“Yes, she is a virgin pure in blood, race, muscle, nerve and thought! The most primitive virgin, the one closest to nature, that exists—the one whom circumstances have even exaggerated; who, instead of weakening beneath the solvent frictions of life, has been astonishingly exalted thereby, who has become in consequence a kind of sectarian of chastity and the ideal!
“She has, in brief, a temperament essentially different from that of my subjects. She is the Ultra-Virgin! And that’s why the contest with her tempts me. That’s why I want to see what results all my fluids and sortileges will produce, when I have thrown them into the crucible of her sensibility, as you put it.
“Well, philosopher, know this: she is the one who will be vanquished! Within two months, I want her to be trailing at my feet, caught by my enjoyments, a slave to my social triumph! I want her nerves to admit the happiness that the Epicureanism unanimous in Eucrasia provides. I want her to obey, like the others, the keyboard that I touch in secret, and no longer to think of returning to liberate the Red Land.”
“And how will you know that she is in that mental disposition, and that she retains nothing of her initial ideal?”
“I have several means,” the Superman replied, calmly. “For one thing, I have my Thought-reader, but that’s an unreliable method. I made the mistake of leaving him too many cerebral pigeon-holes...I need to improve him. But here’s something else...”
He slid his hand into his doublet and took out a little instrument made up of three parts: two contacts connected by wires to a central dial. He unrolled the wires and showed it to the astonished philosopher.
“This is my most recent invention. It’s a psychometer, which infallibly reveals to me the degree of bliss in each of my creatures. In other words, it’s sufficient for me to look at the needle on this dial, which can oscillate between zero and a hundred, to know exactly to what point the spirit of enjoyment has taken possession of my subject—and, in consequence, to exactly what point I have vanquished the nature that creates afflictions therein. The needle ought to indicate a hundred, the culminating point. A hundred: that’s the designation of my omnipotence, the absolute of happiness. Yes, Miss Mary, who presently indicates zero, I shall raise to a hundred, and in a short period of time.”
While speaking, he had placed the two contacts on Choumaque’s temples, and, with his aged eyes, he followed the palpitations of the indicative steam.
“As for you, philosopher, I have good reason to think that you haven’t been able to resist. This psychological compass indicates that you’re already rising. You’re at forty-five! But the fact of having told you has brought you back to twenty. Will you please refrain from recoiling? Imbecile! Since I’ve told you that happiness is a hundred!”
Involuntarily, Choumaque had started and pushed the apparatus away. Caresco calmly rewound the wires around the dial and replaced the device in his doublet. His flushed face radiated an immense contentment.
“That’s marvelous,” Choumaque admitted, “but Superman, what proof is there that your apparatus measures real happiness? For enjoyment, I repeat, is not being happy! To be happy is to feel good fortune by comparison with ill fortune.”
That question obtained no response. The Superman had suddenly disappeared, with a pirouette.
The philosopher experienced some disquiet at such an abrupt retreat. Then, as the serum had not lost its influence, he thought about Philoxénie again.
CHAPTER X
The next few days were employed, for the neophytes, in familiarizing themselves with the new life. Although they found themselves in a country where nothing lent itself to anxiety, where all exigencies and instincts were satisfied with the same simplicity as soon as one desired their realization, it was still necessary for them to adapt themselves to the use of those facilities and to lose the habit of complicating their existence, as they had become accustomed to doing in the Old World.
Choumaque and Marcel had to continue, for some time yet, to live in the sumptuous and deserted caravanserai into which they had been introduced on arrival. The law dictated that they would not live with the privileged indigenes until later, when their initiation was already well under way.
Marjah and Mirror-of-Smiles had been given the mission of edifying them. They accepted the responsibility with the kind of fatalistic complaisance that was the most curious characteristic of their gilded slavery. Every morning, they appeared successively in the apartments of the professor and his pupil. While the machines performed their functions, washing, combing, brushing and perfuming the neophytes, presenting them with their nourishment and collecting its modest superfluity, improved phonographs brought them news of the entire world; cinematographs, animated with a surprising reality, retraced before their eyes the scenes of contemporary history, detailing the scorned efforts of other countries.
