Gradually people on whom equality weighed heavily, without their daring to confess it, began to experience the need to differentiate themselves from one another. In spite of stern opposition, Dignitaries were named. All of them distinguished themselves from the commonplace by means of gold-embroidered garments, Greek tunics, and the return of cylindrical head-dresses and top hats, the attributes of ancient favored classes. There were, therefore, Governors of Phalansteries, Monitors of Dormitories, accredited Bread-distributors, official cup-bearers, a master Baker, an Organizer of copulations and Officers of the Mouth having received an exequatur. By way of election, a Commander of Stercoraries was born, along with a Seneschal of Floor-Wipers, a Provost of Trusses, a Primess of Launderers, a Gonfalonier of Photographs, a Massager of Midwives, a Magnate of Knackers and a Drum-Major of Pedicures.
But these crises of ridicule were nothing compared to the aberrations to which sex gave rise. Indeed, people persisted in being born unequally good-looking or intelligent, imperfectly advantaged from the physiological and mental viewpoint. Differences subsisted between them that rendered the leveling promulgated by anarchism and the equal right to love illusory. Those disgraced by nature, being unable to obtain the passion necessary to life, had to die without knowing the supreme sensuality that seemingly consisted of being loved. A victim of lust desirous of the company of another found the most granitic foundations oscillating, conflicts fomenting, bringing everything into question. Women, moreover, continued to seek brutes with broad shoulders, juicy kidneys and no brains. The preferences they had for individuals of that sort violated the canons of harmony, producing collisions and prolonged shocks that disturbed the entire state of things.
The libertarian order was the product of neo-Malthusianism; only the results of the reproductive act had been taken into consideration—which is to say, procreation—from the social viewpoint. No account had been taken of sexual emotion, which dominated life to a considerable extent—neither its incidences, nor its repercussions in a society that practiced free temporary union. In any case, it was impossible for a Statute, however framed, to regulate particular preferences—so those individual inclinations, before long, led to chaos.
By virtue of being unable to get rid of their old dogmatic ideas with regard to the sexual act, still deemed impure, human beings felt a furious wind blowing over the poorly-extinguished firebrands of old discords. Communities became dissatisfied with the women that had been allotted to them and wanted to steal those of adjacent Familisteries. Citizens, this time competing for the greatest sexual profit and not for the greatest material profit, began to tear one another apart again inside their sumptuous palaces. The jealousy of clans, and rivalry between Phalansteries did not take long to desolate the New Age.
People being unable to live without novelties and adventures, the Teutons, rejected by their sentimental slatterns, declared that Frenchwomen were tastier and that Anarchism demanded that a certain number of them be ceded to them. Simultaneously, the Russians of the Caucasus were obliged to arm themselves against piratical expeditions that came to filibuster their Georgian women, the perfect types of white beauty. Before long, the Iberian peninsula was defending itself against the farceurs of the Garonne, who, in their irrepressible need for sexual intercourse, wanted to indulge it en masse in Andalusia. At the very moment when an accord was about to be attempted permitting the nations of Europe to exchange women every five years, which would have melted all the peoples into a single mixed race, just as the Plenipotentiaries were about to negotiate that accord, which might perhaps have achieved a definitive pacification, a new and general conflagration erupted. That was the Sexual War...
Sagax, who had not breathed a word since he started reading, but whose epidermis had prickled without pause, started. He sketched an abrupt backward leap, and then appeared thunderstruck with terror. For a minute, he remained petrified, then, gradually coming back to life, uttered the cry of an eagle saluting the sun and ran to the Mensigene. Now, he thought that he was beginning to understand...
The droplet evaporated on the marble slab; his nostrils breathed in the generous gas drunkenly, and his intelligence, gathering itself, rushed to assault the weakened Unknown, projecting a fulguration into the antecedent night. The Truth finally appeared to him, and he wrung his hands as if he wanted to dislocate the wrists.
“Yes, the disorder from which the trio presently in lethargy are suffering, the invulnerable aberration that is manifest with such blissful unconsciousness is nothing other than what ancient humans called Love—Love, in its two forms...”
