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  Seen from the place where Sagax was standing, the scene was picturesque, painted in intense colors. Among the comings and goings, regulated like the choreography of a ballet, in the figures of the cotillion that the strange workers seemed to be sketching, running toward the dynamos and then stopping dead in order to steer around one another, flattening themselves on the ground in order to exhume subterranean cables to establish a current, getting up to consult a manometer, unblocking a condenser, the living fresco unfurled its iridescence and promulgated the artistic beauty of industrial labor.

  The dark-haired individuals papered the background of the moving decor with their anthracite gleams; the red-haired ones displayed at every movement the barbaric enchantment of scarlets and vermilions; a few, hirsute with blue-violet fur obtained by artifice, appeared to be draped in saltwort; the blond-haired toned down the whole, tempering the adverse shades with their fleeting radiation of sulfurous copper. The entangled transmission-belts enveloped them all in an immense quivering net, and excessive connecting-rods in hectic rotation, orbited like heavenly bodies around accumulators in feverish activity.

  Sagax, who had moved forward slowly, gave them a signal, for that crew, in service for twenty minutes in the preparation of the Community’s aliments, had Perfected its task. Three cheers welcomed his gesture and saluted his person, and in less than a minute by means of slides moving at vertiginous speeds, the furry and polychromatic troop was absorbed into the distance.

  As a casual but vigilant leader, Sagax wanted to make sure that the little tablets were properly engaged, in lots, in the distribution tubes—which, spreading out in multiple ramifications, would convey them to every house that same evening. He consulted the registration consoles and saw that 11,821 packages of nourishment had been compiled and then dispatched, which surpassed the number of citizens and provided in advance for those who had a robust appetite.

  Satisfied, he moved on. A hundred meters away, to the right, a series of muffled detonations sounded, a raucous and menacing hymn of profound deflagrations, a cantata of redoubtable trumpeting. An aurora borealis shone, which even caused Sagax’s well-tried eyelids to blink, while his epidermis was covered with a warm blush. It was the gallery of prestigious Machines, the Pantheon of the divinities of steel, the only helpful and just Olympus to which humankind had thus far been able to appeal to temper its difficulties. The Machines radiated heat and light within the atmospheric skull-cap, propagating an eternal summer and thus substituting for the debility of the decrepit Sun, which was slowly deteriorating, with every passing year, in the leprosarium of Space.

  Suddenly, Sagax experienced a start, the prelude to a frisson of disgust. Phegor, the unnatural son of bottle 1,324, emerged from an outhouse. He must have hidden the produce of numerous thefts there, previous laborious crimes facilitated by his eloquence, for, heaped up at his feet was a pyramid of little alimentary tablets, which he now swallowed rapidly, at the risk of blocking his intestine—which, moreover, to judge by his abdominal rotundity, was no longer small except in name.

  The compressed aggregates of nitrogen, phosphate and carbon disappeared into his greedy mouth, and he guzzled them unremittingly and frantically, his jaws clicking like castanets, his eyes moist, the irises sunk in the tranquil waters of bliss.

  Suddenly, however, Staroth—the hydrocephalus Staroth,12 the spoiled progeny of bottle 1,758—ran up, full of simian gaiety, the enormous kettle of his forehead beaded with viscous sweat, his diabolical fetal face streaked with grease, his thighs, like those of a skinned frog, buckling under the weight of his belly, inflated like that of a drowned man. At the sight of him, the glutton abandoned his nourishment, luring the imbecile, who hurled himself upon them clucking with pleasure. Sagax saw Phegor sniff the idiot tenaciously, and, his lips oozing the saliva of concupiscence, devote himself subsequently to prolonged physical contact, as if a depository of happiness were hidden in the monster’s perineum.

  Sagax, the Porphyrogenete, had never yet witnessed such a scabrous scene—a spectacle capable of disrupting the heart of a Sage at a stroke. Had humans not yet completely reduced the aggressive force of Nature, then? Had they not permanently enslaved and throttled the villainous Will that had once fecundated the World in a semination of shame, dolor and iniquity? Was Civilization, victorious over chaos, going to return to disorder and Disequilibrium?

