“The Ruins of Granada” (1899) is unique in that it is one of Spain’s first speculative fiction stories and its author, Ángel Ganivet (1865 — 1898), was known mostly for his “serious” writing which helped genre fiction enter the mainstream of Spanish literature. Early in the century, the distinction between “fantasy” and “science fiction” was more fluid than today and thus “The Ruins of Granada” evokes the feel of the “contes philosophiques”—philosophical tales used by early scientists in which a fictional frame provided the context for discussing a scientific theory. The influence of this predominantly nonfiction form can be seen in much nascent science fiction. We feature this story as part of our Strange Scifi Summer; the story was unable to be included in The Big Book of Science Fiction for reasons of space. If you enjoy this story, be sure to visit our interview with Marian and James Womack.

‘Would you care to come with me,’ a scholar said to a poet, ‘and see the ruins of Granada?’

‘I have, for some time, for a long time now, wanted to visit that corner of old Spain. If I am a poet, then I am a poet of ruins. There is nothing interests me as much nor moves me so deeply as contemplating the sense of hopelessness contained in the wretched remnants of things which once were and which now are not. If there is anything more beautiful than life, then it is the bitterness and disenchantment that existence leaves as its residue. Life is like a child who diverts us with his innocent games, and the ruins which life leaves behind itself are like a man of wide and varied experiences who always bears on his lips words that can explain great secrets.’

‘In ruins, what attracts me the most is the idea that they are places where something that we once knew only by reading ancient authors has been resuscitated or come back to life. And I prefer the ruins that are left behind after a catastrophe to those which remain after the destructive action of time; there is something natural about the ruins of Greece or Egypt, something that has developed over the years and which shows how briefly the work of man lasts, even those works that seem to be the greatest and most solid; there is more glory in the ruins of Pompey or London or Granada: these are places where life was suddenly brought to a close, and when they are excavated we discover a few centuries later life, exactly as it once was, petrified at the moment of its extinction. For me, a volcano, which can suddenly engulf a city, cover it in flames, is a sculptor inspired by pure chance. After some time, it is curiosity that opens such an immense sepulchre, and the marvellous work of art appears, the image of an entire civilisation, at a particular moment in the history of humanity.’

‘That is how an archaeologist sees it; there is a more beautiful way to interpret this vision; an artist does not see a petrified version of life, but a new kind of life, life in which man is no longer necessary, in which ideas live and interact in the very air, inspired by the poetry that rises from the ruins. I guess that the ruins of Granada will fill me with the idea of love, that I will sense there the sighs of a woman who loved much, who died loving, who loved so much that scented roses and red carnations grow over her grave, calling out to everyone who passes by…’

‘And is there poetry only in those vague ideas? Is there not also poetry in monuments that have been cast down, and in the skeletons of men? I have thought often about the discovery of the ruins of Granada and what it makes me think about is my desire to see a city suddenly annihilated. Historians say that the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii was presaged by certain strange phenomena which spread panic and enabled almost all the city’s inhabitants to escape to safety. The same thing happened when London was drowned in the sea: the fact that the land was sinking was noticed a long time before the final catastrophe and the Londoners step by step abandoned the city in advance. But the volcano which some thirty centuries ago made Granada disappear forever without leaving a single trace was brand new and, as it burst through the earth’s crust with its lava, it did not leave any time for people to escape, so rapid was its appearance and so quickly did it carry everything away, from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada all the way down to the sea.’

‘Well let us head there at once, I am impatient to see these marvels.’

***

The poet and the scholar headed towards an aerostat station and ordered one to take them to the ruins of Granada.

‘Would you like to travel by the land route or the sea route?’

They had the option of seeing the ruins of London and of ancient Brittany as well.

‘We will go by the shortest route,’ the scholar replied.

‘In that case you should travel via Paris. It is,’ the chief aeronaut added, looking through his travel guide, ‘five thousand and seventy two ptometres.’

The travellers paid for their tickets and got into a small aerostat that was to be towed by a huge balloon that ascended rapidly until it was almost lost from sight. A little while later the balloon came down slightly and the aerostat, driven well by an expert aeronaut, began its flight to the South East, with a following wind.

After a brief and happy journey the travellers found themselves crossing the sky above Granada. As they had travelled, the aeronaut had told them the names of the countries and cities they were flying over, in case they wanted to descend. A few times they did go down in order to enjoy from the scent that rose up from the gardens they saw, or else simply to observe the cities with their inhabitants heading hear and there, busy as ants; at times they had to ascend so as not to knock against the peaks of mountains.

When they came to the end of their journey the aerostat descended until the travellers could see all the details of the dead city. The moon was full and the city was silent and the poet wanted to hear the voice he dreamt would talk to him; the scholar wanted to put together the plan of the city in his head and mentally reconstruct how life had been in the city when it had been alive.

‘I can see fragments of a Moorish city sticking up here and there, buried under mountains of rubble whose meaning I cannot determine.’

‘I am thinking,’ the poet said, ‘of a statue. In the middle of the city the ruins form an extended shape that looks like the reclining body of a woman.’

‘That must be the river which they say had gold in its sand.’

‘And the figure is broken in two, by heaps of stones that seem to be a woman’s waist.’

‘That must be a bridge over the river.’

‘And there are columns spread all over the right hand side of the body, that look like two crossed hands.’

‘That must be a Cathedral.’

‘And high up in the city, where the woman’s shoulders are, there is an eminence that seems to be a reddish pillow.’

‘That must be the Alhambra.’

‘And there is a head that lies on the pillow. It is such a perfect image! Everything is there. The mouth, the nose, the forehead…’

‘Those must be the palace and its turrets.’

‘…the dark splendid hair…’

‘That is all that is left of a forest that the lava burnt to ashes.’

‘And those eyes, that still sparkle so sensuously.’

‘Those must have been cisterns or pools, now filled with rainwater, sparkling in the light of the moon…’

***

When dawn began to break they went down to the ground, landing at the red mountain where the poet had imagined that he saw the head of the reclining statue, symbol of the dead city. The scholar walked over the ground, with its ruins and the typical flora of cemeteries, and he examined everything, looking for archaeological remains for his collection. The poet had stopped to look at some turrets, cut short and cracked, but still somehow standing; the only things standing in that desolate landscape portrait. He took an ebony box out of his pocket and stared at it, fixing his thought in it and on it, on a bright button in the lid of the box, and the ideophone started to sing, melancholically:

How silently you sleep,
you cracked Alhambra bones.
A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones.
You sleep, and death is your dream
though death is far away.
Awake, for there soon will come
the fresh new light of day.
      Your walls in the light of the sun
are painted in shades of gold;
your walls in the light of the moon,
are lit by beams that are clear and pallid:
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      In the firmament the stars
give you their colourless light,
wrapped in the shadowed arms
of the sad and blurry night,
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      The silent breezes at dusk
rub themselves against you;
the savage autumn gusts
try as they can to rend you.
And you are asleep for ever,
and death is far away.
      A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones;
should it reach down to your roots
your death would then be close.
Would that I could be like you
and sleep as the aeons passed
and fall from sleep anew
into nothingness at last!

***

‘Eureka!’ the scholar interrupted. ‘I’ve just made a most marvellous discovery. I have gone down this slope to a place near the river, and I thought that the ground under my feet sounded hollow. I started to dig and remove stones and I found I kind of storage chamber, and inside were several mummies so admirably preserved that I doubt that there are any their equal in any of the museums of the world.’

‘Let’s go then,’ the poet said, without much enthusiasm, putting his ideophone away. ‘I don’t like the sight of mummies all that much, but I am a little curious to see people who existed so many centuries ago. At least, I suppose the mummies are human.’

‘They seem to be; let us go and take a closer look.’

When they reached the mummies’ tomb, the poet and the scholar spent a long time uncovering them, touching them as little as possible, for fear that they would crumble away in their hands. This was an excessive precaution, because the mummies were entirely petrified, and could have been carried from one place to another like blocks hewn from a quarry. There were four of them, and they represented four different types of microcephalic mankind, the sort who lived in the world during the Metallic Age, the period between the nineteenth and twenty-second centuries. However, craneoscopic examination did show that they had attained a certain degree of mental development, roughly of the level of apodic man, that is ‘man without feet’, which existed during the age known as the Metallic Age, or the Movement Age.

All four mummies had irregular features, as their mouths were much larger than their eyes, which allowed one to infer that the people of that period spent more time thinking about eating than about seeing; all of them had beards, from which one can infer that this was an age without barbers.

The first mummy they examined had an extraordinarily well developed superior, or coronal, circumference, which fact suggested that this must be a vertical man, or as they used to say, a comedian (which is to say an individual who, whatever accidents he was faced with in his life, always landed on his feet like a cat).

The second mummy, as was absolutely self-evident once one had examined the smoothness and circularity of his skull, was a horizontal or lazy man, a type of which one can still occasionally find living examples in Araby, where one sees them lying down full length, melancholically dreaming in the hopes of paradise, a place that has been announced to them long since by their gods, to whom they still render homage.

The third example was curious, mainly because of the disposition of his spinal column, twisted almost into a bow; this mean that the man must have been one of the curved people, an optimist as they used to be called, given to agreeable living and laughter, and very poorly suited for tasks that required energy and application.

As for the fourth and final mummy, his posterior circumvolution was extremely pronounced—a clear sign of sensuality—and his skull was flat and angular, thus demonstrating his inverted or pessimistic nature, his desire to move against the flow. In short, he was filled with a kind of insubordinate and infertile energy, poorly adapted to the world in which he lived.

This, in brief, was the scholar’s opinion. And his conclusion was that if these four types represented the general constitution of the men who used to live in this city, then there was no way in which they could have developed to do anything useful or worthy, and that perhaps the volcanic eruption was providential. A result which allows us once again to see the way in which God’s actions with regards to his creatures are always watchful, healthy and beneficent.

The poet listened to all this and grew thoughtful; then he took out his little box and looked sadly at the ideophone; the instrument sang the following sad song:

THE SONG OF THE STONE

Life and death are but a dream
and all the world in dreams is grown;
dream is life itself to a man,
dream is death to the stone.

On your closed and dreaming eyes
one idea is drawn:
‘Worth far more than a man who sees
is the blindness of the stone.’

On your hard and rigid lips
one stiff word will form:
‘Worth more than speech to the man who speaks
is silence to the stone.’

Drawn from the depths of your breast
your hope is dead and gone:
‘Worth more than life to a man
is the death that lives in the stone.’

