Sample 8A.4

Prime was uncertain when remembering first began, he did not know when he first began to know, and could not think when he first became aware that he was aware.  He often tried to look back to find his first memories but only found that time could become confused, details become hazy, and his understanding become nothing at all.

                He was certain that there was a time when he did not realize the power he had over his own form.  A time when he did not know that he was thinking himself bigger or deeper or fatter or longer, thinking a branch here or a globe there or anything at all anywhere he pleased.  There must have been a time when he was little more than a fungus groping blindly for the substance from which to make his flesh and the vital heat with which to fashion it.  He could not have always known how to read the land and feel the earth to find as directly and efficiently as possible those delicious pools in which floated his sustenance.  He was sure that what he knew he must have learned, because he was still learning, but he did not know when he had learned these things.

                What he remembered of his mind’s youth was pride.  Pride in his strength and in his supremacy over all those dumb automaton creatures around him.  Oh how he had reveled in his own vain magnificence!  He thought himself to such height and breadth that he was first everyday to feel the life giving scorching of his planet’s powerful sun.  And just out of spite he thought himself opaque and kept his neighbors out of the light.  He grew his pipettes directly to the waters of life drinking pool after pool leaving nothing for those who might have come after.  He considered it all to be his right, because in his mind he had thought himself into a god.

                Then he broke.  Prime did not know if that was the first time he had broken, although he thought it unlikely in the extreme.  But at the very least this was the first time that he remembered.  He remembered vividly how the land shook beneath him snapping his pipettes and almost shivering his shafts.  Then rocks came rolling down, smashing into him and shattering his entire body.  It hurt a lot.

                Perhaps some shards of himself were carried off by the landslide but most of what remained of his body was simply buried underneath the debris.  He was there waiting in the darkness.  He was near enough the surface to feel some of the heat from the sun, but so greedily had he drunk from the moisture around him that he could find nothing with which to grow and rebuild himself.  It was the first time he felt what would become a familiar horror: the horror that he would end.

                He could sense more living shards of his former self around him.  In time he felt shard after shard end living all around him, starting with the smallest ones.  He could feel other creatures working on the corpses returning the stuff of their bodies to the ground.  He imagined they awaited his own end hungry for his own flesh, but shame, how he hoped waters would come soon and wash him in the sustenance from that decay.  And water did come; rain pouring hard beating upon the ground, roaring and ferocious calling him, and those shards that still lived around him, back to life.

                This was the first he learned of cooperation.  Clumsily at first he grew in sympathy with his brothers: winding his shafts around theirs, and allowing them to do the same, made it possible to reach greater heights without proportionate girth.  With each shattering their cooperation became more sophisticated, it was not too long before one or two brothers would devote themselves to bringing the waters of life to all the others, while some might grow to reflect and contain the sun’s heat around the entire concatenation as others still anchored the structure down lending stability to an otherwise overly elaborate construction.

                It was not possible for Prime to inform his brothers what task he thought each of them ought to take on, and impossible for them to inform him of their own thoughts.  It happened often enough that some would insist on growing into structures that the group already had quite enough of, even neglecting more vitally needed ones.  But when the group worked in perfect concert it could bring back the days of his god-like youth.  It was possible to grow just for the sake of growth.  It was a glorious luxury, growing functionless curves, keeping parts opaque or clear as the air, arching over to a brother and brushing him in a years-long caress.  Prime had been in formations of such frivolous beauty, of such graceless decadence, of such elegant celebration of form, of such stark practicality, of such stupid inefficiency over the eons of his remembrance and he cherished the memory of each and every one of them.  His morphology was a monument, his body was an art form existing often in the context of a community of artists, and he loved every bit of light-hearted vanity and aesthetic ecstasy that inspired it.  But he never again allowed himself to drink so deeply that he parched the ground around him, when he shattered and if his shards did not fall too far, he could be reasonably assured that he would not end—he would add himself again to the group as best as he could, and in this manner a single concatenation could grow to sprawl over miles.  Some even devoted themselves to bringing the waters of life to shards newly broken, having already grown pipettes for this very purpose. The fear of ending might be abolished by such a city, unless the shattering came with such a disaster as could destroy the entire community.  When this happened death by competition was guaranteed and only the strongest survived.  Prime remembered each of these cataclysms painfully. 

