Love in 5000 Years

by Fernand Kolney

  Outside, the City was at rest, blissfully crouched in ash-blonde light. Deserted at that siesta hour, the hour of the Soporal, its streets aligned their geometrical scars while the ulcerated disk of the Sun, its face as if pockmarked with patches of shadow, seemed to be staggering in the void, tumbling in haste from the zenith. In the final padded incubator of artificial heat, in the Gem-City where life could only grow now like a hothouse fruit, delightful aromas from the Garden of Delights drifted idly, inclining all beings to an optimistic bliss.

  Thrust toward the sky, Mathesis’ trident projected three rigid, parallel black rays, which fused in the distance, plunging their trajectories into the remotest distances. In passage, the Sun was marked by three new wrinkles, whose avaricious brightness could not mask its withering. And when the Prefect of Machines turned his magnetic fork in his fingers, the streaks of darkness that brought night to their course devoured the shameful light of the star and mingled with it, combining in a radiant vibration, eventually designing a sort of elongated cylinder that plunged like a scalpel to perforate the virgin breast of the Ether.

  Then Mathesis laughed. “A hook to search the ordure of Infinity,” he said.

  For another minute, the exotic drill-bit ferociously hollowed out the stellar field, seemingly splashed by the lymph of nebulas, discovering a whole swarm of asteroids, infusoria in suspense in the gelatin of the Immeasurable, and suddenly caused an enormous mass to appear: an emaciated planet surrounded by a rind of clouds and an atmospheric pulp.

  “Mars!” announced the Prefect of Machines, simply.

  The miraculous cylinder then seemed to posses the property of attracting that slave of Gravitation toward it. Its relief became more accentuated, its contours sharper, while the ground trembled and, in the distance, colossal turbines and immense generators, gripped by molecular fright, snuffled like domestic animals at the approach of a wild beast. Momentarily, one might have believed that the rotating globe was coming in response to Mathesis’ injunction, like to dog to its master’s call.

  Sagax even felt anxiety digging its icy fingers into his sides. In fact, by virtue of an optical illusion, the planet, with its seas and continents, was turning and bulging close at hand. He passed his hand over his cheeks, as if to wipe away the spray of its gyrating oceans. Again he recoiled, and ducked, this time for fear of receiving the excessive projectile full in his face. But the Prefect of Machines, brandishing his trident, appeared to want to prick the monster full in the body, and the spheroid reared up and bounced backwards, which permitted the two Superhumans to set up a frame and display the visible hemisphere within it.

  Circled by channels, striated by horizontal streaks, the continents of the Sun’s vassal were deserts, and the black rays that were striking their luminous soil caused, by contrast, the most minute details to appear. The seas and frozen oceans surrounded it with a nacreous epidermis, under which opaline reflections played: pale greens, faded pinks and sulfurous oranges. The rivers and streams were serpentine, like fistfuls of de-scaled grass-snakes; the frosted forests were scattered, like the hirsute tresses of witches; and at intervals, mountain chains with jagged somber peaks appeared, like the scars of pubertal acne.

  In sum, it was a wretched plagiarism of the Earth.

  Suddenly, Sagax started. A strange particularity had jut attracted his attention. From east to west ran a fabulous musical stave, which gave the planet the appearance of a fantastic ribbed tart—an apple tart nibbled by the rats of space. And as the envisioned disk lingered on that point, searching its corners, folds and sinuses minutely, the Creator of Humans realized that each of those geometrical lines, each of those deeply-engraved streaks was a profound excavation perhaps a thousand kilometers wide, from which emerged an extraordinary and tumultuous florescence of human tibias, femurs, humeri and skulls, rendered dazzling white by the polisher of the centuries. On that stave, the Martians must once have inscribed the forte of carnage, the organ-stops of extermination.

  Attentive to the play of his colleague’s physiognomy, Mathesis furnished an explanation.

