The scientist sat in the living room of his cabin in the north woods, alone in the darkness. Alone, that is, except for the backstage murmuration of things done and things not done, of sins that required atonement and tasks that needed accomplishment. The noise in his head had driven him out of bed at an hour that, a few months ago, was the bright before dawn, but, now, was a reminder of the long winter’s nights to come.
He looked out the window. There were stars, hung in the sky like clothes on a line. A gift, the scientist mused, for soon the winter rains would make it no more possible to see the stars at night than to dry clothes without somebody somewhere burning rocks or goo to make it happen.
One of the stars blinked. The scientist’s eyes blinked in response, and they then made it the only star in the sky. It blinked again, and then again, and soon the scientist recognized that it was blinking regularly, in synch with some unseen, unheard metronome – and then, that it was moving across the heavens. An airplane. Broadcasting its presence to an unseeing, uncaring world; an actor in full cry on an empty stage, never quite sure that the auditorium is unoccupied, that it doesn’t hide a director, or a hostile critic, waiting to pounce on every missed cue, every fluffed line – a potentially fatal intersection.
The scientist’s mind wandered away from the airplane, to a night when the hours of darkness were short and warm, and there seemed to be more stars than darkness in the dark, and the scientist and his lady had a houseguest who was trying to hide from the university’s bureaucrats and accountants long enough to get the education she had come from halfway around the world to receive.
“Look!”, she exclaimed. “A shooting star!”
The scientist followed her gaze and saw, not the panicked, despairing screamflash of a meteor, but the even, purposeful progress of a pinprick across an arc of the sky.
“A satellite”, he corrected. “You can probably go online, find out which satellite it is and what it’s doing up there.” They did so, and identified it as a communications satellite, belonging to the population that made it possible for the scientist and his guest to access the internet and fetch the intel about that satellite.
Abruptly, the slight smile that this recollection brought on collapsed, as one memory brought on another – of the article in a university’s propaganda magazine (the same university with which his houseguest had been interacting) in which an astronomer decried the ‘light pollution’ from the population of communications satellites, and wailed that it was getting worse.
“Right”, the scientist muttered. “Millions of people, especially those in rural areas without other options, get to talk with each other due to satellite technology, and a handful of clueless elitist scientists, damn it, bitch about how something that is actually useful to people gets in the way of their pet projects. This is how they get their precious telescopes kicked off mountains. We should be grateful for what we’ve got, and figure out ways to make it work for all of us while we still have it. The tech will all collapse of its own weight soon enough.”
The scientist returned his attention to the airplane he had spotted. It was still there, slowly blinking and tracking across the night, a few degrees above the horizon.
Then, abruptly, it wasn’t.
🙂