The Edge of a Desert Called Earth
I – The Sage and the Breath
by Alain Aillet
A sage lived on the edge of a desert, where roads get lost, where questions arrive before travelers. He had neither school nor disciple. To those who came, he spoke little, but in his presence the thoughts fell like overripe fruit. A man sat before him.
On his face was the fatigue of those who have read a lot without finding peace. He asked the sage:
— What is left after the end of the world?
The sage poured water into a clove jar. The water immediately escaped and disappeared into the sand.
— The water is gone. Are you saying it’s no longer?
— She is no longer in the jar, replied the man.
— There you go, said the sage. You have already corrected your thought.
The man frowned.
— Yet, if the world really ends, there is no longer either a jar, or sand, or a look to note the absence. Then there is nothing.
The sage smiles.
— You say nothing with confidence, as if you knew what you were saying. When you say ‘nothing’, what do you show?
— An absence, replied the man. A void.
— Where is this emptiness? asked the sage.
— In… what was there before.
— Yes. The nothing is always housed somewhere. It is the absence in a presence. He is the empty place on the table, the jar without water, the abandoned house. The nothing needs a frame to be recognized.
Hors cadre
The man then says:
— Yet, if someone speaks after the end of the world, the world is not really over. Who could be the narrator of this “after” ?
— You ask the right question. Because the narrator is always an admission.
The sage looked up at the sky, where the twilight still mingled the light with the shadow.
— If the narrator is a survivor, then the ending has left remnants. If the narrator is impersonal, then there remains a scene to describe. If the narrator is the silence itself, then you write that silence again, and it becomes a sign.
— What if the narrator is the Source? asked the man.
— The ending is off. If the Source speaks, nothing has been lost.
The man did not answer. He felt that something in him resisted.
— You would like the end to be total, the sage continued. By desire for coherence or desire for despair, you want an end that has no backstage. Yes, said the man. A ending that does not cheat.
— An absolute end transcends thought, reason, and meaning, says the sage. The end of the world is only the end of a world. Some say: after the end, there remains the man, naked and responsible, without heaven to catch up with him. It is a harsh and dignified word. It asks a lot.
Others say: after the end, there is no break, just a change. They do not cling to what passes. Nor to themselves, who will pass. But saying after the end, there is nothing, is a lost bet. And some say: after the end, there is nothing. This nothing becomes a throne, a being more absolute than the gods.
— And you, wise one, what do you say?
— All these words revolve around the same fire. Not around nothingness.
He picked up a handful of sand.
A handful of sand
— The end of the world is the end of your world. The end of your forms, your guarantees, your comfortable stories. But to confuse the end of forms with the abolition of the Whole is to take the penumbra for the night without a star.
The man murmured:
— But nothingness… absolute absence…
— Nothingness is not a reality, but a game of the mind. It is an idea born from fear of any grasp. The nothing exists: the empty table, the destroyed house, the starless sky. The nothing is painful, but it is habitable. Nothingness, on the other hand, is not. And what is not habitable cannot be a destination.
All nothingness is nothingness of what it results from.
— So, asked the man, what is there instead? A transcendence?
The sage closed his eyes for a moment.
— Some call him God, others Real, others Breath, still others refuse to name him. But all live within it.
— But not everyone knows it. Doesn’t feel it.
— Not everyone feels the density, says the sage, yet no one escapes it. Transcendence does not all affect in the same way. She does not force. She waits and gathers without uniformizing.
He added:
— The reconciliation of which believers speak is not a reward distributed at the end of time. It is the moment when each being ceases to struggle against what underlies it. Some arrive at it early. Others late. Others barely. But no one is out of reach, for no one exists outside the Living. That’s why the very idea of nothingness is prevented. The Living exists, it does not depend on our worlds to be.
— Even if everything ends? asked the man.
— Worlds are sentences. The Living is the mother language.
Do not be afraid that the end will steal meaning. Meaning is not a piece of furniture of the world. It is a ray of the Source through it. When the world collapses, this ray does not extinguish. It denudes.
The man stood up. Something in him had quieted down. The end of the world is not the end of being, but the end of illusion. With or without matter, the Living exists. Life is.
Then man felt the breath of the Living, tenuous, tenacious, which prevents emptiness from becoming absolute.
And this gentle presence is enough for him to walk.
II – Before the Beginning
by Xavier Séguin
Strumul Magloë was president of the FER, Front des Etats Régnants when he unannounced 50 nuclear warheads on the Double Continent. Bombs made in SINASociety Industrielle des Nantis Apatrides! He will deny having done it, saying that it comes from Sina, which is true… originally. Sina manufactures everything the world needs. Even nuclear warheads, which everyone could do without.
The absence of a response from the Chinese authorities confirms Magloë’s claim. Except that Sina cannot respond: it has just been erased from the map of the world by 160 nuclear warheads made in SINA. It was the UNAUnion of Astronaut Navigators that tipped them to end the Sinoise threats against global banks — all controlled by the UNA who want it to continue like this.
