The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  Palais des Hôtes.

  Under a heavy sun, reflected in the glass panels of roofs, domes, bays and greenhouses the village is in fête.

  Long sheets of violet, red and white silk quiver along the facades. Gods are painted on many of them. The large figure of the Virgin with her robe full of cities and peoples on the march recurs incessantly. On the surface or her metal eyes, engraved ships float. The milk flowing from her nipples contains the names of Noumena, mingled with creatures of the three kingdoms, and Jesus, sitting on her lap, bears maxims that summarize the speculations of philosophers inscribed all over the nudity of his body. Generally, behind her, the two directions of the cross traverse one another. Painted or sculpted, they reproduce the emblemature of ethereal currents. The planets seem to be drawn there in a descending and remounting horizontal course that circulates them, combining them with comets, suns, the nuclei of nebulae and hordes of stars.

  With one wing, the Holy Spirit touches the summit of the Cross; the other attains the head of Christ. The pinions of that sacred fowl, as vast as those of our archangels, envelop the Son and the Virgin Mary with the same almost-white protection, even though each septenary of plumes bears the hues of the prism. In sum, the triangle of the Trinity frames the complication of the symbol luminously.

  That is repeated everywhere, on the silk sheets as tall as the facades, on the litters where the clergy caries them in groups of metal, ivory and wood. The statue of Mani and that of Buddha also ornament the temporary altars. From tripods garlanded with fresh flowers—roses, violets and dahlias—perfumes swirl.

  The tram carrying my two friends and me does not run on wheels but slides on a kind of steel spindle encased in a single rail. The cushions are soft. We move rapidly through the joyful murmur of the avenues. Corporate uniforms are assembled under porticos around nymphaeums: black scribes, crimson factory-workers, the Chinese of the public services in national costume, the Malays of the highways carrying canes, with yellow miters on their heads. We glide between the indefinite edifices, all open, allowing glimpses of assemblies in their halls.

  Naturally, the organs glorify the day. The insurgents of the Philippines have just beaten our Spanish troops, and the oligarchic Dictatorship is celebrating that victory, which it calls that of Liberty against Tyranny. Here is the procession, similar to all Catholic processions, except that the costumes and the objects of worship are indescribably luxurious.

  On horseback, a hundred beautiful young women in violet stockings, torsos bare, their heads crowned with enormous flowers, precede the Holy Sacrament, swinging golden ciboria. From their hips to the undersides of their breasts they wear corselets of fabrics garnished with jewels, composing in their assembly the form of fabulous plants. Their long hair spreads out from a small bonnet in silver mesh. Large rubies scintillate at the tips of their breasts. Short skirts of black and green strips, terminated by hollow golden buckles, float over the velvet saddles. Holding on to the horses’ bits are ephebes, similarly naked from the nipples to the white satin trunks on which a sun and precious stones illustrate the location of the penis. Supple boots in white leather cover their calves and thighs. Their right hands are holding a thyrsus or a caduceus. Surmounted by the closed wings of doves, little helmets coif their hair.

  Others, mounted on black horses, are blowing slender trumpets. Robust women march beside their stirrups. Their breasts are supported by crimson networks, their robes made of black canvas into which fresh yellow roses are fitted. On their heads they wear tiaras of myosotis.

  Then come giant men with undulating beards strewn with spangles. Royal crowns consecrate them. The hair on their torso is jaundiced with henna. They display all the beauty of virile vigor. They are holding back the impatience of greyhounds on leashes, mastiffs, lion cubs, antelopes and deer. Some carry spades, other shiny pickaxes, some levers of furbished copper, others gilded hammers, while others hold up set-squares and trowels at the end of scarlet poles. In a low chariot that they are dragging, a red metal machine advances. Its flywheel and its polished steel piston-rods shine more coldly against the other metal, which retains the somber gleam of incandescent iron. In their crimson vestments, the factory-workers file past like an army behind the chariot. They all have a green branch in their hat and a wooden caduceus on the shoulder.

