As for Dimitri, he was both agnostic and superstitious. He believed in a sort of higher godhead indifferent towards humans, which possessed a superior intelligence and was very powerful rather than omnipotent, subdividing itself into a myriad of powers Dimitri usually referred to as the ‘Devil’. Dimitri, however, was on very good terms with all religions, as required by the official ideology of Vitalist Constructivism.
* * *
There was a roar from the sky. Dimitri leaned over towards the window. Despite the darkness, he could make out a greyish, oblong and inflated object far larger than the Albatros. Some two hundred metres away, slightly above them, another airship was crossing their route.
It was a new cargo aircraft, travelling at a slow speed (200 kilometres per hour) – an eight-motor Orca. Dimitri gazed at the huge, suspended carrier, which housed the freight and cockpit. On its dark frame was a black, prancing horse on a yellow background: Ferrari. Following the disappearance of Boeing, four big companies were now vying for the world aerospace market: Ferrari, the pride of Padania; Euromotor Airbus Gesellschaft (EAG), Typhoone and Tao-Wang Air Industries. The last of these was a formidable Sino-Japanese company producing Wang-wa-sii or Flying Dragons, vacuum-filled airships that could travel at a slightly greater speed than the others. Typhoone had announced it could match them with its new ‘electromagnetically suspended airships’, which could reach a speed of 500 kilometres per hour and carry ten times the cargo of the old jets, while consuming ten times less energy.
The only planes now were the superlight ones of the Golden Youth. Goods were freighted via airships or ships, which ran in part on wind and hydrodynamic energy and were less polluting but just as fast. Military planes had been replaced by supersonic missile-throwing drones that could be piloted from the ground – these were known as Sharkies or ‘Flying Sharks’ and were produced by Typhoone – and by low-orbit satellites with powerful lasers.
The person sitting next to Dimitri, a young officer from the Engineers’ Corps, addressed him:
‘Do you know what they’re carrying, Mr. Councillor?’
‘I don’t. Tell me, Lieutenant...’
‘Chimeras from the bio-genetic industry in Kort. They’re taking this cargo to Port Arthur.’
Chimeras were man-animal hybrids – an old dream of ancient civilisations which had become reality thanks to bio-technologies (what were now called genomics). A patent for them had been filed by two American researchers in 1998 to prevent – so the story went – these ethically shocking practices from developing any further. Chimeras (‘pigmen’, ‘anthroporats’, ‘chimpanhumans’) served all sorts of purposes: to produce improved sperm, as anti-rejection organ banks, as haemoglobin donors... These doped animals with human genes were filled with biotronic control chips. They were born in incubators – artificial amniotic uteruses – in the Typhoone labs in Kort, which the aircraft was flying over that very moment.
After 2050, incubators and ‘supersperm’ had been of great help as a means of increasing birth rates and especially improving the genetic performance of the ruling elite. Most of the population of the Federation and the world had merely reverted to the archaic demographic balance of traditional society – the age-old natural order based on high birth and death rates. As slogan no. 405 of Vitalist Constructivism stated, ‘Faustianism is a form of esoterism.’
In the early Twenty-first century, following the Great Catastrophe, technological science had swept away what had been the dominant outlook for the past three centuries. Humanist and anthropocentric dogmas had collapsed. But despite this, the partisans of the old ideas enjoyed freedom of speech. On Euronet they even had a site of their own: ‘The Golden Age’. The government turned a blind eye: it was good for these nostalgic old people to have a way of venting themselves.
* * *
There was a change in the speed of the propellers. ‘We will be reaching Dorbisk, our final destination, in fifteen minutes,’ the artificial voice said. The aircraft was gradually losing altitude. The loud speakers played a muffled version of Douce France,[27] a song by one Charles Trenet[28] written about a century and a half earlier.
The hostess leaned towards Dimitri. Her movements were jerky and she gave off a scent of Ah!, the ‘ultramolecular’ aphrodisiac perfume by Eros Konglomerat. Dimitri immediately realised she was a biotronic hybrid. The hostess was handing out a coloured leaflet. It was Metamorphosis, the official magazine of the Government, printed on glossy paper.
