Negyedik fejezet

The Author begins to surmise what manner of beings he has fallen among.

The solasis.

A few words touching the solasi-works.

All that which I have hitherto endeavored to make the reader comprehend, I myself understood and grasped only after long days and weeks; so much is certain, that even then, when I stood there beneath the man-shaped tree, and of a sudden felt that yon wondrous mechanism, one of the citizens of Faremido, was comparing me with this plant: that even then I began, with a shudder, to surmise such possibilities as I had never so much as dreamed of until then.

My marvelous adventures, which in the course of my earlier voyages had often startled my feelings, had accustomed me, while yet retaining the world-view prescribed to me by excellent philosophers and logicians, and above all by the natural scientists of my adored country, nevertheless to endeavor to take cognizance of such facts and realities as can in no wise be fitted into that world-view; for I know that a serious man of natural science cannot be swayed, in the framing of his theories, by so trifling a thing as, for example, a fact or a phenomenon that flatly contradicts the theory.

Retaining, therefore, my former world-view, I nevertheless took cognizance of the fact that my ill fortune had cast me into such a country, or region of the world, or perhaps such a heavenly body, where the beings that rule over nature, the inhabitants of this heavenly body, are not only unlike man, but cannot even be reckoned living beings in the earthly sense; for although they move by their own force, act purposefully, and together form certain social forms, yet there is not in their bodies a single particle of that certain matter which, according to our conception, is the sole possible bearer and condition of life, and which we commonly call organic matter.

These beings, the solasis (so they name themselves in musical notes), consist of inorganic elements: of iron, of gold, and of many another metal and mineral besides, among them some such as our inorganic chemistry does not know.

As to how these lifeless materials nevertheless move and act, I remark upon this point that we too observe similar motions in lifeless matter, only not so pronouncedly, nor in such concord; for the expansion of bodies by heat, their striving toward one another in consequence of the attraction of matter: all these produce motion in the lifeless; and even then I surmised, of which I later became convinced, that the life of the solasis is governed by such simple and primitive forces as light, heat, electricity, magnetism.

That grand and secret, intricate force which we call, with reverence, the life-force, vitality, which dissolves and multiplies the nucleus of the organic cell: this force the solasis do not know, or they know it, but marvelously have no need whatsoever of it; nay more, as I later understood, they hold it to be a more worthless, in a certain respect a diseased and unnatural form of existence, one not fit to make that soul, which is the condensation, in matter, of the forces of nature, and which is called to the understanding and perhaps the amelioration of nature (and which we call the human soul, the human understanding), to make, I say, this soul and understanding happy, harmonious, and comprehensible.

The organ of the solasis' understanding, their brain, is of inorganic matter: a fortunate mixture of a mercury-like, fluid metal and some other mineral besides.

In this brain it is not that unknown life-force, but known and controllable forces — heat and electricity — that produce the motions we call thought and feeling.

Whether these feelings and thoughts be more worthless than our own, that I cannot, with my finite wit, determine; I observed only, in time, that in essence they differ not from the products of our organic understanding, only that they are immeasurably heightened and more intense, but then there is nothing surprising in this, for on Earth too we observe, is it not so, that machines made of inorganic matter produce more and better in a given unit of time than does human or animal labor.

The association of ideas among the solasis is considerably swifter and more precise than our own; and as touching the force of their feelings and passions, it is characteristic in this regard that even for the communication of their simplest thoughts they employ that instrument which we employ only for the expression of our most heightened and most complicated feeling: music.

For the rest, it may be that thought and feeling are not so sharply demarcated among them as in our understanding.

The reader will find it natural that my first thought, when I began to surmise all this, was this: how do these beings come into being, for that form of propagation which is to be observed among us is, in their inorganic life, without object.

Very soon I had the answer to this question of mine.

That solasi which had set me beside the man-shaped tree, having heard, with visible astonishment, that I could imitate some few of its notes, beckoned to me with one of its arms (for the present I call it an arm) that I should follow.

I set out hastily beside it, the while I perceived that it strove with effort to attune its steps to my pitiable crawling, which by comparison with its own was pitiable indeed.

