The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  “The trajectory of matter through our period of individuality cannot be accurately measured within the limitations of our present methods of analysis, and I am only assuming the simple role of initiator for the benefit of future researchers. The results of their labor will be to incorporate in human beings all the particles of ambient energy of which they might be the recipients or centers of attraction, and, by means of that intussusception, to enrich the anthropomorphy of the sum total of ‘humanizable’ thought that the chemical elements imprison. We shall then have authentically scientific funerals, in which our remains will immediately be redistributed by special incinerators between the various conglomerates that they synthesized during life, and these posthumous substances, residues of our generations, will be further improved repeatedly by their return to human form. As for our deceased, they will experience the delight of finding themselves scattered in the disseminated atoms of the personality that they had initially embodied in concrete form.”

  At these words I felt that, in spite of my best efforts, my face was bound to betray an urgent need for explanation, and having disposed of another mouthful of sparkling wine, I stammered, somewhat at hazard: “That’s magnificent, to be sure, but how will this marvelous project commence?”

  “In the imminent volume announced in my Manifesto,” the doctor replied, “I explain that the alimentations of the future will not be for the sole purpose of satisfying the vulgar and bestial instinct of appetite, and I indicate the composition of a certain number of concentrated elixirs, the list of which my disciples will only have to increase, by following the fundamental principle. When the catalogue is complete, human beings will be constituted physically, psychologically and even psychically by integral and exclusive chemical action. The first experimental applications that I have already made of a few electuaries have been such as to give me a hopeful confidence in the eventual triumph.”

  The doctor had let slip the word applications with serenity. It caused me to shudder. I remembered the pale and thin appearance of Mrs. Gipson. The thought naturally occurred to me that her husband might have carried out a few trials of progressive nourishment on her, from which he had sagely abstained himself—but that was a matter of an intimate nature, which I was prohibited from raising directly, and I got around the difficulty by remarking to Dr. Gipson that in his admirable deductions, he had not yet told me about the scientific treatment specially reserved for the delightful sex of which Mrs. Gipson was a part.

  “It is indeed,” I added, to justify my observation, “a sex which, by its temperament, its needs and even its originalities, seems to me to require a physico-chemistry quite different from ours…”

  The doctor’s face took on an appearance of perplexity in confrontation with the task of elucidating such a delicate problem. He put his chin in his hand, and for a few moments, that hand seemed to occasion a sort of eclipse between myself and the incisive fires of the knot in his cravat.

  “I haven’t yet made any serious experiment in that regard,” he said, after a brief meditative silence, “but I think it necessary, on this point, henceforth to make a tabula rasa of the mass of stupidities that have been voiced at all times on the subject of love, from which our interest in sexual variation predominantly arises. That passion that must, in itself, legitimate conjugal union, will only cease to be an imaginative lure when the couple has been scientifically and respectively chemicized. The experiment would be indecent. It would require not merely the perfect accord of the purely physical particles but also the production, as you have just insinuated, the harmony of animating functions with the aid of substances collaborating in the alimentation of thought. There would only be happy marriages by virtue of the equipment of similar chemical souls in identically composed bodies. The illusions of future spouses regarding their reciprocal charms, the irreflective impulses of desire and the cruel disappointments of characters in conflict, which cause so many hidden miseries and belated regrets today, would be avoided—or at least corrected—thanks to the new method, by studying the degree of sincerity of amorous and sentimental declarations, hostile and hateful ones, and so on, by the manner in which the exhalations, the effluvia and vital emissions of the interested parties influence, for example, litmus paper, or some other reagent whose increased sensitivity will respond in a peremptory manner to those investigative necessities.”

  The doctor was becoming unspeakably obscure, and in order to get him out of that thorny phase, I decided to ask him a question about the final passage of the Manifesto—a passage that was quite clear, for once, but whose preposterousness had raised a particular clamor.

