Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver & Paris

Au Bord de la Seine

Matthew read that the historical sites of Paris were spared, as were those of other popular tourist locations such as Rome, Padua, Borobudur, Bagan, Suzhou, and Cuzco. Some cities, such as Paris or Rome, had five or six cultural sites each.

Since the Baulians had very different standards of beauty and historical value, they picked the sites based on the way humans ranked them in pamphlets and guidebooks. As a result, tourist traps with beautiful beaches, like Cancún or Benidorm, had five or six protected zones, while cultural gems like Guanajuato or Salamanca, only had one.

The Baulians also preserved core sections of newer places: Shanghai, New York, Dubai, Buenos Aires, etc. In total there were 777 historical parks, staffed largely by a selection of the original inhabitants.

Many of the sites were kept as close as possible to their original form. In Paris they left intact most of what was inside the eight-lane Périphérique. They replaced the Ring Road itself with Orange-Maglev (OM) circuits and OM junctions, most of which remained at the traditional gates of the city, such as Porte de Clignancourt. The Four key junctions of Place de la Nation, Place d’Italie, Gare de Montparnasse, and Batignolles were razed to the ground. In their place the Baulians built population hubs three and four hundred stories high. These spots overlooking the charming primitive town were especially prized by Baulian curiosity-seekers and anthropologists.

The whole depressed and industrial area that lay north, east, and south of la Goutte-d’Or was annihilated. The Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord were recycled and in their place the Baulians established a massive OM Central Station. Rising on both sides of the Station was a twin-peaked tower called Sèvres-Babylon II, modelled on the Great Temple of Baulis Prime. Crisscrossed with tropical gardens and sinuous rills, the New Tower was 96 stories deep and 370 stories high. At the top was a pleasure dome where Baulians could relax in orange essence pools, communally joined and free to get up to whatever they pleased.

In some places, extensions of Paris proper were permitted to remain, such as the extension of the Champs-Élysées along avenues Grande-Armée and Charles de Gaulle, leading to La Défense. When Matthew saw the extension he initially suspected that the planners were mocking the French, with their Foreign Legion, their Résitance, and their Force de Frappe nuclear weapons. But then he saw that the Baulians had no such intention. Their historical notes made it clear that defence was a logical and admirable trait they shared with humans.

Once, la Grande-Armée and Charles de Gaulle were clogged with cars, trucks, and buses. Now, OM corridors created rainbows above the pedestrians. Gardened pathways crisscrossed all the way from Bois de Boulogne to the larger park of St. Germain. The railway line that once ripped through the Forêt Domaniale de Saint-Germain-en-Laye was recycled and the series of watery loops northwest of Paris were converted into a vast leisure park. The Baulians called it The Five Loops. Pleasure boats, called Bateaux Mouches et Abeilles (Fly and Bee Boats) plied the waters and forests, which hummed and sang with insects from over a thousand compatible worlds.

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Matthew could see the beauty of it all. And even the necessity. Every scientist knew where humanity was taking the planet. Who knows what sort of Armageddon would have occurred if not for the deus ex machina of the pink cubes?

Prior to the Invasion, the world was in a hopeless state. One doom-laden sign of this was that the American president, the most powerful man in the world, pulled out of the Paris Agreement to stop global warming. Nick-named ‘Trumpet of Doom,’ the president proceeded to envelope Iran in a cloud of toxic fumes. The contagion spread to the neighbouring countries and eventually blew up all the oil in the Middle East. Israel, including its trumpeted capital in Jerusalem, went up in smoke.

And then there were the intractable problems of demography and history. Demographically, if humans remained in their abysmal economic state millions would continue to suffer and starve. If, on the other hand, they improved economically, and started consuming like the fat cat counties of Canada and Saudi Arabia, then the environmental dangers would mutate and multiply like cancer cells. China was the most obvious example of this, yet similar consumption explosions were occurring in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria. The demographic threat was the most basic problem in the world, yet humans in general hardly ever talked about it. Instead, they assumed that population growth ensured economic growth, which to them was the most important thing.

The deep animosities on Earth suggested that the disaster of war would never end. There was hatred between Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent, tribal horrors in the Congo, a Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world, a trigger-happy America, Islamic extremists, Maoist Naxalites in India, and gang violence throughout Central America. There was racism, sexism, inequality, ethnocentrism, nepotism, cronyism, organized crime, and fraud. From the Baulian point of view, the worst problem of all was that humans were destroying their home planet at an alarming rate. They polluted the water, ground, and air, and they tortured, killed, or ate any living thing that wasn’t human.

Considering these problems, many humans could only hope for some alien power to come down and straighten it all out.

But what, Matthew wondered, now that the aliens had descended, would be lost?

Matthew thought of the old universities of central Paris, and of the two years he spent at the Sorbonne when he was in his mid-twenties. He wondered what they would be teaching now.  

He imagined a French priest looking up at the silent towers of Notre-Dame. For a thousand years the towers seemed so big because the sky seemed so familiar.

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Next: 💍 The Soul Star

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