Love in 5000 Years

by Fernand Kolney

  Twenty paces further on the intensified itch had become intolerable, seeming to be pushing hot needles all the way to the bone. Leaning over, he saw that the grass under his feet was on fire. Wherever he placed his foot, the vegetation instantly burst into flame—and, bizarrely, went out of its own accord when he had passed.

  Thereafter, he strove to find bare patches. Was the planet returning to its igneous state? What was the cause of the inconceivable phenomenon?

  As he lingered for the duration of an eye-blink, trying to work it out, the ground reddened; blue flames ran ahead of him in a momentary procession, capriciously, and returned to throw themselves at his legs. Booted with fire, his toga began to burn. With a shrug of his shoulders, he rid himself of it.

  He had but one thought: to save Formosa, at all costs; to preserve her amber tresses and adorable body from the mysterious conflagration. Lifting her higher, holding her with cupped arms, he howled with sacred terror and broke into a furious run, treading underfoot the smoking torches that were the large roots with which the ground bristled, his toes kneading the boiling pitch with which the ground was sticky.

  Fortunately, there was a stream nearby. He threw himself into it, his nostrils full of the acrid odor of his singed fur. He went upstream, cleaving through the water, with the woman clutched grimly to his bosom, like some fabulous triton of the earliest ages carrying off a siren.

  Along the banks, the bushes were indented by fire; ambulant braziers and speedy furnaces pursued him, running with furious cracklings to rear up suddenly, pouring their sparkling manes over the very edge of his liquid refuge. An invisible hand ignited the stripped willows one by one, willows with hydrocephalic heads that would son by fantastic candles surrounding a mortuary bed. A fire-ship of errant plants drifted by—which he only avoided, with great difficulty, by throwing himself into a little inlet on the shore.

  Drunk with panic, he tried to swim, but blazing water-lilies came to touch his mouth like ardent coals. Arrowheads pierced his flanks with their white-hot darts; mosses pressed their incandescent sponges to his breast. The water itself began to seethe, and an erosion of silvery fish appeared at the surface, splashing in circumflex jets.

  Sagax understood that, in a few seconds, he would be boiled. A large protruding rock offered a precarious refuge, on which he stopped in order to die.

  One last time, he looked back, and continuous topaz-colored flashes emerging in the distance from the Machine Sector allowed him to discover the truth. Suddenly, he uttered a cry of savage joy. Other blocks, enormous and polished, led to the spring that ran beneath the hill with the profile of Wisdom, the hill of Minerva.

  The Creator of Humans gathered all the energy that remained to him, and the hope of living and tasting love made him leap over the cold stones with the precision of a heron. Now, his teeth clenched in the woman’s tresses, he hoisted her up with him, with an effort of his arms, into the grotto of Pallas Athene.

  Safe henceforth, he breathed deeply for a long quarter of an hour, methodically aerating his lungs, from which groans were still emerging. Calmer, he verified the common disaster.

  His hair and eyebrows had disappeared and large burns appeared on his thighs, back and sides, which had gone deep into his flesh, transforming his epidermis, in places, into fluted gauze. It was the same for his feet, which his thick sandals had fortunately preserved in part.

  Taking advantage of Formosa’s stubborn faint, he set about examining her with scientific scrupulousness. Joy! She was almost untouched, having no injuries save that the down of her fur was singed. Sagax’s breath blew away the ash that rimmed her face, into a little ochreous cloud, avidly breathed in. Then he took the opportunity to make a more intimate investigation.

  As he had suspected, and as she had affirmed herself, the Reproductress had only been imperfectly defeminized. The botched operation had subsequently rendered demi-sensations possible. And because he had undergone torture for her, he considered the woman with a dispirited tenderness. Had he not conquered her in the manner of the heroes of Prehistory? Against all odds and opposition, he had snatched her from Gehenna, from the tentacles of fire that strove to grip them as they passed. Henceforth, might not that noble deed compensate for his infirmity of castration, and was he not worthy to be loved, at least platonically?

  A few aspersions of cold water might perhaps bring Formosa back to consciousness. He lifted her up and mechanically looked around for a pool. As he did not find one he went, at hazard, to pass his hand under a large mossy boulder to which he had not previously paid any attention.