  “My dear Gipson,” I said to him—for the infectious benevolence of the feast had already occasioned a commencement of familiarity between jus—“does not your program, as you have publicized it, make allusion to something much more extreme than all the marvels we have just passed in review? Have you not confided to the physicians of the future the sublime and definitive mission of vanquishing death and assuring all human beings of the enjoyment of a sort of eternity? That, I believe, is what has unleashed the most ardent protests and anger directed against you.”

  Dear Gipson replied in the detached tone of an inventor who willingly, but without obstinacy, admits the corollary consequences of his discoveries. “I only permit myself one hypothesis in that direction, and I limit myself to furnishing, in that respect, a few preliminary indications for the use of those who will come after me. From now on, however, it seems to me permissible to suppose that after numerous successions of heredity, thanks to the regime that I propose, and thanks also to the increasingly purified quality of the compositions that will be employed therein, that future races, materially refined from top to bottom will be provided with unalterable chemical organs. From that will result the terminal conquest of rational anthropomorphy, the ultimate logical coronation of life—by which I mean living immortality!”

  While the doctor’s reasoning dived into the worst accumulations of shadow, the diamond in the cravat tormented me with a fulguration of almost impertinent gleams. I don’t know why that had finally started to irritate me, but it was very irritating. I knew that I had to control myself, however, and I attempted to make a show of an excess of enthusiasm for the dazzling postulate that had just been formulated.

  “Bravo, my dear Gipson—that’s sublime!” I exclaimed. “That will conclusively relegate the old philosophies that are still divided, without proofs, between dubious ultraterrestrial revenges and imbecilic returns to nothingness. Enough of these threads of consolation or despair, and let us have immortality in life itself!” Timidly, I risked: “But it is necessary to assume that our successors, in spite of the perfection of their mental and physical chemistry, will eternalize themselves on Earth without experiencing the need to reproduce themselves, thus avoiding its eventual overcrowding?”

  In order to reply, the doctor adopted a rather solemn expression, by way of paying homage to the importance of the objection.

  “If I now proceed to affirm my initiatives as the laws of the future,” he said, “that is because I sense in myself a participation of the divinity. Now, as you know, God in humankind is merely successive and, due to the fatality of progress, must always leave himself, humanly, something to do. In the matter of prolific immortality, it is absurd to anticipate that our composite matter will still have a tendency to disaggregate into fragments when it wishes to amalgamate in new cellular syntheses that it will find more sympathetic. We have all the more right to form that conjecture because the immortal Terrans, being of an identical and transmissible facture, will be led to fuse with one another, by means of penetrations, with the worthy aim of representing themselves and containing themselves in the most perfect unity—but this will be in incalculable remote eras, for that will be the authentic God-Human, and the definitive culmination of progress.”

  The doctor’s intellect was going adrift in the densest abstractions, and his face, doubtless like mine, seemed to be env
eloped by a certain dreamy fog—but his inflexible diamond began to scatter powdered sunlight and sting me with flashes that definitely seemed to me to be outbursts of laughter.

  I could not help bursting out myself in the face of such provocation. “I say, Gipson, my dear friend” I exclaimed—we were drinking liqueurs after the coffee, and I was beginning to address my guest in an intimate manner—“what is that satanic diamond planted in your cravat like a searchlight? Has it a soul? Does it understand what you’re saying, or is it mocking me because it thinks that I don’t understand you?”

  “You’re not so very far from the truth,” he told me, without turning a hair. “This diamond is a cadaver, neither more nor less, and its history is quite simple. I was once wandering in the wildernesses of the Far West when the idea occurred to me of studying the incineration that was then in vogue. Guided as ever by plausible hypothesis, I presumed that the ignition of an animal, dead or alive, might develop certain shiny silicates, and gave myself the task of verifying the susceptibilities of their condensation.

