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 of the month of December on Gaia
Letter of the month of the aurora on Kepler
My dear Gaia
In my lands of the Septentrion, winter is here. It comes in majesty, slowly. To announce itself, it begins by sprinkling my earth with a candid veil. Then it marks the step by letting ugly rains gray my countries. Finally he advances serious and precise. Because it is his hour. Sure of his right, he does not hesitate any more, to say the least, he does not tolerate any more the idea to hesitate to present himself under his best day, white, lucid and penetrating of cold. To contemplate him in all the magic of his forms at this beautiful season, more and more Ovoids leave for a polar holiday. Because of this latest fashion, my air is cluttered with waves that carry them and we have seen, as in the past, some Ovoids never reappear. For the moment, accidents are rare, but this practice is becoming massive, and what you would call tourism will not fail to pose painful choices for me.
To frequent these icy regions, my Ovoids must dress. Because under the rigor of the frost, their plasma tends to lose its fluidity. To thicken in a white albumin which will make a jelly and will not irrigate any more their organs of thought. Since live in these countries large hairy animals, covered with a long hair which makes them fleeces warmer than a down of vine shoots, my Ovoïdes decided to seize their furs. Because on this snow which confuses the earth and the sky, they saw them without brake to run with their six legs with the broad hooves. On white expanses as far as the eye can see, these sixpedes roll and splash around without a care. They do pirouettes, somersaults, wallow, climb on each other and never seem to suffer from this strange and staggering disease called chill. They fight, play, challenge each other, run away, rebel or mate without worrying about temperatures that would freeze more than one Ovoid. And when these beasts have finished frolicking in this powder, to quench their thirst they swallow it whole. Without ever getting cold, neither the belly nor the blood, they devour the flakes as if they were oats and seem to be satisfied with them. For they have no other food than this manna fallen from the sky.
To support the rigor of this climate, my Ovoïdes having seen these sixpedes so well living in the company of the cold, could not resist the desire to appropriate their coat.
So to kill them, they invented weapons, javelin organs. From an ore of iron tears, they forged pointed arrows like those that turn with the wind. And on wooden schlittes, they placed rows of tubes as hollow as those of your organs, one next to the other, and inserted arrows into them. And then they hitched these carts to pouloids in cessation of nourishing activity. In the snow, these toil, beaten with straps. They exhaust themselves without reluctance to the work because in spite of their inaptitude, they know they are spared from the rendering. Thus my Ovoids can go hunting.
When they see a herd of silver sixpedes frolicking at the edge of a wood, they point their organs of death. Then, at the bottom of the tubes, the hunters set a black powder on fire. Then, with a deafening thunder, clouds of javelina fly away. The beasts are astonished by the fire and the noise, only to collapse before they realize that their innocent aptitude has made them envious. Ah, my Ovoids are discovering the use of force to satisfy their desires, and I fear that they will devise a strategy for the future. We will see…
Gaia, you told me about your epidemic and a variant you call omicron.
It seems to be more contagious than the others, but less able to kill its hosts. This makes me think that this may be the end of your epidemic. Because if a variant is very contagious without being deadly, it will supplant the most dangerous ones and being easily transmitted by preserving its hosts, it will very quickly give a collective immunity.
Your Charming ones do not know it yet because before their microscopes did not identify your darlings the viruses, but the coronaviruses which confer them currently small colds, were before much more harmful pathogenic germs. As long as they were very harmful, they killed, self-limited by depriving themselves of a great number of their propagators and they provoked quarantines that limited their action. In every epidemic, statistics being what they are, there is everything: very aggressive and very contagious variants, very aggressive and not very contagious variants, not very aggressive and not very contagious variants, but when the not very aggressive and not very contagious variant arrives, the epidemic is over.
At least its perils diminish and social life resumes its rights. Its circulation continues, it seeks hosts of another kind, becomes seasonal and generates only venial discharges and annoying coughs rather than processions to cemeteries.
This is just my experience with epidemics on Kepler, and you’ll see what the future holds for yours.
I come back to give you news about Utula, my little queen of the Empire of the Two Moons. She didn’t hesitate to take the power. She has just ousted her two colleagues from the triumvirate by the game of unavowable alliances and untenable promises. All this for the good of the great people of the Two Moons and under the leadership of her party, the PCL (Lunatic Common Party).
