A diary in the age of wa.., p.23
A Diary in the Age of Water, page 23
When I read her entry, I wondered if she broke up with Hanna. Then last night I caught Hilde crying and I immediately felt a sense of elation—God forgive me. They must have broken up!
But when I gently questioned her, she told me that the last Rorqual whale on the planet had perished. She was crying about the whales. The humpback whale is officially extinct. Right on the heels of the fin whale, the grey whale, the blue whale, and the minke whale. All gone. Forever. First we hunted them to near extinction, then we harvested their food, then we ruined their habitat, and then the oceans warmed and finished them off. The humpback was Hilde’s favourite animal. She considered it a sentinel. It sang the Earth’s song. I remember her school project on this magnificent animal.
I find myself more stunned by the reporting of this finding than its actual veracity. Who keeps track of these things anymore? The statistics are obscene: over three hundred species go extinct every day. This is the greatest loss that the world has experienced since the dinosaurs vanished sixty-five million years ago. It’s become hackneyed.
First they are vulnerable, then of special concern, then threatened, then endangered, then extirpated, and then finally extinct.
I suddenly remembered that absurd conversation with Daniel in Steinberg’s lab—about us turning into rotifers. But we aren’t rotifers and we never will be; they’ll still be here long after we’re gone. Like other invertebrates—insects, bacteria, fungi, and viruses—they will inherit the Earth. It’s only fitting that the lowly tiny creatures we find reprehensible will outlive us. The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Even the beaver, one of our most cherished symbols, has succumbed—just last year—to a new climate-related disease. Beavers, like many north-temperate animals, had been steadily migrating north along with the hardwoods. Literally ages ago, during the Pleistocene and late Pliocene, they used to inhabit the north. The two-metre-long beaver—Castoroides—was the largest rodent in North America during the Pleistocene. When the permafrost thaw unleashed the giant virus, the same virus that had killed the beaver’s prehistoric relative—it went through our beavers like an epidemic, hitting migrants first, then sweeping south to wipe them out before they could develop any kind of immunity.
Is climate change the planet’s way of telling us that we no longer belong?
That we’ve largely orchestrated these changes ourselves is ironic—or is it simply inevitable? Ecological succession happens everywhere following environmental disturbance: a species comes, establishes, then impacts and alters its environment, eventually making the environment less suited to it and more to another species, which will replace it. The succession only stops when a climax community is established. The climax stage can persist indefinitely—until the next environmental disturbance, that is. And there always is one.
Canadians were stewards of the global water cycle, custodians of over a fifth of the planet’s freshwater. We didn’t understand our responsibility. So, when they came—like with the beaver and the giant virus—we were totally unprepared. And yet we should have been, because we knew they were coming. The American and Chinese politicians and engineers. We let them seduce us with promises of jobs and money. Then they took our water. All of it.
Our mistake was to think the bully was our friend. He was never our friend. He will never be our friend. We let him in and played fair with him. But our mistake was that we made him our friend instead of demanding his respect.
Hilde will be part of the first generation to live in the Canadian state. There is no Canada anymore; we gave Canada to the bully. Canada is extinct, along with the beaver, the symbol of hardworking, naïve fools. Because that’s what we are.
When I joined CanadaCorp, I joined the bully’s gang. I helped them get rid of Orvil, who was in their way. And then I discarded Daniel because he was inconvenient. I never stood up for Canada. I never stood up for the trees, lakes, streams, and birds of my homeland. The voiceless.
Mother was right.
I’ve become the bully.
The Seed Ship
That is the last entry. The remaining pages are torn out.
Kyo frantically flips the torn edges, hoping for more entries.
This can’t be! What happened to the torn pages? What of Hilde? How did she and Hanna become the Water Twins of Gaia? How did they destroy humanity? What about the Intervention?
Kyo surges to her feet and looks for Ho, who is still lurking in the main stacks. Finding the old crone randomly moving books on the shelf, Kyo confronts her. “I think you intended for me to find this.” She waves the journal in front of Ho.
