The Mirror of Present Events

by Brian Stableford

  III.

  “My son,” said To’s father, at the end of the seventh month, “you’re now ready to study and undertake your apprenticeship in life. Study and learn! Remember that time is money and that the future belongs to the man who knows how to use all the minutes of his life. Go, my son; I’ll cuddle you tomorrow if my rheumatism prevents me from going to the Bourse.

  IV.

  And To studied, learning frenetically, devouring books night and day, only eating condensed aliments in order to waste less time on meals, and teaching himself to squint, in accordance with the method of a famous physician, in order to be able to read two books are the same time.

  At twenty-five, To was already the most energetic man of his century

  V.

  One day, when he was dictating five dispatches simultaneously—pardon, shade of Caesar!—riffling through a directory with his left hand and an atlas with his right, while one of his ears was listening over the telephone to a speech made in the Senate and the other to the song of a nightingale, To perceived with his left eye, in the street, an adorable young woman passing by.

  Thunderbolt!

  She was beautiful…etc, etc.

  In brief, he made enquiries, found her address, presented himself and was admitted to pay court to her.

  VI.

  Oh, their hearts were both beating rapidly!

  “My name’s To,” he said. “And you, Mademoiselle?”

  “Zi!”

  “I have a fortune of a million. And you, Mademoiselle?

  “A million and a half.”

  “Good. I love you. And you, Mademoiselle?”

  “I love you too.”

  And no sooner said, than they were married.

  Hup!

  VII.

  Were happy.

  Had few children. No time.

  Only two twins.

  And To made fabulous sums.

  Zi too.

  To founded, on average, a bank a day, in Paris, Berlin, Constantinople or Santa-Fe-Bogota.

  On average too, he created at least one bankruptcy.

  Colossally rich.

  VIII.

  He dug canals, discovered mines, dried up seas, reconnected pierced isthmuses, reignited extinct volcanoes and amazed his contemporaries with his exploits.

  One evening, busy transforming Etna into a vast central-heating boiler to warm the whole of Sicily with the aid of subterranean conduits radiating from the volcano, he learned by telegram of his father’s death.

  To was worthy.

  “I’ll weep for you,” he said, in a tone penetrated with tenderness, “when I have time, in my old age.”

  He inscribed in his account book:

  Owed to Papa: tears and eternal regrets.

  IX.

  Returning home unexpectedly one evening, he found a man in his wife’s boudoir.

  “Huh! Ought to know, Monsieur,” To grunted, “not too much free time at the moment...”

  He interrupted himself. A second individual was hiding under the table.

  “Eh! But...! What the…?”

  A third appeared behind a screen.

  “But...!”

  “Pardon, my love! Am very guilty!” sobbed Zi, who appeared in the company of a fourth lover. “But to save time, I thought...”

  “That’s fine!” exclaimed To.

  And, putting his wife’s lovers side by side the middle of the room: “No time to kill you one by one,” he announced. “Going to avenge my honor en bloc. Don’t move!”

  And he aimed a newly-invented device at the platoon: the household machine-gun.

  X.

  The lovers tried to flee, each in a different direction.

  “Monsters!” roared To. “You’ll pay me, then!”

  And, having closed the doors, he took a dagger in each hand and, frantic and terrible, desperate in thinking about the time he was about to waste avenging his honor piecemeal, he charged the platoon

  Screams. Blood. Death-rattles.

  XI.

  He used feet and fists. It was horrible. It took him half an hour to kill them all. And when he had laid all four rivals on the floor, To’s teeth stated chattering.

  He could not stop the convulsive movements of his arms, his legs, his head and his body. He had himself tied up, garroted, bound to a plank.

  In vain.

  The puppet, overtaxed by frenetic roil, had broken down. He had St Vitus’ Dance.

  “That’s fine!” he said. “Will be able to amuse myself cultivating the arts now.”

  And, seeing the disordered twitches that his hands were making, he sat down at the piano.

  XII.

  A few minutes later he fell over, paralyzed on the right side.

  “Papa,” one of his sons said to him. “Have consulted medic on your case.”

  “Well?” asked To, anxiously.

  “As going to Père-Lach, would you like me to light oven for your cremat?”

  “Go light my inf!” cried To, flattered to have a son so energetic and so hurried.

  And he expired.

  XIII.

  “Mama!” said the two twins, then. “Pap’s dead, never having had time to kiss us.”

  “That’s true,” reflected the mother. “Nor me.”

  Rapidly, they approached the dear departed, provoked a stirring of his lips with the aid of an electric current, and then, piously, all three of them advanced their faces and were given a posthumous kiss.

  Régis Vombal: The Immortal

  (1908)

  I. In which there is question of an astonishing discovery and some sensational amputations

  Midnight was chiming at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas when Doctor Jacobus van Brucktel raised toward his lamp the test-tube, full to the brim with a liquid, that he had been watching over for an hour. The old scientist had just discovered, quite simply, the elixir of life: the divine liquor that assured anyone who took a few drops of it of immortality.

  He remained pensive for a moment.

  That phial of violet liquid could upset the world, which had no suspicion of anything.

