I've used the crooked tree to sketch out another scene from a world I imagined in another Flash Fiction challenge.
There’s no-one with less job security than an astronomer - with the
obvious exception of an aeroplane designer - so I often sit under the crooked
tree.
The twigs resemble blood vessels tunnelling out through some invisible
body from the arteries and veins that are the branches…
it is more like a nervous system, which is
how I can communicate with you
I did not hear the words which were as loud to me as shouting though
they didn’t disturb the peace of the glade. The words simply formed in my mind:
as real as memories and just as silent to the outside world.
“Who are you?” I asked the open air or whatever the inner world of my diseased
imagination had conjured up after a lifetime’s disappointment.
i am an exile, the last of my kind;
a skulking fugitive below the outer crust of my home planet a century more
light’s travelling from your world
Not one in a thousand people on Earth really believes in other planets
any more, or that this world is only one of maybe hundreds in the cosmos. When
I tell people I’m an astronomer they often ask me if I draw up horoscopes and
then grow blank and bland and apathetic (or else they become piously furious)
when I explain that it has long been known that the universe contains many suns
like ours (which are what we call the stars) with planets circling them as
whale calves circle their mothers.
Surely this voice was my unconscious dredging up an invisible friend
from a place that Mankind is no longer interested in seeking out; comforting me
after dreaming back home in Iowa of Outer Space were dashed by academic
disappointment as astronomy grew ever less respected by the world’s physicists
and after long years at the drafting table, unsatisfied and resentful, in the
enormous Boeing shipyards on the Jersey shore.
you doubt that i exist, sky-watcher, and yet
you still do not flee this distressed, receptive organism for your home and the
depressive drug you hope will comfort you. you believe in your heart and despite
your grief that I am real. i am real and so i speak to you through (alas for
you no longer have the physics to understand it fully!) let us call it a
wireless radio constructed from this tree’s threatened life. learn well what I
have to teach you, former dreamer; for I have a message of dread news and great
sadness for you and for all Mankind
“I guess the numbers of next Saturday’s Atlantic City Daily Snorkel lottery would be too much trouble?” I
asked, thinking about cigars and some very elderly barley water I kept in the
closet below the shelf for all my bathing trunks.
you must learn to be alert to your
surroundings once more and to see the changes inflicted on your species during recent
decades, lest your nests become tombs and your reefs necropolises just as my
people’s have
If this thing started to tell me how to respect Mom and Pop and how to treat
other folks’ property I was going home and have a talk with my good friends Jim
and Jack and Mac and Glen and then wash myself thoroughly in the Waters of
Chlorine and meet someone not too fussy in the cheap bar of a cheap lido. At
least the Exile wasn’t telling me to build a boat. I hate building boats.
you must learn again – you and all your kind
– to construct aircraft and great rockets and so to regain the skies because what
is coming to your world and that extinguished my people is more terrible than
the dooms of which your religions warn you. the Void grows nearer, little
vertebrate; cruel beyond everything that all the generations of Mankind have
suffered
“Now wait a minute,” I interrupted (myself, I guess) “what changes are
these that’ve been inflicted on us? What should I be alert for?”
remember the fantastic tales that you read
as a child? The stories of gallant explorers visiting strange worlds? what of
them, now?
“But I do remember them; The Time
Machine and Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea has been filmed sixteen times in English. And The Lost World and the comic books about
Superman washed ashore in Maine
but what of outer space? what of The
War of the Worlds and The First Men
in the Moon? and remember from your youth
- did Superman hail from Atlantis in your grandfather’s comics? you; the would-be
scrutineer of the stars have forgotten that the hero was born on another
planet; not in the oceans of Earth. your species has had its imagination turned
inward to the waters instead of outward to the galaxy. the Void, my enemy and
yours, has long clouded your imaginations and it has done so by altering the
chemical balance of your brains and made you all obsessed with swimming and inland
waterways and the oceans. unless you teach them anew and urge them to incline
their eyes upwards, when the Void’s agents arrive to infest your world your
warriors will be obliged to struggle onto dry land from their fleets and learn
– perhaps too late – to fight in large formations on the planetary crust
I listened to a real radio that night, hiding from the Exile and what it
instructed me do. The program was about the Cuban Torpedo Crisis. Depressing
stuff. In the morning I’ll get out my chainsaw. But tonight, I’ll dust off my
old telescope and take one more look out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Perhaps I’ll
see something new.
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