Our planet Earth, Gaia in Greek, considered as a living being, regularly corresponds with another planet in the universe, Aurora Kepler 452 B in the constellation of the Swan. Gilles Voydeville makes us discover this magnificent interstellar correspondence.
Letter from the stellar cold on Kepler
Letter of October on Gaia
My dear Gaia
Thank you for your warm missive which arrives while my northern hemisphere is cooling down under the push of the stellar winds which sweep my northern pole. The sweetness of your Indian summer warms me like a fire in a thatched cottage lost in the middle of the continental forests. Because of the lesser inclination of the axis of my rotation my seasons are less marked than yours, when the frosts descend from my poles, in a very short time the frost can cover everything. It begins by becoming fog and then freezes into cold crystals on all my nature. It nimbles everything, from the cedar to the hyssop, which are common goods to us because born under close climates. This frosting panics my chevroids, fearful hosts of my forests who stop their races to shelter quickly in their dens. Because it is necessary to know that they gallop on their four beautiful hooves made of a fragile horn which splits at the slightest frost. My medorchats feel their silky coat stiffening and becoming brittle. As soon as they feel the wind blowing, they go back to their masters’ house to curl up and fire up the fireplaces. As for my pouloids, they abandon their fat meadows to take shelter under awnings; which does not fail to worry my Ovoïdes who never see with a good eye, the fasting of their nourishing animal.
You had told me a tale where the fabulous unicorns deceived your charming voluptuous.
I imagined pouloids with rostrum and wings. Well, not long ago I discovered animals in the Anatidae Mountains that I thought were large bats resembling your flying foxes from Australia. In your honor, I named them “Unicornas”. These unicorns are small creatures that run as much as they fly. They must resemble your famous winged mammals, but they have four legs and two wings and a small ivory horn on their forehead. Their size is that of a small medorchat and their fluffy coat like a princess’s bed. They nest in suspended caves that they share with birds. They do not sleep there with their feet hanging under the vault. And when the frost of my poles descends, if they are late in returning to their cottages, the coldness freezes their wings and prevents them from flying to their refuge. So much so that they die at the foot of the rocks that make them tombs of basalt and olivine that are universal rocks for us. Thus on Kepler, everyone fears the ghost white as snow and cold as ice that will freeze the body and annihilate the spirit of a bellows of ice.
Did I tell you about such an event earlier? At the time, it caused a great sensation.
A planetary Mostra to which people came to see as much as to show themselves: in the middle of the forest of the Long Trees, people came to admire the remains of my Big Five. They had not fallen from the sky by chance. At the time, I had instructed my papilloma to infest them in order to diminish them. Because my Big Five were threatening all my species, both animal and plant. Thus these enormous dragons had of weakness, here and there, crashed into my nature. Without really explaining why, many of them had found themselves spinning above this forest of the Long Trees. Was it the smell of the resins that had intoxicated them, or the combined effect of the scent and the effects of the papilloma infestation? In any case, their fall in the middle of the woods of the Long Trees had damaged them, twisted them, even amputated them. If one added the dismemberments that they had inflicted on themselves as scavengers, one could hardly recognize them. Thus their corpses were decomposing, stinking up my forest and rotting my atmosphere just as they had rotten my life.
Then the smell dissipated and their remains passed into the state of a transient, the one that your great sculptor Ligier-Richier has already immortalized for the noble René de Chalon.
And when, at the time of the first frosts, their remains had been covered with this boreal frost which glitters like a gangue of diamonds, one had been surprised by the result. The spines had begun to glow like crystal snakes, the orbits of the skulls to fulgurate with greenish rays and the cages of their thorax to make brilliant prisons for the woodland rodents. All this had given them a plasticity that the flesh had not granted them.
So after this frost had covered these skeletons and remains, my ovoid population, eager for distraction, had been called to admire them. They saw in them an artistic expression and even a message. It must be said that the work combined new forms with the evocation of a triumph. This mass grave, each Ovoid found it worthy of contemplation, astonishing and to say celestial. Moreover, this spectacle was reinforced by the commemoration of the victory over these winged dragons. My Ovoids were proud of having defeated these monsters and they celebrated the event with the skeletons of their enemies, a bit like in your country the Bulgarians drank from the skulls of the defeated. In the success of this Mostra, it was difficult to distinguish between harmony – which you would call aesthetic – and the celebration of a victory that had saved my planet from devastation by these funeral fire pumps.
Do you know that among my Ovoids, beauty does not exist? Or at least, it is not named as one of my qualities.
They can apprehend a well-being after the contemplation of an object, a work, a landscape; or at the hearing of a symphony because we also have orchestras. These forms, ways, manners, can generate them a positive affect, incalculable, which differs from the utilitarian feeling of their usual thoughts. These perceptions generate for them a feeling of fullness, of peace, even of ecstasy. But when they feel this, they do not speak of beauty. They say that heavenly images have visited them. These heavens, of which you are a part, send them messages, already to manifest their existence, but above all to enliven, brighten up, embellish their lives on my rather sad earth.
