Story - The Stars We Know (Patreon)

I wrote this a little while ago off of a crazy idea I had. I was talking to a friend, and this idea came to me. I hope you enjoy.

The sun had just touched the horizon when Meekie started up the trail to the outcropping. The pups had already left, and they would be expecting her. The sky was clear and today was the new moon. It would be a good night for stargazing, and as the village’s chronicler, it was her duty to tell the story. And if her calculations were correct, tonight would be a beautiful story.

The village of River Hollow wasn’t much to look at, but it was home. Populated with about fifty canis and a small number of other species, it was one of the larger settlements in the Broadleaf. She had been born there and grown up exploring the ruins in the valley. As an adult, she’d documented them as best she could, but already many had fallen apart and been lost to time. The ruins contained valuable resources too, so there was a limit on what could be preserved. She understood this, but it was still sad to watch scavengers tearing apart buildings to get to the metals inside of them. Scrap was a valuable and essential business; everything that could be reclaimed had to be. When the scavengers found books, though, they always brought them straight to her.

From them, she’d been piecing together the history of the lost years. There was a lot they hadn’t thought to remember, and only so much had survived the dark years. The knowledge she couldn’t use or understand, she passed on, down to the town of Great Lake, the next settlement along the river. The exchange was beneficial since it was Great Lake from which the tools she needed to advance her understanding came from. The most precious thing they’d sent her was a portable light slab. The device was small and not well-shaped for her paws, but if she worked it carefully, she could use the small slab, and from it she had learned a lot. It was with the slab she could tell the story tonight.

The path up the mountains was not too steep, but Meekie took her time picking her way up it. She’d hiked it many times but couldn’t afford to fall. If she damaged the slab, who knew when she’d been able to get another one like it. The reconstructors could not make something like this from scratch, so you had to treat each one carefully. As she went, she pondered what she’d say. The trail itself dated from before the dark years, and the original stone arch bridges it used were still intact.

Meekie reached the outcropping just as the first stars were coming out. Some of the young pups were busy playing tag while the older ones were sitting and talking. There were about a dozen of them ranging in age from four up to fifteen.

“She’s here,” said one of the young ones, bounding over to see her. “Did you bring it?” asked the child. His eyes were big, and his tail wagged behind him.

“Of course I did,” she said, setting down her small pack. “Tonight promises to be a good night. The sky is clear, and we should be in for a show.”

“Yay!” said the pup, running around her before bounding off toward two of his friends. Meekie remembered having that kind of energy, when she’d first started walking on two legs instead of four. The creators, it seemed, had done that intentionally for them. As a result, all pups had a big burst of youthful energy when they transitioned to two legs before they were to come loyal companions when they got older.

Back then, adulthood came when they became bound in their contracts.

The contracts were one of the things she’d researched, hoping in vain their collective memories of them were wrong, but they weren’t. Each morph’s contract was a simple bill of sale. The same type of bill of sale someone would give you as a receipt, except these weren’t for the goods you bought off the shelf. These were for morphs, each custom made to order, made to serve. There had been a war about that, maybe even multiple wars, but that wasn’t why the creators were gone, at least not from what Meekie had read. Later there had been rights, self-determination, and peace. Glorious peace. And then came the darkness.

It was hard to say what caused the darkness because the records were broken. One day the world was fine, and the next, it was shattered beyond repair. It wasn’t like it had fallen all at once either, but something had happened. The seas had been rising for decades, the climate shifting, but something sudden had caused the seeds of collapse to suddenly reach maturity. Why, no one could say, but what happened afterward they all knew.

When the darkness had ended and the disorder was over, the morphs of the world looked around and realized they were all alone. The creators were gone. Maybe they died out, but Meekie thought some of them had to have survived. Some of them had been talking about settling on other worlds, so it is quite possible they left. Maybe they were even still out there. Hopefully, they’d someday figure out what had happened to the creators.

As she took her place on the stone, the pups came bounding over. Even the older ones came, although they took a more leisurely pace. They all sat facing away from her, looking up to the sky, for that was where the story was. She was just the one telling it; she didn’t write the story.

“What are we going to see tonight, Meekie?” one of the kids asked her.

She pulled out the light slab and tapped on the screen. Portable devices like this were rare, and the fact the people she traded with in Grand Lake had given her her own was a blessing. The device was scratched, and she had to wear special gloves to work it to keep her claws from scraping up the screen, but with it she could do things she’d never dreamed of before. The fact that once everyone had carried around one of these in their pockets was amazing. Hers was built from old parts and loaded with software for the calculations her work had begun to require.

“We’ll see the double curve soon, and a little while after that, the mermaid.”

“Who is the mermaid?” the fox kit asked her. Her family was one of the few vulpine families living in town and the only one who had children right now.

“No one knows anymore. She has watched silently over us for generations, though. She was one of the first. They called her the Siren originally.”

“Why is that?” one of the older pups asked.

Meekie shrugged. “I don’t know, but see, the double curve is rising in the west.” She pointed to where the light was coming above the trees

Over the horizon, the top of the double curve had begun to appear. They were two connected archways that appeared white in the sky, reflected light, but it was said they’d once been yellow. If you squinted carefully, you could still see it. The double curve orbited high above the ground, and it would cross the sky over the next two hours before it vanished below the eastern horizon. Sometimes it was visible during the day, but it was at night it really shone.

“Look, falling lights,” exclaimed one of the pups, pointing to a line of glowing lights shooting across the sky.

Meekie had her slab up and started recording the moment he said that. She’d been expecting a satellite decay tonight, but it would be hard to say which one it was. As they watched, enraptured, it streaked across the sky before splitting up into smaller pieces, the debris leaving fading lines in the sky.

“Ooh,” said the fox kit and the others.

This one was a big one, so maybe it was the satellite she’d been tracking. Of course, she’d have to see what the radar back at her house was picking up to know for sure, but that wasn’t important right now. A show like this always brought good luck. “Quick, everyone make a wish,” said Meekie.

There were hushed voices, and everyone said something under their breath, including Meekie. She wasn’t sure what the pups wished for, but she wished that the creators were safe somewhere. There was so much she wanted to tell them and ask them.

“What is that?” asked the fox kit when the debris had faded from view.

“Not sure, but I think it was a small orbital habitat. I’ll check later if it’s what I’ve been tracking.”

The fox was quiet for a moment. Another shooting star lit up the sky, this one small and feeble. It would be almost impossible to know what that was.

“Do you think anyone was still on it?” asked the fox.

The question seemed silly, the station had been up there at least a hundred years, but it was one she asked herself. “Not that are alive. Who knows what secrets it kept.”

“Do you think they’re ever coming back?”

Her ears peaked and then lowered. This was the question she dreaded but also knew everyone asked, especially the canis like her. “I hope so,” she said. “They made us all in their image and made us love them. So it is only natural that we sit and wait for their return. It’s what they would have wanted.”

On the horizon, the mermaid was starting to rise, and Meekie pointed at it. Everyone’s attention shifted to it. “So, the first story tonight is about the mermaid and the beverage the creators used to drink and associated with her, coffee.”