Terminarch

2090

A petulant rain soaked into thin soil as I trudge through sickly grass. At the end of my journey I find a mouldering prefabricated shack waiting patiently under our moody sky. Resentful clouds carried the Promise of a further downpour. “Shack” was perhaps unfair, but it was an old style prefabricated housing module, sitting alone among straggling pioneer species.

It had the look of a mushroom, grown from bare earth. It is clearly once been white, but now dark veins spread across it, gouged with sticky black hollows of necrosis. The myco-foam hab had clearly seen better days, but showed signs of being carefully repaired with wood, sturdy bio-plastic sheeting, and a number of other materials I could not identify, and chose not guess at.

The unsecured door yielded to a gentle push. Inside, the place looked for like laboratory grown out of a jungle. The rain dappled light danced over stained jars, trays of rich dirt and racked vials. I reached out to touch a slime mould budding out of the wall. A voice behind me said “Let them be”.

Under the great hairy cloak and webbing, which they explained was “For the weather, and the long work outside”, they wore the same tough hard wearing clothes as everyone else out here. All variably torn, rotted and patched, but embroidered with mycelial patterns and darned, in little patches with something that looked for all the world, like moss. They followed my gaze to a second heavy black cloak, that shimmered with overlapping patterns of colourful leaves and green vines and white bones, speak of a long and storied career.

“Formal wear” they said, “but it helps with rain and the cold”

There was always a Grim aspect to these gnarled little pioneer habs, but inside, the funereal fecundity was disarming. They cleared a space on the table and creaked heavily to a chair opposite me I arranged my recorder.

“I imagine I’m a hard one to find, I must be one of the last…”

“You wanted to know about the Last Rebellion? I can tell you, I was there. It was quite a show, a last scream that echoed around the world! For a few days…”

“It had been 6 years in the making. Ebb, and flow, always the push, the constant work. Love, rage and joy. Heat, rain, cold, colour and light. Met with a demeaning cocktail of polite disinterest, unimaginative, tiresome, completely predictable abuse and dutiful incarceration.”

“They threw everything they could at us. The bosses called us names, the foot soldiers chased us around, beat us from time to time and the spooks followed us home. They tightened up the law to make it easier to have us just carted away, but what does the law matter on a dying world…? It didn’t stop anyone. And if it did? I would have never called them coward.”

“So, we decided. This, was going to be it ‘If this wasn’t going to work, nothing would!’ So we did it, and we took the square, built a little town, right there. People saw, came, and brought their own tents and sheds. By the weekend we were running a festival. We made sure anyone who came was fed, and cared for, it was a last embrace, but was warm. We talked and talked, we danced and we sang, we prayed, we cried… and we played our drums. It felt like forever and no time at all.”

“They swept in at night, tired of us, and they were so tired. We’d been dancing with them all week. Politely asked us to leave with batons and bear spray.”

“The air thrummed with the febrile tension between their enthusiasm for violence and our frustrated refusal to give them what they wanted. We said ‘Fuck you, arrest us all.’”

“There was nothing else they could do, we gave them no choice, gave no ground, didn’t raise a hand. Six thousand people, all in one go. They doubled us up in the cells, sent us all over the country. It was all over the news or a day and a half, and in an out of court for the next decade, until we all had better things to do.”

“So, that was it. The Last Rebellion, it was over. I was there, I saw it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s just the way it was. I’m not ashamed to say I stood in the street and wept. I watched them carrying people away until it was my turn, I cried for my friends and for their children.”

“This was the last time, the last gasp. Now the sky cries for us all.

It was over, done. We put down our banners and went home. I realised, in walking away, nothing’s over while you’re breathing. You’re just going to wake up again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.”

“So what do now?”

“Yes, I, the great “shepherd of death” do talk to moss… as well.”

“The End, is rarely the end in any real sense. I learned that before most people. The work is always unfinished, the only end is in death, and death isn’t the end of us.”

“Our bodies are star dust. Yes, the big heavy atoms are the scraps of dying second generation of stars, but the hydrogen… the hydrogen you carry in your body, is as old as the universe. You are built on the ruins of everything you have ever been.”

“This is the lesson I learned from The Last Rebellion. We don’t die, we just disperse.”