The Napus, page 2
Le Napus could not have been written in America in 1927, and if, by some freak of chance it had, it could not have been published or appreciated there; it is not surprising that it has had to wait nearly a century to be translated, and if political correctness were an excluding factor, that time would never have arrived at all. It would, therefore, be entirely inappropriate to look at Le Napus as if it were a “science fiction” novel and to try to wedge it belatedly into the historical canon of science fiction. It has much closer affinities with the tradition of British scientific romance, but the French tradition of the roman scientifique, although vaguer, was far more prolific, sophisticated and robust than either of the parallel English-language traditions, and it would be more reasonable to view the English works in the composite genre as eccentric offshoots of the French canon rather than the other way around. To be properly appreciated, Le Napus needs to be seen not as something faintly reminiscent of works with which English readers are already familiar, but as an example of something truly and intriguingly alien.
This translation should not, therefore, be viewed as a belated and eccentric contribution to the genre of science fiction, or even that of scientific romance, but rather as a twisted classic, of sorts, of the gloriously exotic roman scientifique: a book that, although carrying forward an evident tradition, and extending many of the fibers of thought holding that tradition together, is nevertheless a book like no other, a unique entity. It is, in consequence, potentially precious to all those pataphysically-inclined readers who prefer to study exceptions rather than rules, and delight in the unfamiliar rather than the familiar, especially when it is provocatively uncomfortable rather than soothingly soporific.
* * * * * * *
This translation has been taken from a copy of the original Flammarion edition. It poses the usual problem of translation applicable to antique futuristic fiction, in that the terminology subsequently developed in the real world to describe the technologies anticipated in the book is markedly different from the terminology that the author was compelled to invent, but I have resisted the temptation to substitute the real-world terminology even when it would seem appropriate to a modern reader, thus avoiding such terms as “radio,” even though its omission might now appear odd, in the interests of attempting to preserve the eccentric flavor of the original.
PROLOGUE
THE APPEARANCE OF A NEW DISEASE
First, I shall tell you what happened to me on the third of May 2227, in the thirtieth year of my terrestrial existence. Afterwards, I shall tell you who I am and why I am writing these memoirs. Don’t be impatient. Don’t skip a single page—nor a line, nor a word. Everything is connected, in such a way that, after having read me attentively, you will be in possession of a whole host of new and refreshing conceptions, useful for the guidance of life. Afterwards, you can do with them as you wish.
So, on the third of May 2227, which marked the debut in France of the terrible disease, I was going up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées on my own, heading toward the former location of the Arc de Triomphe, which had disappeared in the earthquake of 2150 after being badly damaged by the aerial bombardment of the Franco-German and European-Asian wars of the year 2000. The sky was blue; the air exquisite; life, so far as I was concerned, was good.
As I arrived at the crossroads where avionnettes used to be stationed in the days of non-magnetic aerial transport, I perceived, coming toward me, a tall, handsome old man with a white beard, who was holding a little girl by the hand, flanked by her Chinese governess. The child appeared to be about two or two-and-a-half years old, like a pink porcelain angel under her blonde hair. She was laughing and pulling obliquely ahead of her grandfather’s stride, with a graceful gait.
Suddenly, I heard a dry click, and the old man disappeared completely, as if snatched away by a supernatural force.
“N’a pus,”1 said the girl, spreading her dainty arms wide.
The face of the Chinese woman had become immobile and grave, like that of a conjuror’s assistant witnessing an unknown trick. Numerous passers-by, witnesses to the event, began to tremble, like me, in all their limbs, recognizing, in that adventure, the first coup of the mysterious disease that the press had been reporting for a month, which had first become manifest in Chicago. Half a dozen cases had been cited, followed by three more in Berlin.
“N’a pus, a grand pé a pati, n’a pus,” repeated the child, elated by the annihilation of her grandfather and the accumulation of fear and stupor that had formed around that redoubtable absence.
A policeman arrived as we were getting a grip on our emotions. I gave him my name, number and occupation—Professor of Cellular Energy at the Aristotle Foundation—and was asked to write “Polyplast” myself in his notebook. He was as astonished by my name and the number attached to it as by the unusual phenomenon. Gripped by an abrupt need for mystification that is one of the axiomatic reflexes, I added that the old pedestrian had succumbed to a new disease, the “n’a pus” or Napus, which was beginning to be discussed among scientists.
“Is it catching?” the representative of public order asked me, with an anxious expression.
I assured him that it was not—that the symptom-free disease, which was exceptionally rare, was episodic and not contagious. Then the worthy fellow signaled to a vehicle and had the Chinese woman and the little girl climb into it with him: “a matter of informing the family and the commissariat.”
It was agreed that I would be called as a witness, the case being extraordinary, unusual and, all things considered, bewildering. What was no less bizarre was the difficulty we found, as co-spectators of the event, in going our separate ways and leaving the location of the tragic miracle of sorts. It had created a bond of solidarity between us comparable to a sympathy that did not entail any amity—a necessary of community. Our feet were stuck to the ground.
