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Read Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" p.566-579 in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction and post intial response by Tuesday of Week 7

Write at least 8 sentences about some interesting underlying social messages in the short story.

The Wesleyan anthology of

Science Fiction . . . .

Edited by Arthur B. Evans,

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Joan Gordon,

Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and

Carol McGuirk

w e s l e y a n u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Middletown, Connecticut

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2010 © SF-TH Inc.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The editors would like to thank DePauw University,

the University of Iowa, and Trent University for their

generous support in making this teaching

anthology possible.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Wesleyan anthology of science fiction /

edited by Arthur B. Evans . . . [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6954-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

—ISBN 978-0-8195-6955-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Science fiction, American. 2. Science fiction, English. I. Evans, Arthur B.

PS648.S3W39 2010

813′.0876208—dc22

2009053144

5 4 3 2 1

To

rIchard dale mulleN,

founder and benefactor of

Science Fiction Studies

contents . . . .

Introduction xi

chroNologIcal lIStINg of StorIeS Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) 1

Jules Verne, from Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) 26

H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897) 39

E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909) 50

Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved” (1931) 79

Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931) 96

C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” (1933) 110

Stanley Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) 136

Isaac Asimov, “Reason” (1941) 160

Cliff ord D. Simak, “Desertion” (1944) 177

Theodore Sturgeon, “Thunder and Roses” (1947) 189

Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother” (1948) 211

Fritz Leiber, “Coming Attraction” (1950) 221

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) 234

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Sentinel” (1951) 241

Robert Sheckley, “Specialist” (1953) 250

William Tenn, “The Liberation of Earth” (1953) 266

Alfred Bester, “Fondly Fahrenheit” (1954) 283

Avram Davidson, “The Golem” (1955) 303

Cordwainer Smith, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955) 309

Robert A. Heinlein, “ ‘All You Zombies—’” (1959) 324

J. G. Ballard, “The Cage of Sand” (1962) 337

R. A. Laff erty, “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965) 359

Harlan Ellison, “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965) 367

Frederik Pohl, “Day Million” (1966) 379

Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) 385

viii coNteNtS

Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .” (1967) 405

Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) 415

Robert Silverberg, “Passengers” (1968) 430

Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” (1969) 443

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Nine Lives” (1969) 452

Frank Herbert, “Seed Stock” (1970) 477

Stanislaw Lem, “The Seventh Voyage,” from The Star Diaries (1971) 490

Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (1972) 507

James Tiptree Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here

on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972) 516

John Varley, “Air Raid” (1977) 525

Carol Emshwiller, “Abominable” (1980) 539

William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1982) 547

Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983) 566

Nancy Kress, “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (1985) 580

Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986) 587

Kate Wilhelm, “Forever Yours, Anna” (1987) 598

Bruce Sterling, “We See Things Differently” (1989) 611

Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi” (1989) 630

Eileen Gunn, “Computer Friendly” (1989) 637

John Kessel, “Invaders” (1990) 654

Gene Wolfe, “Useful Phrases” (1992) 675

Greg Egan, “Closer” (1992) 683

James Patrick Kelly, “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995) 698

Geoff Ryman, “Everywhere” (1999) 717

Charles Stross, “Rogue Farm” (2003) 727

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008) 742

thematIc lIStINg of StorIeS Alien Encounters

C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” (1933) 110

Stanley Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) 136

Arthur C. Clarke, “The Sentinel” (1951) 241

Robert Sheckley, “Specialist” (1953) 250

Robert Silverberg, “Passengers” (1968) 430

Nancy Kress, “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (1985) 580

coNteNtS ix

Gene Wolfe, “Useful Phrases” (1992) 675

James Patrick Kelly, “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995) 698

Apocalypse and Post-apocalypse

H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897) 39

Fritz Leiber, “Coming Attraction” (1950) 221

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) 234

J. G. Ballard, “The Cage of Sand” (1962) 337

Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983) 566

Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi” (1989) 630

Artificial/Posthuman Life-forms

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) 1

Isaac Asimov, “Reason” (1941) 160

Alfred Bester, “Fondly Fahrenheit” (1954) 283

Avram Davidson, “The Golem” (1955) 303

Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” (1969) 443

Ursula K. Le Guin, “Nine Lives” (1969) 452

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation” (2008) 742

Computers and Virtual Reality

Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) 385

William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1982) 547

Pat Cadigan, “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986) 587

Eileen Gunn, “Computer Friendly” (1989) 637

Evolution and Environment

Jules Verne, from Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) 26

Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved” (1931) 79

Clifford D. Simak, “Desertion” (1944) 177

Frank Herbert, “Seed Stock” (1970) 477

Charles Stross, “Rogue Farm” (2003) 727

Gender and Sexuality

Leslie F. Stone, “The Conquest of Gola” (1931) 96

Frederik Pohl, “Day Million” (1966) 379

x coNteNtS

Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah . . .” (1967) 405

Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) 415

Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (1972) 507

James Tiptree Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here

on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972) 516

Carol Emshwiller, “Abominable” (1980) 539

Greg Egan, “Closer” (1992) 683

Time Travel and Alternate History

Robert A. Heinlein, “ ‘All You Zombies—’” (1959) 324

Stanislaw Lem, “The Seventh Voyage” from Star Diaries (1971) 490

John Varley, “Air Raid” (1977) 525

Kate Wilhelm, “Forever Yours, Anna” (1987) 598

John Kessel, “Invaders” (1990) 654

Utopias/Dystopias

E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909) 50

R. A. Lafferty, “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965) 359

Harlan Ellison, “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965) 367

Geoff Ryman, “Everywhere” (1999) 717

War and Conflict

Theodore Sturgeon, “Thunder and Roses” (1947) 189

Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother” (1948) 211

William Tenn, “The Liberation of Earth” (1953) 266

Cordwainer Smith, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955) 309

Bruce Sterling, “We See Things Differently” (1989) 611

Acknowledgments 757

Further Reading 761

xi

Introduction . . . .

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction was conceived and developed by the editors of the scholarly journal Science Fiction Studies (SfS). It refl ects no single editor’s viewpoint but rather a consensus among us that a good an- thology should include stories ranging from the nineteenth century to today, should exemplify a number of themes and styles characteristic of the genre, and should represent both the best and—not always the same thing—the most teachable stories in the fi eld. While our journal is known for a lively engagement with critical and cul- tural theory, it is also committed to exploring the disparate body of texts grouped under the rubric “science fi ction” (sf ). Any sf anthology necessarily declares a provisional canon of classics by prescribing a limited course of essential reading. Canonization is a dubious as well as a diffi cult enterprise, but we hope that our canon is less prescriptive than provocative. Our goal has been to suggest how varied the genre is, to showcase writers from the justly famous (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin) to the unjustly neglected (Robert Sheckley, R. A. Laff erty, William Tenn), and to serve as a starting point for further reading. Many of the stories reprinted here, especially those published before 1960, fi rst appeared in the pulp magazines or later digests that served as the chief training ground for sf writers. Authors who published in these formats often spent their careers writing for pennies a word—if that—while in our own day, high-budget sf fi lms and television series continue to recycle their ideas without so much as a screen credit. Despite the ongoing popularity of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, there was no signifi cant North American market for full-length sf novels until the 1950s. The pulp magazines and postwar sf digests were therefore cru- cial publishing venues for the fi rst generations of American sf writers, from C. L. Moore and Edmond Hamilton to Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon. Their work appeared alongside reprinted tales of Wells, Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, so that early readers of the pulps were being simul- taneously introduced to new writers and immersed in some of the best nineteenth-century sf. Although today’s North American sf market is geared

xii INtroductIoN

predominantly toward novels (the form in which most writers now make their reputations), a number of professional and semiprofessional venues— magazines, reprint anthologies, and, more rarely, original short-fiction an- thologies—still publish short sf. The more recently published selections in this volume strongly demonstrate the form’s continuing vitality.

Historical Origins and the Megatext

Origin narratives are always shaped by complex historical and ideological perspectives. Depending on the sf historian’s particular assumptions, the genre can trace its roots back to Lucian of Samosata’s satirical second- century story of a trip to the moon in his True History. Alternatively, the case has been made that sf began with the utopias and tales of great voy- ages of discovery written from the Renaissance through the eighteenth cen- tury—voyages echoed in the nineteenth century by Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires. Many historians have argued that sf ’s origins lie in the techno-scientific cataclysms of the Industrial Revolution; in this context Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale Frankenstein (1818) is of particular interest. A different reading locates the genre’s origins in Darwinian views of evolu- tion, which shaped the scientific romances of H. G. Wells. Still others would set the starting point in the early twentieth century, arguing that science fiction developed generic coherence only after being popularized in the pulp magazines of the 1920s. This “new” genre, originally named scientifiction in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, saw rapid expansion in the pages of pulps such as Wonder Stories and Weird Tales, where Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931) and Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) first appeared. While each of these positions about the genre’s “true” origins has its defenders and the debate is unlikely ever to be resolved, these very different accounts, when taken together, offer striking testimony to science fiction’s complex history. At its core, science fiction dramatizes the adventures and perils of change. Although not always set in the future, sf ’s consistent emphasis on transfor- mation through time demonstrates the increasing significance of the future to Western techno-cultural consciousness. At the same time, sf retains its links to older literary forms and maintains strong generic connections to its literary cousins epic, fantasy, gothic horror, and satire. One of the more interesting developments in contemporary sf is the near disappearance of genre boundaries in such stories as John Kessel’s postmodern “Invaders” (1990). Meanwhile, sf elements are now frequently incorporated into the work of many writers usually associated with the literary mainstream, re- sulting in slipstream fictions by such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Jeff Noon, and Margaret Atwood.

