Love in 5000 Years

by Fernand Kolney

  A pollen of madness had settled upon the Gem-City inseminating brains. Human form and the odor of skin had acquired the property of precipitating all individuals into a quasi-epileptic inebriation.

  The three Sages had sped like bullets through that multitude occupied in sniffing and palpating one another delightedly. No one had paid any attention to their presence. Troubled by their trajectory, the dense crowd had opened and then closed on them again without any emotion, and had resumed the course of their unusual diversions. Everywhere, a murmur of oppressed breathing rose up, and a faint hubbub whose weft was composed of little cries of pleasure, like the cooing of countless doves, which was nothing but the sound of scattered kisses.

  The august trio wanted to end that perambulation in the horrible, but each of them was determined not to turn back until they had explored all the by-ways of that labyrinth of calamity. Holding hands, in order to assure one another that they were not under the influence of some extravagant nightmare, Mathesis, Sagax and Thales were running flat out, their red togas flapping, in order to measure the extent of the disaster.

  At every step they encountered some further desolation. Sometimes, their forward rush knocked over couples abstracted from all reality, whose rhythmic breath seemed to be igniting hot fires, and who, lying on the ground, instead of getting up, continued to agitate in the pursuit of difficult felicities. Often, as they passed, hands attempted to grab hold of their scarlet robes, and viscous voices exhorted them to conform to the general aberration.

  In front of Familistery 132, one group engaged in a tourney of gallant words even cried out to them: “Look at those fools going by! They’re the presumptuous ones who claimed to have changed human nature!”

  An ebb-tide of perfumes and a squall of floral scents enabled them to deduce the proximity of the terrestrial Valhalla, the Garden of Delights. They hurled themselves into it—and before that Eldorado of the last humans, before the gigantic clothed basin, like a patterned dustcover, over the distant carpets of lawns, thickets, meadows and orchards, before the interminable cup with flower-embroidered slopes lacy with the fine arabesques of rivulets, and hills nickeled by the interlacement of winding paths, before the immense valley ornamented with flower-beds and corollas that revealed the ultimate esthetic joys, their distress was complete.

  Everywhere, everywhere, the same unreason! Everywhere, everywhere the Perfected were sniffing women, as beasts sniffed their females in the mating season.

  And beneath the birches with the silver sheaths, beneath the snowy acacias, beneath the flowering lindens, beneath the bewigged plane-trees, beneath the enormous oaks that presides over the council of trees from a distance, couples and more couples were behaving like those in the City.

  Some could even be seen who were exercising less restraint. Undoubtedly, they were attempting to realize an unnamable act that had been perpetrated in distant ages. Was it necessary to believe that they found themselves the objective of an offensive return of a heredity five thousand years old, and that all the fecundation cultures had been vitiated at the outset? They were attempting to insinuate themselves into their companions’ spouts, and, after a thousand awkward gropings, finally conscious that they were unable to attain the objective of their desires, they were darting tongues surrounded by vapor, while their congested eyes bulged from their orbits and their cheeks passed from bright red to celery-green in frustration.

  Soon, on the lawns and the meadows, in the arbors and hornbeam plantations, one the edges of the woods and forests, there was nothing but a cadence of agitated rumps, a billowing of hindquarters, rising, falling, pausing, persisting momentarily in miming a gesture about which they had been recently informed, and which then collapsed, discouraged.

  A groan of impotence, the issue of a thousand throats, came to die at the feet of the three Sages, identical to the ancient breath of the vanished oceans, the halting respiration of warm seas that the sun had once infused with fevers and the great lust of its rays.

  Then, before that vision, the Prefect of Machines threatened the terrestrial Valhalla with his fist. His wrath thundered a supreme malediction against the delirious individuals sprawled like huge insects in the long grass, against the humans who were making such use of the light and life that his genius provided for them.

  “They’re aphids descending by night from the blue sky to kill the roses. They’re swarms of locusts flying from the putrid plains of Instinct to devour the pure seeds of the Ideal.”

  And he turned back, with his two colleagues.

