The Possibility of an Island (47 page)

In reality the heat became oppressive only a week later, at the same time as I began to feel the first attacks of thirst. The sky had an immutable purity and was of a smalt blue, increasingly intense, almost dark. One by one I took off my clothes; my backpack now contained only a few capsules of mineral salts; at this point I had difficulty taking them, the production of saliva was becoming insufficient. Physically I was suffering, which was a new sensation for me. Entirely placed beneath the power of nature, the life of wild animals consisted only of pain, with a few moments of brief relaxation, of happy mindlessness linked to the satisfaction of instincts—for food or sex. The life of man had been, in gross terms, similar, dominated by suffering, with brief moments of pleasure, linked to the conscientization of instinct, which manifested itself as desire in the human species. The life of the neohumans was intended to be peaceful, rational, remote from pleasure as well as suffering, and my departure would bear witness to its failure. The Future Ones, perhaps, would know joy, another name for continuous pleasure. I walked without resting, still at the rate of twenty hours a day, conscious that my survival depended now on the banal issue of regulation of the osmotic pressure, on the balance between my levels of mineral salts and the quantity of water my cells had been able to store. I was not, strictly speaking, certain I wanted to live, but the idea of death had no substance. I saw my body as a vehicle, but it was a vehicle for nothing. I had not been able to reach the Spirit; I continued, however, to wait for a sign.

Under my feet the ashes became white, and the sky took on ultramarine tones. It was two days later that I found the message from Marie23. Written in a clear, taut hand, it had been traced on pages made of a fine, transparent, untearable plastic; these had been rolled up and placed in a tube of black metal, which made a slight sound when I opened it. This message was not specifically addressed to me, it was in truth addressed to no one: it was only a further display of this absurd or sublime determination, present in humans and remaining identical in their successors, to bear witness, to leave a trace.

The general tenor of the message was profoundly sad. To get out of the ruins of New York, Marie23 had had to mix with many savages, sometimes grouped in large tribes; unlike me, she had sought to establish contact with them. Protected by the fear she inspired in them, she had been no less distressed by the brutality of their social relations, by their absence of pity for the old or weak, by their constantly renewed appetite for violence, for hierarchical or sexual humiliations, for cruelty pure and simple. The scenes I had observed near Alarcón she had seen repeated, almost identically, in New York—even though the tribes were situated at considerable distances from one another, and had been unable for seven or eight centuries to have any contact. No feast among the savages could be imagined without violence, the spilling of blood, and the spectacle of torture; the invention of complicated and atrocious tortures seemed to be the only area in which they had preserved something of the ingeniousness of the ancient humans; that was the limit of their civilization. If you believed in the heredity of moral character, this was nothing of a surprise: it was natural that it would be the most brutal and cruel individuals, having a higher potential for aggressiveness, who survived in greater number a succession of lengthy conflicts, and transmitted their character to their descendants. Nothing, in regard to moral heredity, had ever been proved—or refuted; but Marie23’s testimony, like mine, amply confirmed the definitive verdict that the Supreme Sister had passed on mankind, and justified her decision to do nothing to stop the process of extermination that she, two millennia ago, had committed herself to.

You may wonder why Marie23 had continued along her path; indeed, it seemed on reading certain passages that she had thought of giving up, but there had doubtless developed in her, as in me, as in all neohumans, a certain fatalism, linked to an awareness of our own immortality, that brought us closer to the ancient human peoples, among whom religious beliefs had taken root. Mental configurations generally survive the reality that gave rise to them. Having become technically immortal, having at least reached a stage that was similar to reincarnation, Daniel1 had behaved until the end with no less impatience, frenzy, and greed than a mere mortal. Similarly, although I had left on my own initiative the system of reproduction that ensured my immortality or, more exactly, the indefinite reproduction of my genes, I knew that I would never manage to become completely conscious of death; I would never know boredom, desire, or fear to the same extent as a human being.

