AALILA (4)
By:
May 12, 2025
Christopher Blayre’s “Aalila” (1921), which may remind readers of a later work of sf horror, William Sloane’s To Walk the Night, first appeared in Blayre’s University of Cosmopoli collection The Purple Sapphire. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
That was all Markwand told me that day. I think his idea was to let me so far into his amazing secret, and to let what he had told me sink in, so as to judge by my manner how I took it, and whether I were worthy of further confidence. But it was evidently a great relief to him to be able to talk at all about it. He often set little traps for me, to see if I would laugh, or doubt, or sneer, but as time went on and I always listened with a keen interest which required no simulation, he arrived at telling me the progress of his adventure, step by step, and as I have said, what he left out then, I could supply from his journal of the affair — afterwards.
It would take far too long; it would indeed fill a volume of no mean size, were I to set down here the gradual “anastomosis” (to borrow a term from the Physiologists) of Markwand and Aalila, how they arrived at the meanings of words, and how, out of the chaos of incomprehensible sounds, they arrived at conversation. It is not enough, but it must be taken as enough, to record that Markwand little by little arrived at knowing all about Aalila, and about life the planet Venus, where the Physical Sciences had reached a development which would stagger the imagination of a Jules Verne produced to the power of n. What is really most important was the stunning fact that Markwand was in love with Aalila as only a bachelor of his age can be, when he makes his first acquaintance with the grand passion.
It will be observed that I have not hitherto touched upon a very important point. You will not unnaturally have been asking yourself how on earth — or rather in Venus — had Aalila learned the Morse Alphabet? As soon as I felt that I could safely ask questions without “drying him up” I put this to Markwand.
“Oh,” he replied, “of course I ought to have told you that. She learnt from our Fleet Signallers during the War.”
“WHAT?”
“It takes some believing, doesn’t it? The question of interplanetary signalling has always been a burning one up there. They signal to many other planets already, but they had never “picked up” Earth, which, by the way, they call Waluma. Aalila, you will not be surprised to hear, is a great astronomical ‘nut’ up there, and she has been searching Waluma for a sign for years. In August, 1914, and onwards, she observed that our seas were constantly starred with intermittent flashes — of course their telescopes are to ours what Big Bertha was to a pop-gun — and after puzzling over them for months she found that there was a regular sequence in them, that certain groups of dots and dashes continually recurred, especially ‘ringing up’ with a series of ‘E’s,’ and that a single ‘E’ at a short distance always stopped it. She got on to the full stop ‘Ack-AckAck,’ and the ‘Vick E’ at the end of a message, almost directly. And from this she gradually worked out all our letters, not in their order of course. One of her first questions when we could talk was to enquire what were ‘Toc,’ and ‘E’ — T and E, our commonest letters. She had got a lot of common words pat — ‘and, the, it’ and so on.”
“What did she make of it?”
“Why—the inference was obvious to her — we were signalling to Venus!”
“Good heavens!”
“What confused her most were the constant and reiterated ‘E’s’ on land. Those were the flashes of the great guns.”
It made one’s brain reel. I seldom had to ask questions after that.
And here it becomes very difficult for me to write at all about it. I have been so shocked by the death of Markwand and all that it meant and conveyed to me, the terrible proof, as it would seem, that this amazing adventure was no delusion at all, but drew to its inevitable and tragic end, irresistibly, that I cannot think with equanimity of anyone even smiling at details which would readily lend themselves to humorous treatment, but which were in themselves the very essence of the tragedy. In the foremost place there stood the fact that Aalila had, conformably with the customs of her planet, seven husbands — a multiple fact that did not in any way appear to militate against her full reciprocation of Markwand’s passion. Husbands in Venus appear to be of a singularly easy-going disposition, to our mundane intelligence, but an exception would appear to occur at intervals, and one of these loomed large in Aalila’s cosmogony in the shape of an infuriated and jealous male. Highly intellectual as Aalila was, and occupying an exalted position in the scientific world of the planet, this husband, Illuha by name, was to Aalila what an ignorant woman (only one of course) would be to a Regius Professor in one of our own Universities — a woman who sets her own personal gratification and feelings far above the career and the life- interests of her husband. And so in her “affair” with Markwand, Aalila had to be very careful — in certain mundane circles her attitude would probably be described as “wily.”
