Communication is how we diverge.
Communion is how we merge.
Light falling through forest makes shadow-play in the shallow brook below. Photons fall; falling from ferns; bouncing about the never-still water ripples. They are abundant. Billions of photons convert to heat, many are incarcerated by starchy photosensitive cells inside green leaves, a million more excite electrons to change state – yet trillions still remain – they cascade about the glen, dapple among the trees, giggle against the wavelets and back eddies that swirl about the shallow stream.
The never constant, always changing intersection of light and shade, alternately hides and reveals the objects of my desire. Nubile mates cavorting in the twilight, darting to and fro. Daring and risky. Desperate and aloof. We play it cool, but the evening beckons and by sundown – it will all be too late.
There's maybe an hour of life left. Sixty minutes to dance, attract, agree, consummate, impregnate and give it all up to glorious oblivion. Curtain call is close. The end-game. We muster, my mates and me. We hover and flit and flirt, daring each other to be ever braver, bolder, more robust. Young bucks feel sure we'll live forever, even as daylight fades and the leaden weight of slumber fills the filigree of our wings.
I see her, just in the instant she sees me. We share a moment. A twinkling that never ends, a certainty that's self-assured, a truth – both universal and constant. She moves her dance to one side, and I follow. She exposes herself gracefully, artfully, playfully – and I imitate. Although I’m cumbersome, it is enough. Our contract seals. A pact is implicit between us. We commit. She slows, then hovers, then lands. I slow and I hover.
I hover above the brook, wings iridescent in the setting sun, all eyes on her. Lust has commandeered me. I am given over to it. There's nothing left in life for me, but to lay with this creature, donate my soul and perpetuate the cycle of existence.
The sudden shadow is incomprehensible when it first eclipses her.
A glimpse of dread, passing her features, contorting her face, making of our love a mask of abject fear. Without warning – absolute darkness is enclosing me. Maybe there’s a glimpse of teeth, a flash of silver, the jar of a big splash. I've been taken, snatched from the moment, sundered from all that I ever knew.
For a terrible instant I imagine what SHE saw: The powerful fish, arcing skywards. Jaws of death agape. Dead fish eyes already rolled back for protection. I had thrown caution to the wind. My gander was up – my sense of self-preservation was correspondingly down. Focused solely on desire, I miscalculated. I hovered too close to the surface for too long. I was easy prey. Foolhardy food.
It's dark and I'm pinned, powerless between the fish's mighty jaws. No light is attracted beyond the pale metallic pink-green sheen of its lips. On this side of their iridescence, there's naught but blackness in morbid hues of despair. I feel and hear and smell and taste every nuance of the definitive crunch that ends me. I die screaming in fear. I die desperate in panic.
* * *
Then without warning, I feel so very much alive. I'm strong and lithe and flitting through streams of swirling currents. Every nuance of direction is interpreted expertly by fine adjustments to my fin, or a switch of my tail, or a curve of my long sinuous body. The water tastes cold but clear in my mouth, it smells healthy to my gills, it's alive with glistening pebble and reflected tree in my eyes. I am become the fish that ate me.
There's an urgency to being this fish. No less urgent than the innate imperative that motivated recklessness when I was insect. Every turn of the stream, every nuanced gush of water, each lingering tang of earth and tannin and stale foam – calls me home. Everything is increasingly familiar. My direction of travel excites a slow yearning that's fit to flame soon. Eager to erupt. Close to climax.
I'm near my spawning grounds. Very near to where it all began. A journey of a million miles is ending. Like the serpent swallowing its own tail. Like the last word, echoing the first. I’m returned to my very beginning.
We shoal. Countless desperate fish, from every part of the ocean corralled by narrow streams into vast schools, that take minutes to pass. Hours to pass. Days to circumvent dams, navigate weirs and scale falls. We move as one, we divide, we coalesce, we make way as many. There are numerous techniques to be, to travel, to threaten, to sacrifice – and those still alive have learnt to master every one. Learnt to adapt.
I'm dexterous. I flit within and without the group as circumstance dictates. We are loosely bonded, fiercely independent, fundamentally social but essentially alone. Traversing most of the planet, I've survived monsters from the deep and lures that hook and hoick the unlucky from life. I'm combat hardened, a veteran, a survivor, a warrior.
Ironically these are my thoughts as sharp talons pierce my back and curl beneath my spine. I gasp in agony, but already the brook falls beneath me, and I am aloft, streaming watery life blood and flapping useless gills against alien air.
I'm blinded by the light, sharp and unfiltered. Deafened by the wind, cold and dehydrating. Impaled by talons that flex remorselessly with each flap of the eagle’s gigantic wings. We gain height, trees swirl and thin between clouds of mist. I lose sight of water. I lose coherence. My grip on life is loosened. It seeps from the punctures in my back. It advances from the lack of oxygen in my gills. Imminent death dulls my sight, impairs my hearing, softens my sharp pain.
When I'm dropped, I fancy for a moment I'll land in water, swim away, heal and recover. But I land harshly and all too soon. I land awkwardly in a nest of juvenile fledglings with sufficient consciousness to witness them render flesh from my bones. They rip fin from skin, tail from torso, gizzard from guts. At the apex of my anguish, the parent eagle opens its giant maw and bites off my head.
It's dark and I'm pinned, powerless between the bird's mighty jaws. No light is attracted beyond the hard tan-grey pincer of its beak. On this side of their sharpness, there's naught but blackness in morbid hues of despair. I feel and hear and smell and taste every nuance of the definitive crunch that ends me. I die screaming in fear. I die desperate in panic.
