Love in 5000 Years

by Fernand Kolney

  A sudden silence fell, and Mathesis was free to pronounce: “I’ve had a great deal of difficulty this morning, Sagax; the clouds were spongy; they absorbed all my caloric. For three hours, when I needed twenty-seven degrees Centigrade in the shade, I could only obtain 26.8. Finally, I used a little of the energy that we got from the earthquake of the year 4612, and succeeded in obtaining the other two tenths.”

  Fifteen hundred years before, civilization had run out of oil, and it had been necessary to make up for that lack of combustible material by storing the dynamic force produced by successive earthquakes. Thus, all the epilepsies of the planet, which sometimes strove to exterminate at a stroke the parasites that were devouring its epidermis, had served the purposes of the stubborn human vermin instead, and had been stored in order to ensure the perpetuation of life in spite of everything.

  Standing in front of the Grand Physiologist, Mathesis examined him curiously. Gradually, his mental tension because such that his bushy circumflex eyebrows came together over his nose and designed two bat’s-wings on his forehead, beating in full flight.

  “What!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know everything? You haven’t stripped all the documents bare? Antiquity hasn’t revealed its posthumous secret to you?”

  Sagax was astonished that the Prefect of Machines could decipher his thoughts so perfectly. He passed his hand through his hair, the color of dead leaves, in order to assure himself that the lid of his skull was securely sealed and that his idea were not offering themselves to the curiosity of all-comers. Then he opened his mouth to request an explanation—but Mathias beat him to it.

  “Since yesterday, Sagax, I’ve been able to read inside the brains of my fellows as in an open book, and my method, as you’ll soon understand, is not so much what ancient humans called Magic as mechanics. In the second circumvolution on the left of your gray matter I can see Morosex’s final sentences—at which you stopped—inscribed. The discovery that our relatives of five thousand years ago practiced coupling in the fashion of their domestic animals has produced a great disturbance in you, and your feeble heart has not permitted you to persevere in the study of the morbidities of the abolished world. You’ve come to me to learn what you still don’t know...

  “Know, then, that some time after the bankruptcy of Communism, when the so-called “Sexual War” was unleashed to precipitate fratricidal people against one another yet again; when the girandole of fabulous conflagrations lit up on the stage that had just been struck once again by the three strokes of universal carnage; when the Earth described, once again, a scarlet parabola around the Sun and resumed splashing space with its bloody wastes, the inhabitants of Mars, justly indignant, decided to put an end to our infectious sphere, exclusively delegated, it was necessary to believe, to the vehiculation of monsters and madmen...

  “Thanks to interastral photography, they were able to obtain perfect images of what was happening down here, and as we had exhausted the credit of their patience long before, they decided, out of concern for cosmic prophylaxy, to exterminate us without pity or hesitation. Yes, they resolved to purge the solar system of a rogue globe that was its shame and desolation...

  “Without further delay, they set to work, and succeeded in transforming their planet into a sort of fabulous electrical machine whose rotational movement, by means of friction against a partly-dissociated atmosphere, emitted from then on a vertiginous fluid, which fell upon us unexpectedly. The magnetic cataclysm seized us in its embrace, threw us panting into the crucible of Space, kneaded us in the bosom of the Universe, transformed into a frightful churn—and the force of the recoil was such that it disrupted gravitation and cracked the Sun...”

  A whistle of terror, like the stridulation of a machine, emerged from Sagax’s lips. His back was against the wall, his torso rigid.

  “Puerile soul,” Mathesis scolded, “it’s obvious that you have been afflicted by that supreme malady of the will, to which you have finally put a name in recent days. It’s obvious, too, that you have never studied the detailed mechanism that is a human being, and that you have not, as I have, pored over the execrable mechanism for producing disorder, servitude and iniquity that is the Cosmos. Will you have the strength to hear everything?”