If life and death are dreams,
if dreams are the world alone,
I will give my life as a man
to dream in the death of the stone.

The post The Ruins of Granada appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Sever Feliksovich Gansovsky (1918–1990) was a prominent Soviet writer of fiction, including science fiction. He wrote some of the best short stories of his generation, several of them collected in English in Macmillan’s Best of Soviet Science Fiction anthologies in the 1980s. He received the Russian Aelita Award in 1989. There is a fierce intelligence to all of Gansovsky’s fiction, wedded to a spare but effective characterization underpinned by a keen observation of the absurdities and ruthlessness of human nature.

In the classic Gansovsky story “Day of Wrath” (1964), a biological experiment creates human-like creatures with superior intellectual abilities that terrorize the Russian countryside. With echoes of H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau, Gansovsky’s story from Soviet Russia easily rivals that of any of his Western counterparts. This new translation by James Womack is part of our Strange Scifi Summer and appears in The Big Book of Science Fiction, out this summer from Vintage. Be sure to also check out our interview with the Womacks about translating science fiction.

***

Chairman: You read in several languages, you are familiar with higher mathematics
and can perform all manner of work. Do you think that this makes you human?
Otark: Yes, of course. Do humans know how to do anything else?
(From the cross-examination of an otark. State Commission Materials.)

Two riders came out of the thickly overgrown valley and started to climb the mountain. In front, on a roan with a twisted nose, rode the forester, and Donald Betly followed him on a chestnut mare. The mare slipped on the stony path and fell to her knees. Betly, who had been lost in thought, nearly fell off because the saddle—an English racing saddle with a single strap—slid forward down the horse’s neck.

The forester waited for him further up.

‘Don’t let her put her head down, she always slips.’

Betly, swallowing his anger, shot him a frustrated glance. Devil take it, he could have warned me about that earlier. He was cross with himself as well, because the horse had fooled him. When Betly had saddled her up, she had breathed in, so that the strap would be completely loose.

He pulled so hard on the reins that the horse danced about and moved backwards.

The path had levelled out again. They were riding across a mesa, and in front of them the hilltops were visible, covered in fir forests.

The horses took long strides, sometimes breaking into a trot and trying to overtake one another. Whenever the mare nudged ahead, Betly could see the sunburnt, cleanly shaven thin cheeks of the forester and his sullen eyes, fixed on the road ahead. It was as if he didn’t notice the presence of his companion.

‘I’m too direct,’ Betly thought. ‘And that doesn’t help me. I’ve tried to strike up conversation with him a handful of times, and he either answers me in monosyllables or else doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t think I’m worth anything. He thinks that if someone wants to talk, then he’s a chatterbox and doesn’t need any respect. Out here in the wilds they don’t know how to take the measure of things. They think that being a journalist doesn’t mean anything. Even a journalist like… Anyway, I won’t talk to him either. Damn it!’

But step by step his mood improved. Betly was a successful man and thought that everyone else should love life as much as he did. He was surprised at the forester’s aloofness, but didn’t feel any animosity towards him.

The weather, which had been bad in the morning, was starting to clear up. The fog melted away. The dull sheet over the sky had broken up into separate clouds. Huge shadows moved swiftly over the dark forests and valleys, and this emphasised the cruel, wild and somehow liberated character of the place.

Betly slapped the mare on her damp neck that smelt of sweat.

‘They must have hobbled your front legs when they let you out to graze, and that’s why you slip. But we’ll be alright together.’

He stopped pulling back on the reins and caught up with the forester.

‘Excuse me, Mister Meller, were you born around here?’

‘No,’ the forester replied, without turning round.

‘Where were you born then?’

‘A long way away.’

‘And have you been here for a long time?’

‘A while.’ Meller turned to the journalist. ‘You should talk a little more quietly. They might hear you.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The otarks, of course. They’ll hear you and tell the others. Or they could ambush us, jump out from behind and rip us to pieces… And it would be better if they didn’t know why we’re here.’

‘Do they attack people often? It says in the papers that such things almost never happen.’

The forester was silent.

‘And do they attack in person?’ Betly involuntarily looked over his shoulder. ‘Or do they shoot people as well? Do they have weapons? Rifles, machine guns?’

‘They only rarely shoot. Their hands aren’t made for it. Not hands, paws. They’re clumsy with weapons.’

‘Paws,’ Betly repeated. ‘So people here don’t think of them as human?’

‘Who, us?’

‘Yes, you. The people who live here.’

The forester spat.

‘Of course they’re not human. No one here thinks that they are.’

He spoke in bursts. Betly had already forgotten his vow of silence.

‘So, have you ever spoken to them? Is it true that they can speak quite well?’

‘The older ones can speak. The ones who were here when the laboratory was working… The younger ones speak worse. But they are much more dangerous. They are cleverer, their heads are twice the size.’ The forester suddenly reined in his horse. His voice was bitter. ‘Look, there’s no point discussing all this. It’s all useless. I’ve answered these questions a dozen times already.’

‘What’s all useless?’

‘All of it, this trip. You won’t get anything out of it. Everything will stay as it is.’

‘Why does it have to? I’m from an influential paper. We have a lot of influence. They’re gathering material for a Senate Commission. If it is shown that the otarks are really so dangerous, then steps will be taken. You must know that this time they are getting ready to send out the troops against them.’

‘Even so, nothing’s going to happen,’ the forester sighed. ‘You’re not the first person to come here. Every year someone comes, and they’re only interested in the otarks. But not in the people who have to live with them. Everyone asks: “Is it true that they can learn geometry? Are there really otarks who can understand the theory of relativity?” As if that meant anything at all! As if that were a reason not to destroy them!’

‘But that’s why I’m here,’ Betly began, ‘to gather material for the Commission. And then the whole country will know that…’

‘And you think that the others weren’t gathering material?’ Meller interrupted. ‘And… and how are you going to understand the situation here? You need to live here to understand it. It’s one thing to pass through, and another to be here the whole time. Oh, what’s the point of talking? Let’s go.’ He nudged his horse. ‘Here’s where their range begins, anyway. From this valley onwards.’

The journalist and the forester had reached the top of a hill. The path headed down in a zigzag from under the horse’s hooves.

A long way beneath them lay the brush-filled valley, cut in two lengthwise by a narrow stony river. The forest rose in a sheer wall straight from the stream, and beyond it in the immeasurable distance the snow-whitened slopes of the Chief mountain range.

You could see for tens of kilometres all around from here, but Betly saw no signs of life: no smoke from a chimney, not a single haystack. It was as if the place had died.

The sun hid behind some clouds, all at once it grew cold, and the journalist suddenly felt that he did not want to go down after the forester. He coldly shrugged his shoulders. He recalled the warm, heated air of his city apartment, the bright warm office at the newspaper. But then he pulled himself together. ‘Rubbish, I been in worse situations than this. What do I have to be afraid of? I’m an excellent shot, and I have very good reactions. Who else could they have sent instead of me?’ He saw Meller unshoulder his rifle, and did the same with his own weapon.

The mare carefully lifted its feet on the narrow path.

When they were at the bottom of the hill, Meller said:

‘We should try to ride abreast. Better not to talk. We need to get to Steglich’s farm by around eight. We’ll spend the night there.’

They spurred their horses on and rode for about two hours in silence. They headed up and rode round Mount Bear, keeping the forest wall to their right at all times, the drop off to their left, covered in bushes, but so small and sparse that no one could hide among them. They went down to the river and went along its rocky bottom until they reached an abandoned asphalted road, the surface cracked with grass growing through it.

As they rode along the asphalt, Meller suddenly stopped his horse and listened. Then he dismounted, got to his knees and put his ear to the ground.

‘Something’s not right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Someone’s galloping after us. Let’s get off the road.’

Betly also dismounted and they led the horses into a ditch in a clump of alders.

About two minutes later, the journalist heard the clattering of hooves. They came closer. You could feel that the rider was going flat out.

Then through the faded leaves they saw a grey horse galloping hard. On it, sitting awkwardly, was a man wearing yellow riding breeches and an anorak. He came so close that Betly got a good look at the man’s face and realised that he had seen him before. He even remembered where. Back in town there had been a group of people standing around outside the bar. Five or six men, dirty, badly dressed. They all had the same eyes. Lazy, half-closed, impertinent. The journalist knew those eyes—gangsters’ eyes.

As soon as the horseman had come past, Meller rushed out into the road.

‘Hey!’

The man pulled on his horse’s reins and stopped.

‘Hey, wait!’

The rider looked back, and obviously recognised the forester. For a few moments they looked at one another. Then the man waved, turned his horse round, and rode on.

The forester stared after him as the noise of the hooves dies away in the distance. Then he suddenly hit his head with his fist and groaned.

‘It’s not going to work now, that’s for certain.’

‘What is it?’ Betly asked. He had come out from among the bushes as well.

‘Nothing. It’s just put an end to our plan.’

‘But why?’ The journalist looked at the forester and was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

‘It’s all over now,’ Meller said, as he turned and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘The bastards! Bastards!’

‘Listen to me.’ Betly had started to lose his patience as well. If you’re going to get so worked up, then there’s really no point carrying on.’

‘Worked up?’ the forester exclaimed. ‘You think I’ve got worked up? Just look at this!’

He waved his hand at a branch of a pine tree with reddish cones on it, hanging over the road about thirty paces away from them.

Betly still had not realised why he was supposed to be looking at it, when a shot thundered out, he got a strong whiff of gunpowder, and the last pinecone, hanging by itself, dropped down onto the asphalt.

‘That’s how worked up I am,’ Meller said, and went into the clump of alders for his horse.

They reached the farm just as night was falling.

Out of the unfinished log house came a tall dark-bearded man with dishevelled hair who stood watching in silence how Betly and the forester unsaddled their horses. Then a woman came out onto the porch, red-haired and with a flat expressionless face, ungroomed as well. And three children came after her. Two boys of eight or nine years old and a girl aged about thirteen, skinny as if drawn with a single crooked line.

The five of them were not at all surprised at Meller and the journalist: they were not happy or sad. They just stood and stared in silence. Betly didn’t like the silence.

Over dinner he tried to start a conversation.

‘Tell me, how do you get on with the otarks? Are they really very troublesome?’

‘What? the dark-bearded farmer put his palm to his ear and bent over the table. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Speak up. I don’t hear so good.’

