The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  The audience was about to conclude. The nervous lady sat down again in her white armchair, fanned herself with her handkerchief, chewed a pastille and, with one of those mental leaps familiar to her sex, asked me whether the frequentation of my companions, Pythie and Théa was satisfactory to me. I praised them highly.

  She told me then that her normal social function was that of telegraphist in a railway station. Her group had found a means of simplifying telephonic and telegraphic transmission, and had been put in candidature for the Oligarchy. The receivers of the apparatus are being replaced everywhere, and that is an enormous task, all the more so as public petitions are demanding the placement of telephones in every room of all habitations.

  The lady got carried away by her telegraphic theory, not without the disobliging pedantry that seems to infect all the people here. Even so, I succeeded in taking my leave.

  The city of Jupiter does not include anything particularly remarkable. It possesses a theater similar to the one in Minerve, greenhouse-restaurants, curved avenues, edifices with glass cupolas, nymphaeums, enormous docks, facades with enamel images, and a rather rich temple where the colossal image of the Virgin Mary that serves to ornament processions is usually housed.

  In the streets, the white garments of the oligarchs do not attract the respect or salutes of anyone, nor the irony. They are passers-by, like all the rest. I have neglected to see the interior of the theater and to take part in the weekly festival, so true is it that the practical liberty of pleasure wearies you and renders you virtuous.

  The number of statues of groups is a curious feature of the city. At the corners of all the avenues, in the squares and in countless smaller spaces, there are pedestals on which ten or twenty figures of men and women wearing the costume of factory workers stand. These images are very realistic, even too much so. One could believe that one is looking at skillful molds taken of the people. Generally, the bodies and clothing are bronze, the heads and hands in a paste of colored glass. In the middle of the group stands the model of the object that invention created. Several fountains spring from the pedestal.

  I have learned, moreover, that the splendid costumes of the procession will not be seen again in Jupiter. They will appear successively in all the cities of the Dictatorship for a similar ceremony and will then be destroyed. For each fête the artists imagine a new decoration of creatures and chariots. They are never used again. That provides an illustration of the crazy richness of social production.

  When I expressed my amazement, Théa said: “Here we produce joyfully to consume ourselves. You produce sadly in order to sell. How can you expect that our labor would not be a hundred times more productive than yours?”

  To estimate what a similar cortege would cost in Europe with the system of salaries and commerce, one quickly attains a figure of fifty or sixty millions. Neither Holy Week in Seville nor your Parisian Mardi Gras can compare with it—but is such labor useful for such a mediocre joy? I know that I have pronounced the word “useful” and that Pythie laughed in my face with utter impertinence. They both consider me to be an incorrigible imbecile. I almost detest them.

  You will find attached a fragment of the poster printed in advance that the commanders of the aerial ships would have struck on the walls of Paris after it was taken. I’ve removed the preamble.

  After the signature of these preliminaries, the government of Paris will act as follows:

  Article I. It will pronounce the dissolution of the Chambre and the Sénat. The present members will be replaced as follows:

  1. For the Chambre des Députés:

  A hundred will be chosen from among scientists and inventors; a hundred from among writers and philosophers; a hundred from among plastic artists; a hundred from among advocates, professors and bishops; a hundred from among industrialists and agriculturalists; and a hundred from among historians, geographers and physicians.

  2. For the Sénat:

  A hundred will be chosen from among generals; fifty from among admirals and engineers; fifty from among magistrates; fifty from among diplomats; and fifty from among financiers.

  Article II. These new functionaries will not have to deliberate over the laws. They will be charged with collating the petitions of commoners, without discussing them.

  Article II. Civil marriage is abolished.

  Article IV. The imputation of paternity being illusory and not reposing on any natural certainty, new-born children will take their mother’s name in the registers of civil estate.

  Article V. The sole legal heritage is that of the mother to her children.

  Article VI. That heritage will be transmitted in the following conditions:

  A. An expert evaluation will be made of the movable and immovable property bequeathed. The heir will be inscribed for a corresponding sum in the Great Ledger. The income at a tariff of three per cent will be paid to the heir for life. That income will not be transferable.

  B. Other legacies to third parties will only be valid by virtue of testamentary clauses. They will be subject to the same formalities; but the State will impose a levy of fifty per cent on the tariff of the income and the sums raised by that levy will be added to the budget of public education.

  Article VII. Every woman with reason to believe that she is in a state of imminent maternity must declare her condition at the Mairie of the arrondissement. She will be immediately hospitalized in a maritime town in a mild and salubrious climate. The time of that hospitalization will be counted from the third month of pregnancy until the weaning of the nursling. At that time the child will be admitted to an establishment of public education in order to be raised and educated at the expense of the Nation.

  Article VIII. The general mobilization of the French armies is decreed.

  Article IX. The army will cultivate the soil of the fatherland, sow, till and harvest, care for flocks and herds, exploit the wealth of mines, produce in factories and workshops, construct edifices and divide and distribute between the citizen the wealth of the nation.