INtroductIoN xiii

The original subtitle of Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) was “An Inven- tion,” and as the genre’s tangled history suggests, sf is constantly reinvent- ing itself, responding to contemporary scientific and cultural concerns and adapting or challenging prevailing narrative conventions. Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961; trans. 1970), for instance, gains much of its impact from how it revises the assumptions of earlier first-contact stories such as Stanley G. Weinbaum’s optimistic “A Martian Odyssey” (1934). By stressing the difficulties—indeed, the impossibility—of comprehending the alien, Lem intervenes in sf ’s ongoing generic dialogue, showing that first contact might in the event be more of a non-contact. In contrast, James Tiptree Jr.’s “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972) takes a queer-feminist approach to first-contact conventions, with its dire tale of loving the alien all too well. Perhaps because of its twentieth-century history of publication in spe- cialized or niche formats such as pulp magazines, mass-market paperbacks, and sf digests, writers in the genre maintain unusually strong links with each other and with the community of sf readers. Writers of sf conduct long- distance conversations across generations, cultures, social settings, and his- torical challenges. Like all complex cultural forms, sf is rooted in past prac- tices and shared protocols, tropes, and traditions—all of which contribute to what is often called the sf megatext. A fictive universe that includes all the sf stories that have ever been told, the sf megatext is a place of shared images, situations, plots, characters, settings, and themes generated across a multiplicity of media, including centuries of diverse literary fictions and, more recently, video and computer games, graphic novels, big-budget films, and even advertising. Readers and viewers apply their own prior experience of science fiction—their own knowledge of the sf megatext—to each new story or film they encounter. Looking back to one of the earliest novels associated with sf, it is easy to see that the monstrous Creature in Frankenstein is a precursor of both Hawthorne’s Beatrice Rappaccini and the artificial intelligence hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Mark Twain’s Con- necticut Yankee informs Wells’s Time Traveller, who in turn establishes the basic template for all the time-travel tales of the twentieth century, including Heinlein’s “ ‘All You Zombies—’” (1959), which nonetheless offers its own original twist. The sf megatext encompasses specific characters (the mad scientist, the renegade robot, the savvy engineer, the mysterious alien, the powerful arti- ficial intelligence), environments (the enclosures of a spaceship, an alien landscape, the inner space of subjective experience), events (nuclear and

xiv INtroductIoN

other apocalypses, galactic conflicts, alien encounters), and, of particular significance, ethical and political concerns (questions about scientific re- sponsibility, about encounters with otherness, and about shifting definitions of what it means to be human). Every element in the megatext has been re- imagined many times; these reimaginings form the rich intertextual back- drop behind and between all sf stories. The more familiar readers are with the sf megatext, the more readily they will find their way into and through new stories. More experienced readers can appreciate how any particular work both depends and expands on the stories that have preceded it. William Gibson’s celebrated cyberpunk novels and stories—“Burning Chrome” (1982), for instance—borrowed many plot elements from familiar hard sf and noir conventions at the same time that they expanded the sf universe by challenging readers to imagine radically intimate relationships between human beings and increasingly pervasive cybernetic technologies. The impact of Gibson’s fiction lay in its revisionary use of familiar figures such as the cyborg to reveal the degree to which con- temporary techno-scientific culture has itself become science-fictionalized. Stories such as Greg Egan’s “Closer” (1992) and Charles Stross’s “Rogue Farm” (2003) build on cyberpunk’s posthuman foundations in their further explorations of the human-machine interface. In general, techno-scientific verisimilitude (not quite the same thing as scientific accuracy) is considered to be a sine qua non of works in the genre. More particularly, stories about science and technology constitute a sig- nificant strand of the sf megatext, from the dystopian nightmare of E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), to the efforts of lunar explorers to decode the meaning of the mysterious alien artifact in Clarke’s “The Sen- tinel” (1951), to James Patrick Kelly’s revisionary story about the “cold equa- tions” of the physical universe in “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1995). From the perspective of the sf megatext, every story is in dialogue with others in the genre, even as it aims to say something new. Like “Chicken Little,” the teem- ing, amorphous protein source of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s novel The Space Merchants (1952), the megatext is always growing and chang- ing, continually fed by new texts, new scientific speculation, new historical events, and new readers. Although authors in the genre share many concerns, they take diverse historical and cultural positions. They extrapolate unique futures, although many—from Heinlein, Le Guin, and Gibson to Frank Herbert and Cord- wainer Smith—set much of their fiction in different quadrants of one par- ticular future. Such writers settle in to explore the universes of their own making, their own personal megatexts. Some of our selections, such as

INtroductIoN xv

Asimov’s “Reason” (1941) and Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955), suggest in miniature their authors’ consistent concerns, while other stories, including Heinlein’s “ ‘All You Zombies—’” and Herbert’s “Seed Stock” (1970), at first glance appear to be atypical. Our headnotes outline the author’s place in the genre and sketch the relationship of each selected story to the author’s work as a whole. As editors, we have aimed to include stories that not only repay a chrono- logical approach, illustrating sf ’s generic evolution, but that also intersect with some of the genre’s most frequently recurring topics. Among those spe- cifically highlighted here are the alien encounter, apocalypse, dystopia, gen- der and sexuality, time travel, and virtual reality.

Reading Sf

Readers who are new to science fiction learn new ways of reading. Many of the genre’s stories are set in the future, although its worlds are usually linked by extrapolation—a logic of projection—back to our own. Readers of sf must not only adjust their time-space positioning but also learn to nego- tiate connections between individual tales and the sf megatext. Further, they must often deal with neologisms (newly coined words) and other conjectural vocabulary that require them to fill in the semantic blanks with their imagi- nations. In contrast to mainstream fiction, science fiction represents worlds that do not exist here and now, although their existence might be possible in some other part of the universe or, more often, some other time. That time is usually ahead of readers: the future. Simplifying in the extreme, we might say that realist fiction writes about what exists while fantasy fiction deals with hopes and fears and dreams—emotional states rather than ideas. Science fiction, in contrast, writes about things that might be, although they are not yet and may never come to be. Science fiction’s “worlds of if ” (to cite the title of a Weinbaum story of 1935) are connected to the readers’ world through a logical (linear, causal, extrapolative) relationship, yet these sf worlds can also be metaphorical or symbolic. As Darko Suvin has argued, sf is a literature of cognitive estrange- ment that shows readers futures in which the present has shifted or meta- morphosed: they mirror our own world but in a distorted way. Cognitive estrangement is produced by a novum—a puzzling innovation—in every sf story. This novum distances (or estranges) readers from some received “truth”—for example, the idea that human nature is essentially unchanging is called into question in Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966). To Suvin, sf ’s “worlds of if ” offer estranged versions of the author’s/reader’s here and now; nonetheless, the future in sf is logically (cognitively) tied to the present.

xvi INtroductIoN

A number of critics have discussed what they term the reading protocols of sf—the approaches required for understanding the genre. Sf readers know that much of the story will not be clear at the beginning; they live with un- certainty through much, if not all, of a story such as Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” (1953). Some stories might introduce a single novum (for example, the cloned siblings in Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” [1969]), while others might teem with new things. As is fitting, the genre that addresses innovation and change can, in its own storytelling protocols, shift dramatically in response to social changes or new scientific ideas. Two important reading protocols identified for sf are Marc Angenot’s notion of the absent paradigm and Samuel R. Delany’s analysis of sf ’s sub- junctivity. The absent paradigm refers to those semantic blanks, noted above, that challenge the reader’s imagination to construct a new and dif- ferent world out of scattered hints and clues. Sf ’s stories strand readers in an unfamiliar place or time, forcing them to supply contextual meaning for the bits of alien information with which they are bombarded. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), for instance, is set in a post-apocalypse Man- hattan, but the nature and dimensions of the cataclysm must be puzzled out from the narrator’s offhand comments. The estranging effects of sf ’s absent paradigms are experienced in concentrated form in the short story, which can pack a density of futuristic or otherworldly implication into its brief space. The result can be dizzying, as in Ellison’s “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), with its pyrotechnic style and array of new words—swizzleskid, minee, Smash-O, fallaron—that draw readers into a place and time ruled by a lethally efficient future form of capitalism. Sf ’s subjunctivity further complicates the reader’s task. According to Delany, the language of an sf text works differently from language in real- istic—or, to use his term, “mundane”—fiction. In his famous example, the sentence “Her world exploded” can, in a mundane story, only be a metaphor for a woman’s emotional state, whereas in science fiction it could be a literal description of the destruction of her home planet. This linguistic openness or indeterminacy means that sf always operates at a sentence-by-sentence level in the subjunctive mode: sf stories narrate not what can realistically happen at the present moment, but what might happen in future times and alien places—in sf ’s “worlds of if.” Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) displays subjunctivity in its very title, which sug- gests that what we take to be a settled referent (the processes of memory) can mean something quite different in an sf context—in this case because technological advances in Dick’s future world allow for the implantation, at a price, of artificial memories. Readers must accept that the referential

INtroductIoN xvii

functions of language in science fiction are usually, whether subtly or signifi- cantly, estranged. Although these terms—cognitive estrangement, absent paradigm, sub- junctivity—may seem forbidding, they are fully compatible with an intu- itive insight long held by fans: the genre conveys a sense of wonder. This experience—of the exhilarating, mind-expanding power of the best sf—is brought about by the same processes that such critics as Suvin, Angenot, and Delany have analyzed. As readers negotiate the distance between the estranged world of an sf story and their own reality—a process in which they must reconstruct an absent paradigm and decode the text’s subjunctivity— they come to grasp, and be dazzled by, the extraordinary span of time and space; they see the possibility of almost unthinkable social and technological changes. For those who are open to it, the genre’s unique demands provide rare delights, including a sense of awe at the vast transformative power of futurity.

