Floozman in Space

by Bertrand Cayzac

Part I

Chapter 10: The Zodiac of Her Spirit, I

part 1

Science today shall find a source of inspiration above itself, or it will perish.
— Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace)

The decision beat accelerates. The executive committee is in a trance. However, unbeknownst to the participants, the president’s mind is freeing itself from her jail of flesh. Like a pilgrim who seeks his home again, she turns to the high region that the new academy labs have named the SUPERWORLD. It’s a super-fluid, a super-gliding dimension, say the young palotins.

Jenny feels again the waves of this indivisible multiplicity at the bottom of which, she knows, everything is in touch. A strong vital stream is dragging her seaward like a wave, which, ebbing, would catch her by the loins, the small of her back, large and golden, espoused by the oiled ropes of her hair.

But still she resists. She must come back down at all costs. She has made this crucial decision in circumstances so dreadful and supernatural that her incarnate state no longer enables her to conceive it in truth. She must stay in this world, for she now knows what she wants.

She recalls her will power as she stands between two worlds, almost awake enough to contemplate the splendor of the skies towards which she is still drawn, still heeding the furrow of her corporeal life.

Millicent, the stimuli-shield, conducts the meeting while Jenny weaves her way in her twilight world. At her interface with the director’s evanescent psyche, she captures a multitude of visions. They are made up of memories from the time of the first expedition, before Janatone’s flight. Since Millicent cannot filter out the images, she records them in a buffer memory.

* * *

Jenny Appleseed’s journeys into the superworld
and what she did with the form she found there

By means of the archives, Millicent returns to the Academy at the time of its splendor, which some data aggregators date back as early as the beginning of Wilfrid Shootagain’s lectures. The Academy emerges as iridescent lace carved in the cliffs of ice overhanging the palace.

The balanced proportion of its walls and the forest of its innumerable spires, the harmony of its curves and the brightness of its golden scales, the soft arches of its balconies and the audacity of its walkways — all its architecture tells of Jenny’s initiative. She has been willing to sow her money, sometimes with her hand, as the poetess Corinne recommended to Pindar long ago, sometimes the way one casts bread onto the waters according to the sound advice of King Solomon.

Thus did Jenny benefit the scholars, the artists, the philosophers, and the machines that outguessed and inspired them. Thus did she guide them towards the heavens, profusely creating gardens, museums, schools, establishing justice, reviving on the moon the works of the ancients and the fecund paradigms that the science of the first rockets believed it had surpassed. She had been the Scholarch.

Millicent pictures herself again, in the secret laboratories, a short while after the project had begun.

Entangled in a cocoon of thin electrodes, she stares with Jenny’s eyes at the diodes on her solar plexus. All her nervous system’s coprocessors have been allocated to the massive yoga parallel providing her with mental power.

After a long accumulation of cyber-psychic energy, the inner catapult suddenly launched its projectile. Jenny’s consciousness was instantly torn from her body. Her body! The palotins at the control center applauded as they had seen people do in the human archives about the space conquest, but without any genuine enthusiasm.

She went through the palaces she had glimpsed during the previous attempts, then the psycho-pumps came on line, sweeping away stepwise all her images, leaving only a pure mental plasma. Jenny felt herself dying but didn’t believe it. The palotins stopped breathing.

Finally, the signal came. The wall was broken. Jenny was exultant. Now the momentum imparted by the catapult was carrying her away towards the unknown! But all this exultation and all the sensations, visions, brilliance — with which bodily organs could she experience them? The Academy engineers had examined this persistent question from all angles, and they would continue to consider it for a long time, as long as life in the superworld escaped all intelligence.

But their thoughts were timid and their predictions uncertain. As Augustine cites Luke about the eternal resurrection of flesh: “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” thanks to stringent accounting standards, for it is said elsewhere that “all the hair on your head shall be counted.”

Thus, not a hair on Jenny’s head had perished. Her intimate formula unfolded in its most beautiful light, which is also her true light, for, according to the Bishop of Hippo’s intuition: “Lean and fat persons must not fear to find themselves in heaven as they would not have wished to be be on earth, could they have chosen not to be so.”

Moreover, the explorer was dressed in her fetishistic shamanic apparel: piezoelectric satin shorts, a grizzly bear skin adorned with diamonds and sapphires, and her white sneakers. Around her neck she wore the carburetor of her motorbike. She was more beautiful than the Queen of the Night for whoever could see her.

