and attacks that always rise up from below against that which is lofty, proud and extraordinary. What a dream! Have I not realized it?”

  His gesture embraced the enormous city that sparkled and hummed around us, in which the savage spectacle that had been offered to it a few hours before seemed to have augmented the bestial frenzy of enjoyment. Shouting, singing and laughter rose up toward us from all that population subjugated by gross instincts to the domination of the Gem King.

  “At the price of what sacrifices, alas!” I murmured. “Can you suppose that the conflict you have undertaken will conclude according to your will?”

  Goldfeller gripped my arm, and squeezed it hard, affirming through clenched teeth: “I shall annihilate them all, one after another. I…”

  He interrupted himself abruptly, relaxed his grip and pointed northwards. “Look. What’s that black mass, there, flying toward us?”

  The rain had stopped, but the darkness was profound and at first I could not see anything. By dint of staring into the obscurity, I ended up perceiving a large patch that was curving around Aeria, fleeing eastwards under the pressure of the wind.

  “A balloon,” I murmured.

  “Yes!” cried the billionaire. “A balloon, and a poor balloon at that, incapable of passing overhead or of fighting against the westerly wind that is forcing it off course. It’s an attack. It’s necessary to respond. Come.”

  He drew me away. Silently, I pointed at the dwelling where Yella was resting. He shrugged his shoulders, saying: “She’s asleep. Besides, I’ll attack from a distance; she won’t hear anything from here.”

  I had to follow him. In a few minutes, his general staff was gathered in the machine-room and I watched a council of demons in which it was instantly resolved to send a flotilla of balloons to Paris, charged with peppering the city with a cloud of explosives.

  Mute and distressed, I followed them through the city to the mooring-station where the little group of light cigar-shaped dirigibles was bobbing in the wind.

  A long howl of sirens pierced the profound darkness, and with a common bound, the four fulgurant lanterns took flight beneath us in order to light and guide the course of the dirigibles. Four luminous projections extended over the countryside, increasing in intensity by the second, without their concentrated radiation revealing the mysterious flight they were responsible for guiding.

  “The darkness will protect us,” Goldfeller said, returning to the governmental palace. “No, it’s no more than a simple matter of hours.”

  Indeed, there was nothing to do but wait. As the night was fairly well advanced, in spite of the anxious state I was in, I took my leave of the Gem King in order to go to bed.

  I had been sleeping for less than an hour when I was awakened with a start by the noise of a formidable explosion. A blazing glare lit up my room, and almost immediately, the crash of a further detonation shook everything around me, while clamors of distress and pain rose up from the streets and houses in the vicinity.

  X. War! War!

  In the blink of an eye I was on my feet. I went down into the street and immediately deduced what had just happened on seeing the forms of three balloons fleeing into the darkness. the last of them dropped a black mass from the bottom of its gondola, which caught fire at a height of a few meters and landed in the center of a square, causing one last explosion. Paris was returning the explosive bombs that Aeria had dispatched against it, by identical means.

  Without paying any heed to the clamors of the idlers who thought the city entirely destroyed, I ran to the governmental palace. As I ran around the circular boulevard next to the dirigibles’ mooring-station, Kositch suddenly appeared running beside me. He seemed excited, and initially addressed by raising his arms to the sky with an expression of furious rage.

  “Many victims?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders scornfully. “Bah! It w
ould be little enough if it were limited to a few anonymous individuals. The worst thing is that one of their damned projectiles has broken one of the fulgurant lanterns, interrupting the current of air supplying the man responsible for maneuvering it—it’s Moldo, and he must be dead by now. We’re in the process of trying to recover the apparatus. Come and see.”

  With the aid of hastily-installed mobile cranes, a hundred men under the supervision of Hartwig were maneuvering to hoist over the balustrade the enormous dead weight of the injured apparatus. Electric searchlights illuminated the work, which lasted nearly two hours. I followed its vicissitudes by Kositch’s side. Eventually, I expressed my surprise at not seeing Goldfeller with us.

  “We were in the laboratory when the bombs began to burst,” he replied. “It appears that a bell, whose origin I don’t know, has summoned him to a point at which the bombardment has produced particularly dangerous results. I haven’t seen him since then.”

  A name sprang to me lips, which I almost cried out in the suddenness of my terror: Yella!

  I imagined the residence of Goldfeller’s daughter ablaze, destroyed by bombs, and I launched myself forth. But where should I go? The laboratory was empty and the mysterious dwelling of the Gem King was as inaccessible from the street to me as to everyone else. I was forced to wait, to stay in the place to which he was bound to run as soon as he could. Mad with anguish, I watched the final maneuvers of the apparatus that finally succeeded in bringing the twisted debris of the gigantic lantern to rest on the ground.

  Already, Kositch was carefully opening the door of the cockpit in which Moldo was enclosed. Rigidly immobile in his strange diver’s costume, the fulgurant appeared in the depths of his little cage. The lenses in his pointed helmet were shining like staring eyes, and both his hands were clutching the wheel of the transmission mechanism that he used to direct the light of his apparatus.