  Abruptly, the rock moved, oscillating from right to left. An unknown force appeared to be flowing from the summit, which rose up, unfurling beneath it a quivering mass that Sagax saw progressively standing up. Frightened, he recoiled with a cry, for the block took on human form, imposing an apparition of a phantom dressed in a shroud of hair like coconut fibers.

  Thales, motionless until then with his head between hi knees, surged forth before the Creator of Humans like a living statue of Remorse. He had pruned his facial hair and, moreover, used scissors to excise two small portholes for his eyes. His head, in consequence, seemed to he clad in a sort of diver’s helmet.

  Without wasting time in vain circumlocutions, the Grand Pedagogue marched straight up to Sagax and, parting the hair that obstructed his lips, shouted, his right hand emphasizing the anathema and the objurgation:

  “Is it, then, the action of Science to rub a woman like a buck sniffing a doe? Why are you returning to bestiality? Why are you destroying, in a single day, the persistent work of five hundred centuries of superior civilization? Why are you blaspheming the human intelligence that, with its patient alluvia, has raised the coral island of our City above the aggressive ocean of the abstract World, once swept by the tempests of Evil, the hurricanes of invincible stupidity? Why have you come to pluck the unpolluted lily of our Justice, the fragile and virginal flower that we have planted as a supreme protest of the Ideal in the vindictive bosom of hostile Nature? Why, with your sacrilegious fingers, have you slapped the impassive Face of Harmony?

  “To holy Fraternity, we have made the sacrifice of sensual pleasure; we have founded the Gem-City on ground no longer shaken by the evil convulsions of the Flesh. The abominable words dolor and iniquity no longer had any meaning in current language; they had been erased from the human idiom, and now you surge forth to bring back everything, to affirm the supremacy of the genitals over the brain!

  “Yes, we had realized the miracle of giving birth to humans intellectually and physiologically equal. At our discretion and according to our needs, we were able to create genius…and you have brought everything into question again; you want to overturn everything, in order that one of your vesicles might emit a spasm in your suddenly-enchanted fibers.

  “Why have you laid the eggs of a scorpion among us? Why have you stirred up chaos by exhuming the fossil cadavers, the painted mummies of Amour and Sensuality? Do you not know that their fetid odor, their hypogean reek will pour deadly inebriation over humans and force them to desert the geometric routs of lucidity, the luminous paths of Virtue? Are you unaware that the only pacification that was can experience comes from the Truth? Come, follow me, return to it; draw away from is hypocritical rival, physical Beauty, which has always visited despair upon the greater number and joy only to a few.

  “Hear me: Execration! Sevenfold execration upon Beauty with the eyes of artifice, the breasts swollen with temporary intoxications, the empty brain, the mask illuminated by lies, which, in its very essence is as unjust as it is immoral, and whose painted belly let fall among us for far too long the ovules of delirious hatred and pretentious vanity!”

  Thales’ words made the sonorous air of the cavern vibrate and toll like a knell. Drawn from her torpor by their rumbling echo, Formosa opened her eyes and, sighing deeply, fixed Sagax with two eyes like the garden asters. On seeing her revive, the Creator of Humans placed his hand on hr blonde head in a gesture
of enthusiasm. Pain stabbed him; his charred epidermis had swelled like painted wood blistered by heat; in spite of everything, like an enlightened catechumen, he confessed his ardent faith. Ormadz and Ahriman, the two principles of Life, Good and Evil, entered into conflagration again.

  “Get out, Chaperone of Incomprehension! Do you know that I want to live, to live without caring about anything else? Blessed be Disorder, if it permits me to live! Blessed be Evil, if it permits me, incidentally, to taste happiness! Blessed be Chaos, if it permits me to evolve into a human being! Blessed be Injustice, if it permits me to have a heart full of anguish and bitterness, but also full of impetuous passions! And blessed by Pain if, thanks to her, I am no longer an ambulant theorem, and palpitate other than in cold equations.”