  “You have before you the so-called canals of Mars. As you can see, they are, in reality, merely ditches, never sated, into which the victims of civil wars were thrown pell-mell. Up there, in imitation of down here, there was a ten-thousand-year struggle for the triumph of Justice and Fraternity—and when those two unsociable goddesses finally laid their conciliating fingers on the hateful foreheads of the Martians, the anatomical puncture that they had made through space, while operating the gangrenous cannonball that struck us, could not be healed. The cataclysm that they had unleashed against us annihilated almost all of them in their turn. Presently, twelve thousand of them remain, who, following our example, live in artificial heat and light, reproducing by a method identical to ours. Look.”

  A movement of the intra-cosmic pupil caused a luminous umbilicus to appear near the equator: a kind of gross emerald, inserted in an invisible bezel, which scintillated furiously on the pale face of the globe. A glass city similar in every respect to that of the Perfected!

  Now, in clear indentations, the City designed rectilinear streets, specious avenues, octagonal plazas, transparent Phalansteries, a limitless garden full of baroque trees of unknown species, with leaves larger than parasols, in which monopedal beings hopped on their unique leg, in imitation of sand-fleas. Sagax distinguished a large number of them which, by a simple twitch of their hamstring, were covering considerable distances. He attributed that fact to the smallness of the sphere, where the weak gravity permitted bounds of two hundred meters.

  Becoming accustomed to the miracle, he observed that all the Martians possessed four arms, two of which were attached to either side of the lumbar region. Looking more closely, he then noticed that they were deprived of noses, that their respiratory orifice, a buccal cavity, was placed at the base of the neck, and that they all had one enormous red eye situated in the middle of the forehead and another, not as large, rounded in the nape of the neck.

  Mute, and communicating by means of sounds, the Martians could not have known the ravages that eloquence has wrought on the planet Earth. Moreover, they had the precious faculty of seeing behind them—but Nature had made them pay dearly for that advantage, by persistently refusing them the esthetic gifts that the Terrans still possessed. Their glabrous faces, the color of liquid rubber, were repulsive, their featureless second visages, uncrowned by any hair, were hideous.

  In his enthusiasm, the Grand Physiologist was about to take hold of the Prefect of Machines and express his wonder in the bosom of genius—but Mathesis was no longer beside him. With one hand, he held up his trident, from which green undulating fulgurations still hung down like limp algae; with the other, he was operating commutators in order to suspend the course of the phenomenon.

  Suddenly, Sagax tottered; he felt his heart lurching in his breast; it seemed to him that his breath had been permanently decanted from his throat, while his violently afflicted eyes must have burst into twenty shards with a noise of breaking crystal. Unexpectedly, an emission of the star, sprung from the entrails of the void, had just struck him, and thongs of amethyst light were flagellating him ferociously.

  Arms extended, stumbling, he was about to collapse, half-dead, on to Mathesis chest, as the latter shouted, delightedly: “Interplanetary communication has been established. See, see, the response to my signal that I’ve been expecting every day for a month!”

  But as he slapped the hands of the Creator of Humans and then massaged his temples with his thumb in order to ring him out of his temporary faint, he stepped back in his turn. His mouth wide open, an inarticulate cry laboring his throat.

  Sagax had a black star on his forehead, which had just been imprinted there by the Martians...

  Chapter X

  The next day, it was child’s play for Sagax to remove from his forehead the unlucky star with which the inhabitants of the neighboring planet had marked him. Attacked by reagents whose formula he immediately
devised, the top of his face disgorged the mysterious sign emblazoned there without overmuch effort. He only lost a fraction of his eyebrows, devoured by the caustic substances, and the tresses hanging down turned to the color of iodine. That he remedied without any great difficulty, and congratulated himself on his success, applauding his practicality, which had triumphed over the hostility of circumstances.

  Twenty-four hours later, the black star reappeared.

  He did not lose confidence, recommenced making peremptory mixtures, infallible solutions, and the troublesome stigma disappeared—but by the following dawn, it was displayed again between a nascent wrinkle and the root of the nose. He persevered, using all the expedients of his chemistry, only to arrive at a negative result. Whenever he was victorious, finally exonerated of the baneful sign he bore above his eyes, he ran to a mirror, studied the pigmentation of his skin patiently, no longer discovering anything abnormal—but the next day, the minuscule star came back, scintillating in all its indentations of darkness.

