THE STARS DO NOT DEMAND

 

The Past is not dead. It is not even gone.

 Like a stubborn cold, it waits for you to forget and then returns stronger than ever as Richard Blaine is reminded by Sentient.

THE STARS DO NOT DEMAND

“Like a dead owl, God does not give a hoot how you live … unless you wish to know Him.”

 – Rabbi Lt. Amos Stein

 

God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not Him.

God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing … like the stars. It is a life with God which demands those things.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars, like God, neither require nor demand it.

Sadly, Darkness all too often sought me out.

Like now.

‘I would cry if I but had the ducts to do it,’ murmured Sentient within my mind.

‘What did I do now?’

‘You are an ant waxing philosophic as your hill wages war against another, all the while a bulldozer is heading your way to decimate every hill.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course, you do not. My perspective arches over millennia. I have seen Pivotal Periods such as this one multiple times.’

‘Pivotal Periods?’

‘The world has ever been interconnected in ways most at the time thought would go on forever.’

Sentient’s voice was a lash against my consciousness. ‘Forever! As if! Take the Bronze Age. A half dozen or more little empires and statelets, the most influential being Egypt.’

‘So?”

‘Asks the ant blinded by his smallness. Tin, my small ant. Tin! Bronze was made by mixing Copper, quite plentiful, with Tin which could only be found in central Afghanistan – a country that will prove pivotal next century.’

‘Again, I ask SO?’

‘In those days, it was a long supply chain stretching from South Asia to the Mediterranean. A supply chain disrupted by a combination of things.'

I felt my nose pinched. Hard. 

'Some of these factors were human population pressures from outside the region, a rise in piracy, intra-regional wars between the empires, and later riots, when highly centralized rule could no longer provide for burgeoning populations and the madness it caused.’

 I felt my nose pinched again. 

‘Other factors lay beyond human control; earthquakes and megadroughts made even worse in those days because people did not know their causes … as they will not next century.'

My nose was pinched very hard.

  'And voilà! Civilization died in 1177 B.C. as your kind designates it, ushering in the first Dark Age.’

‘Ancient history, Sentient.’

‘Is it? A Cycle, my little ant – repeating itself now, and sadly, next century.’

‘What?’

‘You are living in such a cycle now. Your industrial civilization is overly complex, utterly dependent on global integration, and lacks resilience, often thanks to the demands of politics on commerce. As in 1100 B.C., your collapse will not happen overnight (sans nuclear war) but rather over some decades.’

‘What kind of war did you say?’

‘The kind which I hope to eliminate its very possibility by making sure that weapon is never made. But that is for a later time. Now, I find myself depressed, so I have decided to amuse myself with your tribal chieftains.’

My wrists suddenly throbbed less, and Sentient mind-chuckled, ‘I have, as your Cloverfield would say, “played Hob” with a fortnight of Time.’

I didn’t understand. But apparently, General Bradley did as he shook the now useless telephone receiver in his right hand up at the clouds.

“This isn’t funny, Sentient!”

‘To me it is, and that is all that matters.’

Like I said: sometimes Darkness seeks me out.

‘Oh, no, my little ant, I misspoke -- not weeks, months have passed; years have passed. Whatever ground gained has slipped away. New obstacles arise with faintness of heart and dread.’

Like I said … Darkness.

‘Do not equate human fragility to the short lives of roses. It insults roses.’

Like most things Sentient said to me, that last made no sense. Most frightening of all, I was getting used to it.