In the Shadows of the
Stromatolites, Kindness Abides
By Mike Morgan
Eon:
Very
Late Phanerozoic
Calendar
Date
(Human): 1,002,103,482 CE
Calendar
Date
(Sciuridaen): 32 EARL[1]
A billion years. That’s how long
it takes for life on Earth to rediscover the
evolutionary quirk of humanlike intelligence. This
achievement coincides, within a hundred thousand years
or so, with the Moon falling out of orbit and
obliterating every last iota of life on the planet. The
two milestones are, as you might expect, very much
connected.
I’m getting ahead of myself, of
course. That’s easy to do when you see time as nothing
more than a direction. What’s that next to the potted
begonia? Oh, that’s yesterday, that is. Tomorrow’s
lurking behind the wastepaper basket. It thinks I can’t
see it, but I can, the cheeky little scamp. You’ll have
to excuse me. I digress. I do that.
The household objects are
metaphorical, by the way. Thought I should mention that
in case you start worrying about where the begonia’s
gone.
The cave is a cathedral now,
grown huge and complicated. A cathedral that echoes with
the screams of the dying. “Chara!” calls Chikkakwa.
“Where are you?”
What do you mean, “I haven’t
explained the cave yet?” I have. I told you all about it
later. I introduced it, after a fashion, when I talked
about the stromatolites. Not that the cave existed yet
then, but it was always going to. My point stands,
regardless of the confusion caused by your limited
ability to perceive reality.
Was that impatient? You’ll have
to excuse me. It’s been a long five billion years. Now,
pay attention. People are being hacked to pieces.
The people, I should point out,
are not humans. They went extinct a billion
years ago. Remember? These people have beautiful tails
and the most delicate, long fingers. They also have a
distant race memory of climbing trees, making impossible
jumps, and sneering at peculiar ape hominids hiding
inside ugly, box-shaped nests. But, really, that was all
such a long time ago and is hardly relevant in this
epoch. Nothing that lived then is the same now, if it
survives at all.
Of course, nothing’s going to
survive in about ten minutes, on account of the Moon
crashing down on everyone’s heads. Even the microbes
living their slow, metal-breathing lives in the crustal
rocks deep below the ocean floors are going to find
conditions unexpectedly challenging. It’s the inverse of
that other planet, Theia the humans called it,
colliding with the much younger Earth and forming the
Moon in the first place. Maybe a reborn Theia will
emerge from the molten incandescence of the obliterated
Earth, to begin its wanderings anew. I know, wishful
thinking. I can still see that original collision if I
squint -- it’s sort of north-northeast of here.
The cave. Oh yes, the cave, and
the slaughter.
Chikkakwa (nice fellow, by the
way, very good at weaving) is still calling in
desperation for his mate, Chara. She can’t hear him
because of all the chaos and running about and horrible
murder. Which is understandable. The not hearing him, I
mean, not the murder. Wanton destruction of life is
never okay with me, which is probably why I’m so annoyed
about the business with the Moon.
Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll be
fine; I can’t be hurt. After it all ends, I guess I’ll
return where I came from. I’ll check. Yes, there I am,
going home. I look upset.
I imagine you have questions. For
a start, you’re probably tutting over the Moon’s fate,
insisting it’s not possible. “You can’t yank the Moon
out of orbit,” I hear you saying, “it’s beyond the grasp
of science. Besides, you’d have to be a complete idiot
to do it.”
Well, wrong on the first count --
it’s only beyond the grasp of human science, and
the people doing it aren’t human -- and as for the
second point, I think you’re being unfair. It’s not as
if they’re doing it on purpose. Having said that, the
victims of this massacre did point out the risks of the
current regime’s “Great Endeavor.” Which is why they
were hounded out of the nearby city and took refuge
here, since they regard the cave as sacred. Not that
claiming sanctuary’s done them much good.
You’re also wondering who I am,
and you’re irritated by my failure to introduce myself.
Fine. I put it off because I don’t have a name, not as
such, and your species is all about names. If you’re
that interested, take a look over in the corner of the
cave. There, over by the cowering female (that’s Chara,
by the way) about to be impaled by a Revolutionary
Guard’s spear. No, not the scraggly bush. Next to that.
Yes, the star-nosed, armored, mole-type thing poking its
head out of the sandy soil.
I didn’t say I looked impressive.
I don’t have a set physical form,
not as you comprehend such things, so I adopt a shape
that fits the time/location I’m in. Something
unassuming. Unthreatening. I’m here to do what I can,
which most times isn’t a whole lot. Small acts of
kindness, usually. It’s easier if people don’t know
they’re being helped. That way, their pride and
certainty don’t foul everything up. No one would think a
small, burrowing creature was the cause of the
reputation for holiness this cave has. No one would look
twice at me. Trust me, that’s for the best.
One last question I’m betting you
have: why do I keep mentioning that couple -- Chikkakwa
and Chara? Out of all these innocent people being
killed, hundreds of them, because the regime says
they’re traitors (because they had the temerity to not
only be right but to say it out loud), why am I focusing
on these two?
The answer’s simple. Life on
Earth’s about to end -- if you view events in a linear
fashion -- and I want to finish as I started. By helping
one last time.
