Today's offering consists of several different parts of the story which I have spent the morning trying to stitch together cohesively. The pieces were originally from Of the Greataway, a Machine and the Weavemothers, Dreams, The Dedos, Post-Beginnings and What Shenshi Did, all written in 2008 and 2009.
Once upon another WhereWhen, or maybe several times upon many different WhereWhens, I imagined the WeaveMothers into existence ...or maybe you did...or maybe they Caused us or me to imagine them. One and many, they appeared. And they used the Locomotive's ability to defy the restrictions inherent in causation in order to travel to the many Stations along the Tapestry, along an uncountable multitude of happentracks. Their job, as they...or we...or I...have imagined it, will have been to add the weft threads to the Tapestry. One and several, for they are simultaneous just that, they will have added the colors of existence between the pixels of the Rainbow.
In order to carry out this onerous yet joyful task they gave birth, perhaps in reality, perhaps metaphorically, to the self-programmable, autonomous units which are you and I. And in so doing, of course, we come full circle to the inexplicability of the Way.
Our life paths contribute to the vibrancy and texture of the Tapestry we shall never see completed. But so too do those lives threaten the integrity of the Tapestry's structure.
Yes: The Revealing Science of God
◊ ◊ ◊
The collective consciousness of the WeaveMothers sensed the impending change of gears of the Celestial Steam Locomotive.
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The train approached a long uphill grade of the current happentrack. The Engineer engaged the lever of night. The passenger continued sleeping. The listener fell into a trance. And the storyteller dreamed for them all.
It was a tale of life on the borderland, of the place which was on neither this side nor the other side of the rainbow.
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Wind awoke in a different place. Wind's eyes opened and the place became visible. The colors were different. Wind was not sure what they were different from. But Wind was certain they were different. Crisper? Clearer? Brighter? Shifted? Wind tried to remember.
An effort to recollect the before place proved fruitless. In fact, the effort to remember anything was a struggle. There were memories, but they seemed to belong to someone else. Some of them may have been recollections of Wind, but they were not Wind's memories. There were memories of the Others. There were thoughts the Others had about Wind. So Wind knew there was a past place and time. Didn't there have to be?
Wind arose and noticed that the emerald-hued grass rippled. At least emerald was the word that came to mind. And words were present in Wind's thoughts. A look around brought other words into focus. Sky. Hills. The possibility of trees. Nakedness.
Wind's body seemed new. It was not clear what that was compared to. The thoughts of the others did not include memories of bodies. But Wind knew the word and what it represented. Maybe that was a clue.
Wind also remembered how to count. One. Two. Many. Was there another? Were there more?
Wind's eyes closed. Imagine another place. Imagine being there. Concentrate.
Eyes opened to reveal the same place. No movement in space had occurred. Perhaps there had been movement in time. But how could one tell?
If Wind could remember Others, where were they? The compulsion came: find companionship.
Wind made a plan. Choose the highest hill. Walk to the top. See what could be seen.
Wind walked. Emerald gradually changed to wheat and then to ocher and the grass ceded control of the ground. Rocks began to appear here and there. Shades of gray and slate.
Reaching the top of the hill, Wind discovered the Edge. There was no other side of the hill. Wind had come from There to Here along a spiral edge in the rainbow. It seemed a long drop off either side. And there was no certainty that there was anything below except the colors.
There were no instructions on how to proceed. Does one jump off the one side? Does one jump off the other? Does one explore and learn to become comfortable with life on this Edge?
There seemed to be no compulsion other than companionship? But how did one find that? How does one ever find connection to the Others? Will it ever happen again?
Had it ever really happened before?
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The Engineer released the lever. The storyteller awoke from the dream. The listener became aware. And the passenger continued to dream. Hence Wind continued to either exist...or to have existed. Or maybe the possibility of Wind existing is what continued.
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In the distant reaches of the Greataway, the WeaveMothers imagined a rainbow into the Tapestry.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
In an obscure happentrack Sun passed once more over Canyon. A new warmth emerged. Birch And Pine and Eucalyptus and Willow felt the possibility of a new sentience in the herebelow.
