The Possibility of an Island (43 page)

Around the end of the afternoon the forest began to thin out, then I reached a patch of short grass that marked the top of the slope I had been following since the start of the day. To the west the slope descended, clearly more steeply, then I made out a succession of hills and steep valleys, still covered with dense forest, as far as I could see. Since my departure I had seen no trace of a human presence, nor of animal life in general. I decided to stop for the night near a pond where a stream bubbled up before descending southward. Fox drank for a long time and then stretched out at my feet. I took the three daily pills necessary for my metabolism, then unfolded the light survival blanket I had brought; it would no doubt be sufficient, I knew that I could expect to cross no high-altitude area.

Toward the middle of the night, the temperature became slightly cooler; Fox huddled against me, breathing regularly. His sleep was occasionally disturbed by dreams; at those moments, he twitched his paws, as if getting over an obstacle. I slept very badly; my enterprise seemed to me more and more starkly unreasonable, and destined for certain failure. I had, however, no regrets; I could have easily turned back. No control was exerted by the Central City; defections were, in general, only noticed by accident, after a delivery or a necessary repair, and sometimes only several years later. I could return, but I had no intention of it: that solitary routine, intercut solely by intellectual exchanges, which had constituted my life, which should have constituted it until the end, now seemed unbearable. Happiness should have come, the happiness felt by good children, guaranteed by the respect of small procedures, by the security that flowed from them, by the absence of pain and risk; but happiness had not come, and equanimity had led to torpor. Among the feeble joys of the neohumans, the most constant revolved around organization and classification, the constitution of small ordered sets, the meticulous and rational displacement of small objects; these had proved insufficient. Planning the extinction of desire in Buddhist-like terms, the Supreme Sister had banked on the maintenance of a weakened, nontragic, energy, purely conservative in nature, which would have continued to enable the functioning of thought—a thought less quick but more exact because more lucid, a thought that knew
deliverance.
This phenomenon had only been produced in insignificant proportions, and it was, on the contrary, sadness, melancholy, languid, and finally mortal apathy that had submerged our disincarnated generations. The most patent indicator of failure was that I had ended up envying the destiny of Daniel1, his violent and contradictory journey, the amorous passions that had shaken him—whatever his suffering and tragic end.

Every morning for years, following the Supreme Sister’s recommendations, I had practiced, on waking, the exercises defined by the Buddha in his sermon on the establishment of attention. “Thus he stays, observing the body from within; he stays, observing the body from outside; he stays, observing the body from inside and outside. He stays, observing the appearance of the body; he stays, observing the disappearance of the body; he stays, observing the appearance and disappearance of the body. ‘This is the body’: this introspection is present to him, only for knowledge, only for reflection, thus he stays free, and is attached to nothing in the world.” At every minute of my life, since its beginning, I had remained conscious of my breathing, of the kinesthetic equilibrium of my organism, of its fluctuating central state. That immense joy, that transfiguration of his physical being by which Daniel1 was submerged at the moment of the fulfillment of his desires, that impression in particular of being transported to another universe that he knew at the moment of his carnal penetrations, I had never known, I hadn’t even any notion of them at all, it seemed to me now that, under these conditions, I could not go on living.

The dawn broke, humid, over the forest landscape, there came with it dreams of gentleness, which I was unable to comprehend. Tears came as well, and their salty contact seemed very strange to me. Then the sun appeared, and with it the insects; I began, then, to understand what the life of men had been. The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were covered with hundreds of little blisters; the itching was terrible, and I scratched myself furiously, for about ten minutes, until I was covered in blood.

Later, when we started out across a dense prairie, Fox managed to capture a rabbit; in a clean motion, he broke its cervical vertebrae, then brought the little animal to my feet, dripping with blood. I turned away when he began to devour its internal organs; thus was the natural world.

During the following week, we crossed over a steep area, which, according to my map, corresponded to the Gador sierra; my itching decreased, or rather I ended up getting used to the constant pain, which was stronger at the end of the day, just as I got used to the layer of filth that covered my skin, and a more pronounced body odor.

One morning, just after dawn, I woke up without feeling the heat of Fox’s body. I leaped up, terrified. He was a few meters away, and was rubbing against a tree, sneezing furiously; the source of pain was apparently situated behind his ears, at the base of the neck. I approached and gently took his head in my hands. By smoothing his fur I quickly discovered a small, gray, bumpy surface, a few millimeters wide: it was a tick. I recognized it from the descriptions in books I had read on animal biology. The extraction of this parasite was, I knew, delicate; I returned to my backpack, and took out some tweezers and a compress soaked in alcohol. Fox moaned softly, but remained still as I operated: slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I managed to extract the animal from his flesh; it was a gray, fat cylinder, a quite repugnant sight, which had grown fat on his blood. Thus was the natural world.

On the first day of the second week, in the middle of the morning, I found myself in front of an immense fault line, which blocked my path westward. I knew of its existence through satellite surveys, but I had imagined that it would be possible to cross it to continue my journey. The cliffs of bluish basalt, absolutely vertical, plunged down for several hundreds of meters to an indistinct, slightly uneven surface, the soil of which appeared to be a juxtaposition of black stones and lakes of mud. In the limpid air, I could make out the smallest details on the cliff face opposite, which must have been about ten kilometers away: it too was just as vertical.

