A Crowd of One Not Alone

 by Shaun A. Lawton

                                                                                                                                                        art by Jeff Jordan

           The seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months reel by, wound up on the spokes of time. For years that was how Orloc looked at it. The achievements of mortal beings stored up in a great wheel, a testament to the decades and centuries that have already passed. But could it be different, somehow?  Could it be that all of the millennia unwind, to be mostly forgotten, lost on the winds of time? Are they being unspooled and left formlessly adrift in our wake, just a loosely bound cluster of memories constantly unraveling and left to crumble into dust the farther into the future we travel? 

   Orloc mused over these intriguing matters and considered if there might be yet another explanation. Feeling that time appeared to be associated with motion somehow, Orloc also contemplated if it weren't a mere illusion contrived by the willfulness of the public to construct a legacy together. Then again, Orloc reconsidered, perhaps time is really nothing but another word after all, a mere place-holder invented by a society desperate to understand the incomprehensible. 

   Whatever the nature of time might be, it's just something that happens to everyone collectively, pondered over infrequently by a small percentage of the population, a consideration ultimately to be dropped by all who manage to out-survive one another. What will be the concluding memory or the last waking thought of the final man? Orloc often puzzled over these sorts of questions when he stayed up late evenings sitting outside on his deck underneath the glimmering mantle of the cosmos. 

   He was relatively certain that each pinpoint of white light twinkling overhead at night somehow indicated a demarcation in a magnificent exploded clock-face of time. If each star somehow represented its own 'second hand', Orloc mused, well that would explain a lot. For one, it would indicate that every sun existed relatively parallel to one another, with some lost civilizations marked by bright points fading in the night sky and others flickering indicators of a host of potential societies to come. 

   Orloc could readily picture in his mind's eye the countless alien individuals excommunicated from the great stage of existence upon which his kind alone seemed to currently enjoy the spotlight. For a minute, he considered his own family and friends alongside him on terra firma. See, that's just it, he reflected, not without a sense of bitterness. Our time together, shared right here simultaneously on occasions, was no less fleeting than the now long gone times in which all the remaining entities from their respective planets had enjoyed together on spontaneous occasions, once upon whenever.  

   So why this longing and feeling of wonderment? A yearning for what, exactly? To be able to spend some evanescent moments with extraterrestrial beings? Orloc gazed passively at the bright, scattered stars in the evening sky above. Were they yet to be? Or already long gone? What difference does it make? He considered for another moment, then thought to himself not in existence...that's the inescapable conclusion, here. 

   Here, existence itself in that instant suddenly appeared to Orloc in all its brilliant and stabilized glory. It focused in his imagination into one livid balancing act, at once both transient and eternal. In a single moment, just as Orloc glimpsed a shooting star from the corner of his eye, he appreciated the profound simultaneity of it all.  

   Orloc shut his eyes and accepted the idea that in all respective alien domains, every form of sentient life that ever existed before upon this great stage of time, where both his feet were now firmly planted, as well as all the various multiplicity of races to come further down the line embodied upon all the viable solar systems of the universe yet developing in their monumentally spread out proliferation, was in fact one immense contemporaneous event, quite likely shared by separate individual episodes linked together as a sort of tremendous woven mandala from which each solitary sun glimmered like an isolated jewel from a singular panoramic display whose multifaceted aspect was no different than the segment which he enjoyed now, in the present moment, out here on his dilapidated porch, imbibing a cold drink by himself underneath the shining mantle of constellations arcing slowly by overhead.  

   All by himself...but not alone. 

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Voices by John Shirley 

illustrated by Charles Carter

  

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