It was as though an automobile were leading a man along the ground.

Soon enough we reached the entrance of that grand edifice which had once already dazzled my eyes.

Above the gate I perceived, on this occasion, golden signs or letters; later I learned that in their writing these signs signify: sol-la-si-mi-re, which in approximate English translation means the solasi-works, or the solasi-workshop.

Stepping upon the ellipse-shaped threshold, a peculiar throbbing and clattering struck upon my ear; as we passed along the marble corridor, these sounds grew stronger.

A door of pliant glass flew open before us, and a hall, swimming in a vast white light, disclosed itself to my eyes.

It would take a long while were I to tell all that indescribable, at most circumscribable, confusion which greeted me in this hall; perhaps in a drawing, upon paper, I could the better approach the spectacle.

Long stone tables ran parallel, buried beneath a thousand and a thousand kinds of fantastical instruments, objects, cucurbits, taps, bottles, metals, soldering-irons, screws, levers, balances, vessels, crucibles, liquids, tubes, retorts, current-generators, wires, axles, wheels, rotators, pincers, tweezers, drills.

The greater part of these were in rhythmic motion; driven by some invisible current, disks that turned and circled soundlessly, yet with a dizzying swiftness, flashed in the light; belts and wires spun hissing from above and from below; steel bands quivered; and crank-rotators ran to and fro along the edges of the tables.

Here and there red, violet, and blue lights and flames hovered; under glass and in the open, thick liquids clattered in great vats.

In the first moment I scarcely perceived that solasis were at work amid this seeming confusion; for the frame of these beings is, in fact, the very same as what I had seen in the machines and instruments.

When my eye had grown a little accustomed to the spectacle, I found that beside the tables, at equal distances, stood solasis great and small, immersed in busy labor.

I knew them by the oval golden head and by the two bright glass lenses that gleam in the region of the brow.

From their bodies arms and levers reached toward the table, adjusting and fitting together the parts of every kind, soldering chains together above the flame, like so many watchmakers.

The solasi that had led me now stepped up to the one which stood nearest to us: this one left off its work for a moment, and they began to make music with one another.

Meanwhile both turned their faces toward me; I felt that it was of me they spoke.

In confusion, and with a shame incomprehensible even to myself, I turned my eyes away, and began to examine the objects and parts lying about upon the table.

Many convex and concave glass lenses lay upon the table; in one glass, some transparent adhesive substance.

At the edge of the table, a contrivance already assembled: when I looked more closely, I found with astonishment that this contrivance, at least in essence, was not altogether unknown to me.

It greatly resembled a tiny, infinitely precise and delicate photographing-machine, save that the whole was globe-shaped, and on either side and behind, steel wires hung down to the ground; in front a gleaming, convex lens, and behind it a globe-shaped dark chamber.

It was clear to me that its purpose too was the same; yet withal the whole was like a great, exorbitated eyeball.

It flashed at once through my brain that this was indeed as it should be: we know that the photographing-machine is in essence nothing other than a reconstructed human eye, its operation likewise the same, with this difference, that whereas the human eye cannot be perfected, the machine we may so construct that it reproduces the phenomena of light a hundredfold more sharply and swiftly than the eye; let us but think of those sensitive moving-picture recordings which apprehend a hundredfold more of the phenomena of motion than does our eye.

A glance at the solasi's face convinced me that it was making the very thing it too had need of: eyes.

Now it was clear to me how these wondrous beings, or contrivances, come into being: they themselves fashion their like out of metals and minerals, and the finished solasi they themselves set into motion by means of the sources of power lodged within their bodies (electric accumulators, steam, gas).

At first sight this is perhaps a more cumbersome and troublesome mode of propagating the species than that which prevails upon our planet — and there will be those who add, a less amusing one — but it must be granted that, in respect of the result, it is more reliable and more conscientious.

The solasi that creates or assembles its fellow (I say fellow, because I could scarcely call it a son or a child, seeing that a solasi is brought into being not by two, but by six or seven, they are beings of one kind), the solasi, I say, has it in its power to examine each single part minutely with a view to fitness for purpose, and to assemble it so that it shall have no defect whatsoever.