Constellations
Flash Fiction
I read as much as I can these days, whenever I find a new book, and I remember reading that if you look at 'em from above, the pyramids in Egypt are laid out in a way that looks like the three stars that make up the belt of Orion.
Curious, right?
You know. Chariots of the Gods. Ancient Aliens. I mean, I haven’t seen it firsthand since humans aren’t allowed in the sky anymore, but still…
We should have done whatever was necessary to develop the technology to travel to the stars. We should have been smarter.
We should have visited them before they visited us.
In our night sky, we see constellations every night. They’re easy to spot by their distinctive shapes. The Big Dipper is easy to pick out, and a few others.
Our sun is part of a constellation, too. An alien constellation; a shape you can only see from their system. If we’d given the proper weight to perspective... things might be different now.
I’ve heard people tell parts of the story before, back in the camps, but Kaiser told me the Rujnics come from a system with two rocky planets in the good zone. When their civilization first developed spaceflight, they visited their neighboring planet first. In their telescopes they had been able to see it was a blue planet with clouds and water and plant life, so when they developed rockets that could take them there, they went.
When they arrived, they found the ruins of an ancient unknown people, dead a million years.
Kaiser says the Rujnics knew a dead civilization had lived there because there were ancient monuments — pyramids. When viewed from above, those pyramids appeared to be arranged in an equilateral triangle. When the Rujnics discovered the ruins of that civilization a million years later, they looked up in the sky and saw a triangular constellation. It was made up of three stars.
I couldn’t tell you the names of two of them, not having had a formal education and all, but I can tell you the name of the third star.
Sol.
Our sun.
Our sun formed one of the bright points of light in the triangle constellation they saw in their night sky.
There was an American computer scientist, Alan Kay… I found some books in a house in Ohio about 3 years after the power went out and one of them had a quote by Dr. Kay that said something like “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”
And he was right.
Our best scientists tell us it took the Rujnics 231 more years to learn to travel to the stars, but they never forgot about us. They studied us from afar and gazed in wonder at that triangular constellation for 231 years.
They wanted to know why ancient monuments in their system appeared to point in our direction, like a road sign pointing the way to another advanced civilization. They looked at that triangular constellation through fancy telescopes and decided our sun was the only one of the three that had good planets around it.
And when they finally developed the technology to travel almost 28 light years to our system, they came for a visit.
My oldest memories are from the time before the Rujnics came. With my mom. I was 6.
She had a job. We had a house.
That was all gone before my 7th birthday.
My mom, too.
Since then, it’s been this. Moving only at night. Scavenging for food where you can and hunting when it’s safe. We can’t grow anything in these parts anymore because the ground is poisoned.
The Rujnics don’t come around hunting us, but if they see you in the daylight, they’ll incinerate you.
Really, when it comes down to it, they just make life as miserable as possible. We have unreliable electricity and suspect water. Trash rots in piles on curbs where people still live and corpses rot inside homes where they don’t.
They don’t come around hunting us.
So we’ve decided to bring the fight to them.
Tonight, the port comes down.
Troy Larson is a writer, digital content creator, and broadcast veteran with hundreds of podcast and broadcast credits to his name. Reach out on Facebook and on Instagram.