  The scribes, clad in black, follow, and then the Chinese in brown silk robes, and two hundred girls on foot, with tame birds on their fingers, ivory canes, white trailing tunics and crowns of laurels in their hair. Then come a thousand ballerinas, in swarms, who are dancing, each with a different step, their slender hands agitating sistrums and clicking cymbals. Some, in scaly sheaths, writhe like snakes, and silver wigs shiver against their cheeks. In the midst of violet wings, others bound on vigorous legs, their breasts passed through the oblong openings of blue corsets. Corollas on green legs, flowers spin. An entire squadron represents minerals. Idols of diamond, topaz and sapphire go by; living statues in granite, malachite and bright marble. With one girl of gold, one of silver, one of iron and one of copper, the metals shine. Adolescent simulate aquatic creatures, algae and fish; their slow choreography marks the indolence of floating bodies.

  Oh, that army of dancing-girls! It unfurls for a whole hour. Out of the colleges, the lycées, the gymnasia, all the girls of some beauty had come to the parade. Over the nudity of their limbs a kind of make-up put a miraculous sheen, with the result that no fault of the epidermis was evident. Their flesh seemed to have a bright, slightly varnished freshness. Perfumes that would escape you in their gestures, and you, flowers, flowers, flowers thrown, flowers of costumes, flowers of tiaras, flowers of garlands, flowers of bouquets, innumerable colors of flowers!

  Between the enameled facades, the squadrons of dancers fill the avenue. With their evolutions march white elephants, bearers of towers on which domesticated eagles frolic at the summit. The spindles of many tall chariots slide along the rail, the file of which successively presents the gods of all known religions, with their priests and priestesses in sacerdotal costumes officiating at the altars. The palanquin of a Mother oscillates on the shoulders of a dozen virgins in striped silk leotards. Among the white and yellow veils the pregnant woman lies, under the canopy, and he movement of fans shows a pale face banded by a diadem. Around her, dancers spin, choirs sing a hymn and litanies; cymbals resound and harps vibrate. Stretchers of flowers, drapes of heavy cloth illustrated by embroidery, canopies of white brocade, the palanquins succeed one another between the chariots of the gods, the battalions of dancing-girls, and the choirs of children in red robes.

  Finally, the colossal image of the Virgin terminates the center of the cortege, behind a clergy of bishops, deacons, bonzes, lamas, muftis, softas, bayaderes surrounding the white highness of an old man who, as Pope, holds up beneath a red metal canopy the Monstrance, image of universal cycles and the great Vedic fire.

  Over her mantle, blue as a distant mountain, the hair of The Mother is a forest of minuscule trees. Her knees are two cascades. The miracle of a perfect mechanism launches luminous bubbles of star, suns and comets into the tall glass cross behind her.

  After that come more cavalries of beautiful girls on white stallions. They are sounding long slender trumpets. And now, there are more throwers of flowers, Mothers’ palanquins, ballerinas, harpists and sumptuous choirs of children.

  And that goes on and on. I can’t tell you everything. My eyes, in any case, grew weary. I looked at Pythie and Théa. They seemed to me to be in ecstasy, those creatures who manifested an unbearable coldness and scorn toward everything! I questioned them.

  “You don’t understand,” they told me. “Those harmonious bodies, the play of the combined shades of the folds of the robes, those symbols of religions evoke such simultaneously subtle and universal ideas in us. The total history of Evolutions is readable from gesture to gesture, group to group. For us, the cortege is a volume unfurling. The immense poem of Forces is sung in the splendor of antelopes, eagles, ballerinas a
nd males. We sense God in Everything. A vigorous semen spurts in our imagination, fecundating it. The point, the center, the i, the jod, the phallus and God penetrate us at that instant, and makes us whinny and prance for memorable enjoyments. Evidently, with your European education, you only see naked women and the passage of animals borrowed from a zoo; for us, its harmony that is passing, the jet of creation in fusion. Don’t say anything more. Leave our Spirits to pant, we beg you...”

  I stood up to look down from the height of the vehicle. Then I saw the whole of the file. It extended through the curve of the avenue, extending and moving in accordance with the form of the creative phallus, two or three miles long. Groups of statues eternalized the visages of inventors gazing down from the height of their pedestals around their bronze machines, at that monstrous passage of Life.