I couldn’t persuade the regime’s
leaders that their grand experiment into gravity
manipulation was going to be far more successful than
their experts predicted. I couldn’t influence
technicians working at the massive complex of the Great
Endeavor and make them sabotage a critical system. But
this, this I can do.
“She’s over here,” I whisper to
Chikkakwa. “By that bush. Hurry, the guard’s going to
stab her.”
He hears. He can’t pinpoint where
the voice came from, but he reacts, nonetheless. After a
brief struggle, Chikkakwa knocks down the Revolutionary
Guard. Chara is saved. He embraces his life-mate. In
that instant, they know relief, hope, even joy.
It was worth it. A second of
happiness. A second when the horror receded.
The guards are still killing.
They’re convinced of the righteousness of their cause.
They’ve justified to themselves that it’s permissible to
spill blood on holy ground, that the ends warrant the
means. One or two have doubts -- they’re too scared of
the repercussions of disobeying orders to throw down
their weapons, though.
The one Chikkakwa shoved to the
ground is stirring, unhurt in his armor. He’s intent on
revenge.
It doesn’t matter.
The Absolute Leader ordered the
gravity manipulator switched on a few minutes ago. I
felt it. He’s celebrating with his chief advisors,
confident they’ve ushered in a new technological age of
progress. The test object, a lump of metal a thousand
tons in weight, is hovering above the proving bed. A
lone technician is squinting at a readout, trying to
work out why the numbers are off. He’s thinking the
manipulator is drawing too much power. Why, it must be
projecting a field clear past the test target. A field
stretching out into space.
He starts to calculate what might
happen if such a field struck a body in orbit. The field
would, if it clipped the edge of the object, change its
spin, alter its angular momentum. The variables are
almost too complex to analyze without a computer. It’s
possible, with the additional energy imparted by the
field, that the object could…
Then the Moon falls out of the
sky, and the technician’s train of thought never reaches
its logical conclusion.
###
Epoch:
Very
Late Anthropocene
Calendar
Date:
2273 CE / -1,002,101,177 EARL
“Who’s a good boy, then?” asks
Aston Dalloway as he scratches my ear.
I’m tempted to say, “I am, you
terrible, terrible man,” but that would simultaneously
freak him the heck out and give away far too much. I
settle for a gentle woof. He seems satisfied by my
response, convinced as he is that I’m a greyhound-border
collie mix called Moe. Honestly, it’s not the worst
shape I’ve assumed.
Dalloway’s executive assistant,
Fenchurch, is about to show in a theoretical physicist
who’s figured out the salvation of the human race. The
physicist is called Ulrika Runnymede, and she’s right.
Her solution works, in principle at least. It’s a damn
pity Dalloway doesn’t have any principles.
I’d think up a cunning plan to
save her from the heartbreak of her excellent plan
failing utterly in practice, but I’m distracted both by
the sensation of my ear being scratched and the sight in
the temporal distance of the Earth being transformed
into a glowing ball of superheated carnage in a billion
years’ time.
Oh, if the Moon ever fell toward
Earth, astronomers said, it’d never actually hit the
surface. It’d pass the Roche limit and break up into
debris eighteen thousand kilometers from the ground. The
tidal forces tearing at the satellite would exceed the
gravitational force holding it together at that distance
and -- foom -- it’d disintegrate, forming a
pretty ring of celestial detritus above Earth’s equator.
No direct collision, although pieces would certainly
start hitting the surface not long after, what with the
ring being unstable.
Nice theory with perfect math,
except when that collision happens half the Moon is
passing through a gravitational distortion field and is
artificially bound together. So, you know, massive
commiserations to the mathematical models and the Roche
limit. Also, wow, Theia all over again.
“Ms. Runnymede, sir,” says
Fenchurch, in his typically dour manner. Preparations
for this meeting have gone on all morning, annoying the
assistant. There are two large freestanding metal
doorways set up near us, on the upper deck of Dalloway’s
mansion. A whole team of technicians lugged them into
position earlier. They’re part of Runnymede’s
demonstration and one of the reasons why the meeting is
here. She needed the space. Dalloway didn’t object; he
likes sunbathing and saw an opportunity to combine the
presentation with something less irksome.
Dalloway waves her closer. He’s
sitting on a lounger, his other arm dangling down to
where I’m sprawled out. He’s the richest human alive, so
he can lay there in swimming trunks during business
meetings. He’d fire anyone else for that.
“Don’t keep me waiting,” drawls
the loathsome magnate. No, God forbid. He’s so busy.
I’m only here because Dalloway
goes hiking in the local hills and found me sleeping in
my little cave. What a cute puppy, he thought,
and immediately adopted me. You might think that was an
act of selflessness, and out of character for him. No,
it’s simply his nature to treat everything he encounters
as his property. What he really meant when he saw me was
“I want that, and because I want it I own it.”
It's been exhausting pretending
he’s my master. Fortunately, he’s away most of the time.
The housekeeper is lovely; I get all kinds of treats and
left alone enough that I can relocate my physical
manifestation to and from my cave as often as I want
without anyone noticing.
“No preamble, then,” replies
Runnymede. “I’ve figured out how humanity can survive
the environmental holocaust.”
Ah yes, the ongoing holocaust.
