My legs gave way under me, I fell to my knees before the still-warm corpse of my little companion; it would perhaps have been enough, had I arrived five or ten minutes earlier, to have kept the savages at a distance. I was going to have to dig a grave, but for the moment I did not have the strength. Night was falling, patches of cold mist were beginning to form around the lake. I contemplated, for a long time, the mutilated body of Fox; then the flies arrived, in small numbers.
“It was a concealed place, and the password was: elentherin.”
Now I was alone. Night was falling on the lake, and my solitude was definitive. Fox would never live again, neither him, nor any dog with the same genetic makeup, he had sunk into the total annihilation toward which I in my turn was headed. I now knew with certainty that I had known love, because I knew suffering. Fleetingly, I thought again of Daniel’s life story, now conscious that these few weeks of travel had given me a simplified, but exhaustive, view of human life. I walked all night, then the following day, and a great part of the third day. From time to time I stopped, absorbed a capsule of mineral salts, drank some water, and started off again; I felt no fatigue. I did not have much biochemical or physiological knowledge, the line of Daniels was not a line of scientists; however, I knew that the passage to autotrophy had, with the neohumans, been accompanied by various modifications in the structure and workings of the smooth muscles. Compared with a human, I benefited from a suppleness, endurance, and functional autonomy that were greatly enhanced. My psychology, of course, was also different; I did not comprehend fear, and while I was able to suffer, I felt none of the dimensions of what humans called regret; this feeling existed in me, but it was accompanied by no mental projection. I already felt a sense of loss when I thought of Fox’s caresses, of the way he had of nuzzling against my knees; of his baths, his races, above all the joy that could be read in his eyes, this joy that overwhelmed me because it was so foreign; but this suffering, this loss seemed to me inevitable, because of the simple fact that they existed. The idea that things could have been different did not cross my mind, no more than a mountain range, present before my eyes, could vanish to be replaced by a plain. Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differentiated us most clearly from our human predecessors. Like them, we were only conscious machines; but, unlike them, we were aware of only being machines.
I had walked without thinking for around forty hours, in a complete mental fog, guided solely by a vague memory of the journey on the map. I do not know what made me stop, and brought me back to full consciousness; no doubt the strange character of the landscape around me. I now had to be near the ruins of old Madrid, I was in any case in the middle of an immense tarmac space, which extended almost as far as I could see, it was only in the distance that I could vaguely make out a landscape of dry, low hills. Here and there the earth had been pushed up for several meters, forming monstrous blisters, as if under the influence of a terrifying underground heat wave. Ribbons of tarmacadam rose toward the sky, climbing for several dozens of meters before stopping abruptly and ending in a mass of gravel and black stones. Metal debris and blasted windows were strewn on the ground. At first I thought I was on a toll highway, but there were no road signs, anywhere, and in the end I understood that I was in the middle of what remained of the Barajas airport. As I continued westward, I noticed a few indications of ancient human activity: flat-screen televisions, piles of shattered CDs, an immense point-of-sale advertisement depicting the singer David Bisbal. Radiation must still have been strong in this area, it had been one of the places most bombed during the last phases of the interhuman conflict. I studied the map; I had to be near the epicenter of the fault, if I wanted to stay on course I had to turn southward, which meant I would pass through the former city center.
Carcasses of agglomerated, melted cars slowed down my progress as I reached the M45–R2 interchange. It was while crossing the old IVECO warehouses that I caught sight of the first urban savages. There were about fifteen of them, grouped under the metal canopy of a hangar, about fifty meters away. I lifted my rifle to my shoulder and fired rapidly: one of the silhouettes collapsed, while the others fell back inside the hangar. A little later, on turning around, I saw that two of them were carefully venturing out to drag their companion inside—no doubt with the intention of feeding on him. I had taken out my binoculars and could observe that they were smaller and more deformed than those I had observed in the region of Alarcón; their dark gray skin was pockmarked with excrescences and spots—no doubt a consequence of the radiation, I imagined. They displayed, in any case, the same terror at neohumans, and all those that I came across in the ruins of the city fled immediately, without giving me the time to take aim; I had, however, the satisfaction of killing five or six of them. Although most were limping, they moved quickly, sometimes helping themselves along with their forelimbs; I was surprised, and even appalled, by this unexpected multitude.
