Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Not So Distant Stars

By the time that Egon Lincoln arrived on Titan, most of the surface had already been mapped.  Of the dozens of moons, minimoons, micromoons, and moonlets orbiting Saturn, Titan was the prize and it did not take long to explore, claim, and even to litter it in the name of humanity.  Just like Earth.
      That piece of debris, a robotic camera, was left where it went dead as a kind of marker, a stake in the discovery it made.  This was a small gesture in the grand scheme of things since what the robot found had already been there for millions of years.
      The first images back to the colony were shocking but soon gave way to analysis and study.  There in the middle of a craggy plain under the far stars was a dome, perfectly black and smooth.  Holowaves, spectral scanning, and even an unmanned archeoprobe could not reveal anything more.  It was no doubt the first sign of alien intelligence yet seen in our solar system but whether it was a device or a sentinel or a bomb or a doorway was yet to be determined.  For that they needed to send someone, a person, and that was Egon Lincoln’s job.
     There had been other moments.  Hopeful ones in which Egon used his semiotic skills to determine if some discovered scrap had been created by other sentient beings.  Scratches on a cavern wall on Ganymede that were actually etched by a plasma river.  A complex geometric pattern on the surface of Europa that turned out to be formed by exo-fungi.  There was life out there all right, but none of it smart.  Until now.  Maybe.
      In spite of this, as he rode the rover to the dome, Egon knew that he carried the hope of the world with him.  It was a silent wish that all the problems among humans might diminish in light of finding that there were others out there with answers.  This was a great weight he carried but there was more.  His own private yearnings, for example, to make a difference, to find something monumental, something that might erase his years of frustration and disappointment.  To finally have his life of searching and probing mean something.  To matter in some way.
      As he left the rover and finally stood before the dome, Egon tried to control his anticipation, to stifle his hunger.  It was hard to be objective with his pulse racing.  Besides, he knew very well that nature was herself an architect, capable of producing the most astonishing structures through natural forces or even by using the simplest of critters.  Just because it looked engineered, even beautifully so, did not mean that someone somewhere made this thing.
     He had plenty of equipment on his rover but he liked to rely on his intuition first.  And so he rather casually walked over to the dome and got down on his knees before it.  It was nothing more than a half-sphere, about two feet tall and four feet wide.  It loomed larger in the images.  In the sheen of the black surface he could see his own reflection and the craggy terrain behind him.  The surface was pristine, no dents or markings.  It did not glow or vibrate or, as he knew from previous measures, emit any kind of energy at all.  Egon closed his eyes and placed his hands on the surface of the dome, as if to commune with it.  As if touching it might unlock it in some way or at least give him a feeling about it one was or another.  Which might have been a ridiculous gesture except for one thing….it worked.
      In an instant, Egon felt taken over by some force.  Not a physical presence, but a cognitive one.  As though his consciousness – which, like anyone else, he felt that he proudly owned - was now being leased by someone else.  As when dreaming and here, alone on a lonely rock, on his knees and touching a mysterious dome, Egon Lincoln dreamed.  But not just a dream, an envisioning.
     He dreamed the story of the whole universe, as though floating above a great city that was time itself, with lights like lives and shadows fate, and streams of energy slithering through and through.
     In his mind’s eye, he vividly saw the spark of being, glowing like an ember in a purple sea of nothing-to-see.  Then the molten stars forming and the galaxies expanding, the great spinning that holds space in its thrall.  He saw the churning whorls that wound around baby stars and watched the earth congeal from dusty dust.  The iron core, the foggy brew, and the sea like a vast expanding.  He thought to disconnect himself but the dream was too stunning to end and so he held on.
      The heat of the water rose and from a kind of molecular bath he saw viruses form, then cells piling onto cells, the great architecture of life forming, and the sponges and the starfish, and all of it pushed up from the mire by the force unseen, unnamed. 
      As though history itself had been unloosed, Egon saw in his guided dream the worms and their hopes for enlightenment, then the fish with their willing wanting, and then the lizards, so noble and stern, come to rule the earth.  And the mammals were born and love was new and the dinosaurs with their pride in families and their bulky sense of duty, and the eons passed, millions of years but only a gasp in the breath of life.  And only a single blink in this moment.
     Soon humans walked the earth and all the varied, troubled, wondrous, tragic ages of men and women dawned and dusked.  From mud to brick to wood to steel to titanium to solid hydrogen, civilizations sparked like quarks, and all the multitudes that passed though all the way to the New Birth and beyond.
      He dreamed through to the Second Age of China and the Seventh Eon beyond Nation States, and the Great Exodus and the Aftermath.  In time came the Transition when the Gan came to power, and Burgeners, Solomon cities, and the rise of the Cenidae, their passion, their sublime cathect of sympathy.  And on and on the dream went dreamily into the Ages of Derbil and Selestum and the three Danidey and the Kill and the Alpha and then the great Stepping-into-the-Pale-Corridor, and beings and worlds he could not name without the right sounds for them.
      Egon stirred as a sound intruded – a signal from the base - but he did not move or wake and dreamed of things he could never have dreamed of envisioning.  Of the Minos bearers and the Melarians and their bright winter wars, and of the Windwater, the great Whisper Kingdom from the far star, the carrier of the quantumRose, and the soldier poets of Ei814…all this he saw as clearly as a wish in a child’s wonder.
      He dreamed of the time beyond people, of the ghostbeings in their touchless towers and he heard the music of their holophony, so spicy yet so tender.  And then the Running and the New Beginning.  And the ages of the conscious mind came and went like birds winging, and all the planets were washed clean and storms rose and softened the plains and new truths were born.  The dark matter turned to light and then dark again through many cycles.
Past the edges of the cosmos, he dreamed into the realm of the Nebulae and the billions of ocean worlds, when thought became matter and light could be held in the hand and used to sing.  There at the very end of the collapsing cosmos, he could detect a distant understanding and the acceptance of time itself as an infolding embrace.
      And when the final branes colloided and all of it all came tumbling back, back and back and back into a single pointpin of all there was and ever will be, life itself all enwrapped and enriddled, the final move by the starmaker to begin again, the something that comes from absolute nothing…even then the dream did not end.
      Because that very point, smaller than the smallest notion, a mere speck in the swoon of sooner-or-later, became the impetus for a new conception, another theory of thing and thought, and in a moment that took no time at all, without hesitation and full of will, it exploded in light and heat and expanded and bloomed and then it started once more, the begin and the become all over again.  New day, new universe, world without end, amen.
      When he woke up, Egon was lying on the ground before the dome and he realized that he must have broken the connection and passed out.  Or maybe it was the other way around. 
      He saw then just what the dome was.  It was an encyclopedia of the universe, a timeline of time itself, placed here by some vast intelligence, some future iteration of humanity perhaps.  An immense telling way beyond his own ability to grasp yet for the first time in a long time, he felt at peace.  There was no hint of even his own finely tuned frustration. It seemed to him in his heart and in his onceness, as well as it can seem to any dim dreamer, that everything was just what it was, that life was endless and edgeless and eternally reforming.  And that any human being was only a teeny instant in a perpetual cosmos.
      Sitting there on the skin of a moon of an outer planet in one of a billion universes, feeling his own heart beat lost in the indifferent and majestic scheme of time, he knew he was less than he ever imagined.  But somehow this understanding filled him not with despair but with joy.  He was alive, right then and there, and he knew it.  Breathing, feeling, knowing.  And that was all that mattered for him to matter at all.
      He looked up at the sky and thought for once that the stars up there were not so distant after all.


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