in the town where i grew up, there was a telescope.
the people who told the story always told it as if it had just happened yesterday, and indeed for most of my life i assumed the town had sprung up there, complete to the last worn cobblestone, the day before i was born. they spoke in such casual familiarity of its discovery, by chance one day as the landless nomads we descended from followed a river in search of a land to call home. each and every one of them, family, neighbors, and friends alike, could tell the story through the eyes of one member of the group, but it was though they had each captured the viewpoint of a particular wanderer, so it was as though hearing about an event from each of a hundred people who'd been there and seen it with their own eyes, with their own lifetimes coloring the image, their own opinions about the truth of the matter.
the nomads found the telescope, intact, exactly as it is today. there was no evidence of other buildings ever having existed in the area, a twenty-odd acre clearing in the midst of miles of unbroken forest. there was tall grass, and the water was clean, and it would've suited their purposes just fine, telescope or no.
the telescope itself was a rather remarkable feat of engineering by any reckoning. it was supported by what appeared to be a brick and mortar tripod, though metallic joints showed through at various intervals to facilitate aiming and shock absorbtion. a lever built into one of the legs slid the thick cover off the lens, and though this required a bit of physical exertion, it was a rather quiet affair. with the lens cap off, the viewing dome - a brick building built into the base - would unseal and allow entrance.
the viewing dome was windowless and dark, though various angled air-slits allowed in enough ambient light to see by. these slits could be covered by a crank in the control booth during viewing. upon entering, one immediately realized that the 'dome' was in fact a full sphere, half-buried in the ground. the control booth, set to one side, was ringed in angled seats all around, allowing for the seating of precisely 256 people - more than twice the population of the town. the far wall was left blank.
the true power of the telescope has never been tested, and truly it cannot, for the controls offer only three zoom settings: 2, 4, and +. set into the panel above them is a smooth round trackball, allowing for movement, and a small lever, for precision zooming.
364 days a year, activating the telescope allowed rather restricted viewing of the stars overhead; but, on the summer solstice, from 5PM til 7pm, the earth aligned properly to allow the viewing of the past - earth's past.
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there were, it seemed, three mirrors which had been blasted into space on three consecutive summer solstices. the first one reached one light year's distance from earth before stopping, the second one stopped at two light years, and the third appeared to still be moving directly away from earth at a little less than the speed of light.
as light from earth took one year to reach the first mirror and another year to return to the telescope, it allowed clear viewing of the earth as it was two years prior. the second telescope showed the earth four years in the past. the images were remarkably clear, and with the provided controls one could theoretically view any point on that hemisphere.
the third mirror, viewable with the '+' setting, was rarely used, as it was mostly irrelevant to the people of the town. it was like a tape on rewind, watching events play out backwards at almost real-time. there was no way of knowing how far away the mirror was, or exactly how the telescope managed to find it by flicking a single switch, so it was impossible to know just how far back in time one was viewing.
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for decades, the people of the town only used the first two settings, dependant entirely upon the long-delayed imagery for learning about the outside world. it was much as it is now - barren and empty. the town's founders had little knowledge of the state of the world and made no attempt to pass their limited information to later generations. as a result, by the fifth generation of villagers, the world outside of the little clearing existed only in the past and offered very little of interest. every few years someone would get an itch of wanderlust and leave, only to return with no stories, no news, nothing.
by my time, the telescope was more a novelty than anything else. the parents would dutifully shepherd the kids into the dome once a year to listen as the caretaker relayed the stories i've just told you, manning the controls for long enough to prove them, then taking requests for a bit before the window closed. most kids wanted to see themselves, though some expressed interest in the world at large. they were, by and large, disappointed by the unbroken miles of trees sliding past in crystal-clarity on the wall (though most of the kids, and even a few of the adults, enjoyed the sensation of flying). after a few years of this, many of the children lost interest, and attendance dwindled. i never lost interest; the telescope awoke in me feelings of awe and infinite possibility. if man could build this, i thought, what else could we accomplish? my village, all the world i'd ever known, suddenly seemed very small. i dreamed of great things for my people.