  The great voices of phonographs alternated with that of organs, declaring strophes. The choirs in the cortege responded, and then the lyres, the trumpets and the dances.

  Stupidity or good sense, I confess to not enjoying myself as much as my companions or the other people amassed in the vehicle. It all seemed to me to be very obscure, very pedantic, and not a little pornographic. In spite of everything, the heart of an honest man revolts at these spectacles of nudity. No matter how broad a mind one can claim, it is not appropriate to approve of debauchery when it poses as the principle of government and religion.

  The next day, at the audience granted to me by the Dictatorship I could not prevent myself from saying so to the oligarch who was reproaching me for the obsolete practices, once employed by the Inquisition and reestablished in the province of Cavite by our General Blanco in order to punish the Philippine insurgents.33

  A tall woman, dressed like a white musketeer, the oligarch smiled at my accusation and changed the subject. I was received in a vast, extremely simple room. The stucco walls only astonished me by the fact of elevating a dome of blue glass at their summit. The oligarch examined me with little eyes like particles of quicksilver. She was sitting in a white velvet armchair, and behind her, against the wall, the State banner was unfurled, half black and half red.

  “And what if,” she said to me abruptly, “we were to use our technological superiority to descend upon Europe, annihilate its armies with the aid of projectiles launches from out aerial frigates, and impose upon it what we believe to be Intelligence, Harmony and the Better Fate?”

  “Bah!”

  “It could happen; it would be our duty...”

  The tall woman rose to her feet and started marching back and forth on the rubber floor. She had colorless and wiry hair, a face that had lost its freshness, dead lips and bony hands.

  A sudden anger inflamed her flat cheeks. She came back toward me, exclaiming: “Yes, yes, the time has come. You, the Spaniards, with the cruelty of ancient ages, are stimulating the haste of our projects. Don’t think that our soul saw without passion your justice crushing Cuban ardor thirty years ago, shooting the anarchists of Xérès and Barcelona, reinventing the instruments of the Inquisition for the Philippines. The blood spread over the world fumes as far as us, and our strength trembles with impatience. The veil of hypocrisy will be harshly ripped from the face of the world. The immortality of Power is becoming too great everywhere. It was not merely for us to rejoice and cease to suffer that Jérôme the Founder brought our race to this land and sowed the truth in the minds of its decadence. He created duties for us too. Three hundred thousand Armenians perish, slaughtered, and the Christian Powers, by virtue of an ignoble avidity and an ignoble mutual suspicion, threaten with war anyone who might dare to close the sluice-gate of the blood of the weak. Never, in any time, has that been done. History cites the Crusades. For what example?”

  “Europe would be very glad,” I said, ironically, “if the Dictatorship could prescribe a means of terminating those massacres without opening European conflict.”

  “Could Belgium and Switzerland not act in the name of Christian Concert, and then establish a Byzantine Confederation on the example of the Helvetic Federation, with the small Balkan States, Greece…? But let’s leave it there. The note that has been given to the Dictatorship, on your behalf, demands an explanation for the aid given to the libertarians of the province of Cavite. Our Oligarchy is composing the reply at this moment. I fear that it will not be of a nature to satisfy the ministers of Spain completely.”

  “Ah!”

  I stood up. A sign from the tall woman caused me to sit down again. She continued to march, maintaining an irritating silence. From a distance, she appeared to me reminiscent of an ostrich with white wings and red legs—her morocco gaiters were that hue. Multiple small steps made her gait staccato. She reached the wall and came back toward me rapidly, her hands extended, like an angry chicken.

  “Yes, yes, it’s better to say everything,” she went on. “Know this, then. Three years ago, our predecessors prepared a plan for the conquest of Europe and the gradual extinction of social justice. I won’t talk to you about military projects, but I can indicate the general principles that were to guide the conduct of our strategies following our victory.”

  “That would interest me greatly,” I said.

  “In a year or two it will interest you even more,” she cried, harshly, in her shrill voice, and an echo threw the sonority of her prophecy from one corner of the room to another.