This was how things went on for a few minutes, and the farmer very clearly did not want to understand what was wanted of him. In the end he spread his hands. Yes, there are otarks here. Do they bother him? No, they don’t bother him personally. He doesn’t know about the others. He can’t say anything about them.

In the middle of this conversation the thin girl stood up, threw a shawl round her shoulders and left without saying a word to anyone.

As soon as all the plates were empty the farmer’s wife brought two mattresses out of another room and started to lay them out for the visitors.

But Meller stopped her.

‘I think it would be better if we slept in the barn.’

The woman stood up without saying a word. The farmer jumped up from the table.

‘Why? Sleep here.’

But the forester had already picked up the mattresses.

The farmer led them into the high barn with a lamp. He watched for a minute as they got themselves ready, and for a moment there was an expression on his face as though he wished to say something. But he only raised his hand and rubbed his head. Then he left.

‘What’s all this about?’ Betly asked. ‘The otarks won’t get into the house, surely?’

Meller picked up a thick plank from the floor and forced it up against the heavy solid door, checking that it didn’t slip away.

‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘Anything can happen. They get into houses as well.’

The journalist sat on the mattress and started to unlace his boots.

‘Tell me, are there any real bears left here? Not otarks, but real wild bears. Didn’t there used to be a lot of bears wandering around here, in the forest?

‘There aren’t any more,’ Meller replied. ‘The first thing that the otarks did when they broke out of the laboratory and got off the island was to destroy all the real bears. And the wolves. And there used to be raccoons and foxes—all the normal animals. They took poison from the ruined laboratory and poisoned the smaller animals. There were dead wolves lying around all over the place—for some reason they didn’t eat the wolves. But they ate the bears. They sometimes even eat each other.’

‘They eat each other?’

‘Of course, they’re not people. You don’t know what to expect from them.’

‘Do you think they’re just animals?’

‘No.’ The forester shook his head. ‘We don’t think they’re wild animals. That’s the kind of thing they argue about in the cities, if they’re people or animals. Out here we know that they’re neither one thing nor the other. Don’t you see, it used to be like this: there were people and there were animals. And now there’s something else: the otarks. This is the first time such a thing has happened in the whole history of the world. Otarks aren’t animals—it would be great if they were just animals. But they’re not people either, of course.’

‘Tell me,’ Betly felt that he couldn’t stop himself asking the question, even though he knew it was banal, ‘is it true that they find it very easy to learn higher mathematics?’

The forester turned sharply towards him.

‘Listen, shut up about mathematics for once! Just shut up! I don’t give a toss if they know higher mathematics! Yeah, the otarks can do complicated maths standing on their heads! So what? You need to be a person, that’s what the question really is.’

He turned away and bit his lip.

‘He’s worked up,’ Betly thought. ‘He’s still really worked up. He’s not a healthy man.’

But the forester had already calmed down. He was uncomfortable to have flown off the handle. After a short silence, he asked:

‘Sorry, but have you seen him?’

‘Who?’

‘You know, the genius. Fidler.’

‘Fidler? Yes, I’ve seen him. I spoke to him just before I came out here. The newspaper sent me.’

‘I guess they keep him wrapped up in plastic over there? So he doesn’t get a single drop of rain on him.’

‘Yes, they look after him.’ Betly remembered how they had checked his pass and frisked him for the first time by the walls of the Science Centre. Then they had searched him again and checked his pass again at the entrance to the Institute. And the third search just before they let him into the garden where Fidler came out to meet him. ‘They look after him. But he is a truly gifted mathematician. He was only thirteen when he wrote his Corrections to the General Theory of Relativity. Of course, he’s an unusual man, you’d have to be.’

‘But what does he look like?’

‘What does he look like?’

The journalist hesitated. He remembered Fidler coming out into the garden in his baggy white suit. There was something odd about his figure. His hips were wide, his shoulders narrow. A short neck… It had been a strange interview, because Betly felt that it was rather he who was being interviewed. Fidler had answered his questions. But somehow frivolously. As if he were laughing at the journalist and at the whole world of normal people out there, behind the walls of the Science Centre. And he asked questions as well. Strange, almost foolish questions. Rubbish, like whether Betly liked carrot juice. As if the conversation were an experiment and he, Fidler, was carrying out research into a normal person.

‘Averagely tall,’ Betly said. ‘Small eyes… Have you really never seen him? He’s been here, out at the lake and in the laboratory.’

‘He came twice,’ Meller replied. ‘But he had so much security with him that they wouldn’t even let dead people get within a mile of him. That was back when they still kept the otarks behind fences, when Reichhardt and Klein were working with them. They ate Klein. And when the otarks escaped, Fidler never showed his face here again… What does he say about the otarks now?’

‘About the otarks? He said that they were a very interesting scientific experiment. Very challenging. But he’s not involved with them at the moment. He’s doing something to do with cosmic rays… He said that he was sorry for the victims.’

‘And why did they do all this? What for?’

‘How can I put it?’ Betly thought for a moment. ‘Something that happens a lot in science is what if. It’s led to a lot of discoveries.’

‘What do you mean, what if?’

‘Well, for example, What if we put an electrified wire into a magnetic field? And then you get the electric motor… I suppose what if just means experimentation.’

‘Experimentation.’ Meller ground his teeth. ‘They did an experiment: they let man-eaters out among people. And now no one thinks about us. You’ll get by as best you can. Fidler’s given up on the otarks and on us as well. And they’ve bred and there are hundreds of them now, and no one knows what they’re plotting against us people.’ He stopped talking and sighed. ‘The things these scientists think up! Making wild animals cleverer than people. They’ve gone crazy, the people who live in cities. Atom bombs and now this. They must really want to bring the human race to an end.’

He stood up, took his loaded rifle and laid it beside him on the floor.

‘Listen, Mister Betly. If there is an alarm, if someone starts knocking or trying to break the door down, you just lie there. Or else we’ll shoot each other in the dark. You lie there; I know what to do. I’m so well trained I’m like a dog, I’ll wake up just from instinct.’

In the morning, when Betly left the barn, the sun was shining so brightly and the rain-washed greenery was so fresh that the conversation they had last night seemed no more than a scary story.

The black-bearded farmer was already out in his field—the white patch of his shirt showed on the other side of the river. For a moment the journalist thought that this might be happiness—to get up at sunrise, not to know the worry and bustle of a difficult city life, to do business only with the handle of your spade, with the clods of dark brown earth.

But the forester quickly brought him back to reality. He appeared from behind the barn with his rifle in his hand.

‘Come on, I want to show you something.’

They walked round the barn and came out into the kitchen garden that backed up against the house. Here Meller behaved strangely. Bent double, he rushed past the bushes and stopped in a ditch next to the potato beds. Then he made a sign for the journalist to do the same.

They started to follow the ditch round the kitchen garden. At one point a woman’s voice could be heard in the house, but it was impossible to hear what she said.

Meller stopped.

‘Look here.’

‘What is it?’

‘You said you were a hunter. Look!’

On a patch of bare earth among the tangled grass was a clear five-toed footprint.

‘A bear?’ Betly said hopefully.

‘What bear? There haven’t been bears here for a long time.’

‘So is it an otark?’

The forester nodded.

‘It’s fresh,’ the journalist whispered.

‘From last night,’ Meller said. ‘You see it’s damp. They were in the house before it rained.’

‘In the house?’ Betly felt a cold shiver down his spine, as if something metal had pressed against it. ‘Right in the house?’

The forester did not answer, he jerked his head in the direction of the ditch, and both of them went back the way they had come.

When they got to the barn, Meller waited while Betly got his breath back.

‘I thought as much last night. When we got here last night and Steglich started to pretend that he couldn’t hear. He just wanted us to speak more loudly so that the otark could hear everything. The otark was in the other room.’

The journalist’s voice was hoarse.

‘What are you saying? People are taking sides with the otarks? Against real people?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ the forester said. ‘What do you mean, “taking sides”? Steglich couldn’t do anything else. The otark came and it stayed. That happens a lot. An otark comes and lies down, for example, in the bedroom. Or else they just throw people out of their houses and live there for a day or two.’

‘And what about the people? Do they just put up with it? Why don’t they shoot them?’

‘How are they going to shoot them, if the woods are filled with other otarks? The farmer has children, and cattle that he wants to pasture in the fields, and a house that could burn down… But the children are the most important. The otarks can take them. Can you really keep an eye on your children? And they’ve taken all the rifles anyway. That happened right at the start. In the first year.’

‘And people just gave them up?’

‘What could they do? The ones who didn’t surrender their weapons were sorry…’

He did not finish his sentence and suddenly stared at the willow coppice about fifteen paces away from them.

What happened next took only two or three seconds.

Meller lifted up his rifle and cocked it. At the same time a dark brown mass rose from the bushes, its large eyes sparkling, wicked and frightened, and said:

‘Hey, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’

Instinctively the journalist grabbed Meller’s shoulder. A shot rang out but the bullet just nicked a tree. The brown mass bent double and rolled like a ball into the forest and disappeared between the trees. For a few moments all that could be heard was the cracking of twigs, then everything fell silent.

‘What the hell!’ The forester turned round in a fury. ‘Why did you do that?’

The journalist, turning pale, whispered:

‘He spoke just like a human… He asked you not to shoot.’

For a second the forester looked at him, then his anger turned into a tired indifference. He lowered his rifle.

‘Alright… The first time it causes quite an impression.’

There was a rustle behind them. They both turned.

The farmer’s wife said:

‘Come and eat. I’ve already laid the table.’

While they ate they all pretended that nothing had happened.

After breakfast the farmer helped them saddle their horses. They left without saying anything.

When they had ridden off, Meller asked:

‘What’s your plan, then? I didn’t catch it. All they said was that I should ride you round the mountains, and that was it.’

‘What’s my plan? Well, I want to go around in the mountains, yes. To see people, the more the better. To get to know the otarks, if the opportunity presents itself. In a word, to get a sense of the atmosphere.’

‘Were you getting it back on the farm?’

Betly shrugged.

The forester suddenly reined in his horse.

‘Shush…’

He listened.

‘Someone’s running after us… Something’s happened on the farm.’

Betly had no time to wonder at the forester’s hearing, when a shout came from behind them:

‘Hey, Meller! Hey!’

They turned their horses and the farmer, panting, came up to them. He almost fell over, and grabbed the pommel of Meller’s saddle.

‘The otark took Tina. He’s dragged her off to Moose Canyon.’

He gulped at the air; drops of sweat fell from his forehead.