Behold her shedding a carrousel of light larger than the universe, exceeding quantity itself. Its living numbers established its circumference everywhere and its center nowhere. Mouths without number whispered a tangible, ardent and kindred language.

Eternal objects glittered under the unfathomable vault: some almost intelligible; others, sublime, incommensurable to Jenny’s barely superhuman mind. She contemplated ideas! Ideas as beautiful as big hamhocks.

Yes, like big hams hanging from a greasy pole, their hard rind shines in the oblique light of spring. And thus when the May festivals return and bells call youth to compete in games, the sight of prizes makes a farm boy’s muscles bulge while girls watch him take risks. In like manner, beautiful forms incited the cyborg’s valiance in transcendent visions.

But the dense materiality of this vision caused the pyscho-pumps to clog and cause Jenny’s fall. It was most likely due to a parasite generated by a difference storm somewhere in the intellect. She had to wait for the next trip to start exploring the celestial country.

She returned at last to the Superworld. All the ideas that life had yet grasped in her impulse towards beauty and freedom were here, like timeless, fiery chrysalises. The ones she did not recognize were also visible, and she saw their movements as the rustling of fleeting jellyfish in an ocean of awareness. It was a symphony of perceptions, some almost discernible, some adorned with symbolic flesh or infinitely detailed views of potential configurations of matter.. She was raptured by huge waves of love. Where they came from, she did not know.

She had to concentrate in order to avoid going in beyond her depth. She had to refrain from grasping the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of forms that appeared from beyond the limits of the field where space and time maintain awareness.

Closer to Jenny, still according to the space-time patterns engraved in her spirit, flocks of parent forms moved across her intellect without revealing themselves in all their dimensions. They all seemed to come effortlessly toward her, with a slow, diligent gait somewhat like a giraffe’s graceful amble.

Jenny perceived the forms as moving very fast. She was not fully integrated in their time frame but was hanging among familiar forms growing like bushes around her. So fast and so strangely did they move that the very idea of speed was no longer adequate to describe their capacity to approach along a given vector and then move away from the observer in all directions at once.

There, in a watery fabric of potentialities simmering with the desire of self-actualization, she suddenly discovered a beautiful essence that she understood instantly in all its dimensions and in all branches of its evolution. It was mysteriously close, like a favorite cousin. It had neither color nor substance: it was a pure concept, a node of abstract but precisely articulated gestures dancing over long durations.

It talked to her without language, showing her all it would be capable of. Lo! It was eating as she ate; how amazing! It was loving and reproducing itself before her very eyes. How graceful and terrible was this thing, made up of a vast society of forms all equally straining towards beauty, united by a superior idea, citizens of the same concrescence! It spoke to her without language. Jenny needed only a few evolutionary leaps to be in its likeness and at last see beyond the human horizon. She wanted it for herself.

She wanted this flower with all her being, not like she wanted new breasts or a small bag of genuine Earthly hedgehog skin: she wanted it because it was extending and fulfilling her, she was sure of that. The form had been waiting for all eternity for Jenny to apprehend it. And Jenny had come. She was seeing what represented the most necessary stage in human evolution. What she was seeing here, she decreed, was the form of the SUPERMAN.

She had to take on that shape and none other in order to enter the Superworld... and then seize it when the time was ripe. Jenny jumped at it as she used to jump on the merry-go-rounds of her childhood, when she was chasing the MICKEY’S tail.

With incorporeal organs, the existence of which was unknown to her, she grasped and did not grasp the lovely idea. There was a sort of flash during which the superior parts of her soul made themselves similar to what they were gazing at, inasmuch as it was in their power to do so. The physical waves that were carrying her in this world startled like bloodily spurred horses.

That is how Jenny conceived of the form of the Cosmitics superman.

And then at last, in a day on Jupiter, in a night on the moon, in a distinct time more immediately measured by the latter clock than by the former, Jenny contracted her awareness to return to the world of space. The Cosmitics yoga worked to perfection: the pneumatic valves closed efficiently to lock sensation-awareness into the scale of human time. In advance and with infinite tact, the stimuli-shied wakened her body. The Cosmigirls gave her something to drink and eat, and then they took her to the experiments’ control room.

“I want to become the superman! I want to become the superman while remaining myself. Get ready,” Jenny whispered as soon as she could utter a word.

* * *

To be continued...