  He pointed with his index-finger, and the red toga in which he was clad flagellated his body in a bound of horror and indignation. But the unspeakable couple had perceived him, and was already galloping away, to distance themselves from his anger. Sagax, the Trismegistus, knew panic in confrontation with the Evil that was swaggering before him.

  He had brought three generations into the world, and now self-doubt was eating away at the springs of his energy like an acid, slyly cutting his hamstrings. His Science was the mother that ought only to engender flawless human beings. If he made another mistake, would his fellows not cry out to his face that it was oozing imposture? Would his Sacerdocy not be taken away from him?

  Sagax had upon his forehead the pallor of a Superhuman who had observed, once again, that there is no peace on the summits.

  Chapter II

  Sagax had crossed the threshold of the Machine Quarter. Before him, as far as the eye could see, a furry multitude was gleaming—and when he appeared, a continuous roar of joy unfurled. To the right and the left, he saw the human mass draw back in order to make way for him, and thousands upon thousands of arms spontaneously shot up, striping the view with vertical streaks. Every hand raised above a head was clad in a kind of iron gauntlet, suddenly frothing with a foam of blue sparks. And now, all of a sudden, the crowd left the ground, breathed in by the vast harsh blue sky, effortlessly hoisted at least thirty meters above the ground. Abruptly, it broke up, splitting into parallel lines that glided in an easterly direction. The Prefected were treading on air as if it were a unified and resistant floor. Their pace soon accelerated, but there was no confusion or collisions.

  A few virtuosos seemed to be paddling with their palms, moving without apparent difficulty as if they were being carried away by canoes on an invisible river. Many were content to run at a dreamlike velocity, doubtless shod in seven-league boots. Produced by the magnetism of the pole, which had been displaced, captured and therefore utilized at will, aerial fluid currents carried them all along like mere feathers, making entire groups fly like the down of a bird. In less than two minutes, they all disappeared, swallowed up by a colossal mouth, a verdant maw that opened in the distance like a green stain near the horizon.

  A platinum chariot drawn by two automatic unicorns—unicorns of steel—had stopped in front of the Creator of Humans, and a strange squadron was waiting to precede it. A hundred and twenty cavaliers, arranged in a column, riding bareback without stirrups, mounted on similarly automatic bearded horses resembling wild asses. In response to the raised arm of the leader—a poet who, standing on tiptoe, perforated the distance on his whinnying Pegasus—the escort moved off and took to the gallop on the broad triumphal highway.

  Four platoons, by virtue of skilled maneuvers, surged backwards, performing carousel figures like the sails of a windmill, forming an entire equestrian mosaic, capriciously variegated, steeling into the rearguard of the procession. Equerries with taut reins served as flank-guards, and, in their patrician attitudes, hostile to idle gesticulations, outlining the cameos of their profiles against the feverish azure of the weary sky. All of them were intensely furry, and the pale or dark, bronzed or amethyst pelts, impeccable smooth, momentarily uncovered the fresh redness of a male teat, the placid sex-organ of a redoubtable athlete, a purely-modeled torso.

  The wind of their progress stirred gentle waves, iridescent eddies and persistent sparkles in the natural fleeces, making long tresses fly like perfumed plumes and odorous sails. The air became sticky with a musky scent of human flesh, a thick reek of fresh hyacinths emitted by he transpiration of the epidermis—for the human animal had
lost its atrocious odor since it was no longer nourished on dead flesh. Like a cloud, the cavalcade galloped soundlessly over the elastic ground, beneath the rubber-shod soles of its chargers.

  Preceded by a flock of domesticated pink flamingoes, Sagax once again saluted the genius of his colleague Mathesis, the Prefect of Machines. It was the latter who had invented the automatic horses to amuse the Perfected, since it is human nature to be unable to live without baubles.

  Mathesis had got the idea the day after two unusual mechanisms had been discovered buried in the ground, inextricably entangled: two flying machines perhaps dating from four thousand years earlier. Both of them had been ballasted by a multitude of little steel spheres that contained a white powder whose explosive power had remained formidable. Hundreds of little asbestos tubes had also been discovered, in a small box, which, after patient analysis, Sagax had found to contain cultures of the plague and cholera, scourges that had now disappeared.

