A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction Read online

  At twelve years of age I was sent to the university of Leipsic, and at fifteen was thoroughly master of the dead languages; but my favourite author was Apuleius, the most romantic of all the ancient writers; and I had got almost by heart the first book of the Golden Ass, fully believing in all the wild traditions, the fantastic fables, and visions that it embodied. I thus early divided the life of man into two sets of sensation, but not of equal value in my eyes – a waking sleep, and a sleeping sleep; for it seemed to me that no one could dispute the superior advantages of the latter in perceiving the only world that is worth perceiving – the imaginary one. Natural philosophy was the great object of my pursuit; and it must be confessed that my tutor – for I had a private one, and seldom attended the public lectures – was admirably qualified to direct this branch of my studies. How he had acquired all his learning was a mystery; for he never read, and yet had hardly, to all appearance, passed his twenty-fifth year. Where he had been educated, or from what country he came, was equally unknown, for he spoke all languages with equal fluency. As Goethe says of the meerkats, ‘Even with those little people one would not wish to be alone.’

  Thus, he was a man in whose company I never felt quite at ease, and yet was attracted to him by a kind of resistless impetus. Though his features were good, his face was a continual mask; his eyes, dark and lustrous, had in them an extraordinary and supernatural power of inquisition. There was an expression in his countenance the most gloomy, a desolateness the most revolting; the depravity of human nature seemed to him a delight. He was never known to laugh but at what would have moved others to tears. Though he watched over me as if his own life depended on mine, there was hardly a drunken orgy, or a duel, its natural consequence (for you know such take place daily at our universities), that Starnstein – for that was his name – was not the exciting cause. You saw me look round just now. I often fancy him at my elbow; and thought, since I began talking of him, that he whispered in my ear.

  Being destined for a physician, I repaired, after taking my degree, to Paris, for the purpose of attending the anatomical school. There, however, the only dissections in which I took an interest were those of the brain, which opened to me a new world of speculations – one of which was that all our sentiments are nothing more than a subtle kind of mind, and that mind itself is only a modification of matter. I now set no bounds to the power of Mater Ia, and soon attributed to her all creation, being much assisted in coming to this conclusion by Buffon and Cuvier. Their researches, particularly those of the latter great naturalist, proved to my satisfaction that there was a period when this planet was inhabited by a nameless progeny of monstrous forms, engendered by a peculiar state of the atmosphere – a dense congregation of putrid vapours that brooded over chaos; that all this Megatherian and Saurian brood, those flying liquids, long as the ‘mast of some high admiral’, disappeared at the first ray of light, and gave place to a new and better order of existences; but as inferior to man, or the present race of the inhabitants of our globe, as man is to the ape – himself the original of our species.

  But I was the first to discern that chrystals are to be produced by the galvanic battery, and animal life from acids; to detect in paste, by means of the solar microscope, thousands of vermicular creatures, which could not have arisen from the accidental depositions of ova – this genus being, like that of eels, viviporous. I got some volcanic dust from Etna, which I pasted with muriatic acid, and after a time distinguished, though inaudible save with an ear trumpet – or thought I could distinguish – a hum, like that of fermentation. What was my delight to find that there was vitality in the mass – that these atoms daily grew in size! They were of the bug species; not unlike what the French call a punaise. Their kinds were two; the larger soon began to devour the smaller, till they were completely destroyed; and in their voracity the survivors preyed on each other; so that at last only one, the great conqueror, was left, and he, I speak it to my infinite regret, was crushed in handling – so crushed, that scarcely anything but slime, not of the most agreeable odour, was left upon my fingers. I had promised myself to present him to the Luxembourg, for its splendid entomological collection. He would have been a prize, indeed.

