writes.casa

Droen had reasoned that there would be more than one totem in the cave. More of his people reached maturity and made the journey to fetch a totem than reached old age in good enough health to make the replacement journey, so surely there was something happening to balance this inequality. Still, he wasn’t prepared for the image that came into focus as the fire came to life and began throwing out light: the cave was indeed a small chamber as he had sensed it to be, but its floor was nearly covered with small figurines.

They varied in shape and color, but were all sized to fit comfortably in a closed fist. Many materials were apparent, but most were pale soapstone. When the fire seemed content to burn on its own, he crept in and examined a figure that caught his eye. This was a fox, its bushy tail giving it away. There were wolves, rats, caribou, but also fish, birds, beetles, and even abstract geometric shapes. No two were identical, but some figures were represented many times.

The diffuse effects of fusion scattered photons on countless chloroplasts and cyanobacteria. They captured it, worked with it, died, and sank into Earth’s crust to be cooked. Eons later, some other star dust become conscious discovered that all this death had utility as batteries. Hundreds of millions of years of sunlight had accumulated in a charge that could be dug up, transported and put to work. By men in charge. But to do what?

Well they were pretty good at assault. So they did a lot more of that. And they were really great at robbery. So there was much more of that too. But bit by bit, the batteries ran down. The men in charge had less charge to work with.

They refused to face it. Even as their charge became more diffuse, even though they every one of them were themselves a dissipative system, they could not undertsand that all this time they had been living on borrowed light.