As we sat, looking into each other’s eyes, I thought I felt a niggling, tickling something tweaking at the corners of my mind. Like little insects, buzzing, tickling around my consciousness; the lulling sensation, along with the warm sunshine, soon had me almost dozing, as I sat there watching the sparkles of sunlight dancing through the trees to hit the flowing river.
She is our Mother, a voice suddenly spoke in my mind. Not in so many words; it was more of a translation of concept, but very plain all the same.
“The river?” I said out loud.
Yes. She provides all for us. Our lives spring from her.
I looked up. Tip sat, almost grinning, his head bobbing up and down. His eyes were fixed on mine.
“You all live here? Are there any more villages like this one?”
Tip stared at me for a moment, as though trying to understand what I was asking.
More? Five, up and down river. Other rivers, other families, other ways, other villages.
There was a population, then; even local and regional cultures.
A civilization.
There’s a major difference between humans and other animals. Other animals, other mammals, certainly, feel emotions. Anyone who’s ever had a dog knows what unconditional love that they’re capable of. But the capability of abstract thought – to understand concepts beyond the physical – only Man can do that.
But Tip’s first statement now hammered into my head like a cudgel. She is our Mother, he had said, referring to the river. A metaphor – no, more than that, a statement of religious conviction, or of an advanced abstract concept, at the very least. The Weavers were far more advanced than I’d dared to think. They were more advanced, in fact, than the vast majority of human ancestors.
I sat there, half-stunned. Tip looked at me, bobbed his head once, and stood up. Come, I heard, as he turned and motioned with his head, with a pop of his jaw and a twitter. Follow.
We walked together down to the riverbank, followed by curious glances and twitters.
“Are you the leader?” I asked, as we walked.
Tip looked over his shoulder, a puzzled expression on his narrow face. I don’t understand, he seemed to say.
“Who makes decisions for everyone? You, or someone else?”
No one may tell another what to do, the reply came after a moment. Wisdom is, to know one’s own heart.
“I wish my own people could be as wise as that,” I muttered. “Why are you the one to speak with me?”
I was the one who thought it would be good to speak with you, so I was the one to do so.
It made a certain amount of sense.
Before us, the river spread out, flowing smooth here under the trees. Just downstream from us, three Weavers were dabbling in the water, pulling out some things that looked like crayfish, putting them in baskets.
Here is She, Tip said. He turned to look at me. Sit, he said, motioning towards the ground at the base of a tree. Eat with us.
I looked around, to see another Weaver holding out what looked like pieces of raw fish and several large grubs, offered on the platter of a large leaf. I took the leaf, a little confused, thinking that it might be insulting if I refused. Besides, I was hungry, and as a field zoologist, you get used to eating odd things.
Several more Weavers gathered around with fish, roots, insects, and we all ate in silence, with only the calls of birds and the gentle flow of the river for accompaniment.
Finally finished, Tip laid his leaf-plate aside. You come here from somewhere else, he said.
“Yes,” I said, not quite knowing how to explain. “Very far away.”
What is the thing you carry? The thing that speaks with the voice of thunder? Tip gestured towards the Remington, laid by my side in the grass.
“It’s a tool,” I said, “for gathering food, as you use nets to catch fish, or for protecting myself.”
Tip looked into my eyes. It is good for frightening the big-jawed ones, the eaters of the dead, as well. They must have seen or heard me fire at the creodonts, several days earlier.
“Yes, it is.”
That is a good thing. The big-jawed ones come here from time to time, but we can fright them from safe places in the trees. It has been long since they caught one of us on the ground. He grimaced. They smell so badly, it is easy to sense their approach.
I tried hard not to laugh, and Tip stared at me as I sat there sputtering. Then, after a moment, a twinkle came to his eyes, as though he understood.
My amusement died away quickly, though. I was thinking about what might happen when I went back.
I’d made the first contact with this, a truly alien civilization, a race of advanced, gentle, empathic beings from the unknown past of our own world, and I found myself wondering what the next contact would be like. When the news broke, the Chronos Project would be pressed to send back many more people. Sociologists, biologists, who knows what else; a virtual army of researchers that would descend on the Weavers to study them, pick apart their culture, discover the secret to their projecting empathy.
And the Weaver’s lives would never be the same.
“…. and then I sneezed, and the uptime viruses wiped out the entire society I was entranced by — closing the temporal loop.”
Sorry if that’s actually where you’re going, Animal — I just find chrono-tourism in your own past timeline such a terrible idea that I’m waiting for catastrophic results from this. Still a good read… just with an Impending Sense of Doom! ™
Could you imagine?
You get to travel to a different era, discover this wonderful unknown civilization and by doing so, you cause their doom.
speaks with the voice of thunder
How did he get your rifle?
I was thinking it was a callback to that other story about messing around in the past.
One of our hunters here has a rifle he calls “Thunderspeaker”. I thought it was Animal.
When he finally gets around to replacing it — will it become Thunderspeaker Emeritas?
Thunderspoke
You’re right, my mind just went to the Bradbury thing rather than the “chambered in a caliber ending in Weatherby” thing.
Yes, that was me, Kinnath – my .338 Win Mag is called “Thunder Speaker.”
Great episode. Conversations at last!
That’s ominous.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xZKuzwPOefs
If the weavers realized the threat, couldn’t they scare all the researchers away?
Or make them so angry and fearful that they all kill each other?
The Narrator already resisted an empathy attack, so it’s possible the other humans could as well.
Guess I misread it, I thought he resisted until the weavers realized he wasn’t a threat so they stopped.
Maybe a more concentrated attack from more weavers would work?
