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The Legend of Miaree by Zach Hughes
Chapter One
You must understand, my children, that a fable is merely a fable. Understand, too, that although I am old, and reputed, by former students of certain perceptiveness, to know everything, there are things that even I do not understand. The best mind can be befuddled, for example, by the mere existence of the Q.S.S.'s beyond Cygnus, unbelievably far, unusually bright, deliciously mysterious.
We men are arrogant creatures. We measure and guess, within plus or minus a few light years, their distance, those objects which we cannot explain. We speculate endlessly. Ah, how we do speculate.
The fable. You have read your first assignment, of course. I think not even the most daring of you would face me had you not.
In reading the table you must remember that the world, this world, that world, any world, was once young. Yes, even Trojan V, my young Alaxender. Once we crawled, we men, on the surface of the old earth, and even then we could look up and see the colliding galaxies in Cygnus.
Have you considered, Elizabeth, why man had to go to Cygnus?
Ah, primitivism, you say. The urge to hear and see the big bang. Yes, that is the nature of man. When star meets star—picture it, a giant and ancient blue star sending out a corona at fifty hundred degrees thousand degrees centigrade toward a cooler red star with a surface of only fifteen hundred degrees—man must be there to measure. We are the
inchworms of the universe, glorying in our ability to be there, feeling superior as we observe the paroxysm of two island galaxies wheeling ponderously into the ultimate death dance.
Because of the myth of understanding, you say, Julius. Yes, you too, Leslie, know that myth. Know the parts to understand the whole. See stricken stars surge into death and know the secret of creation.
Has that theory worked in practice, my lovely Stella?
Are we more than we were, John of Selbelle III?
We live. I am proof of that. We spread the dubious vitality of mankind to the far ends of this galaxy. We have heard, not with our inferior ears, but with instruments, the scream of a planet seared in the rush of an expanding nova, and we have probed into the old star fields at the center to find—what? What, Elana?
The dead planets? Death?
Ah, how alone we are.
But the question was this—about Cygnus: Do we understand the whole more for having been to far Cygnus?
At first we tried to go back in time, to measure the prime big bang of creation. Unable to do so, unable to find help in our quest from races other than our own, we poured a portion of the wealth of an empire of worlds into a Cygnus expedition, and we found a burning world and this. This treasury of words. Oh you may, at any time, by appointment (since it is a popular pastime and in great demand), see in the viewing rooms the ponderous dance of the dying galaxies, speeded into a motion which our frail life-span could not cover. This theory and that theory come forth and we know one more tiny part of our universe, but we are still unable to define it, no more than primitive man with his theory of the universe folding back upon itself.
Why do you shiver, Martha from Terra II? Why? Is it the fear of an emptiness beyond the range of our strongest instruments?
We are mobile to an unbelievable degree. Parsecs are but moments to us in our known blink patterns. Yet the unknown exists, representing—what? Death? Fear? We whistle into the dark maw of creation and further our knowledge. For what? For pure knowledge? Ah, we have planets devoted to the worship of data. We usurp a world to store our facts. We have a planet with machines to work endlessly, simply to relate out vast store of words.
Our parent sun, my young Healer from the old world, is said to be billions of years old, and it is a Population I sun, a young star. There at the center, where the Dead Worlds mock us, the stars are ancient, but where there was once life there are only death and silence and a hell of radiation from the densely packed fields of stars, and in all the universe we are, father and son, my young Healer, still alone.
Forgive me, I ramble. The question of ultimate creation is not scheduled to be solved this early in the semester. Yes, you may laugh, Cecile. I congratulate you on being able to understand that I make a pleasantry.
We are here to discuss a fable, for so your learned men have labeled it, this story of Miaree, this slim volume, this handful of words. Consider it and what went into the making of it. It is the product of two civilizations. Made by one, salvaged from a charred world by another.
What does it mean? I will not have the arrogance to tell you that. It is for you to decide.
First, we must remember that the words are only our words, and thus, a feeble substitute for reality. The words are not necessarily those of Miaree, for we found the fable to be totally incapable of literal trainslation. There is, as a result, a certain lack of preciseness, and absence of definition. There are questions left unanswered. Was Rei a man, much like us, Alfred? Ah, you can't say? Don't be ashamed. Neither can I. Yet I can see him and I know him. He lives in my mind, and thus, although he is separated by an eon of time and by endless light years from our pleasant rooms, he exists, does he not?
'When our race was young it looked up and saw the colliding galaxies. They will be colliding long after you and I, young friends, have joined Miaree in past time. And then, as now there will be many questions and few answers; hopefully, men will still be trying to find answers, perhaps, as we do, through literature. For I consider literature to be a minute island of sanity in a sea of excesses of cold measurement
and frantic amassing of data. We live, through literature, many lives. This is a blessing, I feel, comparable to those bestowed by our medical miracles, which give us the longevity to travel to Cygnus for the sole purpose of watching stars mash each other, and which allow us a surplus of years so that we may squander the youth of our children in studying a fable which gives no answers.
I was asked once, by a scientist, the purpose of my seat here. I confessed that I had no answer. I said that my work would not chart the voids beyond our deepest blink. I said that my teachings would not explain any reasons. The universe, I said, will continue to expand as I talk and after I cease to talk, and someday, if you are right, my scientist friend, it will slowly, over endless eons, slow, fail, and fall, to start the cycle again. Will you be there to measure that primeval rebirth? You say, I told him, that all matter began with hydrogen. If so, explain what happens when all the matter in the universe coagulates into one infinite mass and goes Boom!
In the face of such monumental questions, we are more concerned—are we not?—with today's lunch menu in the dining hall. Life is measured in microseconds in the day of the universe, and our sun is but a second in its life, my children. We must be content to live our lives on the rolling seas of the endless eons and to be thankful, as Miaree was thankful.
Thomax, would you please shake your friend LaConius and remind him that sleeping is best done in barracks? Ah, thank you. Now, LaConius, since you exhibit such interest, perhaps you would condescend to open your volume to page 1 and begin to read, that we might savor the literary style of the translator computer so well developed by your fellows on Tigian.
Chapter Two
In the beginning, God set the heavens aglow with a golden light to guide the feet of nocturnal travelers and