As I was preparing to put the pages back in the tube I noticed that it contained a last object, which I had some difficulty extracting. It was a page torn from a human paperback book, folded and folded again to form a strip of paper, which fell into pieces when I tried to unfold it. On the biggest of the fragments I read these phrases, in which I recognized the dialogue of Plato’s
Symposium
where Aristophanes expounds his theory of love:

When therefore a man, whether attracted to boys or to women, meets the one who is his other half, the feeling of tenderness, trust, and love with which they are gripped is a miracle; they no longer want to be apart, even for an instant. And this way people spend all their lives together, without being able moreover to say what they expect from one another; for it does not appear to be uniquely the pleasure of the senses that makes them find so much charm in the company of the other. It is obvious that the soul of each desires something else,
what
it cannot say, but it guesses it, and lets you guess.

I remembered perfectly what happened next: Hephaestos the blacksmith appeared to the two mortals “while they were sleeping together,” proposing to melt them and weld them together, “so that from two they become only one, and that after their death, down there, in Hades, they will no longer be two, but one, having died a common death.” I remembered especially the final sentences: “And the reason for this is that our former nature was such that we formed a complete whole. It is the desire and pursuit of this whole that is called love.” It was this book that had intoxicated Western mankind, then mankind as a whole, which had inspired in it disgust at its condition of a rational animal, which had engendered in it a dream that it had taken two millennia to try and rid itself of, without completely succeeding. Christianity itself, St. Paul himself, had been unable to resist bowing before this force. “Two will become one flesh; this mystery is great, I proclaim it, in relation to Christ and the Church.” Right up until the last human life stories, one could detect an incurable nostalgia for it. When I tried to fold the fragment back up, it crumbled between my fingers; I closed the tube and put it back on the ground. Before setting off again I gave a final thought to Marie23, who was still human, so human; I remembered the image of her body, that I would never have the chance to know intimately. Suddenly, I became worryingly aware that if I had found her message it meant that one of us had deviated from our path.

The uniform white surface offered no landmark, but there was the sun, and a rapid examination of my shadow told me that I had in fact gone too far to the west. I now had to turn due south. I had not drunk water for two days, I was no longer able to feed myself, and this simple moment of distraction risked being fatal. I no longer suffered much in actual fact, the pain signal had faded, but I felt immensely tired. The survival instinct still existed among neohumans, it was simply more moderate; I tracked inside me, for a few minutes, its struggle with fatigue, knowing that it would end in victory. I set off again, more slowly, in the direction of the south.

I walked all day, then the following night, guiding myself by the constellations. It was three days later, in the early hours, that I saw the clouds. Their silky surface appeared to be just a modulation of the horizon, a trembling of light, and I first thought of a mirage, but on closer approach I made out more clearly cumulus clouds of beautiful matte white, separated by supernaturally still, thin curls of vapor. Around midday I passed through the layer of cloud, and found myself facing the sea. I had reached the end of my journey.

This landscape, it must be said, hardly resembled the ocean as man had known it; it was a string of puddles and ponds of almost still water, separated by sand banks; everything was bathed in an opal, even light. I no longer had the strength to run, and it was with wavering steps that I made for the source of life. The mineral content of the first shallow pools was very weak; the whole of my body, however, greeted the salty bath with gratitude, I had the impression of being swept by a nutritive, benevolent wave. I understood and almost managed to feel the phenomena that were taking place inside me: the osmotic pressure returning to normal, the metabolic chains beginning to turn again, producing the ATP necessary for the operation of the muscles, the proteins and fatty acids required for cellular regeneration. It was like the continuation of a dream after a moment of anxious awakening, like a machine’s sigh of satisfaction.

Two hours later I got up, my strength already quite reconstituted; the temperature of the air and the water were equal, and must have been close to 37
^º
C, for I could feel no sensation of cold, nor of heat; the luminosity was bright without being dazzling. Between the pools, the sand was pitted with shallow excavations that resembled little graves. I lay down in one of them; the sand was tepid and silky. Then I realized that I was going to live here, and that my days would be many. The diurnal and nocturnal periods had an equal duration of twelve hours, and I could sense that it would be the same all the year round, that the astronomical modifications that occurred at the time of the Great Drying Up had created here a zone that did not experience any seasons, where there reigned the conditions of an endless early summer.

