Jim Baen's Universe

Classic

Micromegas

Written by Voltaire

Micromegas

By Voltaire

Philosophic Story

Chapter I

Journey of an Inhabitant of the World of the Star Sirius into the Planet Saturn

In one of those planets which revolve round the star named Sirius there was a young man of much wit with whom I had the honor to be acquainted during the last visit he made to our little anthill. He was called Micromegas, a name very well suited to all big men. His height was eight leagues: by eight leagues I mean twenty-four thousand geometrical paces of five feet each.

Some of the mathematicians, persons of unending public utility, will at once seize their pens and discover that, since Mr. Micromegas, inhabitant of the land of Sirius, measures from head to foot twenty-four thousand paces (which make one-hundred-and-twenty thousand royal feet), and since we other citizens of the earth measure barely five feet, and our globe has a circumference of nine thousand leagues—they will discover, I say, that it follows absolutely that the globe which produced Mr. Micromegas must have exactly twenty-one million six hundred thousand times more circumference than our little earth. Nothing in nature is simpler or more ordinary. The states of certain German and Italian sovereigns, round which one may travel completely in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Muscovy, or China, are but a very feeble example of the prodigious differences which nature contrives everywhere.

His Excellency’s stature being as I have stated, all our sculptors and all our painters will agree without difficulty that he is fifty thousand royal feet round the waist; which makes him very nicely proportioned.

As regards his mind, it is one of the most cultured we possess. He knows many things, and has invented a few. He had not yet reached the age of two-hundred-and-fifty, and was studying, according to custom, at the Jesuit college in his planet, when he solved by sheer brain power more than fifty of the problems of Euclid. That is eighteen more than Blaise Pascal who, after solving thirty-two to amuse himself, according to his sister, became a rather mediocre geometer and a very inferior metaphysician.

Toward the age of four hundred and fifty, when his childhood was past, he dissected many of those little insects which, not being a hundred feet across, escape the ordinary microscope. He wrote about them a very singular book which, however, brought him some trouble. The mufti of his country, a hair-splitter of great ignorance, found in it assertions that were suspicious, rash, offensive, unorthodox, and savoring of heresy, and prosecuted him vigorously. The question was whether the bodies of Sirian fleas were made of the same substance as the bodies of Sirian slugs. Micromegas defended himself with spirit, and brought all the women to his way of thinking. The case lasted two hundred and twenty years, and ended by the mufti having the book condemned by some jurists who had not read it, and by the author being banished from the court for eight hundred years.

Micromegas was only moderately distressed at being banished from a court which was such a hotbed of meannesses and vexations. He wrote a very droll song against the mufti, which hardly troubled that dignitary, and set forth on a journey from planet to planet in order to finish forming his heart and mind, as the saying is.

Those who travel only in post-chaise and coach will be astonished, doubtless, at the methods of transport in the world above, for we on our little mud-heap cannot imagine anything outside the range of our ordinary experience. Our traveler had a marvelous knowledge of the laws of gravitation, and of the forces of repulsion and attraction. He made such excellent use of them that sometimes by the good offices of a comet, and at others by the help of a sunbeam, he and his friends went from globe to globe as a bird flutters from branch to branch. He traversed the Milky Way in no time, and I am forced to confess that he never saw through the stars with which it is sown the beautiful paradise that the illustrious and reverend Mr. Derham boasts of having seen at the end of his spyglass. Not that I claim that Mr. Derham’s eyesight is bad: God forbid! but Micromegas was on the spot, he is a sound observer, and I do not wish to contradict anyone.

