The Day Star

by Mark S. Geston

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Once, at the height of Earth's fabled history, there was a city called Ferrin. Compared to Ferrin, all the cities of Earth that ever were or would be - from imperial Rome to towering New York before to the city called R afterwards - paled into insignificance. But in the long twilight centuries that followed the fall of Ferrin memories faded and men's ambitions waned, and by the time that the young man Thel heard of Ferrin, no one was sure it was anything but a myth. But part of an abandoned highway still passed near Thel's home - and when a starry fragment from Ferrin came into Thel's possession, he knew there could be no rest for him until he had followed the ruined roadway that still spanned time and space to find the truth about the Rise and Fall of Ferrin - and also of all humanity's hopes.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 123

Sample

It was said that out of all the cities of the earth, Ferrin was the loveliest. She had lived upon two hundred islands in the delta of the River Noon, tied together with bridges of spider lace and glass. Taxi boats and plump ferries with dragon’s eyes painted on their bows slipped along intricate networks of canals, water glistening like molten tin on the varnished mahogany and teak of their hulls. Float planes and flying boats, hazed in a thin silver fog, accelerated through the main harbor and leaped into the metal fresh air, their engines tearing the mist into wispy streamers.

On many of the islands were villas whose lawns of turquoise grass swept down through magnolia and crab-apple groves to the River Noon. The men of Ferrin and their ladies lived there, and in the low houses of ironwood and pine scattered through the rolling prairie lands north and south of the delta. On other islands there were larger buildings: laboratories built like fortresses to guard sensitive instruments or contain the raging furies that were studied inside them; museums where the magnet of Ferrin’s beauty had drawn the most splendid examples of mankind’s dreaming; factories, lying mostly below the river, where men sweated and cursed with the arresting vitality that permeated Ferrin. Universities spotted the delta islands with their own peculiar colors, steel and oiled teak where engineering, architecture, and physics were taught, old limestone crusted with flowering vines where Ferrin’s scholars worked with their brittle manuscripts.

Observatories spired up from the islands on columns and platforms cast from silver alloy; telescopes crowned them like ceremonial artillery pieces, waiting to salute approaching monarchs. Radio dishes nodded and spun excitedly as they probed spectra far beyond their masters’ reach. From these towers the men of Ferrin searched into the night to chart the course of stars and comets and the wheeling arcs of galaxies.

It was a city of infinite grace and elegance. Clover grew thickly between the marble roadways, and flower gardens were tended around the hangars and landing fields of Ferrin’s airships. Peacocks and leopards strolled among the vast shipyards where Ferrin built her fleets and navies. It was to these places, to the harbors and docks, that the men and ladies and beasts of Ferrin often came to think and dream upon the infinity of wonders that composed their world.

And more than anything else, Ferrin was composed of the sea and of the ships she sent exploring on it. Like the city that had shaped them, they were graceful creatures, their parentage obvious even when they had returned from illimitable voyages, their hulls stained with rust and sea grime. They strung their masts with pennants telling of the kingdoms and lands they had discovered, like fishermen coming home with blue flags boasting of captured marlin, or red ones for tuna.

When these ships, designed to survive any storm that had ever stalked the oceans, gathered in the roadstead of the River Noon, the men of Ferrin and those of foreign nations would walk over the bridges and along the roads of yellow-veined marble to the piers. Scholars and map-makers and astronomers met with the sailors to confer over the new discoveries they had brought home to Ferrin.

It was said that out of all the cities of the earth, Ferrin was the loveliest. But the same men who said this would also say that Ferrin was but a dream, once in the minds of her men and ladies, but now only in the minds of people such as you and I. Indeed she must have been a dream, for these men reason that such grace and goodness could exist only in the dreaming time of night. Our sun is much too bright and harsh, they further reason, to allow a place like Ferrin to exist without melting her observatory towers and spun-glass bridges, without drying up her canals and the River Noon, leaving her ships aground and stranded. A place like Ferrin could never live in the light of day, for this light shows the eye too many things that would have pushed the men and ladies of Ferrin to a bottomless despair.

This is, of course, mostly lie and distorted legend.

For ages after her fall, and after the fall she brought down upon the whole of rational creation, Ferrin was not so lightly dismissed as the product of children’s dreams. She was, rather, vilified and hated. It was only the ineradicable memory of her beauty that tempered the bitterness. Men admitted to themselves that they could not live denying the city’s existence and what she had, in part, stood for. So they allowed her to return to the racial memory, only an iceberg tip of harmless legend projecting up into the conscious mind.

Ferrin’s crime, if it could be termed such, was perhaps preordained by her place in the scheme of original creation—much in the same way the Raipur school of philosophy uses the position of our world in creation to explain the apparent inevitability of the crimes daily committed by its citizens.

