The Cosmic Joke by Amy Lane
At first he was an amoeba. It was a decent existence… floating around in some primal ooze, osmosing various fluids, making the occasional stab at binary fission to propagate his DNA. He spent nearly half a million years as an amoeba. Then he was a paramecium. Then he was one of those hydra thingies with lots of heads and some sort of multi-celled purpose. Then he was an ancient fish with too many spines and hard scales and big, bug-eyes. A meteor came, all the fish were killed, and he was an amoeba again, but he’d learned a bit from being an amoeba before. He quickly sped up the food chain until he got to be a an ichthyosaur—which is another fish, only much bigger—and then he was a dinosaur. Not a great dinosaur, though… one of those small equine types, the size of Chihuahuas. In his walnut sized brain, he did register some suppressed disappointment. By the time he’d learned enough as a Chihuahua-horse to size up, the dinosaurs were gone, but he did get to be a Woolly Mammoth, so that was something.
He was a good Woolly Mammoth. Foraged a lot, led the herd for a couple of lifetimes, gored the saber-toothed tigers when he could, and tried very hard not to step on the homo erectus-es unless they tried to eat him first. He liked that existence. He especially dug the very nifty fur coat that went with the job. He moved up after only a couple more life-times there. He got to be a dolphin then, but he was a bad dolphin. He destroyed his pod after only a few years. He bullied the other dolphins with his bottle-nosed, sharp-toothed snout, and drew blood, calling a whole school of great-white sharks down on him and all his kin.
He came back as a saber-toothed tiger, and it’s very hard to earn good karma as a saber-toothed tiger, so he was stuck there until the damn things started to lose their saber-teeth and started looking like over-developed house cats. Then, one day, as a bob-cat, he spared a little wolf-pup when he was very hungry, and he came back as a housecat. More specifically, he came back as a house-cat living on a plain in Ancient Phoenicia where wheat and grapes were grown. His entire job was catching and eating the world’s fattest, slowest rats. Now that was a good existence. He was a boy, and at that time, no one had come up with the swell idea of fixing what seemed to work perfectly well, so he was possibly the happiest creature in all of creation, especially when he could curl up next to a warm fire, licking vermin-bloodied whiskers.
He would have been content to be a tom cat forever, but he began to invest too much glee in the brutal act of feline copulation, and to wound his mates, so he came back as a tabby cat after a couple of short lives. When tom cats ejaculate, their penises have spiny fibers that umbrella out and stab the female’s sex organs, causing her to ovulate. This hurts considerably. After that pain comes quickening, and birth, both of which are painful, frightening. There are few things on earth more miserable, more often, than a fertile tabby cat. Suitably chastened by the cosmic forces in control, when he got to be the chance to be a tom cat again, he was very tender to his clowder. That, and a heroic leap to save his owner’s infant son from a particularly nasty rat brought him to humanity at last.
For his first human life, he was a female in the fertile crescent, which was an unfortunate error on the part of the cosmos, because putting the heart of a tom cat in the body of a peasant female in a male dominated culture is just asking for trouble. She had sex before wedlock, and was stoned alive. Several times.
Finally, finally, she got to be female as a princess in Aegypt. She had several lovers before age fifteen, and enjoyed them all. However, she was the product of several generations of inbreeding, and died of an aneurysm on her fifteenth birthday. Before she died, she gave birth to at least three children who were not the product of inbreeding (predictably, she had a taste for peasants) and thus ensured the succession of a line of royalty that lasted a thousand years. Unfortunately, because her promiscuous behavior led to the execution of her peasant lovers, she did not get to be a part of that royalty.
Instead, she spent several lifetimes as a warrior in deepest of Africa, tattooing his face and drinking the blood of defeated brothers in arms in order to share in the grief and power. Warriors of any sort die of infection and wounds more often than not before the age of twenty-five, so he got to repeat the whole cycle several times. On the whole, it was a very satisfying karmic interlude. But soldiers start asking questions after a while… what are we fighting for? How many generations have we been doing this? Is there something more to life? Are there really worse things than an honorable death? If so, how long is that list? And with questions comes thought, with thought nobility, and with nobility, a few sweet lifetimes as a farmer’s wife in Medieval Europe, working hard, and knowing the sacred mysteries giving birth in blood, and death in peace.