                The most terrifying sort of disaster still broke his understanding.  The earth, the same earth that housed the waters of life, that anchored his body, the same earth that he would contemplate so deeply, held somewhere deep with in it a different kind of water.  This same earth held with in itself perverse waters with warmth like the sun’s—but a different warmth, a warmth that caused one to end.  When the earth burst and these perverse waters flowed out whole cities could end.  If even a little part of one’s body made contact with these waters one would shiver and crack and that part could never grow again.  If a shard fell into that water it ended.  Where that water flowed it froze into solid rock, almost completely bereft of usable sustenance and far too hard for any shard to pierce.  Such rivers, short lived though they were, cut swathes through cities if the city was not destroyed or made the entire area unusable for a time if it was.  The feeling of so much simply ending, in such terror and pain, brought on a mystic horror from which Prime’s mind could only shrink away.  Perhaps some of his brothers were more courageous in their contemplations and had more fully understood and cherished these strange waters and their agonizing warmth.

                But thinking about such destruction only made Prime prefer those times when he tumbled away from the group and grew in seclusion when he could not ever feel so much disappear.  Sometimes he would be fortunate enough to land on such rich ground that a cooperative was completely unnecessary, and other times he would find himself on such barren earth that it was only by the strictest austerity that he managed to grow at all—such times made him stronger.  But by far he preferred richness.  In times of richness he could grow deeper and wider, he could plumb the depths of the earth, feeling—cherishing—every change in the soil, every rock, stone and pebble.  In times of richness he could dig deep enough to make dalliances with metals, staining his form with blushes of iron, cobalt, copper, gold, or anything at all that he could find as his pipettes groped the earth.  He savored the changes it made in the flavor of the light that reflected around his body, he loved the feeling the metals sometimes made, a feeling that he could sense over short distances; they felt strangely and ironically like the proximity of a fellow creature, but also different; it was wonderfully odd.  Of course it was possible to take metals while in a community as well, but in a very large concatenation there was never enough to go around, it could not possibly satisfy. 

* * *

                It excited him the day a strange being fell from the sky.  It was an admirable creature indeed, because as it fell it was enveloped in a heat that rivaled even the angry waters of his planet’s center and lived.  It slowed somehow before landing exhilaratingly close to Prime.  He felt it, still painfully hot from the fall, with a body made of similar stuff to his own, with more metals, and much that Prime had never felt before.  While it cooled it was perfectly still, not attempting to grow at all.  But shortly a piece of the creature grew apart from the body with astonishing even impossible speed, swinging up to an oblique angle from the plain on which it originally rested and revealing that the creature was for the most part hollow.

                Inside this wonderful creature were two things which Prime could make no sense of.  It seemed at first that they were growing out of the creature, standing on two short shafts, which they were also growing to MOVE themselves away from the larger creature.  But it soon became clear that they were not growing because they were not absorbing matter, nor did it feel as though they were becoming bigger.  They were…rolling, tumbling from one shaft unto the other then back again to the first as rocks sometimes tumble down hills.  But what soft, pliant rocks were these that were rolling UP a hill towards Prime?  Perhaps they were part of that other creature that fell from the sky—Prime could sense that they were in contact somehow, linked by what seemed like light, although a flavor of light that was only tantalizingly familiar to him, another mystery of this creature that was like himself and like his experience but most certainly not the same.