She means it’s the end of the world, or at least the end
of the human race, which they think of as being the same
thing, even though that’s not strictly accurate. The
true end of the world, as we’ve established, occurs in
another billion years and even then a physical remnant
remains; it’s just a very different (and lifeless) world
after that.
Anyway, getting back to the
point, the human race is heading quickly toward
extinction. Global climate change accelerated throughout
the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, making the
twenty-third century a time/place not well suited to
human habitation. All the forests are gone, the seas are
almost scraped clean of organisms, the
everywhere-is-now-Death-Valley temperatures are out of
control, and the ice caps are a distant memory.
Starvation, disease, and war are rampant. The most
optimistic appraisals give the bulk of humanity a
decade. Those who prepare and hunker down behind sturdy
defensives could hold out a few years longer, if they
really tried. They’re going to need to.
My cave is nice and cool, I
reflect, on account of being a cave. I picked a home
well, it turned out. It may not have reached the size of
a cathedral yet, but it suits my needs perfectly.
Dalloway’s elevated patio would not be so pleasant, by
contrast, were it not for its location inside a huge and
extraordinarily expensive dome.
Dalloway’s rich enough to air
condition a fairly big chunk of the ‘outdoors.’ It won’t
last. He needs civilization, infrastructure, armies of
low-paid workers to maintain the illusion of normalcy.
All those things have expiration dates. The one aspect
of his private dome that will endure is the army of
self-maintaining, multi-legged robots that continually
repair the vast bubble’s skin. There’s one now, high
above us, industriously gluing wind-damaged sections of
membrane back together.
Dalloway hates talking to
scientists. He hates dealing with anyone smarter than
him and, honestly, science bores him. Runnymede was
perceptive; she started with a hook sharp enough to
convince him not to throw her out on her ear. He isn’t
exactly enthralled, not yet. But neither is he bored.
Surviving is an activity he can get behind. “You’ve
piqued my interest. You may continue.”
“First,” she says, “a visual
demonstration of what I’m about to tell you.” She clicks
over on high heels to the leftmost of the big metal
doors and grabs its handle. It’s a wide sundeck, so it
takes her a lot of clicking and clacking to reach it.
The door’s jamb is surrounded by cables humming with
power. The structure is as much machine as decorative
feature.
The second she pulls open the
door, something weird happens. The door of the rightmost
piece of equipment also opens, all by itself. Except
this one opens inward, and the door isn’t visible when
you peer around the side of its frame, although it
absolutely should be. Let’s face it, a door has to go
somewhere.
With that thought in mind,
Runnymede steps through. It’s a simple enough doorway,
even with all that hi-tech malarky wrapped around it,
and she should be right there on its far side. But she
isn’t. Instead, she immediately reappears through the
doorway on the opposite side of the patio, the one that
swung open by itself.
Oh, wait. Not by itself. That was
her. Because, yes, I get it, the two doors are somehow
the same door.
As if to underscore the point,
she nods at the rich guy and promptly steps back through
Door Right, reversing her disappearing/reappearing act
by emerging out of Door Left, a good thirty feet away.
“Yes,” sighs Dalloway, “I’ve seen
super-positioned matter before. Pairs of atoms entangled
so deeply that they remain melded as one, no matter how
far apart they are separated. I have a company using the
process to make long-distance travel between gated domes
easier. Cuts out all the unpleasant travelling through
areas populated by the lower classes. Please tell me you
have something more than this to show me.”
“I do.” Runnymede believes she
can save thousands of souls. To achieve that, she
requires Dalloway’s money. “Time travel,” she blurts
out. “The past, a paradise though it may be, is closed
to us -- Time’s arrow takes us further away from it with
each second and we know of no way to reverse its
tyranny. We can’t stay in the present day. The solution
is obvious. We move lock, stock, and barrel to the far future.
To an epoch when the Earth has healed and can support
our species again, with all its requirements for
industrial manufacturing. Half a billion years should do
it.”
Silent thus far through the
proceedings, the gloomy executive assistant stammers,
“Ha… half a b… b… billion years?”
Runnymede nods, all matter of
fact. “We’ll need new sources of oil. That requires a
minimum of fifty million years, perhaps as long as two
hundred fifty million, for new sources to form. Then
there’s natural gas. We’ve depleted that as well. If
we’re going to colonize the future, we’ll need
replenished reserves of gas as well as oil, especially
in the early phases of reestablishing an advanced
civilization.”
She keeps talking, not seeming to
notice her audience’s mounting disbelief. “Gas came from
marine creatures last time. Need I remind you we’ve all
but eradicated ocean life? So, first, we’ll have to
allow time for the seas to recover. If the Permian mass
extinction is anything to go by, that will only take
five or six million years. Then, once the ecosystem
recovers, we need to wait for countless generations of
all those new organisms to die natural deaths and for
their corpses to drop to the seabed. That’s the part
that’s going to take the longest. We estimate a waiting
period of more than five hundred million years for fresh
gas reserves to accumulate from the decomposition of
organic matter. That’s the half-billion, right there. We
can skip ahead, though.”
Dalloway stands, his hand leaving
my ear. “I assume Fenchurch’s outburst was due more to
the idea of travelling in time, rather than the
exact number of millennia involved. You have a means of
achieving this?” He glances at the two metal doors,
suspecting there’s a connection and unable to see what
it is.