  Thales marched in the lead, his arms apart, his back bent, his legs weak, his head weighed down by an invisible yoke of dolor. Suddenly, he stopped, and pulled from an enormous comb that resembled the jaw of a crocodile from the depths of his toga. Carefully, he tidied the hood of his bead, exhuming his eyes and lips, and said: “It’s the end of equilibrium, for the black poison is flowing again in the veins of humankind. Nothing can resist Love, which, throughout the history of the world, has caused more ravages, sterilized more intelligence and energy, than all other scourges—earthquakes, wars and superstitions—combined.”

  “Love!” Sagax objected. “But they’re devirilized. They’re neuters, like us.”

  “All the more reason,” retorted the Grand Pedagogue. “Ancient humans only revered that which did not fall within their understanding. The Perfected will worship and desire amour with all the more force because they cannot know and analyze it. The illusory and injurious power of myths was once terrible, as you know...”

  Since he had hurled himself into the City with his companions, Sagax sensed that the black star on his forehead had been growing larger. At Thales’ words, an interior fire appeared, making the ardent darkness boil, soaking his face with sweat.

  Without being able to explain it, however, he suddenly triumphed over his terrors. A sudden enthusiasm transfigured him. Suddenly, his hand raised, he pointed at the extenuated sun, which, low in the east, was painfully spitting out urgent flames, and which, from pompous light, had passed into the state of a fuliginous candle, a wretched lamp.

  In promising to redeem his brethren, the Grand Physiologist promised himself his own salvation: “Against all odds, we have saved the spark of life from the cosmic cataclysm; we have preserved it from the cold breath of lurking oblivion. But know that if, to your face, we stirred it with our fervors, it was to continue to bear witness to and judge the phenomena of the Universe, which created us—us, humans, us, the sickly and the dolorous, with the sole end of making us witness to the melodrama of its injustice, the changing perspectives of its ferocity. After having triumphed over the intimacy of Nature, after having brought the World back to the sentiment of moderation, modesty and proportion, we want to continue to live in order to see what more its systematic iniquity will invent. No, it will not be said that the present disaster will find us devoid of courage and intelligence. I swear before you that I will soon find an antidote to the new toxin, and I will save the City...”

  Mathesis bowed his head as a sign of approval—but although he liked the beautiful oratory, he knew that eloquence often has the aim of avoiding precision and sincerity. “What are you going to do?” he queried.

  “Grant them the pathological state to which the abuse of sexual pleasure will inevitably lead them. In brief, gratify all these convulsionaries with the general paralysis of which love is, in my opinion, merely the beginning. Soon, appropriately imbecilic, they’ll become inoffensive, and that will give me six months to find an immunizing vaccine for the aberration that we believed to have disappeared forever.”

  The Creator of Humans had scarcely finished speaking when the equine mane carpeting Thales’ face reared up wildly. He fustigated his thorax with it, as if he were trying to chase away a swarm of mosquitoes. It was obvious that he did not approve of half-measures and opportunistic solutions. “And if you can’t cure all these maniacs,” he said, “it will be necessary not to hesitate in exterminating them en masse, you hear? We mus
t not recoil before the necessity of stifling the evil in its cocoon. To incinerate five or ten thousand bodies in child’s play, thanks to the Machines. With your cultures and a few spared reproductresses, it will be easy for us then to give birth to a better humankind, permanently comprehensive, this time...”

  The nape of Sagax’s neck prickled, and a frisson sent icy waves through the marrow of his bones. So, he thought. Love has scarcely shown its ambiguous smile of a vicious cherub than it drags behind it visions of carnage, which it surveys hand in hand with Death, the great regulator of its disorders!

  At hazard, drifting like wrecks, the three Sages resumed their route. Before the vast fields that extended to the left of the Garden of Delights, they came to a standstill.

  Warmed by streams of water vapor and incessantly irrigated, the earth yielded four crops a year there. It was the time of one of the harvests. In the distance, gigantic scythes were moving of their own accord, shaving the soil, moving back and forth like exceptional and gigantic trenchers. The tall wheat fell, crunching, in parallel lines.