A combination of the two devices even transported them to the Comédie or the Opéra, to watch the greatest actors of the epoch. Marjah was astonished that they delighted in that so much, for the rest of the people, concentrated in their particular tastes, were entirely uninterested in it. He told them that those futile curiosities would soon pass, having observed that people are only passionately interested in events susceptible of affecting them and causing upsets in their joy or sadness.
“Later, Messieurs,” he said, “you’ll no longer think of worrying about matters as trivial as a revolution in Kamchatka or the catastrophe caused by the opening of a crater in the heart of Peking”—the two principal news items of the day—“because you’ll no longer have any need, knowing that the Superman wards off all dangers and that nothing bad can happen to you. Occupy yourselves, therefore, with taking pleasure, and nothing but pleasure!”
At these words, Mirror-of-Smiles, obedient to the prescriptions of his employment, ventured an inviting wink, but his offer remained futile. He was beginning to find that disdain surprising.
“But if you don’t savor those curiosities,” Choumaque objected to Marjah, “What do you admit? Yes, tell me, what do you like?”
“Everything! I like everything!”
“That’s it. You like everything, so you like nothing,” Choumaque concluded, faithful to his doctrine.
After dressing, in costumes of uniform hue—violet for Choumaque, orange for Marcel—of a remarkable luxury, richness and elegance, the neophytes absorbed their meal, consisting of a minuscule ball of complete aliment. That ingurgitation flattered their palettes with unprecedented tastes. Their stomachs experienced the pleasures of an easy digestion and copious sensation. Thus ballasted, they went out to visit to the four corners of the island. The pneumatic tubes transported them with lightning rapidity.
Always escorted by their guides, they went through magnificent halls disposed in the form of a lyre, in which the sweetest harmonies were produced on the most perfect instruments by the most beautiful performers. They ventured on foot along the four peninsulas, disposed like human limbs, which, projecting far out to sea, contained the palaces of families installed with the same luxury of commodities, the same fantastic richness of décor and the same superb gardens.
In the regions of the Thorax, the great Woods of Respiration, impregnated with vivifying scents, were animated every day by the games of the crowd. They found all the classes of society there, distinguishable only by their costumes, united in an edifying amorous fraternity. Sterile husbands, clad in red, wore long beards curling over the chest, and their muscles, perceptible under their leotards, had not been softened by maturity. They accompanied their virtual families: fecund mothers with pretty gilded torsades, whose blue tunics covered slender abdomens, emerged undamaged from frequent trials of maternity; joyful and healthy adolescent males in their emerald green doublets; adolescent virgins attractively curvaceous in their pale pink peplums, which they took off to wrestle. Small children were also frolicking in the open air, attempting their first flights with the aid of exceedingly light wings attached to an omnial apparatus.
All those
people, all that variety, all that ostentation—the ostentation of Israel, Choumaque had observed, thinking about Caresco’s Semitic origin—gentle on the eyes, iridescent and radiant, was animated, playing dancing, capering, placing rapid arrows in the taut string of bows, rolling balls along the flat ground, briskly catching knucklebones, or, calming down, allowing music to rise from the strings of harps, flutes and sistrums, mingled with pure voices, in order, later, to savor collations of candies, pastilles, fruits and sparkling wines.
Other members of the community sometimes mingled with their pleasures. There were gitons, clad in yellow tunics embroidered with the symbolic stripe, transformed into a cross by a second stripe when it ornamented the front of a slave. There were courtesans, languid in their mauve robes striped with red, which stripe was complicated by a perpendicular stripe for maidservants. There were also scientists, engineers and artists, freshly released from their labors, coming to add the serious note of their violet apparel to the polychromatic concert.