Different Viewpoints, Different Worlds

Writers in the genre offer widely disparate visions of the world. Readers of sf therefore are invited to analyze divergent ideas as well as literary styles. Scholars, too, represent any number of critical and theoretical approaches, and the editors of SfS are no exception. We have designed this anthology to demonstrate the diversity of the genre and to encourage a broad range of thinking about it. While no anthology can incorporate all of sf ’s richness, we sought in choosing stories to acknowledge as much as possible the genre’s stylistic variety and its many topical interests. For several years, we read, dis- cussed, compared, analyzed, argued, compromised, conducted straw polls, and voted on dozens of potential stories. We asked members of the Science Fiction Research Association and the International Association for the Fan- tastic in the Arts for suggestions on what would be the ideal balance be- tween older and newer tales and what pedagogical materials would be most useful. Finally, we arrived at these fifty-two selections, printed in historical sequence, beginning with a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1844 and ending with a 2008 story by Ted Chiang. We hope that The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction will serve as a bridge not only to an appreciation of some of the best works of sf ever written but also to the world of sf scholarship. With that in mind, and using the many suggestions we received from our colleagues, we have included ancillary material: a critical bibliography that lists many of the most impor- tant studies in the field and an online “Teacher’s Guide”—available on the Wesleyan University Press website at

xviii INtroductIoN

sfanthologyguide>—that includes discussion questions for each story, avail- able Internet resources, illustrations such as magazine and book covers, sug- gestions for course design, and advice on student research. This anthology was created for the purpose of teaching sf at many levels, as well as for casual and critical reading by both neophytes and experts. Science fiction is complex and provocative as well as stimulating and enjoyable, rewarding thoughtful study in and out of the classroom. Welcome to the words and worlds of science fiction.

The Wesleyan anthology of

Science Fiction . . . .

1

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Rappaccini’s Daughter . . . . { 1844 }

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, and used his family’s history there most famously in his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), which drew on his ancestor’s role as a judge in the infamous Salem witch trials. According to his biographer James R. Mellow, Hawthorne borrowed from his own life for “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Like Giovanni, Hawthorne was a handsome and intense man prone to romantic entanglements who had an aff air with the metaphorically poisonous Mary Silsbee. Beatrice’s personality, however, seems closer to the character of the woman he eventually married, the secluded and in- telligent Sophia Peabody. Peabody suff ered from health problems that may have stemmed from her physician father’s overuse of drugs in treating her ailments as a child, so Dr. Peabody may have served as a model for Doctor Rappaccini. Hawthorne was part of the American Romantic movement of the mid- nineteenth century and was friends with other major fi gures in American Roman- ticism such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville. In the spirit of the times, he did not draw distinctions between art and science, using both in ways that would now be considered science fi ctional, not only in the story collected here but also in other stories such as “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “The Birth-mark” (1843), and “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844). As Hawthorne himself put it in “The Custom-House,” his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, his literary concern was with “a neutral territory . . . where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” In this neutral territory, Hawthorne allows science to be imbued with evocative metaphorical signifi cance and off ers plausible explanations from the world of the Actual to undermine seemingly im- possible events from the world of the Imaginary. Just as in The Scarlet Letter every miraculous event has a rational explanation and Dr. Chillingworth and Hester Prynne’s secret powers are explained in terms of medicine, so in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” selective breeding and the powers of suggestion can explain many of the story’s seemingly fantastic elements. Hawthorne’s description of the neutral territory in which he works is very much like that of the English Romantic and

2 NathaNIel haWthorNe

Gothic writer of Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley, sometimes considered a found- ing mother of science fiction, who herself made a point of eschewing the super- natural. Much of what makes Hawthorne’s story so powerful, so psychologically and emotionally convincing, and so eerie, is its use of ambiguous metaphor and sym- bol to layer the tale with multiple meanings. This is a technique that later writers will continue to use to good effect, for example Gene Wolfe in “Useful Phrases” (1992).

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice, which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since ex- tinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily, as he looked around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment. “Holy Virgin, Signor!” cried old dame Lisabetta, who, won by the youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young man’s heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.” Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath the window, and expended its fostering influences on a variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care. “Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni. “Heaven forbid, Signor!—unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs than any that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden is culti- vated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous Doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said he distils

raPPaccINI’S daughter 3

these plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Oftentimes you may see the Signor Doctor at work, and perchance the Signora his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers that grow in the garden.” The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the cham- ber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints, took her departure. Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the gar- den beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one of those botanic gardens, which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once have been the pleasure- place of an opulent family; for there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the center, sculptured with rare art, but so woefully shattered that it was im- possible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man’s win- dow, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one century embodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the luster and richness of a gem; and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them. Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in com- mon garden-pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground, or climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study. While Giovanni stood at the window, he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking man, dressed in a scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, a thin gray beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect and cultiva-

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tion, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart. Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape, and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of the deep intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable exis- tences. On the contrary, he avoided their actual touch, or the direct inhaling of their odors, with a caution that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influ- ences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak upon him some ter- rible fatality. It was strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow—was he the Adam? The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his walk through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple gems beside the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice. But finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice of a person affected with inward disease: “Beatrice! Beatrice!” “Here am I, my father! What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. “Are you in the gar- den?” “Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.” Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and com-

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pressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone. Yet Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid while he looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they—more beautiful than the richest of them—but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it was observable that she handled and in- haled the odor of several of the plants which her father had most sedulously avoided. “Here, Beatrice,” said the latter, “see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge.” “And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendor, it shall be Beatrice’s task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life.” Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly ex- pressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his eyes, and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one sis- ter performing the duties of affection to another. The scene soon terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the stranger’s face, he now took his daughter’s arm and retired. Night was already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants, and steal upward past the open window; and Gio- vanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch, and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape. But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify what- ever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement on starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced, that, in the heart

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of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy; but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter. In the course of the day, he paid his respects to Signor Pietro Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction. The Professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature, and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the Professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he had antici- pated. “Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said Profes- sor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “to withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled as Rappac- cini. But, on the other hand, I should answer it but scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Doctor Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy; but there are certain grave objections to his professional character.” “And what are they?” asked the young man. “Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so in- quisitive about physicians?” said the Professor, with a smile. “But as for Rap- paccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.” “Methinks he is an awful man, indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. “And yet,

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worshipful Professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men capable of so spiritual a love of science?” “God forbid,” answered the Professor, somewhat testily; “at least, unless they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by Rappac- cini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised within those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned per- son, would ever have plagued the world withal. That the Signor Doctor does less mischief than might be expected, with such dangerous substances, is undeniable. Now and then, it must be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a marvellous cure; but, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such instances of success—they being prob- ably the work of chance—but should be held strictly accountable for his fail- ures, which may justly be considered his own work.” The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long con- tinuance between him and Doctor Rappaccini, in which the latter was gen- erally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua. “I know not, most learned Professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing on what had been said of Rappaccini’s exclusive zeal for science—“I know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter.” “Aha!” cried the Professor with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking about or listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of lachryma.” Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in reference to Doctor Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way, hap- pening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers. Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down

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into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine, and now and then nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it; they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich reflection that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude. Soon, however—as Giovanni had half hoped, half feared, would be the case—a figure appeared beneath the antique sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes, as if she were one of those beings of old classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice, the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively illumi- nated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was struck by its expression of simplicity and sweetness—qualities that had not entered into his idea of her character, and which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gem-like flowers over the fountain—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged a fan- tastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues. Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the flowers. “Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint with common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate with gentlest fingers from the stem, and place it close beside my heart.” With these words, the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her bosom. But now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange colored reptile, of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni—but, at the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so minute—it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head. For an instant, the reptile contorted itself

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violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this re- markable phenomenon, and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and trembled. “Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?” Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and painful curi- osity which she excited. At this moment there came a beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered through the city and found no flowers or verdure among those antique haunts of men until the heavy per- fumes of Doctor Rappaccini’s shrubs had lured it from afar. Without alight- ing on the flowers, this winged brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she bent over the dead insect. An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in mid air. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which he had hitherto held in his hand. “Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti!” “Thanks, Signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came forth as it were like a gush of music; and with a mirthful expression half childish and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into the air, it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks.” She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger’s greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But, few as the mo-

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ments were, it seemed to Giovanni when she was on the point of vanish- ing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance. For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that looked into Doctor Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once; the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and pos- sibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing. Guas- conti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever-pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately van- quishing one another and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to accelerate itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a portly per- sonage, who had turned back on recognizing the young man and expended much breath in overtaking him.

