Читать книгу One Night in Copan: Chronicles of Madness Foretold Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror - W. E. Gutman - Страница 13

PAST IMPERFECT

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.

The second best is to have seen the light

and then gone back quickly whence we came.

Sophocles

If the latest theoretical physics fad has any merit, a moment recorded in time, it purports, is a moment exhausted. What this axiom suggests is that impermanence is reality’s only constant. Only what remains uncreated escapes the shift from potentiality to actuality, from imminence to nothingness. To be, for all intents and purposes, is prelude to the unavoidable end of being.

For “Otto,” betrayed by the laws of probability, mocked by fate and spurned by his maker, being was unavoidably the essence of his finality. Unloved, deprived of a memory and short on dreams, Otto, poor Otto, is no sooner conjured from the dregs of an ancient genesis than undone, nullified and jettisoned into the abyss of oblivion. Were it not for some insightful and long-since forgotten astropaleobiologist, his living nightmare -- set at the beginning of time -- might never have been chronicled.

Unschooled and tentative, tolerated but never tamed, nature turned its back on itself and sanctioned -- some say, “with a vengeance” -- the spontaneous advent of a bizarre and unique life form. Ponder, if you can, an organism so vile, so grotesque, so pathetic in countenance, so tortured and twisted, and so utterly purposeless that it lived less than one Earth spin around its axis. Otto’s sudden emergence and abrupt demise defies the canons of evolution; it has no antecedent, it fits no known paradigm. The very laws of thermodynamics are being upended in the process. Serenely unconcerned, entropy spares the miserable “thing” the passage of time. It is an unlikely act of compassion in a realm of cosmic unconcern.

Discovered in meteoric debris, Otto’s fossilized remains reveal a brutish organism, apparently legless but equipped with a prehensile tail with which it flogged itself and copulated through an orifice doubling as its mouth. Paleontologists agreed that the improbable entity was covered with a scaly, mottled hide, and that its single eye, capable of polychromatic sight, was probably endowed with a gentle, almost seductive expression. Otto is also credited to have been capable of emitting piercing moans so rueful that they all but froze the hearts of those who may have heard it. The Grand Lexicon of Random Biogenic Anomalies confirms the existence of cosmic influences capable of inducing auto-asexual reproduction, though none quite as peculiar as Otto -- as the monstrosity was christened.

The ancestor and sole offspring -- the auto-progeny -- of a freak process that doomed it to genetic irrelevance, Otto is believed to have succumbed from exhaustion brought on by futile attempts to reproduce. Tritium dating has tentatively placed the appearance and virtually simultaneous disappearance of this as yet unclassified phenomenon at 500 trillion year ago.

Otto’s remains were laid to rest and a monument was erected to commemorate the momentous find and incongruity.

Signs of Man, the legendary if hypothetical vertebrate believed to have accidentally emerged at an earlier period, are never found. An acceptable theory justifying his advent and arguing his brief and noxious tenancy on a minor planet in the Milky Way Galaxy has not yet been postulated. None is forthcoming.