With a single movement, the forester pulled the farmer up onto his saddle. His stallion rushed forward, throwing up mud high from beneath his hooves.

Betly had never thought that he could travel so fast on a horse. Potholes, the trunks of fallen trees, bushes and ditches all slid by under him, forming some kind of patchy mosaic. At some point a branch whipped off his cap, and he didn’t even notice.

This speed largely did not depend on him. In the heat of the competition, his mare tried her hardest not to be left behind by the stallion. Betly grabbed onto her neck. Every second he thought that he would be killed.

They galloped through the forest, across a wide meadow, down a slope, passed the farmer’s wife and headed down into a big ravine.

The forester leapt down from his horse and, with the farmer following him, rushed down the narrow path into a grove of sparsely planted pine trees.

The journalist left his horse as well, throwing the rein over her neck, and rushed after Meller. He hurried after the forester and his mind automatically noted the surprising transformation that had taken place. There was nothing left of Meller’s former apathy and indecisiveness. He moved with light and collected gestures, never pausing to think, he jumped over pits, slid under low-hanging branches. He moved as if the trail of the otark was sketched out for him in a thick chalk line.

For a while Betly kept up with the pace, then he started to tire. His heart leapt in his chest, he felt tightness and burning in his throat. He slowed down to a walk, and for a few minutes walked alone among the bushes, then heard voices ahead of him.

The forester stood in the narrowest part of the ravine with his gun cocked and pointing at a thick grove of hazel trees. The girl’s father was there as well.

The forester spoke with emphasis:

‘Let her go. Or I will kill you.’

He was talking to what was in the grove.

He was answered by a growl, mingled with the sobs of a child.

The forester repeated what he had said:

‘Or I will kill you. I will give my life to track you and kill you. You know me.’

The growl came again, and then a voice, but not a human voice, somehow like a gramophone record, running all the words together, said:

‘And if I do this, then you won’t kill me?’

‘No,’ Meller said. ‘You will walk out of here alive.’

There was silence in the thicket. The only noise was the child’s crying.

Then there was a cracking noise of branches, and something white appeared among the trees. The thin girl came out into the long grass. One of her hands was covered in blood and she supported it with the other.

Still crying, she walked past the three men, not turning to look at them, and wandered staggering towards her house.

The three men looked as she walked away.

The black-bearded farmer looked at Meller and Betly. There was something so harsh in his wide-open eyes that the journalist could not bear it and bent his head.

‘That’s that,’ the farmer said.

***

They stopped to spend the night in a little empty watchman’s hut in the forest. They were only a few hours away from the lake with the island where the laboratory had once been, but Meller refused to travel in the dark.

This was the fourth day of their journey, and the journalist thought that his tried and tested optimism was starting to crack. Previously he had had a little saying prepared for every time he met with any unpleasantness: ‘But all the same, life itself is wonderful!’ But now he understood that this was a standby phrase, one that worked perfectly when you were travelling in a comfortable train from one city to the next or when you walk through the glass door that leads into a hotel reception, ready to meet with some famous person—this phrase was entirely inadequate to deal with what had happened to Steglich, for example.

The whole region seemed to be wracked with illness. The people were apathetic, unwilling to talk. Even the children didn’t laugh.

Once he asked Meller why the farmers didn’t leave the place. The forester explained that the only thing that the inhabitants owned was their land. But now there was no way to sell it. The land was worthless now because of the otarks.

Betly asked:

‘Why don’t you leave?’

The forester thought. He bit his lips in silence, then replied:

‘I can still be of some use. The otarks are afraid of me. I don’t have anything here. No family, no home. There’s no way they can put pressure on me. They can only fight me. But that is risky.’

‘Do you mean that the otarks respect you?

Meller lifted his head uncertainly.

‘The otarks? How could they? They don’t know respect either. They are not people. They are just afraid. And they’re right. I kill them.’

But the otarks still took a certain amount of risk. The forester and the journalist both recognised it. They had the impression that a ring was gradually tightening around them. They had been shot at three times. Once the shots had come from the windows of an abandoned house, and twice they had come straight out of the forest. After each of the three attacks they had found fresh tracks. And every day they found more and more marks made by the otarks…

In the watchman’s hut, in the little stone fireplace, they lit a fire and prepared their supper. The forester lit his pipe and looked sadly into space.

They had left their horses opposite the open door to the hut.

The journalist looked at the forester. All the time he had been with him, his respect for him had increased every day. Meller was uncultured, he had spent all his life in the forests, he had barely read anything, you couldn’t speak to him for two minutes about art. And even so the journalist felt that he couldn’t ask for a better friend. The forester’s opinions were always healthy and independent: if he didn’t have anything to say, then he didn’t say anything. To begin with the journalist had thought him somehow nervy and irritably weak, but now Betly understood that this was a long-standing bitterness that he felt on behalf of the inhabitants of this large abandoned region, which had been brought low by the mercy of the scientists.

For the last two days Meller had been feeling ill. He had swamp fever. It covered his face with red patches.

The fire was dying in the grate, and the forester unexpectedly said:

‘Tell me, is he young?’

‘Who?’

‘The scientist, Fidler.’

‘He is young,’ the journalist replied. ‘About thirty. No more. Why?’

‘It’s not good that he’s young,’ the forester said.

‘Why?’

Meller was silent for a while.

‘Well, they take them all, the talented people, and lock them away in a closed space. And they coddle them. And they don’t know anything about life. And that’s why they have no compassion for people.’ He sighed. ‘You need to be a person first of all. And only then a scientist.’

He stood up.

‘It’s time to go to sleep. We’ll take turns. Or else the otarks will kill our horses.’

The journalist ended up taking the first watch.

The horses were chewing hay from a small hayrick left over from the previous year.

He sat in the doorway of the hut, his rifle laid across his knees.

The darkness fell fast, like a cover. Then his eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom. The moon came out. The night was clear and starry. Calling out to one another, a flock of little birds flew overhead. Unlike the larger birds, they were afraid of predators and so carried out their autumn journey by night.

Betly stood up and walked around the hut. The forest closely surrounded the clearing where the hut stood, and this was where the danger lay. The journalist checked his rifle to see if it was cocked.

He started to muse over the last few days, the conversations he had had, the faces he had seen, and he thought about how he would tell the story of the otarks when he got back to the newspaper. Then he thought that it was precisely the idea of his return that constantly appeared in his mind and gave a peculiar colouring to everything that he met with here. Even when they were tracking the otark after it had taken the child, he, Betly, had not forgotten that however bad things got here, he could always turn around and leave it all behind.

‘I’ll go back,’ he said to himself. ‘But Meller? And the others?’

But this was too harsh a thought for him to work out all its ramifications now.

He sat in the shade of the hut and started to think about the otarks. He remembered the headline from some newspaper: ‘Intelligence without compassion.’ It was like what the forester said. For him the otarks could not be human, because they had no ‘compassion’. Intelligence without compassion. Was that possible? Could intelligence even exist without compassion? What came first? Isn’t kindness a result of intelligence? Or is it the other way round? It had already been established that the otarks were more capable than humans of logical thought, that they understood abstractions better, had better memories. The rumours were already flowing that some of the first generation otarks were held in the Ministry of Defence and used to help decide certain particular problems. But electronic ‘reasoning machines’ were also used to solve certain particular problems. What was the difference?

He remembered that one of the farmers had told him and Meller that he had recently seen an almost completely naked otark, and the forester had replied that the otarks had recently started to become ever more like people. Would they conquer the world one day? Could intelligence without compassion be stronger than human intelligence?

‘But that won’t happen any time soon,’ he said to himself. ‘If it ever does happen. In any case, I’ll be long gone by then.’

But then he thought: what about the children? What sort of world would they live in—the world of the otarks or the world of cybernetic robots, also inhuman and also, according to some people, cleverer than humans?

His son appeared in his mind’s eye and said to him:

‘Listen to me, dad. We are who we are, right? And they are who they are. But don’t they think to themselves that they are a “we” too?’

‘You’re growing up too fast,’ Betly thought. ‘When I was seven I wouldn’t have asked such questions.’

Somewhere behind him a twig snapped. The boy disappeared.

The journalist carefully looked around and listened. No, everything was fine.

A bat crossed the clearing in its angular wavering flight.

Betly straightened up. The thought came to him that the forester was hiding something from him. He still hadn’t said who the horseman was who had overtaken them on the broken road that first day.

He leant his back against the wall of the house once more. His son appeared again, with more questions.

‘Dad, where does it all come from? The trees, the houses, the air, the people? Where does it come from?’

He started to tell the boy about the evolution of creation, then something seemed to jab him in the heart and Betly woke up.

The moon had gone. But the sky was still fairly light.

The horses were no longer in the clearing. Or rather, one was gone, and the other was lying on the grass, with three grey shadows crouching over it. One of them stretched up, and the journalist saw a huge otark with a large heavy head, grinning jaws and large eyes that glinted in the half darkness.

Then a whisper came from nearby.

‘He’s asleep.’

‘No, he’s woken up already.’

‘Go to him.’

‘He’ll shoot.’

‘He’d have shot earlier, if he could. He’s either asleep, or else he’s petrified with fear. Go to him.’

‘You go.’

The journalist was petrified. It was like a dream. He understood that there was no way out of this, that the catastrophe had arrived, but he could not move a muscle.

The whisper continued:

‘But what about the other one? He’ll shoot.’

‘He’s ill, he won’t wake up… go, I say!’

With a huge effort Betly managed to move his eyes. An otark appeared from round the corner of the hut. But this one was small, like a pig.

Overcoming his state of shock, the journalist pulled the trigger of his rifle. Two shots boomed out one after the other, two cartridge cases were expelled into the air.

Betly scrambled to his feet, the rifle fell from his hands. He rushed into the hut, shaking, slammed the door behind him and put the latch down.

The forester was waiting with his rifle cocked. His lips moved, and the journalist felt rather than heard the question:

‘The horses?’

He shook his head.

There was a scratching at the door. The otarks were propping something up against it.

A voice spoke:

‘Hey, Meller! Hey!’

The forester rushed to the window and would have stuck his rifle out. But at that moment a black paw flashed past against the starry background; he scarcely pulled his gun back in time.

There was satisfied laughter outside.

The gramophone voice, stretching out its words, said:

‘Your time is up, Meller.’

Other voices interrupted:

‘Meller, Meller, come and talk to us…’

‘Hey, forester, say something clever. You’re a man, you’re supposed to be clever…’

‘Meller, say something and I’ll tell you it’s wrong…’

‘Speak to me, Meller. Call me by my name. I’m Philip…’

The forester said nothing.

