b.
Put a bow on it
"Yesterday we only counted as statistics: labor force, emigration, death rate, crime rate, suicide rate. The best of us also counted in the records: wanted lists, political police, reports, prison rolls. This is no metaphysical void! No commodity is more common and more depreciated than man. Is he even worth the weight of his flesh? They wouldn't let a draft animal starve in the gray autumn fields. But a man in a big city?"
—Victor Serge, Conquered City (p. 34)
And while we're at it:
"Spaceland had started several generations back with a flat plate of asteroid rock half a mile in diameter. A mad health cultist had raised a transparent hemisphere of Air-Gel on the plate, installed an atmosphere generator, and started a colony. From that, Spaceland had grown into an irregular table in space, extending hundreds of miles. Each new entrepreneur had simply tacked another mile or so onto the shelf, raised his own transparent hemisphere, and gone into business. By the time engineers got around to advising Spaceland that the spherical form was more efficient and economical, it was too late to change. The table just went on proliferating.
As the launch swung around, the sun caught Spaceland at an angle, and Powell could see the hundreds of hemispheres shimmering against the blue-black of space like a mass of soap bubbles on a checkered table..."
--Bester again, p. 115
Christmas Eve Special: Early Fifties Psychoanalytic SciFi Cliffhanger Delight
"Listen," Reich began in a low voice. "Sorry to bother you but you must have noticed. You're in the star business. You have noticed, haven't you? The stars. They're gone. All of them. What's happened? Why hasn't there been any alarm? Why's everybody pretending? My God! The stars! We always take them for granted. And now they're gone. What's happened? Where are the stars?"
The figure straightened slowly and turned toward Reich. "There are no stars," it said.
It was the Man With No Face.
--Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man (1951)
What dark forms
lurk in the mists of the Carina Nebula?
The question (and the image) belong to NASA. There are, however, other questions worthy of consideration, none of which require attribution.
Until the 1830s, so the story goes, poor Eta Carinae, who resides in the aforementioned nebula, was an ordinary, undistinguished star, another frail, anonymous mote of faraway heat and light. But she began to glow more and more brightly as each month passed over the course of that decade until in 1843, a year that started on a Sunday, she erupted and continued to erupt, gloriously, for twenty years, becoming the second brightest star in the sky. Then in 1863—not all at once but in slow, woeful spurts—she faded from view. (Those dark clouds you see in the image above are plumes of dust from her eruption.) Which means that if you had died, for instance, in the Crimean War, you might have lain on your back, at Sebastopol, for instance, and stared up at gorgeous glowing Eta, and focused all your pain and fear on her, and never imagined that ten years later she, like you, would be gone. Or if you were born, say, on the eve of John Brown's raid and took your first breath in the back of a cart en route to the midwife's, still miles away, and your own screams and your mother's screams and the ruts in the road and the cold of the night so alarmed you in your excruciating littleness that you opened your eyes and saw great big Eta up there burning away, the brightest and boldest thing this corner of the universe had going, by the time you learned to spell her name, she would have been gone. What happened?
"The most popular hypothesis proposes that the star's luminosity becomes so great that it overpowers the effects of gravity that hold the star together."
This seems to me a cautious, even puritanical view: that there are limits to luminosity. What other possibilities remain? Why did she leave us? Why did she burst? I repeat: "What dark forms lurk in the mist of the Carina Nebula?" Are they dark at all or are our senses limited, inverted, poor? What's so dark about darkness after all? Does Eta Carina mourn her faded splendor? Did she even know of her involvement in that strange bright lawn we call a "sky"? Will she arrive at the door late one morning? Or will she knock at the window late one night? Will she be tired? Does small talk offend her? Does she find intimacy alarming? Will she prefer a certain kind of tea? What about a week of sundays? Would a year born on a week of a sundays be seven years long, every day of it a Sunday? And if you lived through it would you age seven years or one, or just a single day?
Wait, listen, this is the good part: Eta Carinae is getting bright again, and brighter every day.
Look at her now!