  The frightful mid-air collision must have spared the lives of the aviators, doubtless enemies; they had continued fighting as they fell. Two skeletons had been extracted from the overlapping frameworks. The larger one’s jaws had been so profoundly sunk into the other’s humerus that it had been necessary to break the teeth to free it. Beside the other a steel rod had been found baring the inscription Albatros-237 Squadron R.13

  At that memory, Sagax shivered, and formed the conjecture that ancient mortals, not daring to destroy one another before the eyes of their fellows, had done everything possible to devour one another in the air. They had wanted to pollute virgin Space! They had given their ferocity the wings of the royal eagle! Thus, from the Zenith, a rain of blood had fallen upon those who were still smiling at the bounty of the light!

  The two kilometers of the Sacred Way had been crossed in a hundred and thirty seconds by the strange machine that bore the Creator of Humans. The pink flamingoes that surrounded him with an auroral halo, and which, with necks extended, stuck out their heads like a rigid flight of vermilion arrows, seemed to be a symbol, something akin to the quivering streaks of the dawn piercing the shadows of the night. A spark crackled in the Porphyrogenete’s pupils, and the savorous vision unfurled in his eyes of the City, in the artery of which he was rolling like a globule of intelligence. One by one, the Phalansteries14 with their transparent alveoli had filed past during his course, falling behind, offering their walls of glass, their roofs with tiles of veritable ruby, their emerald porches, their chrysoberyl vaults, their caryatids carved in a single block from gigantic pearls, supporting wrought-sapphire balconies. The sun, seconded by artificial light, and drawn a wild flamboyance from them, extracting flashes from the precious stones that riddled the sky with colored javelins, assegais in mauve, scarlet, bright blue and peacock green. There, side by side, without there being anything to hide their existence, people lived in peaceful fraternity.

  Speckled in its turn by luminous splashes, dotted with sparks and galloping to the accompaniment of a low rumble of the snorts and whinnies of its automatic onagers, the procession scented the arrival of perfumed breath of the prestigious Park, the great balsamic breath of the terrestrial Eldorado and Valhalla.

  Along the five hundred steps, a colonnade of cyclopean topazes preceded it. With that exceptional garden, an unprecedented Eden of flowers and trees, human esthetics had returned to its point of departure, to puerile babbling, to the bucolic affections of the earliest societies, to the pearl-encrusted innocence with which all poets had attributed to the kiss of Nature—which, beneath the feigned candor of Aprils, the virginal timidity of springs, the sumptuous prodigality of summers and all its sham benevolence, whatever they might have thought, concealed a soul insensible to the fate of human beings.

  A population of rural perfumes in which, here and there, pranced the aristocratic scents of flower-beds, was precipitated toward Sagax—and although it was familiar, he was intoxicated, once again, by the great cantata of the Solstice, and opened his heart to its quivering allegro. It was, in fact, the day of the modern Erotidies, the august day on which Sagax, brandishing in the russet flames of the valetudinarian Sun the red bottle of which he was himself the son, armed with the golden syringe—Sagax, the Creator of Humans—was to fecundate the Reproductress Formosa.

  Greeted by a swell of cheers, a formidable din of cries of delight, launched toward it from the remotest depths, Sagax’s chariot, with its escort, now plunged at a more moderate pace into the bosom of the tangible Empyrean.

  Ten thousand people were there, preparing to celebrate the Festivals of Life. The cheers grew louder and louder at the approach of the bearer of the Sacred Fire; matched echoes generated in mid-air returned packages of enthusiastic clamors to the racket, and in the marvelous acoustics organized by human artistry, invisible cliffs made the bouncing balls of frantic hurrahs fly back and forth, as if from hand to hand.

  Stung by bravos, whipped by popular delirium, a frisson ran along the spine of the cortege, throwing it, along with the Grand Physiologist, into a limitless circus, with slopes carpeted with forests, lawns, orchards and gardens, throwing it like a captive snake into an odorous flower-bed in an immense perfumed bowl, making it snake over the slopes of a necklace of mountains, clasped here and there by the intentional jewel of an adamantine glacier. For the rite that Sagax had inaugurated, twenty years before, specified that the Superhuman, who was about to create a being of genius, should approach his lips to the lips of Summer, receive in his face the breath of the exaltation and warm ardor of the artificial June, of which human industry, in spite of everything, ensured the return and regulated the triumph.