Let me tell you a little bit about the history of my planet. In ancient times, it was the females who ruled social life on Kepler. Without any apparent dominance, but effective enough to channel and direct those males who thought they were ruling while being fooled by their female companions. The lack of strength of the males is one of their problems in forging objects, waging war, etc… But this has an advantage, as the females do not suffer from marital violence and can take risks without taking a beating. You remember, they had invented the counting of marbles to put in their dorsal reproductive pocket, supposedly to avoid exhausting the pouloids but in truth to occupy the place and limit the assaults of their spouse.
It was even said that the marbles gave them intimate sensations similar to Geisha balls.
Utula had previously won votes by denouncing the domination of males in the land of Cocagne. For this was likely to spread throughout the Empire of the Two Moons. If one adds the dull existence, without war but without passion, that most of the Ovoïdes lead, an existence that wearied the young generation she embodied and for whom boredom was a torture, all this had allowed her to belong to the triumvirate. The intrigues she copies from Uncle Xi have done the rest so that she is now alone in power.
Yesterday she predicted a catastrophe if her orders are not followed. Like the one described in the sacred books of the religions of your world, the apocalypse will annihilate the people and will be followed by a celestial governance. And this for a thousand years. This is what you call millenarianism.
Here, since there is no god, the divine governance will be replaced by the celestial.
In your country, there are fewer religious preachers today than there were two thousand years ago. But there are more political prophets, that is, secular and economic prophets…. You have already told me that they are of a sharp sectarianism and do not bother about the consequences of their acts in social cost, that is to say in quantity of misfortune that their doctrines would bring very quickly to the vulgum pecus.
Utula is close to one of your adolescent muses who crosses your ecological world. I consider these modern prophets to be millenarians. Since they announce the end of the world and the coming of an evil governance which will not fail to settle for a long time, perhaps a thousand years if one does not submit to their diktats. Fortunately the prophecies of these messiahs never come true.
Their stories have the advantage of moderating consumerist behaviors that might have increased without their action.
Utula had already announced that she wanted to free the country of Cocagne from the grip of the males who, in order to obtain a precious metal, abuse their females. She has now declared that she has received messages from heaven that announce the end of the world today if they do not redeem themselves. An asteroid from limbo will hit me in less than twenty cycles. All life will be destroyed and the Great Female will come. She will resurrect all the beings she chooses and impose her reign. Unless, when the time comes, each male Ovoid uses tele-transportation to launch itself to meet the celestial bolide and by a crazy wave magic, can divert the celestial object from its target. I strongly suspect that she has found a way to make many males disappear when they are in the form of waves.
It’s cleaner than beating millions of beings with a mixer and it poses less of a problem of waste disposal.
Well, I noticed that I had a new company at my side. She is a brown dwarf and until now I had not noticed her because she does not radiate much. She is actually quite a dwarf. She is even ten times as big as me. And she is probably brown like your moon is red in the first lunation after your Easter holidays. It is neither a star nor a planet. It is too small to be a star because the gravity generated by its mass is insufficient to allow the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen. Because this fusion requires an enormous pressure generated by a gravitation which appears only from a colossal mass, that of your sun or of my Swan. That is to say a thousand times the mass of your Jupiter. And as these dwarfs radiate little, I do not see them in the visible spectrum.
It is new telescopes with infra-red which allowed me to note the presence of my small Smurfette.
Well, when I say little, you understand me. I love the name Smurfette, because it reminds me of your tale of a white girl who is friends with tiny forest inhabitants. I have the impression that this dwarf is a cold brunette, no more than -20° Celsius. And at the Sky Institute they have observed aurora borealis and australis on its poles, which are due to intense magnetic fields: 10,000 times as intense as yours or mine.
I can’t wait to see the pictures of the telescope but these auroras must be stealthy because the winds blow there at 2300 kilometers per hour on this disheveled dwarf.
My dear Gaia, there is no good company that does not leave. So I leave you hoping to have inspired you with images of ribbons mad with joy to dance on your poles; of an opal green, of a tender green, of a phosphorescent green making rounds with dark and galactic violets. Sequences of ribbons that wind and fade. Dazzling ascents followed by cosmic swirls. Dreams of strange and dazzling planets. Dreams of transport and ecstasy. I embrace you again and again with all these celestial frills that swirl on our poles and make us plumes as the ostrich feathers used to swagger on the crest of your knights.
Aurore