He could have done that forever—growing large, exploding with life and love, then draining her life into the bodies and souls of sweet, fat babies, then hale, warm adults. But a life-time came when the husband went off to sea, and she couldn’t bear the loneliness anymore. She despaired, slept with her husband’s brother, and gave birth to a bastard, alone in the woods, pouring her fluids and her life-blood into the loam. She died, and then the child died, and she spent the next several lifetimes as a squatter, with a husband who beat her severely, and children who grew to do the same.
Through those lifetimes, she sheltered the children—always, the children and the life burgeoning forth had become her purpose. Her life was illiterate, her motivations, animal. She was, in fact, more in touch with all she had learned through several thousand lifetimes than since she’d been that noble tom-cat, a few hundred years before. In those miserable spans as a filthy peasant with no teeth, she became feral, furtive, going to ground, thinking only visceral images of food and warmth and the escape from physical and sexual violence. Often she died of a brain hemorrhage from the final brutal beating. A few times she died of disease.
Often, the images of beating remained after birth, even when she was born as a male. On those occasions, he grew to be a feral, frightened man who beat his wife, and then died to be the wife again. Through Druids, through Saxons, through Christians, he repeated into she, until once, just once, someone was kind to her as a child, and she died to be a kind, strong man, who didn’t beat his feral, frightened wife, and who washed on occasion. They lived to be old, happy people, who died in their sleep within hours of each other. They came back as prosperous merchants, who did the same, and again.
The world turned, the world changed, night to day, to soot, to trains, to sunset on fields to sunrise on factories, and so on. One life she died to be an Irishman, and emigrated to America, to have his mate who’d followed her for five hundred years, now. The mate was German, this time, and they met nicely, and celebrated a poor, immigrant’s wedding. They died of pneumonia in a relatively short time, not too much before the twentieth century.
He came back to a good Italian family, living in New York, a precious, big-eyed, charming and kindly little girl. Her mate was born not three blocks away, but he died in infancy of polio, so she was left preternaturally old, for a child, bereft of companion, and rich in wisdom. She had, through the millennium, acquired a certain, abiding sense of both the justice and the order inherent in the cosmos. For instance, she knew, from her moments as an abused tabby cat and as a beaten European peasant, that simple kindness begot kindness, and that cruelty begat hate. She knew from her breath taken as an Aegyptian princess, that the pleasures of the flesh were not worth the cosmic retribution for carelessness in their seeking. She knew from her several deaths as a promiscuous Turkish woman that far too much emphasis was placed on sex and it’s results anyway. She knew from being a Wooly Mammoth and a merchant and even a Saber-Toothed Tiger and a very naughty dolphin that it was good to lead people and bad to lead them to destruction. She knew from her happy moments with her karmic mate that affection was a strength, and companions a blessing. She knew from being a warrior that strength and courage were useless without a cause to which those qualities could be applied. And she knew, even from her visceral, single-celled existence as an amoeba, that the great cosmic forces that controlled the ebb and flow of souls were awesome and wise and should be respected and revered.
Knowing all of this, she committed herself to these forces and took vows as a nun, secure in the unvoiced, unconscious conviction that the God she swore to, and the Allah she had prayed to, and the altars she had worshipped at were all the same consciousness she had known, fleetingly, as she had shuttled from form to form.
She was a marvelous nun. She gave compassion and succor, solace and companionship, faith and healing, as generously and as patiently as any saint had done so in the past. Towards her middle years, she took a post in the South America, bringing religion, blankets, and the occasional chicken to all who needed it. Unfortunately, the countries in South America are unstable, and communism had everybody in a tizzy, and she and her convent were overrun by revolutionaries, tortured, raped, and burned alive.
That was awful. She had thought, during her serene, committed lifetime, that she was prepared for physical hardship. She thought she was ready to die as a martyr. She was proud of what she had planned as an otherworldly acceptance of her fate. But she was wrong.
As her skin was flayed, and her womb and rectum torn, she tried to concentrate on her faith to sustain her sanity. She closed her eyes and wished for succor, and for solace, and for peace, and saw a white light in her vision. It hurt. It blinded her. She hated it. So as her body was being violated in extremes of pain and degradation, she concentrated on that white light. She focused on her hatred of it. She embraced the hatred. She became the hatred. There was no room in that hatred for peace, or for circumspection. When the flames licked her flayed skin she barely noticed her imminent death and it’s warm embrace. When the cosmic forces tried to comfort her, and to lift her to nirvana for her suffering she ignored them. She focused instead on the false light of hatred, rather than the true light of her thousands of lifetimes of learning. The cosmic forces retreated from her rebuff, puzzled and hurt, and tried to alleviate her obvious suffering by offering her a plum assignment.
