Jeep returned to her daughters, weary, desiring
infinite rest. No one of her kind had ever returned from the final cycle
of their journey, the joining to the tree, to say what had become of
them. She had been sent into the universe to explore the unknown, but the
last unknown was the unknown that lay within every living being at the end
of its days.
She did not experience oblivion as she had expected.
Her personal identity had served its purpose, but her store of four
million years of condescend memory was in itself a subjective perspective
than required her personal identity to manage and organize for the racial
ocean of knowing of her people.
She became like a dewdrop fallen into a planetary
sea. Instead of oblivion, she became all that had ever gone before her,
and when she had assimilated her greater being and become comfortable with
it, she saw the beginning of new unknowns and new explorations upon which
to embark.
The Great Tree of Life of which she was part gave
birth to new seedlings, fruits of awareness isolated from the whole with a
new mission and eager to venture forth alone into the universe to gather
new wonders yet to be witnessed, and new experiences yet to be shared by
the greater being from which they emerged. Like energetic children too
numerous and too chaotic in their blind enthusiasm for life to be easily
monitored, they flowed forth into the universe, into the inexorable,
never-ending cycle of darkness to light and back again.
Novels by
William G. Tedford