“Simply put, speed is the most
practical way of time travel. Because, relativity.”
Dalloway shakes his head to
indicate her explanation isn’t helping, so Runnymede
continues. “The new Hadron Annihilator Drive makes it
possible to reach ninety-nine percent of the speed of
light. As you approach that velocity, time runs slower
for you than for, well, pretty much the rest of the
universe. For every year you experience at that speed, a
little more than two hundred years pass for those back
on Earth. A ship travelling at that velocity for two and
a half million years would return to its point of origin
to find half a billion years had elapsed. Which, if you
recall, is our magic number.”
“I do hope you’re not suggesting
I fly a space rocket for two million years.”
She laughs nervously. “No, not at
all. I’m just explaining time dilation. I’ll use that
phenomenon in association with your marvelous, connected
doors and self-replicating drones to achieve our goal.”
She gestures up at a distant robot scurrying across the
interior membrane of the dome. Oh yes, the robots. He
owns the company that designs them, too.
“That makes everything crystal
clear.” I catch Dalloway rolling his eyes. That seems
unfair. I think it’s obvious enough what she intends.
Although I do have the advantage of being able to glance
in the direction where her plan unfolds, so I can see
the practical application.
Runnymede lays it all out in
words and holographically projected graphics. She wants
to build one of those special doors, a really big one,
made of materials that will last practically forever.
Think of it as a single, shut-tight door sliced in half,
right down the sides, so you end up with two halves that
look identical: a front and a back. The side facing the
colonists will stay here in the twenty-third century.
The other side of the door, the back, will be sent off
on the rocket.
As for the rocket and its
precious cargo, it’s automated. Filled with the type of
robots Dalloway has on his dome; created originally to
construct the Mars outposts a century back. That
technology works. It was the cost of resupplying the
Martian bases that doomed the colony, not any failure in
the self-replicating machinery.
A rocket, she points out, can’t
keep going forever. Computers wear out. Parts corrode.
If a ship simply flew at near-lightspeed for eons, it
would be dead as a doornail when the moment finally came
to make a course correction or execute braking. No, the
ship will need to perform a series of countless smaller
journeys, looping away from Earth and back again, its
robot passengers constructing a fresh vessel each time
it returns. At the end of each vessel-building phase of
the mission, the drones will haul the half-a-door aboard
the new craft, and off it will go. That will add time to
the overall mission because of all the accelerating,
decelerating, and general mucking about with robots
making ships and processing all the raw materials
involved, not to mention the robots making new robots to
carry on the work. But that’s not an issue. They can
take five million years. Six. Seven in total. It hardly
matters.
All that’s important is that they
stick to the prearranged schedule. After an appropriate
amount of time dilation has occurred for the half-door
being shipped, it’ll be put in a useful location,
someplace satisfying the criteria for a successful
reboot of human civilization. Back in the twenty-third
century, the team protecting their half of the portal
waits, marking off the hours the robots take to complete
each non-relativistic stage of the operation. Enough
hours to add up to years, certainly. Years while the
robots are engaged in each bit of construction, years
the various iterations of ship take to warp up to
near-lightspeed. Years and years. Decades, perhaps. Not
centuries, though. Decades will be tough enough, what
with the collapse of everything. They can hold out just
long enough, she’s certain. Well, relatively certain.
“When we’ve allowed enough time
to elapse at our end,” says Runnymede, “we simply open
the door. The other side of it will be half a billion
years in the future, on Earth’s new surface.”
Dalloway rubs his chin. “So much
could go wrong.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “That’s why
you need to make a great many doors and fire off
multiple rockets. We only need one mission to succeed.
Imagine a gallery of doors in a fortified stronghold. At
the appointed hour, we open each in sequence until we
find one that’s functional and that reveals the desired
era.”
“What you propose will cost a
fortune. Several fortunes, in fact.”
“That’s why I came to you. You
have a habit of acquiring people’s fortunes. You also
have a vested interest in not going down with the
sinking ship that is our current world.”
He smiles at that. He’ll agree to
her plan, of course. I can see him shaking her hand in
one direction, Ulrika Runnymede is working in her new
lab next year in another. Out near the edge of his
private dome I see the expedition getting ready to step
through the opening doorway.
Runnymede adds a further
temptation to her pitch. “There’s nothing to say the
human race can only pull off this stunt once. We can
exhaust the resources of the rejuvenated Earth, start a
new launch program in that future epoch, move ahead
again. As many times as we like, until the Sun expands,
and the Earth loses its atmosphere.”
She’s not the only one who can
skip ahead. There’s no reason for me to sit through the
boring bits either. I turn through the dimensions and
saunter far enough to reach the one departure bay that
worked at the moment Dalloway and his team are setting
forth. Something like thirty-one years have passed for
them. The magnate looks fit and trim despite his age;
the result of money spent on what he loves most of all:
himself.
He looks at me in disbelief.
“Moe? How can you be here? You disappeared years ago.”
Runnymede is next to him, older
now and less well-preserved. She has clung to her hope
that he’ll let thousands of souls through into her new
Eden. She doesn’t understand. Dalloway will permit only
his chosen few to enter into paradise. Everyone else
will be left to die. Redemption is always possible, but
true evil seldom mends its ways. I feel so let down
every time that happens.
