Peripheral Visions: Take Your Chances

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

Take Your Chances

Father and daughter loitered on the green in dusky gloam.

"Father, what silences prevail, what shadows grow up all around."

"It is unease the comets bring."

"Then are they comets?"

His soft reply in humor couched: "So astronomers have said."

Above them stars took gleam, and the gleaming in them echoed. The quiet was as fulsome as the twilight as it settled.

Father pointed to the majesty of arcs across the night. Six or nine came visible as blackness inked the sky.

"And none have guessed their purpose here?"

"Why, daughter, what is that? Purpose in the works of man? Or in nature's thoughtless jest? Consider how the seams of time and theory will conjoin. By that, I mean how musings meet the moment, and how often chance employs the substance of what comes to hand to answer airy thought. For each need, invention satisfies: That's how it is, and as it ought."

"And these bright arcs that lance the sky? Their trails stretch to needful ends? Their courses scribe a needed verse, remaining yet open to amends? Is this the poetry of time, is this the single song that the keening of the universe required all along? Such pattern in the thoughtless wild; such chance that patterns shared."

The father glanced sidelong and smiled.

The daughter, eyes lustrous, stared.

Above, among the stars, a brightening of a growing web: A waxing in the spectacle along with daylight's ebb.

The daughter spoke to give aloud reflections she detailed. "How perfectly arrayed the sky. How unseamed and self-supposed. Like a chaos of colors, or thought itself, with shades and shades enclosed. What mysteries gather in its basin, its shallows troves as well... an ocean in the imagining, with time fathomless and deepening, and us upon its swell."

Her father said in quiet pride, "Daughter, how you apprehend! No human sage or priest wise, nor any among men. As though the universe were formed according our need – what more symbol must we have to know us blessed indeed? What imposition on the world, and self-regard beside, to require answers of the deep to explain the whole design? Why, no less than Drake could hope to formulate a postulance so advanced it would, with such authority, advance an equal elegance."

His daughter inquired who was Drake, and why his words revered?

"A man who asked a question, child," her father answered her. "A question hearkening toward the concealments of distance and of gods: Should there be life elsewhere than here? Does it flourish far abroad? Around some other sun spring quick, by its fire warmly lit? But should such life in truth exist, then why no sign of it? No visitor from far beyond, no glimmer from the night. No stirring in the static. Nothing to excite. How very opposite, if Drake's enumerations follow: If but one world from a million stars should at its bosom keep a spark of living mind brought to awareness from the deep, then millions are the suns around which races wend and wind; so numbered are the stars, and so expansive fertile time.

"But out of millions, not a one has eager greetings shown? Nor sent a flare to fix upon? Nor into the cosmos flown? Nor ventured into the shallows of Earth's own encircling stellar crown? Is nighttime's majesty so hollow? Shall silence be the sound – the greeting mankind listened for, shall it be never found? Shall the Earth have no response, no answer from the sky? No comfort in companionship? No sentence of reply?

"Behold the answer," father said, and pointed to the arcs; long and bright like comet tails, trailing after sparks. "Behold summation," father said, "of numbers' dreary march; and soaring cries of loneliness, now met and boldly marked. How in this moment, as by design, chance and choice should meet. This moment, neither sooner nor slated for some distant date; this moment when the race of men should be never poised to greet, to speak, to understand? To entertain envoys from some remote co-incidence of clever curiosity? For questions to be answered, and then commence wholly unrehearsed history?"

"This moment," the daughter echoed soft. "An apotheosis at a precipice, when all was nearly lost – and renewal hurries hence."

"Was not this time the focal point?" – her father asked in kind. "Does not the future take its nourishment from all that's left behind? Is the purpose of all action not to stage a semblance of a plan, to codify and crystallize necessity's command? At every stage, necessity! And what seems narrow victory was from the first mandated. So much the better if, as well, a thirst to know is sated."

And the child, eyes shining now, found the shape of Father's thought. She gave a voice to what she beheld, before it should be forgot: "What splendid isolation for a species quite alone; and splendid irony as well, its messages to hone, from firelight to trumpet's call, to the throbbing of a drum, inviting those that chanced to hear with summonses to come. If theory's numbers were proportionate, and all's alike in such expanse, then Earth should think it fortunate if no others should advance. For are those bred under other skies so different all in all? And where a man sets foot, does he not mar the newly known? So into sums by Mr Drake make the proper substitutions; and show that sons of other suns possess like attributions: Conquest, war, and will asserted, frontiers brought to heel! Such drive and such brutality the engine of this wheel that nightly arcs and sinks again, fire scouring creation; like sparks as individuals; like blazes that are nations!"

Again her father smiled in pride, and in a liquid elocution praised her talent and her diligence; and in their language, new to Earth, imparted this intelligence: "A separate evolution must to common ends entail, for all's at one with nature's laws, across span and source and scale. Thus, those of us who first made land – we are most glorified.
The answering of fervent prayers, the force of the future's tide; this world in such distress has summoned us for strange salvation, but the very beings crying out are proved the aberration. So let us answer as we must, and our own salvation tender. We worldless wanderers arrive – and into Earthly annals enter."

Father smiled bright anew. "The equation writ by Mr. Drake was more than formulae. It was the first illumining that presaged a coming day."

Then with microphone to muzzle, he pronounced the fateful call: "All units of invasion force, to fore and to the task. The wheel has settled hard upon this planet Earth at last. The preparations come to close, and plans tied tightly so. Without one beat of hesitation: Soldiers, go and go!"

Beneath the fist of nature's jest the Earth reeled from the blows. The night was lit by stronger stars that glimmered brief below. Fill in the odds as you may dare to puzzlements that once rose; the answers may bear no semblance to what was presupposed.

Next week we take in the sight of a Tom, a man who has traveled farther than he intended in a bid to find fresh freedoms... only to face the prospect of those freedoms vanishing in a moment of bureaucratic fiat.