Ho glances from the journal to Kyo with a stony face. She says nothing.
Kyo feels her muscles shake with anger. “What did you do with the last pages?” She demands.
Ho looks affronted for a moment and then sighs with a tired smile. “I didn’t tear them out, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
But Ho isn’t surprised either, notes Kyo. She studies the librarian. “Who did, then? I know you put this journal there for me to find. Why did you do that if the answers are missing?”
Ho raises a brow as an ironic smile slants across her face. “Not if you know how to look.” Then her stern face warms suddenly, breaking into a faint smile as she glances past Kyo.
Kyo turns and sees Nam, who has silently entered and now sits at the long table at the far end of the library that faces the windows to the forest. Seeing Nam’s warm smile, Kyo brightens. She fills the room with her wise and gentle essence.
Nam, like Ho and the others, are not like Kyo; they only have two arms, one on either side, and their skin is pale and warmly coloured. Nam has the eyes of a mother. They invite Kyo to join her. Ho nods, and they join Nam at the table. Nam carries the scent of rain and leaves as though she has captured the outdoors in her robes. “What question burns still inside you, Sprite? What answers do you seek?” asks Nam. Her voice flows like sparkling clear water.
Kyo pulls the journal open at the torn pages. “These pages are torn out.” She sees in Nam’s face that both she and Ho obviously knew about the missing pages. They look recently torn out. “Did you tear them out?” she asks Nam. Despite herself, her tone sounds challenging.
“Kyo!” Ho remonstrates.
“I’m sorry,” Kyo apologizes, bowing her head with renewed humility. She then raises her eyes to meet Nam’s. “But I need to know. And I think you are both withholding something from me.” She glances from Nam to Ho. “Is there another diary?” She thinks of Hilde’s notebook.
“What answers do you seek, Sprite?” Nam repeats.
“What about the Water Twins? And the Intervention?” the words spill out. “What happened after?”
“You know what happened after,” Nam says calmly.
“I only know what Renge shared with me, what I read in a few historical documents, and what my dreams have shown me. I shared my dreams with Myo, and she confirmed that what I had seen was true.”
“Ah, the dreams…”
“But why did it happen? And how? What about the Intervention? What was it and how did it save humanity?”
“You think the Intervention saved humanity? What makes you think that?”
Kyo stutters defensively, unprepared. “I … well … the angry Twins unleashed an angry Gaia. Nature all but destroyed us and the planet as we know it. If not for the Intervention, none of us would be here now….”
Nam stands and rearranges her elegant robes. “Walk with me,” she says to Kyo, nodding at Ho to remain behind.
Kyo rises, still clutching the journal with one of her four hands.
“Leave that here; you won’t need it where we are going,” says Nam. “Come.”
Kyo sets the journal on the table with a terse glance at Ho as if to warn her off. Then she joins Nam, who is already walking to a large oak door, her long robes flowing behind her like sails in a wind. She glides like a river, her statuesque form almost reaching the height of the door.
The door opens to a large courtyard, rich with the complex, sweet, and pungent smell of plants Kyo does not recognize and has never before seen. The garden is vast, larger than it seems from the outside, as though it defies logic. At the far end of the garden, she sees a solid gateway that glows with a blue light. Kyo’s first thought is that they have passed through a gate into another world. How else can all this be here, hidden in the forest?
“Sit with me,” says Nam, seating herself on a nearby wooden bench. Kyo sits beside her, breathing in Nam’s scent of oak and fir.
Nam surprises Kyo with her next question: “Have you wondered why, of the thousand or so Kyos scattered throughout the world, you are the only one who is reluctant to leave?”
Kyo stares.
Nam looks down at Kyo. “They are all waiting for you.”
Kyo breaks off her gaze from her mentor and studies the paving stone at her feet. “I know.”
Nam surprises her again. “It is not because of the maple.”
Kyo’s gaze darts up to meet Nam’s enigmatic stare.