All this to say of course that the origin of this happiness is not attributable to me, although I am necessarily the author.
They perceive, they appreciate, they are intoxicated by a perception that your little Charming beings would call Beauty. Your Charmings have at least the honesty to give you this merit when you are their progenitor. Mine are so jealous of me that they summon (here there is no god) our sky, this universal common good that I share with you, to express their pleasure and rebuke my aesthetic pretensions. Ah, no population is perfect! And these celestial forms which charm them, they never seek to reproduce them by themselves. That would deny them any power of seduction. So much so that on my planet, without their taking offence or sadness, everything is ugly. My Ovoids live without being able to seduce their fellow creatures by their works nor their forms. In view of the canons of art of your planet, their body resembles only an egg without shoulder nor pelvis. They cannot even enjoy the contemplation of a work of their fellow creatures. So they have little joy. But they do not wage war out of desire for another’s possessions or concupiscence for the curve of a female’s loins. They wait for the stars to send them celestial gifts and are satisfied with them.
You would think them wise, they are only devoid of passion.
I have begun to have your letters read to one of the three rulers of a great country, the “Land of the Two Moons”, from which my two moons can be seen several times per revolution around my star the Great Swan. This continental country has eighteen islands and extends in a small part of the so-called temperate zone, that is, from the equators to three quarters of the distance that separates them from the poles. On a tenth of my circumference it is delimited by the orbits of my two moons which make that one can see them there six times the year. Thus was made this country by the contemplation of the stars and not by wars.
This ruler is called Utula. She belongs to the rising generation of Ovoid people whose profile is changing in the direction of recognition of my benefits. She has worked hard for the reproductive liberation of Ovoid females. To this modern spirit, she combines a body that is slimming at the waist and makes her look like a cello. This would not yet be a criterion of beauty for your Charmants, but as I see her growing small blisters in front on the upper body and some filaments on the top of the shell and between the legs, I wonder if she would not be evolving towards a more charming model. I notice moreover that its reproductive pocket is lower than that of its congeners and is under the aforementioned size. In short, she is a mutant but she is not the only one to transform herself in this way.
In her work for the liberation of females, Utula has learned to fight and she does not exclude practicing it against a neighbor, the country of Cocagne, whose inhabitants take a little too much to their ease with their females and exploit their nature to the point of making her bleed gold.
Utula is very interested in your charming Chinese people, especially in their leader. She finds that he knows how to manage an enormous population with very simple principles that are sufficient to guide millions, even billions of subjects more or less lost by the evolution that assails them. Utula has a strange desire. She would absolutely like to have an image of this leader, but since you didn’t send me one, I don’t know if quantum entanglement can make her wish come true. But I’m asking you. Utula confided to me that all she could think about was this Charming guy and that he took over her dreams. This is a feeling that the Ovoid people here have for works of art that come from space, and perhaps that is why she is attached to your leader.
Until now this attraction for a living being did not exist on my planet. But on your earth I know that every Charming is moved by it.
Utula is in the midst of a cult of the leader named Xi. She has great admiration for him and believes that he is a gift from the stars.
This way of privileging the Chinese people without any consideration for their neighbors has totally seduced her. She admires the skill, the amalgam, the denial, the bad faith, in short she believes that Xi is the bearer of a message that the sky, that is to say our missives, has sent him. She considers him a master thinker. She understands that he has, to spare you, greatly participated in, or even favored, the blossoming of a plague for your entire land. Without this making his subjects suffer as much as the other less disciplined charming peoples. He knew that he could use his aura to stop an epidemic very quickly. This Xi has the authority to rule everything, and what could be more effective than hundreds of millions of Charming people marching hand in hand in the same direction? Xi has given himself the means to realize his plans. Utula understood that he was the author and the great beneficiary of this pandemic: what a talent! In short, I am afraid that Utula is a little too devoted to leadership and that she is thinking of abandoning her triumvirate to take power alone in the Land of Two Moons. But if she intends to spare me from the new delusions of building factories that my Ovoids have planned to manufacture transport devices – because there is a saturation of waves for teleportation – I will see her project in a very good light.
By the way, Utula wants to write to Xi. I’ll send you her letter with a small picture. You can forward it to her…
My dear Gaia, I will wrap a thousand ribbons of sidereal purple around you. I will send you a thousand caresses of galactic winds, a thousand rays of my blessed star. I still hope that we can take our people a great way to bring them closer and strengthen each other. The good news is that your Xi will fall in love with Utula. But what would he admire about her? I don’t think he would be attracted to her, even though her looks are remarkable. And considering the submissiveness of the female in China – which Utula has not yet discerned – it is unlikely that she will be charmed for long.
Your twin sister Aurora