With the life story of Daniel1 at the front of my mind, it was with a strange emotion that I found myself in the Calle Obispo de León, where his first meeting with Esther had taken place. Of the bar he mentioned there remained no trace, in fact the street was reduced to two sides of blackened wall, one of which, by chance, displayed a street sign. I had the idea of looking for the Calle San Isidor, where, on the top floor of number 3, the birthday party marking the end of their relationship had taken place. I remembered fairly well the map of the center of Madrid as it had been at the time of Daniel: some streets were completely deserted, while others, following no apparent logic, were intact. It took me about half an hour to find the building I was looking for; it was still standing. I climbed to the top floor, raising clouds of concrete dust with each step. The furniture, curtains, and carpets had completely disappeared; there were, on the filthy floor, only a few piles of dried excrement. Pensively, I went through the rooms where no doubt one of the worst moments in Daniel’s life had taken place. I walked as far as the terrace from which he had contemplated the urban landscape before entering what he called the “home stretch.” Of course, I could not stop myself from meditating once more on the passion of love in humans, its terrifying violence, its importance to the genetic economy of the species. Today the landscape of burned-out blasted buildings, the piles of gravel and dust produced a calming impression, inviting a sad detachment, with their dark gray dilapidation. The sight before me was almost the same in all directions; but I knew that to the southwest, once the fault had been crossed, from the heights of Leganes or maybe Fuenlabrada, I was going to have to make my way across the Great Gray Space. Estremadura and Portugal had disappeared as differentiated places. The succession of nuclear explosions, of tidal waves, of cyclones that had battered this geographical zone for several centuries had ended up completely flattening its surface and transforming it into one vast sloping plane, of weak declivity, which appeared in the satellite photos as uniformly composed of pulverulent ashes of a very light gray color. This sloping plane continued for about two and a half thousand kilometers before opening out upon a little-known region of the world, whose sky was almost continually saturated with light clouds and vapors, situated on the site of the former Canary Islands. Obstructed by the layer of clouds, the rarely available satellite pictures were unreliable. Lanzarote may have remained an isthmus, or become an island, or have completely disappeared; such were, on the geographical level, the uncertain givens of my journey. On the physiological level, it was certain that I was going to be short of water. By walking twenty hours per day, I could cover daily a distance of one hundred and fifty kilometers; it would take me a little more than two weeks to reach the maritime zones, if they actually existed. I did not know exactly how much my organism could withstand desiccation; it had, I think, never been tested in extreme conditions. Before setting off I spared a brief thought for Marie23, who must have had to confront, coming from New York, comparable difficulties; I also spared a thought for the former humans, who under such circumstances would commend the
ir souls to God; I regretted the absence of God, or of an entity of the same order; I finally raised my mind toward hope in the coming of the Future Ones.
The Future Ones, unlike us, will not be machines, nor truly separate beings. They will be one, while also being many. Nothing can give us an exact image of the nature of the Future Ones. Light is one, but its rays are innumerable. I have rediscovered the meaning of the Word; corpses and ashes will guide my feet, as will the memory of the good dog Fox.
I left at dawn, surrounded by the multiplied rustling of fleeing savages. Crossing the ruined suburbs, I approached the Great Gray Space just before midday. I put down my rifle, which was no longer of any use to me; there had been no sign of life, animal or vegetable, beyond the great fault. At once, my progress became easier than expected: the layer of ashes was only a few centimeters thick, it covered the hard ground, which looked like clinker, and my feet gripped easily. The sun was high in an immutable blue sky, there was no difficult terrain, no obstacle that could have made me change direction. Progressively, while walking, I slipped into a peaceful daydream in which were blended images of modified neohumans, more slender and frail, almost abstract, with the memory of the silky, velvety visions that, a long time before, in my previous life, Marie23 had made appear on my screen as a way of paraphrasing the absence of God.
Just before sunset, I stopped for a brief while. With the help of a few trigonometric observations, I was able to determine the declivity at about one percent. If the slope stayed the same to the end, the surface of the ocean was situated at twenty-five thousand meters below the level of the continental plate. One would, at that point, be no longer very far from the asthenosphere; I should expect a significant increase in the temperature over the course of the following days.
In reality the heat became oppressive only a week later, at the same time as I began to feel the first attacks of thirst. The sky had an immutable purity and was of a smalt blue, increasingly intense, almost dark. One by one I took off my clothes; my backpack now contained only a few capsules of mineral salts; at this point I had difficulty taking them, the production of saliva was becoming insufficient. Physically I was suffering, which was a new sensation for me. Entirely placed beneath the power of nature, the life of wild animals consisted only of pain, with a few moments of brief relaxation, of happy mindlessness linked to the satisfaction of instincts—for food or sex. The life of man had been, in gross terms, similar, dominated by suffering, with brief moments of pleasure, linked to the conscientization of instinct, which manifested itself as desire in the human species. The life of the neohumans was intended to be peaceful, rational, remote from pleasure as well as suffering, and my departure would bear witness to its failure. The Future Ones, perhaps, would know joy, another name for continuous pleasure. I walked without resting, still at the rate of twenty hours a day, conscious that my survival depended now on the banal issue of regulation of the osmotic pressure, on the balance between my levels of mineral salts and the quantity of water my cells had been able to store. I was not, strictly speaking, certain I wanted to live, but the idea of death had no substance. I saw my body as a vehicle, but it was a vehicle for nothing. I had not been able to reach the Spirit; I continued, however, to wait for a sign.
