skonen_blades

Darwin, in Galapagos, wrote evolution down
But those are not the only islands where strange things abound
Where dead ends merely hang a left off road and innovate
Where niches beg for filling so the mutations mutate
In distant, misty seas that hide away from human eyes
In secret archipelagos, they warp and improvise

Why, take the chain called Runktugus in South Pacific seas
A tiny group of dots on maps and rich in manganese
Though no one know its rich because it’s yet to be explored
In fact the only people who have ever been before
Is one young sailing couple who were gusted way off course
(They struggled back to port but it resulted in divorce)

But on the beach they picnicked while they planned a way back home
And left the basket there awash in tidal ocean foam
With all the dishes, vessels, tools, utensils, mugs, and such
And Darwin would be first to say it doesn’t take that much
It’s been centuries since they both luncheoned near the sea
And what they left behind is now a strange menagerie

Their detritus and tableware has mixed and reproduced
And evolutionary overdrive’s been soundly goosed
The simple fork and knife and spoon combined in many ways
The glass, the bowl, the plate, the cup, are also in these bays
They mix and warp, compounding genes in ways complex and free
Some grotesque and some divine, all with some specialty

They fill each niche that offers food with new ecologies
They cross breed, grow and mutate into new zoologies
There’s sporks and foons and knorkenspives that flit from tree to tree
There’s every kind of combo of this mutant cutlery
The crockery’s been remixed on the potter’s wheel of time
With halfglass cups that undulate near plates that grasp and climb

They’ve even mated with the local wildlife round here
There’s even jellyfish of glass that look like chandeliers
There’s turtle baskets, bottlefish, and spoonsnakes in the hills
There’s tablecloths that fly like moths with bird-like hunting skills
There’s urchins made of fork tines and some bushes growing knives
There’s little tiny pepper shakers living out their lives

A colony of cheese-knife ants walk past some teacup seals
And near to them a frightened corkscrew-bodied otter squeals
There’s bowlicans and parrotknives, and bugs with forks for tails
And never do these animals see passing sailboat sails
They live in freakish joy without a pen to call them freaks
As evolution improvises wild new techniques

But that’s just one of many islands we have never seen
There’s probably a thousand of them warping cell and gene
Playing jazz with DNA and objects washed ashore
Microcosmic symphonies that scream for an encore
Ecospheres with no one there to call them weird or strange
And where the only constant constant is, as always, change



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We were so wrong.

We saw evolution as a paring down to essentials. Our pinkies were getting shorter and soon we might only have four fingers, for instance. We theorized evolution as a process that winnowed away the unnecessary. It aspired to simplicity, we thought.

The spiked and glimmering ships that came down through the clouds all over the world looked nothing like each other. The only characteristic they all shared was that they were complex.

One ship was a series of two hundred rings interlocked and rotating. One ship had millions of thin antennae pulsing and waving, landing like an obscene sea urchin and balancing on fibers no wider that a hair. Impossible half-invisible cathedrals, glowing neon origami, ships comprised of stuttering light floated down from the sky. Ships made of dyed bones, ships made of all types of metal, and ships made of patchwork flesh warbled their way to the earth. One ship appeared to be a sixteen-mile long piece of crimped silk twisting through the air currents ever closer to the ground. Another had thousands of orbiting asteroids chasing each other around playfully.

Since no missiles were flying and the newsfeed stations showed the ships landing around the world with no gunfire, I could only assume they had arranged this with our governments already or that the entire planet’s military had been struck frozen in fear like a caveman spotted by a sabertooth tiger.

A mirrored mobius dodecahedra touched down on the soil in the central park near where I lived in Iowa. It was only a few blocks over so I walked there to see what I could see. If this was the end of the world, I was going to grab a front seat. There were around fifty like-minded people in the park near the craft.

It shone and sparkled in the sun like a mutated disco ball. My head hurt if I tried to figure out its impossible shape. One panel of the ship disintegrated into a cloud of metal butterflies and an alien cantered down before us.

What I assume was its head looked like an ornate chandelier. It moved quickly, rippling on millions of tiny legs. No two legs appeared to have the same number of toes or joints. It had so many arms that I initially mistook them for fur, each arm ending in what looked like a job-specific tip. Its back was infested with softly cooing antlers. I couldn’t guess at the purpose of most of the appendages. The complexity of the alien was almost too much for my mind to handle. It was hypnotizing.

