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It begins with microorganisms – bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes eventually. The evolutionary biologists agree, if evolutionary biologists can be said to ever agree on anything. Let's not mention the taxonomists. It's harder to disentangle that knot than to disentangle the royal bloodlines of Revachol.
No, wait, a little earlier... it begins with attraction.
(love?)
(You can call it love if you want to. It's fine. It can be other things too, of course.)
Little pieces being drawn to each other, coalescing, forming larger masses; then breaking up and reforming again. A constant push and pull between entropy and growth, between dissolution and creation. It begets warmth, chaos, attracts interest. Life thrives at the edges.
(The scrublands, the delta, the warm, shallow shelf before the thalassic drop.)
The perfect places, the mid-tempo existence, the sprawling suburbs. The congregations of organisms. The lukewarm coral reefs, the uncut meadows – not the breathless altitudes, the crushing depths, but the gentle slope between. The cracked disc poised in the thinnest possible band between its star and oblivion. Death, life, death again.
(Not that you should think of the deep places as dead. Even there, there is movement. In the abyssopelagic zone, at the bottom of the deepest trenches: red, pulsing life, black smoke, thin films of perfect, microscopic squares thriving in boiling acid. In the arid deserts too, the scorching hot, the freezing cold... in the irradiated remnants of apocalyptic conflict, between the houses ground into powder that grows in the lungs like fungus.)
(it's not fair, with that much sorrow. the world should die with us.)
(But it won't.)
Life is information. Life is strings of letters that attract
(love)
each other. Life is words written across the universe.
(The universe is approximately a million words, and a million more in the apocrypha. Encoded in text, images, reels, fabric, smiles, touches (transformation. congregation. collaboration). Some spoken, some not. The one who never speaks somehow begets the most words. (it's funny.) He is.)
The edges, then. It begins with microorganisms. Entrotrophes, opportunistic life that feeds on the energy emitted by the dissolution of reality – the constant processing of now into never. A thick biofilm, a solid basis. Trophic levels: enough to sustain the next, and the next, and the next. Data flows in one direction
(and sideways, horizontal transfer, an ever-flowing concentric wave)
and accumulates like toxins, potential life and potential death on microfilm, coiled in the apex predators.
(And through time, even. Your mother went through the pale exactly four times, on business trips. Your father stepped in once on a dare. You have a rare condition, now, something that should have slept in you but awoke from the nothingness caressing the words that made them, erasing some, writing new songs in the depths of you. Epigenetics. Flip the switch from on to off, from off to on. Pale mutation, they call it. Some call it miracle.)
Those are the ones we remember: the smallest and the largest. The microorganisms
(so many, enough to stain the edges purple)
and the charismatic megafauna.
(because how could you not. how could you have a soul and not.)
(We had to do remembrance. In the petroglyphs: row after row of tiny dots, painstakingly drilled, filled with sap and blood and pigment to mimic them. And above: the vast tableaux. Huge antlers draped in pale tendrils, striding out of the nothing with eyes clouded. Minds that never felt the anxiety of loss of time, minds that were always poised on the edge of flight in any case, no matter the heat death of the universe. Holy fools. We envied it. We tried to copy it.)
But the true edgewalkers are the ones in between – the little skittish ones, the scavengers, the opportunists. The ones who have a foot in each world, ambireal, entroambivalent. Solace in nothing and sustenance in something. Too intelligent for comfort. Their turncoats spell despair for some, hope for others.
(it's both. it's always been both.)
And the ones that transverse. The inspiration, the ones we followed because we trusted them for all that we needed, we the apex predator, we the accumulated knowledge. We saw them walk in and walk out, and we did what we do best. We copied.
(Too deep and you will be erased. But humans did it. The Trans-Katla Magistral, the U41-A. The ships – but depth has no meaning either. It's not direction but intent. There is no depth, no centre and no edges. Huge, heavy feet walk the same paths they have for aeons. Light, quick paws pad the liminal, mapping out the uncharted, the undefinable. It's like flying: it only works if you don't think too hard about it, or if you don't think at all.)
And the truly mindless ones, too: the ones that we fear the most. The ones for whom the transition starts much further in
(there is no further. there is no in.)
and ends only when there is nothing left but the memory on the outside: there was bark here, once. There was a trunk and leaves and fruit. The ones whose words flow in sap and water, through phloem and xylem, through roots and shoots and mycorrhiza.
(love, love, love. the purest form of communication.)
Just as easy to rewrite but who feel no pain from it, that succumb with grace to the dissolution. Vast and slow, they grow unencumbered by our superstitions.
(Carpenters say that pale-grown wood is too easy to work with. All you have to do is remember what it's supposed to be. Some won't work it. Some never work with anything else. It's rare that it's ever used for anything but transitory items: things that are meant to break, things that are destined for dissolution. Inviting it into your home is bad luck. It has a scent all its own, ozone and mould and someone else's memories.)
Edges slowly creeping inwards, creeping outwards – expanding in the vacuum left by loss of hope, silence, nihilism. Life teeming in the transition, as deep as it can go. All because the only constants in the universe are bullish tenacity and endless adaptability. That's where it ends.
(does it?)
(It does. And begins again. Push and pull, ebb and flow, life and death. A great unmaking that makes the world anew. And in the meantime, we go on.)