  I pass over several years of my life, and find myself, in the summer of 18–, at Manheim. It is a curious old town, but I shall not stop to describe it. There it was that I first met with a German translation of that very ingenious history of Frankenstein. Such was my predisposition to a belief in what might have seemed to others prodigious, that I read it without a question or suspicion of its being a fiction. The part, however, that most interested me was the creation; the scene that riveted me most, the creation scene. One night I had the passage open in my hand, when who should walk into the room, arm-in-arm, but my old tutor and that anatomical man – that identical phantasmagoric hero.

  Starnstein, after having posted him against the oak panelling, turned towards me with one of his old Sardonic grins, pointed to his protégé, and slipped off before I could have detained him, had I been so inclined, which, to tell you the truth, I was not. I had never seen him since I left college; but wished to renew his acquaintance, and sometimes doubt whether it was not his apparition. But not so the other. He was too palpable to view, and without any mistake. Thus he was standing in propriá persona – the human monster; the restored ruin; the living phantom; the creature without a name. I put my hand before my eyes more than once, to convince myself that it was only a vision such as a feverish imagination conjured up. No rattlesnake could have more fascinated its victim. Yes, there he stood in all his horrible disproportion. His back, as I said, was against the oak wainscot, and his face turned towards me.

  Everyone knows the effect produced at Guy’s Hospital on the medical students, when the corpse of a criminal, under the effect of a powerful galvanic battery, opened its eyes, made one step from the table against which he was placed, erect, and stiff, and fell among them. Such was the feeling I experienced, lest he should advance. Horrible sensations for a time came over me; there was a lurid glare on all the objects in the room; everything took, or seemed to take, the most fantastic forms, and to bear some mysterious relation to the strange being before me. But by degrees I became familiarised with his person, and at length thought I should not dislike his company; I therefore took up the lamp, and with measured and stealthy steps began to approach my visitor. But this rashness had nearly proved fatal, for that which had given him life had well-nigh caused my death: so powerful was the galvanism with which he had been charged, that the shock struck me to the ground like a forked flash of lightning.

  How long I lay I know not; but, on recovering, had learned sufficient prudence to keep a respectful distance from my uninvited guest. There he was in the self-same state. I now examined him steadily; but, instead of his being gifted with the faculties assigned to him by the fair authoress, I found he had only a talismanic existence – he was a mere automaton, a machine, a plant without the faculty of motion. His eyes – those yellow eyes so graphically depicted – rolled pendulously in their sunken sockets with a clicking sound not unlike that of a clock; there was a mechanical trepidation of all his fibres, and his whole frame had a convulsive motion, whilst his head moved from left to right and right to left, like that of a Chinese mandarin. As I gazed and gazed on the image before me, I pitied him, and said to myself, I will be a new Frankenstein, and a greater. Frankenstein has left his work imperfect; he has resuscitated a corpse: I will give him a mind.

  A mind; yes, with a frantic joy I shouted, till the room re-echoed in loud vibrations, ‘I will create a mind for you, and such a mind as man, till now, never possessed!’ But, how to begin? Such an undertaking, till within the last twenty years, would have seemed preposterous and absurd. But, what were all the physicians and metaphysicians of old compared to the philosophers of the new school? There are only two sciences worth cultivating – phrenology and animal magnetism – and it was by their means that I hoped to accomplish the great arcanum
.

  All who know anything of craniology must be aware that genius depends on organisation, and organisation only – on the elevation and depression of certain gasses in the cerebrum. The cerebellum is another affair. With toil of mind that strengthens with its own fatigue, I made a discovery which, alone, in any other planet, would have immortalised me. I found out what neither Gall nor Spurzheim ever dreamed of; I learned intuitively, or, rather, by that sense which I need not name animal magnetism. I perceived, I say, that every one of those compartments, as laid down in the most approved charts of the head, contains a certain gas, though it has, like the nervous fluid circulating in that curious network of the frame, hitherto escaped analysis or detection. To this gas I have given the appellation of the ‘cerebral afflatus’, and now felt satisfied that the protuberances of the cranium, called ‘brains’, are derived from the action of this mental air pent up in its cells. Newton, when the laws of gravitation flashed upon his mind by the apple hitting the boss of mathematics, never experienced the proud gratification this sublime discovery gave me.