The journalist walked over to the window with uncertain steps. The voice was very close, just past the log wall. There was an animal stench—blood, dung, something else.

The otark who had said his name was Philip spoke right under the window.

‘You’re a journalist, right? You, by the window.’

The journalist cleared his throat. His throat was dry. The same voice continued:

‘Why did you come here?’

There was a silence.

‘Did you come here to destroy us?’

There was another pause, then other voices started to speak:

‘Of course, of course they want to wipe us out… First they made us, now they want to destroy us…’

There was a chorus of growls, then another noise. The journalist had the impression that the otarks were fighting.

Over the top of all this noise came the voice of the one who had said he was called Philip:

‘Hey, forester, why don’t you shoot? You always shoot. Come and speak to me now.’

Somewhere above them a shot suddenly rang out.

Betly turned round.

The forester had climbed on top of the fireplace, had moved aside the thin poles with straw on top that made up the roof, and had opened fire.

He fired twice, paused to reload, and fired again.

The otarks ran away.

Meller jumped down from the fireplace.

‘We need to get some horses. Or it’ll be tough for us.’

They looked at the three dead otarks.

One of them, a youngster, was practically naked, with hair only growing on the back of his neck.

Betly nearly vomited when Meller turned the creature over on the grass. He managed to contain himself, holding his mouth shut.

The forester said:

‘Remember, they are not people. Even though they can speak. They eat people. They eat each other.’

The journalist looked around. It was already dawn. The clearing, the field, the dead otarks—everything seemed at that moment to be unreal.

Could it really be so? Was he, Donald Betly, standing here?

***

‘This is where the otark ate Klein,’ Meller said. ‘One of the locals told us all about it, a man from round here. He worked as a cleaner, when the laboratory still existed. And that evening he just happened to be in the next room. He heard everything…’

The journalist and the forester were now on the island, in the main building of the Science Centre. That morning they had taken the saddles from the dead horses and had crossed to the island over the dam. They only had one rifle now, because Betly’s had been taken by the otarks as they ran away. Meller’s plan was to get to a nearby farm while it was still light and taking some horses there. But the journalist had talked him into allowing half an hour to look over the abandoned laboratory.

‘He heard everything,’ the forester continued. ‘It was in the evening, round about ten o’clock. Klein had some kind of contraption that he was taking apart, connecting to electric wires, and the otark was sitting on the floor, and they were chatting. They were talking about physics. This was one of the first otarks they had bred and he was considered the most intelligent. He could even speak foreign languages… This guy was cleaning the floor and could hear them chatting. Then there was a silence, then a thud. And suddenly the cleaner heard a voice saying ‘Oh God!’ It was Klein, and there was so much terror in his voice that his knees bent under him. Then there was a gut-wrenching scream of ‘Help me!’ The cleaner looked into the room and saw Klein lying on the floor and writhing, with the otark chewing at him. This guy was so frightened that he couldn’t do anything and just stood there. And it was only when the otark came for him that he shut the door.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they killed two other laboratory workers and ran away. And five or six stayed on as though nothing had happened. And when the commission from the city came, they talked to the otarks. Then they took them away. We found out later that they’d eaten another person on the train.’

Everything had been left untouched in the large laboratory. The flasks and dishes were on the long benches, covered with a layer of dust, and spiders had spun their webs through the cables of the X‑ray machine. The glass in the windows was broken, and the branches of wild, uncropped acacias came through the empty frames.

Meller and the journalist left the main building.

Betly wanted very much to look at the radiation apparatus, and he asked the forester for five more minutes.

The asphalt on the main road of the abandoned village had been broken through by grass and young strong shoots. It was autumnal and you could see a long way. It smelt of rotting leaves and damp trees.

On the village square Meller stopped unexpectedly.

‘Did you hear something?’

‘No,’ Betly replied.

‘I was thinking about how they came as a group to besiege us in the watchman’s hut,’ the forester said. ‘They never used to do anything like that. They always acted alone.’

He listened again.

‘It’s as if they were planning a surprise for us. Let’s get out of here as fast as we can.’

They went over to the low-slung round building with its narrow barred windows. The massive door was half open, the concrete floor by the doorway was covered with a thick layer of forest debris—reddish pine needles, dust, the wings of midges.

They went carefully into the first room with its hanging ceiling. Another massive door led into a low-roofed room.

They peered in. A squirrel with a fluffy tail like a flame rushed across the wooden table and leapt through the wooden slats covering the window.

The forester looked around quickly. He listened, holding his rifle tight, then said.

‘No, this is no good.’

And he hurried back the way they had come.

But it was too late.

There was a rustling noise and the outside door clanged shut. Then there was a noise as if something heavy were being placed against it.

For a second Meller and the journalist looked at one another, then they rushed to the window.

Betly took one glance then stepped back.

The square and the wide dry pool, which had been built there for no obvious reason, were filled with otarks. There were dozens and dozens of them, and new ones kept appearing as if they were coming out of the ground. A noise rose from this crowd of non-humans and non-beasts, a mixture of cries and growling.

In shock, the forester and Betly stood silently.

A young otark near to them stood up on its back paws. There was something round in its front paws.

‘A stone,’ the journalist said, still unable to believe what was happening. ‘He wants to throw a stone…’

But it was not a stone.

The round object flew through the air, by the window it burst with a blinding light, and a bitter smoke came into the room.

The forester stepped back from the window. He looked confused. His rifle fell from his hands and he grasped at his chest.

‘Damn it!’ he said and lifted up a hand, looking at his bloody fingers. ‘The bastards! They’ve got me.’

Turning pale, he took two uncertain steps then sank to his heels, then sat against the wall.

‘They got me.’

‘No!’ Betly cried. ‘No!’ He shook as though with fever.

Meller, biting his lips, turned his pale face to him.

‘The door!’

The journalist ran to the exit. There was already something heavy propped against it from the outside.

He went back to the forester.

Meller was lying down now against the wall, holding his hands to his chest. A damp patch spread over his shirt. He wouldn’t let the journalist bind the wound.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I can feel that this is the end. There’s no point causing any more pain. Don’t touch me.’

‘But I can get help!’ Betly cried.

‘Who from?’

The question was so bitter, so open and so hopeless, that the journalist grew cold.

They were quiet for a while, then the forester said:

‘Do you remember the rider we saw the first day?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was most likely running to tell the otarks that you were here. They work together, the city bandits and the otarks. That’s why the otarks were able to band together. You shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure that if octopuses came here from Mars, they’d find people willing to side with them.’

‘Yes,’ whispered the journalist.

The time until evening passed without anything happening. Meller grew weaker quickly. He stopped bleeding. Even so he wouldn’t let anyone touch him. The journalist sat next to him on the stone floor.

The otarks left them alone. They made no attempt to break through the door, or to throw another grenade. The chattering outside the building grew faint, then rose again.

When the sun went down and it started to get colder, the forester asked for something to drink. The journalist gave him water from his flask and wiped his face as well.

The forester said:

‘Maybe it’s a good thing that the otarks have appeared. Now it will become clear what it means to be a man. Now we will all know that to be a man it is not enough to be able to count and to study geometry. There’s something else. And the scientists are proud of their work. But that’s not everything.’

Meller died that night, and the journalist lived another three days.

The first day he only thought about saving himself, moving from despair to hope, shooting a few times through the window with the idea that someone would hear the shots and come to help him.

Towards night-time he realised that all his hopes were illusory. His life seemed to be divided into two halves that were impossible to reconcile in any way. He was mostly agitated by the fact that there was no logical connection or continuity between them. One life was the happy intellectual life of a highly-successful journalist, and that life had finished when he and Meller had ridden down from the mountainside into the thick forests of the Main Range. This first life had given him no indication that he was destined to die here on this island, in an abandoned laboratory.

In the second life everything was possible and impossible. It was entirely made up of coincidence. And really, it could not be happening. He had been free not to come here, to have refused this call from his editor and take another job. Instead of studying the otarks, he could have flown to Nubia to write about the protection of the ancient monuments of Egyptian art.

An unlucky chance had brought him here. That was the cruellest blow. A couple of times he had almost stopped believing in what had happened to him, and had walked round the room touching the sunlit walls and the dusty tables.

For some reason or other the otarks had lost all interest in him. There were only a few of them left in the pool and on the square. Sometimes they would fight among themselves, and once Betly saw with heart-stopping horror how they threw themselves on one of their own, tore him to pieces, and settled down to eat.

At night he suddenly decided that Meller was guilty of his death. He felt disgusted by the dead forester and dragged his body into the next room and put it by the door.

For a couple of hours he sat on the floor, hopelessly repeating:

‘Lord, why me? Why me?’

On the second day his water ran out and he started to be tormented by thirst. But he had already understood that there was no way he would be saved, and he remained calm and started to think about his life again—it already seemed like someone else’s. He remembered how, right at the beginning of the journey, he had argued with the forester. Meller had told him that the farmers wouldn’t talk to him.

‘Why?’ Betly had asked.

‘Because you live in the warm, with all your comforts,’ Meller replied. ‘Because you are one of the people at the top. One of the ones who betrayed them.’

‘What do you mean, I’m at the top?’ Betly said, refusing to accept what he was told. ‘I only earn a little bit more than they do.’

‘So what?’ the forester said. ‘Your work is light, fun almost. They have been dying here for years, and you’ve written your little articles, you’ve gone to restaurants, you’ve had your intellectual conversations…’

He realised that all this was true. His optimism, which he had been so proud of, was in the final analysis the optimism of an ostrich. He had just buried his head when it came to the bad news. He read about executions in Paraguay in the newspapers, or about famine in India, but spent his time thinking about how to get money to buy new furniture for his large five-room apartment, or how he might be able to win the good opinion of some important person or other. The otarks—the otark-people—shot crowds of protestors, speculated on the price of bread, prepared wars in secret, and he turned away from it all, pretending that nothing of the kind ever happened.

From this point of view, all of his past life suddenly seemed strongly connected with what was now happening to him. He had never spoken out against evil, and now the time had come for pay-back.

On the second day the otarks came and spoke with him by the windows a couple of times. He didn’t reply.

One of the otarks said:

‘Hey, come on out, journalist! We won’t hurt you.’

And another one, standing next to him, laughed.