Obviously, a non-trivial amount of Weavers need to be brought forward into the present. We could give them Memphis.
They would make a killing on OnlyFurs.
The Weavers 2: Dispatches from the Yiff Wars.
“The river?” I said out loud.
Yes. She provides all for us. Our lives spring from her.
Plenty of water at Memphis. I never will walk by the Brazos again.
Why is everything stupid?
https://x.com/WajahatAli/status/1888799413134410157
Because everyone is stupid.
And in this case, absolutely desperate for a big hit of Copium…
I assume he’s just trolling, honestly. Maximum asshole stupidity he can fit in a single tweet just so he can rail against “The Neo-Nazi Right” and all.
He’s probably trolling but I do know people who eat this shit up and believe it with their whole hearts.
Somebody needs to be more stoic about the rampant stupidity on social media….
Not upset by it, just confused.
Trump goes too far.
https://i.redd.it/7fu9fb4bp5ie1.jpeg
“Oh, my god, you, like… sneeze glitter.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Baking/comments/1ilx65r/i_15_made_my_dad_a_birthday_cake/
That’s some crazy talent.
Sorry to be serious for a moment:
Assuming that The Weaver did in fact go extinct and aren’t just hiding somewhere, I would say that humans do have a a responsibility to save their species. Though we shouldn’t do it by preventing their extinction since that could screw up our evolution/grandfather paradox everything.
How many of them are there, and how well could we coexist with them? Also, how many could we take without also doing that whole grandfather paradox thing described earlier?
nope
“how well could we coexist with them”
As far as I can tell, based on what I know of history, not at all. We’d wipe them out, one way or another.
Well, assuming they need to live along riverbanks, that greatly limits their ability to expand. So far they only seem to be competing with Cajuns directly for resources.
Why?
Because they’re cute and fuzzy. Which is the universal human criteria for determining whether or not another life form is worth protecting.
That is why I keep my husky.
You’d kill little fuzzy, you heathen!
Time travel and telepathic raccoons – it’s certainly an original premise.
I’m still wondering what the final twist is. Did the protagonist somehow cause the extinction of the weavercoons? Do the weavercoons end up being the ancestors of humans? Are the weavercoons still around and have been guiding the course of human history, possibly even orchestrating the protagonist’s time travel?
In other news, I was offered deferred prosecution and took the deal. I have to take two classes and pay a few hundred dollars in fines. But no conviction and no jail time, which is great. Jail food sucks and that mattress was lumpy as hell. One night in the slammer was enough for me, though it did give me more Florida Man street cred.
What the hell did they accuse you of?
Open carry of a firearm, which you’d think would be legal in the “We’ll Get You Next Time” State.
Also, I was wearing a plastic Viking helmet and a keffiyeh as a sash at the time. Kinda like this:
https://platedlizard.blogspot.com/2025/01/i-viking-yamabushi.html
What can I say? I thought a show of force was in order after 5 people tried to run me over.
My mare’s leg lever action was slung over my shoulder in a holster like Ash from Army of Darkness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or3okI_mad8
Hail to the king, baby!
Speaking of everything being stupid, there was a Canadian roller derby team that inquiring about playing Mrs. TOK’s team. The Canadian team just backed out because of “the political climate” in the US. What’s the worst that can happen, they’d get sent back?
Rounded up and sent to Gitmo. Duh.
I would consider ‘Canadians being rounded up and sent to the camps’ to be a bright line to go fetch my rifle. But that’s me. I feel sympathy for even the dumbest and most helpless of God’s creatures.
🙂
People are so dumb.
Maybe you’re lucking out in some fashion.
Probably. But some of her teammates can be just as bad.
I’ll have to be a little vague about this, but we are beginning to get e-mails from both university administration and faculty leadership on how to deal with things such as: ICE agents entering classrooms to detain students; students coming to us identifying themselves as illegal and how to help them; how to respond to non-enrolled people entering our classrooms without permission to “observe and report” on our teaching.
The basic question I want to ask (but won’t b/c it’s a waste of time) is: can you provide any evidence of any of these things actually happening. Or have you just talked yourself into believing they will happen.
They’re instructing you to break the law?
Yeah, pretty much.
I can’t imagine any of those things happening. And honestly, if they did, a lot of Trump supporters wouldn’t be happy.
@TOK: yeah, faculty are reporting that a lot of students are scared and offering this as proof of how terrible Trump is. It couldn’t be that people like faculty have spent 8 years terrifying people.
The Trump admin needs to be careful, and I think they are smart enough to do that. There seem to be plenty of felons out there they can arrest and deport without “going into classrooms”. If there were students overstaying their visas and such, those can be handled outside a classroom.
Mandates from the bench in RI instead of HI. My assumption is the WH just wants to fast track this to the SC. It’s not a good look for the rule of law, but it’s what happens as the republic crumbles.
Trump administration ordered to restore all frozen federal spending
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-ordered-fully-comply-with-order-lifting-funding-freeze-2025-02-10/
Like the ruling isn’t crazy overbroad and the executive branch has no authority to control itself.
I think the argument is that Congress allocated those funds, so they must be spent? But for USAID at least, they didn’t specify exactly where it should be spent. So I say we call Trump and have him us it all on a generous donation to Glibertarians.com.
USAID invests the money in Treasury bonds to save for future needs
This about more than just USAID spending from my brief readings about the orders.
Getting this hammered out in front of the SC is part of the plan.
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33563
Either the President is in charge of the Executive Branch, or they have to explain who is.
My titties are calm.
Now I’m wondering what The Weavers would think of our modern trash pandas. Ugly and smelly like we consider chimpanzees? Would they be horrified to see what they evolved into?