  The Creator of Humans made an effort to raise up the parcel of dirty underwear that his torso appeared to have become. Mathesis was right. An execrable power had contrived an aberration of energy within him, and an unhealthy need to burst into tears was laboring him continually, without him being able to figure out why. He straightened up, to some degree, and put his hand over his mouth; his breath filtered plaintively though his fingers.

  It was all he could do to formulate a nod of his head.

  The Prefect of Machines considered him pityingly. Again, his eyebrows caused his impassive forehead to stir with their fluttering flight. He went on.

  “The human species was almost totally destroyed. Only some twenty thousand individuals escaped. And in that situation, you shall see how illogical the belief of ancient ages in a force named Providence was. The catastrophe only spared the vilest of humans—those whose loss a judicious Fatality would have decreed before all the rest. In fact, the Martians had calculated that no mortal, however robust he might be, could escape the discharges of their deadly fluid. However, at the very moment when the intercosmic radiation reached the Earth, it happened that a certain number of civilized individuals were fornicating in the immense brothel that a city named Paris had become. Some of them were miraculously saved because the organic resistance of the males was supplemented by that of the females to which they were presently riveted, face to face and thigh to thigh. Only they survived the universal disaster, getting away with a few days’ catalepsy.”

  Sagax had pulled himself together. That just execution of the preceding hideous Societies had finally satisfied his appetite for justice, which had been unable to find the slightest aliment in reading Morosex. So all those fabulous crimes had not gone unpunished! And that certainty was the cordial of his weakness, serving him, so to speak, as a stimulant, in order to draw him out of his torpor of depression. A child of harmony, the ultimate success of human intelligence over the evil forces of Nature, the victory of the Perfected, immersed like their ancestors in the asphyxiating darkness of chaos and stupidity, but emerging in spite of everything into the pure light of equity, the triumph of his present brethren, which had succeeded in getting a grip on the maleficent heart of Great Pan, now exalted him and transported him, when scarcely a month before, the fact had seemed banal and devoid of lyricism.

  Emphatically, he exclaimed: “So the incoherence and iniquity that watched over the cradles of early societies also presided over their death throes! The ancient world was only edified for the triumph of the depraved, villains, malefactors and the turpid, and in the final catastrophe, it was them, once again, that it saved lovingly!” And as the Prefect of Machines nodded his head several times in assent, he added: “But where, then, did the peaceful children of Justice and Pity come from?”

  “We descend in a direct line from that detritus of humankind. The flower of our civilization emerged from that filth, as a lily sometimes emerges from fertilizing mud. Putrefaction, as you know, infuses humus with the ardent fevers that permit it to cause the most generous calices to spring forth, and the redness of roses is often drawn from the blood of cadavers. There resides the symbol of the execrable Universe.

  “That is also our case, and this is how it came about. After the almost complete annihilation of the unspeakable human tribe, a few of those who had abusively escaped finally achieved lucidity. They understood that, from birth to death, from oblivion to oblivion, in the fleeting moment that takes humans ‘from the uterus of a woman to the other uterus called the tomb,’ intelligence was obliged to play its part in too many vile deeds, crimes and indefectible horrors, and that it was better not to exist, since it was impossible to organize life in accordance with Rhythm and Beauty. They understood that the apparent
charm of things, the magnificence of the visible World, was the white greasepaint, the rancid make-up with which Nature adorns the raddled face of an actress, in order to hide her wrinkles of cruelty, her cankers of exaction and the rictus of a torturer. They understood that the quest for Justice and the Absolute would always be thwarted by existence. They understood that esthetic sensations, all the joys of power, wealth, art and genius, could not balance out the horror of death, and that, in the spasms of agony, a thinking being no longer remembers anything except for his present torment and the absurdity of his antecedent agitation.

  “Emulating the third-century sect of the Valesii, they castrated themselves, by virtue of hatred of the ineradicable Evil that humans have the mission of perpetuating in perpetuating the species!

