A huge Moon loomed above the sky as a faint, young Sun touched the horizon. Waves crashed against the beach, strange, gelatinous trees were gently rocking in the wind. High up in the sky floated triradial polyp-like creatures, preyed on by flying disks. Their wings were made of feather-like growths that were actually fleshy in nature. “Fleathers” if you will. The ground was covered in a dense mesh of purple rhizomes, forming an everchanging, evershifting “spongeland” instead of grassland. Embedded in the spongeland was even stranger vegetation, cones connected by strings like pearl-necklaces, spirally algae, long stalks that ended in egg-like “flowers” and large transparent orbs that were suckled on by asymmetrical worms. Only here and there was the spongeland broken up by gigantic, three-sided pyramids and extravagant houses built out of bricks and large stone blocks. Their ornamentation was exquisitely extravagant, quite byzantine one might say, with gilded arches and little frescos depicting history and mythology at every corner. On one of the roofs sat a slug-like creature, its belly armed with hundreds of tiny stubby legs. Its head was an elongated tube, adorned by one huge eye made of a silicate disk. With its tendrils and tentacles it played a baroque tune on a concertina-like instrument, singing to the people below the roofs like a muezzin, telling them to pray to their gods.
This was not an alien planet, but Earth itself, approximately 1.7 billion years before the modern day, deep in the Proterozoic. Except for the algae, none of the creatures here were multicellular life as we know it. The polyps, worms and the musician were not animals, the trees and cones were not plants, the rhizomes were not fungi. They were all stem-eukaryotes or even multicellular bacteria, descending from experiments in multicellularity that long predate the fauna and flora that would arise in the Cambrian. 400 million years earlier, their evolution was boosted during a quick oxygenation event, leading to a first fauna of macroscopic slime-mold-like flowers and polyps, which greatly diversified in the course of evolution into the wide biodiversity seen here on display. But today only that very first primitive generation, known as the Franceville biota of Gabon, would be preserved as enigmatic fossils, continuing to puzzle humans but ultimately being overlooked in the grand history of life as little more than curiosities.
Out of his window, Ptahhatp watched the serene scene. But whereas it used to fill his being with calm, he now watched the horizon with melancholy in his hearts. Ptahhatp spent a lot of time thinking about the world, about philosophy. He was a scribe of the Society of Sohon, one of many intellectual gentlemen’s clubs. Ptahhatp’s civilization has had many ups and downs, a history even longer than humanity’s. But it had already hit a ceiling millennia ago. The long line of gelatinous trees, with their leathery skin instead of solid bark, did not turn into coal upon fossilization. Algae had simply not existed for long enough or in great numbers yet for their remains to turn into sizeable deposits of petroleum. Living trees were sacred to the dawn-creatures, one needed to make a prayer each time one wanted to fell one. So, all in all, there simply was not enough with which to fuel an industrial revolution. For the better part of a millennium now, Ptahhatp’s society was stuck in an elongated equivalent of the early 18th century. The height of technology were pocket-watches and elaborate crank-operated automata, imitating people and the fleathery flying disks. They served as little more than entertainment and luxury for the high society.
With no real vision towards the future, Ptahhatp’s society became expert antiquarians, obsessed with the past, “new” movements, be it in art, philosophy, politics or religion, simply being cyclical renaissances of old ideas being brought back in new ways. His Society of Sohon, named in honour of a famous archaeologist, was one of many orders of antiquarians, which met each month to discuss their findings and share and reproduce their texts, much like the royal societies of Enlightenment Scotland. It was one of his favourite hobbies during retirement, now that he no longer had the capacity to go on his adventures. Ptahhatp used to be a polymath, like some sort of Precambrian Shen Kuo, having experienced many different things during his political career under the Emperor. He built canals, oversaw trade and taxes, worked as a royal astrologer and mathematician, drew maps of the realm, led armies into war… it would be easier to list the things he did not do. But now he was living a calm life in his big, old mansion, writing poetry. Until now.
The previous night, he was plagued by a strange dream, a nightmare even. Everything he knew, all the world, was encroached by a veil, not of darkness but of blinding white. Huge walls of ice, thrice as tall as the tallest pyramids, relentlessly marched towards the equator, burying all beneath them until the whole globe appeared like a ball of snow. Drifting solemnly through the emptiness of space. Ptahhatp’s disembodied mind floated atop the ice-sheets, seeing all of history beneath him. Eventually the ice melted and returned to the poles, but when it did, nothing beneath remained. The mighty glaciers carved away the entire world, not just the surface, but also all the rock formations holding eons of life’s history inside them. All the buildings were gone. All the flora and fauna were gone. All the mighty monuments and ruins were gone. All the fossils were gone. It was as if his entire world had never existed. Eroded away by the abyss of time.
Dreams held great meaning to Ptahhatp. Ironically for a person obsessed with the past, he felt as if he had been cursed with visions of the future. But he had never dreamt this far in time before. What was he to make of it? He looked around his chamber, onto the shelf with all the little antiquities, reliquaries and fossils and contemplated the likelihood of them having been preserved, found and brought here. Each one, even the most mundane piece of fossil plankton, is nothing short of a small miracle. The odds of them surviving into the modern day against all the destructive forces of time were astronomically low and now they are just sitting there on his shelf. But they will not survive forever. No matter how good he and his descendants take care of them, they will be destroyed one day. Everything will be destroyed one day, fading into oblivion. Even Earth will one day be gone, with perhaps nobody else in the universe ever knowing that it existed. All the life, all the cultures, all the works of this little pale blue dot… gone forever.
As he looked at his collection, Ptahhatp slowly went through a crisis of faith. What is the point of him preserving history if none of it can be preserved forever? For whom is he doing all of this? Just for himself? He, who cannot take any of this with him into oblivion? Not far from where he lived there was a crimson pyramid, so old that no carving on or in it survived into his time. Nobody knew who built it anymore, what ancient king may have been buried inside. Only the red sandstone blocks remained and in a few thousand years they would be gone too. If even the mighty works of god-kings will fade, what chance does he as a mere historian have that any of his works will be preserved across time?
And he looks out the window again. Into the Sun on the horizon, the lush spongeland, the undulating gelatine trees, the merry musicians on the house roofs. The joy and laughter of the people. This is the present. This is what he actually lives in. There is no past and there is no future for him to experience, only the now. In a flurry of inspiration, his tendrils pick up an ink-tipped fleather and he writes down a poem, unusually for him written in prosaic rhyme:
“What is better?
To have lived and left no letter?
To have legend and no life?
Living but an endless strife?
To become a memory,
Known but for mortality?
Burn my works, smash my bones!
What worth they are once I am gone?
All these things are but loans.
Death is all I own.
I am but sole witness
Of my life in stress.
There is no reason and no rhyme,
Everything just flows with time.
If a Beyond there is,
With my goods I cannot depart.
And so these I should not miss,
But one thought I will impart:
Mourn me, do not.
Cry for me, do not.
Search for me, do not.
Beyond death, you need not plan.
To be happy is all you can.”
He goes out to play with the musicians in the street. He does not make history today, but he does make his day.