Then he was gripped by a sort of convulsion; horror racked his brain.
“No, no…it’s impossible...” he croaked.
For a good quarter of an hour, he remained prostrate. The appearance of ancient civilizations, with their web of rascalities and absurdities—so many inconceivable sins, unspeakable crimes, irreparable weaknesses in the past of the animal category to which he belonged—had overwhelmed him with a mortal disgust. When his clear-sightedness surfaced, he was afflicted by a nausea of the soul that made him spit out sentences like hiccups.
“Everything that I’ve suspected thus far, abominable as it appeared, is now a confirmed fact…! Yes, ancient humans fornicated, reproduced in the manner of animals... Yes, the vertigo of sex plunged the individual into a vat of madness, and from that transitory dementia, individuals were born, who reflected all the organic defects, all the mental faults of their progenitors, but nevertheless had to collaborate to form civilized Humankind...”
And for a second time, interlacing his fingers, clicking his phalanges, he lamented with what breath he had left: “Love, Love is again among us, the Perfected. Love, the stupefier of lucidity and energy. Love, the devouring worm that patiently gnaws at the axis of equilibrium. Love, the epilepsy that preexisting societies were unable to evacuate from their heart, and which precipitated them, one after another, into the grip of chaos!”
Suddenly, a din exploded in the Fertilization Laboratory. The cries of breathless humans, the raucous plaints of throats exhausted by running, two hundred voices mingling their stridulations and their appeals: all of that burst forth like a thunderclap, and caused Sagax’s knees to bend on hinges of unreflective fear. It seemed to him that the execrable past, from which he had scarcely escaped, still livid, was speaking out; it seemed to him that a word of abomination was emerging from the entrails of the Anterior, to stand out emphatically, proudly to trumpet a panegyric to the turpitudes and rascalities with which the Ancient World had been adorned.
Alarmed, he leapt to the receptacles for whose guardianship he was responsible, the cultures that contained the Future, and, his hallucinated eyes unseeing, seized by an inebriation of terror, he extended his arms defensively and put his red toga over bottle 4,245, his father, which he believed to be the target of a return of Evil Forces.
But no, he was deluded. No cataclysm threatened the sacred liquids that concealed future generations. In front of him there was merely a quivering tide of prostrated backs, a swarm of crawling spines, a bank of aggregated napes from which long tresses hung down like wet algae, a host of young shoulders furred by the wrack of thick fleeces.
In the center, seeming marching over the living wave that had just spilled as far as Sagax’s feet, a single man was standing—and that man was Thales, the head of the Prytanaeum, whose mission was to educate youths, to orientate adolescence toward the adamantine constellations of Knowledge and Wisdom.
Gnarled like a centenarian oak, Thales was over seven feet tall. A mahogany beard, silky and bushy, ate into his face, scaling his cheeks, even circling around his orbits to combine with his eyebrows, thus forming a kind of hood from which emerged the vivid gleam of his mauve eyes. Like the Grand Physiologist and the Prefect of Machines, he wore a red toga.
His extended right arm floated like the branch of a tutelary cedar, and took his pupils, still kneeling, beneath its aegis. A breath ran through the veil of his beard, lift
ing up the hairy sash that fell from his upper lip.
“Don’t treat them harshly, Sagax. Their irresponsibility and impetuosity are those of youth. They got away from me and from my lecture as I had just, thanks to Coregium’s documents, reached the conclusion of the history of past times.”
An unbending of the legs had brought the prostrate youths to their feet, and, as their faces were raised toward the light, the four hundred irises seemed now to be a shovelful of incandescent embers thrown at hazard into the thicket of hairy waving arms.
“Yes, yes, pardon and forgive us, you who are August, who can do anything, who have made Nature serve as the auxiliary of human progress...”
“Modify our exterior, give us another form...”
“We no longer wish to resemble, in appearance, the ancient humans who were covered with so much opprobrium; we no longer wish to be similar to the pseudo-civilized individuals who dishonored forever the human species that we still represent!”