Quite quickly I lost the habit of having regular hours of sleep; I slept for periods of one or two hours, during the day as well as the night, but, without knowing why, I felt each time the need to huddle in one of the crevices. There was no trace of animal or vegetable life. Any kind of landmark in general in the landscape was rare: sandbanks, ponds, and lakes of variable size stretched out as far as I could see. The layer of cloud, which was very dense, most of the time prevented me from making out the sky; it was not, however, completely immobile, but its movements were extremely slow. Occasionally, a small space opened between two cloud masses, through which I caught sight of the sun, or the constellations; it was the only event, the only modification in the passing of the days, the universe was enclosed in a sort of cocoon or stasis, fairly close to the archetypal image of eternity. I was, like all neohumans, immune to boredom; some limited memories, some pointless daydreams occupied my detached, floating consciousness. I was, however, a long way away from joy, and even from real peace; the sole fact of existing is already a misfortune. Departing from, at my own free will, the cycle of rebirths and deaths, I was making my way toward a simple nothingness, a pure absence of content. Only the Future Ones would perhaps succeed in joining the realm of countless potentialities.

In the course of the following weeks, I ventured further into my new domain. I noticed that the size of the ponds and lakes increased as I headed south, until I could, in some of them, observe a slight tidal phenomenon; they remained, however, very shallow, and I could swim out as far as their centers, with the certainty of rejoining a sand bank, without any difficulty. There was still no trace of life. I thought I remembered that life had appeared on Earth under very particular conditions, in an atmosphere saturated with ammonia and methane, due to the intense volcanic activity of the first ages, and that it was implausible that the process could be reproduced on the same planet. Organic life, anyway, a prisoner of the limited conditions imposed by the laws of thermodynamics, could not, even if it managed to be reborn, do other than repeat the same patterns: constitution of isolated individuals, predation, selective transmission of the genetic code; nothing new could be expected from it. According to certain hypotheses, carbon biology had had its day, and the Future Ones would be beings made of silicon, whose civilization would be built through the progressive interconnection of cognitive and memory processors; the work of Pierce, basing itself solely at the level of formal logic, enabled us neither to confirm nor refute this hypothesis.

If the zone where I found myself was inhabited, it could in any case only be by neohumans; the organism of a savage could never have stood up to the journey I had made. I now anticipated without joy, and even with a certain annoyance, an encounter with one of my fellow creatures. The death of Fox, then the crossing of the Great Gray Space, had desiccated me inside; I no longer felt any desire, and certainly not the one, described by Spinoza, of persevering in my being; I regretted, however, that the world would survive me. The inanity of the world, evident in the life story of Daniel, had ceased to appear acceptable to me; I saw in it only a dull place, devoid of potentialities, from which light was absent.

One morning, immediately after waking, I felt for no perceptible reason less oppressed. After walking for a few minutes I arrived in front of a lake that was much bigger than the others, where, for the first time, I could not make out the other bank. Its water, too, was slightly saltier.

So this was what men had called the sea, what they had considered the great consoler, the great destroyer as well, the one that erodes, that gently puts an end to things. I was impressed, and the last elements missing from my comprehension of the species fell finally into place. I understood better, now, how the idea of the infinite had been able to germinate in the brain of these primates; the idea of an infinity that was accessible through slow transitions that had their origins in the finite; I understood, also, how a first theory of love had been able to form in the brain of Plato. I thought again of Daniel, of his residence in Almería, which had been mine, of the young women on the beach, of his destruction by Esther; and, for the first time, I was tempted to pity him, without, however, respecting him. Of two selfish and rational animals, the most selfish and rational of the two had ended up surviving, as was always the case among human beings. I then understood why the Supreme Sister insisted upon the study of the life story of our human predecessors. I understood the goal she was trying to reach: I understood, also, why this goal would never be reached.