29/05/01 Wrong Turn
A kangaroo was quietly cruising the scorching wasteland he called home, picturing in his mind the various females he had been given to meet. He judged them on their symmetry, their health, their age... He also judged them on cultural factors - for kangaroos indeed shared a culture; and it was one in which those who could leap very, very high, were acknowledged as the superior specimen. Some kangaroos were so powerful that they could climb up to the koalas, in their eucalyptus trees, without touching any wood or any other forms of vegetal life. Kangaroos were not monogamous, obviously, but it was true of life that beautiful people preferred to bread each other.
Then! Suddenly! Domestic cat! Camel! Horse! Tiger-elephant-bear-salmon-rat-armadillo-parrot-hippopotamus! Bald Eagles! Alligators! Capuchin Monkeys!
Flying sharks! Not quite ... but almost!
The kangaroo suffered an unspeakable, existential dread, as he witnessed in abject horror the much, much larger context annihilate the one he had evolved to understand. “What do you *mean*, poison is not the best evolution? Are you a drooling koala? Everyone *knows* the apex life forms compete to produce the best venom!” the kangaroo debated to himself.
“Alas! My strange friend, that as become a lie!” a foreign presence spoke in his back.
The night was dark, and the kangaroo knew instinctively the voice of a predator. He jumped forward, turning about.
There, from the shadows, a wolf approached him, quite young in appearance. The kangaroo relaxed somewhat, because his powerful legs could make short work of this potential threat.
“It is not venom, but intelligence! The priceless answer to a priceless question!” he continued, in a soft, calming tone.
“Who are you, intruder” the kangaroo spoke, unreceptive, “to include yourself as you just did? Have you no respect for boundaries?”
“Ah!” - it was a knowing “Ah!”, the kind that could only come from a jaded traveler with tens of years of experience tasting and recognizing a fine wine he had half forgotten. It somewhat clashed with his youthful appearance; maybe the light of the moon and stars was particularly generous.
“I am a simple wolf. I heard the noises from a distance, and felt this profound, visceral urge to join. For what is the lonely night, but a scar to the soul?”
The wolf howled at the sky, his effort receiving nothing but silence.
After a short pause, the wolf continued: “will you please tolerate my companionship on this one night, my friend?”
The kangaroo did not know how to refuse - or relax his vigilance. And so they spoke through the night.
“Humans! You know them to live in huts, and barter in loud, arbitrary noises; the ones I know, however, have developed quite intricate and sophisticated designs! You will see the difference, trust me. They will build out of wood, gray wood and rock; and always it will be untold experiments of straightness and squareness! You have never seen just how long a strand of gray wood can be! It will easily cover the entire world, placated with its perpendicular wood beams ... and the entire world is much bigger than this island!”
“Mark my words! Take the two furthest points on this island; in your lifetime they will be covered with one such structure!” the wolf continued, dealing with silence the only way he knew.
“I am not afraid of humans! Kangaroos are allowing them to live here, not the other way around!”
“Do as you please; yet I must urge you to never walk upon the Black Soil. You will recognize it instantly, for it is very hard and fosters no vegetal life. There lives only bloodthirsty demons. Just run away.”
“I am sure that many animals that have crossed your path have felt the same way about you, you know?” spoke the kangaroo, skeptical.
“You are prejudiced against me; which is perfectly fine. In my many travels, I have found many animals, mostly birds, whom did not know to fear in advance. Not having evolved prejudice, their fate was sealed by the extermination of their individual species.”
“You have visited many islands?” the kangaroo spoke, suddenly interested.
“Why, yes! Of course! It took thousands of individual swims across the Great Water, and as many islands to visit, in order to reach this place. Why, I was even born on one! Oh! It was much smaller than yours. If you were to swim north for countless days, you might just stumble upon my ancestral home - yet none of my kind you will meet.”
“None?”
“Indeed. I believe I am the last of my kind.”
“What happened?”
The wolf hesitated to reply; the kangaroo realized there could only be one answer -humans- and shifted the subject.
“You come to me with these tall tales. And they are entertaining, that is not the issue; but I obviously cannot mold my behavior to fit these special rules that you seem to be conjuring from nothing I can touch or smell or hear! Even if you are honest, I will need the shock of interacting with these demons you speak of in order to properly understand, in my genes, in my foundation, the set of preferences that is warranted for me to possess to be capable of dealing with these new challenges!”