Around Sagax, the extended hands designed a circle of imploration, advancing to seize him in tender embrace that might render the unanimous desire inexorable.
“Generous youth!” murmured Thales, rubbing his eyes and collecting a tear that was running over the hood of his squirrel-tail beard.
“Children!” concluded Sagax, shaking his head three times, his face enameled with cold sweat, having been heated and reheated in the fire of previous emotions.
And, under the guidance of Thales, who had resumed his pedagogical expression and was now furrowing his eyebrows, like stalks of millet, desperate not to be scolded by the Sage, the pupils of the Prytanaeum went out one by one, in a concert of sobs, in the midst of a general distress that arched their torsos and weakened their knees.
Chapter IX
Left alone, Sagax, not knowing which way to turn after so many various shocks, went slowly back to his study. All the pathology of the world, and the people who had just blown their pestilential odors and deadly miasmas in his face, across forty centuries, seemed to have infected him with a kind of moral malaria, and he felt devoid of the courage to undertake further research.
The past of Societies, the monstrosities of their ripe age and their decline, tarnished life, made civilized life appear less beautiful and less serene, having suddenly revealed all the cankers that had once ravaged it.
The chest of documents filled him with horror; it offered itself to him like a reservoir of black poisons of understanding and consciousness, like a monstrous herbarium where the aconite, belladonna, strychnine and upas with which successive civilizations had intoxicated themselves were preserved. The cadaver of Evil, swathed in bandages and stuffed with aromatic resins, was preciously mummified therein for the desolation of present ages.
In spite of the spur of will, which pricked his soft and cowardly flesh, he could not gather his strength; he snorted, and stole away, prey to an irreducible panic.
There were, however, three things that he still did not know—three things that it was necessary to know, no matter what the cost.
Firstly, who was the inventor of the method of artificial fertilization, and in what era had it first been put into practice?
Secondly, where did the Perfected, the children of Science and Harmony, come from, and how had their ancestors been able to escape the planetary catastrophe?
Thirdly, in consequence of what phenomenon had the sons of bottles 1,758 and 1,324 reflected so completely the stupidity and putrescence of individuals who had flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century?
Were these three enigmas going to deride, once again, his lack of perspicacity, reducing his brain to the level of gray matter devoid of genius? How was it explicable, otherwise, that the poet Carminus and Mathesis could have triumphed immediately, and had been informed before anyone else, since the augur had taken it as a pretext to insult the Sun and the Prefect of Machines had given a guarantee, before the people, that he Sagax, had nothing to do with the defectiveness of the cultures of which the monster and the cretin were the issue?
The Grand Physiologist felt that he would never again have the courage to rummage through the seven-times-execrable archives of the past! He went out, in order to go to Mathesis’ dwelling.
Outside, in the vast sector, the gigantic mouths of the Machines were pouring out their waves of enveloping warmth, breathing, as usual, eternal spring over the City—and thanks to the accelerators of calorific velocity, the heat diffused into the distance in all haste. Although that industrial terrain was hostile in appearance, although the continual fever of the earth there dried up the sparse vegetation, although the paltry lawns there were afflicted with alopecia, joy expanded there’re nevertheless, fomented by the august fervor of the impartial summer.
To assist the tubercular sun, to cleanse the face of the soiled azure, artificial light took dewy flight there, and swallows embroidered the sky with their overlapping parabolas. Turbulent flocks of quarrelsome sparrows fluttered, ardent in quest of fodder for their nests. Some distance away, a bristling tomcat with his tail erect was inviting some female to the sabbat of his amours with hectic plaints, and probing the wells of shadow with his phosphoric irises in order to seek out the object of his desire. Golden pollen and fluffy down-feathers drifted on enamored breezes, nonchalantly sewing fecundity at the whim of their caprice. Amethyst thistles, purple sage and amaranthine gorse reared up, drinking life as it passed by, in the orgasm of their stems or palmate leaves. Clouds with animal forms held out to the setting sun a barbaric net knotted with bestial embraces, heaving with the rut of fabulous creatures. Coupled insects rained down like leaflets from effervescent trees. Vagabond dragonflies, wimples streaked with emerald, cylindrical bodies imbricated with topaz and lazuli, strove to rediscover the road to the reeds.