  Disappointed, he briefly entertained the idea of transforming himself into a negro by twice-daily ingestions of an appropriate tinctural substance. That way, the abominable mark would melt into a sepia tint generously disposed over his entire epidermis. But did he have the right to make a man of color appear for a second time among the human species? Then again, he was reluctant to singularize himself so completely. What was more, if he abdicated the ethnic aristocracy conferred by the whiteness of his skin, would not Formosa feel somewhat distanced from him?

  That thought, which occurred him slyly, suddenly made him roar with distress.

  Now he was making that woman, and the opinion she might have of him, the criterion of his decisions! With what malady of free will had he been afflicted, that he should be preoccupied before anything else with the antipathy that the reproductress might nourish for his person? As a response, a kind of snigger made itself heard within him. He had a sort of hallucination. Before his closed eyes, and in front of is mouth, two stucco breasts veined with pale blue were projected, in a surge of whiteness, and the blonde hair of the Genitrix, with an odor of fresh wax, lashed his face.

  Formosa! Formosa! The name cast the arpeggios of its enchanting syllables into his ears, while a vertigo made his heart lurch, and wrathful flames circulated in his blissful loins.

  When he recovered from that swoon, he turned to the bitter delights of mortification. He was no longer good for anything; his science, once again, had been found wanting; thus, he must pass his responsibilities on to someone more worthy. But who? Since his successor was only germinating in the womb of the woman he had fertilized artificially, and humans no longer died before the age of two hundred, his brethren had the right to draw upon his services for another fifty years.

  On due reflection, ought the anomaly of his face to arouse such despair? He recognized therein the faults of his emotive character, all the impulsiveness that he had never been able to vanquish, and which Mathesis had mentioned to him. Was it not better to reconcile himself to the asterisk that decorated his forehead?

  Thus, he remembered in time that facial flaws had no importance for the Perfected, and that they had only been an affliction in the Societies of the past, when reproductive instinct, obedient to animal fashion, had fomented esthetic sentiments and a taste for corporeal beauty.

  Profoundly perturbed by all these emotions, in order to take account of his general condition, Sagax consulted the Biometer, which, in contemporary society, had advantageously replaced the physicians of prehistoric ages.

  The verdict of the apparatus was terrible. The needle on the dial indicated mental troubles of the utmost gravity, and declared that the resistance of his cells, in their present condition, would not be prolonged beyond twenty years. Thus, merely by letting things continue as they were, he would die at the age of 130—which is to say, scarcely having reached middle age. This was where the pathological appetency he nourished for the external form of Formosa had led him: almost deprived of perspicacity, his intelligence permanently suborned by unreason, his will virtually annihilated and his genius no longer being capable even of removing the black stain from his forehead!

  He decided to seek Mathesis’ advice, the latter being immune to the frightful evil that Sagax now knew to be love. He decided to call upon his colleague’s aid in order to free himself, at the very least, from the phenomenal stigma by which he had been tattooed.

  Turning his face eastwards, he sent his waves of volition in quest of the Prefect of Machines, and in less than en seconds, the latter, summoned by telepathy, came into the Artificial Fertilization Laboratory.

  He was accompanied by Thales, and from the outset, the latter’s helm of hair displayed an astonishment, quivering throughout its silky length, then bristling like a monstrous hedgehog, merely by virtue of observing the disconcerting seal with which the forehead of the Creator of Humans as stamped.