Betly thought about the forester once again. But his opinion had changed. He thought that the forester had been a hero. To tell the truth, the only real hero that Betly had ever encountered. Alone, without any kind of assistance, he had fought against the otarks, had struggled with them and died undefeated.

On the third day the journalist started to fall into delirium. He imagined that he had returned to his newspaper and was dictating an article to the stenographer.

The article was called ‘What is a Man?’

He dictated out loud.

‘On our century of astounding developments in science one might be forgiven for concluding that science is all-powerful. But let us imagine for a moment that an artificial brain has been created, twice as powerful as the human brain and possessing twice the capacity for work. Would a creature with a brain of this type really be allowed to call itself a man? What is it that makes us what we are? The capacity to perform sums, to analyse, to make logical deductions; or is it something else, which arises with the development of society, which is to do with on individual’s relation to others and with the relation of the individual to the collective? If we take the otarks as an example…’

And here his mind started to wander.

On the third day there was an explosion in the morning. Betly woke up. He thought that he had stood up and was holding his rifle at the ready. In fact he was lying helpless by the wall.

The muzzle of a wild animal appeared before his eyes. With an agonising effort of thought, he remembered what Fidler had looked like. Like an otark!

Then his thoughts lost their focus again. He could not feel how his flesh was being torn at, and for a tenth of a second Betly was able to think that the otarks were not really so terrible, that there were only a couple of hundred of them in this abandoned region. They could be dealt with. But the people… The people!

He did not know that the news of Meller’s disappearance had already spread across the whole area, and that the desperate farmers were digging up the rifles they had hidden.

The post Day of Wrath appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

***

The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Henrique Alvim Corrêa illustration for War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been posting a series of strange scifi stories this summer at Weird Fiction Review. These are stories that were uncovered by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer as they edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, out this year from Vintage Books.

So far we’ve posted stories by two early-20th-century German fantasists Paul Scheerbart and Karl Hans Strobl. The first story, “The New Abyss” by Scheerbart, tells the story of a strange alien planet called Klips whose inhabitants watch as the planet becomes consumed by an abyss, while Strobl’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” recounts the tale of a town whose toy factory creates a small legion of toy rabbit replicas.

Next week, we’re featuring an interview with translators James and Marian Womack who translated a combined eight stories for The Big Book of Science Fiction. To accompany their interview, we’ll also be posting two stories: “The Ruins of Granada” by Ángel Ganivet, translated from Spanish by Marian Womack, and “The Day of Wrath” by Sever Ganovsky, translated from Russian by James Womack.

Lastly, we just wanted to mention a story we posted in 2015 called “Mutation Planet” by Barrington J. Bayley. It’s an excellent piece of weird science fiction by an author who has another story in The Big Book of Science Fiction called “Sporting with the Chid.”

We hope you’re enjoying our exploration of strange scifi and we should have a story or two more before summer is over so be sure to keep checking back.

The post Strange Scifi Summer appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Karl Hans Strobl (1877–1946) was an Austrian author and editor of fantasy and weird fiction. His writing was strongly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Hanns Heinz Ewers, author of such weird horror classics as “The Spider.” After World War I, Strobl relocated to Germany, where he founded the magazine Der orchideengarten: Phantastische blätter (The Orchid Garden: Fantastic Pages) in 1919 with Alfons von Czibulka, which is now regarded as the world’s first specialized fantasy magazine, predating Weird Tales in the United States by two years.

Strobl carved out a space for himself as a unique writer of macabre fiction, earning comparisons to the Czech writer Gustav Meyrink and to Alfred Kubin. However, Strobl also became increasingly extremist as an advocate for German nationalism. This impulse led to Strobl’s adopting right-wing and anti-Semitic views late in the 1920s. Some of the racism inherent in Strobl’s worldview had been visible as early as the illustrations commissioned for Der orchideengarten but metastasized when Strobl joined the Nazi Party before World War II, spending the rest of his literary career producing pro-Nazi propaganda. As a result, his works were banned by the Allies at the end of the war.

“The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907) originally appeared in The Big Book of Science Fiction where it was translated for the first time into English. It is only one of many interesting stories Strobl wrote prior to the hardening of his radicalized rightwing views. What comes through behind the apparent faith and optimism about industry and industrialization is the threat inherent to a mechanized society: the rebellious artificial legions stealing the world from their masters, foreshadowing one of the themes of classic science fiction. This stance is in direct opposition to the “can-do, gee whiz” attitude about humanity’s endeavors on Earth and beyond the stars that dominated some early American science fiction.

***

The town’s toy industry had grown considerably in the last few years. All civilized countries placed orders upon orders, eager to own mechanical toys—multicolored, marvelously precise: the Punchinello puppets banging drums, the indefatigable fencers, the madly fast automobiles, the proud war vessels propelled by veritable steam engines. Through some forceful entreat, one could export the toys to unsophisticated lands—though the demand was not as imperious. One could often find— deep in the forests and out in the deserts of Africa—little indigenous children playing with what remained of those remarkable products. A famous explorer even confessed to having been fooled in the jungle, at the edge of the Malagarassi, by a very peculiar monkey: the beast sat in a palm tree, and the explorer had convinced himself he had discovered another simian species, when he glimpsed his country’s trade mark, D.R.P.^[1] N. 105307, which destroyed his hopes. But the independent press soon placed this story in the usual category (as far as explorers of Africa were concerned) of imaginary ravings, and condemned it as one more conspiracy conceived by the abhorred colonial policy.

The automated rabbits from the firm Stricker & Vorderteil were by far in greatest demand. These small animals, exact replicas of the natural creatures, were capable, when their spring was fully wound up, to hop around like their living models, in five or six circles.

A mechanical engineer of universal genius, an American, of course, whose inventions seemed to fall from the heavens directly onto his lap, had designed the humble inanimate beasts specifically for the company. Unfortunately, the moment when the firm’s performance and celebrity peaked, everything collapsed like a house of cards. With the impertinence of the man who believes himself indispensible, Hopkins requested to be paid double, work half hours, and have access to a personal laboratory and a vacation property out of town. Stricker was inclined to accept, but Vorderteil opposed this decision in the strongest possible terms: “We can’t do that, if only for the sake of management’s principles; otherwise, in six months’ time Hopkins will come up with some new whim.”

Stricker agreed. The American, a grin hovering about his face, listened to his boss’s decision and responded by handing over his notice.  The slight consternation and discontent caused by this reaction vanished when the owners realized all the crucial secrets of fabrication were safe and the enterprise risked nothing.

“What if,” said the anxious Stricker, “Hopkins creates a competing firm?”

“Leave it to me,” said Vorderteil in a soothing tone, as he was, through a few discreet dealings, acquainted with the town’s mayor. The defector would receive no permission to start his business.

Meanwhile, Hopkins worked as if nothing had happened. He continued to supervise the factory’s production, changing a few small-scale details, as if he intended to work for Stricker and Vorderteil forever. One could say he invented as easily as he drew breath. During these last weeks, important orders of rabbits came in, and the firm was forced to increase its means of production, to fabricate those legions of small animals. Hopkins, wearing his customary smile, left at the end of his notice, doffed his impeccable top hat and bowed low to his former employers. He remained worryingly quiet about his future projects, and what Stricker’s fretful nature had correctly intuited turned out to be true. Through his discreet dealings with the Mayor’s office, Vorderteil learned that Hopkins had bought a vacant lot and had filed a building permit, to build a new factory.

“Guess,” Vorderteil cried, “what he’s going to fabricate?”

“I have no idea,” Stricker answered, and this time he really had no clue.

“Toys made of glazed colored glass. That’s what he wants to do. Glazed colored glass! Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Stricker had never heard of such a thing, but he deemed Hopkins capable of anything, even of making glazed colored glass toys, which is why he blanched, nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and hunched over, thus losing three centimeters in height.

Vorderteil yelled: “Glazed glass. And colored! Nonsense!”

“Calm down. It’s probably a mistake. Maybe Hopkins meant to say ‘gasified air.’ I think I heard something about it.”

At these words, Vorderteil banged his fist on the table, so forcefully the huge Shannon recorder placed over his head oscillated. He cried:

“This is a serious matter. Don’t be facetious, now that everything we worked for is crumbling around our ears. When Hopkins says glazed glass, he thinks glazed glass, and, if I understand well, he gave an overview of his project, from which it would appear that he has discovered a process to solidify air, a method that allows submitting air to very high temperatures, giving it all the properties of glass, except for fragility.”

“That would be an industrial revolution, and he is very obliging, given that he intends to use this breakthrough technology to make toys. Who knows where he’ll stop?”

“Very obliging, yes. But what if, all of a sudden, children were given dice, skittles, puppets, locomotives made of colored glass that never break, and the toys are completely safe? Maybe he will even make automated rabbits, oh!”

Vorderteil threw himself back so violently in his armchair that the huge Shannon recorder fell on his head. While papers flittered around him, he bounded to his feet.

“That must be avoided at all costs, and if you, Mister Stricker, indulge in incomprehensible nonchalance, I myself must thank God for having connections that will help me foil Hopkins’s nefarious plan.”

The following weeks, many discussions took place through the usual discreet channels, between the Mayor and Vorderteil. It ensued that these secret dealings caused a firm refusal of all the requests, appeals and revisions filed by Hopkins. To the point that Stricker, crushed by his associate’s repeated victories, saw himself shrink about two centimeters in height every day.

After the seventeenth rejection of Hopkins’s request, a peculiar din resounded before the City Hall’s door, and the American, flanked by two enormous mastiffs, entered the anti-chamber, which was made narrow by thick folders, all sorts of carefully kept clutter, and rolled-up sheets of paper containing building plans.

Secretaries and clerks took refuge in the adjacent rooms, while the doors moaned under the weight of the mastiffs that were leaning into the panels. Thanks to the two monsters, whose heads reached up to his shoulders, Hopkins was able to get into the Mayor’s office. Here he stood, Hopkins, facing the Mayor, hat in hand, while the mastiffs, giving in to their instinct, sniffed the cabinets all around the room, upending vases and unabashedly leaving the marks of their huge paws on the delicate patterns of the rug, and the Mayor tried to find something to say:

“Don’t you know that dogs are not allowed inside?” he ended up yelling.

“Of course I know,” Hopkins answered, smiling. “Dogs must stay outside.”

“So how dare you introduce your tykes here!”

“These? But they’re not dogs.”

“Oh, yes? What are they then?”

“They’re machines, Mr. Mayor.”

