Time after time

2090

Their time was done. The man made to leave and Moss rose to see him out. Joints creaked, inside and out and as they waded around the table and across the living lab. The rain was getting heavier now. Eto opened the door to the outside, took a look out, and turned back. Moss rolled their eyes skywards in apology, and hauled their heavy sloth-fured cloak from the wall by the door. The gero-assist rig took some of the strain but still they stumbled a little under the heavy garment. Eto stepped in, helping ease the massive furry raiment onto Moss’s shoulders so the rig could take the weight.

“For the weather” he said, sheepish. The cloudbank that had hovered all day had grown heavier and with it the persistence rain had grown heavier. It was getting dark.

Moss twisted and flexed under the weight limbered up, touching the door frame.

“I’ll walk you back. You’ll be alright?”

He nodded, shrugging on his own silvery hydrophobic rain jacket. As they stepped out into the rain it became bright with noise as Moss became a silent shadow. Rain sheeted and splattered off Eto’s coat like a force field, barely slowing down. The cloak’s opposed fur bilayer silently shed water and stayed warm. Moss enjoyed the subsonic patter of the rain as it fought, to no avail, to get at their skin. The sky carried a sullen threat nowadays, always waiting with banks of clouds to hurl squalls and downpours onto those below. The forests they were building would be a refuge, but as they walked across the open ground towards that wall of life the bare ground began to give way under their boots.

Eto raised his voice over the blatter. “I think I’ll have time, the weather will be holding my databus down anyway, so the crew will be waiting for me.”

“Time’s a funny thing you know, gets away from you…” Moss mumbled, half to themselves

“Sorry, I-” Eto started.

“I mean, when I was young, time didn’t matter. Everything was new and eternal or infinitely boring. Then, when you get a little older, time is dozens of tiny boxes. Classes or car rides or homework or snatched play. You’re always just moving from one packet to the next.”

Eto had surreptitiously started recording again as the ancient terminarch chuckled to themselves and pressed on. The dark mud had given way to tough, trouser soaking grass, which was much more comfortable to walk on, but was itself slowly giving way to hardy pioneers, tripping and gripping around legs in the dark.

“A little more time passes, almost nothing, and you grow up a little more. Suddenly you’ve got a little control over the when and how of your life, but everyone’s demanding you make choices that will define the rest of your time with no experience to base them on.”

Eto didn’t really know what the old necrodruid was talking about. He’d grown up decades later, on the other side of the world, during the collapse of his local biosphere and the exodus of his people to the sea, all of this seemed alien to him. But good science is good observation, so he recorded the terminarch’s parting words.

“Then, I was out on my own, and the world was dying around me… You understand.” They inclined their head below the shaggy hood. Eto nodded.

“Everything was suddenly immediate and too late, all the time. Every target was danced merrily past and every deadline looked down on with great solemnity, as we trudged over it. You know, at a certain point, heat and pressure are the same thing.” They chuckled again, Eto remained lost.

“It’s a phys- don’t’ worry. Time is a cruel, disinterested master. I was driven forward, whipped and enflamed by it. Everything had to be done as soon as we could. We held each other in that, but you can’t stand in the crucible forever. When you step out, time whips back and away. You breathe easier, but you remember, with the heat, the pressure. Everything was still too late.”

“You are, it would seem, the last rebel. You won, didn’t you? We survived.”

“Nobody won! Look around! We survived, we did better, but the earth will never forgive us …and nor should she.” They swept an arm towards the lifeworkers huddled under the threadbare primary canopy. The bedraggled souls engaged in the slow, vital work of dragging the forest behind them up the isocline towards the pole, towards the safety of Canadian refugia. Eto had always thought they carried an air of industrious desperation, it made him nervous, like he was missing something they knew.

“They’re doing their best, I know, and they’re getting the support now. I’m here to help too, alongside others of my kind. We bring the soil to life, through death and past, you understand?”