We exchanged visiting cards, and vague considerations regarding the unknown quantity surrounding us and the future of humankind, henceforth very hazardous. Some thought that the new thunderbolt would remain in a state of rarity, in view of the excellence of our temperate climate; others believed, on the contrary, that it was the beginning of a plague.
The latter, of which I was one, were correct. The worst is virtually certain.
With the general system of waves, the event quickly became known. Half an hour later, the entire world knew of the arrival in France, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, of the new disease of the total and abrupt disappearance or acute aphanasia popularly known as the Napus. The little girl had thus baptized the annihilation of her grandfather.
And now, before continuing, it’s necessary that I tell you who I am.
I belong to the group of international “witnesses,” the outcome of the international interbreeding of the year 2007, which succeeded the six year war in which thirty million people of all nations were killed. It was then thought that universal peace might be obtained by numerous Franco-German, Franco-English, Franco-Italian, Italo-German etc. marriages, and the forenames of the semi-artificial products that my grandparents thus became were replaced by numbers. We call ourselves “Polyplasts,” which signifies “formed of several” and I am known as 17,177. It’s perfectly ridiculous, but there is nothing I can do about it.
I will add, though, that the multiplicity of my origins has only increased in me the quality and evidence of current Frenchness and stimulated my patriotism. It is the same with all the Polyplasts spread throughout the planet. We are also interested in military inventions, as if the confused sources of our violent blood were continuing their antagonism. Psychological chemistry is as ironic as the majority of human inventions, which rapidly turn against human beings after having served, in an illusory fashion, for their comfort and pleasure.
1. Pus is the past historic of pouvoir [to be able], so the phrase as rendered can be construed, approximately, as “it cannot be” or “impossible,” although it seems more likely that the child is mispronouncing “n’a plus” [is no more] or even “n’a pas” [is not] and is simply indicating absence, in line with her more elaborate comment “a grand pé a pati”—i.e. grand-père a parti [grandpa’s gone].
CHAPTER ONE
AT THE ARISTOTLE FOUNDATION
The Aristotle Foundation, due to the specific legacies and the generosity of a number of Australian and American bankers, is somewhat analogous to what the Institut Pasteur was three centuries ago—with the difference that the latter was devoted to the study of the microbes (as one said then) that were believed to assault the human organism from without, and the juices, or sera, capable of curing the diseases caused by those microbes. Since the advent of the theory of cellular energy, itself creative of benevolent and harmful microorganisms, neither independently nor by means of products and chemical extracts, but by virtue of the new force named cyton.
The Aristotle Foundation is devoted to the study of all the forms, variants and transformations of cyton—of which the history is rather unimportant now, in view of the criticisms to which it has been subjected. These repeated criticisms, some of which are well-founded, have weakened our theoretical studies and laboratory work with regard to cyton to such a extent that we can no longer do anything, so to speak, except discuss between ourselves the events of the day, new armaments and methods of combat, and the rivalries—economic or otherwise—between nations.
A gossip-mongering bear-garden, that is what our venerable institution has become. It is the same for all the foundations of the same category in Europe and America, whose decrepitude and decay have been the object of numerous discouraging theses.
When I arrived the next day at my laboratory—or, more exactly, my talking shop—my male and female colleagues where all discussing the exciting aphanasia of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which filled the papers and wireless broadcasts. I was surrounded and bombarded with questions, to which I replied as best I could.
The term Napus delighted them, and the female doctors made faces, mimicking the infantile appellation and the fateful phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” There was talk of a further event of the same order, which had occurred in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and had “blown away” a foreman at a furniture factory, as well as an epidemic of threes cases in Marseilles affecting a family of Greek cockle-fishers. We were well-read people, Polyplasts for the most part, and hypotheses were being produced in abundance.
“It’s the beginning of the end of the world,” asserted my cousin 17,178, knowing nothing about it. He was the product of a mixture of Germanism and mysticism that had caused him to be baptized Görres, the name of a celebrated turner of German heads.2 He claimed that the affair had been predicted by a Moldavian monk in the twelfth century and that Nostradamus had made allusion to it in a centurie:3
When the seventh, preceded by a double third,
Will have broken the Ardent of august Sex
And powder expends with nothing found outside.
“The first line,” my cousin affirmed, signifies 2227, the number two being repeated three times. The “august Sex” signifies the little girl, whose courage—the Ardent—was broken by the sudden pulverization of her grandfather, who disappeared without leaving a trace.”
My lovely laboratory assistant Henriette Tastepain, however, who had discovered a new magnetic center in the cell, remarked that the lines of the famous centuries were contrived in such a way that one could always find meat and drink therein.