The limitation of Ferrin to legendry is supportable only if one is convinced of the exclusivity of the world the sun shows us. As long as we are dealing with a creation whose total limits are susceptible to immediate, rational perception, we can be confident that Ferrin could never have existed in our world and, hence, never existed—for is not our world the totality of creation? The risk of supposing other worlds beyond our own is taken by very few intellects of our current Empire. To admit to such a thing would be to admit further that we are trapped here, a single point on a line composed of an infinity of points. Once having allowed our intelligences to be so seduced, the perversity of human imagination would conjure all manner of wondrous traffic between the points on the line, postulate the existence of nations and continents, each one more fascinating than the one before it, until the ultimate glory of Ferrin is reluctantly arrived at.

To carry this speculation a step farther, the conflict between the lineal progression of worlds and the concept of the circular universe held by our most advanced physicists might be reconciled through the introduction of a spiral universe.

Ferrin was the final point on this spiral universe, and our world and the sun that so mercilessly illumines it, the starting place. The sun is the birth-flash of god, from which raging gouts of energy and time still stream out into the successive worlds, filling them up, battering against the smooth curving walls until they reach the wider expanses of night.

The chambered nautilus’ shell is a more appropriate image than that of a flat spiral. If the universe were only a two-dimensional disk through which time rioted with a ferocity checked in only two dimensions, we would have long ago been blasted out of our daylit world, carried like wood chips out into more tranquil places. This has not happened, for the separate worlds of creation are finite in all three physical dimensions, joined and connected by small and devious passageways, laid out one against the other as they lead through progressively larger and more complete worlds.

This is the double risk of taking Ferrin to be anything more than legend. First, one realizes that he is held against the force of time in its most vicious and corrosive form. Second, one must admit that this world, being the first and smallest, is also one made by a most unpracticed god. It was here that he first tried to organize the elements of chaos into a coherent world, and it was here that his imperfect efforts were most subject to the terrible erosion of time.

With successive efforts, newer and larger worlds were fashioned, each more perfect than the one that preceded it. Many men have wasted their lives, as I very nearly did, looking for the doorways that connect our world to the rest of the spiral, seeing the ever-expanding spaces which swallow and blunt the roaring velocities of the time wind. For unexplainable reasons, the citizens of our world, almost alone in all the worlds of creation, have had a singular lack of success in finding the doorways, let alone ever opening them.

Just as the day marks the beginning of the spiral, so must it give way to night as the bottled time winds spread out, dissipating their furious energy in progressively greater spaces. And at the end of night, at the farthest limits of Ferrin’s last world, the time winds must gather their force again and howl off through gateways denied to men not because of any physical barriers, but merely because they did not know where to look. This is what the telescopes and antennas of Ferrin sought more desperately than anything else, this is what her ships continually pushed back the limits of the known world in search of, and this is what her scholars and scientists played out their lives in libraries and guarded laboratories seeking. They did this because they felt the time wind even in Ferrin, even though none of their instruments could register its ghosting passage. They felt a humid closeness about their spirits as the time wind swirled and wandered about them, for it often had difficulty finding its way past the final barrier and out of the nautilus’ shell.

At last, the men and ladies of Ferrin found the gateway and glimpsed the lands that lay beyond it. They freighted the chronic wind with robot probes which reported back to them; they recorded the wind as it whistled through the opening and then sighed, as if in gladness, and then quieted.

Discovered by her instruments, charted by her probes, Ferrin made ready to enter what many were convinced was Eternity. She built more towers and pylons, greater than those of her cathedrals and observatories. For ages, if time would be measured as in our world where the time wind shrieks outward from its birth, metal spikes rose from the islands and from the delta country. Aircraft spun up through the dark air between them, and shielded cables the thickness of a man’s chest connected them to the fortress laboratories and to each other. If time and the mortality it inflicted did not exist beyond the nautilus’ shell, then something else would have to be provided so that men were not totally without direction and proportion.

Some of the city’s more imaginative men speculated that whatever this place of Eternity was, part of its function might be to suspend and protect the nautilus’ shell. Classical legends, both of Ferrin and of our world, invariably hold that the universe was ordered out of chaos. If this chaos existed and broke through, it could erase any trace of rationality and life that had ever endured the time wind. But this was speculation, and the escape from time, the defeat of mortality and corruption, held a greater appeal for most of Ferrin’s men.

The entity that was to guide and order the new lands was called the day star. No legends report what it had been made of, how it worked, or anything else specific about it. Indeed, it is unlikely that any more than a handful of minds ever . . .