It was all very well for Aalila to shut herself up in her observatory and communicate with her Terrestrial Lover. Illuha, who was of course not ignorant of the vast potentiality of Astral physics in Venus, was, it appeared, far from easy in his mind as to the scope and extent of Aalila’s researches, and — well, as I have said, Aalila had to be very careful. Very frequently the nightly communion would be intercepted by unreasonably uxorious reproaches, not to mention physical interruptions, which scared Aalila intempestatively from the photo-telephone; and it seems from a note of Markwand’s that Aalila had in a moment of relaxed vigilance allowed Illuha to catch sight of sundry telephoto-graphs of Markwand, and, to put it perhaps somewhat crudely, Illuha was on the prowl.
All might, however, have been well had it not been for the high quality of Aalila’s scientific knowledge, attainments and ambitions. From transmitting very remarkable, and I am bound to say often highly compromising pictures of herself, she soared to the ambition of, and devoted much research to, the accomplishment of transmitting herself; that is to say a replica, an astral body of herself, perfect in every essential detail, and of a bodily consistency adequate to all practical purposes. Of the development and ultimate success of this crowning triumph of Aalila’s scientific career I can only gather the broad outlines, for Markwand himself seems to have grown shy of his record in this matter, and the scientific accuracy of his register is marred from this point by a doubtless proper and laudable discretion, which leaves certain details, but not many, to the imagination, and tends therefore to the detriment of scientific knowledge. It must remain enough to say that the semi- but not too-æthereal Aalila came to Earth and visited Markwand in his observatory, whenever she could get away, whilst her physical body remained on guard, as it were, in her observatory in Venus. And it must be recorded to her credit that she never attempted to conceal from Markwand the paramount, the terrible danger of these astral excursions. Though her physical body remained behind, she brought her intellect to earth with her, and this it was that in fullness of time brought her and Markwand to grief. For the physical body, temporarily bereft of its directing mind was not up to controlling the apparatus, and the romance of her interviews with Markwand must have been seriously hampered by the necessity of keeping an eye on the screen, and an ear at the photo-telephone.
Consequently these amazing interviews had to be arranged for occasions when Illuha could be counted upon to be absent from home, or at any rate not likely to come bothering after her at the observatory. From what one could gather, the position of husbands in Venus is — setting aside, of course, their plurality — much the same as that of wives in the so-called civilized portions of the earth, and, perhaps, vice versa.
Markwand was, as I have indicated, reticent as to the details of his interviews with Aalila in conversation with me, and a fortiori recorded in his scientific journal only political, economical, and sometimes ethnological details of life on the planet, and looking over the record, it may be said that the personal equation must have bulked largely in their communion, for lengthy meetings with Aalila frequently furnished but a few lines in either his private or scientific journals. He tried to explain to me, however, the nature of the risks they ran, but the explanation was largely beyond my powers of comprehension — Hertzian waves — Potential — Amperage, and other technical terms bristled in his exposition, and I gave up trying to become an expert in the matter. I only knew that the physical Aalila left behind had mechanical control of the projection apparatus, and if disturbed, or damaged, might work irretrievable disaster. It was clear that the interference of any unauthorized or inexperienced person in the observatory might, and probably would, divert the full force of Aalila’s generating plant along the communicating beam. Upon what would happen in that event Markwand did not care to speculate.
“The physical Aalila,” he said, “would almost certainly be destroyed, and what would happen here it is difficult to conjecture. I should imagine some form of instantaneous annihilation — volatilization — I don’t know. But we take all necessary and possible precautions.”
I hazarded a question.
“Is the replica-Aalila of sufficient substance to suffer physical hurt?”
He thought for a moment — and I am not sure that he did not blush a little. Then he replied: “Oh, yes. There is little doubt about that.”
“Take another postulate,” I said. “Supposing some unauthorized person” (we seldom or never mentioned Illuha by name, from motives of delicacy no doubt) “were to get at the apparatus in her replica-absence, and supposing that person found himself — or herself” (I hastily added), “projected along the ray in some way? What then?”
Markwand, I am sorry to say, shrugged his shoulders and laughed; yes, he positively laughed, and instead of answering he turned away, chaunting under his breath a line of an old plantation song which ran:
“The congregation all stand up, and sing — Hallelujah!
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
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