Two other aliens ambulated out behind the creature, each of them more bizarre, colourful, and complicated that the first one. One looked to have hundreds of blinking cat heads, each with too many eyes. It rolled forward on a festival of coloured tentacles and flapped a hundred types of tiny wings. The other one kept going in and out of focus like it wasn’t tethered to this reality very well but when I could see it, it looked as if the instruments from an entire orchestra had been glued together by some welder gone mad.

The one in the lead spoke by rattling its glittering chandelier head and formulating the sound waves into words in our direction.

“We’ve come to help.” It said in a lilting voice. “Apparently, you’re evolving backwards.”



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You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.

You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.

That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.

They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.

They looked like us for a reason.

And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.

In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.

Humans.

Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.

According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.

That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.

We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.

We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.

But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.

It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.

The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.

The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.

Suits us fine.

However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.

And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.




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There. On the beach of the Glassapagos islands.

The Darwin Sisters: Rebecca, Sanskrit, Sunita, and Lullaby.

Eccentric to a fault. Their attention to detail and ludicrous theories concerning the origins of tableware were infamous in the courts of Blue Albion. Four pairs of glasses winked white in the sun. Their white chemises fluttered in the silent breeze. The peace was marred now and then by the light scraping of metal and glass on the volcanic glass of the islands.

The Darwin Sisters’ theory of evolution had a chance to be proven here. The Glassapagos islands were cut off from every other silicosm in the world and the islands were neither too large nor too hazardous to cross on foot. A rarity.

Life was abundant on the islands. The ladies focused on photographing, collecting, and recording all of the evolutionary dead ends and keeping them safe in their records for posterity.

Rebecca concentrated on the glassware. So far, her favourite was the silver-ringed Tuscany: a head-sized bulb of glass so thin that it flexed on the air currents. Four rings of silver, two near the top and one near the skirt with the last one glinting in the middle, acted as both conductors and constrictors, pulsing to keep the animal aloft like an airborne jellyfish.

Just one wrong move and the silver-ringed Tuscany shattered on the rocks. The winds were unpredictable but the Tuscany were numerous. Their deaths softly filled the air now and then with a wind-chime exodus of souls.

There was a species of softglass urchin. There were spun-glass tumbleweeds and the manta ray panes. There were even chandelier kites far above the island, soaking in the sun and avoiding danger. Rebecca looked up at them, holding on to her wide brimmed sun hat.

Sanskrit, dozens of yards away, squinted her piggy eyes down at the forkroach she had crawling in her hand, the tines touching her skin. They sensed the dim current she had firing through her human nerves. The fork’s handle curved around in a hoop, no silvertamer’s stamp yet on it.

She took notes on the spoondragons and the knife beetles. Wild cutlery fascinated her so. She had mapped seven separate species of garlic press clattering softly amongst the rocks so far, and she had seen something that looked like a cross between an apple-peeler and a can opener that she named a Scuttlejaw because of its odd locomotion.

There was cutlery here whose uses could only be guessed at. The utensils were improvising, going down paths that deviated from the eventual use at the dinner table. It was fascinating to surmise purpose and entertain notions of genus.

The lensant, for instance, cooked its food with the focused sun’s rays. They were annoying creatures that had peppered her and her sisters' exposed ankles with tiny burns when they first strode ashore from the rowboat. However, when she had held one up over her notebook to take notes on it, the writing beneath the single lens of the insect had come into sharper focus.

Single lens cutlery? Unheard of. This would make the binocular theory clergy go mad. She sweated and smiled in the sun, writing furiously.

Sunita, dark-haired and wandering, had found a nest of Igneous Ocularis ‘Eye-Rocks’. Black rocks with nodules of polished mirror protruding from their skin, blinking as the sun changed position and shutting entirely when Sunita’s shadow fell across them. They were soft and warm to the touch. They cried silently when they were picked up, oily tears soaking the palms of her hands. She loved them.

Lullaby was sitting next what might have been the most exciting discovery of all: a nest of vacuum tubers. She was the youngest. Nearly albino, her long white hair lifted in the soft breezes as the nest of vacuum tubers buzzed and beeped softly. Were they calling for a parent? Trying to communicate with her? Were they aware she was there?

She would have to bring a few back for her Aunt Marconi to look at further.

She set up her daguerreotype to take pictures. Soon she must take the camera to her sister’s sites for another round of photographs and a brief sharing of notes and sychronizing of watches.

They worked in silence, accustomed to each other and comfortable in their shared obsession. These finds would revolutionize dinner tables around Europe.

The ship and her sailors waited offshore for the signal to come and collect the girls. They were only too happy to do so. The young ladies and their passionless stares unnerved the sailors more than any tale of sirens or kraken.






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