The triumph of President Strumul Magloë is short-lived: he perishes under a rain of nuclear warheads made in SINA once again. Who started the shower? The Ideal Coalition of the Followers of the Order could not be sold, too quickly destroyed under a nuclear hurricane funded by the International Federation of Disunited Nations which includes all countries left behind, too poor and irrelevant for rich countries.
As for the old UROP, Union Rétrograde Optimiste Passéiste she contented herself, as always, with counting the points. But it does not take long to fade under an avalanche of warheads hijacked by the HIHAN. Intentional holding of the Stateless Non-aligned Hackers
The few survivors did not take long to die in the worst sufferings, contaminated by the mega-rads of fallout. They wandered without hope, without the slightest food, without medical help, nor hospital, nor medicines — nothing but their eyes to cry. Enormous fires seized everything that could burn, various ruins, plants, animals, and humans.
All the prayers of the religious of all denominations had no effect on this heartbreaking finale. Here there is no longer any living being left on or in this planet, human, animal or vegetable. It will take I don’t know how long for the earth to become habitable again.
And by the way, habitable by whom? But yes, you guessed. Easy, I just said it. Those from the inside. The former giants who inhabit the earth-center. Terminus everyone descends. What is happening to them? Easy to guess, they set sail just before.
Does that surprise you? You amaze me. They influence people constantly. They oblige humans –sheep that they have always been– to align themselves with the changes of era. So that the mud age can succeed the glass age, already they got into a fight with perfect humans in their genus. They were quite adapted to the age of the bully merdasse, an era of wading and congenital crabs. The Glass Age didn’t appeal to them at all. Too transparent.
One of the previous giants had the fatal idea. So that mud men could improve to the point of being mature for the glass age, he posited the hypothesis of a single God. He said it in the air, without really thinking. It didn’t hold up against the thousands of gods who ruled over thousands of people at that time. Always as idiots, men invented religions. Each for his own unique god, all the other unique gods having become de facto sacrilegious inventions.
And religions have perverted them to the last, women and men, children and adults.
So the giants of the interior had left the earth center for a good month, just to hide behind the moon, their favorite shelter, to observe the show at leisure. As soon as everything broke, they went back up in their spacecraft to gain a distant star in instant teleportation. It’s less annoying. And no one will talk anymore about the earth, which existed and no longer exists.
Excuse me? I forgot other humans?
Survivors? Humans unharmed? Ah yes! You do well to say so. It’s obvious though. If I had not survived, how could I write this? I was forgetting the cohort of the awakened. The astral travelers, of course! Those half-fools who swirl around the world-where-one-gets bored. It’s true. I’m part of it.
We are on the way to uh? … to our destination. We are all irresistibly sucked towards uh? … towards where we are going. I don’t know more. I’ll tell you when we get there.
After spinning like losers around what was left of the big blue marble, noticing each other from time to time, we ended up wondering what we should do. Stay here? Why do it? The earth has lived, its uh? .. its remains are totally imbitable, uninhabitable, unusable and completely disgusting.
So get out of here quickly. The universe is ours. It’s big. A bit too big. The few survivors that we are cannot agree. Everyone has their own little idea, no one likes those of others.
The psychic vacuum cleaner decided for us. Without warning it went off we had no choice, we got sucked in. It goes fast but it’s long. Usually we move in the astral, fast, it’s without moving. Barely gone, you arrived. Cool. While there, we are in the real world, well if there is something of this type, which I doubt. Let’s say that we are in the same ‘reality’ as the cosmonaut astronauts spacionautes of yesteryear.
But unlike the latter, we have no scuba gear, no oxygen mask, no metal hull around us, no reactor, no porthole, nothing that has made such beautiful images over the past two centuries. In both senses of the word. Two centuries that were truly the last for the earth.
Another difference: we are there like clampins without knowing where we are going. But we are going. We will know where when we are there. Still? The noise ran from one heart to another, in the twinkling of an eye we all understood that we were not aspirated, but that the stellar world was running towards us, which remained immobile: travelers of space and time, passengers at a standstill, invisible, without bodies.
No dense material, natural or processed, could survive after the disaster. We like the rest, pure spirits, and when I say pure I am undoubtedly exaggerating. Here is that the Great Bear surrounds us, dazzled by the enormous stars. A smaller one near a very big one, Alcor near Mizar, we head towards Alcor.
Will we go to the third planet, Ur, stay of the Goddesses? No, we pass the Sun of Alcor and here we are lost in the immensity empty of light and matter.
It is believed to join the space-time of emptiness, before the beginning…
The manuscript stops here. Issued from the future, it reached me — I don’t know how or why. I date it in a range of +2200 to +5000. The fork is big, it’s true. Worse: I’m not even sure about that. If it happens to come from the past… The scalar travelers of which he seemed to me to be part did not get lost. They no longer had bodies, they could not remain under the Sun of Alcor. To the body. The Sun that has the body. Not like them…
The survivors without bodies went to nest on a gaseous veil between Alcor and Mizar. Invisible veil for the invisible ones. Immaterial…
This formless veil is called Sankor.bodyless They are still there.