All of them, equals with regard to one another, fraternized and accorded themselves the trivial privacies of amour. Choumaque and Marcel saw the fathers of families drawing courtesans toward nearby arbors, under the complacent gazes of their wives. The latter did not repel the advances of young adolescents, and their husbands did not seem to want to punish that audacity.
When the neophytes expressed their astonishment, Marjah said: “What is more natural? Everyone’s bodies are everyone’s. The pleasures that each can offer belong to the generality. Are we not emanations of life, gifts of nature like air and light? Would you deprive someone of respiration, or bathing in the warmth of the sun?”
“It’s a strange altruism, which must constitute very curious hearths,” Choumaque objected, speaking aside.
They withdrew waiting until later to familiarize themselves entirely with that implausible social organization. Marjah promised them other surprises.
The next day, they visited the Heart. There, fluids were manufactured, automatically, almost without the aid of human labor. That excursion was prodigiously interesting for Marcel. He took pleasure in seeing the immense gears moved by wheels with a radius of two hundred meters, capturing the natural forces of the earth, the air, the sea and the stars and transforming them, by means of chemical reactions, into the unique substance named Omnium, the essence of all energies, able to become at will light, electricity, air, water, vapor, matter and fluids of every sort.
All of that was agitating silently, rhythmically, accomplishing formidable tasks within the shelter of high walls, in a paroxysm of labor. From an armored basin in which all the services were concentrated, enormous subterranean conduits departed, ramifying innately, to every diverticulum of the island, every branch of every individual house, distributing, on command, cold, heat, lighting, water, nourishment, perfumes, repose and activity. A single engineer sufficed to supervise these divisions; it was sufficient for him to press a button for the slightest arteries to be impregnated and saturated by them.
Then there were the palaces of the Stomach and the Liver, where the materials of subsistence were elaborated. In reality, people rarely ate, all hygienic nourishment being provided by the balls of complete aliment, but the most delicate pastries and confections were abundantly distributed. In addition, certain festivals were celebrated—those of the Brain, Omnium, Fecundity, Sterility, Eucrasia and Life—recurring on determined dates, during which there were bacchanals that permitted pleasures of the table in the fashion of the old world, but more refined and devoid of any animal substance.
These palaces, admirably organized and designed, obeyed mechanical genius with as much fidelity as the factories of the Heart. In the great kitchen-garden of the Liver, adjacent to the bagpipe of the Stomach, vegetables were cultivated intensively, from which organic juices were extracted in order to be mixed with the substances of the complete aliment.
All the detritus of the island, human ordure and liquid excreta and the wastes of machines were taken to the Renal and Intestinal regions, where, after being subjected to a chemical triage that conserved and dried the fractions still utilizable, they were dumped far out at sea, to be carried away by dirty currents. Thus Hygiene removed from the people all the harmful by-products of nature, as conclusively as the explosive devices protected them from human malevolence.
Marjah then took them to visit the Palace of Public Fortune, inhabited by the Chief Representative Zadochbach. They were able to go in as they liked, for, peculation being non-existent, no special prohibition forbade entrance to it. They considered colossal fortunes there, in the form of papers that, if realized, would have been equal in value to the mountains of gold, which had no significance for the islanders. However, Zadochbach plunged his earthy face toward them gladly, and palpitated them lovingly.
The arena where Choumaque was soon to speak in public was adjacent to the Palace of Fortune, so they extended their stroll to it. The philosopher admired the open-air amphitheater, and the adorable panorama of verdant stages framing it. He promised himself beautiful phrases, in order to edify the women with the flavorsome flesh.
A little later, Marcel boarded the ironclad of which he had been given command. He recognized, not without astonishment, one of the units of the French mobile defense, which was said to have disappeared during a hurricane. The vessel was moored not far from the Mount of Venus, whose high summit was lost in the snows, enigmatic, wild and eternally icy.
What was to interest them even more than these various aspects of the island, however, was the region specially reserved for amour. Marjah promised them that they would not have to wait long to visit it.