On the cover of the magazine was a photo of the Christopher Columbus base on Mars, which had been operational since 2062. On rocky, light-red soil, under a dirty grey-orange sky, stood some inflated or half-buried structures; next to them were men in white spacesuits seated in small vehicles with large wheels. The title read, ‘On Mars we are multiplying our territory tenfold.’ The article described a deal that had been signed with the Chinese Empire for the division of the Red Planet along an equatorial frontier: the north hemisphere would be left to Eurosiberia and the southern to the Chinese and Japanese. Eurosiberia’s Asian rivals had thus set up a base on the south pole of the planet. Dimitri flicked through the index of the magazine. ‘The Kingdom of Naples is offering rural communities ultra-resistant, low calorie maintenance work horses. The Imperial Government is signing an agreement with the Amerindian Union for the reforesting of the Amazon. The construction of the Re-Educational Penitentiary City in the Caucasus is now complete, etc.’
The Plenipotentiary Minister leafed through the magazine. The articles were replete with official slogans and techno-realist illustrations. For instance: ‘Federation! Our sun never sets over our fourteen time zones,’ ‘The Great Homeland is not only a heritage: it’s a project too,’ and so on...
On a glossy interior page was an advertisement for a laser mini-disc: Our Hymns: those of our astronauts, sailors, ploughmen, lumberjacks, liberated women, etc. Dimitri reflected that his son might have liked this – he wanted to become a musician.
Arrival
Below, Dimitri could now see his town, Dorbisk, surrounded by snow-topped hills glittering under the waning Moon, near the sparkling waters of the Bering Strait. The aircraft came to a halt and people disembarked using the lift. On the summit of the floodlit control and landing tower, the great red-and-white checkered flag of the Empire fluttered in the night, lashed by an icy wind.
Dimitri reached the entrance hall. The radio-topographic short-wave chip set in his watch informed him that Olivia was waiting for him in Hall Number Two. Thanks to the electro-biological signals from her wrist, it took Dimitri less than two minutes to find her.
‘Did you have a nice day, Dimitri Leonidovich?’
‘An excellent day, Olivia Fiodorovna. How’re the children doing?’
‘They’re in bed. You’ll see them tomorrow.’
She embraced him.
‘I brought you a fur coat. You must be cold, coming from the warm regions of the Empire.’
Olivia covered Dimitri’s shoulders with a huge wolf-fur coat.
There was a sleigh waiting for them nearby. The driver grasped the horse’s reins and the snow started crunching under the sleigh’s runners. Their house was only ten minutes away from the airport.
In the main room of the house, a large peat fire gave off pleasant, scented and sweet heat.
As Dimitri sat in front of the fireplace, Natcha, his young maidservant, served him a platter of raw fish marinated in a sour wild-nettle sauce – a traditional Siberian dish.
Olivia watched her husband eat with her large blue eyes and a questioning, almost anxious air.
‘Did you accomplish your mission?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we going to spend fifteen days holiday together, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see, Dimitri? The sun is rising.’
Beyond the wooden frame of the window, light shone from the east. Far off, the snowy peaks of Alaska were visible, enveloped in the morning mist. In the violet sky, a musical roar and
a fast-moving streak of smoke revealed the presence of a Sharkie 27 – the aeronautical pride of the Typhoone company. At Mach 7, 25,000 metres above the ground, it crossed the icy sky. The stratospheric patrols of these flying sharks were securing the frontiers of the Empire.
Dimitri unpacked and gave Olivia the jewel he had brought for her from Brittany for their ten-year anniversary.
‘Come, let’s go to sleep.’
Facing the bed was a painting by the Twentieth century French artist Olivier Carré. It was a small green-and-grey oil canvas entitled Fin,[29] with a steel frame that the artist had made himself. The painting depicted a monster, ‘Le Grand Albert’.[30] His eyes appeared red and threatening, although there was no red in the picture. It was dated 1982.
Half asleep, Dimitri could hear his children laughing from the room upstairs. The white radiance of the Siberian sun always woke them up early.
