The prologue of my new book, “STARLESS and Bible Black,” now available.
(I am sorry I didn't post this while it was free on Amazon. If you'd like it, comment on it with your email and I'll send you a free PDF of the finished book.)
Prologue:
The Flicker—the Night the Stars Went Out
It was a beautiful, crisp, starry night blanketing the shadowed half of this predominantly religious world. The countless flickers, scintillating pinpoints of divine camaraderie, proclaimed our fellowship with the rest of creation. Too distant to render any heat, they bequeathed warmth in other ways.
They were our legacy, the stars. Our progenitors. We were in the continuum of stellar ontogeny, perhaps mere side effects; perhaps crowning achievements. Our dust was as germane to this continuum as the dust that made the stars that made us. We have lived as the progeny of fusion, depletion, collapse, and explosion, all forging elements heavy enough to become the sentient beings that wrote about them, first as myth, then romantically, and finally scientifically.
The twinkling night both chased behind and receded away from the day, the metronome by which all life on Earth bides time. For half of all of our heartbeats until the last, the gift of the night was ours to behold, allowing us to fall asleep in a comfort of constancy that our world would be there when we opened our eyes again. The repose that ended each day, when all brows unfurrowed and the beauty of infinite calm swept all faces, evidenced how we indeed were made in his image and likeness.
The sky dazzled those who looked up on this beautiful, crisp, starry night. It was cloudless, the curtains drawn away from center stage for the show that must go on. Night after night, since Man first looked up, this show was enjoying a good run. A million million points of light, often the metaphor for giving hope as it always had, promised an end—someday—to our loneliness: Were we first? Were we only? Were we left behind? The answers shined in staccato encryption on the dome of each night, awaiting meaningful dialogue.
Our large orbiting telescopes brought the beauty of the cosmos to the common man who financed it invisibly with withholdings from his earnings. There was a science called Astronomy, as richly explored as any other discipline. Cosmological certainties played the music of the spheres to those who danced with gravity and time and space, hoping to decrypt overtures from the aether. There was a pseudoscience called Astrology, as richly exploited as any other discipline. Cosmological alchemy played the music of the spheres to those who were tone deaf to the realities.
Astronomy looked outward, astrology inward. Outward, however, was where there were both hope and anticipation, beyond…perhaps, just perhaps...
The hope in the stars often slipped away, neglected and unappreciated, less and less on the minds of the distracted busy men and women otherwise going about their days that separated their nights; even children, who felt the hope more, only rarely fantasized the comic book possibilities of others elsewhere offering new ways that could change everything.
Mostly, life went on in our predominantly religious world, day after day, night after night, our stars unnoticed as much as the air around us; as much our companions as the love, hate, greed, benevolence, ruthlessness, and mercy that directed our motives and decisions. Always there for those ingrates who could simply look up, the stars faithfully held our hands in the universe whether we beheld them or not.
On a night we were to look up and see nothing, look up and see them no more, it would be a nightmare, just as intangible yet just as horrific.
We were not immune to nightmares, however. The astronomers at work at the eyepieces on our big telescopes financed by common men—on Mauna Kea, in the Canary Islands, and at Palomar—were having a bad night as their viewing opportunity drifted to them from the east at the speed of the world’s rotation. On this one evening, for those astronomers who watched along serially darkening longitudes, the stars were gone. They had gone out. In a blink.
They simply were no longer.
No one guessed correctly the reason for their sudden disappearance, instead misdirecting blame on a suddenly overcast sky, on pollution, or even on washout by a greedy grandstander full moon which persevered as our only remaining friend in a universe previously filled with hope.
Motorized telescopes the world over moved more this night than in many years combined. But this—Shakespeare’s o'er-hanging firmament—they discovered, was brave no more; this roof, they realized, was no longer majestic or fretted with golden fire.
The Saturn Encounter mission took the straight line into oblivion, no longer circling within the rings, because Saturn wasn't there. The New Horizons mission that had visited Pluto and now aimed for future Kuiper belt targets went astray into nothing. Martian rovers stopped sending data. The historic Voyagers I and II, now forever only moving away toward nothing, would never reach anywhere at any time, ever.
Astronomy ended that night. Astrology ended that night. Hope and anticipation ended that night. The Earth jutted out as a crag overhanging a sterile abyss. The sky was universally starless over cities like New York, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, and Llareggub. The sky was evenly Bible black over bucolic forests like Sherwood, the Sequoias, and Milk Wood.
Just as we outlast our nightmares, extinguished by each dawn, we are only one sunset away from the nightmare’s return.
(I just published STARLESS and Bible Black on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722CKQT7).