CHAPTER XI
From inside, Carabella drew aside the large curtain of red velvet, embroidered with gold, that closed her dwelling in the Courtesans’ quarter. Her unfastened peplum, falling away from the globular splendor of her right breast, the scatter of her loosened brown hair extending to her waist, where geranium petals were mingled with it, and a residue of languorous ecstasy that continued to shiver in her dark eyes behind the silk of her long lashes, all revealed that she was emerging from pleasure. The three people to whom she granted passage, Golden-Gaze and his wife Veloutine, and Philoxénie, the lover of strangers, confirmed that she had not been partaking of it alone.
“Adieu, dear Carabella, tamer of our loins, hospitaller of our frenzies! We have spent moments with you that count among the most exquisite. Adieu!”
All three kissed her on the mouth before leaving. Then they drew away along the lawn delimiting the gem-like flower-beds, the brown-haired Philoxénie in the middle, slightly taller than the blonde Veloutine with cheeks as fresh as a peach, who was slightly shorter than Gilded-Gaze, with the blazing eyes, whose ample beard fell in curls over his chest. Soon, their three colors—red, mauve and pale blue—faded into the glory of the sunlit afternoon, and nothing remained visible except the scarlet of the sterile spouse, which finally disappeared as it went around the corner of the marble palace in which Philoxénie lived.
Then Carabella, excessively weary, decided to rest. She went back in, letting the curtain fall behind her. She went through one room with a gleaming mosaic floor, hollowed out by a basin in which fish as mauve as her tunic were swimming. A pet leopard came bounding toward her. She paused momentarily to caress its silky fur, and then crossed the threshold of another, darker room in which the windowless walls, streaked with silver arabesques from floor to ceiling, enveloped a solitude propitious to meditation or religious voluptuousness.
There, a large unmade bed, still rumpled by the sojourn of her companions, occupied the center, raised up on an altar; around it were dressing-tables covered with bottles, ointments, creams and a thousand objects aiding the artifice of adornment: mirrors framed in precious metals, boxes full of jewelry, combs and diamante clasps, belts studded with gems, and various instruments, curious in form, with which she assisted pleasure in herself and others.
She felt a thrill of gratitude for that environm
ent. Already she was stretching herself out on the warm bed, and her muscles, fatigued by recent vibrations, were about to relax into sleep when an order, simultaneously emitted by the microphone and luminously signaled by a screen, brought her to her feet again, hastily. It was the summons of the Almighty.
“Carabella, the Superman is waiting for you!”
She hurried. She tidied her hair with a few flicks of the wrist, and then went out, adjusting her girdle. A large airplane in the form of an eagle, decorated with the potentate’s colors, was waiting for her in front of the atrium. Without it touching down, the four slaves who formed its crew skillfully collected the courtesan and laid her down on the cushions of the nacelle.
A rapid flight carried her away and soon deposited her inside the Palace of Surgery, in front of a small door of sculpted bronze, through which she went in order to go along a dark corridor. When she had traversed it, guided by a light emerging from a brightly lit room from which loud noises were emerging, she hesitated momentarily. Her presence had been detected, however, and a voice rose up on the other side of the wall.
“There you are, courtesan—come in!”
It was Caresco who had issued the invitation. She went in. The surgeon had just emerged from an operation, although he was not in the place where he had carried it out. There was nothing around him, in fact, but the apparatus and instruments of orthopedics.
Naked to the waist, his legs covered in a large impermeable apron still streaming with blood, his hairy arms soiled with clots, he was delivering heavy blows of a hammer to a pedestal, in order to bolt the carapace of the half-man captain, whose breast he had opened a few moments before in order to resect a part of the malfunctioning heart. Satisfied with his work, he was expending his strength impetuously, raising the instrument and bringing it down, causing the anvil to ring. By his side was the thin, bizarre silhouette of Dr. Hymen, his assistant, who, similarly clad, was still sporting his furry top hat, fused with the shock of his hair, supporting the torso of the patient, who was still asleep.
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