The Aerial Valley

by Brian Stableford

  “Yes, perhaps I haven’t wasted my time, even in dreaming. Oh, if I were sure of it, I’d soon go to sleep again!”

  Victor Hugo: The Future

  From the Introduction to the Paris-Guide

  (1867)

  In the twentieth century, there will be an extraordinary nation. That nation will be great, which will not prevent it from being free. It will be illustrious, rich, intellectual, peaceful, and cordial to the rest of humanity. It will have the gentle gravity of an elder. It will be astonishing in the glory of its conical projectiles, and it will have some difficulty in determining the difference between the general of an army and a butcher; the red of the one will not seem very distinct from the red of the other. A battle between Italians and Germans, between Englishmen and Russians, between Prussians and Frenchmen, will appear to it as a battle between Picards and Burgundians appear to us. It will consider the spillage of human blood as futile. It will only experience a mediocre admiration of a large number of men killed.

  The shrug of the shoulders that we give with regard to the Inquisition, it will give with regard to war. It will look at the battlefield of Sadowa with the expression with which we look at the quemadero of Seville. It will consider as stupid the oscillation of victory that invariable ends in funeral returns to equilibrium, and Austerlitz always balanced by Waterloo.

  It will have almost the same respect for “authority” as we have for orthodoxy; a lawsuit against the press will seem to it as a trial for heresy seems to us; it will consider vindictiveness against writers as just as we consider vindictiveness against astronomers, and without comparing Béranger closely with Galileo, it will no more be able to understand Béranger in a cell than Galileo in prison. E pur si muovo, far from being its fear, will be its joy.

  It will have the supreme justice of bounty. It will be modest and indignant before barbarians. The vision of a raised scaffold will be an affront to it. In that nation, punishment will soften and decrease in increasing education like ice in the rising sun. Circulation will be preferred to stagnation. People will no longer be prevented from passing. Frontier rivers will be succeeded by arterial rivers. Cutting a bridge will be as impossible as cutting off a head.

  Gunpowder will be drilling powder; saltpeter, the present utility of which is piercing breasts, will have the function of piercing mountains. The advantages of the cylindrical bullet over the round bullet, and the flint over the fuse, of the percussion-cap over the flint, and the hammer over the percussion-cap, will be incomprehensible. Marvelous culverins thirteen feet long in hooped steel, able to fire either hollow or full bullets, will leave people cold. There will be no gratitude for the Chassepot surpassing the Dreyse or the Bonnin surpassing the Chassepot.52 That in the nineteenth century, the continent, for the advantage of destroying a town, Sebastopol, sacrificed the population of a capital, seven hundred and eighty-five thousand men, will seem glorious, but singular.

  That nation will esteem a tunnel under the Alps more than the Armstrong cartridge. It will push ignorance to the point of not knowing that in 1866 a cannon weighing twenty-three tons was fabricated, named Big Will. Other beauties and magnificences of the time will be lost; for example, those people will no longer see budgets, such as that of present-day France, which makes a pyramid of gold every year ten feet square at the base and thirty feet high. A poor little island like Jersey will think twice before indulging, as it did on the sixth of August 1866 the whim of hanging a man whose gibbet cost two thousand eight hundred francs. There will be no more luxury expenditures of that sort.

  That nation will have for legislation a facsimile bearing as close a resemblance as possible to natural law. Under the influence of that dynamic nation, the incommensurable fallow lands of America, Asia, Africa and Australia will be offered to civilizing emigration; the eight hundred thousand cattle annually burned for the hides in South America will be eaten; it will reason that, if there are cattle on one side of the Atlantic, there are hungry mouths on the other.

  Under its impulsion, the long trail of the wretched will magnificently invade the rich and fat unknown solitudes. People will go to California or Tasmania not for gold, today’s coarse and deceptive bait, but for the land; the starveling and the barefoot vagabond, those dolorous and venerable brothers of our myopic splendors and egotistical prosperities will have, in spite of Malthus, their table served under the same sun; humanity will swarm outside of the cemetery, become narrow, and cover the continents with its hives. The probable solutions of problems that are ripening, heavier-than-air and directed flight, the sky populated by aerial vessels, will aid these fecund dispersions and pour life everywhere over that vast ant-hive of laborers.

  The globe will be the house of humankind, and nothing of it will be wasted; the Corrientes, for example, that gigantic natural hydraulic apparatus, that venous network of rivers and streams, that prodigious ready-made irrigation system, traversed today by swimming bison and ferrying dead trees, will bear and nourish a hundred cities; whoever desires it will have on virgin soil a roof, a field, wellbeing and wealth, on the sole condition of enlarging throughout the earth the idea of fatherland, and considering himself a citizen and laborer of the world; with the result that property, that great human right, that supreme liberty, that mastery of mind over matter, that sovereignty of humanity forbidden to beasts, far from being suppressed, will be democratized and universalized.

  There will be no more ligatures, no tool-gates on bridges, nor customs-barriers at city-gates and State frontiers, nor isthmuses between oceans, nor prejudices in souls. Initiatives alert and questing will make the same sound of wings as bees. The power-house nation from which movement will radiate over all the continents will be among other societies what a model farm is among smallholdings. It will be more than a nation, it will be civilization; it will be better than civilization, it will be a family.