the year i turned twenty, the caretaker died a month before the solstice. i had no desire to follow my family's long tradition of sheep farmers, so when nobody else stepped forward to fill the position, i did so happily. when the solstice came around, absolutely nobody came to the viewing. perhaps they'd finally all gotten tired of it, but i found myself sitting in the control booth, looking over rows of empty seats. my earlier feelings had not diminished;
with little else to do, i flipped to '+', a setting i'd only seen demonstrated for a few minutes when i was twelve. after scrolling across a few miles of the same unbroken trees we'd seen on '2' and '4' - all the birds flying backwards, everything slightly tinted red due to the mirror's motion away from us - i found something.
several square miles of rust and debris, all of it vaguely metallic. zooming in revealed the debris in more detail but offered no clues as to what i was looking at. with the rest of my two-hour window, i found several more similar expanses. then the alignment shifted and i was once more staring at stars. i made notes of where these were, then put the matter from my mind. caretaker or no, the sheep needed tending.
each year, i checked these locations, and the rust brown slowly receded to reveal silver. the trees slowly retreated, the inner fringes eventually going as black and ruined as the debris. when i was twenty-seven, thick cloud cover prevented viewing for the first time since my birth, and i was left to wonder for another year. in the meantime, slight interest was rekindled in the telescope, so when my 28th solstice rolled around there were actually a few people who filtered in when i cranked the lens cap off and opened the doors.
i gave the speech as best i could remember it, showed the town two and four years ago as was customary, then switched to '+'. i began explaining, for the first time, about the strange sites i'd discovered in previous years as i traced the now-familiar steps to the nearest of them.
there was dense cloud cover over the first one i visited, as well as the second. as i was about to scroll away, i noticed the clouds beginning to condense, then glow. the clouds collapsed into the light, burning as bright as the sun, which itself shrank down and sank into the earth. when the light vanished, a small cylindrical object rose up then chased a thin stream of cloud away to the southwest.
the ruins were gone. in their place stood impossibly tall buildings, shining bright in the afternoon sun.
the dome, silent until now, began buzzing with excitement. i quickly scrolled around to the other sites, where similar scenes were playing out. after watching it happen for the fifth time, i decided to zoom down between the buildings. there, standing on a flat black landscape marked with intersecting yellow lines and full of strange metal boxes, was a single man. he was looking, impossibly, directly at us.
the window closed, and the sudden plunge into the stars left us all silent once more.
i never saw such lights again, in all the years since, though i've found a great many more of these cities. we even mounted an expedition to the nearest of them, though nothing was there - i estimate that the events we saw had to have happened at least a thousand years ago, as nature had clearly had plenty of time to reclaim lost land.
to say i was intrigued was an understatement. i spent most of my years hypothesizing about this ancient world, filling books with observations and theories about who they were, where they'd gone, what had happened. it was a vast civilization which clearly dominated most of the world - at least, most of the hemisphere i could see. the cities each housed millions of people, making the total human population something astronomical. when i was thirty-nine, one of the children asked me how many people were alive back then; i laughed, told him to count the blades of grass in the town, then multiply that by thousands. his eyes grew wide, and i saw him in the front row each and every year after that. occasionally, in the spring, i'd spot him cutting down swaths of grass, bundling them up, then carrying them home to sort and count.
it was bizarre, watching people who looked generally like you or me going about esoteric lifestyles in reverse. we watched as they got in and out of their little metal boxes that transported them around, entering and exiting buildings. i saw no evidence of farms or wildlife, and never did i see anything like our telescope.
the telescope. i was sixty when i finally realized the importance of it. the civilization i'd been watching, at least a thousand years dead, had certainly had the technology to create such a thing. but the mirrors, at least the '+' mirror, had to have been launched about halfway between then and now - maybe 300 years before the founding of the town. remnants had to have survived, presumably isolated from the rest of the world in order to retain the tools, materials, and knowledge to produce such a feat. but who? had they the means to survive the desolation of earth, only to die out after creating this one telescope? i couldn't believe it. i wouldn't. they were our ancestors.
i vocalized these concerns during that year's solstice viewing. afterwards, i was approached by a man in his mid-twenties - the boy had grown up, had traded in his grass-cutting ways for a hunter's lifestyle. we spoke of the matter for a while, then parted ways. i saw little of him over the next year. during the next solstice, he requested i set it to '2' and explore the edges of our hemisphere.
it must've been a hunch, or divine intuition. within five minutes, we discovered a small band of people near the western border. they had a camp, tents, meat roasting over an open fire. they were strangers. they'd come from somewhere else. there was somewhere else!