  In a corner of one field, metal cables, activated by magnetic discharges, reared up on their bases like snakes on their tails, then straightened, subsequently to coil around sheaves, which they rapidly bundled up, thus giving them the shaped of stout women. The method had been introduced around the year 2850 and had been handed down by tradition to the acquaintance of the civilized inhabitants of the Gem-City. Since then, it had been continued by way of retrospective curiosity, and in order to prove to the young that barbaric humans had once nourished themselves on grains, like birds.

  Before those crops of ancient invention, Sagax meditated, and a vision of exact reality appeared to him. Now, there was no longer anything of which he was unaware. He could no longer doubt that a human species, which had then comprised billions of individuals, had hoped, panted, implored and suffered, only to be mystified a little more every day by the abominable forces composing the world. Recent days had undeceived him. Until then, he had thought that he was correct in thinking that humans had always been lucid, peaceful and just, and that if there were no longer more than a small number of them, the Perfected, their society was no different from those of old.

  What a disillusionment he had undergone! Henceforth, he was certain that what he had mistaken for the “natural” was merely the artificial, and that the Civilization of Neuters was nothing but a little happiness stolen surreptitiously from Stepmother Nature. But after that protest of Intelligence against the baneful phenomena of Creation, was the last parcel of Humankind about to cut short its brief pause in Justice and, reaching out toward Disorder, staggering on bloody feet, resume a course along the road that all the races had followed, the endless road of Despair and Aberration?

  He raised the forehead on which his black star was still scintillating, and directed his gaze toward the horizon. In the distance, herds of cattle were grazing—herds that were quite useless, intended purely to furnish the landscape, to render it more pleasant, to alleviate the impression of emptiness that chills the most beautiful scenery and, in accordance with an eternal esthetic rule, renders it hostile to the contemplative eye.

  He considered his colleagues. Mathesis seemed to be locked in a profound meditation. Thales was agitated, using both hands to pull long threads from his mouth, the color of the corozo that felted his face.

  Pointing to the distant heifers, nonchalantly parading their russet paches in the pearl-gray mist sweated by the earth, incubating in artificial warmth, the Grand Pedagogue said: “Who would ever have thought that our ancestors nourished themselves on the cadavers of animals, that they lived as necrophagic carnivores!”

  The horrified bat’s-wing eyebrows of the Prefect of Machines seemed to be hiding in his hair. “Perhaps we’re not far away, ourselves, from that regression to barbarism,” he said.

  Mechanically, the three Sages had returned to the Triumphal Way that led to the gate of the prodigious park, and now a dull tread, a confused friction of cohorts on the march, a softly undulating rumor, was audible, becoming clearer with every passing minute. A volley of cries and acclamations cleaved through space, to crumble around their ears.

  Then there was an anxious science, like the threat of a storm, stringing out the first measures of its thunder...

  Then the immense avenue was gripped by gurgling hiccups, and subsequently vomited forth a crowd, dispersed in large pools, disgorging an uninterrupted trickle of people with furry bodies, fuming with sweat in their nudity, mouths trumpeting.

  Thales, the terrible Pedagogue had just understood. Flashes darting from his eyes threatened to set fire to the hood of his excessive beard, and, his lips inflamed by indignation, he said: “Twenty times over I’ve denounced the immorality and ridiculousness of pomp and processions; unrelentingly, I’ve asked you to abolish the Festival of Life, for simplicity ought to be the only pageantry of the Righteous. You wouldn’t listen—see what comes of it!”

  Preceded by a platoon of automatic horses, prancing on his Pegasus, the poet Carminus surged forth. An apostate himself, amid the unanimous apostasy, his face rubicund with sacred exaltation, he was proclaiming his new Faith:

  “Evohé! Salutations to the immemorial and ever-youthful Force! Salutations to the Principle that engenders, reinvigorates and transfigures! Salutations to Amour, Licensee of the Universe, Superintendent of Equilibrium! Salutations to Amour, whose immortal fire makes the stars ardent and permits worlds to exchange caresses of light and kisses of warmth across the blue-tinted steppes of the palpitating ether! Salutations to Amour, which has kneaded life in a dough of felicity with quivering arms! Salutations to Amour, which the aberrant had expelled from our destiny, and for which the Earth wears mourning in her widow’s weeds, beneath veils of frost, in crêpes of darkness.”