“It’s my dog. Look, it’s Moe. He
came back.”
“Of course I did,” I want to say.
I will stay at your side for as long as you need my
comfort.
Incredulity vies with
overwhelming happiness on a face unused to expressing
any emotion other than disdain. Dalloway’s momentary
glimpse into the miraculous nature of the universe is
interrupted by the physicist.
“We should go,” she says. “The
gate is open. Bring the dog if you like.” She thinks
he’s gone mad, not remembering me from our one brief
encounter.
The group consists of twenty
brave explorers, all dressed in environment suits.
Initial probes sent through an airlock fitted to the
enormous door reported the air was breathable. They’re
more worried about viruses. The departure bay is sealed,
protecting what’s left of the city outside its walls.
Dalloway’s told Ulrika Runnymede
this is the first stage of setting up the new world.
He’s left out the part about it being his personal
kingdom.
I can see a forest on the other
side of the gateway. The Middle Phanerozoic. Pretty
close to the century they were aiming for. A smidge over
halfway toward the nonhuman calendar’s beginning. That
makes it 503,917,427 CE or -498,186,023 EARL, unless I’m
wrong, and I seldom am. I trot across the threshold and
the humans follow.
They’re so happy, walking in this
virgin landscape. Trees, in stunning new colors and
textures, have reconquered the hills and valleys. The
climate is temperate. Birds, brought near extinction
long ago, glide between the giant trunks, showing teeth
within their beaks. The humans note everything they see.
They take samples, they film their colleagues
celebrating. Runnymede literally dances a jig. Not bad
for a woman grown into the autumn of her seasons through
waiting.
“It’s perfect!” she cries. “We
need to bring through building materials without delay.
Earthmoving equipment. Drilling rigs. We can process all
this timber in hours.”
One of the survey team calls out,
“There’s a clearing ahead. I think I see some animals.”
I sit in the tall ferns on the
forest floor and watch an iridescent beetle climb a
wildflower. The humans are eager to see what wonders
evolution has wrought with the fauna. This used to be
North America before the plates shifted. They’re
thinking of groundhogs or chipmunks, maybe a frisky
nutria.
Long ago, or roughly south a fair
distance, depending on how you look at it, megafauna
lived here. Paleolithic creatures of a size that would
shock these humans. Sloths and mammoths and
saber-toothed cats, oh my. Thing is, evolution sometimes
follows familiar paths, retreading old themes, repeating
adaptations that worked before and fit a need now.
The animals in the clearing
aren’t giant mammals. Mammals have bred their way into
something new -- but these creatures are giant.
And they have claws as long as swords.
Runnymede gets the farthest. She
almost makes it back to the door. The distant
descendants of tree-dwelling rodents, grown anew to
enormous size and changed by the march of the eons into
a fresh class of vertebrate, are the lords of this
domain. They echo the appearance of the Miocene epoch’s
buffalo-sized rats, the Josephoartigasia monesi,
and share that prehistoric monster’s bite force.
The humans brought guns, as you’d
expect. A couple of shots are even fired. The
mega-squirrels are too quick to hit, jumping with
stunning speed from ground to tree trunk to victim.
Sixteen seconds and it‘s all
over, bar the chewing.
I trot through the ferns to where
Dalloway lays bleeding and settle at his side.
The glint of life fading from his
eyes, he reaches out a trembling, age-wrinkled hand and
entwines his gloved fingers into my fur. “Good boy,” he
slurs. His last words are, “You found me.”
Even the worst deserve a shred of
reassurance at the bitter end.
I think of poor Runnymede and her
dream of saving her species. How hard she’d toiled and
for so long. It’s better for her to fall to a sudden
death here, amid such beauty, not knowing that the
terrified survivors of the choking, starving city had
risen in a paroxysm of violence and burned her facility
to the foundations. No more portal, at least on the far
side, in the past.
Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall.
The giant not-rats are going to thrive and alter to fit
the future conditions of this world. They’ll get
smaller, learn to use tools. It’s going to take a while,
and there’ll be a lot of false starts and blind alleys
along the way. One branch of their family tree will
figure out introspection and language and conscription,
though.
Yippee.
One of the creatures returns to
inspect its strange kill. “I’m a dog,” I tell it. “Yeah,
I’m an anachronism. Give me a sec.” I adjust my
manifestation, and then I look like one of its kin.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I
squeak. “I’m going to find my cave. I’ve been away from
it for quite a while. Goodness knows how much of that
limestone has been dissolved by water seepage. It was a
nice, comfortable size when I left it.”
###
Epoch:
High
Anthropocene
Calendar
Date:
1965 CE / -1,002,101,485 EARL
“Shoo!” shouts Jeremiah Waltham,
the manager, through the office window of the Clifftop
Hotel. He’s looking out at the building’s front porch.
“Filthy squirrels! Get out of it.”
I consider revealing those filthy
squirrels are the inheritors (and destroyers) of this
world. Not a good idea. Even if he believes me, the
hotel cat, he’d only be spurred to greater efforts
against them. Also, he’d worry he was going crazy. Cats
in this era haven’t been retrofitted with cognitive
enhancers yet.
The squirrels’ current crime
consists of sitting on the porch railing eating acorns
and defecating where they please. At night, they gaze at
the Moon and wish they could touch it. Careful what you
wish for, little friends.
