Humanity Prime. Bruce Mcallister

you! Where is the island? A territory near?”

      Poundgrayly arrives now within eyes’ range. I stare at the two small eyes that blink over his beak, and grow impatient.

      “Which territory?”

      “I told you a moment ago, but you were not listening. Yours.”

      “No....”

      “No? You fear the responsibility?”

      “Of course not! It is no because I cannot understand how.”

      My territory? How? There are thousands of my kind, and their thousands of large territories. That mine is the one the bigshinegray has come to is impossible!

      “More foolish thoughts—when this is one day no foolish soul should have awakened. Listen: every soul of your kind thought as you, believed the dream would eventually come—but not that the coming would be to his or her territory. ‘The world is large, and I am small,’ each soul thought as you. But when the bigshinegray came, it could only touch one territory, and chance does not apply to places or souls chosen by certainty’s ways. Cease your pink chattering, begin your swim.”

      Perhaps I do fear the responsibility, deeper than the fringe of my self’s pale knowledge:

      Suddenly the wish for Father’s death moment rushes to me again, offering strange escape from another moment—this one that my people have wanted since the beginning of our times.

      “I go, but before I go,” I say, “give me the death moment.”

      “Dumbest soul, starved yourself today? Your hunger for death so fierce. You are truly one of your dark-dreaming kind in their—”

      “Give! Please....”

      “I say no. Perhaps you will get it soon, perhaps never. If it is given, it will not be before you have greeted the souls inside the bigshinegray. If your kind could see you now, view your craving of a moment deeply trivial in this moment’s light, they would make pieces of your flesh. Go! A day’s swim lies before you.”

      The hunger dims. I begin to remember images of who I am, who my people are, why our world is divided into wide territories of lone waitings, why we have been waiting, watching, living at all for so long.

      I begin to move my tails, one up, one down, knees not touching. I tuck my head against my chest, arch my shoulders properly, kick harder, and the bright water begins to slip by.

      Behind me poundgrayly offers: “I shall move on to tell your kind this day’s event. In the moment you reach the bigshinegray’s island, perhaps all your people will know, to the ends of water....”

      The old soul dims in the distance, and I hear only faintly, “One female of mine awaits you at the chosen island. Do not keep her soft soul waiting.”

      I swim on alone.

      I would fall again into living memories with screamdeep and waterjoyup, but a larger pink memory holds me. For the first moment in my soul’s life I carry fully and endlessly the vision of all the waiting souls that are like my own.

      A bigshinegray....

      Though it belongs to the start of time, I remember well the first bigshinegray.

      See it: The ancient memories among my people are accurately formed, properly hued, passed down from father to son, soul to younger soul, precision of shared impression in a gift to each new age of children.

      As I swim on, I speak with myself, and the bottomless mouth within me opens. “See it: Many details were lost in time’s passing. The soul selects what bits of now it sees, and remembers even fewer bits to be given to other souls, younger, other. But the important parts of our beginning here have not been forgotten.”

      I remember easily the forefathering times of now as if I myself had been alive then to touch them:

      He— I— I am—

      I am one of the breathers of dryness, the touchers of dry ground, asleep in the first bigshinegray. I awake. I look around me with good eyes in the dryness I breathe, and remember that the great shiny gray cave which holds me has been traveling quickly for the longest time through an endless darkness drier than the dryness I breathe.

      “Wake up!” I say to another man—speaking with pounding rhythms from my dry moving mouth.

      Yes, and I remember now that soon the travel will end, that my bigshinegray will fall from the darkness to a fine dry land, which I will touch with the ends of my limbs, and then bear children to touch it too, and always be glad that the long sleep of travel (yes, we have been fleeing from a dark hurting thing or things) has ended. (But we will not forget: if the infinite is good to us, one dry day a bigshinegray will come to find us...one dry day sooner or later....)

      I...

      I am another man, the son of the son of the man of the bigshinegray. We have worked to make shelters on the dry land, and we are contented—

      —Until the moment we look up to the bright twin lights high above us, and find those lights beginning to change.

      We scream, we are sad, are angry, we try to hide.

      Our pale flesh bubbles, our bones run soft, our children die—inside their mothers and on the heated land.

      We die.

      But some of us live. We have changed, are different, we live.

      We change, we live, we die. Others are different too—a million differences in a million bodies. Some manage to live, but then they die. Deaths, more differences, living.

      I—

      We—

      We are different. (Live!) We live, though the land often pains. We live where land (dry hot) meets water (comfort cool) and our children live (bear children!) though many die in their differences. We are different (flee to water) but we remember something (different body then) that was our beginning.

      We die (terrible dryness!), we live (to water, go!).

      We—

      We are different, now, here, the water around. There are many of us. We dream of a large gray thing (it will come: remember). We swim, we live—we die (children without tails).

      I—

      I am one of the first souls with bodies of change—legs with tails, not with stumps so worthless for swimming. (“Remember,” tell your children, “the shiny gray thing of dreams, night and waking, brought the yester-us from darkness to here, to these waters. Another one will come—tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow—to discover us....”)

      I—

      I am my father’s son. (“Remember,” he always told us, brothers and me, “it will come.”) I look up at the light which falls from dryness into our waters. I am waiting. All of us are. We dream of hot, of rotting flesh, of large dark caves, of brilliant round lights, of strange infants, of stranger old men, all things we fail to understand. We understand waiting, but this is not enough, and our depths scream black moans, and many of us seek to kill ourselves for the deaths we all seem to want—son after son after son’s son.

      I wait.

      I wait, and we all say, “Remember.”

      I—

      I am—

      I am fishsinger, in the pink of now—

      —the boy who swims toward the bigshinegray now finally come; the single soul who will greet the breathers of dryness, the touchers of dry land, the speakers with mouth’s rhythms, the sons of our shared forefathers—who have come to us from endless darkness dryness.

      I will tell them about the changes that have come to us, the rise of soul’s strength, the lengthening of legs, the life of water’s embrace.

      We have remembered.

      But as I swim toward the island, purple eyes lift in