  “Others, by contrast, floated momentarily on the troubled sea of the ideal, and seized the last straw of hope. They decided to give life a formularistic rigor, in order to bring it into accord with Science, the sole panacea that the human race had been able to develop. The Perfected, the first people to emerge from the age of Instinct to penetrate the age of Intelligence, are their descendants.”

  The two Sages were standing face to face. A bleak sadness was inscribed on Mathesis’ face as he detailed all of the aberrant past in that fashion: the heritage of disasters that present civilization had striven to liquidate in order to bring about comprehension and generosity. He had certainly killed illusion, the governess of enthusiasm, in the heart of the Creator of Humans. Would the latter not come to doubt the beauty of his work, his legitimate right to created, when it was necessary for him, with the aid of his bottles, to give rise to the Future, to engender posterity? Confronted by the pubertal hysteria and senile decrepitude of the ancient World, should he not think that the moral statute that had administered life prior to the great cataclysm, in ignominy and suffering, had perhaps only been temporarily suspended? What point, then, was there in continuing humankind, especially after what had just been revealed to him? Nevertheless, he had to.

  The eyebrows of the Prefect of Machines like brambles descended from the heights of his furrowed forehead, like two projections of thatch, to protect his eyes, spangled with incandescent points. “I can anticipate your question,” he said. “‘Who invented the present method of procreation?’ you were about to ask me. Alas, we cannot claim the honor of that miraculous discovery. After the planetary upheaval, the humans I mentioned—those who had decided to allow themselves descendants nevertheless; those who had established, finally, that the animal instinct of reproduction is the irreducible antagonist of social equilibrium—exhumed, from a laboratory bunker that had escaped the destruction, an entire series of labeled phials and numerous wads of documents. The Physiologists who had watched over them as dead, but his ideas—or, rather, those of the Initiator—lived on. His labeled phials contained the first cultures of rational humankind, and the documents indicated the manner of, so to speak, making use of them.

  “That discovery of genius, which permitted our species to break the natural contract, which permitted us gradually to purify our veins and our brains, redeeming it from all the viruses, all the maleficence and all the dust of stupidity that the blood of our ancestors had heaped up in the soul, that incomparable discovery is due to a man named Eliphas37 who lived around the year 1900. Alone among his contemporaries, he had applied his ear to the heart of Nature, ausculated her, if one might put it that way, with the stethoscope of philosophical analysis, and then, pale and haggard, chilled to the marrow with fright, returned to his peers to enable them to hear the throb of ferocity that impelled the rhythmic pulse of the monstrous Universe.

  “Needless to say, his contemporaries, critics and administrators, treated him as a lunatic and resumed the course of the interrupted revelry, sitting down enthusiastically at ‘the social banquet’ at which the chamberlains of injustice placed the guests and the bread-waiters of politics circulated loaves steeped in imposture, and the singers of esthetics quenched their thirst with the hypocrisy of stupidity, while their starving clients and fellows found their only nourishment by dipping their tongues in the trickles of foaming vomit that the masters’ table poured on to the mosaic they had bloodied.”

  Sagax could not contain himself. He had waited patiently for Mathesis’ tirade to come to an end. He shook his head, moving it backwards several times in the trepidations of a surprise that turned to delight. With one hand in the hair that coiffed him like an armful of sun-dried seaweed, he interjected: “Monsieur Eliphas! I read a text that bore the title The Promenades of Monsieur Eliphas, but I assumed that he was a satirist. I didn’t know that he was our benefactor.”