Besides, you don’t want to go
there for a while. The humans will be sending up Apollo
rockets in a couple of years, cluttering up the
landscape with flags and abandoned rovers. It’ll all get
far too busy. Worse, follow-up missions will be replaced
by ludicrous conspiracy theories that astronauts never
went there in the first place.
The reception bell rings its
jarring tinkle.
I stretch and follow the manager
out to the counter. Jeremiah stiffens. The thoughts
flitting through his mind are no secret to me. The man
and woman standing at reception are what he terms
‘black.’
To me, they’re Irwin and Betty. I
have the advantage of being able to read their minds.
Jeremiah’s not uncomfortable because of their skin
color; his concerns are centered on other townsfolk and
whether the strangers will be safe.
“You have a vacancy?” asks Irwin.
Jeremiah pushes aside his fears
long enough to answer. “Sure. How long you staying?”
“Just the night. Got a long drive
ahead of us in the morning.”
Falling into the routines of
hotel management, Jeremiah goes through the various room
rates available and settles payment. A key is handed
over. Everything humans do is needlessly complex. I find
them exhausting. They need to be distracted before they
complicate things even more. He’s telling them about
breakfast when I leap up onto the desktop.
“Oh, you have a cat!” exclaims
Betty.
Jeremiah snorts. “More like the
cat has me.”
“How’s that?”
“He wandered in all by himself.
Set up home here, bold as brass. Treats the hotel as his
personal property.”
“That’s a cat for you,” agrees
Betty.
I’m here because the hotel was
built on the cliffs on top of my cave. They’re literally
clomping around on my roof. That’s humans for you.
I let her stroke me. It reduces
her blood pressure.
We’re having a terrific time of
things when the sheriff’s car pulls up in front of the
hotel. Jeremiah notices first and flinches. The
middle-aged married couple turn to see what caused him
to react that way. They’re not thrilled either.
Betty and Irwin are on their way
to visit family in New York. Irwin operates a shoe
repair business in Pennsylvania. Betty is an
administrator in an elementary school. They wouldn’t
hurt a fly.
I peek toward the next few
minutes. Clement Leary, the town sheriff, is going to
walk into reception and make every one of Jeremiah’s
fears come true. A core of hate and burning
righteousness festers in his soul, coupled with a
certainty that he’s accountable only to voters happy to
let him get away with murder, so long as his victims
aren’t white. He’s convinced cruelty is a virtue when
his rage is directed at people he's decided deserve it.
Jeremiah doesn’t understand what
Leary’s doing here. The police don’t patrol hotels,
especially one as far off the main roads as this. But he
knows Leary. He knows him from senior high. Leary was a
piece of work even as a teenager.
What Jeremiah doesn’t know is
that a concerned citizen saw the couple from
Pennsylvania driving up Main Street and was so affronted
by the mere fact of their existence that he phoned his
pal Clement. Who then checked four other places they
could have gone before figuring out they’d pulled in at
the Clifftop.
Deputy Hagman is with Leary. When
Leary says, “Coloreds got no place taking rooms from
decent folks,” Hagman’s going to make a feeble
protestation. “Oh, Sheriff,” he’ll say, “there ain’t no
need.” That’ll be the extent of his heroism. Leary will
slam Irwin’s head into the desk. Irwin’s going to lose
the use of his right eye, and the Sheriff will write it
up as an uppity out-of-towner, one of them,
getting what he had coming for back-chatting an officer
of the law.
Jeremiah’s going to blame
himself. Too slow, he’ll think, too old and
feeble to stand up for what’s right. Then all the
fight will leak out of him, and what’s left will take to
drinking a tiny bit too much, until he dies alone at
fifty-seven, never having had the energy to ask out his
newly divorced and available college sweetheart,
Lucilla. Which is a shame as she’s been thinking a lot
about Jeremiah.
I’m not here to solve every
problem. My purpose is not to guide the destiny of Man
(they haven’t changed the terminology to ‘humanity’ in
this decade, although I look forward to the gender
neutrality of that shift), nor do I act as prophet.
Here, though, in my humble habitation, in the patch of
meagre dirt where I have dwelled for so long, I have a
certain latitude.
And I do not allow suffering, not
in my own home.
(I do, really, I admit to myself.
I do not meet my own high standards. In a billion years,
in a time/place that has already happened/that will
always have happened, I watched/will watch as hundreds
were slaughtered/will be cut down in a sacred hall
dedicated to the myth of my bounteous intercession. I
found/will find no good outcomes there. Here, though,
there is hope.)
Leary’s about to haul his sweaty
bulk out of his car. He’s reaching for the door handle,
his treacle-fast intellect marinating in a sludge of
anticipation.
A bear is foraging for food in
the woods nearby. An adult male black bear. “Hi,
friend,” I whisper to it, not in words, you understand,
but in the gentle warmth of a mother’s caress. “Come sit
on this warm car hood and take a nap.”
The sheriff freezes with terror
when the bear does just that.
“Darndest thing,” breathes Irwin
from the doorway of the Clifftop.
Jeremiah laughs, and Betty joins
him in that outpouring of relief.