After making a long tour, Micromegas reached the globe of Saturn. Although he was accustomed to see new things, he could not, on beholding the littleness of the globe and its inhabitants, refrain from that superior smile to which even the wisest men are sometimes subject. For Saturn, after all, is hardly more than nine hundred times bigger than the earth, and its citizens are dwarfs only about a thousand fathoms tall. He and his friends laughed at them at first, much as an Italian musician, when he comes to France, laughs at Lulli’s music. The Sirian had good brains, however, and understood quickly that a thinking being may very well not be ridiculous merely because his height is only six thousand feet. Having started by amazing the Saturnians, he finished by becoming intimate with them. He engaged in a close friendship with the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man of much wit who, although he had indeed invented nothing himself, yet had a very good idea of the inventions of others, and had produced quite passable light verses and weighty computations.

I will record here for the benefit of my readers an odd conversation which Micromegas had with Mr. Secretary.

Chapter II

Conversation of the Inhabitant of Sirius with the Inhabitant of Saturn

When His Excellency had laid himself down, and the secretary had drawn near to his face, Micromegas spoke. “It must be admitted,” he said, “that there is plenty of variety in nature.”

“Yes,” agreed the Saturnian, “nature is like a flower bed of which the flowers …”

“Enough of your flower bed,” said the other.

“Nature,” resumed the secretary, “is like a company of fair women and dark women whose apparel …”

“What have I to do with your dark women?” said the other.

“Well, then, nature is like a gallery of pictures whose features …”

“Oh, no!” said the traveler. “I tell you once more—nature is like nature. Why seek to compare it with anything?”

“To please you,” answered the secretary.

“I do not want people to please me,” replied the traveler. “I want them to teach me. Begin by telling me how many senses men in your world have.”

“We have seventy-two,” said the academician, “and we complain every day that we have not more. Our imagination surpasses our needs. We find that with our seventy-two senses, our ring, and our five moons, we are too limited; and despite all our curiosity and the fairly large number of emotions arising from our seventy-two senses, we have plenty of time to be bored.”

“That I can quite understand,” said Micromegas, “for although in our world we have nearly a thousand senses, we still have an indescribable, vague yearning, an inexpressible restlessness, which warns us incessantly that we are of small account, and that there exist beings far more perfect. I have traveled a little, and I have seen mortals much below our level; I have also seen others far superior: but I have not seen any who have not more appetites than real needs, and more needs than contentment. One day, maybe, I shall reach the country where nobody lacks anything, but up to now no one has given me definite news of that country.”

The Saturnian and the Sirian proceeded to tire themselves out with conjectures, but after many very ingenious and very uncertain arguments, they were forced to return to facts.

“How long do you live?” asked the Sirian.

“Ah! a very short time,” replied the small man of Saturn.

“Just as with us,” said the Sirian. “We are always complaining how short life is. It must be one of the universal laws of nature.”

“Alas!” sighed the Saturnian. “We live for only five hundred complete revolutions of the sun. (That makes fifteen thousand years, or thereabouts, according to our reckoning.) As you can see, that means dying almost as soon as one is born. Our existence is a point, our duration a flash, our globe an atom. Hardly has one started to improve one’s self a little than death arrives before one has any experience. For my part, I dare make no plans; I am like a drop of water in an immense ocean. I am ashamed, particularly before you, of the ridiculous figure I cut in this world.”

“If you were not a philosopher,” returned Micromegas, “I should fear to distress you by telling you that our life is seven hundred times as long as yours, but you know too well that when a man has to return his body to the earth whence it sprang, to bring life again to nature in another form—which is called dying—it is precisely the same thing, when the time for this metamorphosis arrives, whether he has lived a day or an eternity. I have been in countries where the people lived a thousand times longer than my people, and they still grumbled. But everywhere there are persons who know how to accept their fate and thank the author of nature. He has spread over this universe variety in profusion, coupled with a kind of wonderful uniformity. For instance, all thinking beings are different, and yet at bottom all resemble each other in their possession of the gifts of thought and aspiration. Matter is found everywhere, but in each globe it has different properties. How many of these properties do you count your matter as having?”

“If you speak of those properties,” said the Saturnian, “without which we believe our globe could not exist in its present form, we count three hundred, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, and so on.”