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“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten me? That might well be the case, if I were as much altered as yourself.” It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first meet- ing, from a doubt that the Professor’s sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared forth wildly from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a man in a dream. “Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now let me pass!” “Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the Professor, smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest glance. “What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.” “Speedily, then, most worshipful Professor, speedily!” said Giovanni, with feverish impatience. “Does not your worship see that I am in haste?” Now, while he was speaking, there came a man in black along the street, stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so pervaded with an expression of piercing and active intellect that an observer might easily have overlooked the merely physical attributes and have seen only this wonder- ful energy. As he passed, this person exchanged a cold and distant saluta- tion with Baglioni, but fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever was within him worthy of notice. Neverthe- less, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking merely a specu- lative, not a human, interest in the young man. “It is Doctor Rappaccini!” whispered the Professor when the stranger had passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?” “Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name. “He has seen you! He must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance of some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini’s experiments!” “Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “That, Signor Professor, were an untoward experiment.” “Patience, patience!” replied the imperturbable Professor. “I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in thee. Thou hast

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fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora Beatrice? What part does she act in this mystery?” But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke away, and was gone before the Professor could again seize his arm. He looked after the young man intently, and shook his head. “This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!” Meanwhile, Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering itself into a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame, therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak. “Signor! Signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving in wood, dark- ened by centuries. “Listen, Signor! There is a private entrance into the gar- den!” “What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an inanimate thing should start into feverish life. “A private entrance into Doc- tor Rappaccini’s garden?” “Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful doctor’s garden, where you may see all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be ad- mitted among those flowers.” Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand. “Show me the way,” said he. A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the Professor seemed to suppose that Doctor Rappaccini was involving him. But such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey

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the law that whirled him onward, in ever lessening circles, towards a result which he did not attempt to foreshadow. And yet, strange to say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position; whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only slightly or not at all connected with his heart! He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and sound of rus- tling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, he stood beneath his own window, in the open area of Doctor Rappaccini’s garden. How often is it the case, that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had throbbed with feverish blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice, and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants. The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an indi- vidual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous off- spring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possess-

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ing the questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or three plants in the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous. While busy with these contemplations, he heard the rustling of a silken gar- ment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the sculptured portal. Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deport- ment; whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden, or assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the desire, of Doctor Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice’s manner placed him at his ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by a simple and kind expression of pleasure. “You are a connoisseur in flowers, Signor,” said Beatrice, with a smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window. “It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare collection has tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies, and this garden is his world.” “And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “if fame says true—you likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my instructress, I should prove an apter scholar than under Signor Rappaccini himself.” “Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and sometimes, methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my eye. But, pray, Signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing of me save what you see with your own eyes.” “And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked Gio- vanni pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him shrink. “No, Signora, you demand too little of me. Bid me believe nothing save what comes from your own lips.” It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni’s eyes, and responded to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness. “I do so bid you, Signor,” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have fan-

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cied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be false in its essence. But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true from the heart outward. Those you may believe.” A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni’s con- sciousness like the light of truth itself. But while she spoke there was a fra- grance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful, though evanes- cent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice’s breath which thus embalmed her words with a strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear. The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have felt conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden. She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill that was just catching its first glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the reflections of earth and sky which were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon there gleamed across the young man’s mind a sense of wonder that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful attributes—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections were only momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to make itself familiar at once. In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now, after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of glowing blos- soms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni recognized as identi- cal with that which he had attributed to Beatrice’s breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were throbbing suddenly and painfully.

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“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I had forgotten thee!” “I remember, Signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward me with one of these living gems for the bouquet which I had the happy boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial of this interview.” He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand. But Beatrice darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his fibers. “Touch it not!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “Not for thy life! It is fatal!” Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the sculp- tured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld the emaci- ated figure and pale intelligence of Doctor Rappaccini, who had been watch- ing the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the entrance. No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of Beatrice came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the witchery that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her, and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities; she was worthi- est to be worshipped; she was capable, surely, on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of passion transmuted into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as she was the more unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the dawn had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Doctor Rappaccini’s garden, whither Giovanni’s dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man’s eyelids, awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on the point of plucking one of the gem-like flowers. On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist. O, how stubbornly does love—or even that cunning semblance of love

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which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him, and soon forgot his pain in a revery of Beatrice. After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the whole space in which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder. Nor was it otherwise with the daughter of Rappac- cini. She watched for the youth’s appearance, and flew to his side with confi- dence as unreserved as if they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were such playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and reverberate throughout his heart: “Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!” And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers. But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whis- pered by the way; they had even spoken love in those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath like tongues of long hidden flame; and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the physi- cal barrier between them—had never been waved against him by a breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a spoken word was requisite to re- pel him. At such times he was startled at the horrible suspicions that rose, monsterlike, out of the caverns of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint as the morning mist, his doubts alone had substance. But, when Beatrice’s face brightened again after the momentary shadow, she was transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he had watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty be- yond all other knowledge. A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with

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Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a visit from the Professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he had long been to a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni. The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of the city and the University, and then took up another topic. “I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath— richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander, as was natural to a youth- ful conqueror, fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, happening to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.” “And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid those of the Professor. “That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison—her em- brace death. Is not this a marvelous tale?” “A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair. “I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense among your graver studies.” “By the by,” said the Professor, looking uneasily about him, “what singu- lar fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber.” “Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the Pro- fessor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken for a present reality.” “Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said Bagli- oni; “and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of some vile

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apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures his medica- ments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath; but woe to him that sips them!” Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the Professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a torture to his soul; and yet, the intimation of a view of her character, oppo- site to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspi- cions, which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove hard to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s perfect faith. “Signor Professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference. But I pray you to observe, Signor, that there is one subject on which we must not speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong—the blas- phemy, I may even say—that is offered to her character by a light or injurious word.” “Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the Professor, with a calm expression of pity, “I know this wretched girl far better than yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter: yes, poisonous as she is beautiful. Listen; for even should you do violence to my gray hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become a truth by the deep and deadly science of Rappaccini, and in the person of the lovely Beatrice!” Giovanni groaned and hid his face. “Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt, you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still! Rappac- cini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing.” “It is a dream!” muttered Giovanni to himself; “surely it is a dream!” “But,” resumed the Professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend! It is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly, we may even succeed in bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy

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to be a love gift to the fairest dame in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.” Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver phial on the table and withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young man’s mind. “We will thwart Rappaccini yet!” thought he, chuckling to himself, as he descended the stairs. “But, let us confess the truth of him, he is a wonderful man—a wonderful man indeed! A vile empiric, however, in his practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession!” Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had occa- sionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her charac- ter; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and incredible as if it were not in accor- dance with his own original conception. True, there were ugly recollections connected with his first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fanta- sies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear to be substan- tiated. There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and generous faith on his part. But, now his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice’s image. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust. He resolved to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature which could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers. But if he could witness, at the distance of a few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in Beatrice’s hand, there would be

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room for no further question. With this idea he hastened to the florist’s and purchased a bouquet that was still gemmed with the morning dewdrops. It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallow- ness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life. “At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp!” With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot through his frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already beginning to droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh and lovely yester- day. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at the likeness of something fright- ful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the chamber. It must have been the poison in his breath! Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself. Recovering from his stupor, he began to watch with curious eye a spider that was busily at work hanging its web from the antique cornice of the apartment, crossing and re-crossing the artful system of interwoven lines—as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep, long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated with a tremor originating in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous feeling out of his heart: he knew not whether he were wicked, or only desperate. The spider made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung dead across the window. “Accursed! Accursed!” muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. “Hast thou grown so poisonous that this deadly insect perishes by thy breath?” At that moment, a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden. “Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest thou? Come down!” “Yes,” muttered Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!” He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath and despair had been so fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her by a glance. But with her actual presence there came influences which had too

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real an existence to be at once shaken off; recollections of the delicate and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often enveloped him in a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and passionate outgush of her heart, when the pure fountain had been unsealed from its depths and made visible in its transparency to his mental eye; recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its magic. Giovanni’s rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen insensi- bility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was affrighted at the eager enjoy- ment—the appetite, as it were—with which he found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers. “Beatrice,” asked he abruptly, “whence came this shrub?” “My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity. “Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?” “He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature,” replied Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. “It has qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni—I grew up and blossomed with the plant, and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human af- fection; for, alas!—hast thou not suspected it?—there was an awful doom.” Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her blush that she had doubted for an instant. “There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh! how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!” “Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her. “Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly. “Oh! yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.” Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning flash out of a dark cloud.

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“Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!” “Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she was merely thunderstruck. “Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. “Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now, if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!” “What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her heart. “Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart-broken child!” “Thou—dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pesti- lence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!” “Giovanni,” said Beatrice calmly, for her grief was beyond passion, “why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou—what hast thou to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery, to go forth out of the garden and mingle with thy race, and forget that there ever crawled on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?” “Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her. “Be- hold! This power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini!” There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They circled round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the same in- fluence which had drawn them for an instant within the sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice, as at least a score of the insects fell dead upon the ground. “I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; for, Giovanni—believe it—though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food. But

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my father!—he has united us in this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! Oh, what is death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world of bliss would I have done it.” Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer together? If they should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality—and there be well. But Giovanni did not know it. “Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away, as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! There is a medicine, potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is com- posed of ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil?” “Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little silver phial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a peculiar em- phasis: “I will drink; but do thou await the result.” She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statu- ary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused; his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands over them in the atti- tude of a father imploring a blessing upon his children. But those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives! Giovanni

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trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her hand upon her heart. “My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid thy bride- groom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another, and dreadful to all besides!” “My father,” said Beatrice, feebly—and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?” “Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy? Misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath? Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?” “I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father, where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will pass away like a dream—like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” To Beatrice—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini’s skill—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death. And thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunderstricken man of science: “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?”