And Hopkins called one of the mastiffs closer, and unscrewed its head so that it was possible to glimpse the gearwheels inside; he also explained how the animals moved their limbs, and sniffed, particularly insisting on the clever mechanism that allowed the dogs to wag their tails.

“What in the Hell is this for—?” asked the Mayor, an almost imploring expression on his nonplussed face, while the cogs, wheels, springs, and electrical batteries spun frenetically.

Hopkins switched his dogs’ mechanisms off and riposted through another question:

“Why wouldn’t you let me build my factory?”

“For that, you should address the Civil Engineering Office, in order to learn whether it is possible to obtain a building permit.”

“I have already put the same question to the Civil Engineering Office. There, I was told to address the Police Office.”

“Well, then, and—?”

“From there, I was sent to the Technical Assistance Office.”

“Well, then, and—?”

“There, they wanted me to go to the Civil Engineering Office again, but at this point I decided to address you directly.”

The Mayor, seeing himself abandoned by all his auxiliary offices, resigned himself to replying.

“We didn’t respond favorably to your request because the legal requirements were not met.”

“But everything’s perfect, and if you don’t believe me, I shall do whatever it takes to obtain your agreement, one way or another.”

Under the dogs’ lackluster stare, which seemed as threatening as the glint in their master’s eyes, the Mayor dared not to contradict his interlocutor. The three creatures that fenced the Mayor inside a magical circle resembled receptacles of accumulated force waiting for a switch-on to explode into action, unleashing destruction.

In a wavering voice, he asked: “And now, what do you intend to do?”

“Oh, I can choose one among hundreds of possibilities … like … rabbits, for example.”

“Ra—rabbits?”

“Yes … I can set a billion mechanical rabbits on the town.”

There, the Mayor burst into laughter. “A billion! And … mechanical … ah ah.”

“I’m under the impression you have no idea what a billion is, and you don’t know a thing about the perfection of mechanics, not to mention the effects of inanimate objects to which one lends movement …”

But the Mayor, who couldn’t control his fits of laughter, kept saying, “Ra—rabbits. Au-tomated … ra—rabbits. Ha ha.”

“Then you take responsibility for it?”

“But of course … of course.”

“All right,” said Hopkins, and he tipped his hat by way of a farewell.

He turned on his dogs’ switches, and followed by the monsters, exited, an amiable smile at the corner of his mouth. It took the Mayor two hours to recover, and only after all the heads of departments succeeded in restraining their serious cases of the giggles, he went home, a vague air of satisfaction about him. Exhausted by his unusual exertions, he couldn’t wait to tell his wife about the joke. In front of the door, he saw in a corner, shyly nestled against the wall, looking miserable, a cute little white rabbit produced according to the renowned process of the Stricker & Vorderteil firm. Amused by the thought that Hopkins had already placed a little white rabbit by his door, the Mayor extended a hand to seize the small beast, but the rabbit hopped away, quickly escaping him. Still intent on the idea of pursuit, the Mayor saw with satisfaction that not far down the street, a few rascals had trapped the animal. The story told by the Mayor was sheer pleasure to his wife as her thrifty nature immediately envisaged the opportunity of procuring children’s toys at no cost. When little Edwige appeared clutching a little white rabbit she had found on the porch, the Mayor’s wife laughed joyously. She burst out laughing again when Richard brought in a rabbit, which settled in on the kitchen table, and again when Fritz and Anna emerged from the dark depths of the cave, each carrying a rabbit.

These animals with dull glass eyes hopped to-and-fro in a frenzy: one had to stack them up into a corner, from which they escaped, causing the children to become noisily nervous. But when Cook, pale in the face, reported that one of the creatures had all of a sudden leaped into a marmalade jar, the mother’s hilarity gave place to the housewife’s carefulness. During the afternoon, the rabbits multiplied in a worrisome manner. They seemed to lurk in every corner, erupt from the cracks in the floorboards; they sat on all the moldings and doorframes; sprang blindly everywhere, so that the general amusement quickly ceased, while a murmur of disapprobation filled the house.

The Mayor, fleeing from the nuisance, went to his club through a twilight peppered with hopping white smudges. There he met friends who, as perplexed as he, had convened to discuss the phenomenon, while rabbits, in ever increasing numbers, came to disrupt the men’s reflections. From time to time, Joseph, the club’s barman, swept the animals out of the rooms, but the next minute, the things shot up from every corner, leaping at one another, their glass eyes red and bulging. Upon the reading table, the creatures devilled the sacred placement of the newspapers. The gentlemen traded furious glances, deeply disturbed by this aggravating intrusion, and left as soon as it appeared that Joseph and his broom were unable to get rid of the vermin.

That same evening, the Mayor felt a hard lump under his bedclothes, and, when he anxiously groped for it, his hand came up filled with a rabbit that stared at him stupidly. Cursing, he threw the thing, but the animal contented itself with uttering a weak high-pitched scream, like a struck instrument, and then resumed hopping. At this proof of resilience, the Mayor flipped his lid, and the effects of his anger troubled his sleep as his dreams teemed with rabbits. Written in letters that reached the sky, the terrible word “UNDESTRUCTIBLE” loomed in the midst of a crowd of rabbits, which went up and down the sign, as agile as the proverbial enchanted cats. The red eyes converged on the same point, the Mayor, who lay paralyzed in bed.

When he decided to wash away the sweat caused by the nightmare, the man found the top of his washing stand invaded by rabbits, and one of them, with its fur thin and dull, twitched pitifully at the bottom of his pitcher. With a satisfying malignant pleasure, he hurled the creature to the floor, but the rabbit slowly straightened and resumed hopping with the usual enthusiasm.

In the streets, the passersby could not take a step without stumbling upon one of the little monsters, which survived the most incredible torments applied by urchins, and even the passage of the heaviest trucks.  Rabbits on the steps of the City Hall. Rabbits in every corridor. Perching on the highest folders, they glanced down at the poor Major, who passed among his employees fighting against more rabbits, to enter his office. Thirteen rabbits welcomed him from his desk, causing the papers to rustle and scattering them in splendid disarray. The Mayor let himself fall into his armchair, invoking all the destroying powers. He cried out in anguish when his hands landed on soft fur. It seemed to him that over the vacuous muzzles hovered an expression resembling a smile. Thanks to the multiplication, the smile seemed to amplify, growing stronger, and finally the Mayor had the impression of seeing Hopkins’s grin repeated a hundred thousand times.

Mustering all his energy, the Mayor called Vorderteil. Aghast, they gazed at each other for some time, until the Mayor recovered a shade of dignity.

“This Mr. Hopkins …” he began.

“Yes, this Mr. Hopkins,” Vorderteil said.

“A billion automated rabbits …”

“Indestructible … Indestructible,” Vorderteil confirmed.

“It’s horrible … A billion automated ra—” The Mayor had to brush away a rabbit that had brusquely leaped onto his shoulder and wanted to climb his head. “Damned mechanics!” he cried, on the brink of tears.

“Yes, yes, but I don’t understand …”

“What is it that you don’t understand?”

“My factory has never produced so many rabbits before.”

“Where do they come from then?”

Vorderteil was unable to answer as he found himself inundated by the red ink a rabbit had just spilled. His elegant black trousers were ruined. The Mayor laughed convulsively.

Then Vorderteil said, “I think Hopkins has hoarded all the latest orders. That man is the Devil incarnate … and he’s out to get us … but …”

And, ignoring the red tide that continued to spill out between them, he whispered: “But I’m thinking of something even more terrible …”

“What?”

“Have you noticed that two generations of rabbits have presented themselves?”

Yes. It was true. Among the twenty-three rabbits that frolicked on the Mayor’s desk, a few seemed to be smaller, more delicate … younger than the others. Even though all of them hopped about, eyeing the world with the same fixed, stupid gaze, smiling the same hideous smile.

“You see, when Hopkins was still working for us, he alluded to some revolutionary process, something … a kind of natural reproduction of mechanical rabbits, which he called ‘asexual reproduction.’ We made fun of him at the time, but now, apparently, he is using this process. It’s clear now: he’s using it to terrorize us. Yes. These rabbits are admirable replica of life. They’re reproducing, and tonight we’ll see the third generation. Tomorrow morning, we’ll welcome the fifth, and the day after tomorrow, we will sail toward the two billion beasts …”

This conversation met a quick and strange conclusion, which also ended the discreet dealings between the two men. Seized by the irrepressible desire to avoid going insane, and maybe a combination of rage and desperation, the Mayor grabbed by the neck the author of this disaster, spun him around and had him thrown out. Unfortunately, this violent act brought no resolution to the problem of the rampant rabbits. When they had appeared, the town was amused, and then enraged, but now the general sentiment was horror, and disgust. White beasties hopped among the dishes on the tables. They could only be destroyed with axes and fire. With the magistrate’s authorization, bonfires were lit on the streets, and rabbits were brought in buckets, aprons, and hutches. But despite these measures, the number of rabbits increased by the hour until the town’s population gave up. The fires consumed, a reek of burned fur stank up the air. Without anything to keep them at bay, the rabbits destroyed every trade, jammed the traffic, invaded all activities, and even insinuated themselves into the secret of amorous passions.

But it happened that in a region nearby, in Switzerland, a woman gave birth to a stillborn child. The terror experienced by the mother had caused this premature birth, and the child had on its face a mark in the shape of a rabbit. Indignation erupted, and the City Hall was almost assailed by a rioting, armed crowd. In this crucial moment, the Mayor remembered Napoleon III, who succeeded in calming the miserable masses with raucous parties. Fighting an internal disquiet with external actions seemed the right solution, even more so since he had glimpsed the fifth generation of monsters in his own house. So he ordered festivities of the greatest splendor commemorating the poet Schiller. Like a captain casting a last glance from the mast of his floundering ship, the Mayor contemplated his town from the highest spot of the City Hall. Even though the month was September, the rooftops, the streets and parks seemed to disappear under layers of snow, but this peculiar blanket twitched, decomposed and recomposed. It was only the billion rabbits—as promised. Like an old man, the Mayor stepped down from the tower, slipping over the soft backs of a few thousand rabbits, and, as soon as he reached the ground floor, he heard the report of a policeman he’d sent to Hopkins’s home. The man was nowhere to be found, which did not surprise the Mayor in the slightest.

That evening, the townspeople gathered for the commemoration, after braving the mountains of rabbits filling the streets, particularly the crossroads, where the beasties superposed in double and triple layers. Even inside, it was difficult to move about as the rabbits leaped among the revelers’ legs, occupied the chairs and filed up and down the galleries, like a bas-relief conceived by a mad sculptor.