“I’ll carry your bags up.” It’s a
small hotel, the Clifftop. The title ‘manager’ written
on Jeremiah’s name badge barely begins to describe his
duties. “By time the sheriff works up the guts to scare
that handsome devil off, you’ll be outta sight.”
“He’ll make you tell what room
we’re in,” says Betty, knowing the way people sometimes
do what the cop has planned.
Jeremiah nods, accepting the
unspoken truth of what nearly happened. “He can ask.
Figure I’ll take my camera outside in a moment or two,
snap a few pictures. Suggest to Leary I send ’em to the
local paper. Might be the most popular article they
print all year. Unless he thinks he has someplace more
important to be. Wouldn’t want the sheriff to be a
figure of ridicule.”
The couple fall silent, not
speaking to the shared knowledge that Jeremiah may be
making an enemy this day.
Instead, Irwin comments, “Strange
things happen often in these parts?”
Jeremiah puts down their case
outside the door to their room. “Wouldn’t say often.
Wouldn’t say never. The owner built the Clifftop here
for a reason. It’s a place of some minor repute
hereabouts. A site of comfort, protected, so they say,
by an eternal guardian of succor.”
“Guardian?” asks Betty. “Well
now. Fella’s still here, I’d say.”
That earns a laugh from the
good-natured manager. “We have the cat. That’s the only
inexplicable beast I’ve ever spotted in these parts.
Now, don’t you worry. I have a feeling our sheriff’s
going to have his hands too full to bother you for the
foreseeable. You have a wonderful stay here.”
###
Epoch:
Middle
Anthropocene
Calendar
Date:
1687 CE / -1,002,101,763 EARL
“You must be sick of my voice,” I
say. “I’ve been talking forever. Forgive me, every now
and then I have to let it all out.”
The pine squirrel (my audience)
has things of his own he wants to get off his chest.
Complaints, mostly. Grouching to other rodents of the
genera Tamiasciurus comprises about ninety percent of
his proto-culture, so I’m not at all surprised.
Especially as he’s convinced I’m a fellow North American
pine squirrel.
The tall, pink creatures,
he chitters, wear fur that is not their own, and how
messed up is that? His complaints continue: They
tear down the trees, they take away the hiding places.
Worst of all, they have no respect for territorial
boundaries. It’s as if they don’t care which squirrel
owns which patch of forest.
I resist the urge to point out
squirrels can’t keep that straight either. Instead, in
sounds and gestures that transcend language, I invite my
guest to rest and eat the seeds that happen to be piled
behind his bushy tail. The squirrel chirps in surprise
at the food.
You’re safe here, I tell him.
Safe beneath this overhang of rock with its deep
recesses. Safe inside this hidden sanctuary, out of the
wind, far from the prying eyes of invading Europeans.
The squirrel asks what a European
is, not associating the mind-sound with the lumbering
animals it had seen earlier.
“Never mind,” I reply. “It
doesn’t matter. They can’t disturb you here and, anyway,
with the exception of a very small expeditionary team
that enjoys a few seconds of joy in a distant age, their
species is only going to last until the beginning of
what they call the twenty-fourth century. Not like your
lot. You’re the dominant lifeform of the next billion
years. The humans will never realize.”
The squirrel thanks me and keeps
eating. Food is everything.
“Don’t stay too long,” I warn.
“The humans are going to find the cliffs tomorrow. Then
they’ll take a liking to this area and use all the wood
they chopped down to start building a settlement. One
day, there will be malls as far as you can see. No,
don’t ask what a mall is. It’s not important.”
###
Period:
Late
Jurassic
Calendar
Date:
152,067,954 BCE / -1,154,171,404 EARL
I honk a sauropodian ‘Rest Here’
hoot; a call you wouldn’t expect to emanate from the
form of a tiny Nanosaurus. I always try to speak the
lingo of any passing visitor.
Suspicious, but having little
choice, the tired sauropod stumbles inside the welcoming
hollow, too exhausted to continue its headlong dash. As
a follow up, I plant the concept of “the hungry one
won’t smell you here” in the animal’s unsophisticated
consciousness.
The haven is a fresh-scented
indentation at the base of gray cliffs, deep enough to
offer protection from searching eyes. Life-sustaining
water trickles nearby.
The herbivore, a placid
Kaatedocus, munches on leaves that edge the depression’s
entrance.
In the distance, we hear the
rustling of something large moving through the
vegetation. The Allosaurus, presumably. Frustrated at
losing its prey.
Well, life’s hard. The hunter
will have to find other prey, at least for today.
“Stay as long as you need,” I
tell the herbivore, in language too complex for it to
follow. “You’re better company than arthropods, let
alone bacteria.”
The sauropod chews in silence,
too confused to honk in reply.
###
Period:
Middle
Devonian
Calendar
Date:
385,688,023 BCE / -1,387,791,473 EARL
Prototaxites,
twenty-four-foot-tall giant mushrooms, tower over the
landscape. Trees are making a bid for dominance, but
they haven’t yet worked up the courage to grow more than
a few feet in height. One day they’ll soak up so much
carbon dioxide the world will cool just enough to kill
off the Placoderms. The Earth is going to have to make
do without those armored fish.
Lot of changes coming, that’s for
sure. And not a few mass extinctions along the way.
In this neck of the proverbial
(fungal) woods, I’ve only got invertebrates for company.