26

Jules Verne

from Journey to the Center of the Earth . . . . { 1864 }

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a prolifi c French novelist often identifi ed as one of the “Fathers of Science Fiction,” the other being the British author H. G. Wells. During the nineteenth century Verne popularized an early brand of “hard” science fi ction in a series of novels called the Voyages extraordinaires (1863–1919), which depicted adventure-fi lled quests to the ends of the Earth and heroes making use of scientifi c knowledge and the latest technology to explore “known and unknown worlds” (the subtitle for this series). Expertly marketed by his publisher and men- tor Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne’s novels became best sellers in France and around the world. Today he is ranked as the third most translated author of all time, ac- cording to UneSCO’s Index Translationum. Verne’s career began in the theater: he was a struggling playwright in Paris dur- ing the 1850s. He also penned articles on scientifi c topics and wrote occasional short stories such as “A Voyage in a Balloon” (1851) and “Master Zacharius” (1854) for French magazines. After the publication and success of his fi rst novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), about an aerial trek across the continent of Africa, Verne told his friends at the Paris Stock Market, where he had been working part-time: “My friends, I bid you adieu. . . . I’ve just written a novel in a new style. . . . If it succeeds, it will be a gold mine.” And a gold mine it was, not only for Verne and his publisher but also for world literature as his many Extraordinary Voyages helped give birth to a new literary genre. Verne’s next book manuscript, a futuristic but dystopian story called Paris in the Twentieth Century, was rejected by Hetzel as being too unrealistic and depressing. Verne promptly locked it in a safe and never looked at it again (it was discovered and published only in 1994). For his subsequent novels, Verne agreed to return to the successful narrative template of Five Weeks—that is, educational adventure tales heavily fl avored with scientifi c didacticism, mixed with equal parts of drama, humor, and “sense of wonder,” and seasoned with a large pinch of Saint-Simonian positivism. This narrative recipe proved to be enormously successful, and Verne was soon churning out one imaginative masterpiece after another. Some of his

from jourNey to the ceNter of the earth 27

more celebrated works include the subterranean thriller Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); the first scientifically plausible manned lunar voyages in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870); the world’s most memo- rable oceanographic novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869), with its brooding Captain Nemo and his dream machine, the Nautilus; the prototypical circumnavigation novel in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873); the first example of a technological “robinsonade” in which castaways on a deserted island rebuild Western civilization in The Mysterious Island (1875); and a highly influential tale about early aeronautics and the conquest of the sky in Robur the Conqueror (aka The Clipper of the Clouds, 1886), among many others. Many of Verne’s later works seem to have a dramatically darker tone when compared to his earlier ones, exhibiting a steady shift away from a sunny techno- logical optimism toward an outlook that is more often pessimistic, cynical, and anti-science. The novel Topsy-Turvy (1889) ridicules the hubris of scientists who believe that they can modify the axis of the Earth; Propeller Island (1895) details the dire effects of colonial imperialism on Polynesian island cultures; Facing the Flag (1896) takes as its subject the dangers of science used for military purposes; and The Master of the World (1904), with its focus on the protagonist Robur’s descent into madness, vividly depicts the idea that advanced scientific knowledge can breed moral corruption. The following excerpt from Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (from the end of chapter 28 through chapter 31) portrays the moment when the three explorers, after weeks of perilous descent through a volcano’s dark tunnels (and young Axel’s near fatal tumble down a deep shaft), suddenly find themselves on the brightly lit shore of an underground sea. The sources for the story include the popular hollow-earth theories of the time as well as growing public interest in geology, paleontology, and the new ideas of Darwin. Narrated in the first per- son by the impressionable Axel, the novel’s discursive structure maintains a bal- ance between his uncle Lidenbrock’s detailed scientific exposés and Axel’s poetic rêveries. This delicate intertwining of fact with fantasy, mathematics with myth, and didacticism with daydreaming can be seen in all of Verne’s most successful Extraordinary Voyages.

Suddenly the ground beneath my feet gave way. I felt myself falling down a vertical shaft, ricocheting off the craggy outcroppings of what seemed to be a deep well. My head struck a sharp rock, and I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was in semi-darkness, lying on thick blankets. My uncle was looking down at me intently, his eyes hoping to discover on my

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face some sign of life. At my first sigh he took my hand, and when I opened my eyes he uttered a cry of joy. “He lives! he lives!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I am still alive,” I answered feebly. “My dear boy,” said my uncle, giving me a hug, “thank heaven you are saved.” I was deeply touched by the tenderness with which he uttered these words, and still more by the cares that accompanied them. It often required such extreme circumstances to bring out such displays of emotion in the professor. At this moment Hans approached us. He saw my hand in my uncle’s, and there was much joy in his eyes. “God dag,” he said. “Good day, Hans, good day,” I replied in a whisper. “And now, dear Uncle, please tell me where we are at the present time?” “Tomorrow, Axel, tomorrow. Right now you are still too weak. I have ban- daged your head with compresses which must not be disturbed. Sleep now, and tomorrow I will tell you everything.” “But at least tell me what time it is, and what day.” “It is eleven o’clock at night, Sunday, August 9th. And I forbid you from asking me any more questions until the 10th of this month!” In truth I was very weak, and my eyes were beginning to close involun- tarily. I needed a good night’s rest. So I let myself drift off to sleep, with the knowledge that my long solitude of several days was at an end. The next morning when I awoke, I looked around me. My bed, made up of all our travelling gear, was in a charming grotto that featured splendid sta- lactites and a floor of fine sand; it was bathed in a kind of twilight. No torch and no lamp was lighted, yet some mysterious gleams of light were filtering in through a narrow opening in the wall. I also heard a vague and indistinct noise, something like the murmuring of waves breaking upon a shore, and at times a whistling of wind. I wondered whether I was fully awake, if I were dreaming. Or whether my brain, injured by my fall, was perhaps registering purely imaginary noises. Yet neither my eyes nor my ears could be so completely mistaken. “It is a ray of daylight,” I thought, “slipping in through this cleft in the rock! And that is indeed the sound of waves and of wind! Am I quite mis- taken, or have we returned to the surface of the Earth? Has my uncle given up on the expedition? Has it come to a successful conclusion?” I was puzzling over these unanswerable questions when the professor entered.

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“Good morning, Axel!” he said cheerily. “I bet you are feeling better today!” “Yes, much better!” I replied, sitting up on the blankets. “I expected so, for you have slept quite soundly. Hans and I took turns watching over you, and we could see you recovering little by little.” “I really do feel a great deal better, and I will gladly give you proof if you offer me some breakfast!” “Certainly you shall eat, my boy! The fever has left you. Hans rubbed your wounds with a special ointment known only to Icelanders, and they have healed marvelously. Our hunter is quite a fellow!” While he talked, my uncle prepared a few provisions, which I devoured eagerly, notwithstanding his advice to the contrary. While I ate, I over- whelmed him with questions which he promptly answered. I then learned that my providential fall had brought me to the end of an almost perpendicular shaft; and as I had landed in the midst of a torrent of stones, the smallest of which would have been enough to crush me, the conclusion was that a loose portion of the rock-face had come down with me upon it. This frightful conveyance had carried me into the arms of my uncle, where I fell bleeding and unconscious. “I am truly amazed,” he said to me, “that you were not killed a thousand times over. For the love of God, let us never separate again, or we might not ever see each other again!” “Never separate again”? Was the journey not over, then? I opened my eyes wide with astonishment, which immediately raised the question: “What is the matter, Axel?” “I have a question to ask you. You say that I am safe and sound?” “Without a doubt.” “And I have all my limbs intact?” “Certainly.” “And my head?” “Your head, except for a few bruises, is perfectly all right and still sitting on your shoulders, where it ought to be.” “Well, I am afraid that my brain has been affected.” “Your brain?” “Yes, I fear so. We haven’t returned to surface of the Earth, have we?” “No, of course not.” “Then I must be crazy; for I seem to see shafts of daylight. And I seem to hear the wind blowing outside, and waves breaking on a shore!” “Ah! is that all?” “Will you explain to me . . . ?”

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“I can’t explain the inexplicable. But you will soon see and understand that the science of geology has not yet learned all that there is to learn.” “Then let us go,” I answered, rising quickly. “No, Axel; the open air might be bad for you.” “Open air?” “Yes; the wind is rather strong. I don’t want you to risk exposing your- self.” “But I assure you that I am perfectly well.” “A little patience, my boy. A relapse might get us into trouble, and we have no time to lose, for the voyage may be a long one.” “The voyage?” “Yes, rest today, and tomorrow we will set sail.” “Set sail?” This last word made me almost leap to my feet. Sail? Was there a river, a lake, a sea nearby? Was there a ship anchored in some underground har- bor? My curiosity was now greatly aroused, and my uncle tried in vain to re- strain me. When he saw that my impatience would do me more harm than answering my queries, he finally yielded. I got dressed rapidly. As a precaution, I wrapped myself in a blanket and then walked out of the grotto. At first I could see nothing at all. My eyes, unaccustomed to the light, closed themselves tight. When I was able to reopen them, I was more stupe- fied than surprised. “The sea!” I cried. “Yes,” my uncle replied, “the Lidenbrock Sea! I don’t suppose any other ex- plorer will dispute my claim to name it since I was the first to discover it.” A vast expanse of water, the beginning of a huge lake or ocean, stretched away as far as the eye could see. The deeply indented shoreline offered to the swells which lapped against it a beach of fine golden sand, strewn with the small shells that were once inhabited by the first beings in creation. The waves broke on this shore with the hollow sonorous murmur peculiar to vast enclosed spaces. A light spray whipped up from the waves by a steady breeze moistened my face. On this gently sloping shore, about two hundred yards from the edge of the waves, began an abrupt wall of enormous cliffs that curved upward to an incredible height. Some of these, piercing the beach with their sharp spurs, formed capes and promontories that were worn away by the ceaseless action of the surf. Farther along the shore, the eye could discern their massive outline sharply defined against the hazy distant horizon.