She got to be a wealthy man in a Middle-Eastern country. It should have been a good thing. She should have reclined in luxury, spent his time in education and sensuality, with periods of aesthetic denial and meditation. Unfortunately, he carried with him a hatred from his death so intense it consumed him. It grew, swelling, blinding and destructive, to consume those around him. He forgot all he had known of faith and prayer and serenity; however, he still gravitated towards religion. But he was blinded by that white light. He became a zealot, and his hatred had a focus. He hated all who did not believe as he.
He was magnetic, charismatic in his certainty. People followed him by the thousands. People gave their lives to save him. He became a maniac, sending fellow zealots on suicide missions that cost a few lives on his side and thousands on the other. He launched sudden, surprise attacks on the innocents in the West, and laughed as the media showed their symbols of power pulverized to dust and so much jagged metal. He laughed and he hid, and oozed his karmic venom over all who wandered into his coils.
He was clever, as a saber-toothed tiger, and a leader, like the head dolphin, and a warrior, as fierce as any in Africa. He abused his women, as a husband, and vented his public scorn on them as a leader. He scorned the cries of children as a father, and reveled in them as a general. In short, he forgot. And the atrocities spawned by his lapse in karmic memory were both heinous and unforgivable.
The cosmos wept. He had been so close, so very close, to being all that a human could be. To use all that knowledge, and the personal power it gave him, and to twist it in such a way… it was beyond contemplation, even for the cosmos. The cosmos remembered the Hitlers, and the Stalins, and the Jean-Paul Marats of the world and despaired that yet another had arisen. But the cosmos had a plan. The cosmos always has a plan. When the zealot died in his home, under house arrest at a ripe old age, he was forced to begin all over again.
He was hauled right back to be beginning, floating in an upsurge of ooze. He had no vision, no voice, and no cerebral cortex to speak of. However, all of the toxin of a past life spent in abomination does not simply go away in death, just as all wisdom does not go away in death unless consciously driven out. He became a vicious, particular amoeba that lives in the groundwater of a small town in Mexico. It divides as rapidly as possible, and spends its enzymes spawning filth and slime in people’s intestines, as it had once been wont to do with their minds and good intentions. The amoebic dysentery generated by this one-celled animal is so vitriolic that Americans have taken up the town of San Osama as a cause, and are sending bottled water so that the inhabitants might not all die of diarrhea. The amoeba continues to divide, and the cosmos watches that patch of contaminated groundwater with great interest. It is hoped, that with each instance of binary fission, with each lifetime, the hatred and anger will grow a little less. The cosmos is still waiting.
He was a good Woolly Mammoth. Foraged a lot, led the herd for a couple of lifetimes, gored the saber-toothed tigers when he could, and tried very hard not to step on the homo erectus-es unless they tried to eat him first. He liked that existence. He especially dug the very nifty fur coat that went with the job. He moved up after only a couple more life-times there. He got to be a dolphin then, but he was a bad dolphin. He destroyed his pod after only a few years. He bullied the other dolphins with his bottle-nosed, sharp-toothed snout, and drew blood, calling a whole school of great-white sharks down on him and all his kin.
He came back as a saber-toothed tiger, and it’s very hard to earn good karma as a saber-toothed tiger, so he was stuck there until the damn things started to lose their saber-teeth and started looking like over-developed house cats. Then, one day, as a bob-cat, he spared a little wolf-pup when he was very hungry, and he came back as a housecat. More specifically, he came back as a house-cat living on a plain in Ancient Phoenicia where wheat and grapes were grown. His entire job was catching and eating the world’s fattest, slowest rats. Now that was a good existence. He was a boy, and at that time, no one had come up with the swell idea of fixing what seemed to work perfectly well, so he was possibly the happiest creature in all of creation, especially when he could curl up next to a warm fire, licking vermin-bloodied whiskers.
He would have been content to be a tom cat forever, but he began to invest too much glee in the brutal act of feline copulation, and to wound his mates, so he came back as a tabby cat after a couple of short lives. When tom cats ejaculate, their penises have spiny fibers that umbrella out and stab the female’s sex organs, causing her to ovulate. This hurts considerably. After that pain comes quickening, and birth, both of which are painful, frightening. There are few things on earth more miserable, more often, than a fertile tabby cat. Suitably chastened by the cosmic forces in control, when he got to be the chance to be a tom cat again, he was very tender to his clowder. That, and a heroic leap to save his owner’s infant son from a particularly nasty rat brought him to humanity at last.