after the viewing, i noticed the hunter speaking to a small group of teenagers and young men. i thought nothing of it. the next morning, most of them had vanished. they'd left no word, had no pre-existing travel plans. there were no ongoing hunts. the town briefly mourned the loss of a dozen young men in their prime, then forgot all about it.
i was eighty-seven when they finally returned, twelve strong. my eyes were starting to fade by then, and though i still dutifully tended the telescope, i relied on others to observe, direct, and take notes. so, when twelve arrived, i did not immediately notice that two of them were not from our village. they were different. for one, they had blonde hair. there were no blondes in our town.
they told of their own homeland, a town not unlike our own, located exactly half a planet away. they claimed that an industrious digger could dig straight down from our telescope and eventually come up beneath their's - for they, too, had a telescope, and though it was calibrated for the winter solstice it was identical in every other way. they claimed to be directly descended from the builders.
there had been two groups of builders, once. they had, as i'd theorized, hidden themselves away before the planetary destruction had rained from the heavens, living in self-contained ecospheres deep underground. 500 years from when the bombs fell - that's what they called them, "bombs" - they re-emerged into the sunlight to recreate society.
the two cities had some form of contact, apparently, for our visitors knew that our local city had been wiped out almost immediately after emerging. cataclysmic earthquakes had rocked the area, burying the underground city and leaving the two small groups exposed. one of the groups was comprised of scientists and engineers, their main project being the construction of the telescope. the other group were hunters, meant to support the builders and generally explore the region.
the telescope was build to spec, but soon afterward the builders were wiped out by an epidemic. our visitors said - though, i think, this must be partially mythical, for how would they know? - that the very last scientist collapsed after launching the third mirror, having kept himself alive by sheer willpower, happily surrendering to the fire of the booster rockets as they lifted his life's work into the sky. the hunters moved on with their secondary mission to explore, though as time passed they forgot their origins. whether it was luck or some primal instinct that their ancestors wandered into the clearing and founded our town, we'll never know.
but on the other side of the planet, the reconstruction had gone as planned. while not widespread, they claimed a population around ten thousand, three cities built from materials reclaimed from the underground city. their technology was somewhere between the ancient civilizations and our own - they lacked the mobile metal boxes, their cities were somewhat less sprawling, but the buildings rose all the way to the clouds. their hunting party had come to our hemisphere in search of any surviving traces of the world that was, but upon meeting our villagers and learning that there was nothing to see here, they returned home with two of our own, sending two of their's as ambassadors.
they did not seek to change our way of life. in fact, the two were in awe of our lifestyle, claiming it was exactly what had been intended for them, as well. they said that the devastation of a thousand years ago had been as result of our growing too fast, upsetting the natural balance of the world; we destroyed the environment, enslaved or annihilated plants, animals, and other cultures alike, and in the end the only solution that could save the earth from becoming permanently barren was to wipe out 99% of the population.
the survivors were to be equipped with what they'd need to survive, and little else - only the telescopes, they'd hoped, would show us the true price of avarice. the builders assumed that humanity would once more be on the verge of making the same old mistakes around the time the telescopes would be revealing the apocalyptic results of those mistakes, hoping against hope that the sight of bombs dropping across the world would be enough to keep us mindful of conservation, of moderation, of our proper place in the ecosystem.
for our brothers on the other side of the planet, the warning came at the perfect time. for us, it was completely unnecessary - with only a hundred-odd people living utterly rural lifestyles, there was little to no risk of such things ever happening again. this warmed the hearts of our visitors, who soon left with a few of the hunting party - including their leader, a young man with infinite blades of grass still reflecting in his eyes. they never returned.
in their wake, i passed on stewardship of the telescope to my own grandson. i no longer desired great things for my people; in our conversations, learning about the ways of the ancient civilization, i had come to realize that, no matter the trappings, the most important thing was to keep living. if we could extend our species' lifespan by a few millenia by sacrificing the frills and extravagances, well... that was just fine by me.
i am ninety-five, now, unable to see to write. thankfully, my grandson has been patient enough to sit with me these past two years as i get the last few ideas out of my skull along with what little i've learned since my hands lost their ability to grip a pen. now, with all said and done, i believe i will go to sleep.
i do not believe i will awaken in the morning. but others will, and will continue to do so for a long time to come, and that is enough.
life is enough.