  Exasperated, in a sudden descent, the chirping birds of the vault came to assist Sagax and help him chase Thales away. In a compact flock, beaks thrusting and wings beating, with a din of shrill cries, they hurled themselves at the face of the Great Educator, threatening his eyes, pecking the long cloth of his face and driving him outside.

  Thus, the Creator of Humans had reverted to the anterior conception of civilized life. By virtue of replacing himself under the aegis of Nature, returning to slake his thirst at the “eternal spring of fecundity and wisdom,” a new vigor, an effervescent youth, spread through his enchanted marrow.

  How stupid the doctrines of abstract beauty and the moral law that had previously ruled the Neuters seemed! The plastic sense of the World, so long sacrificed to social eurhythmia, was reborn within him, to restore the true significance to things. Was not the Absolute that humans has realized on Earth monstrous, he said to himself, since it was an assault on the relativity and contingency of Creation? Why had Humankind tried to teach a lesson to its host, the Cosmos. Was the latter not too superb, and was not the Universe, for that very reason, inclined every day to expel its presumptuous tenant?

  When everything hates everything else, collides with everything else, devours and destroys everything else, should humans live, fraternally and peacefully, in the midst of the gigantic conflict? There was the dissonance, the sin against the universal Harmony, that nature could not tolerate. With their foot on permanently-enslaved Matter, thinking beings had sought to construct perfect ideologies, impeccable systems of happiness, without ever palpitating in the flesh! Antinomy! The human species could be envisaged as a series of corpuscles that had prospered, like some absurd vegetation, on one of the cogwheels of the Great All. Why did that grain of dust, that reasoning species, want to provide an obstacle to the fabulous technology of the Universe? Was it not better to participate in the eternal vibration that produced light and life, even if Evil were the sole key that permitted the perpetual movement of infinity to be rewound?

  Those thoughts brought a strong wine to Sagax’s mind, which intoxicated him, and he suddenly observed that the entrance to the cave was reddening, like his dreams of the future, Minerva’s mouth was rubified, passing through capricious shades of red, vinous hues, violets of enfevered mucus, and settled definitely in the raw whiteness of molten glass. A moment later, it folded up, forming a moue, seemingly simpering coquettishly. Even the lips were quivering with pleasure, pursing beneath a kiss that appealed to him, Sagax, and then extending—and their granite boiled, liquefying in broad flows that sought to come together.

  Up above the birds of the vault took fright, fluttered madly, colliding and falling in a multicolored rain, to rise up again and engage in strident battle. The vanquished fell on their backs, littering the ground with their limp bodies, and clawing the air with their feet in the spasms of agony.

  Sagax wanted to know the reason for that new phenomenon and he plunged forward, head first, the pallor of his bloodless forehead causing the black star that gravitated there to become even more prominent.

  A blast of explosive vapors drove him back, next to Formosa, who, gripped by terror, her arms braced against the ground, was uttering continual yelps. Beneath the thicker downpour of dying birds, the Creator of Humans saw the daylight gradually shrinking; he saw the disk of light contract, and it was soon no more than a pale eye. Now, only a curt gleam, a flash of cold brightness, as sharp and flat as a steel blade, perforated the increasing darkness.

  Another second, and then, abruptly, imperious and mute night...

  Then the evidence imposed itself upon Sagax. The entrance of the cave had been sealed, like a stopper sealing the neck of a bottle. Standing in the Hall of Machines, Mathesis had buried him alive, with Formosa!

  No, no! He would not die. Once again, he would escape. He too could unleash a terrible power—and he lowered his head, drawing it back to his shoulders like a bull gathering itself. Through the walls of his exit-less prison he sent the psycho-magnetic fluid that could blast his adversary at his battle-station.

  Thus, Reason and Sensation, those two irreconcilable forces, disputed the victory, each seeking, in sum, to capture what remained of the World. One attacked in the Light, the other defended himself in Darkness.

  Twenty times, the Creator of Humans discharged the high-voltage current of his magnetism, and twenty times, he hoped that, beneath the forceps of his will, the valve of the cavern would finally open to give birth to daylight.

  Nothing.

