100 followers and counting! All I can say is another thank you!
Oh, and here is a short story, as promised.
I wrote it a few years ago, so I can see some of the weak points and flaws, but I like it the way it was originally written. There's some charm in amateur work, which accounts for 98% of my charm.
This story is longer than the rest, so I'll post part 1 of 3 today, and the next two parts over the next two nights (so as to avoid the text-wall that is the bane of this blog).
The Sundrinker, Part 1
Many years ago, out in the black of space, a giddy young star drifts past a cold, black cloud of dust that had not given or received heat in billions of years. The star nods at the cloud and angels are borne off - beautiful wisps of superheated matter that swirl and dance happily toward the star.
#
In his lab, Dr. Glenn Tenso blinks sleep out of his eyes. His experiment is nothing new, nothing revolutionary, and barely passes for grant-work by his department’s standards. In fact, his work is cutting edge, but the blade is pointed the wrong way, both technologically and professionally.
In a computer controlled kiln behind layers of ceramic and coolant, fueled by old and new methods and materials, Glenn is trying to make something that alchemists in the Middle Ages discarded as foolish: The Sun-Drinker.
Theory, scraps of poorly-made parchment drawings, and coffee are his personal fuel for the project. His colleagues at the South Atlantic University physics department never offer their time or expertise, and his lab and home are a reflection of flying solo; wrappers, books, and a clutter of loose papers abound in both places. There is no solace in using a discipline, a degree, and an institution so forward focused as Dr. Tenso’s for something so archaic. Everyone else is pushing the limits of transistor size, and lasers are still popular, but archeology and alchemy are for historians – who work in a different building, didn’t you know, Dr. Tenso?
"Didn’t I know what?" He asks, looking away from his screen to the door. Standing halfway in his room, kicking aside a crumpled up something, is his department chair, Dean Anglen.
"Didn’t you know it’s midnight. Go home."
"It will take an hour to cool down, I can’t leave until then. I didn’t realize the time."
#
Dean smiles; there is a decent man buried beneath his grey eyes and hair, and his reserved speech, but it seems to have a hard time coming out around Glenn. ‘I can’t leave until you do, Glenn.”
"You could. You’ve known me for years, it’s not like I would steal anything."
Dean points above Glenn, until the younger scientist looks up.
"What?”
"Lights Glenn, you steal electricity, and we both know that isn’t reusable."
"Ah, good one sir."
"Right, well knock on my door as you leave"
"Ok"
The door clicks closed behind Dean and Glenn turns back to frown at his project. "It might be," he mutters to himself and sets the kiln to cool faster than normal; there is no sense in wasting more of a tomorrow that is already today.
#
Back in a time before Earth, the drifting star has looked better. Around it, the collections of dark matter hover in their usual halo, waiting mysteriously for the final hurrah. Its bulging depression of gravity has things with their own impressive satellites screaming as they break under velocity and finally impact, to become just another snack.
Dust clouds no longer dance shimmering to meet it, they are simply swept up, and the time finally comes to collapse. This is not unusual; stars die all the time, as they must for the elements to scatter and seed new worlds. This star is at first like all the rest of its class: It will go through the elements from hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon, and would continue on to iron, but runs out of energy. It sucks inward in seconds. Everything but the carbon core is ejected. Newly naked, it becomes a white dwarf. It drifts and fades – a glowing diamond the size of our Earth - while the patient halo of dark matter closes in to create more of itself once the light is gone.
There are forces in Universe, of light and dark, heat and cold, seen and unseen, which compete, most which are unknown, and of which this star’s story is only a glimpse through a keyhole at another world
Just when the dark tendrils are growing too bold, an unwitting hero saves the day. A bright young star wanders by, pushed there not by choice but by galactic forces, and drives off the dark matter with its bold song of light and heat. The dwarf falls into step with the new star, and hand-in-hand - dwarf taking some of new-star’s hydrogen - they wander on together. As dwarf shares with new-star, they form a bond never before created in the universe; their masses are perfectly balanced for a moment, between the siphon of gasses to and from each-other, even as new-star has grown old. In this moment, this perfect unduplicated instant, there is an electromagnetic pause between them, as both shine and push equally, and something is created in that held breath.
The ever-present dark matter around the two backs up, in reaction to something new on the other side of the table. The new light matter between the two friendly stars knows itself, knows it is order, and unlike any other thinking or moving thing, it does not take energy; it makes it. The shape of it changes, as it forms itself into the best possible structure for emitting. It is, after all, only a few thousand old molecules made new, and once aware, it knows it needs to learn how to exist in the most enduring way.
The suns flared in excitement as the light matter tipped their scales, in a few million years that slight imbalance let them converge and collapse to form a neutron star, but one that the dark matter avoided still. The light matter was gone though, delivered by the final explosion of its parent stars into new places, to learn how to live among strange stars.
In the dark among the constellation of LED lights on his workstation, with the gentle whir of fans, Glenn imagines himself in a universe of his making, and tries to find the point where his creation went wrong.
He had turned the lights off in order to see not what was, but to see what could be. He felt, even as a professor of it, that science has a way of robbing magic: If you confidently explain a rainbow as the refraction of light through droplets of water, then you are no longer talking about the rainbow, you are explaining it into a box and putting it on a shelf. That water and light should exist is a miracle, and neither has an origin that is traceable. That you should be able to perceive their meeting, with eyes evolved from nothing to something over billions of years in a line stretching from you to your parents back to a single cell, and back farther to when that line was a point inseparable from what became the light and water is something that should make any of us cry with awe. If someone sees that tear refracting light and explains it to you, is it not the same crime, and should you not cry another for their dusty shelves?
Despite these misgivings about seeking useful truth at the cost of beautiful truth, Glenn found his happiness in the meeting-place between the two: The past: In the ancient dreams of our ancestors, before speedy travel and cameras, the mystery of everything unseen made fear and love the only divisions between truth. There were holy truths and unholy, and in smoky rooms of both kinds, ideas that have since been pried apart by science were caressed by imagination. These shimmering and uncertain landscapes of ideas shared borders, borders that were often shaped by a coughing fit or hunger. Parchment scarce, words – keys guarded by clergy from the commoners – decorated and lost.
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