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It was a real ocean, with the same irregular shores as on the Earth above, but empty and fearsomely wild in appearance. If my eyes were able to range far out over this great sea, it was because a strange light revealed its every detail. It was not the light of the Sun, with its dazzling shafts of brightness and the splendor of its rays; nor was it the pale and indistinct shimmer of the Moon, which is just a reflection without heat. No, the illuminating power of this light, its flickering diffusion, its bright, clear whiteness and its low temperature, indicated that it must be of electric origin. It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmic phenomenon, filling a cavern large enough to contain an ocean. The vault that was suspended above my head—the sky, if it could be called so—seemed to be composed of large clouds, moving and shifting banks of water vapor which, by virtue of condensation, must produce torrents of rain on certain days. I should have thought that under so powerful a pressure from the atmosphere there could be no evaporation; and yet, by a law un- known to me, here they were, great rolling clouds in the air above me. But at that specific moment “the weather was fine.” The play of the electric light in these layers of cloud produced singular effects upon their upper strata. Their lower portions were deep in shadow; and often, between two levels a sudden flash of remarkable brilliancy could be seen. Yet it was not the Sun, and the light lacked heat. The general effect was sad and quite melancholy. Instead of a firmament shining with stars, I felt that beyond these clouds existed vast walls of granite, which seemed to overpower me with their weight, and that all this space, vast as it was, was not enough for the orbit of the humblest of satellites. Then I remembered the theory of an English captain, who compared the Earth to a huge hollow sphere, whose interior air remained luminous be- cause of the high pressure, and where two stars, Pluto and Proserpine, circled about on their mysterious orbits inside it. Could he have been right? We were in reality imprisoned inside a cavern of colossal dimensions. Its width could not be estimated, since its shores widened as they stretched off into the distance; nor could its length be guessed at, for one’s gaze was blocked by its misty horizon. As for its height, it must have been several leagues. Where this vault rested upon its granite base was not evident. But there was one cloud hanging in the atmosphere above whose height we approximated at 12,000 feet, a greater altitude than that of any terrestrial cloud, and no doubt due to the greater density of the air. Obviously, the word “cavern” does not properly convey the idea of this immense space. But mere human words are inadequate for anyone who ven- tures into the deep abysses of Earth.

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Besides, I did not know what geological theory could account for the exis- tence of such a huge underground space. Had the cooling of the globe pro- duced it? I knew of several famous caves from the descriptions of travelers, but had never heard of any that could rival the immense size of this one. The grotto of Guachara, in Colombia, visited by Humboldt, did not give up the secret of its full depth to this philosopher, who investigated it to the depth of 2,500 feet, but it probably did not extend much farther. The im- mense Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is of gigantic proportions; its vaulted roof is said to rise 500 feet above an unfathomable lake, and spelunkers have explored its interior for more than 10 leagues without reaching its end. But what were these subterranean cavities compared to the one I was now contemplating with admiration, with its sky of luminous vapors, its bursts of electric light, and this great sea contained within its depths? My imagi- nation was powerless before such immensity. I gazed upon these wonders in silence. I could not find words to express my feelings. I felt as if I were on some distant planet such as Uranus or Neptune and witnessing phenomena which had no equivalent in my terres- trial experience. For such new sensations, new words were needed; and my imagination failed to supply them. I stared, I thought, I marveled, with a stupefaction mingled with a certain amount of fear. The unexpectedness of this spectacle had brought back the color to my cheeks. I was healing myself with the medicine of astonishment, and my convalescence was aided by this unusual therapeutic treatment. In addition, the sharpness of the dense air was invigorating me, supplying extra oxygen to my lungs. It should be easily understood that, after being confined in a narrow tun- nel for forty-seven straight days, it was sheer bliss to breathe this moist, salty air. I had no regrets leaving behind my dark grotto. My uncle, already accustomed to these many wonders, had ceased to marvel at them. “You feel strong enough to walk around a bit?” he asked. “Yes, certainly! Nothing could please me more!” “Well, take my arm, Axel, and let’s follow the windings of the shore.” I eagerly accepted, and we began to walk along the edges of this under- ground sea. On the left, there were huge pyramids of rock, piled high one upon another, producing a prodigious effect. Down their sides flowed count- less waterfalls, flowing abundantly in clear gurgling cascades. A few light clouds of heated water vapor, leaping from rock to rock, denoted the loca- tion of a few hot springs. And, gliding down the gentle slopes, several fresh streams flowed softly to the common basin below.

from jourNey to the ceNter of the earth 33

Among these many watercourses I recognized our faithful travelling com- panion, the Hansbach, who merged here into the mighty sea, just as it had been doing since the beginning of the world. “We shall miss him,” I said, with a sigh. “Bah!” said the professor. “It makes no difference, one guide or another.” I found this reply a bit ungrateful. But at that moment my attention was drawn to an unexpected sight. At a distance of five hundred paces, at the end of a high promontory, appeared a tall and dense forest. It was composed of trees of moderate height, formed like umbrellas, with sharp geometrical outlines. The currents of wind seemed to have no effect upon their shape, and in the midst of the windy blasts they stood unmoved and firm, just like a stand of petrified cedars. I hurried forward. I could find no name to identify this odd sort of tree. Were they some of the 200,000 species of plant already known, and did they claim a place of their own in the lacustrine flora? No! When we arrived under their shade, my surprise promptly turned into admiration. There standing before me were indeed products of the Earth, but of gigantic stature. My uncle identified them right away for what they were. “It is only a forest of mushrooms,” said he. And he was right! But imagine the huge size attained by these plants, which prefer a warm, moist climate. I knew that the Lycoperdon gianteum attains, according to Bulliard, a circumference of eight or nine feet; but here were pale mushrooms, thirty to forty feet high, and crowned with a cap of the same diameter! There were thousands of them. No light could penetrate through their dense cover, and complete darkness reigned in the shade of these giants since they were crowded together like the round, thatched roofs of an African city. I wanted to venture further beneath them, and a chill fell upon me as soon as I set foot under those fleshy arches. For a half an hour we wandered in their damp shadows, and it was with a true feeling of relief when we ar- rived once more upon the sea shore. But the vegetation of this subterranean realm was not confined to mush- rooms. Farther on we saw other groups of trees with colorless foliage. They were easy to recognize. They were lowly shrubs of Earth, but here they had grown to gigantic size: lycopodia, a hundred feet high; huge sigillaria; tree ferns as tall as our fir-trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendrons, with cylin- drical forked stems ending in long leaves and bristling with rough hairs like those of a monstrous cactus. “Wonderful, magnificent, splendid!” exclaimed my uncle. “Here is the entire flora of the Secondary Period of the world—the transition period. The

34 juleS VerNe

humble garden plants that we see today were once tall trees in the early ages. Look, Axel, and admire it all! No botanist ever had such a feast as this!” “You are right, my uncle. Providence seems to have preserved in this im- mense greenhouse all the antediluvian plants that our scientists have so patiently reconstructed.” “You’re correct, my boy. It is like a greenhouse; but you might add that it’s also a zoo!” “A zoo?” “Yes; no doubt about it. Look at that dust under our feet; see the bones scattered on the ground?” “Bones!” I cried. “Yes! of prehistoric animals!” I eagerly examined these primeval remains, made of indestructible cal- cium phosphate, and without a moment’s hesitation I began to name these monstrous bones, which lay scattered about like decayed trunks of trees. “Here is the lower jaw of a mastodon,” I said. “These are the molar teeth of the deinotherium; this femur must have belonged to the greatest of those beasts, the megatherium. It truly is a zoo, for these bones were not brought here by some cataclysm. The animals to which they belonged roamed on the shores of this subterranean sea, under the shade of those arborescent trees. Here are entire skeletons. And yet . . .” “And yet?” said my uncle. “And yet I cannot understand the appearance of these quadrupeds in a granite cavern.” “Why not?” “Because animal life only existed on Earth during the Secondary Period, when the sedimentary soil was formed by alluvial deposits, replacing the igneous rocks of the Primitive Period.” “Well, Axel, a very simple answer to your objection is that this soil is in- deed sedimentary.” “What! at such a depth below the surface of the Earth?” “Without a doubt; and there is a perfectly good geological explanation for it. At a certain period the Earth consisted only of a flexible crust, alternately moving upwards or downwards as it was acted upon by the laws of attraction and gravitation. There were probably many subsidences in the outer crust, and a portion of the sedimentary deposits was carried down into these sud- den openings.” “That must be so,” I agreed. “But if antediluvian creatures lived in these underground regions, who is to say that one of these monsters may not still be roaming through these gloomy forests, or hidden behind these steep rocks?” As this idea occurred to me, I surveyed, not without a certain anxious-