An eminent professor who had considerably contributed to the town’s intellectual life delivered a speech, and when he extracted a rabbit from his suit pocket to toss it away, the gesture seemed to punctuate his words in a customary manner.  A more lugubrious impression occurred when the trumpets released a discordant tune, caused by the rabbits obstructing the instruments. Only the young dramatic singer Beate Vogl created a harmonious atmosphere when she sang a lied in Schiller’s honor. Until a terrible scream broke the crystalline sounds as the singer extracted a rabbit from her cleavage. A rabbit, yes, with nine more newborn rabbits hanging from it. The turmoil had reached a peak when a powerful voice rose above the din.

Hopkins stood on stage, beside the unconscious singer. He waved his impeccable top hat and bowed to the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to please pay attention to what I have to say.  The painful events visited on you these last days could have been avoided if the authorities had been able to grasp the meaning of the word ‘billion,’ also showing greater consideration for the accomplishments of modern technology. I desire nothing more than putting an end to these disagreements. The rabbits will disappear as soon as my request is accepted.  Although, if my projects should meet more obstacles, then, and only then, would I, against my desire, rest assured, make your situation a little worse.”

Smiling, Hopkins, fished a squirming rabbit out of his pocket, and held it up by the ears. “So far, you’ve seen an innocuous species of rabbit, but, tomorrow at midday, you’ll encounter a new variety: the rabbit that can eat.”

With these words, he presented the animal with a bunch of clover.

The silent crowd watched in consternation as the animal’s muzzle twitched and turned toward the vegetable to swallow it with mechanical delight.

Everyone pictured an army of indestructible, voracious rabbits devouring everything in sight. Dread crushed the assembly. Nobody dared utter a sound.

That night, an extraordinary meeting of the City Council was called, and, come morning, an employee was dispatched to the American’s house with an invitation to the Mayor’s office. This time, Hopkins was at home.

The inventor, upon hearing the decision that gave him permission to build his factory, listened gravely to the question he surely expected.

The Mayor, tired and pensive, his face expressing a deep doubt, said:

“Tell me now.” His hand caressed his forehead as if wanting to dispel an oppressive impression. “I get most of your science. There’s something, though, I don’t understand. It’s the fact that, thanks to your savoir-faire in mechanics, by mastering the process of life, you have created rabbits that can eat. How is it possible? The rabbit you showed us …”

Hopkins gave a smile that was more bitter than usual, and tipped his impeccable top hat. “Well, that one … ‚” he said. “That rabbit, Mayor, the one I showed you, was, quite exceptionally, a real, living rabbit.”

_____

[1] Translator’s note: Deutsche Reichspatent

The post The Triumph of Mechanics appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This summer at Weird Fiction Review, we’re featuring weird science fiction stories that we uncovered while doing research for The Big Book of Science Fiction. To kick off this series, we’re featuring a story by early-20th-century German writer Paul Scheerbart. Another one of Scheerbart’s stories, “The New Overworld,” appears in The Big Book of Science Fiction.

Illustration by Helmut Glatz

“How is it possible,” said Mr. Töpfer, “to bear so quietly all the transformations that are allotted to us here on earth! Great innovations happen every day. Our culture develops at such a rapid pace that elderly people just can’t keep up anymore.”

“Take comfort in reading,” said Mrs. Malwine Pate, “we all must try to comfort ourselves by reading. Why else are so many books written and printed? That’s because we are supposed to read them. Forget the newspapers – read books.”

And so the conversation went between two old people in the great Andean hotel on the summit of Chimborazo, in the spring of the year 3300. Outside the snow was meters high, but in the guest room of the hotel a pleasant warmth prevailed. The morning sun glittered on the frost patterns of the big mirror windows, and Mrs. Malwine Pate asked Mr. Töpfer if she should read something to him.

“Yes,” said Mr. Töpfer, “do read. It helps to forget Europe and America. We are not obliged to always think about the transformations we witness on the surface of the earth. It doesn’t make anything better.”

“On other stars,” said Mrs. Pate, “you will find even greater transformations. I’m going to read a chapter to you which tells about such a transformation.” And Mrs. Pate read the following:

A Spoke In the Wheel

Klips looked like a round loaf of bread. And at the center of the star the Long-Legged Ones wanted to build a great palace. They began by ramming huge, long poles through the center, but that didn’t work out too well, because the poles sank into the ground too easily and went deeper and deeper – and found no support below. All efforts to prevent the sinking of the poles failed – the entire ground gave way and the Long-Legged Ones were forced to withdraw to the outer rim of the star. The builders got a spoke in their wheels: They were forced to give up constructing a palace in the middle of their star. Right there, a large, wide hole formed – a new abyss. And this abyss grew deeper day by day, and on the other side of the star, a huge mountain emerged. The mountain grew higher and higher, while the abyss became deeper and deeper. As the Long-Legged Ones were forced to live on the outer rim of the star, all of their life habits underwent a sudden change. They couldn’t climb the mountain that had formed on the other side, because the mountain grew hotter every day. Soon, the star looked like a pointy hat, and the Long-Legged Ones strolled along their new abyss and looked down into the opening. And they couldn’t enter the abyss, because it was very hot as well. Every inhabitant of the star had six long legs, which made it was impossible to walk much on the rim, because the rim became narrower and narrower. The worst thing was that many residences on both sides of the star were destroyed by the emergence of the mountain and the abyss. They had no idea where to stay. Everybody settled very closely to each other on the rim, and the Long-Legged Ones started to erect very high houses with hundreds of storeys. Then the Klipsians looked out of their windows into the new abyss, and they had no idea what it would lead to. One day, there was a horrible bang at the bottom of the abyss. And the abyss was torn apart deep inside, so that a huge hole was formed, through which one could see other stars in space. No one could explain the cause for this stellar transformation. But all the Six-Legged Ones lived now closely together and got to know each other – in the past everybody would have avoided everybody else as much as possible.

***

“Ah!” said Mr. Töpfer, “so the star has transformed only to bring the long-legged gentlemen closer to one another.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Malwine, “this seems to be the cause for the transformation. When something is transformed here on earth, then there is surely a good reason for that as well. We just can’t figure it out fast enough.” In the meantime, the frost patterns on the mirrors had thawed, and they looked out into the magnificent mountainscape. But when their eyes started hurting from the sheer brightness of all the snow, Mrs. Pate asked if she may read another chapter from her “Klips” novel. Mr. Töpfer agreed, and Mrs. Malwine read the following:

The Telescope

The view into the new abyss was very interesting for the Long-Legged Ones; they didn’t get tired at all of looking downwards, for it was very busy down there. Bubbles constantly rose up – and then a glassy mass took shape and gradually formed into a lens. And one day the Long-Legged Ones saw all the stars below greatly enlarged: A natural telescope had formed down there. Now everybody on the star Klips felt blissful, for the sight of the great stars was far more magnificent than everything else they had experienced until now. One could also see comets – just as if they were nearby. And there one could see distinctly that the comets were colossal light serpents with diamond heads – yes, it was quite visible that the heads sparkled like diamonds. And the strangest beams emanated from those diamond heads – in manifoldly arched curves. And then one saw in close proximity a multitude of little stars of all possible forms and shapes. Klips’ entire environment suddenly seemed to liven up. Some of the Long-Legged Ones were now climbing down into the great cauldron, and they realized that its walls were getting cooler bit by bit. And then there was much more to be seen down there; the whole world suddenly came alive for the Long-Legged Ones. Now they started building chain bridges which then connected both sides of the funnel. That’s how they discovered the locations/spots with the best view through the natural glass lens. And then so many bridges were built that all the Klipsians could settle in the center of the great crater. And there, right in the middle of it, they lived even closer together. But this transformation of the star was still not the last one in a long series of transformations. Single parts of the crust from the lower big mountain cone came off like pieces of skin. Slowly, they bent upwards and over the rim, so that on the rim of the planet high walls were formed behind those 100-storey-high houses; this finally rendered the entire star a colossal tube. And afterwards other natural glass lenses formed on top of one another in the lower part of the crater so that the Long-Legged Ones had to detach their chain bridges from the inner walls of the funnel. One had to constantly mount the chain bridges at much higher positions, which allowed an even better view through the ever-enlarging lenses. And as once again more and more lenses formed in the higher parts of the abyss, one had to go higher and higher inside the huge tube, until finally the peaks of the new walls were connected by chain bridges. This natural telescope improved more and more, and one could see better and better through the lenses. And one saw more and more – and more. And the Long-Legged Ones exclaimed in awe: “Who built us this telescope? Is our star so kind that it transformed into a telescope in order to please us?” And they didn’t know what to think of it. But they had no doubt anymore that their star, which they had called Klips, was an almighty, living giant; only they weren’t quite able to explain how it came about that a giant could transform into a telescope. But then they gazed even more closely through their star telescope and discovered now in many other stars so many more transformations that the transformation of their home star seemed perfectly natural. In order to honor their star, they called it from now on “The Great One” – and spoke of it with great adoration.

***

“That,” said Mr. Töpfer after Mrs. Pate had closed her book, “is quite a comforting story. If such transformations with those kinds of results take place on other stars, we actually don’t need to worry much anymore about the transformations our earth’s surface is destined to suffer.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Malwine replied, “the new swimming islands that have formed in the Great Ocean are likely to make our life only richer in the end.”

“And the great plateau in North Asia,” said Mr. Töpfer, “is probably also going to create something wholly new.”

At this very moment, the landlord entered the guest room and exclaimed breathlessly: “Ladies and gentlemen, just now I’ve received a telegram which says that rift formations appeared in the North Asian plateau. And out of these rifts brand-new, fire-red dragons came flying. And these dragons are very intelligent creatures; they claim that they’ve lived inside the earth for many millennia – and that they are glad to finally see the great sunlight.”

“That certainly sounds like a fairy tale!” said Mrs. Pate, but she read the telegram and threw her hands up in despair.

“How are we,” said Mr. Töpfer, “to endure all these transformations?”

“But,” exclaimed the landlord, “that’s no disaster! Now we don’t need to socialize only with humans anymore. I’m inviting the red dragon people over to stay a few years in my Andean hotel. That way I’ll always have a full house.”

And eight days later there already were two dragon people in the Andean hotel – and the landlord was beside himself with delight – and Mr. Töpfer, too – and Mrs. Malwine Pate – as well –

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