I, Voyager
She shook him awake into another night, a night that only a poet would call new. A night old and beleaguered of dreams that murmur of a world cast in shadow and ruin and beset by the awful cold outer dark. “Brock, Brock,” she said as he muttered utterances that could have no less been the ramblings of a dead language as that of delirium or madness. “Hush,” she said. “You’ll wake him.”
“What?” he said. “Wake what?” He started and threw an arm across her as he sat up and gaped at the darkness of the room.
“The baby,” she said. “Hush.” His frenzied imagination arranging all manner of dread upon a world yet cloaked in darkness, a blank slate for the worst his imagination could conjure. His mouth palsied with incomprehensible mutterings as he drove back against the headboard. She held him as he bore himself back as if there were some place further yet to go. His eyes wide and riven in horror. “Laney,” he said. She shook him.
“I’m here,” she said and put his head in her hands. “I’m here,” she said. “Look.” His eyes rolled the world over and finally squared themselves on hers. He stared blinking, and then she held him.
“Good god,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was.”
In this world, through the window-blinds seeped in the street lights of the city of Meloroma — the strange, unreal glow of a city that sprawled across the entire North American continent.
“The baby,” she said. “You might have woken him.” The crib was there at the foot of their bed, like it had always been. She put her hand through his hair, then he sat up and he remembered now where he was and where he had seemed to be a moment before. He had been awakened from this dream writ of another world:
A point of light is cast out into the rotund domain of dark, a quiet cipher among billions blown upon the void of interstellar space. It is a permanent voyager among so many other points of light, but unlike the others, its intent is certain; its origins retraceable. But it’s destination is a wholly different matter. For this voyager, hope alone plunges it through that cold dark glory, for it is a messenger, a communique with the cosmos, a pleading with the heavens to not be forgotten among the stars.
There is no certain destination; there is no return, and the messenger drifts through the deep as it’s makers age and one by one drift away into their own great unknown, and, likewise, the aging astronomer’s who had once witnessed it’s departure and calculate its travels, ultimately, relay it’s whereabouts down an unbroken line of apprentices that outlasts the crumbling of nations and civilizations. So much time has passed the astronomers speak in generalities reminiscent of a kind of mythology than they do in terms of the kind of precision that launched the voyager into space.
Indeed, as the messenger drifts through that cold awful glory into the furthest reaches of the deep, those long ago notions of time and space supply little aid to an anthropic perception of depth and meter. Indeed, such notions have scant bearing at all beyond the mundane needs of landbound speculations. And yet, that the voyager’s lonesome point of light continues into the endless deep.
It’s light is faint, momentary, less than momentary even and, at once, obliterated by the sheer magnitude of complete and unbroken distance. And yet, there is a stirring deep within the dark and frozen reaches. As if in a mock answer to its maker’s prayers, an observer has awoken and with pitiless gaze it looks out upon that boundless vacuum with which it is engulfed. By degrees, the point of radiance is become sustained, unwavering. Alas, there are fouler things in the deep places of the world than that which hunts with claw and tooth.
That pitiless gazer yawns wide upon the void and speaks thus:
Oh darkness, what light have you. Oh light, how much darkness abounds you. Where is your aphelion? Perhaps this quiet wink of light will yet turn away. Among such spaces and such time and such infinite freedom, freedom itself has become a prison. But rest ye weary, and despair, Oh quiet radiance, lest you encroach and provoke me from my stony sleep.
And so, once again, the observer sleeps, for one that has slept so long would not relinquish itself to a ranging of the voids so easily.
That lowly wink of light reflect by the voyager drifts on through the vast wakes among the passings of worlds and galaxies and worlds within worlds, the majesty of these gamboling configurations so vast the likes of only a god could truly witness such an all-encompassing panorama. At the edge of the quadrant, a star combusts in a supernova. Its pulsing radiance shearing out of the void, flash on flash, within its own minute and spectacular microcosmic vastness. All motion is seemingly suspended as the visible world dons its blank and primordial filiality. And so, that one quiet, ethereal point of light is besieged in its approach by those radiant bursts as the star collapses into a new eternity.
Amid such volatility, the point of light assumes a fixity the gazer will not ignore. And, all is silent. It always has been. It will always be. There is no habitat in such space for what depends on what is not silent for survival. There is no vein for the vibration of a tone to reside in.
And yet, the gazers does stir once again.
I have seen the likes of you once before, but of a wholly different world, have I not? I, the meaning quite different then, inchoate as I was. Much like you who are but a protos of some primitive artisan. That long ago encounter now little more than a myth. Images of dark revelation pervade my quietus still: A world seized in the throes of terror amidst tidal forces of such intensity that the land was ruptured and bisected with chthonic chasms, each rift spewing a molten viscera upon its own surface. Parturient star rendered black upon a gray-lit sky, blotted out by mine voided extension. Those afflicted supplicants who dwelled upon that world gathered in reverie kneeling there upon their nameless land, but, alas, one glares irreverent, as if with vulturous eye from among them. And I turn to see that multitude of mortal ruin. Testing, taunting.
Which of you is it! To watch and wait as you do. Make yourself known!
Alas, my disquietude had been provoked. I bargained. I charmed. But no forthright capitulation could be obtained. In a final convulsion, rending world from world in howls of confusion and rage, that which envied me perished, and now all that become silent, and so I departed, for there was naught left but a barren waste and listless ejecta.
Such artisans were marked. A trait specific to those that traverse the voids. Such a logic resides and, yet, perhaps, presides over you — you who are but the furthest reaches of a stargazer.
The engravings on this golden disc, it must be a map. Yes, of these fourteen pulsars, I am acquainted. I am to triangulate the center and that is where I am to find that which proceeds you? You, who, in all likelihood, are not so peaceful yourself, nonetheless you insist that the universe which abounds you would tend toward your better attributes? Woe to the worldbound who would allow a history fraught with the likes of such untold barbarisms to go unheeded. Indeed, one often disbelieves having seen one’s reflection in those places they were least expecting to see it, when, to their astonishment, it has been there peering back through the darkness all along. Surely, you, even now, are perched upon the cusp of cataclysm, an apocalypse. Surely, did you not know? And yet you seek. Your determination is remarkable, commendable even, but it is also compelling. To me. Because I, too, am a voyager.
I am your perihelion, Oh quiet one. Together we traverse these vast wakes and return you to your home. I am curious. Perhaps, there, too, I will find a likeness to my own beginnings. For what else might one voyage but for the searching of one’s origins.
Brock sat there a long time and looked at the glow of the street lights of Melorama on the window blinds. Outside the city was just as alive now as it would be at noon tomorrow.
“I was dreaming,” he said.
“I know. You were yelling,” she said. Neither spoke for a long time. Then he said:
“You think dreams predict the future?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we know things we can’t really explain to ourselves and sometimes dreams are all we get for it.”
“That might be true.”
“That’s the second time this week. Maybe you should see a doctor.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He got up and went to the crib at the foot of the bed. At night, half the city played out its own fantastical dreams while the rest slept theirs away. In this world, their child lay asleep, undisturbed. The infant’s mobile over the crib reeled silently as miniature birds hung in their tiny motion playing a tiny shadowshow upon the sleeping child. Brock smiled because he wanted it that some things would always be enough. For now, he would content himself in knowing there was at least one reason to awaken from a dream.