At that moment, Polyplast 14,026 arrived—the issue of a series of alternating Franco-American and Franco-Hungarian interbreedings crossed with negro, whose physiognomy is like a mosaic of those various nationalities. His erudition is extraordinary. He knows almost all the languages spoken on the planet, the majority of mathematical and biological sciences, and can cite, in bibliographical matters, the abstracts of all the periodicals that have appeared in France, Italy, England and Germany in the last ten years. The little fellow, who is also sensitive and even passionate, is an ambulant index. We asked him what he thought the explanation of the phenomenon might be. He reflected for ten minutes before answering, in the fashion of a prodigious calculator, and then his strong, cracked voice set forth the following:
“The disease, epidemic today, is, in my opinion, very ancient, having probably appeared in uncivilized countries and in a sporadic form. Complete disappearances that occurred before witnesses were recorded in Patagonia a hundred years ago. There have been others more recently in New Guinea. In the deserted part of Ireland, where the uninterrupted civil war has only left a few buildings standing, an observation mistaken for a legend—which is quite frequent—has established the sudden and total disappearance, about thirty years ago, of three members of the same family. I believe I remember, though, that Marco Polo, in his account of his journey to China, had already.…”
The laboratory door opened to admit my Lyonnais laboratory technician Mouillemouillard, who has the face and accent of Chignol,4 minus the “sarsifie.” He was both alarmed and terrified.
“The hourly wireless broadcast has announced that two other people have just disappeared from the Rue de Rivoli, while they were trying on shoes in a store. The young woman who was assisting them with the shoehorn is half-mad.”
We burst out laughing—which finished widening Moulemouillard’s pale gray eyes. The bizarrerie of the Napus, in the early hours, simultaneously excited an easily comprehensive fear and a kind of bizarre rictus, which must have been that of our earliest ancestors before the invention of fire or the appearance of the mammoth. In addition, scientific curiosity mingled with it. Stuffed with theories to the point of nausea, it was a veritable feast for us to get hold of a raw, undeniable and patent phenomenon. That is why amusement was associated in our souls with anguish.
Although it carried people off without any warning and sometimes prematurely, aphanasia at least offered the advantage of avoiding the formalities and embarrassments created by bodies, and, as Bossuet put it, “unfortunate residues.” With that, no more coffins, no more funeral processions, no more cemeteries. It had no deleterious effect on religious beliefs—on the contrary, in fact: corporeal disappearance could be considered as the acme of spiritualism, giving free range to all certainties of a mystical order, which are in any case the least unsteady. It reinforces the belief in the miraculous that inhabits even the most materialistic among us, if they care to reflect that everything down here is miraculous, beginning with the fact of their existence.
“Messieurs,” said Professor Ailette, “there is no doubt that, in the general disarray procured by the appearance of a new plague—for doubt in that regard is, alas, no longer possible—the public will turn to us and demand explanations. Let us therefore get to work and seek the cause, or the causes. Then we can think about the means of combating it. At first glance, however, it doesn’t seem very convenient.”
The general hilarity was increased by this speech, officious in appearance and in conformity with the specialty of Professor Ailette, who has a dry tone, small, pale and hairy features, and a mania for holding forth endlessly about any subject whatsoever, and making speeches over any tomb whatsoever. Everyone was thinking that the Napus would cut off his speech at source and deprive it of its ritual and preferred exercise. In any case, on what could we base research into the cause, or the causes, of a destruction followed by the scattering of being in the ether?
The terrible plague brought us all, ignorant and knowledgeable alike, back to the “subjection without understanding” that likens human and terrestrial discipline to the strictest military discipline. That was what Professor Sidoine, a brown-haired giant, stolid and hirsute, expressed very aptly:
“My dear Ailette, I’d like nothing better than to work, with you and our colleagues in the Aristotle Foundation, to combat this frightful disease. It is, however, still necessary for me observe a case with my own eyes—for after all, it might be a myth, or a illusion on the part of our eminent comrade Polyplast 17,117, or a communal hallucination propagated by the press and the wireless.
“Remember, in fact, that a little more than three centuries ago, one of our most illustrious predecessors, Professor Charcot—who flourished, its true, on the crumbling soil and in the unsteady light of democracy—described and named a non-existent disease, hysteria, of which no specimen has ever been seen since, in three hundred years. I have in my library, however, works—which have become rare after a long period of oblivion—in which women are observed twisted into all sorts of attitudes by that implausible and improbable malady. Professor Charcot was certainly neither a visionary nor a liar. He believed that he had seen what he described. He had projected a phantom, a mirage.”
Thus put on the spot, I reiterated the account of the grandfather and the little girl, the testimony of the persons present, the new cases reported in the newspapers. I added that I had not put into it any kind of authorial or journalistic distortion; that it was possible that I had participated in a mass hallucination, of the sort created by the famous and imaginary trick of the fakir who caused a rope to stand up and then climbs it; I proposed that we wait, that we allow ourselves to be guided by events—advice which, although being only timidity, generally passes for wisdom.
We separated on those good resolutions—but I was certain that we would come together again before long, and that the malicious demon of aphanasia would not rest there.
