The Possibility of an Island (46 page)

It was the end of the morning and outside it was mild, almost warm; the frost had not lasted, we were only at the start of winter, and I was definitively going to leave the cold regions behind. Why was I alive? I was hardly of any importance. Before leaving I decided to take a final walk around the lake, my rifle in my hand, not to hunt really, for I would not be able to take the game with me, but to offer Fox the satisfaction of frolicking in the moat, sniffing the smells of the forest floor, one last time before we started out across the plains.

The world was there, with its forests, prairies, and its animals in all their innocence—digestive tubes on paws, with teeth at the end of them, whose life amounted to finding other digestive tubes in order to devour them and reconstitute their energy reserves. Earlier in the day, I had observed the savages’ encampment; most of them were sleeping, slaked with strong emotions after their bloody orgy of the night before. They were at the top of the food chain, their natural predators were scarce; so they had to take on themselves the elimination of the aging or sick, in order to preserve the good health of the tribe. Unable to count on natural competition, they also had to organize a social system of control of access to the vulva of the females, in order to maintain the genetic makeup of the species. All this was in accordance with the order of things, and the afternoon was strangely pleasant. I sat down by the lake while Fox ferreted around in the thicket. Sometimes a fish jumped out of the water, sending out slight ripples, which eventually died at its edges. I had more and more difficulty understanding why I had left the abstract and virtual community of the neohumans. Our existence, devoid of passions, had been that of the elderly; we looked on the world with a gaze characterized by lucidity without benevolence. The animal world was known, human societies were known; no mystery was hidden in it, and nothing could be expected from it, except the repetition of carnage. “This is this and that is that,” I repeated to myself mechanically, many times, until I achieved a slightly hypnotic state.

After a little more than two hours I got up, perhaps a little calmer, in any case ready to pursue my quest—having nonetheless accepted its probable failure, and the death that would follow. I noticed then that Fox had disappeared—he must have scented a trail, and ventured further along the forest floor.

I beat at the bushes around the lake for more than three hours, calling out from time to time, at regular intervals, into an agonizing silence, as the light began to fade. I found his body at nightfall, pierced by an arrow. His death must have been terrible: his already vitreous eyes reflected an expression of panic. In a final gesture of cruelty, the savages had cut off his ear; they must have acted quickly for fear of me arriving, the cut was crude, blood had spattered across his muzzle and chest.

My legs gave way under me, I fell to my knees before the still-warm corpse of my little companion; it would perhaps have been enough, had I arrived five or ten minutes earlier, to have kept the savages at a distance. I was going to have to dig a grave, but for the moment I did not have the strength. Night was falling, patches of cold mist were beginning to form around the lake. I contemplated, for a long time, the mutilated body of Fox; then the flies arrived, in small numbers.

“It was a concealed place, and the password was: elentherin.”

Now I was alone. Night was falling on the lake, and my solitude was definitive. Fox would never live again, neither him, nor any dog with the same genetic makeup, he had sunk into the total annihilation toward which I in my turn was headed. I now knew with certainty that I had known love, because I knew suffering. Fleetingly, I thought again of Daniel’s life story, now conscious that these few weeks of travel had given me a simplified, but exhaustive, view of human life. I walked all night, then the following day, and a great part of the third day. From time to time I stopped, absorbed a capsule of mineral salts, drank some water, and started off again; I felt no fatigue. I did not have much biochemical or physiological knowledge, the line of Daniels was not a line of scientists; however, I knew that the passage to autotrophy had, with the neohumans, been accompanied by various modifications in the structure and workings of the smooth muscles. Compared with a human, I benefited from a suppleness, endurance, and functional autonomy that were greatly enhanced. My psychology, of course, was also different; I did not comprehend fear, and while I was able to suffer, I felt none of the dimensions of what humans called regret; this feeling existed in me, but it was accompanied by no mental projection. I already felt a sense of loss when I thought of Fox’s caresses, of the way he had of nuzzling against my knees; of his baths, his races, above all the joy that could be read in his eyes, this joy that overwhelmed me because it was so foreign; but this suffering, this loss seemed to me inevitable, because of the simple fact that
they existed.
The idea that things could have been different did not cross my mind, no more than a mountain range, present before my eyes, could vanish to be replaced by a plain. Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differentiated us most clearly from our human predecessors. Like them, we were only conscious machines; but, unlike them, we were aware of only being machines.

I had walked without thinking for around forty hours, in a complete mental fog, guided solely by a vague memory of the journey on the map. I do not know what made me stop, and brought me back to full consciousness; no doubt the strange character of the landscape around me. I now had to be near the ruins of old Madrid, I was in any case in the middle of an immense tarmac space, which extended almost as far as I could see, it was only in the distance that I could vaguely make out a landscape of dry, low hills. Here and there the earth had been pushed up for several meters, forming monstrous blisters, as if under the influence of a terrifying underground heat wave. Ribbons of tarmacadam rose toward the sky, climbing for several dozens of meters before stopping abruptly and ending in a mass of gravel and black stones. Metal debris and blasted windows were strewn on the ground. At first I thought I was on a toll highway, but there were no road signs, anywhere, and in the end I understood that I was in the middle of what remained of the Barajas airport. As I continued westward, I noticed a few indications of ancient human activity: flat-screen televisions, piles of shattered CDs, an immense point-of-sale advertisement depicting the singer David Bisbal. Radiation must still have been strong in this area, it had been one of the places most bombed during the last phases of the interhuman conflict. I studied the map; I had to be near the epicenter of the fault, if I wanted to stay on course I had to turn southward, which meant I would pass through the former city center.