  In front of Sagax, as far as the eye could see, was a fleece of foliage and flowers, a sort of verdant tidal wave that was hurling itself beyond the rivers, ponds and lakes to inundate the background. Tranquil waves, undulations of foliage, rippled imprecisely and faded into the distance, and suddenly, higher waves, waves of the depths, emerging from impenetrable forests, launched forth toward the sky, as if they wanted to lick the sun, resuscitating with sly caresses its ancient, debilitated strut. And it required nothing less than the undulating flows, the discharges of light that Mathesis’ machines propelled indefatigably into the sky, to recall them to reality, to make them understand the inanity of their enterprise, how presumptuous it was for them to aspire to reinvigorate the syphilitic star that no longer shed any but ridiculous clarities and derisory calories.

  Sagax’s escort plunged like a javelin into the heart of wood that opened up before it. The land, irrigated with heat by profound channels of warm air, had been saved from disaster by human expediency.

  In that place, the birches, clad in silver, corseted in the armor of the white knights of old, were dressed in candor amid the ardent forest propagated by the aphrodisiac breath of its perpetual fecundity. The acacias and the laburnums there burned the incense of their gleanings and slowly shook their crowns like ritual censers. The plane-trees, whose trunks separated into five stocks, came to pay reverence to those opposite, roofing the road with a leafy arcade from which feathers fell, extracted by excessively vivid passions from nests. The lindens, coiffed with thick fleeces into which the combs of the north wind had never bitten, perfumers inspired by summer nights, dispersed enamored breath that caused the red deep to bell more loudly in the depths of the thickets and swooning insects to rain down.

  Carobs with trunks cut into by twenty read gashes appeared, like giants stabbed in the course of some fabulous duel, while green and patient mosses, varnished and helpful ivy quit their feet and hastened toward them as if to bandage their bloody wounds. Tall, tremulous sylvan barons, enormous oaks extended their hundred arms, taking the vicinity under their aegis, arranging their tributary vassals around them. Sophoras menacing the ground with their giant branches, which crawled through the air, writhing like fabulous pythons and boas, while the wind drew prolonged hisses from them. And, like a disreputable troop living apart, somber larches with maleficent gleams were reminiscent of a h
orde of korrigans greeting the moon at midnight on a pustulent and lethiferous heath, on which toads croaked in dull distress.

  Now, however, the cortege responded to the invitation of the unfurling meadows and the velvet that spring patiently weaves. Intoxicated by the balsamic scents that the environment dispensed from its flesh and spirit like a philter, Sagax, with his emotional heart and artistic soul, allowed his gaze to plunge into the distant depths, while the harmonies of the gold of enthusiasm played in his being. The meadows offered themselves, hemmed by lines of willows, circled by pollarded and stropiate trees: a swarm of gnomes with twisted dorsal spines and excessive heads crowned by sparse tresses of graying foliage.

  The Creator of Humans leaned over. Beneath the wheels of his chariot, the living path filled out, its fabric thick with herbage. He perceived multitudes of daisies and cornflowers: all those floral plebeians that crowd together in compact cohorts. He discovered buttercups, seemingly tinkling like little bells of yellow metal, emitting the angelus that brings hope, sounding the end of the day’s labor to minuscule familisteries, the equitable cities of the glebe and the sward: the ants, also living by the laws of communal harmony.

  Nearby, the queens of the meadows raised up dentellate bells, where crickets sing at lecterns, where ladybirds, godly creatures, took flight in the fashion of the cloistered nuns who, in the ages of unconsciousness, devoted themselves to the service of unreal fetishes. Hostile to all discipline and seditious by nature, poppies with barbaric petals, which the wind models into Phrygian bonnets, dispersed like lost children, and suddenly came together in, leading assaults on fields of wild wheat defended by grilles of wild oats.