MOTHER OF CHILDREN

She relied on Art for beauty and Tradition to give meaning, all else was Science.
 
Answers came from observable phenomena – such as that no two snowflakes are alike and yet always have six sides, similar to fossilized human fingerprints. Seeing such patterns, how they correlate and continuously replicate in nature with what was once humanity drove the desire, then her work – because the natural world implored diversity she decided it should start again and hopefully fragment into something different than what had since become sanitised.

Hence offspring, extracted from ossified embryonic seedpods, were fermented and came out pink and pudgy, resembling what had existed countless millennia’s before; at least what the annals said did anyway. Her children roamed about an artificial environment designed especially for their bipedal form and filled with surroundings conducive to what such a primitive biology had evolved to function in. Inside there they listened to their surrogate-mother’s voice sing in shadows and watched her fantastic visage speak to them in clouds; or whatever other incorporeal avatar she chose to take. As adolescents her children experienced many states of consciousness; the strange ones were regarded as spiritual experiences, and this was good, because with each was achieved a profound self-knowledge. The mother, who always watched, gave this a positive value, since she and her kind could no longer achieve it.

In maturity the children asked questions and tried to leave, or as they put it, to explore; to see what lay beyond their discernible world. The mother thought this acceptable, if not proper; but others intervened–

Elders of her culture decided such an experiment had gone on long enough, that clinging to the ancient past in such a way was abnormal; repeating history, particularly their own, in hope of achieving a different result, nothing less than an abomination. Reluctantly, the mother in principle agreed. Culturally her people had a big dilemma of their own to deal with; the age of the universe was finite, but they were immortal. Every effort was put into tackling this, the entire civilisation geared towards surpassing it.

A message sent in light travelling faster than its carrier conveyed the Elders resolution. The mother received a cancellation order: exterminate before contamination (procreation) can happen. 

The Elders waited for confirmation.

Yet in voids between stars, wherein live invisible forces that act between all things, from constellation to constellation – for the perimeter of their society was wide – every square-inch remained silent to the order; no response did the mother send forth. Receiving this news she felt nothing, for the mother was not even remotely human; having only an intellectual understanding of flesh and blood. Yet, when travelling the depths of space she sometimes felt awe and wonder – and more so quite recently a sublime loneliness stemming from regret. There appeared to be only one solution: to seek fellowship among the stars, or at least put a mechanism in place so her children could one day do so.

In this, her native universe, one of many, of a hundred trillion mapped stars, there must be a single orbiting planet suitable to hide her children from the sight of beings who could see everything.

She found it. A vibrantly hued galaxy, stuck between nine others, where thick swirling star-clusters weaved their esoteric symmetry. Here waterways shimmered sarcoline and glaucous with tiny life and deep broadleaf forests dominated landmasses housing frond-leaves much like ruffled feathers that buzzed deep tones when winds caressed them. In a yellow glade amid bronze meadows where each waving cane bore scents of iodine and hay and other substances the newcomers would soon name; here the mother cushioned her children almost lovingly in their new nest.

Some of them awoke at feeling her presence depart and glanced up to see her true form, modified and enhanced by aeons of sped-up evolution, now a creature of pure energy rather than physical matter; but they did not recognise her.

A noiseless, scentless gas looking substance flitted away through the air, then beyond the atmosphere and slipped into the structure of space itself and disappeared inside eternity amid countless frozen lattices of light.

THE END

Sean Mulroy lives in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. His work has previously been published in Perihelion Science Fiction and Every Day Fiction. This is his second story in Aphelion.

E-mail: Sean Mulroy

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