When
the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to
be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him,
incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of
straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose
track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so
long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging
from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines
towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and
shadow.
He
came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had
forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for
distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner
Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to
dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first
star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the
world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream,
shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.
In
our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in
our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we
found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise
life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of
civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered
the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but
death had won over it.
Among
the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of
a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange
of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came
under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a
few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We
would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one
of these worlds.
Eventually,
the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our
dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was
coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered
the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar
collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the
inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had
forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered
it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red
and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.
There
would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No
friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old
King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed,
his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were
catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our
infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened. The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild
and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word:
vanquished. He walked amongst us once
more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and
terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.
When
the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to
be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him
to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our
skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the
blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions
followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest
floor.
