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Story 3

Mike Morgan

I won't deny it. When I read "In the Shadows of the Stromatolites, Kindness Abides", my mind was blown. The sheer effortlessness of the scope took my breath away. Read and enjoy.

Mike Morgan was born in London, but not in any of the interesting parts. He moved to Japan at the age of 30 and lived there for many years. Nowadays, he's based in Iowa and enjoys family life with his wife and two young children. If you like his writing or art, be sure to check out his website: Perpetual State of Mild Panic. Check out his art on the Guest Art page.

-- Mike Morgan

 

   

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



___________________________________________

[1] The dates in this account use two calendars, each one representing a system common to the two dominant intelligent species that arose on the third planet orbiting the star, “Sol.” In the spirit of “elders before betters,” the human-centric CE (or “Common Era”) is given first, followed by EARL (or “Era of the Absolute Revolutionary Leader”), the dating system used by the culture initially shown here.

It is fair to note that the name of the star, and indeed the planets around it, are as much a matter of debate as what to call any given year, the answers varying greatly depending not only on the species you ask, but also the local geographic point and the era from which they originate, their languages and customs altering quite considerably from place to place and time to time. This is all far too complicated for me to go into in any detail here, and so, for the sake of convenience, the languages and dates you see in the above account will adjust automatically to suit your own particular species and personal epoch. I assure you that were you a Sciuridaen native of the Late Phanerozoic, for example, but from an adjoining continent, the dates throughout would be rendered not only in your very different regional dialect but also in the calendar applicable to your own supra-familial dray.

Since humans weren’t around as long, I honestly took less of an interest, so I’ve stuck pretty much to English and a single dating system for them -- the one I opted for being the frankly eccentric calendar in usage for a brief while in the area where my cave came to be located during the Anthropocene. If you’re a human and that’s not convenient… sorry, I guess? But it shouldn’t bother you for very long, all things considered, what with the whole being-about-to-die-out thing. Sorry. That was rude, wasn’t it? I mean, I’m sorry you went extinct. I appreciate that sucked, for you. On the plus side, I can wander over and visit you whenever I like, so that’s something. So, you know, it could be worse. I mean, I’m not sure how it actually could be worse, but that’s a thing you lot used to say, right? I don’t seem to be helping with this digression. I should probably stop.


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