“Come, Sprite, what is really troubling you?”
How can Kyo explain her brooding guilt to Nam when she can’t even explain it to herself? “I feel…” She trails off, looking into the garden of exotic plants.
“Guilty?”
Kyo’s eyes snap to Nam’s face, then she drops her gaze to the ground. “How did you know?” she murmurs to the ground.
Nam responds, “Surely you do not still feel guilty about who and what you are, my little Sprite?”
Kyo studies her blue hands. They are … so blue.
“You are the future,” says Nam quietly.
“I just wish I wasn’t … so … blue.”
Nam laughs. “Still wishing you were simply normal, eh?”
Kyo stares at her mentor. She can’t hide anything from her.
“I comprehend your need to understand the past; that is the only way for you to understand where you must go,” says Nam. “But, for someone who has dreamed so much of the past, you don’t know much about what really happened, do you?” After a pause, she adds, “Tell me what you know of the past.”
Kyo takes in a deep breath and then launches into an effusion of words. “The Water Twins unleashed a wrathful Gaia with their alien technology, frequency generators, and shamanic potions. First, the water changed, then the land. When the ice melted, sea levels rose quickly, and there were terrible storms. The oceans acidified, and the global water cycle became unstable. Permafrost melted and released huge amounts of methane that spiked the carbon in our atmosphere and made the warming worse. Humanity became infertile, except for the odd hermaphrodite birth through parthenogenesis. That was followed by a group of virgin births—all mutant girls—but then they disappeared suddenly. Some suggest that they were all rounded up and murdered. They were considered abominations. Then humanity went almost extinct due to shock protein failure. If not for the Intervention, there would be no humans left. As it is, there are no more men on the planet; we simply stopped making them.” She sucks in halting breaths, then continues. “Everything led to the trees. They started dying. Like the maple. The planet is now heaving with the instability of transition. That’s where we are now.”
Nam is silent for a time. She quietly examines her long robe. When she finally speaks, she looks right into Kyo. “As our trees die, they signal the onset of a new age. Gaia is giving birth to a new world, one in which we no longer belong. It is time for water to move again. Water must move. Just as it travels from lake to river and ocean, water must flow from planet to comet to black hole. As it has for all time.”
Kyo blinks with this new information. She glances to the gate at the end of the garden. Its closed doors glow with an eerie blue light. Hoping for clarification, she adds, “But what about the Intervention? What brought it on? What was it, in fact? Was it an alien race? How did they save us—well, such as we are? And are they still here?”
“Water has intelligence, but it is ultimately altruistic,” Nam says, apparently ignoring Kyo’s questions. “To move this way, to leave a planet, water must have the appropriate trigger. And the right reason.”
Kyo stares at Nam expectantly. “What is the right reason?”
“Not what, who.”
“Who, then?” Kyo asks, finding an edge in her voice she didn’t intend. “Was it the aliens?”
Nam looks at her strangely, and Kyo feels the hair on her neck rise.
“Hanna signalled the Intervention without realizing what she was doing,” Nam says, not quite answering Kyo’s question. “The Water Twins were so innocent, Kyo. That was the key, their innocence. Their genuine and selfless intention. When Hanna succeeded in changing enough of water’s frequency with her generator and crystal amplifier, Hilde charged it with her intention: to save Water.”
To save water? Not humanity and not the planet?
“That signalled the first of the Intervention’s three steps.”
Kyo remains silent, hoping Nam will elaborate. She doesn’t. But one eyebrow rises on her regal face. Kyo’s breath hitches suddenly as a truth she both knows and doesn’t understand claws up her throat. “Steps?” she barely gets out.
“There are no alien beings,” Nam says, waving her hand dismissively with an arcane smile. “Not strictly speaking, that is.” Then she adds, winking, “Unless you understand that water has an alien origin.”
“What are you saying? That Water intervened to save the human race? How could it have? It was part of the catastrophe that almost wiped us out.”
“Yes. That was the first step.”
