Evil Empire 125
This tumultuous concerto of voices, which appear not to respond
to one another, wrote Probii, in fact slowly engage, creating a series of
intelligible utterances, asserting the desires and opinions of each person,
and yet these are expressed not via a single tongue, as it were, but in a
language that, though it includes words, does not depend upon them.
In order to understand it, Probii began to observe people in various
phases of development. He established that, whilst babies seem to share
the same tongue in the early phases of verbalization, over the course of
their development this is forgotten or stops making sense. Then begins
a period of introspection that lasts until the start of puberty, when, after
an eternity spent in silence, adolescents watch their bodies change and
quickly learn the gradations, accents, and ellipses of their physiognomy;
they perfect the figuration of their flesh until arriving at what is the
planet’s lingua franca: copulation.
Thereafter the planet’s inhabitants copulate in every imaginable
way and with every participant needed in order to express themselves
with precision. What is being said when one puts one hand in one place
and the other in another varies quite a bit depending on what each is
doing with their mouths, how many others are participating, and how
slowly this is being done. The nose is vital in the communication of
nuance. When words appear during the act, they are spaced out, not
pragmatic objects but the accent on a sentence already being said with
hips or with teeth.
This is the way relations are entered into, parties are organized,
secrets revealed, recipes passed down, detailed instructions given. The
planning of the city’s largest bridge, for instance, required the amatory
efforts of ninety-seven people at once.
Clearly it was the prospect of learning such sexual sophistication
that led to Agent Probii’s perdition. In the last report filed, Probii
singled out one particular person with whom to enter into contact, but,