  Unity of language, unity of money, unity of measurement; unity of meridian; unity of legal code; fiduciary circulation to its highest degree; paper money ensuring that any rentier has twenty francs in his pocket; a incalculable added value resulting from the absolution of parasitisms; no more idleness of arms bearing arms; the gigantic expense of sentry-boxes suppressed; the four millions per year that permanent armies cost left in the pockets of citizens; the four million young workers honorably annulled by the uniform restored to commerce, agriculture and industry; iron disappearing everywhere in the form of blades and chains and reforged in the form of plows; peace, the goddess with eight breasts, majestically seated in the midst of men; no exploitation, whether of the small by the great, or the great by the small; and everywhere the dignity and the utility of each sensed by all; the idea of domesticity purged of the idea of servitude; equality emerging ready-constructed from gratuitous and obligatory education; gutters replaced by drainage, punishment by education; prison transformed into school; ignorance, which is the supreme indigence, abolished; a man who cannot read as rare as one born blind; le jus contra legem53 understood; politics absorbed by science, the simplification of antagonisms producing the simplification of events themselves; the artificial aspect of events eliminated; for law, the incontestable, for the unique senate, the Institut.

  Government restricted to that considerable vigilance, highways, which has two necessities, circulation and security, the State only ever intervening to offer patronage and purification gratuitously. Competition on absolutely equal terms, in the presence of the type marking the minimal standard of progress. No impediment anywhere, the norm everywhere, College normal, the factory normal, the warehouse normal, the shop normal, the farm normal, the theater normal, publicity normal, alongside liberty. The liberty of the human heart respected by the same title as the liberty of the human mind, love being as sacred as thought. A vast march forward of the crowd Idea led by the spirit Legion.

  Circulation multiplied tenfold having the result of production and consumption multiplied a hundredfold; the miracle of the multiplication of bread become reality; waterco
urses dammed, preventing floods and poisonings, which will produce life at a lower cost; industry engendering industry, arms calling to arms, work done ramifying in innumerable works to do, a perpetual recommencement emerging from perpetual achievement, and, everywhere, at every hour, under the fecund ax of progress, the admirable rebirth of the heads of the holy hydra of labor.

  For war, competition; for the mob, intelligences toward the dawn; impatience for good scolding slowness and timidity; all other angers vanished; a people excavating the flanks of night and operating, to the profit of the human race, an immense extraction of light; that is what the nation will be.

  That nation will have Paris for its capital, and will not be called France; it will be called Europe. It will call itself the Europe of the twentieth century, and in the following centuries, further transfigured, it will be called Humanity.

  Humanity, the definitive nation, is at present only glimpsed by thinkers, those contemplators of penumbras; that what the nineteenth century is witnessing is the formation of Europe.

  A majestic vision: there is in the embryogeny of peoples, as in that of individual beings, a sublime moment of transparency. The mystery consents to allow itself to be seen. At the moment where we are, an august gestation is visible in the womb of civilization. Europe, united, is germinating there. A people, which will be France sublimated, is in the process of being born. The profound ovary of fecund progress bears the future, in that form henceforth distinct. That nation to come is palpitating in the Europe of the present like the winged being in the reptilian larva. In the next century, it will deploy its two wings, one made of liberty, the other of will.

  The fraternal continent, such is the future. If everyone plays his part, that immense happiness is inevitable.

  Before having its people, Europe has its city. If that people does not yet exist, the capital already exists. That seems a prodigy; it is a law. The fetus of nations proceeds in the same way as the human fetus, and the mysterious construction of the embryo, simultaneously vegetation and life, always commences with the head.

  Gustave Marx: Love A Thousand Years Hence

  (1873)

  One

  It is generally unknown that for centuries, the Great Kabbalah, or Occult Science, is the only science that has rendered great services to humankind.

  It is by virtue of that science that humans learned about writing, numbers, astronomy, the compass, gunpowder, printing, magnetism, the telegraph and the steam engine. The art of healing owes its best and simplest prescriptions to it. Philosophy and politics owe everything to it. Strangely enough, it is from a race scorned by the vulgar that all these treasures of science, religion and human knowledge have emerged.

  It is generally by rabbis replete with years and knowledge that the great physicians, celebrated monks and illustrious philosophers who have traversed the centuries have been initiated—after long and dangerous proofs—into the revelation of some progress, of some mystery that brought innumerable changes and advantages to nations. It is to the Kabbalah that secrets societies are owed, and it is to the Kabbalah that, after centuries of service, the three great divine words were brought to light.

  What were Moses, Solomon, Plato, Mohammed, Gutenberg, Luther and Franklin? Great and august initiates!

  The author of these few lines is one of the most infimal among the infimal initiates and the publication of these pages will close the doors of the temple to him forever, for he belongs to the impatient, and is committing a great sacrilege by revealing what ought not to be revealed. But what does it matter? He is one of those who desires enlightenment for everyone and not for a few rare privileged individuals, and if he must pay with is life for his indiscretion, he will die without dread, for he is merely relieving his conscience.

