“Tell me a story”, I asked Nana. “Tell me a story before I go to sleep.” I ruffled up under the covers in the dim candlelight.
“Very well”, she replied. “There are six inhabited worlds in our sky, though we cannot fly to them anymore. You know their names.”
“Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno and Sterope”, I recited, as I had recited a hundred times before in the little classroom under the tanglewood trees. Nana nodded.
“Let me tell you of the King of Maia. Musk was his name. An old man from the homeworld.”
“The homeworld?” I asked. She winced in disgust.
“Earth.” She spat. “We do not speak of that place anymore. Too many great tentacles of evil spread from that dark place. Anyway. King Musk was a great man. Seven feet tall, with a big golden beard. He flew across the sky every night in his flaming chariot of light, going from cities on one planet to another.”
I gasped in awe.
“What happened to him?”
“He built that planet. He landed, and built towering glass cities into the sky. In his old age he sat in his great palace of glass at the peak of the great mountain. Among his machines that kept him alive.”
“Machines?” I asked.
“Like the watermill that runs down in the valley. Big contraptions of metal, and wood, and glass. They kept him alive. Kept him young. Yet, even those machines had their limits. He knew his days were numbered, and his time was soon to come. So he sat with his three sons. Jordan, Keith, and Vincent. He told them of the ways of humanity. Humanity is the conqueror of the stars, the envisioner of new worlds. ‘Go forth my sons’, he told them. ‘Go forth and spread your seed among the stars. Bring new realms under our dominion.’ Yet his sons were lazy men. Lazy and futile. They wanted only to lie on their backs dreaming. They had little machines built into their heads, machines that allowed them to see things that weren’t there.”
“Machines in their heads?” I asked. Nana nodded.
“Oh yes”, she replied. “Machines in their heads. And so did the rest of the people of Maia, back then. So did the people on our world, too. Back then, the people just wanted to explore the machines in the inside of their heads. They had no wish to conquer the stars anymore.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“They died”, Nan replied. “The machines inside their heads ate them.”
“Ate them?” I asked, aghast. Nana nodded sadly.
“There was a great war raging on all of the planets. The machines were eating us alive.” My eyes widened. “And that is why we only use simply machines now. Simple trinkets of wood. Machines we can control. Not machines that control us. Now. Go to sleep.”
She snuffed out the candle, and left me in the dark with my dark thoughts.
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John Verley 