[editor's note: this was published in a fancy literary magazine. i have a hard copy in my work office but can no longer find the supporting internet site. contrary to popular opinion, fancy literary magazines have little quality or taste and do little to support writers. they, their staff writers, their editors, their publishers, and their works should not be taken seriously.]
[author's note: the idea was to imagine searching through the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand and coming upon some ancient interesting fragment of writing. the other idea was to imagine the entire experience of our universe and galaxy and earth showing up as a footnote in the experience of the writings of some other universe or galaxy or earth far grander than our own.]
While pursuing my PhD in Religion at Harvard, I took an interest in nineteenth-century American utopias, supposing that most were communes founded on Christian principles. I discovered, however, that many such communities were inspired by the philosophies of French socialists such as Etienne Cabet rather than by Bible teachings. In the fall of 2012, I traveled to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris to study more closely the works of Cabet.
At my request, Madame Duteil, the librarian, brought me a box of weekly newsletters ascribed to Cabet’s Icarian society of Nauvoo, Illinois, founded 1849. The typed newsletters were predominantly accounts of life quotidian in the egalitarian society: where to find surplus vegetables; lists of prominent visitors to town; weddings and deaths. While reviewing these materials, I came across an eight-page booklet. The writing in the booklet was tiny, by hand, in French, and appeared, based on the type of paper folded into the eight-page signature, to have been written, as Madame Duteil herself would verify, closer to the time of World War I than to the 1850s. In short, the booklet was unrelated to Cabet and unrelated to his Icarian society. Madame Duteil could not explain the variance from protocol that had apparently led to misplacement of the eight-page signature.
Nonetheless, out of sheer curiosity and with Duteil’s blessing, I studied the booklet. Duteil would neither allow photocopies nor digital photographs, so I scribbled out a copy in my own hand. The author’s name appears on each page of the booklet as Richard Jean Mauriac, although on the final page the word Richard has been crossed out and replaced with Pape. The consistency of the handwriting suggests that the author himself made this modification.
My inquiries have satisfied me that the author of this story is indeed one Richard Jean Mauriac, deceased 1920, buried at Montmartre. This Mauriac was a deposed Catholic priest. Some of his letters, which I have cross-referenced with credible historical societies, indicate that he was confined to a mental health sanctuary from 1915 to 1917. At the outset of World War I, Mauriac was apparently swept up in an end-of-times fervor, and believed himself to be God’s final prophet before the Second Coming. It was during this period of confinement that Mauriac authored his account, which he titled "A Brief Report of a Brief Visit."
I have taken the liberty of translating the author’s French into English. I take full responsibility for any errors of translation. Although my comprehension of written French is sufficient for my religious scholarship, I have no particular skill as a translator of fiction, as will be evident. To the best of my knowledge, the story recounted below has been veiled from public view until now:
In the wake of the reported geological activity upon the surface of the blue-green planet, we began a closer observation. We gave the signal to ground our flying ships on the blue-green planet (UIZnNO-UEQ, or Earth in their parlance) in order to make an exploration and to discover their form of self-governance. We had the assignment to identify the deceased remnants of their queen and study her anatomy, physiology, and communication patterns to ascertain the source of her powers. Our visit to the blue-green planet would conclude our examination of the complex Spheres within the provincial reach of the outermost ring of Grimmt Chosinn Kiy (GCK). Deitre remained with the flying ship while Kavid and we took our companies out onto the terrain. Kavid led their team to the lower space of the greater smoke and the tall formations and we led ours to the higher open grey.
It was soon evident that the cataclysmic events had, as posited, been fatal to the entire population of the two-legged creatures. The terrain was unpredictably swollen and crevassed; smoke was ubiquitous.
Based upon our recent surveillances of the Spheres of Tartmon and Garamula, once containing complex forms of life similar to that of the blue-green planet, we hypothesized that the two-legged creatures had, as in those other spheres, abandoned community living and begun living each alone. We exited the flying ship and inclined up and up from the valley of our landing point to the immense mountain where the vegetation when it was still green no doubt called to the two-legged creatures for concealment and encampment. We encountered here a vast number of small habitations. These were spaced UM apart atop, below, and beside, beyond our counting. Each habitation measured 2 UM by 2 UM. Our tools opened the locks on the habitations. We entered.
We confirmed inside their habitations their dead bodies. At first appearance, the dead bodies looked to be hibernating or sleeping. None could be awakened. We entered one thousand habitations. Each habitation contained one dead two-legged creature and only one, never zero, never more than one. In other words, the number of dead two-legged creatures we discovered was equivalent to the number of habitations we entered; or one thousand. This is documented with numerical support in the appendix to our report.
