Nest Among The Stars

Intruder - Part 2

Michael thought upon the actual words of the ancient verse, trusting they held no truth. In light of the circumstances now facing humanity, he feared the words as originally scripted might foretell a future soon to come to pass.

Standing before the transparent image he contemplated the journey which had brought humans to the present time. After having spent thousands of years staring into the starlit heavens, while remaining bound to the surface of their planetary home, humans had now been traveling and exploring throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years.

The first to break free did so in fragile one-man capsules. Claustrophobic contraptions, dangerously frail; virtually the entire craft was nothing more than a thin-walled cylinder into which volatile liquid propellant was poured. 'Rockets' they were called, the same name as used by the ancient Chinese to describe devises shot into the sky with the sole purpose of exploding into marvelous colors in order to entertain an audience below.

Unfortunately, the earliest spacecraft to carry human cargo sometimes did as their venerable predecessors had done. Accidents took many lives while the technology improved with painful slowness. Eventually reusable multi-person shuttles were developed.Regrettably, they relied upon the same archaic engineering concepts as their predecessors. Launched into orbit on the backs of explosive containers, the first shuttles could only glide back to Earth with the occupants hoping the primitive flight control and navigation systems would allow them to do so safely. The slightest error in operation or defect in structure could, and did, send many blazing into eternity.

We journeyed farther, discovered more, increased our knowledge and, in doing so, we added to our own dissatisfaction. Our lives were without any real collective purpose and, both as a species and as individuals, we went through the motions, existing in futility and welcoming whatever death would eventually extinguish our frustrations. We could take from the universe what we wanted, unchallenged and unassisted, but the knowledge of this very fact was a malaise which began destroying us.

Michael sensed life's vanity from time to time, more so since the death of his wife. With effort he could deny what he felt, put it down and carry on. But it always returned. Partly from a nature he was born with and partly from his training, his thoughts could be disciplined to focus on immediate tasks and not wander toward questions that were probably unanswerable in any event.

Nights were the hardest. He had time to think, to contemplate, to become aware of something he could only describe as spiritual. He resisted such thoughts; spiritual awareness had caused so much harm to civilizations and now was only to be tolerated by individuals and governments, never promoted. A divine nature could never be empirically substantiated and therefore had to be denied, with belief in such things allowed to lapse over time. Humans were taught that the only truth to be found was what your senses could discern through scientific methodology. Only the physical was to be counted as real.

Still Michael wondered. He thought on things his society considered harmful. As with everything in his life, he had never feared to search deeper, especially into his own thoughts. Even into his non physical nature.

Motionless before the entrance decorated with the predatory bird guarding its home, his mind continued to wander. Becoming lost in thought was something that had been happening with increasing frequency with the passing of each day in his empty world.

Earth's moon, for so long serving as the focus of human aspirations, had never been colonized. A useless piece of dusty real estate few people ever visited, no serious activity having taken place on it since the late twenty-first century. It remained Earth's friendly companion, as it had been for time out of memory.