  Two

  In my capacity as an initiate, I received, two days ago, a letter from my brother Mardochée, and it is that letter I want to communicate to you, because he who has the truth in his hand ought to open it.

  Before then, however, I ought to tell you, my friends, who Mardochée is.

  Mardochée was born on 22 March 1852. He is the unique heir of Rabbi L. Scheloumé of Iffendorf, a small village in our dear Alsace.

  The old Rabbi is of the holy tribe of Levi.

  He married six times; he married, by turns, the five sisters of his first wife, and, as if the finger of God had struck him, he could not conserve one of them.

  He had eleven sons. He lost them all successively. His children bore the names of the first eleven sons of the patriarch.

  The final words of the sixth wife, Refk Sephora, were: “The child who will be born, and whom I shall not see, should not be called Benjamin; it is necessary to name him Mardochée, and he will live.”

  Rabbi L. Scheloumé, who as a zealous believer in the Kabbalah, said: “What must be, will be,” and he did not murmur against the Eternal, who took his last wife from him.

  But he consecrated his son, as the nasir Samson had once been consecrated.

  Before publishing his letter, I ought to tell you that it was during the war of 1870 that I knew Mardochée.

  A native of Nancy, I belonged to the garde mobile of the Meurthe, Mardochée to that of the Haut-Rhin.

  Both wounded and taken prisoner, confined in a village in Silesia, our characters gelled during the long hours of captivity, and after a few proofs, Mardochée instructed me in the Kabbalah, which is the unique language of the Children of God and the friends of humankind.

  The letter came to me from New York.

  The old Rabbi and his son, having been unable to opt for Germany, had departed for America, without abandoning all hope of return.

  Three

  New York, 25 March 188654

  My only friend,

  It is under the influence of the most vivid joy that I address these few lines to you; I know that everything fortunate that happens to you rejoices your heart, so I am in a hurry to make you party to my felicity.

  It is nothing but a dream, my dear friend, but a dream so beautiful that I cannot forget it, and will never forget it as long as I live.

  In confiding it to you, I am proud of it, and if I did not have such a great respect for the Kabbalah I think it would be good to make it known to our fellows. This is the dream:

  For a month, my father had been pensive; in the evening, he looked at me in a strange way, but with increasing affection. He prayed with an even greater ardor, perhaps, than usual. He sometimes shut himself up in our oratory for hours on end. A week ago, he came to me and said:

  “Mardochée, the great day is approaching, that of your dear birth, and also that of the death of your poor mother. Tomorrow, you will fast with me, and in the evening”—and in saying these words, his gaze and his voice had a supernatural quality—“my son, you will drink the water that will enable you to see ten centuries: the marvelous water that I have prepared for you since the day of your birth; the water that the great prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah drank, and which only one person may drink every hundred years.

  “Your heart will not weaken at the last moment, because, you know, the one who drinks the water and who has committed a single sin against God or men dies instantly, and I would not like to be your murderer. Is our soul pure?”

  “Yes, Father,” I replied, simply.

  The next day, my father and I fasted; in the evening, my father accompanied me to the little room where I slept; he poured me a few drops of a green liquid whose taste was unfamiliar to me, but which had an extremely sweet flavor.

  Scarcely had I taken that beverage than my head became heavy, my eyes closed and I went quietly to sleep, my hands in those of my revered father.

  This is what I dreamed.

  Four

  I was in Paris in the Champs-Élysées, but that promenade had been subjected to extraordinary changes. I found myself a short distance away from the Place de la Concorde, where, like the enigma of the Pharaohs, the needle of granite ornamented with its hieroglyphs still stood; bu
t the Palais des Députés bore little resemblance to the one that I had known.

  In its place, a superb temple rose up, of gigantic proportions, surmounted by five magnificent domes, whose base was formed by thousands of columns of porphyry, marble and gold.

  Colossal statues crowned the edifice. On its fronton was inscribed: Temple of Concord.

  I perceived a great number of devotees dressed in bright costumes, holding crowns of laurels and enormous bouquets of roses in their hands.

  The wind brought me a faint echo of delightful melodies coming from two sumptuous kiosks placed to either side of the façade of the temple, where two orchestras of a hundred musicians in satin, silk and velvet uniforms were located.

  The Champs-Élysées resembled an immense forest sculpted by skillful sylviculturalists.

  Somber groves of centenarian chestnut-trees could be seen there, into which the sun never penetrated, and which rendered an inexpressible coolness.

  On all sides, trees of the most bizarre forms rose up, forming various and charming tableaux in which all the shades of green were fused, against the azure of the sky.

  Numerous birds with multicolored plumage and delightful songs were flying through the air.

  Fountains rose up at the corners of all the pathways.

  A thick and velvety lawn was resplendent with myriads of buttercups and large daisies, extending as far as the eye could see, inviting repose.

  Silvery sand was spread in the spacious pathways, where brilliant carriages were transporting the excursionists.

  In the large avenues, the trees were linked together by garlands of honeysuckle, which hid the branches hung with chandeliers, and when the lights came on in the evening, as if at a stroke of a magic wand, the lighting must have been magical.