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An Edge in the Rainbow
When I Dream
Who am I
when I dream?
What is this house
with many rooms
hidden entrances
staircases to adventures
opening into who knows
what world?
Where is this place
and time
and why am I there
or here?
Where is the doorway
into that better place
from this reality?
Who am I
when I traverse
the ideal?
--Robyn Elaine Serven
--November 28, 2008
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Once upon a time I started a story. Well, actually, I borrowed some dead guy's story and decided to add to it, subtract from it and generally mold it into something else.
I've been asked to relate a bit more of the story. In former times, the previous snippet was added to the Ifalong on what we humans describe as November 28, 2008. Much had transpired between then and when the current episode was posted on May 24, 2009. I guess I needed some time to connect to the Rainbow computer, where the files are kept...if only because it is easier to initiate something comprehensive that way.
It might be time to learn some other parts of the story.
The Engineer downshifted and the locomotive slowed as it traversed a difficult curve.
The Storyteller began a new story. Actually, it was a very old story. One of the oldest...and most important. The Rainbow computer had it exactly, it was assumed, but nobody told it as well as as the Storyteller. The Listener became intent on trying to discover previously undiscovered nuance. And the Passenger continued to dream.
Once upon a time, back when there were just a few Travelers along the happentracks of the Ifalong, before the BigWish that created the locomotive, travel was via nodes with many facets. Beings existed, called Dedos, whose very existence required that they observe the nodes, sense when a Traveler was approaching and touch the facet which indicated the arrival. For an extremely limited instant in time, the Dedo and the Traveler would become one and the Dedo would learn the desired destination of the Traveler. The Dedo would then touch another facet and the Traveler would move on however many light years or years backward or forward were required to get to the next node.
This task of the Dedos was built into their genes. Also written into Dedo genes was the ability to read the Ifalong.
One of the Dedos, Wutan by name, spawned an offspring who was given the name Shantun. After about 30,000 years, with the apparent age of 8, Shantun distracted Wutan from hir job. To be sure, it was unintentional, but the damage was done. At that very instant, the Three Madmen of Munich, the pseudo-humans who had been created by the human race to protect it from the much-feared inhabitants of the Red Planet, were passing through that node. Wutan could have diverted them, but did not. And they released the Hate Bombs upon us all, forever. The Hate Bombs prevented the denizens of the Red Planet from attacking us, but the cost was very high. The sector of the Greataway near Earth became divorced from the rest, even from the other planets which mankind had seeded.
Wutan died. Shantun earned the surname The Accursed. And traveling between the nodes was terminated...but too late. The damage had been done. The Hate Bombs detonated in the vicinity of a star named Sol.
Third Stone from the Sun
The Dedos made it their existential purpose to undo this destruction. After consultation with the mind of the WeaveMothers, they devised a long and intricate plan, involving a Wild Human, a Cuidador, and the Girl With No Name. They would become The Triad: the Artist, the Guardian, and the Girl.
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In telling any story I'm told that it is advisable to provide some background. But the Song of Earth is too much to tell. According to what is recorded in the Rainbow, the universe computer that records everything (and some even believe is everything), there was once an attempt to sing the song and all who knew it...or thought they did...gathered and sang...for 150 years.
The Storyteller was there. That's where he learned his stories before he got on the train.
And they barely got started.
So maybe one just has to pick a place and tell a little bit and nurture it so that it will grow and answer any relevant questions when they do pop up, if one is able.
In the beginning?
The song doesn't go back that far, since there was nobody to record it and the Rainbow had not yet been conceived.
But we can speculate that the WeaveMothers were weaving the Tapestry of Life. Why they have done what they have and when the started will likely always be a mystery.
Tapestry
Eventually there were Dedos and the nodes they tended. Possibly they were just woven into the fabric of the Tapestry, as if they had always been there.
