IT WAS LIKE SORROW
It was like sorrow, solid and almost visible – a wall, a feature. Nothing else could explain the apparition. Nothing else fitted.
Greg knew only the sound of his uneven breath hissing, the slight tickle of a stray hair at his temple, moved by god-only-knew-what – and he didn’t buy that shit. Under the circumstances it seemed unlikely, too, as he lacked both hair or temple to brush against.
He was in transit.
There were moments in the slow-shift that he had half expected to temporally reform into someone else entirely – but such was the nature of the generally-slipping, the fad-fade of nuance and science as sold by the Narrowmen. However, this was not how he had foreseen things, back home, or even back in the nectar-spits of the corrosives, their freeform effluent speech patterns battering and blinding whilst still rebuilding and redefining. (Those bastards! They could sell you anything!) Such thoughts as this returned his view to wider thoughts on humanistic habitats more suited to old thinking, unrefined by the bites we took out of our minds in the name of progress.
So. He thought. This is the turning point then. No going back, not now. Unless…
But unless was a form of escape rudely denied the instant it formed in almost-letters, brief half-thought moments before the change inevitably swept past the rising panic of considered escape and rebuilt his possible futures in the shape he had chosen for himself:
The blue and magenta flumiform of the Enticulate – floranimal, metasentient and multiple.
Greg was no longer Greg, he was Gregandrewalicemhabbudannette, and a whole bunch of other sentients whose languages or thought-waves, systemic delusion-building artifices or sensory filigree were rapidly becoming familiar to him – becoming his/their own in fact.
We’re unexpected/expectedly open/closed ready/warm/wet/pleased/ to greet/absorb – I am/we are/we - he felt, as the group Enticulate drifted slowly out over the rocks it drew minerals from, so far beneath the oceans men called Prahpacs on the moon known as Myrddin.
It was just getting to know itself all over again.
***
Had it been so bad? Had their life really been worth the risk, the loss – everything? Joan and Greg had struggled to see eye to eye, for sure. Their initial love, a half-decacentury earlier, had been real enough. They both walked outside the norms. He with that distracted single mind, the complex meld of fear and bravery, shyness and command. She with her crippling empathy, her cruel love of nature, and again that shyness-and-spirit mixed. Together they had crafted warm hollows to entertain in, and raised bright thinking children who had gone on to craft their own shimmering curves across the blooms of their lives, close and true. Loving each other. So why had Greg and Joan finally grown so distant?
The affair didn’t help of course. But Joan had been driven to that. Greg’s drinking had grown unacceptable, keeping him far from the hub when he was running the Meredith McCrea in the Albulax Flaw, taking tourists out to the Monde and back. She had raised a gaggle of Billbets in spite (Thieving little bastards!) and Greg had turned a blind eye to it – which had not been her intent at all. So she had an affair. But then Greg had had several. So again – was that reason enough?
Ten more long cycles and the animosity had continued to grow. Joan hated his pet projects that took him away for so many hours at a time while bodily he remained in close proximity. It was like living with a corpse. His mind wandered, crafting nuanced and imaginative flux-hexes in the metasphere, but she just wanted him to sit with her, and – what? – maybe just talk to her! Old-school. Face to face. The way they did when they were young and in love.
But they had continued to drift apart and he had grown angry and bitter while she became frivolous in an attempt to escape her unhappiness. Ultimately she went away and he chose to be temporally reformed. A new life. An alien life. Far from her, far from the kids and the troubles that had ultimately become the greatest plague of man: The inescapable inevitability of sentience and self-knowledge – the blind dive into delusional faith, or the cold face of clarity and all its apocalyptic subtexts.
Even we gods must die.
It was hard for her to grasp that he had truly gone from her this time. There was no return, unless…
***
The explosion at the hub was planted, that was all anybody knew. It had the signatures of a Billbet operation, but the material had been Mode. They were not going to solve it. The husband had been rebirthed as a collective mind in the seas of Myrddin. Extrapolating information from the alien would be impossible now. If he had done it he was beyond the law.
The children gathered at a ceremony and wept.
***
Gregandrewalicemhabbudannette felt a ripple through time-space – one of billions, but this one had meaning to it. It was a passing of mind into the Kiazmus, and it came with a shock of sadness, causing the creature to curl in on itself and contract, hugging the rocks as it shivered. It was like sorrow.
Excellent. Ilike both your writing and drawing. And I love it when they're mingled.