“It appears,” said the traveler, “that for the Creator’s purposes regarding your insignificant abode that small number suffices. I admire His wisdom in everything. I see differences everywhere, but everywhere also I see proportion. Your world is small, and so are its occupants; you have few sensations; your matter has few properties: all that is the work of Providence. Of what color does your sun prove to be if you examine it closely?”

“Of a very yellowish white,” said the Saturnian; “and when we split up one of its rays we find it contains seven colors.”

“Our sun,” remarked the Sirian, “is reddish, and we have thirty-nine primary colors. Of all the suns I have approached there are no two which are alike, just as with you there is no face which does not differ from all the other faces.”

After several questions of this kind, he inquired how many essentially different substances they counted in Saturn. He learned that they counted only about thirty, such as God, Space, Matter, substances which have Extension and Feeling, substances which have Extension, Feeling and Thought, substances which have Thought and no Extension; those which are self-conscious, those which are not self-conscious, and the rest. The Sirian, in whose world they counted three hundred, and who had discovered in his travels three thousand others, staggered the philosopher of Saturn. At last, after acquainting each other with a little of what they did know and a great deal of what they did not, after arguing during a complete revolution of the sun, they decided to make together a little philosophical journey.

Chapter III

Journey of the Two Inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn

Our two philosophers were ready to set forth into the atmosphere of Saturn, with a nice supply of mathematical instruments, when the Saturnian’s mistress, who had heard of their approaching departure, came in tears to protest. She was a pretty little dark girl who stood only six hundred and sixty fathoms; but she made amends for her small stature by many other charms. “Ah! cruel man,” she cried, “when after resisting you for fifteen hundred years I was beginning at last to give way, when I have passed barely a hundred years in your arms, you leave me to go on a journey with a giant from another world. Away with you! your intentions are not serious, you are nothing but a philanderer, you have never loved me: if you were a real Saturnian you would be faithful. Where are you going to gad about? What do you seek? Our five moons are less errant than you, our ring is less variable. One thing is certain! I shall never love anyone else.”

The philosopher kissed her, wept with her, for all that he was a philosopher, and the lady after have swooned went off to console herself with one of the dandies of the land.

Meanwhile, our two seekers after knowledge departed. First they jumped on the ring; they found it to be fairly flat, as an illustrious inhabitant of our little globe has very well guessed. Thence they journeyed from moon to moon. A comet passed quite close to the last one they visited; with their servants and instruments they hurled themselves on it. When they had covered about a hundred and fifty million leagues they came upon the satellites of Jupiter. They came to Jupiter itself, and stayed there a year, during which time they learned some very wonderful secrets that would now be in the hands of the printers, had not my lords the inquisitors found some of the propositions rather tough. But I read the manuscript in the library of the illustrious archbishop of ——, who with a generosity and kindness which cannot be sufficiently praised, allowed me to see his books.

But let us return to our travelers. When they left Jupiter they crossed a space about a hundred million leagues wide, and passed along the coast of Mars which, as we know, is five times smaller than our little globe. They saw two moons which serve this planet, and which have escaped the attention of our astronomers. I am well aware that Father Castel will decry, even with humor, the existence of these two moons, but I take my stand on those who reason by analogy. Those good philosophers know how difficult it would be for Mars, which is so far from the sun, to do without at least two moons. Whatever the facts are, our friends found Mars so small that they feared they might not have room enough to lay themselves down, and so they continued on their road like two travelers who scorn a miserable village inn, and push on to the nearest town. But the Sirian and his companion soon repented, for they traveled a long while without finding anything. At last they perceived a small glimmer: it was the earth, and it stirred the pity of the people coming from Jupiter. However, fearing that they might have to repent a second time, they decided to land. They passed along the tail of the comet and, finding an aurora borealis handy, climbed on the tail of the comet, and touched land on the northern coast of the Baltic Sea, the fifth of July, seventeen hundred and thirty-seven, new style.