  Death was henceforth a word devoid of meaning; the natural order was destroyed; and yet, at that moment, physicians’ bells were ringing; sons at bedsides were receiving their mother’s last breath; people everywhere were suffering, weeping and dying.

  Everything was changed completely; humans would no longer be human. And he, Jacobus van Brucktel, had just carried out a theft from God similar to the one for which the Titan Prometheus, millennia ago, had been subjected to the agonizing outrage of the vulture that devoured his liver.

  Yes, like him, but less fortunate, Prometheus had once stolen the sacred fire of the Master of gods and men, the redoubtable thunderous Zeus, who, having had him chained to a rock, sent a bird of prey that plunged its hooked, bloody, horny beak into his renascent entrails every day.

  In the street, long silent, students who were coming out of the brasserie and returning to their lodgings went by, laughing; a young woman was singing, and the light couplets rose up to the scientist’s window, celebrating in the peace of the spring night, the card games at Robinson’s, the swings in the gardens, the intimate suppers under arbors garlanded with convolvulus, and the melancholy of all the human things of which people would weary, and which would end after a few seasons.

  The old man smiled strangely and gazed ardently at the crystal phial in which the clear violet liquid was sparkling.

  He was only thinking about himself. Since he had discovered the remedy for death, he was about to be the first to test it. He was old, to be sure, but robust, and without any of the infirmities that make old age an interminable agony; he was about to drink, to become immortal.

  He went to fetch a small glass from the kitchen, poured the contents of the test-tube into it and raised the glass toward the lamp.

  It was of Prometheus that he was still thinking, and it was him that he saluted with a slightly puerile bombast, offering to that torture-v
ictim of mythological legend a radiant toast with the most precious of liqueurs.

  “Salut, O Prometheus,” he said, “distant ancestor, precursor, forefather of all those who have wanted to steal the fire and unveil the great secrets! Salut, admirable thief, for it is in honor of your memory that I am about to drink this elixir, which you foresaw at the dawn of the centuries, O thunderstruck!”

  In a single draught, he swallowed the warm liquid. Then he remained alone in the silence of the night, listening to the rumble of carriages, the laughter of the students and the young woman’s song die away in the depths of the Rue Gay-Lussac.

  When he woke up the next day, the May sunlight came into his bedroom, the shutters of which he had forgotten to close, and he recalled his discovery of the previous day in a flash. He got out of bed delightedly. As soon as he was dressed and his housekeeper had served his chocolate, he went out, having to buy a few drugs from a pharmacist that he needed for his experiments.

  It is futile to explain what happened as he came out of the shop; such things have no explanation. Doubtless distracted, he could not get out of the way in time, and an enormous autobus laden with passengers ran over him. He was carried home, and one of his friends amputated both his legs.

  It is necessary to admit that the elixir he had discovered did not render the body any younger, nor invulnerable, but only ensured that the soul, the principle of life, withdrew from the mutilated parts, able to animate the smallest parcel, the most humble organism, that remained intact.

  Furthermore, the liquor embalmed, in a sense, the entire being, and there was no further need for nourishment once it had been absorbed.

  The shock of the amputation, however, had had an effect on the scientist that has often been observed. A curious amnesia followed the operation, and Jacobus van Brucktel could no longer remember the miraculous formula.

  Cases of amnesia are more frequent than is believed, and often rather bizarre.

  There is the well-known story of the banker who was carrying half a million in a valise, and was the victim of a derailment on the railway; there were no papers in his bag and no card in his wallet. He was cared for in a small station in the Midi, where he settled and lived for five years. He had forgotten his name, his wife and his children, and was about to get married when he read on a café concert poster: Debut of Madame Georgette Stella.

  He was like a man walking through a dark stormy night who sees, in a flash of lightning, an entire red-tinted horizon, chalky and yet quite clear, with the crenellations of rocks on the mountain, and trees exactly delineated by the abrupt light. From the utmost depths of his torpid memory, a name—his forgotten name—rose up slowly; he sensed it, like a little bright bubble that is only waiting for the open air to burst. Frightened, he followed its dolorous ascent, full of hope, fearful of the dark, for the interval of a quarter of a second, and suddenly the words he sought sang in his brain like the clang of a bell, hummed in his joyful heart and filled his mouth: Georges Estel! His name was Georges Estel!

  Dr. Jacobus had only forgotten his formula.

  The physician, who did not expect him to pull through, because of his advanced age, was astonished to see him, after a week, not on his feet, since he no longer had any, but as hearty as in the times when, shod in sturdy American boots, he had taken his regular after-dinner walk in the Luxembourg.

  Jacobus van Brucktel was rich. He hired a valet, bought the most advanced carriage, and did not sacrifice any of his habits.

  Nor did he abandon either his work or his scientific research, and he was in the process of inventing a new powder when his retort exploded, this time ripping apart his arms, in such a fashion that they had to be amputated at the shoulder.

  He recovered.

  His valet picked him up like a parcel, put him on the seat of an automobile and took him for an excursion in the Bois every afternoon.

