Love in 5000 Years Page 6

  What remained of the inhabited world seemed to be illuminated like a viscous hovel—and a sacred panic gripped living beings, caused humans to cry out in distress, and beat the drum of discord for the funeral march of the obsequies of Hope. In wrathful nudity, a purulent Sun, corroded by a cancerous shadow, seemed ready to collapse, to faint in the lap of the meager clouds that extended toward it like the arms of nurses.

  Conscious of the formidable event that had just taken place, with the Woman vibrant in her flesh, Carminus,17 the chief poet of the escort, standing on the porphyry table in the place from which Formosa too had fled, insulted the Source of Causes, hurling an anathema at the Sun.

  “Presumptuous Sun. you have said to us: ‘I am the Father of the caresses of light, the counsels of the superb, the embraces of ardor; and I have ornamented with the carpet of my rays, the diaphanous veils of my auroras, the fuming redness of my settings, the dwelling of the sons of my spiritual love. The burning pollen ejaculated by my vigor had fecundated the matrix of the Void—and behold: I, the Satrap of the Absolute, have made seven children, seven planets docile to my companion, Space.

  “‘The Distances quiver and swoon at my slightest touch, and when I shake my blazing mane, the alcove of the Cosmos is too small to restrain the agitations of Matter that engross my quotidian stupors.

  “‘I have created Life by means of the stormy stamp of my kisses and the spasm of my viscera of flame. I have devoured the black entrails of Chaos; I have eaten the face of Disorder in order to give rise to Harmony and Equilibrium, to permit them to cradle the Universe in their soothing arms.

  “‘I am the minister of Rhythm, the Alchemist of promissory joys, the Architect of Number, the Disparager of the Inanimate, the Tutor of Gravitation, the Pivot of Movement, the Progenitor of Infinity. And when I set, weary of the magnanimous labor that has enabled me to inseminate the field of Space and blue with azure the mirror of the Ether, Night, impure daughter of the first coupling of the World with Confusion, Night, intermediary and procuress, Night, the sole enemy that I have been unable to vanquish, comes to prowl around you, shaking the anguish of which her skirts are full...

  “‘But, indulgent and vigilant, I return every day to prevent the sly grip of Darkness stifling the globe that I have engendered. And then, bewildered and never sated by my magnificence, you look at me, you children of the Earth, gorging your eyes on the splendor of my Face, and I parade the Sublime once again at all the crossroads of Immensity. You are my vile worshipers, my invisible slaves, the insects swarming around my fever, and that is why I have pity on your distress and your debility. I have searched my furnace pockets; I have thrown you alms of industry, a gratuity of science, on which you have thrown yourselves as hungry and shivering serfs. Ridiculous plagiarists, you have imitated me from afar; you have innovated the arts of fire, the metallurgical trades—and it is since that day that you go less naked, sometimes feeding your hunger, and pushing plows that you have snatched from my commiseration...’

  “Hyperion, Fabulous tyrant of Space, Emphatic Sun, you are a liar!

  “Before you, Confusion, Nonexistence, Nothingness, the swollen Ovaries of an undeflowered World, set up in sterile clusters the embryos of Suffering, the seeds of Disease, the germs of Crime that were already appealing to you, monstrous Fornicator. Over the torpid Nothing watched the virginal Night, which, with her complaint of silence, enchanted the sleep of the Great All. You came and, in consequence, Hysteria leapt upon the throat of the Universe, breathed unreason into its larynx, which spat out granulations of planets. You cried: ‘I am the Potentate of Equilibrium, the Autocrat of Harmony’—but you gave birth to nothing but Disorder and Anarchy.

  “At your voice, dolor acquired the gift of ubiquity and the vitriol of tears commenced to etch the cheeks of the multitudes who implored the sniggering sky. At your sight, deception deployed its iridescent wings and, like a butterfly, launched itself toward your astral combustion, only to fall back upon us. You caused the bosom of Putrescence to beat more powerfully than the heart of Justice. A flux of imposture streamed from your ardent diadem, for your stupid crest, to make us believe, for twenty thousand years, in the possible triumph of Equity.

