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Edward Wadsworth, The Offing II, 1942
To the oldest had been assigned the most complex of
responsibilities. Stepping from our catacombs when the deluge
had subsided, we had first to locate the spots where our power
had been concentrated, and we then made use of the few tools
that were left. There were fossils from the future. There were
artifacts from a world that never did exist. We no longer
remembered the whole of who or what we were; we only knew
what we must do. However obscure the protocol, much depended
on one's attention to the smallest of details. For want of a period,
the whole of the Ur-Text could be lost.
It was we who had removed the seaweed from the statues that
resembled us, inside of which were our "geniuses." The light
pulsing from our dark companions was unbearable, and soon, we
would learn to hate them once again. Their breathing was so slow
as to be almost imperceptible. Like us, they breathed; unlike us,
however, they breathed space instead of air. Their eyelids were
no thicker than a zero. Our hands moving as by themselves, we
then reinstalled the snails that they had used as earplugs and
placed fresh coins on their eyes. There were rivers with strong
currents to be crossed. There were scribal anomalies. There were
whirlpools. There were topological mists. Beyond these, there
were oceans with no shores. Some amount of foreign assistance
was required; hence, the importance of the transport fee. Such
was our tradition, yet we knew that there were ferrymen who
would flatly refuse this medium of exchange.
We had done our best to prepare these statues for their voyage.
For a time, we shared our breath with these delegates from the
Pole Star, and they had offered to us, in our dreams at least, full
access to their records. Even then, however, we could sense that
the field of our vision had been compromised. All but
imperceptible at first, we could see a black speck, growing. The
light of the world's morning slipped from us as if we were
contaminated. You would think we had done something wrong.
What, exactly, might this be? Who among the small number of
survivors had not done something worse, and what race had the
standing to accuse us? If our shadows had stretched to several
miles in length before they had detached themselves, this was odd
, yes, but we had no reason to believe that this was more than a
coincidence. We had done no more than prepare our duplicates
for their voyage. These statues were a link to the lines on the
palms of our hands. We had just begun, and, already, the moment
for their departure was several years past due. One day, we
observed that they had left. Six houses of the zodiac would rise
and fall before we once again recognized the perfect language
that we spoke.
Theodoros Stamos, The Sacrifice of Kronos, 1948
It was we who had once volunteered to give away our powers, yet
we did not anticipate how large a portion this would be. We knew
that speaking clearly was important. A great weight had been
placed upon our tongues. Our lips just barely worked. We were
scared of the depth of the forgetfulness that was coming. We were
scared that a constellation might get stuck in our throats, that we
might shake our stories apart in trying to dislodge it.
It was we whose preparations fell short of the mark. It was we
who could not count the vessels that had shattered. It was we who
had once plotted to assassinate the gods, our temperamental
children, who had tampered with our DNA, who claimed that
they had planted every culture. Few indeed were the rites they
had not "borrowed" from their elders. They had taken from us
our bird-cloaks, our plumb bobs, and our fish-suits. They had
taken from us the small stones we had rubbed smooth with our
hands. They had taken from us both the raw materials and the
end results of our alchemy. With all their arts, they were less
experienced than we were, and they were far more invested in the
cosmic status quo.
The gods were desperate for existence; we could take it or leave
it. Their love of supernatural power had caused them to inflate,
like balloons that would soon be turned into lead buoys. They
used our untold traumas to fuel their conjurations. By creating
their own reality, they were hoping to go up without ever coming
down, to be full without ever being empty, and to be strong
without ever being weak. Well, that was not going to happen. We
would bow our heads, and smile. We would shield our energies.
We would tend to our gardens, and we would scavenge for usable
pieces when they crashed. Like ours, their arc was downwards.
For them, it was not a choice. They were rulers, yes. They were
beings who commanded our attention. Should we even still call
them gods?
We were not, perhaps, quite as tiny or as limited as we appeared.
Our rigor was martial. Death had camouflaged our capacity for
stealth. They had hooked rings through our noses, the better for
us to assist in the "improvement" of their stock. They had sealed
the key to hyperspace beneath the eight plates of the skull. To
some, a bit more intelligence; to others, a bit less, thus to set the
part in opposition to the whole. Again and again, they told us
stories from our childhood, of monsters under the bed, of
presences too luminous to look upon and live, of traps to be
sprung, of whole populations slated for blood sacrifice, of steps to
be taken so this blood would not be ours. They told us what our
needs had led us to demand, or rather what our fears had led us
to imagine. If certain warnings did prove accurate, this was no
thanks to our rulers, who had fallen under the spell of their own
voices. They ignored far greater threats. They had always been
pretenders.
Zdzisław Beksiński, Untitled, 1987
They did not take note of the comet that was curving through
deep space. Their hearts did not break when the last bees had
departed from their honeycombs. They did not hear that the
planets had stopped ringing. They did not care that the ocean had
crept inch by inch towards their cities, that it welled up through
their drains. They did not sense how each action would produce
its harmonic counterpart. They could not grasp the sheer number
of things that were happening at one time. As the wheel turned,
the gods were subject to the law of unintended consequences.
They forgot how to fit through keyholes. They could not find their
way around their bodies. Their bones grew dim. Their magic
became cancerous, yet they clung to their belief that their lineages
were pure.
Let them play, we thought. Let them bask in the rays of their
artificial sun. They did not know on whose backs their empires
had been built. Even then, some few of us were circling in the
borderlands, crouching around our campfires as the first lights on
their towers began to flicker off. "We will," we said, "almost
certainly, find the means to pull both the Earth and the sky from
beneath them." We were nothing if not patient, and we had the
advantage of having seen these events a great many times before.
There were those who believed that the ocean was not once as red
as blood, or "wine dark," as the poet would prefer. A wave had
once shattered every symbol on the coast, taking with it, as it
withdrew, the occult history of our race. In our hearts was a
catastrophe; we would pour them out. We drunken sailors did not
have any choice but to gather up wealth from the four corners of
the world. We were poor, and we had to pay down the high
balance on our debt, which we had first incurred when we were
brighter than the sun. Earth's overlords were rich, and asked for
nothing but our lives. We had more than enough. Our bodies
were like stadiums that had not ceased to hold multitudes.
Adolph Gottlieb, Untitled, 1948
Again, we had begun to see. It was we who had built a faster-than
-light vehicle out of space, and then narrowed our focus to
develop the small bones of our feet. Strangely, we then swore at
them, even though they had done their best to support us. It was
we who instructed the megaliths that they should not speak with
strangers; instead, they should whisper to the chosen, to those
whose psyches were scarred. It was we who had consigned the
most luminous of our cities to the deep. It was we whose all
-purpose ships were built from the simplest materials. It was we
who were forced to redraw our maps from scratch. It was we
whose emptiness had given birth to the 64-cube tetrahedron.
For the infinite has a form. In the discord that it generates, the
one sphere is economical. It was determined that we would meet
in Ithaca at the end of the Great Year. There, even now perhaps,
the Translucent Ones are replaying every turning point in the Ur
-Text, as they choose up sides for the Games.
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