An Unkillable Frog
regression would take an exponentially larger number of halls; at some point the galleries would have to interweave and cross, for your antecedents were not limitless in number. You have arisen from a cauldron of human genetic material bounded now by borders and datelines, but once merely by the farthest field that marked the village’s end. So we will not navigate such a landscape.
Irrespective of this, father to son is important, Nathan. Knowledge of our fathers is what completes a man.
Nathan wiped a tear into his sleeve and smiled.
On we go then. Let us say you start to walk down this hall towards its far end. You choose a gentle pace, and stop to neither study your ancestor’s faces nor acknowledge their presence. They are half-aware of you and I, for no museum exhibits are these. They are your flesh, Nathan, caught betwixt the dream-world and waking. Their time came, be it by the sword or pestilence or the sure hand of age. Shed no tears for them, for we see them now as they would like us to, in youth undiminished.
Nathan’s father was indeed about twenty-five, in clothes that made the boy glance downwards so as not to divulge his amusement. He stood as a soldier might, a half-smile upon his lips, his eyes unfocussed. His son extended a tentative finger for purposes of cheek-prodding, but thought better of it. Nathan returned to the book.
The generations recede.
Lifting from the flagstones imperceptibly, the Knight and Nathan flew down the hall. The ranks blurred to patterns of oscillating haze, like fence-posts viewed from a speeding car.
Weapons sit at the hip of some; still others are bedecked with tools unfamiliar to you. In 10 minutes’ walk you might gain the edge of recorded history. These fathers are hunters. Wolf-teeth crowd their necks in links of polished white; they slew lions where the Eiffel Tower now stands.
The boy sought echoes of his own face within these warriors. They were much smaller than he could have imagined. One clasped a stubby bow tight to his chest, his cheeks furrowed with thin scars of lost ritual. As Nathan peered at the man, there was the barest rightward shift of his eyes; his head shifted an inch or two. Nathan jumped in alarm.
Betwixt the dream-world and waking, read the book. On a summer’s afternoon within the fern-fronds of some ancient vale, this man will now be rousing. He will tell his clan-mates his vision of you.
The pair rushed on again. It seemed that the air offered no resistance to their passing. To Nathan’s surprise, their flight’s end was accompanied by no discomforting feeling of deceleration. Scott enjoyed a game based around just this premise, gunning his car and then stomping on the brakes again and again in cycles of lurching queasiness.
The crab’s claws scattered a page free:
Beyond the ice ages, their jaws flatten slightly and brows bulge, these fathers. We see evolution’s hand.
These beings were just as the Knight had described. Their dress of roughly cut hide differed little now from generation to generation. They were more an amorphous rank stretching without limit to Nathan’s left and right. The boy described to the Knight a picture he encountered once in a science book: a fish flopping stumpy legs upon the ground away from a fetid pool. Beyond this creature crawled an amphibian, and beyond that a lizard, and so on until a businessman strode into destiny bearing a suitcase. He told the Knight of this picture.
Such is man’s conceit. When you have the merest inkling of the true nature of that progression, it shall depart and never return. Also consider that your ancestry is but one species of human, Nathan. There were others –
“Neanderthals!” said the boy excitedly. Before the page turned, he noticed the dash after “others” and felt less pleased with his answer than he might have liked. The per-ordained nature of their conversation weighed upon him somehow, dulling the amazements of the Ancestral Hall.
Yes, Neanderthals and many others. None of their descendants walks with us today. It is like a great and monstrous family who board a ship for a new land. Its uncles are ogres, dressed in their mammoth-hide finery. Goblin children crowd the decks. These grotesques are all your blood, Nathan. Say some pestilence befalls the tribe mid-ocean and a solitary child survives to make landfall: Homo sapiens sapiens, double wise man. The companions we had on that forlorn voyage are soon forgotten, save as wisps of legend.
Nathan nodded.
Perhaps this father-
The Knight drew his sword and laid it upon the shoulder of the closest being; the page flipped and took up with a dash and the word “Slaughter.”
-slaughtered the last of some ancient race of man-kin. He may have seen them as usurpers, sport for the hunt or even game. Who can tell?