And some of the nodes and their Dedos were on Earth. And here things get complex.
Time, you see, is not a single thread, stretching forever into the future. It is more like a tree, with many possibilities envisioned...like branches and twigs...until they are no longer possible. Each of the twigs and branches is called a happentrack, containing what might have happened. The tree itself is called the Ifalong.
Being Dedos they were born with the ability to foresee the Ifalong. And occasionally they could foresee their own demise. When that happened, they had the ability to activate the egg inside their wombs, and almost 95% of the time this would result in the birth of a child who would be trained to replace them. But for some unknown reason...unknown to them, but perhaps not to the WeaveMothers...occasionally the child would not have the genes that were required to be able to become a Dedo.
But there was a purpose for these other creatures, named Paragons, even if the Dedos were unable to sense what it might be.
The stories of the Paragons are many and varied, leading to such consequential events as the division of Pangaea and the creation of many of the planet's animal species. And maybe some of them will be shared on another day.
Like the Dedos and the WeaveMothers the Paragons were honorable. The Paragons were also capable of love. And they were scarce. They spent their time tending to the animals and plants in their domains, and they loved them very much. Because they were scarce, they were lonely. And because they were lonely, they developed the emotion of jealousy. And these emotions lead to those consequential Things-That-They-Did.
One of the Paragons so loved one of the animals in his charge, an ape-like creature, that in his loneliness he mated with it. And they had offspring.
That offspring of their unions are called the First Species: Original Man. The Second Species consisted of three types, eventually.
There were the True Humans. At least they believed that they were. But they were slowly dying off and searching for some way to produce more True Humans. The cuidador Zozula was a True Human, as was his wife, Eulalie, who was dying.
There were the Wild Humans, who evolved to live in the oxygen-poor air of the outside world. They were thick-chested, with huge lung capacity. Manuel, who the Dedo Shenshi sought, was one such.
And there were the Polysitians, who had developed to live in the oxygen-rich environment True Humans had tried to develop so that they could live outside. The True Humans have long since forgotten where that environment is.
The Third Species consisted of the Specialists, developed in their seemingly infinite variety by adding animal and/or plant genes to other human stock to develop, well, specialists who could do those things that the True Humans had forgotten how to do. They were all created by the Whirst Institure. All specialists revered the memory of their creator, Mordecai N. Whirst.
The Fourth Species consisted of the Dream People and included the neotenites who the cuidadores nurtured in the Domes, aided by the specialists. The neotenites were the hope for the future, the True Humans thought. They had the minds sufficiently advanced, but their bodies had become infantilized over the millennia, so that they appeared as babies nearly six feet tall when they were full grown. They would never be able to survive by themselves unless the True Humans, assisted by the Specialists, could find a way to reverse the evolutionary course of their bodies.
Meanwhile the neotenites were resting in their thousands...perhaps even tens of thousands...on tables in the domes, cared for by the raccoon-nurses and gorilla-doctors while their minds were connected to that portion of the Rainbow called Dream Earth.
The Girl With No Name was one of them. Unlike the Marilyns and Burts, Johns and Yokos, Xaviers and Charos, she had chose to be Herself in her dreams. Hence she had become so very sad.
The Fifth Species consisted of what have been called the Quicklies. They had evolved to have a super-fast metabolism and could barely be noticed by the others.
∇ ∇ ∇ ∇ ∇
Two volumes of the Song of Earth are available at Google Books now:
Volume 0: Cat Karina
Volume 1: The Celestial Steam Locomotive
Canyon sensed it first. With Sun passing overhead once again, something changed in the rock formation. It's essence seemed different. Something that had always been there seemed to be lacking.
Shenshi awoke in human form. It would be a long walk to the sea, but she was closest, so it became her duty. The art machine must be delivered to the wild human Manuel so that he could some day become the Artist. Destiny needed fulfillment. Other Dedos had, through the generations, ensured that Manuel would be born by protecting his forebears.