  Thales took three steps toward Sagax, and, in the pontifical tone that his functions had inevitably given him, he said, sententiously: “Are you the fatal man, the Predestined individual marked for accursed tasks?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mathesis, who had departed from his habitual gravity and whose white-patched hair was shaken by a nascent hilarity, causing the meager pelt on his chin to dance. “I can see by your words that you’ve been occupied recently in writing about the literature decadence of antiquity, and that you have, in consequence, been contaminated by what was known as ‘Romanticism.’ That reprovable School, you know, put a false nose on the Fatum of the Greeks, caparisoning it with straw in order to drag it in its wake in masquerades of fabulation. There’s nothing tragic about Sagax’s case. If his forehead has become firmamental, if Vesper, the evening star, rises there punctually, it’s simply because the Martians could find no other recorder than his face. Before another three days have gone by, though, I’ll be able to efface all trace of the accident—and no one will be able to allege that our colleague has been touched by ‘the Hand of Fate,’ as the barbarians of ancient ages would have put it.”

  Evidently, a distance of five thousand years had not yet been able, in the eyes of scientists, to redeem the capital crime of Romanticism—which is to say, fantasy!

  While speaking, Mathesis had drawn nearer to the convergence apparatus, and he leaned over it mechanically. Suddenly, he started. One might even have believed, momentarily, so clearly did his facial expression translate horror, that his bat’s wing eyebrows were flying away from his face and that his raised hands were trying to recapture them.

  Intrigued, Thlaes leaned over in his turn, and the paradoxical fleece in which his face was hidden, as if in a hood, swelled up beneath his shrill exclamations. The mauve flame of his immersed irises seemed to be trying to set fire to the surrounding brush. His robe having slipped from his shoulders, he was nothing more than an immense body draped in the cilice of his russet fur. And Sagax, who ran forward hastily, felt the horses’ tails that were hanging from the frenetic lips of the Grand Pedagogue Thales brush his cheek.

  Welded together by the same astonishment, the three men now formed a single block. Suddenly, there was a sway of heads, a continual trepidation of upper bodies and a clash of shoulders, which awoke a common desolation that soon extended to stupor. For a moment, they clung to one another in order not to fall down, folding up and then straightening up, moving away from the microcosm, the object of their panic and then coming back, involuntarily fascinated.

  Then a quavering voice emerged from that human landslide.

  “Is your apparatus faulty, Sagax?”

  “I repaired it recently. It’s accurate, Mathesis.

  Frantically, the three Sages ran to the door.

  The Machine sector, almost adjacent to Sagax’s dwelling, was crossed laterally, and the panicked trio of August Individuals raced into the Triumphal Way.

  Disorder everywhere!

  Everywhere, the victorious and cynical disease, displaying itself like a patient gang
rene that had finally found its moment!

  The convergence apparatus certainly had not lied. The City of Harmony now seemed to be populated by the inmates of a madhouse in unwarranted activity. And Sagax despaired at the thought that he would never have enough fluid to carry out psychic orthopedics to bring all the hordes now requiring padded cells back to the rectilinear path of reason.

  What was the point of suggestion anyway, since it did no good?

  Unprecedentedly, the couple and the monster, whom he had inflicted with lethargy, had disappeared from their glass cells! They had broken the constraint of his magnetic will. And those wretches—it was no longer deniable—had permanently contaminated all their brethren.

  Obstructing the broad avenues that seemed to be carved out of blocks of precious stone, rolling its polychromatic waves through the streets where the alternate flashes of gold and sparkling gems replied to one another, emerging in urgent waves from Familisteries, an aberrant crowd was wandering, unfurling the phases of a hitherto-unknown merriment. Every Perfected had his arm around the waist of a woman and, with trembling legs, stopped at intervals to take her hands, uttering sighs whose undeniable objective was to extinguish the adverse fire of blazing eyes. All of them were marching in pairs, interlaced, many looking one another in the eyes for long periods, like children blissfully contemplating the moon in a pail of water. Some must have had lips coated in a miraculous jam, for they were licking one another reciprocally and repeatedly. Others preferred ears, into which they introduced the moisture of their tongues with exclamations of delight.

  It was indubitable that a large number were afflicted by burning itches, devouring fleas or hitherto-unknown skin diseases, since they were rubbing themselves ardently against the hips and thighs of their companions. Some were grazing the curls that grew like wild grass on feminine napes. Many, whose ocular globes were tilted back by ecstasy, were moving awkwardly, aiming orbits filled with white faience at the clouds.