Eto nodded again, always confused by the theatricality of necrodruids. He supposed that the calling came with so much socio-cultural baggage it must have been hard to do anything but embrace it. They passed under the first supple young trees and the air grew darker as the rain eased off. Moss took down their broad hood and looked over. They stopped walking, the rain gave way to the sounds of insects and the occasional low whoop of something in the distance.

“When we started to make our peace with the what we had left, purpose was everything. The work will never end, our time is the only end, not even death. Everyone has a purpose now, though. Not much doubt left, no room and nowhere to go.” Moss glanced ruefully at the sky.

“Everything you did gave us more time” Eto said.

“Moments, minutes, seconds? Does it matter now?” They turned away.

“I’m not sure when I stopped counting.” Moss, realising they were being rude, turned to the other man, and they embraced, the gero-rig creaking slightly under Eto’s pressure.

“Thank you for your time-” Eto said, and they both laughed at the absurdity of it.

“It’s alright, time has an altogether different pulse now. It doesn’t matter so much, at the end of my own. It’s all starting to unravel anyway. Good luck in your investigation, and I hope I was… helpful.”

“Oh, you were. Thank you.” Eto smiled, and walked away into the sodden, dripping darkness of the pioneer forest. Moss looked around, smelled the petrichor in the air felt the pulse of mycorrhizal networks starting to spark and flash under the soil. He creaked down onto a decaying log, imported from some older part of the forest, and inspected it’s transition from life to death for a moment. It was doing well, breaking down and offering itself to the soil and the air and the life of the forest.

When had they stopped counting the time? Forest work didn’t need it, it just wasn’t important anymore. This was a time, after time. The cycles were all that mattered and they, even in this new, terrible world, were eternal. Days and nights, seasons and years, were just rhythms in a constant pattern. Through their tireless efforts they’d bent humanities suicidal linear trajectory back into the cycles of nature. Crashed their civilisation back in to the soil to decay and re-join the world. Moss had seen it all, and played their parts over the century and now watched as the time that had meant everything unravelled, sinking back into the earth.

They stood, and began to walk back to their slowly decomposing home. They realised in that moment, that this would be the last assignment. This would be the last resting place. Moss’ kind famously worked until their last day, when they became part of the cycle themselves and a lesson to others who would follow. Not today though, there was more to do, but soon.

The lifeworkers, retreating further under the canopy, nodded respect as the terminarch drifted in the opposite direction, heading back out into the rain. Life seemed to shrink back as they strode wearily back to the much patched and decayed prefab shack. The deep green of the forest gave way to the brighter greens of new growth and finally to the thin earth around the shack.

Moss lived on the edge of the world. On a front line of the great war for life. Beyond Moss’ home was little in the way of life for kilometres until one met the great northern agroforest. Empty land waiting for their deadly touch to bring life and bridge the gap between these two communities of life.

They hobbled through the door, home. Taking off and hanging the cloak, it would drip dry in good time, they creaked over to the table in the middle of the main room. Sinking down into a chair, they looked around them at this laboratory made out of jungle. The science of life and death filled every decrepit space. Phials and sealed jars, fungi and seedlings, soil samples and memories of a century of turmoil cluttered every shelf.

Slowly, nimble craggy fingers unclipped the rig from arms legs and waist. Leaving the armature and it’s intricately embroidered webbing sitting in the chair the terminarch rose and shuffled through a basic airlock into the next room. They stripped and hung their sturdy, comfortable work gear on the way and allowed the decom shower to extract its toll of resigned shuddering at its cool misty touch. Feeling clammy and older than the world, they fell into their unmade bed. It was warm, and soft, and as they lay, feeling their bones ache and joints settle, they wondered aloud.

“My time is over, who’s time is it now?”

Through the rain smeared skylight, the clouds parted, finally moving on. The night sky sparkled, steaked with falling stars. Moss drifted away into another of the cycles of time, after time.