For his first human life, he was a female in the fertile crescent, which was an unfortunate error on the part of the cosmos, because putting the heart of a tom cat in the body of a peasant female in a male dominated culture is just asking for trouble. She had sex before wedlock, and was stoned alive. Several times.
Finally, finally, she got to be female as a princess in Aegypt. She had several lovers before age fifteen, and enjoyed them all. However, she was the product of several generations of inbreeding, and died of an aneurysm on her fifteenth birthday. Before she died, she gave birth to at least three children who were not the product of inbreeding (predictably, she had a taste for peasants) and thus ensured the succession of a line of royalty that lasted a thousand years. Unfortunately, because her promiscuous behavior led to the execution of her peasant lovers, she did not get to be a part of that royalty.
Instead, she spent several lifetimes as a warrior in deepest of Africa, tattooing his face and drinking the blood of defeated brothers in arms in order to share in the grief and power. Warriors of any sort die of infection and wounds more often than not before the age of twenty-five, so he got to repeat the whole cycle several times. On the whole, it was a very satisfying karmic interlude. But soldiers start asking questions after a while… what are we fighting for? How many generations have we been doing this? Is there something more to life? Are there really worse things than an honorable death? If so, how long is that list? And with questions comes thought, with thought nobility, and with nobility, a few sweet lifetimes as a farmer’s wife in Medieval Europe, working hard, and knowing the sacred mysteries giving birth in blood, and death in peace.
He could have done that forever—growing large, exploding with life and love, then draining her life into the bodies and souls of sweet, fat babies, then hale, warm adults. But a life-time came when the husband went off to sea, and she couldn’t bear the loneliness anymore. She despaired, slept with her husband’s brother, and gave birth to a bastard, alone in the woods, pouring her fluids and her life-blood into the loam. She died, and then the child died, and she spent the next several lifetimes as a squatter, with a husband who beat her severely, and children who grew to do the same.
Through those lifetimes, she sheltered the children—always, the children and the life burgeoning forth had become her purpose. Her life was illiterate, her motivations, animal. She was, in fact, more in touch with all she had learned through several thousand lifetimes than since she’d been that noble tom-cat, a few hundred years before. In those miserable spans as a filthy peasant with no teeth, she became feral, furtive, going to ground, thinking only visceral images of food and warmth and the escape from physical and sexual violence. Often she died of a brain hemorrhage from the final brutal beating. A few times she died of disease.
Often, the images of beating remained after birth, even when she was born as a male. On those occasions, he grew to be a feral, frightened man who beat his wife, and then died to be the wife again. Through Druids, through Saxons, through Christians, he repeated into she, until once, just once, someone was kind to her as a child, and she died to be a kind, strong man, who didn’t beat his feral, frightened wife, and who washed on occasion. They lived to be old, happy people, who died in their sleep within hours of each other. They came back as prosperous merchants, who did the same, and again.
The world turned, the world changed, night to day, to soot, to trains, to sunset on fields to sunrise on factories, and so on. One life she died to be an Irishman, and emigrated to America, to have his mate who’d followed her for five hundred years, now. The mate was German, this time, and they met nicely, and celebrated a poor, immigrant’s wedding. They died of pneumonia in a relatively short time, not too much before the twentieth century.
He came back to a good Italian family, living in New York, a precious, big-eyed, charming and kindly little girl. Her mate was born not three blocks away, but he died in infancy of polio, so she was left preternaturally old, for a child, bereft of companion, and rich in wisdom. She had, through the millennium, acquired a certain, abiding sense of both the justice and the order inherent in the cosmos. For instance, she knew, from her moments as an abused tabby cat and as a beaten European peasant, that simple kindness begot kindness, and that cruelty begat hate. She knew from her breath taken as an Aegyptian princess, that the pleasures of the flesh were not worth the cosmic retribution for carelessness in their seeking. She knew from her several deaths as a promiscuous Turkish woman that far too much emphasis was placed on sex and it’s results anyway. She knew from being a Wooly Mammoth and a merchant and even a Saber-Toothed Tiger and a very naughty dolphin that it was good to lead people and bad to lead them to destruction. She knew from her happy moments with her karmic mate that affection was a strength, and companions a blessing. She knew from being a warrior that strength and courage were useless without a cause to which those qualities could be applied. And she knew, even from her visceral, single-celled existence as an amoeba, that the great cosmic forces that controlled the ebb and flow of souls were awesome and wise and should be respected and revered.