from jourNey to the ceNter of the earth 35

ness, the entire horizon before me; but no living creature could be seen on these deserted shores. I felt rather tired, and went to sit down at the end of a promontory, at the foot of which the waves were breaking noisily. From there I could see every part of the bay along the coast. At its back, there was a little harbor lying be- tween the pyramidal cliffs, its still waters calm and sheltered from the wind. A brig and two or three schooners might have anchored there in safety. I almost expected to see some vessel coming out under full sail and taking to the open sea with the southern breeze behind her. But this illusion quickly faded. We really were the only living creatures in this subterranean world. When the wind lulled, a deeper silence than that of the deserts fell upon the arid, naked rocks and weighed upon the surface of the ocean. In those moments, I tried to see through the distant mist, to peer through that mysterious curtain that hung across the horizon. So many questions arose to my lips! Where did this sea end? Where did it lead to? Could we ever explore its opposite shore? My uncle seemed to have no doubts that we could. As for me, I both de- sired and feared it. After spending an hour in contemplation of this marvelous spectacle, we walked back up the shore to return to the grotto. And it was with the strangest thoughts that I later fell into a deep sleep. The next morning I awoke feeling completely healed. I thought a bath would do me good, so I went to immerse myself for a few minutes in the waters of this Mediterranean sea, a name which it surely deserved better than any other. I came back to breakfast with a good appetite. Hans was a good cook for our limited menu; he had water and fire at his disposal, so he could vary our bill of fare now and then. For dessert he gave us several cups of coffee, and never was coffee so delicious. “Now,” said my uncle, “it is nearly high tide, and we must not lose the opportunity to study this phenomenon.” “The tide?” I asked. “Absolutely.” “Can the influence of the Sun and the Moon be felt down here?” “Why not? Are not all bodies subject to the universal attraction of gravity? This mass of water cannot escape the general law. So, in spite of the heavy atmospheric pressure on its surface, you will see it rise like the Atlantic itself.” At this moment we reached the sandy beach, where the waves were slowly moving further up onto the shore.

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“Here the tide is certainly rising,” I observed. “Yes, Axel; and judging by these ridges of foam, you can see that the sea will rise about ten feet.” “This is incredible!” I said. “No; it is quite natural.” “You may say so, dear Uncle; but to me it is most extraordinary, and I can hardly believe my eyes! Who would ever have imagined that, under the Earth’s crust, there would be an ocean with ebbing and flowing tides, with winds and storms?” “Well,” replied my uncle, “is there any scientific reason against it?” “No, I can see none, provided that the theory of a central fire at the Earth’s core is abandoned.” “So then, at least thus far, Sir Humphry Davy’s theory is confirmed?” “Evidently. There seems to be nothing to contradict the existence of seas and continents in the interior of the Earth.” “Yes, but uninhabited.” “To be sure, but why shouldn’t these waters serve as habitat for fishes of unknown species?” “But we have not seen any yet.” “Well, let’s rig up some lines, and see if our hooks will have the same suc- cess here as they do in sublunary oceans.” “We will try, Axel, for we must penetrate all secrets of these newly discov- ered regions.” “But exactly where are we, Uncle? I haven’t yet asked you that question, and your instruments must be able to furnish the answer.” “Horizontally, 885 miles from Iceland.” “As much as that?” “I’m sure that I’m not more than a single mile off.” “And does the compass still show our direction as south-east?” “Yes, with a westerly deviation of nineteen degrees forty-two minutes, just like on the surface. As for its dip, there is something very curious going on which I have been observing carefully: the needle, instead of dipping towards the Pole as in the northern hemisphere, is now pointing upwards instead.” “Would you then conclude,” I said, “that the magnetic pole is somewhere between the surface of the globe and the point where we are right now?” “Exactly. And if we were beneath the polar regions and reached that spot near the seventieth parallel where Sir James Ross discovered the magnetic pole, we should see the needle point straight up. Therefore that mysterious center of attraction is not located at a very great depth.”

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“Indeed, and that is a fact which science has never suspected.” “Science, my boy, is built upon errors; but they are errors that are good to make, for they lead little by little to the truth.” “What depth have we now reached?” “We are eighty-seven miles below the surface.” “So,” I said, examining the map, “the mountainous part of Scotland is now over our heads, where the snow-covered peaks of the Grampians rise up to their incredible heights.” “Yes,” answered the professor laughing. “It is rather a heavy weight to bear, but the vault above us is very solid. The Great Architect of the universe has constructed it with the best materials; no human builder could have given it so wide a span! What are the great arches of our bridges and cathedrals, compared with this vast nave with a radius of forty miles, beneath which an entire tempest-tossed ocean can flow at its ease?” “Oh, I am not afraid that it’ll fall down upon my head. But now, dear Uncle, what are your plans? Are you not thinking of returning to the surface now?” “Return? Certainly not! We will continue our journey, seeing that every- thing has gone so well thus far.” “But how are we to get down below this liquid plain?” “Oh, I don’t intend to plunge into it head first. But if all oceans are, tech- nically speaking, only large lakes, since they are encompassed by land, then of course this internal sea must be surrounded by granite banks.” “Yes, that is surely the case.” “Well, on the opposite shore we’ll doubtlessly find new passages opening up.” “Just how wide do you suppose this sea to be?” “Eighty or a hundred miles.” “Ah!” I said, thinking to myself that this estimate might well be inaccu- rate. “Therefore, we have no time to lose, and we shall set sail tomorrow!” I instinctively looked about for a ship that would carry us. “Set sail? Fine! But on what boat are we going to book passage?” “It will not be a boat at all, my boy, but a good, well-made raft.” “A raft?” I exclaimed. “A raft would be just as impossible to build as a boat, and I don’t see . . .” “I know you don’t see, Axel, but you might hear if you would listen.” “Hear?” “Yes, don’t you hear the hammer blows? Hans is already busy at it!” “What? Has he already felled some trees?”

38 juleS VerNe

“Oh, the trees were already down. Come along and you’ll see for your- self.” After a quarter of an hour’s walk to the other side of the promontory which formed the little natural harbor, I could now see Hans at work. A few more steps, and I was at his side. To my great surprise, a half-finished raft was already lying on the sand. Its timbers were made of a peculiar kind of wood, and the ground was strewn with a great number of planks, knees, and frames of all sorts. There was almost enough there to build a whole fleet. “Uncle, what kind of wood is this?” I asked. “It is fir, pine, or birch, all sorts of northern conifers, petrified by the sea water.” “Is that possible?” “Yes, it is called surtarbrandur, or fossilized wood.” “But then, like lignite, it must be as hard as stone and unable to float?” “Sometimes that happens. Some of these woods become true anthracites; but others, such as this, have only gone through the first stage of fossil trans- formation. Look here,” added my uncle as he threw one of these precious fragments into the sea. The piece of wood, after disappearing for a moment, returned to the sur- face and bobbed to and fro in the waves. “Are you convinced?” said my uncle. “Convinced that this is incredible!” By the next evening, thanks to the skill of our guide, the raft was finished. It was ten feet long by five feet wide; the planks of surtarbrandur, tightly bound together with ropes, offered a solid surface; and, when launched, this improvised vessel floated easily on the waters of the Lidenbrock Sea.

39

H. G. Wells

The Star . . . . { 1897 }

Along with Jules Verne, H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells is generally acknowledged as the originator of modern science fi ction. Wells was born in 1866 in southeastern England, into a lower-middle-class family without access to elite classical educa- tion. Winning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (which was later to become the Royal College of Science), where he studied with T. H. Huxley, Dar- win’s most brilliant and prolifi c advocate in Britain, Wells was drawn to evolution- ary biology. He began his career as a writer with journalistic articles, in which he posed thought experiments about the future of humanity from the perspective of both biological and social evolution. In seven phenomenally productive years between 1895 and 1901, Wells published six “scientifi c romances” that established some of the most enduring archetypal scenarios for later science fi ction: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). In each book, Wells addressed contemporary anxieties about the way technology and scientifi c theory were transforming the world and the human species, linking philosophical speculations based on science with Gothic eff ects. In The Time Machine, for example, Wells used the device of time travel to depict the future “devolution” of the classes of industrial capitalism into degenerate subspecies of humanity; in The War of the Worlds, he used the theme of a Martian invasion of Earth to speculate on the fate of humanity as it becomes increasingly dependent on technology. Unlike his elder contemporary Verne, Wells was especially interested in the potential for radical transformations of human biology and society in the future. He was active in the democratic Socialist movement, and much of his fi ction experiments with envisioning credible utopias created and managed by enlight- ened technocratic elites. Chief among these was his vision of a world govern- ment, which gained many adherents in the years before World War II. Few literary fi gures matched Wells’s infl uence on the political culture of his day. His work

40 h. g. WellS

was read by world leaders; he corresponded with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill; he interviewed Lenin and Stalin. His vision of an air war fought with dirigibles in The War in the Air (1908) profoundly affected European military strategies between the two world wars. His description of nuclear fission in The World Set Free (1914) was credited by its discoverer, Leo Szilard, as his source of inspiration. A famous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on Halloween in 1938 caused a mass panic in the United States, a phenomenon that many commentators consider a signal event in the history of mass media’s power to manipulate populations. Wells first published “The Star” in the Christmas 1897 issue of The Graphic. Typical of his early sf, it is a parable wrapped in the mantle of scientific exposition. The theme of a heavenly body moving on a collision course with Earth was first conceived a few years earlier by the French writer-astronomer Camille Flammarion in his novel La fin du monde (translated as Omega) in 1893–94. Like Wells, Flam- marion imagined that the immense destructiveness of the passing comet would be followed by a golden age of moral development in the human species. Wells’s version, which notably lacks an individual hero or a technological rescue project, displays all the characteristics of British scientific romance, described by literary historian Brian Stableford as a minimization of individual heroics, a focus on evo- lutionary perspectives, a skepticism about the future of the species, and a sense of passivity in the face of cosmic phenomena. Its vision of humanity’s essential helplessness in the face of a catastrophe from space has been echoed many times in the genre’s history, notably in J. G. Ballard’s “The Cage of Sand” (1962).