In spite of everything, the aphrodisiac musk, the odiferous exhalation of Nature in stimulated emotion emerged from the vegetal cassolettes of the Garden of Delights, and, driven by the artificial breeze, carried their intoxications as far as the zone of the Gem-City in which the steel pulse of technology was beating.
Sagax felt gusts of bliss rising from his heart to his face. What was wrong with him? Why was his soul floating on a diffuse felicity like a water-lily on a calm pond? Yes, why was a sudden languor weighing down his loins, prostrating his will, causing everything to become unsteady, as if his entire body were buoyed up by a wave of pleasure?
Immediately, without transition, with his face upturned toward the zenith, he uttered several yelps, one of which maintained its note in his head for several seconds. The memory of Formosa had returned to him, the woman’s form becoming precise, flagellating him with her perfumed hair and, in order to constrain him to silence, plunging the gag of a tremulous breast into his mouth.
Then, to escape the iron fingers of renascent obsession, he broke into a run, his eyes aflame and his red toga flapping from one side of his thighs to the other.
He found Mathesis in the middle of the redoubtable Menagerie of Machines whose Tamer he was. There were grouped the giant monsters, the steel pachyderms, the cast-iron mammoths, the huge dynamos, the grunting generators, wheezing asthmatically, the turbines rotating like double stars: the entire nervous system, the entire vascular network, the entire vast magnanimous heart by means of which humans had replaced the failing life of the gout-stricken World, the sap of the decrepit spheroid.
Isolated, creating a void around it, was a stack of colossal batteries of accumulators charged with celestum, a substance with strange properties, the least of which were radiating light and electricity and annihilating terrestrial weight or provoking gravitation at will. Its action, combined with that of polar magnetism, captured and deviated, created the solid roads traced in the air. The substance was, in sum, nothing other than primal Matter, the embryo of the spheres, the seed of the Universe. Thanks to celestum, the Perfected had been able, after the cataclysm, to reestablish equilibrium in space, palliate disorder and restore the orbits around the Sun of the dome
stic planets that its attractive force was no longer sufficient to maintain in tight subordination.
In the immeasurable hall, in the midst of the bombilation of drive-shafts, the coming and going of pistons, the wailing of cylinders, the rush of transmission-belts interlacing their web like a loom for weaving energy, Mathesis was the active thought, the very soul of that great body of technology in sublime labor. At his orders, the service crew, a hundred and fifty workers, had just gone into the basement to channel the force there.
Carried by a cart that ran of its own accord over indefinite rails, he launched himself toward an array of numbered keys like those of a gigantic harmonium, and with expert fingers, played them as an artiste. Then, with a simple gesture of his extended index finger, commutators spontaneously sank their white eyeballs into porcelain orbits, docile levers were activated, and handles turned by themselves two hundred paces away, as if all those things had acquired the intelligence to obey in a human manner.
Half-naked, the wrack of his enormous eyebrows bristled in the magnetic effluvia with which he was saturated in passing; his moustache twisted, curving into a crescent beneath the wind of velocity, and every hair on his body was tremulous with violet sparks. Surging from the depths of distant penumbras, disappearing like a meteor into the background, he came back, fulgurant, surrounded by barbed flashes, only to depart again, like a placid God, like an intelligent and good-natured Zeus.
At the sight of the Creator of Humans, his speedy cart, which drew plaints from the perforated air, stopped dead, without a squeak, and he leapt to the ground. Two minutes later, he had taken Sagax into his workroom.
Cluttered with measuring instruments endowed with a sort of particular consciousness, overloaded with disconcerting apparatus that displayed moving figures at every second in order to inform their master that this or that maneuver was about to be carried out, filled with shrill whistles, Mathesis’ workroom bore no resemblance to a silent abode where a sage might delight in meditation. When Sagax entered, the racket increased, and the Prefect of Machines touched a button, activating a trigger.
Love in 5000 Years Page 14