No backbones here, no sir, and that’s not due to any
cowardice, just that they haven’t made their way onto
land yet. Spines are the province of the seas.
Mist roils between the huge
pillars of fungus, obscuring the shallow rivers and
tributaries that crisscross the landscape. Hidden in the
obscuring whiteness, centipedes process elegantly over
moist ground, while trilobites glide soundlessly through
the waterways.
It’s another warm, wet day near
the equator in the mid-Devonian. In three hundred
eighty-five million years, once the plates have shifted
enough, all this will be North America.
One of the centipedes is
struggling to find food. Trying on its shape, I point
out an early insect.
That was easy. The centipede is
briefly satisfied. I do feel bad for the prey.
I’ll need to think through the
ethical considerations of feeding organisms to other
organisms. I have a suspicion things will only get more
complex.
The arthropod scuttles off.
“You guys have an amazing world.
It’s a pity you’ll never evolve the ability to
appreciate it.”
If the centipede could answer it
would say self-awareness isn’t a prerequisite for a
fulfilling life, not when there are delicious bugs to
eat. It’s a point I’ll have to chew over. I’m struggling
to think of a reason why it’d be wrong.
Great, I’m talking to myself. I’d
wish for life to hurry up and evolve into something more
diverting, except I know precisely how long it’s going
to take.
I remember how excited I used to
get about increasing organic complexity. I think it was
back when there wasn’t much difference between the two
dating systems I’ll get attached to. I mean, come on,
when a year has that many commas in it, what’s a
difference of a single digit at the start?
###
Eon:
Early
Archean
Calendar
Date:
3,450,709,157 BCE / -4,452,812,607 EARL
Cone-shaped stromatolites, each
one the size of a quarter, stretch as far as the eye can
see. The mounds are solid accumulations of bacteria.
The colonies of cyanobacteria
don’t understand the size comparison, lacking both
coinage and eyes. Visual receptors are a long way in the
future, quarters even more so.
The fierce meteor bombardment of
the Hadean eon has just ceased. It only seems like
yesterday the Earth possessed an oxygen-free atmosphere
and prokaryotes were my sole charges. Watching them feed
on phosphorus near hydrothermal vents was not a
rewarding pastime.
Things are about to get a lot
more exciting, and I can’t wait. New forms of life! I am
not embarrassed to say I’m looking forward to that, if
only so I’ll have cause to finally change my shape
again, to take on the form of something a bit more
challenging than a mound of microbes.
One conical formation, not too
far away, seems to be suffering. Not enough moisture.
Life’s a struggle, there’s no denying that.
I can see a dent in the rock
nearby, where water collects. Given enough erosion and a
certain amount of judicious protection from the
slumberous rise and fall of continents, a divot like
that could grow into something remarkable.
Move there,
I think at the cyanobacteria. One by one, that’s it.
Reestablish your colony where it’s safe and sheltered
and conditions are far more welcoming.
I wonder briefly where it’ll all
end. Checking’s easy. Time is a direction to me, and I
have very good eyesight.
Epochs to go before it all stops.
Plenty of lifeforms I can help along the way. Kindness
is its own reward.
That’s it,
I think to the microbes. Keep it up. You’ll get
there.
###
Eon:
Early
Hadean
Calendar
Date:
4,502,764,102 BCE / -5,504,867,552 EARL
“A planet?” asks the one who will
be the Guardian, in a voice that is not a voice.
“A consolidation of matter.
Filled with life. Once it cools.”
“Life?”
The other presence points to
where the future unfurls.
“Oh, I see. Organic complexity
amid corporeal mundanities.”
“They will struggle. There will
be much pain, much suffering.”
“I see no way to avoid that. We
cannot solve their problems for them.”
“If only…”
“If only what?”
“If only there were some way
their pain could be lessened.”
The one who is becoming the
Guardian feels his future coalescing in the face of the
decision being made.
“You’re going to say they need a
place to find comfort. They need someone who will listen
to them, care for them, if only for a short time.”
“I am.”
“I will reply that such
compassion makes no difference. Prey that hides from a
hunter for a day is still eaten, after it emerges from
hiding.”
“You will.”
“And you will observe that
kindness is never a mistake, never wasted.”
“I will.”
“And I will fail to find a flaw
in that argument.” The Guardian angles his consciousness
toward the molten, cratered planet. Another, smaller
world seems to have recently collided with it, some of
the ejecta from the impact forming a moon. “I think it’s
safe to say we both have the eyesight to see how this
plays out.”
“You will be there a very long
time,” states the other presence. “As these concepts are
quantified.”
“Yes, although time is simply a
direction for us, I fear I must travel some distance
along its particular course. Well, if I am to sit out
the ages, I should find some pleasant, secluded corner
to inhabit, to make that journey as agreeable as
possible.”
“I will miss you.”
The Guardian answers as he falls
into somethingness, “Then visit me from time to time. I
will offer you succor, so that your pain is eased. If
only for a while. And you will know that you are loved.
After all, isn’t that the point?”
The other presence refrains from
replying. As they are both all-too-aware, the question,
like kindness, craves no answer, for Kindness is -- no
matter how many eons may pass -- eternally complete unto
itself, and Love never seeks a reason.
The End
___________________________________________
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