                Perhaps those two mobile things were not things at all…impossible as it seemed, the only way a rock could roll UPWARDS was by intending it, and only a living creature could intend anything.  They even felt a bit like creatures, or perhaps they merely had metals in them… But if they were creatures, they most certainly were not intelligent like Prime—why the things looked exactly alike!  They were no better than the automaton creatures which Prime and his brothers sometimes cultivated as decoration or for company.  But if indeed they were creatures…they came from that larger one and remained in mysterious contact with it…were they somehow being controlled by it?  Prime had always wished that he could make his brothers know what he knew, see what he thought—had that creature from the sky found a way to do this with light?  He could not grow at the speed of this thing, nor could he make light—but he could reflect it and refract it in time!  What a fascinating idea!  Oh but he was alone among his kind here—he was growing at this moment in self indulgent seclusion.  If only there were others here with him he might have tried to share his mind, and perhaps they also might have had the same thoughts!  Never before had Prime’s mind worked with such fervid speed and urgency.  Normally he could play with an idea over several lifetimes, never had a thought of such monumental importance come to him so completely in so little time.  How could he show such thoughts as these, flashing like lightning, when he grew so slowly?

                But Prime did not have the time to finish this thought; he was being broken.  Prime had to stretch his memory almost to breaking in order to remember when last a creature existed that could threaten him.  He and his brothers had long since edged out all the other creatures that competed with them; a few more manageable things were cultivated, mostly for aesthetic reasons.  But here were these things, stupid, unthinking things that couldn’t even grow as they liked, in arcane probably slavish connection to that intruder from—from the sky!—breaking him!  Suddenly he was just a shard—a shard that used to be an integral part of a larger design—fitting in the concavity at the end of one of the automatons limbs.  He was held up to the light, as if he were being afforded one last chance to know and cherish it, before being placed in a box filled with some stiff thing that conformed to his shape then never yielded another bit.  It was all shadow and silence.  He could not even feel motion.  There was nothing here for him to eat and no heat to digest it; he must surely end inside this place.  He had never known such certainty, had he been less terrified he would have taken the time to cherish it.  This was also the first time that he had ever truly known loneliness.

                It was impossible to tell time here, but eventually he was taken out from the box and he found himself lost.  There was light again, white but cold.  The automatons had shrunk and were reflecting a different flavor of light.  He was inside some clear container attached to the wall of the place, it was hard and appeared similar to himself, but it was indigestible if it were.  There were blinking lights of different flavors everywhere.  But Prime was not taking these things in with the attention he normally afforded his surroundings.  He was distracted by yet another new and totally incomprehensible phenomenon: Prime was not resting on the bottom of the container, he was not attached to any part of it, he had the sensation of falling but was really just spinning slowly in the air…  And then came understanding: he was inside the hollow of the creature and the creature had gone back through the sky, far enough to never have to fall again.  Perhaps this is where it lived; it looked very much like this is where Prime would end.  At the very least, he was no longer in that box.

                Prime had the memory of his first self—the self that could think about its own selfhood—, when that broke and shards of that self scattered, he could remember being one of those shards, he could remember growing again with his brothers, and breaking again, and growing again—usually with more brothers.  Prime remembered everyway he had ever grown, and although he had traveled over the ages far from where his first self had broken, Prime also remembered every place he had ever grown.  He remembered every hill, plain, valley, river, and brook.  Prime remembered every brother he had ever grown with, and every shard he had felt end.  Some of these things he remembered only vaguely, others with exacting detail.  He had made knowledge his purpose.  He and his brothers had contemplated every measure of land on their world and cherished it in memory.  He knew that if not for himself and his brothers there would only be rock and water and senseless creatures without anyone to remember them when they were gone and hold them in thought while they were there.  But none of his brothers had ever known or sensed what he now knew and was sensing, floating in this place and when he was gone no one would cherish his experiences.  It was…sad. 

Prime knew he must end soon, it was too cold and too barren here.  He would spend his last moments contemplating not this new horizon, but the value of himself and all the things that led up to this moment.  He wished dearly that he could share these contemplations, to save them from oblivion, but there was not one person in the rocket that could ever know his thoughts.