  “He died about the year 1915,” Mathesis specified. “His work was continued covertly by a series of clear-sighted individuals until the moment of the cataclysm. Alas, as soon as his cultures were developed, several of them were adulterated by one of his aides, who was stung by misanthropy. That wretch vitiated a few roes that already contained perfect generations in embryo. In a spirit of paradox, he contaminated them with a few spermatozoids slyly taken from debauchees and the most definitive imbeciles. Added to the other seeds, grafted from one age to the next on to purer stocks, our trusting forefathers made use of them to inseminate the vast field of life. Until now, they have comported themselves in a praiseworthy fashion and have automatically engendered the noble children of Justice and Equilibrium. No one was ever able to perceive the crime committed against civilization by the scoundrel that I am presently cursing. Like the grain of wheat once found clutched in the hand of a mummy, however, and which, planted in the ground—as I have learned from a document—gave rise to an ear, the putrescence of stupidity of those who furnished the maleficent zoosperms produced their full effect after fifty times a hundred years. Hope that propitious fate might determine that the scourge can be circumscribed, and that all our bottles are not similarly contaminated—for otherwise, do you hear, Sagax, we shall no longer be able to procreate!”

  A crazed terror invaded Sagax’s emotive soul merely by glimpsing the possibility of such a disaster. Plaintively, he wailed: “Until now I had thought that you had striven, by means of an expedient, to save me from shame on the day of the Festival of Life—but it’s true, then? Cultures 1758 and 1324 must have had, as a point of departure...”

  “A rascally philosopher who exalted the beauties of war, whose name has been lost, and another, whom we only know by the denomination of Polyphème des Vespasiennes,” confirmed the Prefect of Machines, sympathizing with his distressed colleague, whose voice had been drowned out by sobs.

  Sagax was now ripping his toga. Knowing the power of the Evil by virtue of experiencing it currently, knowing that he had been afflicted by the rift of Love, he had a vague perception of a malevolent power sly undermining the foundations of the City. His disturbance came from Formosa; on the other hand, were not the afflictions brought to Harmony by the monster and the cretin the harbingers, the warning signs of an even more redoubtable disorder? And an idea much more terrible, a mortal suspicion, assailed him in his own regard.

  In the midst of the gurgling of his weeping, he stammered: “You can have no doubt, Mathesis, that I would have preferred to be guilty of an scientific incapacity or insufficiency. Two impure magmas, strictly speaking, are trivial, and I would be able to remedy that without difficulty…but what if there are others... what if there are others…what if all of them are similarly polluted…?”

  “That’s why I have left you unaware of all the circumstances of the terrible fact, and you can see that I was right to fear your propensity for discouragement,” replied the Prefect of Machines, without making any precise response to the Grand Physiologist’s questions. “I’m aware of the impulsive side of your make-up, and I hoped that, by means of personal research, the initiation would come slowly. Gradually, you would have resigned yourself to the idea that it was appropriate to analyze your seminal cultures one by one, in order to avoid a repetition of similar disappointments. That
formidable task is not beyond the resources of your and genius. You owe it to your brethren.”

  Suddenly, Sagax straightened himself up, his tears dried up by a sudden fire. His face, turned scarlet a little while before by unexpected emotions, was now veiled with the shadows of a vehement horror. Gripping his interlocutor by the shoulders, he cried into his face: “Do you think that I too might have for my origin one of those zoosperms of abomination by which our liquids were polluted? If you know that, say so, for many things would then become explicable!”

  After having hesitated, perhaps for two seconds, Mathesis shook his head. Anguish was painted on his features too, while the Creator of Humans, having grasped his shoulders harder, shook him feverishly, as if to make the truth fall from his mouth like a ripe fruit. But the Prefect of Machines had made a definite resolution. He drew his companion to the glazed bay of the study and opened the window, doubtless thinking it prudent to change the direction of the conversation.

  “No, Sagax,” he said, in an ill-assured voice, “your scientific disillusion is leading you astray. Nothing authorizes you to think that you are not the issue of a stainless bottle and that, in the depths of time, your pedigree does not descend from the pure flanks and immaculate soul of a sound individual. Let’s leave these matters for today, shall we, and turn our desolate faces toward the eternal consolatrix, toward the vigilant maternity of Science.”

  Mathesis escaped from the Creator of Humans, ran to pick up a sort of trident, linked it to a wire that emerged from an enormous reel sealed in the wall, and then came back to the gaping window. The roars of a metallic mastodon were audible thereafter in the distance of the gigantic hell.