  “Sowing dollars in abundance, I had an immense furnace installed, provided with a ventilation system capable of producing a maximum heat and directing it toward an octagonal receptacle in which the crystal would be produced. My wife, whose devotion is unbreakable, accompanied me, as did a young student whose love of science—or so he claimed—attached him to my footsteps. The truth is that, while spying on my discoveries, he was paying court to my wife—but that detail is unimportant, for my faithful other half had immediately warned me, and I was able to devote myself entirely to my research.

  “I believe that you will have no trouble, now, in guessing the outcome of the anecdote. Know, however, that the absence of inhumatory organization in the country did not permit me to experiment legally on any human cadaver, even for money. I was reduced to building my furnace, which was not very elevated, in the form of a humpback bridge that a buffalo lured by cereal tidbits had to scale to the culminating point. Then, I only had to activate a spring suddenly to lower the descending slope, with the result that the quadruped was immediately engulfed in the crematory machine.

  “One morning, everything was ready. I had displayed my vegetable bait while a buffalo was wandering about the prairie. The animal, however, scarcely moved forward; it seemed suspicious, and was in no hurry to make its contribution to an illustrious invention. I was breathless with impatience, when I suddenly felt as if I were being watched. The student was, in fact, on the lookout to see and comprehend. Oh, that boy! I said to myself. He not only wants my conjugal prerogatives, he also requires half my glory! Abruptly, I turned round, and with a prodigious leap I thrust the spy into the orifice. A marvelous confirmation of my hypothesis! I took him out again, after a month’s cooling, in the form of the splendid specimen of carbon to which you are devoting your curious attention. Believe me, the beauty of that find freed me from any idea of remorse, but Mrs. Gipson, whom I informed about the adventure, always manifests a little ill humor when I wear the jewel…”

  The meal had terminated in the apotheosis of a flambée of punch, and we said our farewells at the door of the restaurant.

  The propagator of nourishment by science and the bold precursor of chemical Eternity had not forsaken his apparent tranquility throughout the conversation. He seemed to me to be a man capable of accommodating himself for a long time yet to the kinds of food, and especially the kinds of liquids, that will constitute the pleasures of our present feasts until the new order begins. For proof of that, I had the tall, flexibly perpendicular figure that swayed lightly from one sidewalk to the other, while his magnificent diamond detached from the street-lights a coming-and-going of stars—and until the vanished from sight at the far end of the avenue, I wondered whether he was dragging through the night the darkness of insanity or the blinding visions of a brain troubled by too audacious a comprehension of the future.

  He left me, moreover, with a fantastic impression. His theories took possession of my being and put it in astounded communication with universal nature. An ethereal atmosphere flooded my brain, seemingly wanting to bear me up toward the clouds. Involuntarily, and my body abandoned itself to the attraction of the multiple consubstantial atoms that linked it to the Earth…and I went home to transcribe the interview, God knows how!

  Louis Mullem: The Supreme Progress

  (c. late 1889s-early 1890s)

  The morning sunlight was dancing gaily in the trembling foliage of tall trees, and the walls of the attic perched beneath the roof of the vast edifice received pretty pale green reflections embroidered with threads of silver.

  Save for this natural ornamentation, the furniture of the cabin-like space was of the simplest sort. It comprised two iron bunks enveloped in white curtains, several chairs and a little imitation-mahogany table. It was all scrupulously neat. In a corner, a nightstand supported a few toilet items.

  Such an environment, reminiscent of a furnished hotel, contrasted strongly with the venerable aspect of the room’s two occupants—a married couple, according to all appearances—who were at that very moment welcoming, with abundant ceremony, a young gentleman dressed in black, with a white cravat.

  Few preliminary words were exchanged, the principal motive for the conversation having doubtless been determined in advance. After a few words of apology regarding the lack of luxury of the abode, which gave evidence of an improvised and probably temporary residence, the Thinker—such was the pseudonym evoked at first glance by the aged husband—took his place, with the other individuals, at the little table, which was cluttered with papers.