Chapter IV

What Happened to Them on Earth

After a short rest, they ate for lunch two mountains which their attendants served up for them quite nicely, and then had a mind to explore the minute country in which they found themselves. They went first from north to south. The usual pace of the Sirian and his people measured about thirty-thousand king’s feet. The dwarf from Saturn followed at a distance, panting, for he had to take twelve paces to each of the other’s strides. Picture to yourself (if such a comparison be permitted) a very small lap-dog following a captain of the King of Prussia’s Guards.

As these foreigners moved rather quickly, they circled the world in thirty-six hours. The sun, or rather the earth, it is true, does a like journey in a day, but it must be remembered that it is easier to travel on one’s axis than on one’s feet. Here they are, then, returned to the point whence they started. They have seen the puddle, almost imperceptible to them, which we call the “Mediterranean,” and that other little pond which under the name of the “Great Ocean,” surrounds the molehill. The water had never come above the dwarf’s knees, and the other had scarcely wet his heels. Moving above and below, they did their best to discover whether or no this globe was inhabited. They stooped, laid themselves down flat, and sounded everywhere; but as their eyes and their hands were in nowise adapted to the diminutive beings which crawl here, they perceived nothing which might make them suspect that we and our colleagues, the other dwellers on this earth, have the honor to exist.

The dwarf, who sometimes judged a little too hastily, decided at once that there was no one on the earth, his first reason being that he had seen no one. Micromegas politely made him feel that it was a poor enough reason. “With your little eyes,” he said, “you do not see certain stars of the fiftieth magnitude, which I perceive very distinctly. Do you conclude from your blindness that these stars do not exist?”

“But,” said the dwarf, “I have searched well.”

“But,” replied the other, “you have seen badly.”

“But,” said the dwarf, “this globe is so badly constructed and so irregular; it is of a form which to me seems ridiculous! Everything here is in chaos, apparently. Do you see how none of those little brooks run straight? And those ponds which are neither round, square, oval, nor of any regular form? Look at all those little pointed things with which this world is studded; they have taken the skin off my feet! (He referred to the mountains.) Do you not observe the shape of the globe, how flat it is at the poles, and how clumsily it turns round the sun, with result that the polar regions are waste places? What really makes me think there is no one on the earth is that I cannot imagine any sensible people wanting to live here.”

“Well, well!” said Micromegas, “perhaps the people who live here are not sensible after all. But anyway there is an indication that the place was not made for nothing. You say that everything here looks irregular, because in Jupiter and Saturn everything is arranged in straight lines. Perhaps it is for that very reason there is something of a jumble here. Have I not told you that in my travels I have always observed variety?”

The Saturnian replied to all these arguments, and the discussion might never have finished, had not Micromegas become excited with talking, and by good luck broken the string of his diamond necklace. The diamonds fell to the ground. They were pretty little stones, but rather unequal; the biggest weighed four hundred pounds, the smallest fifty. The dwarf picked some of them up, and perceived when he put them to his eye that from the way they were cut they made first-rate magnifying-glasses. He took, therefore, one of these small magnifying-glasses, a hundred and sixty feet in diameter, and put it to his eye: Micromegas selected one of two thousand five hundred feet. They were excellent, but at first nothing could be seen by their aid; an adjustment was necessary. After a long time, the inhabitant of Saturn saw something almost imperceptible under water in the Baltic Sea: it was a whale. Very adroitly he picked it up with his little finger and, placing it on his thumbnail, showed it to the Sirian, who started laughing at the extreme smallness of the inhabitants of our globe. The Saturnian, satisfied that our world was inhabited after all, assumed immediately that all the inhabitants were whales, and as he was a great reasoner wished to ascertain how so small an atom moved, if it had ideas, a will, self-direction. Micromegas was very embarrassed by his questions. He examined the animal with great patience, and finished by thinking