Kyo frowns with frustration. Why is Nam being coy with her? What is she meant to learn? “I don’t understand. The first step? What are the three steps?”
“The Ouroboros of creative-destruction, and then the leaving.”
Kyo pulls in a deep breath. Three steps: destruction; creation; leaving? She understands step one—the destruction through floods and storms—but what was created in step two? And how did step three result in her sisters leaving? Nam said there were no alien beings. “What makes the Intervention … the Intervention?”
“You do.”
“I do?” Kyo instinctively pulls back from Nam and stares, puzzled and growing more perplexed. “The vivid dreams—” she cuts off, unwilling to grasp the hidden truth within her dreams. They are so vivid, so real, that she often wakes in a terrible sweat, distressed and aching all over.
Nam senses her confusion and hesitation. “For the seeds of the lodgepole pine to germinate, they must first burn in a great fire. And then that fire must get put out, just as water, when exposed to the vacuum of space, must first boil and turn to vapour before it can freeze into long-lasting crystals. A transformation is required.”
Kyo sighs heavily. When Nam resorts to metaphor, it usually means that Kyo must learn for herself. But she does not understand. They sit for a long time in silence. Kyo breathes in Nam’s fresh scent of the forest and examines the intricate paving stones of the garden.
Then Nam finally speaks again. “Creative-destruction is part of an eternal cycle of transformation that comprises the whole. It is the great paradox. One cannot exist without the other. They lead to each other. To create, we must destroy, and destruction must have creation. They belong together, just as impermanence is part of permanence. These all lead to transformation, the one constant in the universe.”
“You are saying that nothing is bad or good—it just is. Does that justify the hatred of the Twins? Does it justify the actions they took to unleash Nature’s rage and destruction?”
Nam shakes her head with sadness in her eyes. “Not hatred, Sprite. Nature does not get angry. But Gaia does respond to cause with effect. There is always consequence to every action: to the acidification of the coral reefs and oceans, to industrial and municipal effluent entering our rivers and freshwater lakes, to the drainage of our wetlands, to deforestation and desertification, to mining of groundwater, to fracking, and to massive diversions. These all lead to vast ecosystem loss, massive extinctions, and disturbance of global life. They all signalled the end of the Age of Water. All was already in motion, in concert with global warming. The Twins were just the catalyst. They triggered the Intervention. To free Water—”
“To free water?” Kyo blinks several times, trying to make sense of this revelation. Water needed freeing? She has never considered that before. “But why is it that I have never placed myself into these dreams? If I was somehow part of the Intervention—as I think you are suggesting—how can that be? How could I be there when I am here? The time is all wrong. And how can I not remember something so phenomenal?”
“We. You mean we, don’t you?” Nam tilts her head slightly. “Water is a pleroma. It came to Earth, then travelled from ice to river and lake, to plant and vapour and air, and then to ocean. Together, then separate, as drops, as crystals, as flowing liquid, water is a whole. Kyos are all one. You are thinking that you were born much too late for the Intervention—which happened hundreds of years ago—even though your dreams of it are as vivid as they would be if it had just occurred. But think of your strange bond with the Water Twins. Kyos are the sutra, the voice of Water. You are the thread of life that connects everything through sound and vibration, and through the past, present, and future. You are just like water, which exists in gas, liquid, and solid forms. Time does not exist for a multi-dimensional being, Kyo. Like Water, you are the question and the answer.”
It doesn’t make sense to Kyo. “You’re saying that I—all Kyos—were the Intervention.”
“Are,” Nam corrects her. “Not were. In some very real way that event is occurring in the present, right now, as we are standing here. As all Kyos dream it….”
“We dreamed it into being?”
“Think of the vividness of your dreams, Kyo. Why do you harbour so much guilt about a time to which you have no connection? Why are you intimately linked to the Water Twins? Because you are their water, Kyo. Their water is your water. You incarnate their intention and they incarnate yours. You dream them and they dream you.” After a long pause, she adds, “Hilde gave birth to a baby girl…”