  Ulysses, as all know, carried about with him the winds in bladders – a contrivance clever enough before the invention of glass; and the Usula of Don Cleophas bottled the lame devil Asmodeus. These hints were not lost upon me. I set, therefore, my mechanical genius to work, and fabricated a number of tubes, composed of a mixture of diverse metals, such as went to the formation of Perkins’s Tractors.

  These tubes had, at one end, tunnels; and to the other I attached phials, in the shape of balls communicating with them, and so contrived as to open and shut by means of screws, or vices, so that the fluid of which I was in search, once risen to the top, might be there imprisoned, and, once hermetically closed, could only escape at my option. These tubes were all of one size; but not so the globes, which I blew of a vast thickness, lest it should happen that the expansion of the confined air might endanger the security of my retorts, which, like steam-engines, did not admit of safety-valves.

  Thus admirably provided, I locked up my treasure, as carefully as a miser does his gold, and issued, like a new Captain Cook, on a voyage of discovery much more interesting and important than the great navigator’s.

  The author of Faust was then at Weimar. Easily accessible to a man of genius like myself, and ignorant of my motives (which, if he had known, his familiar would doubtless have befriended me), Goethe was easily persuaded to submit himself to my manipulation. No patient I ever had was easier brought en rapport. From him it was that I sought to extract Imagination; and I reconciled myself to the theft, knowing that, however much I might appropriate to myself for the use of my protégé, Goethe might well spare it. Nor would it be long missed, considering that the working of his fertile brain would soon generate fresh gas to supply the vacuum. So abundant was the stream, or steam, that flowed from my fingers’ ends, and thence conducted by my thumb into the tube, that my largest globe was, at the first sitting, almost filled to explosion, and as soon inescapably sealed.

  Delighted with the success of my first experiment, I now deliberated which of my compatriots I should next put in requisition. Unhappily, Kant (that mighty mystic!) was gone to the land of shadows; but he had bequeathed his spirit to a worthy disciple, who, to the uninitiated, lectures in an unknown tongue.

  Transcendentalism, owing to the habitude of my own organs, has always been to me a wonder and a mystery, but I was determined that it should not be so to my adopted son. The gaseous effluvium which I drew from the professor was of so extra-subtle and super-volatile a nature, that it was long before I could satisfy myself that I had obtained a quantum sufficit in ullo vehiculo, as the physicians say; but, by dint of pressure with my finger-pump, in a happy moment I heard a slight crackling, like that of confined air in a bottle of champagne. I would have given worlds for half an hour with Swedenborg, or Madame Grizon. As I could not resuscitate the dead, I passed in review the living, and bethought me of one who had, as they, a religion of his own. He was [here the narrator turned to me] a compatriot of yours.

  Imperfect, indeed, would the accumulated fog of my phenomenon have been without this great essential; and, therefore, I crossed the Alps, and found Shelley at the baths of Lucca. The great poet’s animal magnetic sensibility is well known, and it had been, if possible, increased by a late visit to the Prato Fiorito, where he had fainted with the excess of sweetness of the jonquils that carpet that enamelled mead. He was, at that moment, full of the conception of his Ode to Intellectual Beauty; and I extracted enough of that particular sort of devotion to form a recipe for my ideal citizen.

  Passing through Bologna on my return, I tapped the Bibliotecario Mezzofanti for three hundred and sixty-five languages; which, strange to say, he had acquired without stirring out of his own library.

  Travelling night and day, behold me now, as ‘I stood tiptoe upon a little hill.’