  “According to the whim of your humor, according to your caprice as Corporal of the stellar vaults, you dispensed Health, Beauty, Strength and Intelligence without ever taking account of Justice. At Sunrise as at Sunset, your boutique of apotheoses, your bric-à-brac of pomps, was always open for the stronger and new for the more worthy. You lent your light to all the monsters and comforted all the blackguards with your indifference. You, whose breath could have desiccated everything, whose flamboyant Action could have ordered everything according to Good and Truth, allowed Conquerors to slaughter races, disemboweling palpitating Humankind with their Ambition.

  “However, you had only to veil your face, to hide your light, to render forever impossible the inexplicable crimes that, throughout the ages, have terrified the planet, your daughter.

  “But you sniggered from the height of your Zenith, to see your will swell the teats of the Earth with poisoned milk; you delighted in the spectacle of people stumbling in the dungeons of ignorance, in the ditches of Barbarism, without ever being able to attain the happy shores of Truth and Pacification.

  “The human past has been known to us since yesterday, and that is why I am confronting and insulting you. If my audacity offends you, strike me down with your ultimate and sordid rays, for you execrate everything that is pure, and are pleased by nothing but decomposition. Nuptial lamp that, since the origin of ages, has lit the espousals of the Indecent and the Unjust! Pregnant with iniquities, your womb, swollen with fulgurations, has only ever known the intrusions of Maleficence! Whomsoever, down here, has generous dreams; whomsoever manifests a proud heart and a free spirit, lives harnessed by you to the panegyric of the Ignoble. To the tail of your stallions plumed with lightning, you attach all the noble beings who clamor for the Absolute, and they perish, dragged by your quadrigas of derision across the desert plains of Impotence.

  “Upstart of Gravitation, Plebeian of the Cosmos, you strut with a boorish pride and do not see the anguish that lies at your feet. Imbecile luminary, licking your lips before Atrocities, you have overpopulated your domains by abusively multiplying mortals; you have made your creatures gather harvest of distress, and, as wages, you have thrown them nothing but your own vainglory. Bankrupter of Hope, Defaulter of Comfort, Forger of Pity, one of your rivals, weary of your bluster, slapped your face one evening in some evil corner of Infinity, and now you are agonizing in the pus of your last ignitions, too cowardly to fight on, to fetid to move us to pity!”

  Carminus quit the altar, and leapt astride his automatic Pegasus, which lacerated the air ahead, carrying away the Blasphemer, whose gestures were still menacing.

  Down below, beneath the cold caress of the atmosphere, the paradisal landscape was slowly frosting over. The valleys were paling, covering themselves with an icy epidermis, the trees sheathing themselves in opalescent carapaces, and mucosities of stalactites were already hanging from the beards of sloping forests. A wan fear fell from the sky, which disgorged a flux of anger and detestation.

  Standing in the middle of the circle, ten thousand people shivered in an undulation of shoulders, an omnicolored frisson of fleecy torsos. Their arms raised, their mouth vociferating, they too insulted the senile star, which, after having sent them life, had resigned its employment, abandoning them on their wreck as the World foundered...

  Chapter III

  At seven o’clock the previous evening, Mathesis had, fortunately, activated the Machines again. The peril thus averted, the frosts had only been a brief episode for the last humans—an unusual phenomenon about which they were now ecstatic. A painter and engraver of windows, winter had, to everyone’s astonishment and admiration, designed a water-color of frost, decorated the pale faces of windows with festoons of exceptional flowers by means of a chisel of ice. Hard thistles with tormente
d thorns, volute irises, dahlias with heavy necklaces, lanceolate ferns—the entire jewelry of abolished December—had soon melted under the breath of the Perfected, glued by curiosity to the glass façades of their transparent Phalansteries. And the unexpected spectacle would, for many weeks to come, be the subject of the puerile conversation of Neuters, reverted to the innocence of the cradle.