  Article X. The State factories and those requisitioned for that usage will immediately manufacture agricultural equipment in conformity with the progress of the sciences, including steam-powered plows, threshing-machines, seed-planters, harrows, etc. That equipment will be delivered within three months to the military stewards.

  Article XI. A committee of agronomists and engineers, half of the members chosen by competition and the other half elected by their qualified colleagues, will direct the work of the social army in order that the rendition of the soil will be maximized.

  Article XII. The courses at the École de Saint-Cyr and the École Polytechnique will be extended to five years. During that period the pupils will add to the knowledge required thus far those necessary for the general application of scientific principles to ameliorate the cultivation of the soil and the production of industry.

  Article XIII. Whoever shall import, manufacture, sell or buy alcohol will be prosecuted in conformity with the laws on a charge of attempted murder. The State will provide the needs of laboratories of chemistry and pharmacy, with regard to the production of alcohol.

  Article XIV. Any individual convicted of theft, murder, arson, bankruptcy, abuse of trust, fraud, whatever the facts thus qualified might be, giving proof of the desire for conquest, will be incorporated for at least five years into the colonial armies. The colonial armies will play the same role in their military territories as the regular armies on the metropolitan territory.

  Article XV. By way of the decease of the holders, all immovable property will become the property of the State, the sole legal possessor of land.

  Article XVI. The colonies are submitted to the same transitional social regime as the metropolis.

  Article XVII. The system of direct government by the people is substituted for the system of parliamentary representation.

  A. Every Sunday, in a register deposited for that purpose in the Mairies, the citizens of the commune will inscribe the t
ext of petitions concerning the subjects that they judge useful to the general interest.

  B. The following Sunday, the citizens of the commune will vote on the texts, yes or no.

  C. The officers of the legislative body will classify the communal petitions by analogy, indicating the number of votes expressed, for or against.

  D. Within a period of six months at the most, the Authority will make known via the Communal Bulletin the reasons that it believes ought to favor or oppose the principles of the petitions.

  E. After a further communal vote, and the sanction of the Council of State, those petitions will acquire the force of law, but their dispositions will only be applied in the communes where they were originally drafted.

  F. Nevertheless, if other communes claim that application, it will be granted to them.

  Article XVIII. Men and women will enjoy the same civil and political rights.

  Article XIX. Every woman between twenty and forty-five years of age owes social service to the State.

  Article XX. The working day is six hours.

  Such, my friend, is the law of the conqueror, which I fervently pray to God to spare you.

  LETTER VI

  March.

  Fort des Quatre-Têtes.

  After the train had crossed indefinite terrains lugubriously clad in dense forests, and plunged into the gorges of violet-tinted mountains, it reemerged the following morning in a region of lakes. Over the extent of the vast waters, many small islets were mirrored in bouquets. Ships glided between two wakes, without smoke, without noise and without masts, rapidly. We traveled over a median causeway where the waters ended. Gradually, that causeway broadened out. The tropical flowers invaded the ballast, soon defended by means of a trellis against the thorny plants and shrubs of the brushwood. Then an entire countryside spread out, almost entirely covered by the tall glass edifices of agricultural greenhouses. Thickly painted with colors, the panes protected the cereals, fruits and vegetables from burning by the sun. Those colors were various, according to the nature of the vegetables. A long explanation by Théa educated me with regard to that kind of medication by colored light.

  Many greenhouses were open. We perceived automobile plows tiling by themselves, and elsewhere, seed-planters distributing the grain. In a third location rollers were flattening white-tinted soil stuffed with artificial fertilizer. Here, the seasons do not collaborate. Mechanics and chemistry replace the care of nature, with a multiple activity.

  The agricultural greenhouses are gigantic. They cover whole areas. The Galerie des Machines in Paris gives some idea of the least of them. Under the edifices of glass dynamos set the apparatus in motion. A few men supervise. There are vineyards bearing the grapes of the Promised Land, wheat-fields whose overly heavy ears require stays, and rice-stems three meters high—but the potatoes remain minuscule because their taste accommodates better to that dimension. As large as walnuts, they are, browned, crunchy and cold, a delight for the mouth. In the same way, the Lilliputian strawberries enthuse the palate, whereas the flavorsome monstrosity of pineapples and pears renders the soul blissful for hours.

  “Yes,” Pythie declared, “our stomachs are the most pampered in the world. As it is unnecessary to sell inferior products cheaply to the poor, our agrarian groups eliminate from culture everything that does not seem to attain succulence. The study of the conditions that favor it permits them to be reproduced to the benefit of all the fields, and you’ve been able to see manual works eating victuals at the tables of the public refectories that are only served in Europe to millionaires, kept women, great criminals and kings. Honest people enjoy good sensations here...”

  That is the bitter tone incessantly employed in my regard. You will appreciate, my dear friend, the petty torture caused to me by the presence of that woman beloved by my passion, very welcoming for the folly of my senses, and conspicuously disdainful of my person.

