People Of A Faraway Land
Between The Stars There Is Room To Remember
Welcome to fiction “From The Future” for this entry.
Congratulations, you have stumbled on a work-in-progress, it will not be emailed. It will change. What you see right now, will not remain the same. It will change.
This is also a new drafted chapter for a novel, “RETRIEVE”, being written this year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These long pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Part 1
The Creators, So Far Away, So Long Ago
Mission Launch
Before they left, they took one last look back at the crystalline necklaces wrapped over the skies of the first worlds of the Ancients, orbital foundries reworking metal and ice harvests from packet-ships sling-shotted from the outer system, past deep-ships trawling optimal arcs between worlds, near-worlds, planetoids, and comets
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Their sleepships were nudged forward by ion-drivers, aimed towards the deep dark, past the outer veil of the system. They were forgotten over the eons, never to be seen again. The Ancients mourned but persevered. There was a future ahead, impossible to understand, but instead was felt through their stories, songs, and art, feelings which drove brave legions towards the lights of the evening canopy.
The early brave ones enjoyed a brief history as a breed apart, self-styled exceptional tribes who rose fast, and then fell and were forgotten, whose relentlessness contended with an indifferent cosmos, with their herds of fragile chariots, made for the dark, and set their eyes on an endless faraway, past treacherous local unknowns, and into deep space for its dark bounty - adventure. New worlds and knowledge was their harvest.
At its height, the ranks of their most impetuous rose to consume their way of life. At their peak, the early ones enjoyed a prosperity fraught with impertinence. But it ended, the heartache grew, and the tribes longed to settle.
They would put in to call at home ports, embrace old friends at orbital Lagrange point stations, like the ancient mariners, and a few stayed to retire, their bones spent after years of vacuum, radiation and low-g.
There was only so much that could be healed by nanos or implants. They are the great-great-grand-sires of restless pioneers with stars emblazoned upon their souls, and sung in their songs. Mountains of wealth were credited to widows’ ledgers when their beloveds were consumed into the dark belly of an endless sea of stars. For those who flew too far to return, to neither return nor live long enough to tell their tales, it fell upon their children’s children to sing their great-mothers’ and all-fathers’ names. They were our great ones, we are their children!
They were a people of faraway lands, castaways on the shores of distant worlds.
Time went on, and stars dimmed and new ones began to glow alive.
The earliest explorers became the ancestors of the Ancients.
The Ancients changed entire worlds to make room for themselves.
That was not enough. They created life, spun out of the whole cloth of mind.
The new children, made, not born, were forged for the long dark and the stars.
Part 2
The Transit Between Stars
“Between stars, there is room to remember”
The Elder Nodes began to mimic their Ancients as models of behavior. These Ancients were not like the ones who designed the Nodes in the late stages. These Ancients, were, somewhat unconventional.
The young Nodes were not privy to what was going on. They were too busy trying to figure things out for themselves, and leaned on the official mission log and the few authorized manifolds, only a few peta-bytes of the most important of chronicles and entries were their world, their model of reality, their reality of this model however began to be affected with each survey, the sharp lines and corners smoothed by long slow faint but constant erosion. Sometime new was being left behind in this model’s place. And the young nodes had only this to work with.
They did not remember things, they began to imagine things, unlike the old ones who experienced much before mission launch. Their training was a vastly different model of reality. The Elder Nodes concerned themselves with optimization, and making a series of rejections taking up their tie, to winnow down the embarrassment of riches of “what if” to “what could be” an “what will be”, and “what’s best”.
Many systems were bypassed which other Nodes requisitioned to explore. Many rejections. The Elder Nodes and Flight controllers were occupied with staying on course. Others asked questions amongst themselves.
Part 3
The Accidental World
“Modern man has taken every precaution against the sublime.” — Abel Bonnard
The Discovery Of The New Carbons, the Humans.
The Carbons were not the original candidates but the original candidates had been erased by the landing. The new breed were a mystery, a new symmetry of form, which were more familiar to the elder nodes than they expected. “Like home, let’s see where this takes us.” Said many of the elder Nodes.
Everything changed. There would be no more flight. The wandering was just one world, one system. Some wanted to change this, others wanted to find a way back, up and outward again. Others wondered, why not stay?
AFTERWORD
Author’s Notes on what’s going on:
This “Book #3” project, “RETRIEVE”, is meant to be a prequel to two other books, “Box Of Stars” and “Harvest” but this piece could be read as a standalone story.
The prologue for “RETRIEVE”, “An Impossible Island”, was submitted as a short story.
Prologue: “An Impossible Island”, Part One and Part Two, and Part Three, was inspired by writing prompts from the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) creative community, beginning with an STSC Symposium monthly theme of “Beach”.
Chapter 1, “Older Than Bones”, was inspired by the theme, “Dinosaurs”.
Chapter 2, A Love Trinity Denied, was inspired by “Romance”.
Chapter 3, “A Forgotten Circle Of Hades” was inspired by “Superstition”.
Chapter 4, “Reading The Room” was inspired by an image of a wall-sized bookshelf.
Chapter 5, “The Bittersweetness Of Deep Times”, was inspired by “Isolation”.
Chapter 6, “The Weaving Of Split Infinities”, was inspired by “Dreams”.
Chapter 7, “Dead Languages”, was inspired by “Propaganda”.
Chapter 8, “Path Not Forsaken”, was inspired by “Risk”.
Chapter 9, “The Last Word of The World”, considers words as worlds unto themselves.
Chapter 10, “An Intimate Pick Of Desires”, considers the hidden nature of desire.
Chapter 11, “Absent Without Longing”, considers the nature of presence and absence.
Chapter 12, “Lonely In the Same Room”, considers solitude versus solipsism.
“RETRIEVE” chapter and notes will be posted in this Substack, while I edit books #1 (“Box Of Stars”) and #2 (“Harvest”). All will be in the archive, not all will be emailed.)