* * *
Without warning, once again I feel so very much alive. I'm strong and fearless and soaring through strong up draughts of swirling air. Every zephyr of direction is interpreted expertly by tiny adjustments to my wings, or twitch of my tail, or angle of my powerful muscular body. The wind tastes warm in my mouth, it smells healthy in my nostrils, it's alive with rotating forest and hidden valleys that reflect in my eyes. I am become the bird that ate me.
There's motive to being bird. No less urgent than the innate imperative that motivated the globe’s circumnavigation when I was fish. Every gust of wind, any new scent on the air, each nuance of leaf that moves wrong or rustle that sounds off – reminds me to stay close to home. Many predators prize eagle young. Clever tree-climbing mammals, lesser birds, sly sinuous snakes all remind me to stay close, remain alert, defend the next generation at all costs.
I ride the thermals in a deceptively lazy, expanding circle. The air is warm and rising well today. The sun's only beginning to burn off the valley mists, yet already my belly's full. There's no time to rest though, the offspring never stay satiated for long. They'll be demanding more sustenance soon, and more after that, and more after that.
Without warning - I let out a screech that surprises even myself. It's long, loud and shrill with anger. It screams of pain. The pain's sharp and sudden. Something hit my belly, hard and fast, piercing the soft unprotected flesh. I spot a glimpse of naked tribesmen, hidden in a tree, all loincloth and feathers. He’s retracting a blow gun from his mouth as I fall.
Numbing pain radiates rapidly from the dart in my belly. Poison. I fight to keep my wings extended, to glide, to maintain control – but with each beat of my heart, the numbness spreads, the dread spreads, the ache of atrophied muscle spreads. Then, at some critical point of aerodynamics failure, I drop like a stone. Clouds and valley somersault around me and the roar of the wind is deafening – soon my vision and hearing begin to fail. I'll be dead before hitting the ground. A realization that makes me incandescent with rage.
Not just angry and frustrated on behalf of my defenseless fledglings, I'm livid that this 'man' has broken the sacred cycle. He isn't eating me alive, absorbing all that I know, sharing and amalgamating and extending my life. He's murdering me with dumb tools. The poisonous dart is incapable of housing my spirit. This is real and avoidable and irrevocable death.
The world goes black. Silence descends. The sense that I'm falling ceases. All sensory input stutters, then halts. Finally, any recognition of breath and heartbeat and circulation cease. I've never felt so abandoned.
I'm as fragile as a soap bubble in the wind. Afraid to even 'Think' in case such action somehow pops the meniscus of my existence and evaporates myself into the entropic universe. Thinking is unthinkable. Language retreats to gibberish. Identity dissolves.
* * *
I stay this way for a time, in a space where time has no meaning. I don't move, I don't think, I don't speak – but I don’t decay. This stasis lasts a lifetime, or maybe just an instant. Eventually and with subtle reticence, my alien storyteller makes its presence known. My internal companion. I can't tell if it was always there or just arrived but, now – it's waiting. As though it'll wait patiently forever. It waits politely while my thoughts slowly and tentatively percolate.
It remains black here, like I've gone blind and deaf. I miss sunlight the most. The sound of it. All blue sky and shimmering water and uncurling fern. It's the music of life. A defiant beat that rallies the organics in their fight against heat-death. There's a lesson here. Something about humanity 's unnatural reliance on tools. Perhaps there's a threat here too. An emphasis that I'm powerless and totally dependent. Without cooperation, I'll be returned to the dark and mothballed for eternity amidst the ruins of my rusty language, the debris of my dying identities.
I make a decision, a sacred vow. Others might see it as a cowardly act of treachery: I acquiesce. I submit. I surrender without condition. I make it understood that in return for quality of life outside the non-spacetime of despair – everything I am is available for consummation.
In my defense, this capitulation is not made lightly or in ignorance. I'm keenly aware that this exchange is one-sided. The alien pedals illusory experience, and in return – I sell out life. I trade civilization and all that it stands upon. Everything ever achieved by organic life on Earth, every scintilla of knowledge from the single celled microbes beneath the waves to the far-flung spacecraft hurling across the milky way. This is the price of my future.
History might judge me harshly. History might praise my diplomacy. Only time will tell.
Almost immediately I feel my companion worm deeper into my psyche. Extracting the mental equivalent of micro-biopsies from all the experience encoded in my mind. I am laid bare, undone, plundered and catalogued. As a species – in that instant – we are conquered; utterly and irrevocably vanquished.
* * *
That shame is short-lived. The feeling of exposure soon turns to feelings of empowerment. The alien process of discovery is reciprocal. Obviously, there's a massive experience differential, so I've no doubt my companion learned far more about us than I learn about them. But none the less, I saw things, I understood things, I was exposed to things beyond my most feverish dreams.
It's the same universe, just a different interpretation. The same matter, perceived so differently as to be unrecognizable. The same mind, but now with a new language. Upgraded thoughts. A superior identity. Communication is how we diverge. Communion is how we merge. I realize with the broadest of smiles that I am no longer merely human. I am evolved. Enriched. Rejuvenated.
With awe and wonder, it slowly dawns on me: The mysterious, otherworldly process that transmogrifies an insect to a fish, a fish to a bird – is also at work here. I have been partially eaten. Perhaps I have been both a diner and the dish. Maybe we are each something 'Other' now. New beings, never before seen in this universe, or any other.
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