  Getting up before anyone else, Sagax had rushed to the Saturator. In great haste he had increased the discharges of the special gas that, mixed with the atmosphere, rendered the citizens benevolent, intensifying their love of their neighbors. Knowing that only the certainty of joy and wellbeing brings peace, and that uncertainty regarding the future and unjust suffering transform previously sociable bipeds into ferocious beasts, is a rudiment of psychology—and he feared that the crisis of fear, the fit of terror suffered in common twelve hours earlier, might awaken spite, and even cruelty, among the inhabitants of the Gem-City.

  Once that action had been carried out he had returned to his laboratory and devoted himself to other tasks. He had fecundated a hundred and five women. A further twenty still remained to be impregnated. Without assistance, he worked for more than three hours, moistening with vulgar liquors the batch that was to procreate individuals without special attributes, the host whose sole preoccupation would consist of allowing themselves to live.

  In nine months, that operation would yield, without any wastage, twenty-five children of the female sex and a hundred of the male sex—for the number of male always had to be quadruple that of females. Sagax had prepared his bottles himself, had arranged them in series, utilizing them as he went along in order to obtain, at will, brown-haired, chestnut-haired, violet-haired and blond-haired individuals, with assorted eyes-color, individuals or tall or moderate height, according to the requirements of the moment, which were indicated by a small table placed in front of him.

  None of the Reproductresses had shown any emotion similar to the one that Formosa had manifested during the Festival of Life. Some morbid cause must have made the latter descend to the animal level and inflicted her with physiological reactions similar to those of unpretentious mammals. Yes, but what was that cause? That was what Sagax was seeking in vain—and he would surely not extract that new problem from the unknown today, for he had scarcely formulated it.

  He had spent a frightful night, during which his brain had never ceased to unfurl a multitude of baroque dreams, emollient visions that had left his limbs numb and his head aching, as if after an excess of lard labor.

  Anxious, as soon as he was out of bed, he had hastened to measure on the Biometer the energy of his cells, his organic resistance, in relation to that of previous days. Diligently, the apparatus had notified him that he had aged by two years in less than forty-eight hours. As soon as he had some leisure time it would be necessary for him to repair that physical loss with a substance that he had concocted, which had the property of delaying human decrepitude until after the second century of existence.

  No matter how hard he applied himself, it was difficult for him to work. Without knowing why, although he needed all of his self-composure, he would have liked to let his mind run the risks of adventure in the vast pampas of fantasy. A blissful and slightly morose laxity weighed him down; bizarre tickling sensations ran through his thoughts, and an inebriate enthusiasm made stifled arpeggios audible in his heart.

  It was not, however, his present labor that could have excited him in that fashion without him being aware of it. He did it every two years at the same time, and, for more than ten lustrums, that aspect of his Sacerdocy had no longer had any capacity, so far as he was concerned, to foment any effervescence whatsoever. On the other hand, he formulated his own ideas with a quest for precious expressions, a sugaring of sweet epithets, and when his voice sounded internally in his ears, it seemed to him to be steeped in a syrup of amenity that could not, he thought, fail to ensnare Formosa at the first opportunity.

  He was even on the point of infringing the domain of the poet Carminus, of weighing his syllables in the dosimetric balance—of making verses, in a word—to better welcome the auroras that were dawning in his being. If he dredged his brain methodically, he drew out the clearest impressions. The memory of the physical particularities of Formosa was inscribed therein in brilliant images, encrusted in luminous intaglios. He could still see the Woman, whose changing eyes were speckled with lapis, whose amber fleece swayed ardent emanations, whose blue-veined breasts were like two inverted onyx cups—and he thought he was going mad when, mechanically, he looked at his fingers, because delightful contacts still seemed to remain there, merely by virtue having brushed, the previous day, the fresh pulp, the epidermis, whiter than alburnum, of the Reproductress.

  Suddenly, he shook himself in order to rid himself of the unhealthy suggestion, to collect his truant thoughts and get back to work.

  At hazard, his gaze requisitioned one of the twenty women not yet fructified. She, very serious, lay down on the marble table, slid a gutta-percha sheet under her hips, abruptly tipped back her head, which plunged into the incandescent embers of her coppery tresses, and offered her russet belly, over which ran satined gleams as pure as eider-down. Sterilized, the syringe soon arrived, directed by Sagax’s sure hand, passed through the orifice hidden by a tuft of mossy silk the color of onion-skin, then plunged slowly and, with a piston-stroke, ejaculated life. An athlete was created.

