Sniffing The Terrain
Having been away, they were back in the most silent, quietest sense; sniffing engagement, rolling through the wind filled trees. There was an essence beyond all of us; saturated here in this terrible light. Something came for you, whispers in the wind, engagement. They would come and they would go exactly as they saw fit. They could prepare the ground, but in the end, what was in it for him? Nothing, really. Engagement with the heavens. Understanding of the Earth. An engagement with a remarkable phenomenon. All of these things, as tendrils reached out to find what they were looking for, as the replicants built in number, as the shocking destruction of Australia came ever closer to fulfilment.
What was so astonishing was how much of it was out in the open. They crawled through trees and other lifeforms. Humans were just one thing on this planet. Genetically predisposed, well there was that, but so were many other things, if you could only read the tea-leaves, if only we could surrender our own faulty dispositions, if we could only transcend for one tiny moment the mortality of these frames, the fleeting nature of it all.
He had been away, the geographical connection broken. We became familiars. Or familiar. There were two sides to this, and he a bridge.
Bridges break. Bridges are trodden upon. Bridges are only appreciated as points of departure or connection, as places where one tethering is linked to another. In the trees, in the trees. "We know what you are," one of the Watchers on the Watch had told him days before. "You're not the only one." Something he had known for a very long time. They escalated through the trees. They crawled across broken ground. They dissembled into flesh. They came from so very far away, were so very different, that they, too, stared with astonishment at the things they saw, birds in flight, the fruit bats heading to their feeding grounds across the evening sunset, hills in the distance, a murmuring place, not secret, it was all for all to see, how ravishing this place, how the planet teamed with life, wherever you looked, an insect buzzing, a spider weaving its web, fruit trees beginning to attain stature, all of it a mystery beyond our ken, and yet we, in a very real sense, were the origin of it all.
We were born here and would die here, and yet we were all, too, born very far away.
As for the country; fool's paradise. The rampant dysfunction and connivance unbelievable now. A leader hiding in his office, knowing full well the lies were coming undone, that you could only fool so many people for so much of the time before everything unraveled. Flow brains, they boasted, these self-aggrandising jerks who had destroyed the country.
We weren't here to change that, because nothing could change it now.
Old systems and new. Civilisations rise and fall. Communities come and go. Families are at the centre of sentient life forms; for a time they are everything, and then gone, too. Not into history, because history itself was ephemeral, but into a great forest humus of the past.
The future belongs to us. The future belongs to a more decent breed of human. The future belongs to intelligences beyond your ken. And the country we thought, the Europeans thought, they had built was the same country their descendants destroyed and in which the common people slept.
There were far more intelligent lifeforms out there than we could possibly imagine; and if the swarm had chosen this time and this place to manipulate the deck chairs of history, well so be it. They were powerful beyond our realm, well this realm, and the brief visitations, the replication of all that was good, the spirit that moved upon the water, well, that same water was lapping under the pier, was tangling through fishing lines, was home to yet more life.
And we came to whisper in your dreams, of a power way beyond yourself.
He watched. They watched. Game on.
And what would be preserved out of this time in history? What could save an unfulfilled nation? What could save a population deliberately de-educated?
Here in the reaches. There on the shore.
HEADLINES
She never set out to be famous. She was just being herself. Conspicuously, arrestingly, unmistakably herself. It's just that being Jeanne Little involved wigs, extravagantly false eyelashes and a wardrobe that was aiming for Hollywood glamour but somehow came out as high camp.
She was loud. She was flamboyant. There was no-one else like Jeanne.
"It was almost as if she came from another planet," says friend and entertainment reporter Craig Bennett.
And she was like that all the time, says her only child Katie Little. "You try being woken up by Jeanne Little at seven o'clock in the morning to go to school and see how you like it," she says.
For Jeanne, life was, literally, a cabaret. Until it wasn't.
Until the loudest person in the room was struck silent. Until a person who never stopped talking was rendered mute. Until the laughter died and the vivid brightness faded into the illness of Alzheimer's. And it wasn't funny anymore. Then the world became a little bit more ordinary.
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