Knowing all of this, she committed herself to these forces and took vows as a nun, secure in the unvoiced, unconscious conviction that the God she swore to, and the Allah she had prayed to, and the altars she had worshipped at were all the same consciousness she had known, fleetingly, as she had shuttled from form to form.
She was a marvelous nun. She gave compassion and succor, solace and companionship, faith and healing, as generously and as patiently as any saint had done so in the past. Towards her middle years, she took a post in the South America, bringing religion, blankets, and the occasional chicken to all who needed it. Unfortunately, the countries in South America are unstable, and communism had everybody in a tizzy, and she and her convent were overrun by revolutionaries, tortured, raped, and burned alive.
That was awful. She had thought, during her serene, committed lifetime, that she was prepared for physical hardship. She thought she was ready to die as a martyr. She was proud of what she had planned as an otherworldly acceptance of her fate. But she was wrong.
As her skin was flayed, and her womb and rectum torn, she tried to concentrate on her faith to sustain her sanity. She closed her eyes and wished for succor, and for solace, and for peace, and saw a white light in her vision. It hurt. It blinded her. She hated it. So as her body was being violated in extremes of pain and degradation, she concentrated on that white light. She focused on her hatred of it. She embraced the hatred. She became the hatred. There was no room in that hatred for peace, or for circumspection. When the flames licked her flayed skin she barely noticed her imminent death and it’s warm embrace. When the cosmic forces tried to comfort her, and to lift her to nirvana for her suffering she ignored them. She focused instead on the false light of hatred, rather than the true light of her thousands of lifetimes of learning. The cosmic forces retreated from her rebuff, puzzled and hurt, and tried to alleviate her obvious suffering by offering her a plum assignment.
She got to be a wealthy man in a Middle-Eastern country. It should have been a good thing. She should have reclined in luxury, spent his time in education and sensuality, with periods of aesthetic denial and meditation. Unfortunately, he carried with him a hatred from his death so intense it consumed him. It grew, swelling, blinding and destructive, to consume those around him. He forgot all he had known of faith and prayer and serenity; however, he still gravitated towards religion. But he was blinded by that white light. He became a zealot, and his hatred had a focus. He hated all who did not believe as he.
He was magnetic, charismatic in his certainty. People followed him by the thousands. People gave their lives to save him. He became a maniac, sending fellow zealots on suicide missions that cost a few lives on his side and thousands on the other. He launched sudden, surprise attacks on the innocents in the West, and laughed as the media showed their symbols of power pulverized to dust and so much jagged metal. He laughed and he hid, and oozed his karmic venom over all who wandered into his coils.
He was clever, as a saber-toothed tiger, and a leader, like the head dolphin, and a warrior, as fierce as any in Africa. He abused his women, as a husband, and vented his public scorn on them as a leader. He scorned the cries of children as a father, and reveled in them as a general. In short, he forgot. And the atrocities spawned by his lapse in karmic memory were both heinous and unforgivable.
The cosmos wept. He had been so close, so very close, to being all that a human could be. To use all that knowledge, and the personal power it gave him, and to twist it in such a way… it was beyond contemplation, even for the cosmos. The cosmos remembered the Hitlers, and the Stalins, and the Jean-Paul Marats of the world and despaired that yet another had arisen. But the cosmos had a plan. The cosmos always has a plan. When the zealot died in his home, under house arrest at a ripe old age, he was forced to begin all over again.
He was hauled right back to be beginning, floating in an upsurge of ooze. He had no vision, no voice, and no cerebral cortex to speak of. However, all of the toxin of a past life spent in abomination does not simply go away in death, just as all wisdom does not go away in death unless consciously driven out. He became a vicious, particular amoeba that lives in the groundwater of a small town in Mexico. It divides as rapidly as possible, and spends its enzymes spawning filth and slime in people’s intestines, as it had once been wont to do with their minds and good intentions. The amoebic dysentery generated by this one-celled animal is so vitriolic that Americans have taken up the town of San Osama as a cause, and are sending bottled water so that the inhabitants might not all die of diarrhea. The amoeba continues to divide, and the cosmos watches that patch of contaminated groundwater with great interest. It is hoped, that with each instance of binary fission, with each lifetime, the hatred and anger will grow a little less. The cosmos is still waiting.