Geosapiology: a brief history of geogenesis, the Stones, and the Theory of Appeasement — Part Four
By K.A. Wiggins
An ocean—or at least a couple of borders—away from open combat, a people who yet carried memories of once-living stones and told stories of great transformations in the days of their ancestors remained among the green foothills and wide river deltas between the snow-capped peaks of the coast mountain ranges. And so, when their ever-hungry neighbours took yet another of their own, their grief and anger mingled with awe, as they retraced her final footsteps, to find a glimmering crest of living granite where none had stood before, winking and flashing in the sun.
They came in ceremony then, with offerings and stories and songs, to mourn and celebrate in equal measure, and that which they called transformer continued to flourish in their presence, although it took in only the tokens offered to it and no great measure of flesh. Nor did it strip the thriving grasses and trees and brush, nor sift the soil for minerals and mycelial mulch.
The granite of the mountain grew around those who came in ceremony in the way of granite; blocky grains extruding in cascading ramparts of cat-tongue textured stone, forming pillars and bridges and overhangs, with translucent crystalline accretions directing and refracting the light.
By the time researchers and authorities and curiosity-seekers and profiteers and bigots showed up, it was ready to protect as well as awe—and it was no longer so novel as it appeared.
Others like it had emerged in singles and duos and triplets around the world, wherever blood was spilt in quantity—and some said, even before. Obsidian spires and diamond fortresses and slate-walled villages memorializing the fallen and sheltering the vulnerable against the more hostile of their species.
Some called it a miracle, divine intervention, angelic protection manifesting in startling power.
Others looked to folklore and legend and myth, mining the desiccated and butterfly-pinned remains of oral legends and ancient teachings for insights from the distant past. The spontaneous generation and rapid growth were new and increasingly widespread, but the earth that had birthed them was old beyond human memory. Had some eons-long cycle awakened the living Stone? Could its origin be found in tales of trolls and giants underground or otherworldly folk? In the passed-down teachings of the monumental transformers, or mercurial elementals, or darker spirits, even?
Still others looked not to earth, but to the stars, and saw there not the origins of terrestrial minerals, but an earth unexpectedly impregnated by alien biology or sparked to new motion by galactic technologies. Camps formed and split and warred among themselves over whether these speculations were to be cause for celebration or terror, whether they might fold in folkloric and religious and scientific seekers of truth into grand unified theories or must remain steadfast in their singular vision of extraterrestrial life attacking or infiltrating or uplifting humanity, as the various manifestos trumpeted.
Scientists beavered away, each at their own hypotheses, examining evidence, making comparisons, chipping away at possibilities, pretending the bulk of the funding and the urgency wasn’t coming in near equal measure from national defense and commercial interests. Increasingly, they did not have to travel far for their research. In suburban back yards and inner-city alleyways and bucolic alpaca hobby-farms, arising from the mossy imported rock amidst the tidy raked sand of a Zen meditation garden and the rugged upthrust bones of the mountains exposed at the side of a trending, litter-strewn hiking trail, there appeared to be no limit nor pattern to the type nor origin of the Stones save one—a living creature in harm’s way.
The scientists, of course, and others less systematically, found themselves compelled to explore the precise boundaries of this observation. A paper cut did nothing. No willingly self-inflicted wound ever had been recorded as awakening the Stones. Consenting injuries likewise failed to stir a response. Scientists spent quite some time slicing one another up before abandoning this area of research, and every so often a grad student decided they had come up with a new angle and talked some peers into half-maiming themselves for a good cause before abandoning the exercise in anaemic despair.
The definition of ‘living creature’ was likewise explored. More gingerly, as it turned out the Stones did not consider any nonverbal vertebrate capable of giving consent to harm in the name of science and were found to be variable in their responsiveness beyond that. An accidentally crushed ant would not rouse the Stones. A jar of ants purposefully set alight might.
It took no time at all for someone to consider what would happen if stones kept coming to life and growing beyond all reason. A child here, a mother there, a boy with dreamer’s eyes and a girl permitted half the education she should have, but a mind determined to make up the difference. In their dozens and hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands around the globe they asked. Quietly at first, and wonderingly, and then exasperatedly, and despairingly, and defiantly. Why was no one doing anything about the Stones? Why did no one in power seem to see or be willing to prepare for what was coming?
Still, it took a shockingly long time for the scientific establishment to agree on a growth model, and to further calculate the range of resource depletion attendant on that growth (with cautiously worded recommendations on curbing excess spontaneous generation where possible; scientific research of course being an exception to said restrictions), and to generate the impact assessment models with a suitably adjusted y-axis to de-emphasize the scale of the catastrophe in the interest of avoiding mass panic and/or accusations of sensationalism.
It took longer still for politicians and governments and corporations and voters to accept that they had a crisis on their hands. And, by some point in the third century after the first Stone had shuddered its way to sentience—by now the cornerstone of a labyrinthine hive-mind entity spanning the entire geopolitical region of its nativity—humanity, or at least a notable number of the remaining Stone-bounded enclaves, were finally and necessarily united around a singular purpose: bring down the Stones.
K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) is an award-winning Canadian speculative fiction author who can't stop inserting monsters (and magic) into local landscapes.
Best known for her gothic-dystopian YA+ Dark Fantasy series Threads of Dreams, in which a macabre (neurospicy) misfit storms monster-infested, post-eco-apocalypse Vancouver, her quietly subversive works have also appeared in Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Brave New Weird: Best New Weird Horror, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, The NoSleep Podcast, Fantasy Magazine, and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, among others.
Kaie spends her days with books on the traditional unceded territory of the K’omoks and Pentlatch peoples, writing, working as a school library tech, teaching as a Creative Writing for Children Society educator, and leading the Children's Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society. Find her at kawiggins.com.
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