If the maps drawn from the surveys did not allow you to foresee at all the uncrossable nature of this unevenness in the ground, they did on the other hand give you a precise idea of its route: beginning in a zone that corresponded to the former site of Madrid (the city had been destroyed by a succession of nuclear explosions, during the last phases of the interhuman conflicts), the fault crossed the whole of the south of Spain, then the marshy zone corresponding to what had been the Mediterranean, before plunging deep into the heart of the African continent; that meant a detour of a thousand kilometers. I sat down for a few minutes, discouraged, my feet dangling in the void, while the sun climbed up the summits; Fox sat down at my side, looking at me inquisitively. The problem of his food, at least, was resolved: the rabbits, which were very numerous in the region, let themselves be approached and killed without displaying the slightest suspicion; no doubt their natural predators had disappeared many generations ago. I was surprised by the speed with which Fox rediscovered the instincts of his wild ancestors; surprised also by the manifest joy he exhibited, he who had only known the mildness of an apartment, sniffing the mountain air and gambolling across the mountain prairies.

The days were mild and already warm; it was without difficulty that we crossed the ranges of the Sierra Nevada through the Perto de la Ragua, at an altitude of two thousand meters; in the distance, I could see the snowy summit of the Mulhacén, which had been—and remained, despite the intervening geological upheavals—the culminating point of the Iberian peninsula.

Further to the north extended a zone of plateaus and limestone peaks, the surface of which had been bored with numerous caves. They had served as shelter for the prehistoric men who had first inhabited the region; later, they had been used as refuges by the last Muslims hunted by the Spanish Reconquista, before being transformed in the twentieth century into recreation zones and hotels; I got used to resting in them during the day, and continuing my journey at nightfall. It was on the morning of the third day that I saw, for the first time, indications of the presence of savages—a fire, some small animal bones. They had lit a fire on the floor of one of the bedrooms installed in the caves, charring the carpet, despite the fact that the hotel kitchens contained a battery of vitroceramic cookers—that they were incapable of understanding how to use. It was a constant surprise for me to observe that a large part of the equipment constructed by men was still, several centuries later, in working order—the electric power stations themselves continued to churn out thousand of kilowatts that were no longer used by anyone. Deeply hostile to anything that could have come from mankind, wanting to establish a radical break with the species that had preceded us, the Supreme Sister had very quickly decided to develop an autonomous technology in the enclaves intended for inhabitation by neohumans, which she had progressively bought from bankrupt nations who were incapable of balancing their budgets and soon after of satisfying the health needs of their populations. The previous installations had been neglected; the fact that they could still function was all the more remarkable for this: whatever he might have been otherwise, man had undoubtedly been an
ingenious
mammal.

On reaching the top of the reservoir of Negretin, I made a brief stop. The gigantic turbines of the dam turned slowly; they now only powered a row of sodium lamps that stretched, uselessly, along the highway between Granada and Alicante. The road, crevassed and covered with sand, had been invaded here and there by grass, and bushes. Sitting on the terrace of a former café-restaurant overlooking the turquoise surface of the reservoir, amid metal chairs and tables gnawed by rust, I found myself once again seized by a fit of nostalgia as I thought of the parties, dinners, and family reunions that must have taken place there, many centuries before. I was however, and more than ever, conscious that mankind
did not deserve
to live, that the death of this species could, from all points of view, be considered only good news; its spoiled and deteriorated vestiges were nonetheless upsetting.

“Until when will the conditions of unhappiness last?” wondered the Supreme Sister in her
Second Refutation of Humanism.
“They will last,” she replies at once, “for so long as women continue to have children.” No human problem, teaches the Supreme Sister, could have found the merest hint of a solution without a drastic reduction in the density of the Earth’s population. An exceptional historic opportunity for rational depopulation had been offered at the beginning of the twenty-first century, she went on, both in Europe through the falling birthrate, and in Africa thanks to epidemics and AIDS. Mankind had preferred to waste this chance through the adoption of a policy of mass immigration, and bore complete responsibility for the ethnic and religious wars that ensued, and that constituted the prelude to the First Decrease.

Long and confused, the history of the First Decrease is now only known by rare specialists, who rely essentially on the monumental, three-volume
History of Boreal Civilizations,
by Ravensberger and Dickinson. An incomparable source of information, this work has sometimes been considered to be lacking in empirical rigor; the authors have especially been reproached for devoting too much space to the relation of Horsa, which, according to Penrose, owes more to the literary influence of
chansons de geste
rather than strict historical truth. Its critics have, for example, focused on the following passage:

The three islands of the north are blocked with ice;

The finest theories refuse to make sense;

It is said somewhere a lake has collapsed

And dead continents rise back to the surface.

 

 

Obscure astrologists crisscross our provinces,

Proclaiming the return of the Hyperborean God;

They announce the glory of Alpha Centauris

And swear obedience to the blood of old princes.

This passage, it is argued, manifestly contradicts what we know about the climatic history of the globe. Deeper research has, however, shown that the beginning of the collapse of the human civilizations was indeed marked by variations in temperature that were as sudden as they were unpredictable. The First Decrease itself, that is to say the melting of the ice, which, produced by the explosion of two thermonuclear bombs at the Arctic and Antarctic poles, was to cause the immersion of the entire Asian continent, with the exception of Tibet, and divide by twenty the population of the Earth, occurred only a century later.