  I allowed a smile to animate my lips. The madwoman became exasperated, more and more reminiscent of an ostrich in a zoo whose provender had been stolen by a turkey.

  Tumultuously, she declared: “Suppose this for a moment. Our aerial squadrons are hovering over Paris. They have crossed all military lines, reduced forts, artillery dumps, arsenals, barracks and prisons to smithereens, sparing the lives of soldiers as much as possible. The terror produced by the material effect of our explosives masters opinion. Around the city, our torpedoes fall once again on inhabited areas, hollowing out hundred meter craters in the ground, breaking all the windows in the city with the noise of their detonations, which, perturbing the atmosphere drown the country with rain. Resistance has evidently become impossible…”

  “Might surpasses right!” I pronounced, appositely.

  “Yes, since people only recognize the evidence of might; since, without the terror of greater force, they will not alleviate the fate of those that their own force crushes. What are a majority and a minority? Two armies in confrontation, of which the weaker numerically, too cowardly to attempt the contest, renounces it immediately. What triumphs in that instance, except stupid numerical strength, without which the vanquished minority will obtain nothing of its hopes? Yes, we shall be the strength of minorities, the brute force of minorities finally victorious. We shall throw into the lighter pan of the scales enough weight for equilibrium to be established in a stable manner. Know that...”

  The ostrich flapped her wings comically before me. Saliva leapt from her beak with the words...

  “What do we have to fear in imposing our force?” she went on. “Crushing intelligence and spirit? No, truly. There are diplomats that our European newspapers praise, that your Academies invite as notable minds to sit among them. Having the honor of representing Christian thought before the world, they applaud all the massacres and all the injustices of the Powers. Diplomats make arrangements to allow the Turks to slaughter, gut and disembowel at their ease, opposing them with phrases of absurd elegy. One obtains by that genius the protection of Greeks and Armenians in words without protecting them in fact, while delivering them to the sword of the bachibouzouk, without approving of the crime of which they are the evident accomplices. Sinister slyness wins them the flattery of letters, arts and nations. Do you think that by crushing intelligences of that sort our force would be crushing a veritable thought, a veritable honor, a nobility of soul? Yes, we would be brute force against their base ideas, but our force would kill fewer people than they massacre...”

  The ostrich stopped, out of breath. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and fanned
herself.

  “There’s one thing,” I said, “that I don’t understand. You carefully close access to your country to others. How do the telegrams informing you of the physiognomy of the world reach you?”

  “We have a house of correspondence in Hong Kong, and a submarine cable. In certain inaccessible massifs of the Alps, the Himalayas the Urals and the Rocky Mountains we have posts that communicate with the telegraphs of cities and our aerial ships.”

  “And no indiscretion?”

  “We pay well enough for trusted consciences to remain unbribable.”

  “So, if that expedition had been made, and Europe, vanquished by the explosives of the aerial frigates had sued for peace, the Dictatorship would have made a tabula rasa of our Latin institutions, from one day to the next?”

  “Very nearly, but not immediately. Your hosts are still so deprived of altruism and energy that they would not tolerate the operation of a tabula rasa without perishing in civil wars. Our plans accommodated a transitional period, yes. If it interests you, I can have you shown one of the printed posters that would have been stuck to the walls in Paris during the preliminaries of the armistice.”

  “I’d like to know the tenor...”

  The lady promised to send one.

  “You’ll see,” she added, “that we would have made use of the army, the only organization functioning well, and put it to work for some time for the first applications of the new regime. For the military army we would simply have substituted, without disruption, the agricultural and industrial army. The exercises would have changed, that’s all.”

  “So,” I continued, “nothing of the mission that my government has given me appears likely to succeed?”

  “You must excuse me, Monsieur. The Dictatorship cannot respond definitively. Yesterday, in Cavite, eight insurgents were shot. The governor of Manila twists the truth in his dispatches, like his colleague in Cuba. Even Japan is moved by these injustices and is preparing to lend the insurrectional movement effective aid. Circumstances are becoming aggravated. Diplomats require prudence.”