All Along the Watchtower
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As Shenshi passed the Dome on her way to visit the boy Manuel, she sensed that Eulalie was dying. She cast some thoughts into Eulalie's head.
Eulalie was dying. All the True Humans knew that. And this was a major problem because no one in all the domes on all the planets inhabited by humans knew the computer as well as Eulalie.
No one.
And since there had not been a true human born since before they knew Eulalie was dying, there was no True Human to train as a replacement for her. There was discussion about trying to create a new kind of Specialist who could be trained, but there was universal agreement that to do so would signal the end of True Human control. Prejudices were hard to overcome, even after 50 or 60 millennia.
Training a Wild Human seemed out of the question. They were just too unpredictable. And the Polysitians? It had been so long since they had been in contact that nobody even knew...or cared...where they were anymore.
One night, while Eulalie slept, she had a dream. She related her dream to Zozula the next morning, admitting that she wasn't terribly sure of the advisability of following the path it revealed.
In her dream she was taken through the do-portal of the Rainbow and traveled the entirety of Dream Earth as if in the wink of an eye and found one good candidate, one neotenite who would be capable of learning how to replace her. She had found someone who, capable of all of the possibilities of the Wishes, Big and small, had chosen to be Herself for as long as anyone could recall.
The Girl was Herself and she was intelligent and, most importantly, unlike most of the inhabitants of Dream Earth, she was empathetic. True, she was also sad and lonely and capable of great fear, but she could also hope, a skill most neotenites had discarded.
There was, of course, the problem of trying to keep her alive if she were disconnected from the machines which had been doing so. And she would no doubt be clumsy in her ungainly, adult-sized baby's body.
But it was a plan. It was Something-To-Do rather than just waiting for True Humans to die off.
They set about trying to create a means of teaching her what she would need to know.
Shenshi turned her attention back to Manuel. It was only a few more kilometers to the coast. Already the dryness of the land around the canyon that held her node had given way to this hilly grassland. To the north seemed to be dominated by a cordillera. To the southeast was savannah, with what appeared to be jungle in the further distance. Shenshi walked onward. She was almost there.
Village history records only the story Manuel told Dad Ose, the priest at the Old Church, about where he obtained the machine that allowed him to create his mind paintings.
One day Manuel had become exceptionally bored. He was tired of the sea, tired of the beach on which he had built his house, and tired even of looking for driftwood and other gifts from the sea with which he had built and decorated his house. And he was definitely tired of the stodgy people who lived their stodgy lives in the village in their stodgy houses of adobe and thatch. There weren't even any Quicklies to watch.
Aburrido.
So for no apparent reason Manuel walked. At first it was directionless walking but eventually he headed in the direction of the dome. Maybe he would see one of the people who thought they were gods.
As he climbed up the hills, it became harder for him to fill his lungs with air. Eventually he had to rest and he laid on his back, watching the clouds, looking for the portents of the future the villagers tried to discern in them.
Alpacas. The horse clouds of the past few days were over and the snake clouds were probably on their way. He would have to head back before the chokes began.
As he started to rise, he noticed that he was not alone. There was an old woman, dressed in black who had somehow silently sneaked up on him. She called him by name. And he was afraid.
He rose and leaned against a nearby stunted tree for support...and to keep a grasp on reality.
She spoke to him slowly, of the world outside of his village and the universe in which the world sat and the Ifalong and happentracks and the Greataway...and he understood little of it, beyond the words she had uttered after she called him by name:
You are going to be a famous man, Manuel. In the distant Ifalong minstrels will sing of your exploits--and of your companions. You will have adventures such as men have never dreamed of.
--The words of the woman to Manuel, as reported by Alan Blue Cloud
Manuel asked who she was and how she knew these things.
"I am a Dedo," said Shenshi, for it was she. Then she laid the box upon the ground beside Manuel. "This is for you."
"What does it do?"
"Nothing that does not come from yourself."
Manuel blinked...and she was gone. So he carried the Simulator home. And he put the helmet on his head and he thought. And an image formed in front of the Simulator.