  “To think,” Théa said, “that with your enormous population, you could make the soil of Europe render the same felicities, on condition of shaking off the tyranny of money. Instead of that, you continue to compete, hate, vanquish, enslave and debase…after nineteen centuries of Christianity!”

  “But it seems to me that we’re reaching the military zones,” I announced. “Are those not the rectangular terrains of the defense: fortifications at ground level, a steel cupola scarcely emerging from concrete embankments that mask those artificial slopes and that plantation of small trees? That’s evident proof! In truth, you desire neither to hate, nor vanquish, not enslave…and the Dictatorship has invited me to follow a expedition of your troops against the Malay tribes, to whom you will certainly express love at the point of a bayonet, as our Weyler34 did to the Cubans.”

  No, not at all! We’re making war on a kind of indigenous tyrant who cuts off heads to decorate his feast, who impales, pillages, rapes and kills in order to relieve the monotony of his days. The majority of his slaves desert and come to us. He is demanding that those lives are rendered to his bloody caprice. We refuse. He has ambushed and murdered our sentinels, derailed two trains and caused eight hundred deaths. Even so, the Dictatorship has offered to make peace with him. He wants his victims; his honor demands it! And he prefers to be buried under the ruins of his palace rather than permit his fugitive subjects an easy existence.”

  “He’s not alone in sustaining that principle of honor, however.”

  “No; ten or fifteen thousand men are armed for that.”

  “For the honor of the fatherland, which they judge superior to the material wellbeing of the individual. I don’t find that ugly.”

  “Your race approved for a long time of the frenzy of Inquisitors who preserved the paradisal eternity of crowds by removing, by means of massacre, the contagion of heresies. It doesn’t astonish me that you applaud a war sustained for the honor of causing people to perish, at the whim of one alone.”

  “For the honor of the fatherland and for the laws of the fatherland. In any case, are you not arming yourselves very patriotically in order to avenge your fellow citizens killed in railway catastrophes?”

  “No, we’re defending productive life against destruction. We’re arming ourselves in order to protect life.”

  “A certain way of life, as the Malays are arming themselves in order to protect another way of life, which they judge superior to yours.”

  “They know full well that it is inferior to ours.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, proportionately to the number of the population, there is much less death among us, and we produce much more. That is the sole criterion of superiority or inferiority between peoples.”

  “Then the races afflicted by a high mortality, who produce little, ought in consequence to renounce the laws of their fatherland and their traditions, and adopt the legislative formulae of states...

  “Where life and production are multiplied the most.”

  “And that without taking account of the atavisms of race, or mores, or the personality of the fatherland, or the principle of nationality.”

  “But my dear friend, you’re saying sentimental things, uttering the commonplaces of rhetoric; you’re not reasoning. Cite us then, in Europe, one fatherland that is the exact representation of a face or a nationality. Your Spain, for example, contains Basques whose language is foreign to all Latin dialects, and Celts in Galicia who are closely related in their mores to the people of Wales and Scotland, and play the same bagpipes. It includes Andalusians of Moorish blood and Castilians who are sons of Iberians and Visigoths. In the times of Charles V your nationality also included Italians, Germans, Burgundians, people of Flanders and Picards. Your neighbor France is almost as well supplied with a mixture of races. It is, therefore, puerile to sustain that the principle of nationality corresponds to a homogenous assemblage of souls. Geographic nationalities such as Italy seem more acceptable.

  “In sum, your fatherland exists by virtue of the peninsular figuration of the land. Nationality is, ther
efore, purely a definition of the atlas. It is to misunderstand all of history only to attribute its origin to the personal ambitions of leaders, kings and emperors, the proprietors of territories whose views were limited to the increase of the serfs of their domain.

  “The real fatherland, the corner of land where a race exits speaking the same language, employing the same mores, is always tiny. The Basque country would be one fatherland, Provence another, Brittany a third. The Walloons of the century of Louis XI would form a fatherland. Germany, save for the Polish provinces, represents a fatherland where homogeneous races are assembled in the same region. After the Zollverein, however, it does not constitute a nationality. At what moment was Rome a fatherland? In the epoch of the kings, that of the Republic, that of the twelve Caesars, or of Byzantium? If it was in one, it was not in the others. In the time of the Republic, its spirit was Hellenic, and Asiatic after the Antonines. Only the Armenians maintain the unity of Byzantium. How, then, to define the Roman fatherland, the most complete and best-known historical phenomenon, from its origin to its dehiscence?

  “In the beginning, the fatherland designated the territory of the people. The tribal leaders, out of need or ambition, attempted to increase their property. They conquered, they enslaved. When the vanquished are numerous, a contract is imposed by the victor. Laws form the first bond of nationality, which can grow without limit by means of successive annexations. The desire for property drives the chiefs of a strong people to multiply their resources in men—producers and soldiers—and in fertile soil.