[June 25] [Original] Safe As Houses

[annwyd.livejournal.com]

Title: Safe As Houses
Day/Theme: June 25, "everything is as it was"
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: None
Rating: PG

It's safest in forests. Contrary to the modern image of the ever-still and majestic spread of silent trees reaching up into the sky, forests are noisy places. There's always a bird to call, or some small animal to run over a dry leaf, or some larger animal to crack a fallen branch as it pounces on that smaller animal. Forests are the safest place, if you're lucky and don't get eaten by a bear.

Since the middle of the industrial revolution, the human population has boomed. There are many reasonable-sounding scientific explanations for this involving increased food supply, antibiotics, and the like. They are all wrong. The reason humanity has grown unchecked since the world became noisier than a forest is that noise hurts the thing that once grew with us.

It was born in Antarctica when apes losing their hair first used tools to bury their dead and scratch designs onto cave walls. It crawled northwards to find things that could think and dream and mourn. That was what it fed on. It was humanity's immortal twin brother, and it consumed us.

We tamed fire because we were afraid of the dark. We were afraid of the dark because there were predators in it--sabretooth tigers and giant bears and their kin. But that doesn't explain why we made music. And that's simple: we made music because music hurts it.

But someday, the machinery will fall silent. We'll be left alone in houses that have already settled and have no more creaking to do. Cars will not roar by. And it will crawl out of the walls again. We can only hope we still know how to make the right kind of music when that happens.

Or maybe it will evolve, and music will no longer be good enough.