Under my feet the ashes became white, and the sky took on ultramarine tones. It was two days later that I found the message from Marie23. Written in a clear, taut hand, it had been traced on pages made of a fine, transparent, untearable plastic; these had been rolled up and placed in a tube of black metal, which made a slight sound when I opened it. This message was not specifically addressed to me, it was in truth addressed to no one: it was only a further display of this absurd or sublime determination, present in humans and remaining identical in their successors, to bear witness, to leave a trace.
The general tenor of the message was profoundly sad. To get out of the ruins of New York, Marie23 had had to mix with many savages, sometimes grouped in large tribes; unlike me, she had sought to establish contact with them. Protected by the fear she inspired in them, she had been no less distressed by the brutality of their social relations, by their absence of pity for the old or weak, by their constantly renewed appetite for violence, for hierarchical or sexual humiliations, for cruelty pure and simple. The scenes I had observed near Alarcón she had seen repeated, almost identically, in New York—even though the tribes were situated at considerable distances from one another, and had been unable for seven or eight centuries to have any contact. No feast among the savages could be imagined without violence, the spilling of blood, and the spectacle of torture; the invention of complicated and atrocious tortures seemed to be the only area in which they had preserved something of the ingeniousness of the ancient humans; that was the limit of their civilization. If you believed in the heredity of moral character, this was nothing of a surprise: it was natural that it would be the most brutal and cruel individuals, having a higher potential for aggressiveness, who survived in greater number a succession of lengthy conflicts, and transmitted their character to their descendants. Nothing, in regard to moral heredity, had ever been proved—or refuted; but Marie23’s testimony, like mine, amply confirmed the definitive verdict that the Supreme Sister had passed on mankind, and justified her decision to do nothing to stop the process of extermination that she, two millennia ago, had committed herself to.
You may wonder why Marie23 had continued along her path; indeed, it seemed on reading certain passages that she had thought of giving up, but there had doubtless developed in her, as in me, as in all neohumans, a certain fatalism, linked to an awareness of our own immortality, that brought us closer to the ancient human peoples, among whom religious beliefs had taken root. Mental configurations generally survive the reality that gave rise to them. Having become technically immortal, having at least reached a stage that was similar to reincarnation, Daniel1 had behaved until the end with no less impatience, frenzy, and greed than a mere mortal. Similarly, although I had left on my own initiative the system of reproduction that ensured my immortality or, more exactly, the indefinite reproduction of my genes, I knew that I would never manage to become completely conscious of death; I would never know boredom, desire, or fear to the same extent as a human being.
As I was preparing to put the pages back in the tube I noticed that it contained a last object, which I had some difficulty extracting. It was a page torn from a human paperback book, folded and folded again to form a strip of paper, which fell into pieces when I tried to unfold it. On the biggest of the fragments I read these phrases, in which I recognized the dialogue of Plato’s Symposium where Aristophanes expounds his theory of love:
When therefore a man, whether attracted to boys or to women, meets the one who is his other half, the feeling of tenderness, trust, and love with which they are gripped is a miracle; they no longer want to be apart, even for an instant. And this way people spend all their lives together, without being able moreover to say what they expect from one another; for it does not appear to be uniquely the pleasure of the senses that makes them find so much charm in the company of the other. It is obvious that the soul of each desires something else, what it cannot say, but it guesses it, and lets you guess.
I remembered perfectly what happened next: Hephaestos the blacksmith appeared to the two mortals “while they were sleeping together,” proposing to melt them and weld them together, “so that from two they become only one, and that after their death, down there, in Hades, they will no longer be two, but one, having died a common death.” I remembered especially the final sentences: “And the reason for this is that our former nature was such that we formed a complete whole. It is the desire and pursuit of this whole that is called love.” It was this book that had intoxicated Western mankind, then mankind as a whole, which had inspired in it disgust at its condition of a rational animal, which had engendered in it a dream that it had taken two millennia to try and rid itself of, without completely succeeding. Christianity itself, St. Paul himself, ha
d been unable to resist bowing before this force. “Two will become one flesh; this mystery is great, I proclaim it, in relation to Christ and the Church.” Right up until the last human life stories, one could detect an incurable nostalgia for it. When I tried to fold the fragment back up, it crumbled between my fingers; I closed the tube and put it back on the ground. Before setting off again I gave a final thought to Marie23, who was still human, so human; I remembered the image of her body, that I would never have the chance to know intimately. Suddenly, I became worryingly aware that if I had found her message it meant that one of us had deviated from our path.
The uniform white surface offered no landmark, but there was the sun, and a rapid examination of my shadow told me that I had in fact gone too far to the west. I now had to turn due south. I had not drunk water for two days, I was no longer able to feed myself, and this simple moment of distraction risked being fatal. I no longer suffered much in actual fact, the pain signal had faded, but I felt immensely tired. The survival instinct still existed among neohumans, it was simply more moderate; I tracked inside me, for a few minutes, its struggle with fatigue, knowing that it would end in victory. I set off again, more slowly, in the direction of the south.
The Possibility of an Island Page 35