The habitations contained immaterial variations such as differences in the hues of painted walls but were each identical in practice. Each habitation was alike in providing a variety of wet and dry inputs and outputs. Each habitation afforded numerous thin black filaments which came from outside the habitation into the habitation and then were connected to a flat transmission tablet within the habitation. Each tablet the size of the skull of the creature. In all cases, the tablet rested upon or near the creature. It appeared as if the creature had expired while holding the tablet or sleeping adjacent the tablet. There were additionally inputs into the habitations for water, breath, and food, and outputs for their garbages and odors.
We followed the channels of inputs and outputs some distance from the habitations to their junctions.
Junctions were vast internal underground cities of filaments and congregated tubules of inputs and outputs supported by delicate machineries and massive arches and other infrastructures. The two-leggeds had, we calculated, in earlier times constructed these junctions before division into solitary dwelling. Their engineers of spatial relations, of atomic transmission, of arts and métiers, and of anthropological interactions, we assume, were charged to disregard all other pursuits and make glorious jewels of these junctions. Junctions were, in our analysis, the centers of their civilization, their holy temples, their city squares, their museums. The enormity and perfection of the junctions extends beyond those creations seen in any of our prior explorations on any Sphere. The descriptors of our language are incompetent to display the junctions accurately. With our apologies and your permissions, we can append the report if necessary with a description in the subjective poetic form.
We deduced that the thin black filaments connected to the flat transmission tablets of the two-leggeds were joined together here in the junctions. We further deduced that the inputs of water, food, and breath were also joined in these junctions and connected deep below the terrain into vast stores of supplies that the two-leggeds drew upon. Similarly, the outputs for garbages and odors all followed from the habitations into the junctions, where the garbages and odors were disposed of far below the surface.
We departed the junctions and returned to the habitations to determine whether there was possibility, following the cataclysmic events, that the isolated two-leggeds could have escaped their habitations to join with other two-leggeds. Our analysis ruled in the negative—the strength of the creature was inferior to the strength of the hardness of the lock of the habitation. At the moment each two-legged entered the habitation, the decision was irreversible; there could be no returning to community thereafter. This further proves the conclusion that community living had utterly ceased at the time of the cataclysmic events. The pattern is alike to that at Tartmon and Garamula, where disassociation into individual pursuit preceded the cessation of complex organic animation.
We declined down and down from the higher open grey to the flying ship, bearing our sleds of collections. The flat transmission tablets we set about to dissect within the laboratory of the flying ship. We had retrieved one thousand tablets total. We believed we could attain the identity of the queen of the creatures by studying the transmissions from and to the tablets. In hierarchal societies previously studied, a review of transmission patterns will paint the shape of a triangle with the queen or doyen or autocrat standing atop the triangle. This is because the queen is the only transmitter who does not ask for permission from time to time. In this way—by studying the requests for and grantings of permission within transmissions—it is possible to ascertain the lowest rungs of society, the middle rungs, the upper rungs, and the very top rung.
Once the identity of the queen were attained, our assignment was to analyze the queen’s methods of staying at the head of her citizens. What of biology? What of wisdom? What of violence? What of means? What of tribal advantages? This knowledge would have value to our own society, to reach an understanding of how to better govern ourselves and how to rebuke, if necessary, approaches from other hostile civilizations.
We dissected their tablets with ease and reviewed their transmissions. It was impossible, however, to identify their queen. We exhausted all our knowledge, our tools, and our materials. Each creature, using the tablet, engaged in thousands of transmissions each day. The creatures were fascinated with their own selves, transmitting frequently images of the self engaged in quotidian activities such as grooming or feeding or making signs with their digits. Despite the small size of each habitation, each creature seemed capable of endless variation in the capturing of the image of the self. Many captured images of the self involved in acts such as self-cleaning—this delight of exposure apparently in contrast to the choice of isolation and privacy, each assigned to one habitation without community in an immediate physical sense but connected by filaments and transmission tablet to every other two-legged creature outside the habitation.
Setting aside these images, each creature spoke in a commanding and non-conciliatory tone, rendering our task of finding their queen impossible. Each creature issued hundreds of daily edicts—stating the creature’s interpretation of a law or adherence (or non-adherence) to certain ethical or religious or moral principles and commanding that the recipients of the transmission follow suit. Each creature routinely stated preferences for such matters as sleeping head down or head up, coloring of the toes, and scent of floral subsidy to mask the odors of the habitations, and demanded allegiance to those utterances. There was no seeking of permission or giving of permission, but one thousand queens issuing one thousand unheeded commandments.
As the time allotted to our mission had expired, we inventoried the tablets. Deitre and Kavid verified. As we have been some time away from home, we return to you now.
This is our brief report.
Commander Saj
Comments