Carcasses of agglomerated, melted cars slowed down my progress as I reached the M45–R2 interchange. It was while crossing the old IVECO warehouses that I caught sight of the first urban savages. There were about fifteen of them, grouped under the metal canopy of a hangar, about fifty meters away. I lifted my rifle to my shoulder and fired rapidly: one of the silhouettes collapsed, while the others fell back inside the hangar. A little later, on turning around, I saw that two of them were carefully venturing out to drag their companion inside—no doubt with the intention of feeding on him. I had taken out my binoculars and could observe that they were smaller and more deformed than those I had observed in the region of Alarcón; their dark gray skin was pockmarked with excrescences and spots—no doubt a consequence of the radiation, I imagined. They displayed, in any case, the same terror at neohumans, and all those that I came across in the ruins of the city fled immediately, without giving me the time to take aim; I had, however, the satisfaction of killing five or six of them. Although most were limping, they moved quickly, sometimes helping themselves along with their forelimbs; I was surprised, and even appalled, by this unexpected multitude.

With the life story of Daniel1 at the front of my mind, it was with a strange emotion that I found myself in the Calle Obispo de León, where his first meeting with Esther had taken place. Of the bar he mentioned there remained no trace, in fact the street was reduced to two sides of blackened wall, one of which, by chance, displayed a street sign. I had the idea of looking for the Calle San Isidor, where, on the top floor of number 3, the birthday party marking the end of their relationship had taken place. I remembered fairly well the map of the center of Madrid as it had been at the time of Daniel: some streets were completely deserted, while others, following no apparent logic, were intact. It took me about half an hour to find the building I was looking for; it was still standing. I climbed to the top floor, raising clouds of concrete dust with each step. The furniture, curtains, and carpets had completely disappeared; there were, on the filthy floor, only a few piles of dried excrement. Pensively, I went through the rooms where no doubt one of the worst moments in Daniel’s life had taken place. I walked as far as the terrace from which he had contemplated the urban landscape before entering what he called the “home stretch.” Of course, I could not stop myself from meditating once more on the passion of love in humans, its terrifying violence, its importance to the genetic economy of the species. Today the landscape of burned-out blasted buildings, the piles of gravel and dust produced a calming impression, inviting a sad detachment, with their dark gray dilapidation. The sight before me was almost the same in all directions; but I knew that to the southwest, once the fault had been crossed, from the heights of Leganes or maybe Fuenlabrada, I was going to have to make my way across the Great Gray Space. Estremadura and Portugal had disappeared as differentiated places. The succession of nuclear explosions, of tidal waves, of cyclones that had battered this geographical zone for several centuries had ended up completely flattening its surface and transforming it into one vast sloping plane, of weak declivity, which appeared in the satellite photos as uniformly composed of pulverulent ashes of a very light gray color. This sloping plane continued for about two and a half thousand kilometers before opening out upon a little-known region of the world, whose sky was almost continually saturated with light clouds and vapors, situated on the site of the former Canary Islands. Obstructed by the layer of clouds, the rarely available satellite pictures were unreliable. Lanzarote may have remained an isthmus, or become an island, or have completely disappeared; such were, on the geographical level, the uncertain givens of my journey. On the physiological level, it was certain that I was going to be short of water. By walking twenty hours per day, I could cover daily a distance of one hundred and fifty kilometers; it would take me a little more than two weeks to reach the maritime zones, if they actually existed. I did not know exactly how much my organism could withstand desiccation; it had, I think, never been tested in extreme conditions. Before setting off I spared a brief thought for Marie23, who must have had to confront, coming from New York, comparable difficulties; I also spared a thought for the former humans, who under such circumstances would commend their souls to God; I regretted the absence of God, or of an entity of the same order; I finally raised my mind toward hope in the coming of the Future Ones.

The Future Ones, unlike us, will not be machines, nor truly separate beings. They will be one, while also being many. Nothing can give us an exact image of the nature of the Future Ones. Light is one, but its rays are innumerable. I have rediscovered the meaning of the Word; corpses and ashes will guide my feet, as will the memory of the good dog Fox.

I left at dawn, surrounded by the multiplied rustling of fleeing savages. Crossing the ruined suburbs, I approached the Great Gray Space just before midday. I put down my rifle, which was no longer of any use to me; there had been no sign of life, animal or vegetable, beyond the great fault. At once, my progress became easier than expected: the layer of ashes was only a few centimeters thick, it covered the hard ground, which looked like clinker, and my feet gripped easily. The sun was high in an immutable blue sky, there was no difficult terrain, no obstacle that could have made me change direction. Progressively, while walking, I slipped into a peaceful daydream in which were blended images of modified neohumans, more slender and frail, almost abstract, with the memory of the silky, velvety visions that, a long time before, in my previous life, Marie23 had made appear on my screen as a way of paraphrasing the absence of God.

Just before sunset, I stopped for a brief while. With the help of a few trigonometric observations, I was able to determine the declivity at about one percent. If the slope stayed the same to the end, the surface of the ocean was situated at twenty-five thousand meters below the level of the continental plate. One would, at that point, be no longer very far from the asthenosphere; I should expect a significant increase in the temperature over the course of the following days.