  That little hill was Primrose Hill. I for a moment looked down on the mighty Babylon beneath me, and listened to the hum of the ‘million-peopled city vast’, itself hidden in a dense fog. Out of all the multitude, there was only one whom I sought: the eminent Coleridge. I found him at no great distance, in his own rural retreats of Highgate, and at that time taking ‘his ease in his inn’. No man was more accessible. Talking was not the amusement, but the occupation of his life; and it must be confessed that he was an adept in the art, as should naturally have been a person whose tongue was employed for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. For the first five of our interview, the clack of a water-mill, the wheels of a steamboat, the waves on a sea-shore, were poor comparisons to express the volubility of his organ. That coma, or trance, somnambulism, into which I had hoped to throw him, was transferred from the operated on to the operator. I called to mind the celebrated epigram:

  ‘Safe from the syren’s tuneful air

  The sage Ulysses fled;

  But had that man of prose been there,

  He would have talked him dead.’

  The mighty stream, ‘without o’erflowing, full’, rolled on, and carried all before it – even the floodgates of reason. He was the despair of the animal magnetist, and I almost began to doubt the efficacy, not of the system, but of my own powers, when he filled from a quart bottle a bumper of his favourite beverage, black-drop; and during its opiate influence I felt a vibration of the tube, like the string of a harp in concert-pitch, thrill through every fibre of my frame, to its utmost ramifications. ‘Io triumphe!’ The victory was complete.

  And now, behold me back to Manheim. No miser, gloating over his stores – no devotee, the possessor of some relic of her patron saint, not even Psyche herself, with her precious casket, felt half the raptures I enjoyed as I turned the key of my laboratory.

  I found my homuncio (which means, I believe, a great ugly fellow, though not such did he seem to me) posted exactly where I had left him, with the same mechanical clicking of the eyes, the same oscillation of the frame. And now for my reward.

  One by one did I carefully unvalve my phials, and apply the contents to the portals of the brain – the porticoes of my innominato, as the man-fiend is called in the Promessi Sposi. Scarcely had I discharged through the olfactory nerves the subtle fluids, when I perceived a strange confusion ensue, and it was easy to perceive that the late arrivals were dissatisfied with their new lodging, finding, doubtless, the apartments not to their taste. I was immediately reminded of Casti’s Caso di Coscunza, in which the spirits of the hero and heroine – a priest and his housekeeper, removed simultaneously from the world – being called back by the prayers of the good peasants of Estramadura to reanimate their clay, by mistake enter the wrong bodies; so that the don finds himself no man, and the donna no woman. Thus happened it, I should conjecture, with some of the newly imported and imprisoned spirits in my innominato’s cranium. It was long before quiet was established in that ‘dome of thought’, and I waited, in an agony of impatience, to see the effect of my operation.

  Motionless as the sculptor, or almost turned t
o stone as one who had seen Medusa, I stood, all eyes and ears intently fixed on my phenomenon. I saw the glassy and unmeaning glare of his eyes give place to the fire of intelligence; the jaundiced hue of his cheek disappear, like the grey of the morning at the uprising of the sun; and, as his lungs became inflated, I could distinctly hear the a, w – those sounds so expressive of inspiration and expiration – at measured intervals repeated. I now expected that his first impulse would be to fall down and worship me. But, far from this, what was my vexation and disappointment to mark the look of unutterable scorn and hate with which he regarded me.

  I think I now hear the floor ringing with his heavy tread, as he paced it backwards and forwards to give circulation to his blood, or as though waiting for the chaos of his thoughts to be reduced to form, ere he attempted to give them utterance. At length, he found that distinguishing characteristic of man above all other animals – speech. His voice was hollow, hoarse, and unmodulated, resembling most a pair of asthmatic bellows, or a cracked bassoon, rather than aught human. At first, his utterance, like that of a newborn babe, consisted of inarticulate sounds; but, after running up and down the gamut of the vowels, he put together a variety of words, as by way of practice, and with a slow and laboured delivery, and a sort of telegraphic gestures, commenced a harangue.