The last image Dimitri Leonidovich Oblomov saw before his eyes before falling asleep was the huge red-and-white checkered flag – the living symbol of the Great Homeland. Red: like the blood shed and the blood it protected and served; white: like the radiance of the rising sun, like pure strength and loyalty.
* * *
All the scientific information provided in this story is accurate and not merely the product of the author’s literary imagination. For the inventions described, patents have been filed in the late Twentieth century. They were only developed later, however, in the Archeofuturist age, from a very different perspective...
[1] This seems to be a play on two famous works of Russian literature: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, about a man imprisoned in a Siberian gulag during the Stalinist era, and Oblomov by Ivan Gonchorov, about an aristocratic man who refuses to get out of bed.
[2] The sesterce was the coin of the Roman Empire.
[3] German: ‘bye’.
[4] Cernunnos is a god of the Celtic religion. Icons of him have been found in France and Germany.
[5] This probably refers to Deep Space One, an ion-propelled space probe that was launched as an experiment by NASA in 1998. The contract was secured by Hughes Electron Dynamics in 1995.
[6]Maharaja is Sanskrit for King.
[7] G, which is short for gravitational force, refers to the amount of gravitational force acting on a body when it is accelerating. The amount of force acting on a stable body on the Earth’s surface is 1G. A vehicle which accelerates rapidly, such as a fighter jet or the planetrain in this story, would subject its passengers to a high level of force – in this case, twice what a person ordinarily experiences in everyday life.
[8] Hoplites were the soldiers of ancient Greece.
[9] The Amsterdam Treaty, signed in 1997 but which went into effect in May 1999, in part gave more powers to the European Parliament of the EU.
[10] Shiva, one of the major deities of the Vedic pantheon in Hinduism, is the god who destroys the universe at the end of each cycle of time. Hindus who elevate Shiva above the other gods are known as Shaivites.
[11] Tintin is a character who travels the world in The Adventures of Tintin, a series of comics which began in Belgium in 1929.
[12] The International Money Fund, an international organisation intended to help stabilise the global economy.
[13] Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a German philosopher and is considered part of the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar era. His most important work was The Decline of the West, in which he theorised that all civilisations go through an inevitable cycle of ages of rise and decline in power. Spengler saw the West as entering its period of decline at the time he was writing.
[14] Russian: ‘peasant’.
[15] A traditional style of house in Russia.
[16] This would be Euro Disney, or Disneyland Paris.
[17] A peplum was a body-length women’s garment.
[18] ‘Tell Me that You Love Me’.
[19] Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was a great Russian filmmaker of the Soviet period. His films frequently depict the Russian countryside in a mysteriously pastoral manner.
[20] In the Hindu caste system there is no element by this name. It may be that Abishami is a family name that is associated with a particular caste.
[21] There is no actual book by this title or description, although the idea of the Titanic successfully completing its maiden voyage has been explored in a number of real alternate history stories.
[22] Muslin is a type of cotton fabric first introduced into Europe from the Middle East.
[23] Genetically modified organism.
[24] The Marshall Plan, named after Secretary of State George Marshall, was the American reconstruction program in Europe following the Second World War.
[25] Étienne François de Choiseul (1719-1785) was a French diplomat who was famous for his accomplishments. Among his achievements was the Second Treaty of Versailles, which secured Austrian support for a war against Prussia (the Seven Years War).
[26] Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was a philosopher and Emperor of Rome. His Meditations, among other points, asserts that one must use reason to attain harmony with the cosmos.
[27] ‘Sweet France’.
[28] Charles Trenet (1913-2001) was a French songwriter especially popular in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.
[29] French: ‘end’.
[30] ‘Albert the Great’ was Saint Albertus Magnus (1193?-1280), a Dominican bishop who attempted to reconcile science and religion. He was also noted for being the first Medieval thinker to merge Aristotle with the Catholic tradition.
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The Saga of the Aryan Race
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The Jedi in the Lotus: Star Wars and the Hindu Tradition
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It Cannot Be Stormed
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Tradition & Revolution
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Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right
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The Initiate: Journal of Traditional Studies
by David J. Wingfield (ed.)
Archeofuturism Page 31
