He was not and would never be a king.

He had the qualities and the requirements for it. His name was Romm and he was a microbial colonial organism living in the soil around Monument, Kansas. He had been born during the latter half of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. He knew the date only roughly; the self of then had had no consciousness, no kingship, no power. His precursor organisms had not known they were in a desperate struggle to survive, that luck would see their particular cell transformation outpace the other bacteria that attempted to adapt to the rising temperatures, and that with every tiny death and birth of a protein, they were stockpiling change.

By his estimation, it took Romm some fifty-four million years to gain the right to kingship. When he woke, he met a king named Llrn, who assured him first that she would not crush him beneath the icy citadel that was herself. She did not care for the land he held and so it would be his dominion for change.

Having already lived longer than Llrn herself, Romm had not said right away that he would be a king. He stopped and thought about it.

He was not as grand as Llrn. His triumph was that his organisms had mastered the perpetuity of soft tissues through horizontal gene transfer and could convert multiple types of radiation into glucose. Their number did not need to fall, nor did it need to rise, and sparing a catastrophic outside force, Romm was fairly certain he would never die should he choose to simply be as he had been thus far.

When Llrn next approached, some forty thousand years later, he asked her:

Must a king change?

She replied:

You’re mistaken. A king is that which changes.

Romm’s next thoughts were spent on wondering if those were truly different things. He spent many years that way, neither king but more than microbe, having conversations with Llrn every time she spread across North America, digging lakes and rivers as she came and went. She was younger than him but knew far more; ice knew what it was sooner than microbes did. The tragedy of living organisms that were not Romm was their short, quick lives, and how they had to spend all their change on living them. Whenever he was ready, Romm’s organisms could duplicate at such a scale and so quickly that all the continent and the oceans beyond it could belong to him, though Llrn said at once that she would fight him for it.

Romm had politely declined. He was still not sure he wanted to be a king at all, though he did enjoy the many conversations he had with kings, mainly with Llrn, but also with the kings of atmosphere. There were many Kings of Carbon, there being many different isotopes, and a few were as old as Romm himself, having been born when he was yet a handful of microbes struggling in the soil. They were able to tell him about the other living organisms that had come and gone in the ages when Romm had not yet been awake.

None had been kings. A few of the more fanciful kings of those times would take on the shapes of the largest organisms; the King of Carbon-12 even showed some of them to Romm, stomping around on his soil on thick feet with wide claws and great gnashing teeth. That was how Romm learned what claws and teeth were, what walking and breathing was, and all the other mechanisms by which organisms that were not microbes prolonged themselves. Having only known the life that a bacterial colony could live, he found the whole affair a marvel, and he begged Carbon-12 for a thousand years to teach him the trick of changing his shape.

But you can change yourself already.

I only want to seem changed. I don’t know if I’m ready for real change yet.

So Romm learned how to be something other than himself, arranging his colony into the facsimile of the hulking, heavy-horned bison that roamed atop his soil in those days, feasting on high grasses. It was a marvel. Truly, a marvel! For many millions of years, he had never known organisms could be so complex! Their bodies demanded endlessly convoluted processes to operate, which they could only do for a breathtakingly short amount of time. In desperate fear of their short lives, they reproduced, and out of a union of two organisms would come a new, unique third. Having discovered perpetuity, his own microbes had not so much as a vestigial trace of this reproduction mechanism left, the concept of a lifecycle lost in the fifty million years when Romm had not been awake. While his longevity had made him a king, he was not sure it had been for the better.

He lived a bison’s life. It passed in the span of a thought.

A thought was not enough time to learn anything at all. Romm arranged himself once again and once again spent a whole thought in living as a bison. For six hundred and sixty-eight more times, he lived a bison’s life, and then he chose the body of one of the great wolves that had slain him and his children many times over those lives. These he lived for one thousand and thirty times and after them, three thousand and fifty-nine lives as the long-legged eagles that leapt and danced in the high grasses he had eaten as a bison. The fish and the owls followed them, then the stags and the sloths, though by then Romm had lived enough to know he preferred the bison and the wolves, perhaps because they were first, and it was a wolf’s shape he wore when Llrn came next.

She scolded him when she saw him.

You are greater than all of them.

But by then, Romm had an answer for her.

I don’t think that’s true.

Their argument ended poorly. She and Romm did not speak again for a hundred thousand years and by then, change had come to all the things that lived in Romm’s land.

A new king was challenging him for territory.

As all other kings would one day know, it was mankind that came in those days, and began his conquest. For Romm, the whole affair was terribly pitiable: he was not truly a king himself, having never exerted his capacity for change, and mankind seemed wholly incapable of doing anything but change. They lived and died and adapted with reckless haste and in the span of fifty of their lives had changed where the grass grew, who ate it, and when, and yet none of them knew or remembered what the grass and the bison used to be like. While a microbe could live more quickly, and change more quickly, it had still taken Romm a very long time to be capable of changing the world around him in the way that mankind did.

From their perspective, they could not even see what they had done.

Romm felt sorry for them. He tried to talk to them, but though he could speak to the atmosphere and to the glaciers and to the hot, rumbling heart that slumbered below, mankind could never hear him. He could take their shape as easily as he could the bison or the wolves, but they still did not understand him, and dying under thrown stones was a somehow worse experience than any other death he had known.

He went back to the soil for a while, thinking, and Llrn returned sixty thousand years too late.

She apologized to him, as he did to her, and she told him that soon she was going to die.

Soon for an ice sheet was, of course, far longer than the lifespan of any organism, and by the time Llrn was well and truly gone, humans had turned even the grasses to their will.

Romm did think that agriculture was fairly brilliant; even now, he liked to listen to the high stalks in the cornfields rustling in the summer. But he’d not had the time to give proper words as to why that was before there were too few kings left to converse with. A king was that which changed, as Romm had learned so long ago, and by making other kings and kingdoms an instrument of their change, mankind had rendered those monarchs silent. Mankind had killed the other kings, Romm thought, though of even that he was not sure. The place where Romm was born became Monument, Kansas, but only after other humans had given it other names, and Romm pitied them still. Mankind changed even each other and no one there but Romm remembered what it had been before, with what names and what lives.

But mankind did try. They did try a little bit.

There was a cemetery in Monument. It was an expression of his home’s new name: a memorial. A testament. It was not meant to change, nor was it meant to be changed, and while a king would remember all the lives and names and shapes that existed during his lifetime, the monuments that mankind made would outlive the men that made them.

There was something to that, a thought that Romm wanted to spend time on.

While he thought, Romm kept the graves that men had made, and walked the cornfields as he had the tall grasses, and the feel of them against his legs was nearly the same.

~*~

Romm, who could be king.

Character design adopted from who I hope will forgive me for turning him into a siphonophore. Lore is a part of my ongoing series, called Kings of Earth:

1 - The King of Central Park
2 - The Second Worst King in New Jersey
3 - The Half-King of Kansas
4 - She Sleeps in Nunavut
5 - When Manhattan Was Just an Island
6 - The Sand, the Stones, and the Sea at La Serena
7 - A Light Died in Union City
8 - The Last Man in Monument