With a barely audible sigh, the ancestor shrugged one shoulder against the sword’s weight.
There is no easy leap from man to animal, no clear devolution. Just as surely, the light of intelligence does not dim in the space of a generation. 2,039,808,385 people currently walking upon the Earth can trace their lineage, as you do, directly to this man. When might the soul be lost and the breath of divinity expire within the hulking beast?
Again, Nathan nodded and was silent.
A week’s journey by foot.
They travelled at far greater speed now, the Ancestral Hall all but a haze far beyond the discernment of shape or colour.
We pass your fathers as might a general reviewing a troop of billions.
Their pace slackened. The faces sliding by at vision’s periphery were that of apes no taller than Nathan’s shoulder. This vision perturbed him, somehow, and he asked the Knight not to stop.
Certainly, the page read, in these eyes we would not see beings covetous of dominion . I see an animal whose ascendancy is by no means assured; whose rule might be thwarted by comet-smite, pestilence or vaporous effusion of pyroclastic gases from within the Earth. On we go.
Their next stop was before a line of cat-sized creatures that Nathan fought the urge to stroke, despite their strong resemblance to dogs crossed with fierce rodents. As before, the animals were identical to their fellows in both directions. Nathan was reminded instantly of a rather feral pet show.
The common ancestor of the mammalian line. Within this body plan lies potentiality for a organism as large as a bus and as small as your thumb; who will sprout wings and blind itself as it worries its way through the soil.
Gently, the Knight knelt and extended a gauntlet to smooth a stray wisp of hair from the closest mammal-father.
This is wealth, Nathan. An evolutionary richness of which you are but one inheritor. Which is to be though of as more worthy of awe, a whale-song or the Sistine Chapel? You are a man at arms in the company of mammals, Nathan. Unique is your awareness of self, but nothing else about you might be though of as such. Genetically speaking, you are an eyeblink away from a chimpanzee.
Nathan recalled the moment Jeremy had revealed this fact to him. His friend seemed to take this as a confirmation of man’s baser instincts, a reason their war-play would remain with them lifelong.
In another hundred million years, will your ancestor still walk upon this or other worlds? Will your line end, as did the Neanderthals, cowering at a spear-tip? Look with reverence upon this father, Nathan. Its children are your brothers; race-car drivers and killer whales.
Without warning, they alighted and sped away.
We move now faster than anyone has before, ten kilometres a second. In a half-minute’s travel down the hall at this pace, we have passed several million years. The entirety of recorded human history flashes past in the merest paring of a moment. Even at this rate, we will need half a day to reach life’s beginning. Should we accelerate now to the speed of light, we shall be there in a little over five minutes.
It is almost impossible to comprehend what we pass by: the dinosaurs wither to lizards in a matter of seconds; their fathers and yours become fish soon after that. For most of this time though, Nathan, life consists of the very simplest creatures that can be.
“Bacteria?” suggested the boy. The Knight shook his head and the book
flipped a page.
Your father here is the father of even bacteria. Although of course, the term “father” loses its meaning this far back. Lineage itself is lost.
Nathan frowned.
Let us stop, and I will explain.
They did so. The hall here was empty in both directions. Nathan peered at the flagstones to discern a scrap of slime or frog’s egg-like collection of cells, but there was nothing.
Life at a basic level is the transposition of genes. A gene is an instruction for the coding of proteins. Yes my boy, such is reductivism and such are you. But here is a time before life constituted the exchange of genetic material.
Nathan could not stop his eyes from finding the hall’s horizon, where ceiling and floor converged in an implacable whole. The sight disconcerted him.
“Where do animals begin again?” he asked.
Walk now, Nathan, and never rest. At the end of your life you will not be able to differentiate this stretch of hall from the one that passes your dying eyes.
“Oh,” said the boy.
Run for a thousand years and find your animal. Forget not that here lies the font of plants. Here, your brothers shall be summer grasses and mildew and willow trees.
“Can we go further back?” Nathan asked.
Life finds no irreducible instance of primacy.
"You mean there's no first father at the beginning of everything," said Nathan.
Indeed, read the book, a state in itself perversely paradoxical.