A Dream of Starlight [Short Story]
A short story about looking to the stars and seeing tomorrow
I am struck, as I gaze upon this cosmic theatre, by the memory, not of the night skies over Lunaris1 or the Grand Archive of Hellan2, but of my father. Of my father, and the stories he’d tell. Those sweltering summer nights when we’d lay on the roof of our house watching the starships pass by overhead. I’d have been eight or nine at the time, a mind like mud after fresh rainfall, ready for all the wonder of the universe to impress upon me.
And impress it did. Though the image of spotted starlight in the obsidian night felt extraordinary, the true wonder came from the stories they told. I still feel the hard, metallic smell of the desert dust as it caught in the sweat on my face. Even now, on those late nights in the university3, I find myself opening my office window to feel that smell wash over me again.
And I am back, for a moment at least, with my father on the rooftop. Bumps roll up my arms and legs as the chill of the evening creeps its way out of the wild darkness and into the thick, stifling air all around us.
It is the sound of his voice, so deep and so soft as to resemble the low hum of an engine as it rolls through the vastness of space. A voice that fills the world with sound, permeating your chest and reaching down deep into your heart - concussive and firm. A voice I still hear when my own child brings home those same tales my father passed to me on that rooftop a lifetime ago.
Tales of an ancient rock adrift in the din, far beyond even the farthest reaches of The System4. Beyond the Minor System5 and the Calister Belt6, out where gods rest and time itself ceases to be. A rock he called Tomorrow. Tomorrow was a place gifted to my own father by candlelight in his own bedroom when he was a child. Now he was gifting it to me in the hope that I might bring this tale, and all the others, with me to the future.
Tomorrow was a dark world, cold and empty like sleep without a dream. There, on the surface of this desolate place, one single pinprick of light persists. Akin to a flame breaking through the night, this light wavers but never ceases. It was, my father told me, as though an invisible hand was shielding it from harm in the hopes that one day, the light would once again flourish.
In this place, where time was long forgotten, this single source of iridescence waited. Until, from beyond the bounds of Tomorrow came a ship. The Starlight, as my father called it, crashed on Tomorrow. The wreckage streaked across the surface of the blackened world until it rested within striking distance of the light.
Out of the Starlight crawled a woman. Her body was broken, one leg in several pieces being held together by her space suit. An arm dislocated and a shoulder so swollen she couldn’t even think about moving it. Mercifully, the visor of her helmet remained intact. Her light, however, was shattered. And so she stood, leaning on the smouldering remains of the Starlight as they quickly faded to an icy ruin, and stared out at the darkness.
The woman has several names. My father called her Mary. Mary wiped away the crystalline dust that had settled on the domed glass of her helmet and saw, out beyond the horizon, the single spot of light. Knowing remaining with her ship meant certain death, Mary did her best to press her shoulder back in place and started on the journey towards the light.
For an eternity, she walked. In this place where time had ceased, where light was swallowed, there were no days or weeks or cycles or years. Only one step. And another. And another.
With each step, the light stayed just out of reach, kissing the horizon of Tomorrow, a blackened shadow cutting in two the heavens and the earth. With no more strength in her unbroken leg, Mary collapsed into the dust - her suit counting away the final moments of her life.
“Please,” she whispered, “I’m not ready to die.”
And so she felt the light around her, drowning in the bright iridescence. So bright was the light, she had to lift both her arms in front of her face to protect her eyes. So bright was the light, that Mary had yet to realise that the swelling and pain in her shoulder was gone. That she was now standing on two, unbroken legs and looking out at a void of light. Every kind of light poured out before her.
I asked my father the same question every child asked the teller of that particular tale when they heard it for the first time.
“Did she die?”
My father looked to the night sky above us and gestured to the infinite stars and those beyond what our eyes permitted us to see.
“No,” he said, in a voice safe and true, “she’s all around us.”
Author’s Note
And so begins the Season of the Ancients, a three month long series of interconnected stories, world building and more. I wanted everything in this new era of The Yesterday Saga to feel cohesive yet distinct. The analogy I’m using is Star Trek. You can just watching your favourite show or movie and enjoy the story as it unfolds or you can watch everything to pick up on the subtle ways the timelines and characters intersect.
This new style of storytelling is, selfishly, my way of allowing myself the freedom to try new things. What’ I’ve learned writing The Calibray Job is that I need to play with new tones and genres. The future of The Yesterday Saga is stories like ‘A Dream of Starlight’, small scale and introspective fiction designed to build out universe by seeing mythology and world building through the eyes of the people of The System.
This story is told by a professor reflecting on the stories his father used to tell him as a child. The Yesterday Saga has always been a story of mythic science fiction, space fantasy if you will. It’s a universe with space ships and aliens and distant planets, but it’s also one of myth and magic and mystery. One thing I wanted this story to hint at is the sense of scale to the mythology. That’s why I wanted to use it to kick of the Season of the Ancients. This is the first glimpse at the distant past and even more distant future of our fledgeling universe.
Next Sunday, I’ll be introducing the most important character in the entire saga, Yesterday herself. Until then, we’ve got another episode in The Calibray Job on Wednesday.
What are some of your favourite mythic science fiction stories?
Appendix
Lunaris is a moon in orbit around the planet Hellan in the Major System. The moon is home to the Golden City, the de facto capital of The System.
The Grand Archive, now known as The Anamnesis, is a fortress library that sits within the university city of Hela on the planet Hellan. Built by King Setia III as a way of containing and controlling the history of humanity and The System, the archive stores vast amounts of data in the form of holographic nodes.
At the centre of the circular city of Hela, sits the great university. The University is home to a number of branches known as Guilds. Each is responsible for research and development within a specific area including physics, cosmography and biologics. A student, upon being permitted entry to the university, will undertake several years of general study before applying to join one of the guilds. Should their application be rejected, they are summarily expelled from the university.
The System is the name given to the dual-star solar system within which humanity settled some three thousand years after fleeing the world known as Earth.
The System is home to two stars, Hellan Major and Hellan Minor. Each star has several planets in its orbit which make up the Major and Minor systems respectively.
At the farthest edges of The System exists the Calister Belt, a mineral-rich asteroid belt that is home to a number of research stations and resource-gathering operations. Though most such operations are sanctioned by the Thousand Suns Alliance, there are some conduct illegal pirating of resources within the Calister Belt. Policing the belt is nearly impossible due to the hazardous flight conditions and magnetic interference from the asteroids.