Intergalactic Summit

*

Exile. Perhaps five hundred years into it - and it was after the third occasion of my descending into madness.

This time: A lucid waking dream, rather than the anguished gulf of hysterical certainty, as before. Now: Episodic encounters with my former, better selves. Dialogues: cheery and articulate; thoughtful and inane in turn.

Me: “How goes the ravishment of Delve?”

Younger me: “As good as can be expected without guns. We reload our fingers as often as we can.”

Me: “A delay then?”

Younger me: “A palpable delay. But we’ll be done in a few minutes.”

*

I will not apologize for a delirium state:

Stand too long staring into the heart of a sun, and one will wither. We become only pieces of foul smelling foil - with an overexposed chemical imprint burned into them.

Our retinas aglow, icy pinpricks that shall never see sleep again.

*

And what of ears? Strain to hear the stars and the silence will burst your god-damned eardrums.

I had stopped listening, for I could no longer bear to hear.

*
On the third day (or week – or year?) in that state I found Him, and the wonder of it returned my senses to me as surely as a bullet returned forcefully to its chamber would perish the pistol that fired it.

Let me describe:

My scanners were long dead, and I floated adrift, at a speed that approached madness, having only ever chosen “forward” and “accelerate” as my ambitions.

Then, with the device of human eyes alone I beheld four stars at a crackling console.

Four white pinpoints that danced together, alone, unfurnished by gas or satellite: Four white bursts of energy that drifted in the vacuum, as I did.

For the first time in my exile I found company, and it was as if Angels sang to me, for I knew I was approaching God.

*

I spent a decade in that state, in daily awe and fear and joy as this spectacle grew.

No longer a dance of mere heavenly bodies, the incessant approach revealed them more to me: Their tormented struggle.

These angels were dancing in death, their hallowed gravities ripping each other, tearing ribbons of light from each other as a crucifix wave. At the center of their despair, a squared cross of light writhed that met in every accurate fashion the golden mean of measurement.

I scratched the pattern of it a thousand times on the membrane of my console, until that device was dead and shattered. Then I could only peer at the lifeless thing and pray that my last other machines would not fail me: A flickering toy that threw an emasculated radar signal the length of that long path, and an even-yet-more-frail human soul that sent the hope that rode before it.

*

Fail they did not: In the start of the tenth year my course shifted and I was pulled into the center of the burning cross: A sliding blasphemy of false tumbling gravity that ripped my ship's hull like fabric.

How I wept for her, as I ejected from her tattered debris, and clung to the last womb as I slid into the maelstrom.

*