Ryan and Emma lain together on flatbed of truck, the cool of autumn’s arrival drawing and keeping one another near in arms and hold of the other. They stared on the clear night sky as softening songs of crickets sang the last of their cantos before frost’s season of silence.
They stared on the Dragon rising low in sky, Leo stronger set, Gemini, Cancer, and other constellations as they dreamed, then through the celestial stories, a new line wrote.
Appearing in fold and point in sky, procession of lights appeared; steady line of moving stars that were not stars at all appearing in even and geometric spacing in train across the sky; appearing, star after star, from same point in sky; then disappearing again into oblivion at fixed place in sky.
Ryan recognized the pattern. He had seen it once before; and after, accompaniment of second sign.
“Did you see that?” Emma asked.
“I did,” Ryan answered.
“What was it?”
“Starlink,” Ryan answered.
It was a word and project referenced and praised and anticipated by the forward-looking and most modern of men. An array of satellites to provide the most modern and instantaneous internet to all men across the world, anywhere in the world, without need for land towers or stations. It was to revolutionize the communications of man forever after.
Ryan mused on its meaning. He was not so modern. He’d seen the way it works in different fields, forward promise with orders of effect never spoken or told on the back; the way those promised aid endure after-effects of different adversities and consequences less easily ameliorated than the simple non-problems, in reality, modern solutions addressed.
The heavens were forever changed; and man praised reception of a device unseeing that the devices divided and isolated man from each other and maybe more. Already, there were new satellite ventures underway to outdo the Starlink that was not complete. The new arrays, when panels were extended reflected light of the sun that outshined any star in the sky. So is the way with technology without bounds: always a new and greater before the present is even complete, and in looking to the future, the present is dismissed; its gifts cast aside or indifferently destroyed for promises of tomorrow.
Man’s reference to the Cosmos was forever changed. Man’s view of heaven would forever hold new guiding lights: none eternal, none of God, none fixed in sky; all ever moving, changing and disrupting man’s points of reference to an eternal order stared upon for all mankind. The new, racing and moving fixtures, would never be stars –only imitations that receive and magnify the messages of man living in its immanence.
Ryan and Emma rested in silence staring on procession of false-stars until all had disappeared. In silence after, they held quiet, still, in contemplation of the sight.
“There will come a time when the ignorance of man, blinded by the lights of night, will deny there is even a Universe. Like the ignorance of past ages, man will see himself as the center of Creation. But—this time—not as the center of a great and infinite Universe as in the past, instead as the center of a sky man himself created and hung as false-heaven. In our saturation of immanent sky, there will be a day when man can no longer even view the lights and depths of a transcendence that has always awed and elevated man into Inspiration and to Wonder.
The future ignorance of science without bounds or reference to history and eternal will be darker than any man has known before, and in the blinding and ever-changing blind lights, man will misuse the word again and proclaim a new day of man and enlightenment undiscerning—without grounding in the eternal—both have lost their meaning.”
Emma listened, eyes and mind returned eternal sky.
In the east, second sight showed: a shooting, not falling, star as she had never seen; beginning low in horizon and rising fast and flat across sky, dividing one into two as it rose before disappearing without dying fade.
When star was gone, Emma asked, “And what was that?”
“A sign,” Ryan answered.
“What was it? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know what it was. It remains Unknown, a telling that even as man does all he can to deny and blind his fellow creatures from sights and visions of transcendence; God intervenes. To hearts and eyes that hold open: God will show and speak in signs. Man of the immanent will mock; but Wisdom is not knowledge, and God’s Truth will live again.
Man may very well destroy himself, but God will remain. Man’s destruction of vision from does not destroy the truth of God. Even in age of blindness and enslaved immanence, man will never destroy the eternal and infinite Beyond.”
True stars shined, and they held to each other’s warmth gazing on disappearing Heaven-view as autumn cantos carried through the still night air.