  In the intensified heat, the air became thin. He understood that Mathesis was winning—and he threw himself to the right and the left, forwards and backwards; the helix of his crazed arms beat the darkness, while his feet sank into the soft litter of avian corpses. Warm entrails clung to his heels.

  Then, he stiffened himself one last time, bracing his back, and sulfurous flames crackled around his head to make a transient vivid diamond necklace in the darkness.

  Wasted effort.

  Already, his arteries were only circulating a heavy blood, which made his temples bulge with its precipitate assault. Auditory hallucinations commenced, certain harbingers of the loss of all consciousness. It seemed to him that billions of rats were gnawing at the walls of his prison.

  With one bound, into which he put his last strength, he leapt sideways, exhausted—and he understood that from now on, all resistance was futile. He sensed that death was approaching, to knot its strangling fingers around his neck, to press him against its bosom of panic, to stifle him in a grip that stirred up vertigo.

  Wildly, he grabbed hold of Formosa, who had fainted again, and pressed his mouth to the mouth of the woman for whom he had already suffered so much. In one last savage kiss he fell with her, inanimate, to the ground.

  Chapter XII

  The Creator of Humans was not dead, immured. Miraculously, he had been saved by the Neuters who had tracked him in the Garden of Delights and whom he had then disarmed because they had then believed a lie. He was the last hope of the Perfected. He was the only one on whom they could count to recover the human condition, and they had patiently dug through the earthen walls of Minerva’s grotto with their bare hands. What he had mistaken for the nibbling of a myriad of rodents was the salvation that was drawing nearer, the tenacious excavation of those to whom he had given a promise to restore, before long and in all its plenitude, the faculty of making love.

  Freed, Sagax had taken refuge in the propitious circle of his bottles of spermatozoids. That was an inviolable and sacred shelter in which the Prefect of Machines could not attack him without also destroying the Cultures and depriving the Ideal City, by that very action, of any posterity. With an ardor and frenzy that did not exclude method, he had worked without weakness or rest.

  On the evening of the third day, he had given Formosa a perfectly restored sexual sensibility.

  Two weeks had not elapsed when he had recreated his own genitals.

  Those two marvels had been accomplished thanks to the vital fluid improperly called “the soul” by distant centuries—a fluid that he had succeeded in extracting from the human organism, subsequently isolating it and capturing it. For a long time, he had been on the track of that discovery; for hal
f a century, already, he had considered that the anterior theory of thought was no longer acceptable.

  He knew, in fact, that in order to relax or contract a tendon required a material agent, a fluid, perhaps imponderable but physical, and not a phenomenon of the mental order denominated as “will.” A brass wire, which channels electricity and reacts to its passage, could be precisely compared to an animal’s tendon, and he had set out in search of the mysterious emanation that impressed the tendon in order to determine movement. The mechanical heresy that claims that a conductive fiber can be influenced without discharging any current thereinto—the ancient explanation of Locomotion, in brief—he had destroyed forever.

  For him, the human body was analogous to an electric pile with multiple concordant elements, which elaborated a fluid whose principal pole was the brain. Animated by that fluid, which was nothing other than the radiation of heavenly bodies, in which the planet bathes,43 the brain entered into vibration and, through the objective of the five senses, imprinted concrete images of the world on the gray matter of its circumvolutions. Then it immaterialized them, and from their harmonized association, created will and cogitation—which is to say, the penchant of the individual, his inclination toward one or other order of nervous shocks susceptible to procuring him the maximum material or mental pleasure. The cervical mass, activated by the effluence improperly identified as “the soul,” processed the impressions received in the manner of an alembic on the boil distilling the residue, the grounds, in order to extract the essence, the “spirit.” The identity of the two functions was such that the same word served to designate their product.

  Thus, Free Will did not exist. An idea, considered as a effect, could no longer be envisaged as a cause. On the other hand, all the beings bathing in the vibrations of the Cosmos, in the radiant waves of the sovereign Matter—energy, dynamism, magnetism—were, in the period of life, merely poorly conductive bodies, receptacles, in which the universal effluvia could blossom in a brief and fleeting fashion. An accident, which destroyed one or several elements of the pile, led to death, rejecting them from the Cycle of Universal Palpitation.