HENRI MICHAUXFuture
Centuries to come
My absolute present, always present,
obsessionally present...
Born as I was when it didn’t seem all that easy to go from Paris to Peking, when
it was so late in the afternoon we were afraid of not getting home before dark.
Oh! Centuries to come, I see you so clearly.
A great little century, all bright and shiny, the fourteen-thousandth century CE,
believe me!
The project was to get the moon aspirated out of the solar system. A nice
problem. It was in that terribly hot autumn of the year 134957 when the moon
began to move so fast that it lit up the night like twenty summer suns, and left
as planned.
Centuries infinitely far o√.
Centuries when the homunculi, the size of a closed umbrella, lived from 45 to
200 days, in possession of the appropriate wisdom.
Centuries of 138 species of artificial men, all, or almost all, of them true
believers—of course!—and why not? flying undamaged, whether in the
stratosphere or through twenty layers of poisoned gas.
I see you,
No I don’t.
Girls of the year twelve thousand who, as soon as people start looking into
mirrors, will know how to make fun of our clumsy e√orts, so close to the
ground.
You’re hurting me already.
If I could be with you for just one day I’d give up my life right away.
Pity there’s no one to o√er me that chance.
All that fooling around with airplanes (we were still using gasoline, you know,
jet-propelled), the profound imbecilities of still childish social experiments
bored us to hell, believe me.
They were beginning to detect the radioelectric echo coming from the direction
of Sagittarius, 2,250,000 kilometers away, recurring every fifteen seconds, and
another, so much fainter, millions of light years away; they had no idea what
to do with them.