  The sleeves of his jacket dissimulated the absent limbs quite well, but among the strollers and the masters of elegant carriages that the doctor’s machine went past, no one would have thought that that human trunk had once known the secret of life.

  He was even-tempered; the experience amused him prodigiously, and what infirm individual does not, over time, become accustomed to his condition?

  The days went by, and the years.

  Scientists came from all over to see what remained of Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel. He had followed in his vehicle the funeral processions of all his friends, the sons, the daughters and the grandsons of his friends, and he alone remained of an epoch whose houses were already beginning to be demolished.

  People came to consult him about everything; historians laid siege to his door, for his journal, written day after day by his secretaries, was the most complete of the records of history.

  He was for the generations of the year 2300 what an old man who had known Louis XIV would have been for our time, and who could say: “I saw the king on the evening of the day of the death of Charles le Téméraire; he had toothache, and his jaw was swollen, but he was laughing...”

  One day, he confessed to a journalist that he repented of having drunk a toast to Prometheus when he had drunk the elixir, still warm, that he had discovered. He believed that God had struck him as Jupiter had struck the Titan.

  He endured, he still endured, and that appeared to him to be a supreme irony; he, of whom hardly anything remained, witnessed the deaths of all those robust individuals; he saw the young women depart who passed beneath his windows, drunk on youth and spring, saw generations extinguished, governments succeed one another, the centuries file past before him, an imperishable human milestone, like the images of the god Terminus that had witnessed in their stone sheath the festivals of ancient Rome, the invasion of the Barbarians, the devastations of several thousand years, and which remained, in spite of everything, in spite of the days of murderous time.

  He had rented a country house in a pleasant setting on the banks of the Marne, and gave orders, one July evening, for the departure. The following morning, the automobile was humming outside his door like a huge insect of vermilion-painted steel, and his valet took him down to the vehicle.

  The light machine carried him to what had been in our day the Gare de l’Est, through avenues two hundred meters wide bordered by fifty-story houses.

  None of the heavy vehicles we know encumbered the streets with their slowness and their noise; only a few rapid automobiles, silent and infinitely improved, furrowed the gigantic boulevards—but in the air, the spectacle was prodigious!

  Aerial trains and vast airplanes transported hosts of passengers a thousand feet up in the azure. Aerostatics no longer had any secrets for that epoch, and squadrons of balloons were moving through the open sky.

  They were of all forms and dimensions. The largest were elongated, like ships, others were similar to fish, baskets or birds, and they were all crossing paths, flying, soaring in the blue sky with their flags, the fabric ornamenting their nacelles, and women’s veils floating in the wind.

  Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel’s automobile was speeding along the immense avenue beneath the splendid airship when a dog that the driver had not perceived was run over, and caused the machine to swerve fatally. The man let go of the steering-wheel and the vehicle crashed into a wall.

  II. In which nothing but a head can any longer be seen, but in which an issue of the Petit Parisien can be read 405 years in advance.

  When Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel was brought out, there was great alarm: on the crushed torso, the head alone was alive.

  At the hospital to which he was immediately transported, he asked to see the surgeon. He explained to him that so long as a piece of him remained intact, he would not perish; they could cut off and remove anything they wanted.

  He was relieved of his pulped torso. He was reduced to his simplest expression, conserving nothing but his head. On the evening of the accident, all the newspapers carried banner headlines in which one could read:

  DOCTOR JACOBUS, THE IMM
ORTAL,

  VICTIM OF AN ACCIDENT

  ONLY HIS HEAD SPARED: STILL ALIVE.

  And great luminous transparencies displayed in the open sky, all night long, in all the cities, the illustrious head on the hospital bed: the serene, clean-shaven head with the soft smile on its lips.

  When the bloody section had scarred over, the doctor who had carried out the operation picked up the head and carried it away. In the same voice, Jacobus van Brucktel greeted his domestics, joking as he entered, and, not wanting to remain on the table where he had been placed like a melon, had a kind of pedestal constructed by a workman, as tall as a man: a padded stele on which he lived henceforth.

  He seemed thus, alongside his bookshelves, to be a living piece of sculpture. He stayed there until dusk. He read, his maid turning the pages of the book she held in front of him. Sometimes, the pedestal was taken to the window, and the doctor’s head watched the bustle of the street, recognized passers-by, always interested in life.

  Time passed, but his symbolic scythe would have blunted itself in vain on the threshold of Dr. Jacobus van Brucktel.

  Like the Roman images of the god Terminus to which we have already compared him, he witnessed all the evolutions impassively.

  In any case, nothing very sensational occurred after the year 1989. When we say “nothing very sensational,” we obviously do not mean that literally, but nothing caused any abrupt upheaval in the world. The sure scientific conquests, linked to one another, the progress that we cannot even suspect, seemed natural and inevitable things, arriving in their time with a mathematical precision. People scarcely remembered the great shock of 1989.

  After muted agitations, discontentments, and an abominable war that had scythed down several generations, the antique social framework had simply cracked, like something too old, too worn out, and a new order had triumphed. Life was enlarged, powerful machines reduced the part of labor and drudgery to negligibility; peaceful humanity relaxed.