Moving Stars
Strange stars move in the frosty sparkle of the night sky. The eternal star patterns themselves have moved little in 5 million years, but now there are new stars superimposed upon them; and these stars are in gentle continual motion. They are ignored by the creatures below, who do not appreciate what profound changes are about to be inflicted upon their world.
The sluggish beings in the trees of the forests can comprehend nothing higher than the tops of the trees that they inhabit. Nor do they need to, all their food existing to hand in their own environment. Nothing outside can have any effect on them.
Out in the vast deserts, the members of the few huge hives that are left continue their lives in the familiar mechanical way. Permanently-manned foraging and gathering routes reach out, tentacle-like, from the massive hubs that consist of labyrinthine subterranean bunkers, all swarming with ordered and predestined life. Amongst these millions of individuals there is not one mind that can comprehend the heavens, let alone the significance of new moving stars.
The decadent parasites, embedded in the fat layers of their grotesquely misshapen hosts, care nothing beyond their hosts' continuing survival; and their hosts are mere feeding machines, dumbly eating, eating, eating.
The swift hunters, specialized for catching birds, small mammals, fish - or even the parasites' hosts - may wonder about the movements in the night skies above them; but they have not the wit to imagine that these events could possibly have any effect on them.
Out in the oceans, the teeming aquatics know little of what happens above their watery ceiling. They can hardly comprehend the existence of life on land, let alone the nature of the stars in the sky.
Only the possessors of the hereditary memory could have understood, but these have been extinct for millennia. Their religious refusal to use the knowledge that they all possessed meant that they could do nothing to help them- selves to improve their situation. When natural conditions changed they refused to change as well. The Earth's magnetic field reversed, continents moved, and changing sea levels cut off migration routes. Rivers changed their courses, volcanoes threw up new barriers, and climates altered from year to year. Creatures of lesser wit and no knowledge of the past survived these upheavals, which constituted disasters on a local scale, but merely inconveniences on a global one. However, amongst those with the memory, the changing conditions took their local environment further and further away from what they knew or remembered, and eventually, rather than change with it, they perished.
The coniferous forest is black and silent in the night. Hunters lie huddled, asleep. The trees jut up black spikes into the sparkling sky - the sky in which there are now, for the first time in 5 million years, slowly-moving particles of light. Overhead a star, one of the new moving ones, is glow- ing brighter than the rest. It expands and descends in a gentle arc across the sky, stringing behind it a fading trail of glowing mist. A shock of thunder eventually sweeps across the surface of the land beneath its path, rousing the birds from their trees, and shaking awake the startled hunters on the ground. The glowing descent is now accompanied by blasts of fire as its course is altered, and through the dazzling incandescence can be seen the vague shape of some kind of vessel. It slows, and directly beneath it a descending waft of hot air becomes a searing blast that incinerates trees and undergrowth in a spreading circle. The vessel sinks into the boil of smoke and flame that is produced, and very gently it touches the ground.
The Earth's long period of innocence is over.