  He passed by, beneath a vault of cheers, and behind him, on an onyx chariot covered with a sheet of white and red lilies, under a dome of hyacinths, daisies, narcissi, poppies, lotuses and gladioli falling in perfumed girandoles and pendants, came the two Initiators, the two Lovers, Amborix and his companion, Flamina.38 Powdered with saffron, their heads crowned with myrtle, their loins embroidered with carbuncles, with interlaced strings of rubies and emeralds on their thighs, like two idols scintillating with gems, they pressed their lips together, embraced one another with their hips, in a continuous gesture that aroused the enthusiasm of the multitude.

  After them came Phegor, the unnatural son of bottle 1,723. His head mitered, his eyebrows painted, his eyelids rouged, his belly constellated with rutilant jewels, he was carried on a throne of reed-striped alabaster by six blond adolescents with sea-green eyes and hair bound in silver nets—and he was erecting a monstrous indecency, the sight of which had the spectators swoon with pleasure, and howl: “He’s a man—a male and not a neuter! Soon, we’ll be like him...”

  Along the flanks of the procession, at its head and tail, a delirium had gripped the people, twisting them as if ten thousand bodies were being leached. The general vertigo seemed to hurl the masses into a whirlwind of frenzy, and then project them in quivering curls, long serpentine undulations and chaotic eddies. Nothing could be heard but the soft sound of kisses and the friction of pelts.

  Everywhere, arms were curved into harpoons to grip torsos; everywhere, lips were rounded into suckers to imbibe joy. Everywhere, throats were assailed, scattered tresses whipped faces and were hectically sniffed, exasperated feet stamped, while larynxes liberated groans of impotence and women bared their breasts. Even on the ground, heaps composed of bodies clinging to one another were zigzagging and jumping convulsively, poorly balanced on the dozens of feet huddled at their base. Torsos were twisting, rotating thighs scything the air, faces emerging from the swell of bellies—and occasionally, a woman, her face mottled with red, emerged, soon dragged back into the depths of the pile by avid concupiscent hands.

  Reproductresses were four times less numerous than men, and the battle for females was beginning!

>   The three Sages, petrified and dumbstruck, watched the unfurling of that fresco, painted by the furious brush of reality. In front of them, dispersing in all directions, old women with over-ripe breasts, macrobites with denuded foreheads, were running away, conscious that the new sensuality about which the city was talking would never be known to them, who had lived too long. They stopped here and there to weep, to throw their arms out impulsively and then to draw them in again as if they were trying to embrace an illusory lover, but only hugging emptiness to their disenchanted bosoms.

  There was no longer any doubt about it; that entire army of castrati was in search of carnal enjoyment, and striving as intensely as possible to recreate the organ to assist the function.

  Suddenly, a streak of fire flashed through Sagax’s brain. He clutched his companions’ togas in order not to fall over. In front of him, Staroth, the cretinous offspring of bottle 1,324 went by, exhibiting a bulbous ignominy that could compete advantageously with that of his friend Phegor. Desirous of pleasing and invoking the passive sex, he had fashioned a garment with the ill-adapted fragments of a woman’s toga. From the drooping petals of his rags emerged, like a pistil, the slender and pimply neck that could hardly support the green-blotched pumpkin of his spongy head—and he strode on thus, ostentatiously parting his legs like the blades of scissors.

  The Creator of Humans had understood. His puerile candor, the lily-white innocence of the Perfected, had not permitted him, until now, to grasp the truth. Now he could no longer ignore it. Staroth, like Phegor and Amborix, had been imperfectly devirilized at puberty. Similarly, Flamina and Formosa had been only partly exonerated of their system of sexual sensibility.

  And Sagax connected with that fact the sudden disappearance of the surgeon responsible for operating on all the young adolescents—a disappearance that had occurred the day after the Festival of Life, to which he had paid little attention at the time. The rumor had gone around the City that he must have left the Gem-City of the Garden of Delights, that he had imprudently ventured outside the zone where life was maintained, and that the breath of the eternal winter had changed him into a statue of ice.