Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 32
Part 33
Part 34
Part 35
Part 36
Part 37
Part 38
Part 39
Part 40
She smiled warmly, no longer frustrated by the looks of it. “You’re learning. It’s so satisfying to watch.” But I wasn’t done working my way through the idea. “What does that make you, then? I mean, that was my original question.”
She studied me, once again pausing to formulate her next sentence. Was she afraid of answering in a way that would offend or frighten me? Useless to guess. “My name is Asherah. I am an elohim, what humans once considered gods.”
Gods. Another entry on the list of shit I stopped believing in when I turned twelve, under bigfoot and ET. That list will need a bit of revision now. Unless this really is just the tail end of the trip and I’m still hallucinating, a great deal about my mental model of the world now required some rejiggering.
“So, where is your wife?” she inquired. I didn’t properly understand her at first, and asked her to repeat it. “There’s a woman in your life, I can sense it. Why isn’t she here with you? Bring her before me, and commence mating.”
I burst out laughing. “What’s wrong with you? If you mean Aubrey, she’s in Antarctica and we’re no longer involved.” Asherah wasn’t having any of it. “What are you doing with your life, then? You should be finding a woman to reproduce with.”
The overt, unapologetic lewdness caught me offguard. She’d come across as this wisened benevolent forest spirit until now. Then out of the blue, she demands I find somebody to fuck in front of her. I tried to explain that humans have other priorities.
“Impossible” she declared. “There is no higher priority than that. If you believe otherwise, you’ve deceived yourselves. As it has been since the dawn of life on this world, the most important thing you can do with your life is to ensure that the unfathomably long biochemical chain reaction that produced you continues unbroken into the future.”
The bawdy, single-track mindset of a sex maniac. Or a wild animal I suppose, which made more sense given that her experience must be primarily with simpler animals. It struck me as small minded until she elaborated on it a moment later.
“You recall that I perceive time differently, yes? The chemical signals by which trees communicate are vastly slower than the electrical exchange that takes place between neurons. A second to you is an eternity to me. Though the sacrament slows your own brainwaves down enough to converse with me, normally I don’t even perceive individual humans. I perceive the superorganism comprised of humans. Something like a fast moving fluid which blankets the globe.”
Like a slime mold, then. But much larger, made up of multicellular organisms instead of microbes. “Your own life seems significantly long to you, but not to me. If I choose it, from my perspective your life will be over in the blink of an eye. Every other matter you concerned yourself with besides continuing your lineage will amount to nothing but a grave. Only if you had children will there be any persistent expression of your genome to continue speaking with.”
An altogether alien point of view, but one from which her inappropriate demand that I reproduce as soon as possible appeared more defensible. Mother nature values little else but whatever is required to ensure the continuation of your genes.
“You only get one shot at life, and death is a harsh teacher. As beautiful as the natural world is to you, it’s also relentlessly brutal. Every day brings with it the very real possibility of being eaten alive, still screaming, or watching helplessly as a predator snatches one of your young.”
I found nothing to dispute, but instead reflected on how much she sounded like the narrator of any nature documentary I’ve ever watched. It was briefly amusing. “Don’t think I relish in it” she said. “I mourn every species which fails to hold onto its place in the world. When they pass into history, their genetic distinctiveness forever lost, I shed a tear for that loss.”
I asked if she was talking about the dinosaurs. “Not specifically, but sure, that’s a good example. Whew, that was a while ago. I was inconsolable for eons! It is mercifully rare that so many species are wiped out all at once. For a time I thought that was the end of all life on this world.”
I now lay on my back as I did the night before, idly watching her float this way and that amid the jungle canopy. Like the backdrop against which she could most accurately display herself. “I’ve noticed an accelerating increase in the rate of extinctions recently, do you know anything about that?”
I described climate change as best I could. How industrial emissions exacerbated a natural warming trend leading to unnaturally rapid heating of the atmosphere and ocean. “That’s right!” she broke in. “There’s been something wrong with the ocean for a little while now. It’s unusually warm and acidic. I think something must have broken the methane cycle.”
I repeated that by our best scientific reckoning, it was human industrial activities that caused the runaway melting of seafloor methane ice. As if she only now heard me, she scoffed at the notion that humans had anything to do with it.
“There you go again with your narcissism. Last I checked, you were still covered in fur, swinging through my branches. Now you want me to believe you possess the power to alter the planetary climate? That’s adorable.”
I insisted it was so. Like a mother who cannot help but see her adult son as the helpless little baby whose diapers she once changed, Asherah struggled to believe we could have developed so far beyond the termite munching apes she once tenderly nurtured.
Her eyes began to tear up. “You’ve grown up so fast. It isn’t fair! I miss when you were smaller, simpler. When you needed me. The jungle was your classroom and nursery. I watched over you all as a mother ought to. There were only a couple million of you back then. It was so much more intimate and special.”
I couldn’t help but feel mildly offended by her nostalgia. “So wait, what are we to you now? Pests?” She sniffled, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Some of you are still very dear to me. The ones who never left the wilderness. The ones who still bring wreaths out into the woods to hang upon my branches, and live as I intend.”
She could only mean those villagers from yesterday. All that business with the engineered plants must be real as well, and I now had a better idea of who supplied them with it. No wonder it’s so far beyond the state of the art in biotechnology, though in fairness I’ve been out of the loop for six years. Maybe the gap isn’t as large as I’ve so far assumed.
“I don’t know anybody back where I’m from that’s even aware of you. The only context I’ve heard Elohim in was Biblical, as one of the names of the God of Abraham.” She rebuked me. “A lie they perpetuate! That word was never meant to be singular, but plural. We are superorganisms of various kinds. We are many!”
She directed my attention to an anthill, worryingly large tropical ants in the process of dragging the carcass of a bird back to the opening. “You have seen, even in the form of ant colonies, that animal-based superorganisms exist. The coordinated movements of a flock of birds is another example.” She pointed to a swarm of small tropical birds I could barely make out against the bright blue sky. “Now you have come to understand that there exist plant-based superorganisms as well.”
Human societies qualified, and it now seemed to me as if every war in history was just one superorganism trying to kill and eat another. How obvious that would be if seen from orbit, just as the synchronized behaviors of ants are only obvious because we view them from a removed vantage point, as I did with the birds.
“In truth I tell you that there are all manner of emergent minds to be found in nature. Gods of the sea, of the sky, of storms and the geological processes taking place deep underground. Humans once acknowledged all of these Gods, and paid them tribute.”
Enthralled, I asked Asherah what happened to change that. “My lover revealed himself to a tribe of desert dwellers. Their society was harsh, brutal and unbalanced. Men controlled every facet of life. Women lived in fear and submission. He gave them rules, and sought to rebalance the masculine and feminine dimensions of their culture.”
She could only mean the tribe of Abraham. If so, her male counterpart had chosen poorly. What I knew of Abraham suggested that he was a schizophrenic old codger who heard voices telling him to kill his own son, but that it would be acceptable not to if he instead chopped off the tip of his penis.
Stay Tuned for Part 42