It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomi- cal profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

the Star 41

Few people without a training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost de- feats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century, this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it. On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemi- spheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this un- usual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague, of some imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been. Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of day- light, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, laborers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening coun- try it could be seen—and out at sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky! Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery

42 h. g. WellS

signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast Negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star. And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel astonish- ing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck, fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marveled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marveled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night. And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watch- ers on hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. “It is larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its ap- parent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star. “It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!” And voice after voice repeated, “It is nearer,” and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is nearer.” Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realization, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.” It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. “It is nearer.” Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent inter-

the Star 43

est they did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!” Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves—looking skyward. “It has need to be nearer, for the night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all the same.” “What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead. The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said, with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this—! “Do we come in the way? I wonder—” The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two Negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fire-flies hovered. “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light. The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this mo- mentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Halfway up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star. He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. “You may kill me,” he said after a silence. “But I can hold you—and all the universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now.” He looked at the little phial. “There will be no need of sleep again,” he said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered his lecture theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and

44 h. g. WellS

once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his gray eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing. “Circum- stances have arisen—circumstances beyond my control,” he said and paused, “which will debar me from completing the course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly and briefly, that—Man has lived in vain.” The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained intent upon his calm gray-fringed face. “It will be interesting,” he was saying, “to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume—” He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that was usual to him. “What was that about ‘lived in vain’?” whispered one stu- dent to another. “Listen,” said the other, nodding towards the lecturer. And presently they began to understand. That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yel- low and wan. And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout Chris- tendom a somber murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangor in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earth rolled on its way and the night passed, rose the dazzling star. And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all night long. And in all the seas about the civilized lands, ships with throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and living crea- tures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over the world, and

the Star 45

translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the earth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from its orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide of its sunward rush, would “describe a curved path” and perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth. “Earth- quakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit”—so prophesied the master mathema- tician. And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed the star of the coming doom. To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened towards a thaw. But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing toward mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendor of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared through the night, and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—for then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star—mere gas—a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy everywhere, scorn- ful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful. That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take. The master mathema-

46 h. g. WellS

tician’s grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self- advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world left the star unheeded. And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master mathematician—to take the danger as if it had passed. But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew—it grew with a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer the mid- night zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night into a sec- ond day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, but blind- ing white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder- clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches—with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys. And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift and liquid that in one day it reached the sea. So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific, trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and island and

the Star 47

swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last—in a blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it came—a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and swept in- land across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the mur- mur of the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night—a flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death. China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Tibet and the Himalaya were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains of Bur- mah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of men—the open sea. Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible swift- ness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships. And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clear over- head, though the ground quivered perpetually, but in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the center of its white heart was a disc of black. Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled. All the

48 h. g. WellS

plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a black disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together across the heavens. So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to sight in the bril- liance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat and despair en- gender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun. And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thun- der and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volca- noes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out Titanic gullies over the country- side. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes con- tinued. But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun

the Star 49

larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now fourscore days between its new and new. But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin’s Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and the passing of the Star. The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men—were naturally profoundly inter- ested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. “Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,” one wrote, “it is astonishing what a little dam- age the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (sup- posed to be frozen water) round either pole.” Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.

50

E. M. Forster

The Machine Stops . . . . { 1909 }

E(dward) M(organ) Forster (1879–1970) was one of the most critically acclaimed British novelists in the fi rst quarter of the twentieth century. His novels A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924) are consid- ered canonical works of modernist realism—Passage is one of the fi rst to openly confront the racism of British colonial rule in India. “The Machine Stops,” Forster’s only foray into science fi ction, has become a classic of dystopian literature. Forster’s image of a future society of human beings governed by an autonomous Machine built to satisfy all their needs, and conse- quently sapping them of all natural drives, was the fi rst in a long line of dystopian visions based on the model of the beehive that would eventually include the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s One State in We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Oceania in 1984 (1949), Star Trek’s Borg, and WALL-E ’s Axiom (2008). Forster claimed that he was inspired to write “The Machine Stops” as “a counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells”—probably to A Modern Utopia (1905)—in which Wells imagined a future utopian society managed by a techno- cratic elite. Forster had been infl uenced by Samuel Butler’s satirical utopia, Erewhon (1872), in which human beings, expecting their machines might someday evolve into intelligent beings destined to dominate humanity, ban them from society. “The Machine Stops” is one of the fi rst examples of a dystopia, a futuristic monitory parable that dramatizes the consequences of a troubling social trend in the present day. Distant echoes of its vision of an empty, closed-off , claustrophobic future can be heard in Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965). Adapting the Frankenstein theme of a science usurping the powers of nature to Plato’s myth of the cave, “The Machine Stops” became the model for the “if this goes on . . .” story that was one of the dominant forms of later science fi ction. Although Forster was personally not unsympathetic to socialism, the diction of “The Machine Stops” clearly links it to the conservative Victorian tradition that viewed technology as a threat to basic humanistic values.

the machINe StoPS 51

Part I

The Air-Ship

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radi- ance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the center, by its side a reading-desk—that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music was silent. “I suppose I must see who it is,” she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room, where the bell still rang importunately. “Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been inter- rupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: “Very well. Let us talk. I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything im- portant will happen for the next five minutes—for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on ‘Music during the Aus- tralian Period.’ ” She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness. “Be quick!” she called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.” But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her. “Kuno, how slow you are.” He smiled gravely. “I really believe you enjoy dawdling.”

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“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.” “What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneu- matic post?” “Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want—” “Well?” “I want you to come and see me.” Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. “But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?” “I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.” “Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.” “Why not?” “One mustn’t.” “You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.” She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit. “The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you.” “I dislike air-ships.” “Why?” “I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship.” “I do not get them anywhere else.” “What kind of ideas can the air give you?” He paused for an instant. “Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars, three other stars?” “No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea? How inter- esting; tell me.” “I had an idea that they were like a man.” “I do not understand.” “The four big stars are the man’s shoulders and his knees. The three stars

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in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hang- ing are like a sword.” “A sword?” “Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men.” “It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is certainly original. When did it come to you first?” “In the air-ship—” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race. “The truth is,” he continued, “that I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth.” She was shocked again. “Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth.” “No harm,” she replied, controlling herself. “But no advantage. The sur- face of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies im- mediately in the outer air.” “I know; of course I shall take all precautions.” “And besides—” “Well?” She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had a queer tem- per, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition. “It is contrary to the spirit of the age,” she asserted. “Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?” “In a sense, but—” His image in the blue plate faded. “Kuno!” He had isolated himself. For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons

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and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced litera- ture. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accu- mulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?—say this day or month. To most of these questions she replied with irritation—a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one—that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music. The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm- chair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre- Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primeval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its con- clusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed. The bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she had a feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for beds were of the same dimension all over the world, and to have had an alternative size would have involved vast alterations in the Machine. Vashti isolated herself—it was necessary, for neither day nor night existed under the ground—and reviewed all that

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had happened since she had summoned the bed last. Ideas? Scarcely any. Events—was Kuno’s invitation an event? By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter—one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound. Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured “O Machine!” and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed, she turned to page 1367, which gave the times of the departure of the air-ships from the island in the southern hemisphere, under whose soil she lived, to the island in the north- ern hemisphere, whereunder lived her son. She thought, “I have not the time.” She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she made the room dark and slept. Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and made the room light. “Kuno!” “I will not talk to you,” he answered, “until you come.” “Have you been on the surface of the earth since we spoke last?” His image faded. Again she consulted the book. She became very nervous and lay back in her chair palpitating. Think of her as without teeth or hair. Presently she directed the chair to the wall, and pressed an unfamiliar button. The wall swung apart slowly. Through the opening she saw a tunnel that curved slightly, so that its goal was not visible. Should she go to see her son, here was the beginning of the journey. Of course she knew all about the communication-system. There was nothing mysterious in it. She would summon a car and it would fly with her down the tunnel until it reached the lift that communicated with the air- ship station: the system had been in use for many, many years, long before the universal establishment of the Machine. And of course she had studied

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the civilization that had immediately preceded her own—the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms! And yet—she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born. It curved—but not quite as she remembered; it was brilliant—but not quite as brilliant as a lecturer had suggested. Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again. “Kuno,” she said, “I cannot come to see you. I am not well.” Immediately an enormous apparatus fell onto her out of the ceiling, a thermometer was automatically inserted between her lips, a stethoscope was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor. So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling. The voice of Kuno was heard asking how she felt. “Better.” Then with irritation: “But why do you not come to me instead?” “Because I cannot leave this place.” “Why?” “Because, any moment, something tremendous many happen.” “Have you been on the surface of the earth yet?” “Not yet.” “Then what is it?” “I will not tell you through the Machine.” She resumed her life. But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal to the public nurseries, her one visit to him there, his visits to her—visits which stopped when the Machine had assigned him a room on the other side of the earth. “Parents, duties of,” said the book of the Machine, “cease at the moment of birth. P. 422327483.” True, but there was something special about Kuno— indeed there had been something special about all her children—and, after all, she must brave the journey if he desired it. And “something tremendous might happen.” What did that mean? The nonsense of a youthful man, no doubt, but she must go. Again she pressed the unfamiliar button, again the wall swung back, and she saw the tunnel that curved out of sight. Clasp- ing the Book, she rose, tottered onto the platform, and summoned the car. Her room closed behind her: the journey to the northern hemisphere had begun.