  Wadded with cotton-wool, the genitrix then prepared to be examined—but in that one as in the others, the Grand Physiologist did not find any anomaly. All of them had been subjected, at the moment of puberty, to the ablation of the little mound of sensitivity, and the profound fibers innervating the intimate channel had been desiccated by an ardent fluid. That was an operation commanded by the good order and perfect equilibrium of the general economy, and which ought to have been compulsory since the appearance of the first man and woman on Earth—like, for example, the section of the umbilical cord. Of that Sagax could have no doubt.

  Formosa having been similarly treated, it would have been futile to summon her in order to carry out anatomical investigations that would certainly not have revealed anything. Even if, in fact, she had not been neutralized, her epidermal enchantment, at the moment of fertilization, would have been no more explicable, for the human race had never been able, in that matter, to behave like cattle or cats, to name but two.

  The fact continued to be as disconcerting as if Formosa had been caught digesting her nourishment in the fashion of a heifer with four stomachs. However, at the idea that he might once again palpate the rounded flanks and sacred parts of the Reproductress—merely at that evocation—a sensation of horror mingled with a foretaste of extreme delight welled up in Sagax.

  No, no—he must never see her again!

  And he recoiled, impulsively, surprised that the exercise of his duty could now give rise to impressions so unexpected, and of such a disconcerting kind.

  For another hour, having taken off the toga that hindered his movements in the increasing fatigue of his limbs, the Grand Physiologist inseminated the women who were patiently awaiting their turn. Sweat was now beading on his thorax, which the privileged patrician of Knowledge permitted himself to maintain fur-free, like Reproductresses and his colleagues in Wisdom. When the last of them had been sent away, a powerful sentiment galvanized him. Similar to the joys that Nature might taste when she has just successfully brought about one of her formidable parturitions, a supreme felicity straightened the curvature of his spine and relaxed his overworked back.

  Consecutively, in a paradoxical manner and with a teasing itch, the memory of Formosa solicited his thoughts once again. Why was the golden coiffure of her hair so enticing? Why should he want to feel the breasts that he had seen vibrate the day before quivering in his hands? To what constant hallucination had he fallen prey, that the lazuli-speckled irises should dance in his memory like the reflection of a star in rippling water? Never had such an emotion excited by the e
xterior of another person, so far as he knew, been introduced into a human heart—including, for very good reason, his own. Had he ever been tenderized by the repercussion in his intellect by the grace of a titmouse or the massive serenity of a ruminant’s rump?

  The phenomenon was, however, of the same order. Beauty was found in objects, animals and superior beings, and thus far, no one had mistrusted it, or had suspected it to be capable of such blackness. Now it was sowing the seeds of unreason in the brain of the most illustrious of the Perfected!

  Sagax was almost going crazy. The fine mesh of his lucidity was impotent to retain sensations as fleeting, in order to pass them on to the touchstone of peremptory psychology.

  The day before, Mathesis had been obliged to excuse him before the multitude, and the explanation the latter had furnished with regard to the monster and the idiot seemed, after meditation, to be a trifle specious. Had he told the truth—the whole truth?

  Surely, something unprecedented had been introduced into the world, and his investigation could not find its formula. Was he to wander like that, endlessly, in the tenebrous arcane of the Impenetrable? Today, as on the preceding days, would the Mystery hide its face in opaque darkness, only to fill his ears with the sound of derisive laughter? Since his faculties were declining in parallel, he had only to let himself age. Once again, the internal bleeding of doubt emptied his arteries, distended his nerves, which were suspended within his muscles like limp threads. Without restraint, he drank the bitterness of discouragement.

  Let sleep come, and the forgetfulness of all rancor!

  Sagax lay down on the ground, turned a handle that, as it turned, made a noise like tearing cloth, and soon found himself lifted up by a fluid, three feet from the floor. For a long time the Neuters had slept like that, supported without contact and lying on an invisible mattress of magnetism, on a base of effluvia that bathed the with invigorating waves, sterilizing their fleeces and massaging their fatigued limbs.