  Very tall and very thin in his monastically-tailored dressing-gown, his eyes pale blue and full of dreams beneath the large forehead fringed by a cloud of grey hair, the Thinker prepared to read aloud from an unpublished manuscript, the pages of which he rearranged.

  The wife of the Thinker—one must regret here that neither custom nor necessity yet imposes the urgency of a term applying that epithet to the fair sex67—seemed to be a respectable lady whose more-than-modest costume nevertheless indicated slowly-ruined former wealth. She gave the impression of a wife resigned to an ideology in which her voyages in higher intellectual realms had long distracted her from the cares of her fortune. She manifested toward her husband an attitude of obstinate admiration, ostentatiously matrimonial to an even greater extent than rational.

  As for the gentleman dressed scrupulously in black, with the scrupulously white cravat, he demonstrated by his attitude that the purpose of the interview was to make known to him as quickly as possible the tenor of the manuscript, the threat of which had just been indicated as imminent.

  Then the Thinker, raising his severe and meditative face to the light, read out the following fragment of a thick work that he entitled The Supreme Progress, while the gentleman, now even more rigidly clad in black and even more intensely cravated in white than ever, never ceased to listen with scrupulous and mute attention.

  Introduction to the Work

  The parties engaging in dialogue in the present work, the Thinker read, assume for a setting the idea that everyone’s imagination is able to form, approximately, of the Unreal.

  It is in that vaguely ethereal and indescribable milieu that “the Gentleman and the Lady,” the two characters endowed with eternity that we set on the stage, are pursuing an endless conversation, of which we can only reproduce a brief extract here. On this particular day, an indescribable well-being was spread around—something, if one might put it thus, like a more-than-usually lucid diaphaneity in the hectic undulation of space. For this reason, He and She felt even more pleasure than usual in abandoning themselves to the current of their reflections.

  Possessed of the patience that coincides with absolute wisdom, the Gentleman immobilized himself in his aerial contexture, spherically and diametrically equal to the ancient terrestrial globe. The Lady, although confounded with the subtle effluvium of her spouse, gave evidence of her joyful humor by means of a few undulatory
quivers that slightly irregularized the contours of their extremely light communal volatilization. The oceans of yesteryear had once agitated their moving lace around the around the rigid form of the planet in a similar manner.

  This episode is occurring, as you have doubtless guessed, at a time in the most incalculably distant future, when the terrestrial organism, finally emancipated from any substantial matrix, occupies an extent of some sort in an exclusively fluid state. The Gentleman and the Lady are, in fact, the couple in whom the collective soul of extinct humankinds are summarized, and know no other employment of time than to devote themselves to the purely disinterested elucidation of eternal abstractions.

  Obviously, these two essentially atmospheric individuals are not employing an articulate language. Their reciprocal ideas are only exchanged by means of a differentiation of internal currents. Let us also note that the slowness of their speech is proportionate to the incessant series of centuries that succeed one another during their conversation. One of the consequences of that fact is the phenomenon that each of their remarks—as will be more comprehensible shortly—is equivalent in duration to that of the epochs described by the historical and other events to which those remarks apply. Our present faculty of calculation, and even the present state of our sentiment of infinity, cannot, therefore, conceive of the incommensurable sum of centuries-long periods embraced by the rapid chat that follows.

  It is understood, moreover, that the two interlocutors are disembarrassed of the sensualism of ancient anthropomorphism to the point that the delimitation of their respective sexes is henceforth manifest—as we shall see in due course—only in the insouciant playfulness enjoyed by the caprice of the Lady and the inflexible love of truth cultivated by the Gentleman. A fortunate harmony is maintained nevertheless in their debate, for they have no other desire than to fall into agreement. Even in the most advanced of our future descendant, however, as among us nowadays, philosophical discussion rarely produces a result, and the entente that can ensue therefrom remains a matter of politeness rather than persuasion.