“You are half right, kangaroo; and for that you deserve praise, intelligence being such a rare display amongst the consumers of plants. Your mistake is believing that you are being challenged, when you are so far behind that you are kept around precisely because you present less of a challenge, in contrast with carnivores, whom are evermore systematically purged from this world.”
“Have you considered that no one likes predators?”
The wolf did not reply immediately; when he did, it was through a surprising redirection:
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know any of your kind. I will venture that you are younger than ten summers, and older than two.”
“I have witnessed one hundred summers.”
The kangaroo looked at the wolf, confused. Finally, he said:
“I do not know your kind. Is that a lot?”
“Oh yes! It is! And all these years, I have felt as young as three, and never had to eat a single meal!”
“You do not need to eat at all?” screamed the kangaroo.
“Not at all”, replied the wolf, “it almost appears as a cruel twist of fate, that my species should vanish as I emerged, the most important specimen in all of Life. Yet, now you understand, I think, that you really do not need to fear me. If I eat, I usually eat that which I found already dead.”
“Yes, I do understand.”
The kangaroo experienced a deep transformation in his analysis of the wolf, implicitly choosing to believe him.
“Birds are at the top of the food chain!”
What a bizarre statement, mutually agreed the kangaroo and the wolf without consulting each other. Looking to their side, they found a large egg walking towards them; it was dark still, and only when it came closer did the wolf recognize that it was the belly of a penguin.
“Hello penguin” spoke the wolf.
“Yes yes kangaroo penguin. Wolf penguin. We are presented.”
“Do you care to justify your belief of bird superiority?” asked the wolf.
“It is quite simple really, not many outsiders know this, but birds are dinosaurs. It is only a matter of time before we grow back our massive, monstrous physiques, and conquer the world again!”
“That will be very difficult as long as the humans are around”, the wolf claimed, before being interrupted by the kangaroo:
“Just how many foreigners are going to barge in my home today? I understand with him claiming he is a victim of genocide, but what’s your excuse?”
“I happen to be sterile. Ashamed by my handicap, I aim to die from dehydration under the scorching sun of the wasteland you call home.”
The penguin additionally appeared poorly socially adjusted.
The wolf: “As I was attempting to say, the humans can easily deal with neo-dinosaurs, or whatever other threat you may conceive. Any drastic transformation in the context of our competition amongst each other can only be birthed out of their reach - which happens to be great.”
The penguin: “Do not be ridiculous! We evolved flight without any curtains or castles to shield the precious cocoon of our ascendancy!”
The wolf: “The humans are different. Because they have intelligence, they will easily detect and nip in the bud whatever revolutionary evolution could threaten their dominance. Whatever you are thinking of, it would need to be impervious to predation before it is even born!”
“The thought I am trying to express, here”, continued a somewhat exasperated wolf, “is that kangaroos are very strange. This entire island is very strange. This entire island would not be strange if it had been a few days’ swim closer to the much bigger island to the north-west. It would have largely accepted most competition premises of that other much larger island - yet there exists no guarantee whatsoever that these two particular premises were any good to begin with! All we know is that the bigger island had more life, therefore increased overall rates of mutations and evolution, converging towards a form of competition which is merely probably superior!”
“All we know”, he continued still, “is that this island will stop being strange; all we know is that there only were so many islands in the world, and as many attempts at articulating the perfect premise. But kangarooism shall simply not evolve from scratch, at this point in evolution, from any of these populations from the other, larger island! Canines shall not wrestle the warm climates away from the felines, and vice versa! We do not have the room to explore the warm climate, let alone specialize for it!”
The kangaroo: “So, what do you want exactly? Besides telling me I am doomed? For you must understand by now that I will keep fighting for my place in the world.”
The penguin: “And I will develop these neo-dinosaurs of which you speak with great fright and amazement!”, he spoke ... then he corrected himself: “My people, that is, not me specifically...”
The wolf: “Maybe a better way to phrase my thought is that it is impossible to imagine a kangaroo before seeing one. We do not know how many possible life forms are trapped out of existence, unable, in their infancy, of surviving forms of competition which are deemed trivial by us. Sure, we may invent fictional creatures - yet just how exactly could we figure, with our limited minds, just the precise physiology of the head of an animal that breathes fire? The material of its wings, and the exact length of its tail? Because all these values are computed very precisely to be optimal! By something, somewhere... I don’t know where... I don’t know where...”
As the sun emerged from the pitch blackness of dawn, the three silent companions were filled by three visions: a bipedal wolf, a venomous kangaroo, and a flying penguin.