“The worst of your infection has passed,” I said, “enough for me to take care of the rest from home…”

Mother barely heard me.

“Oh, I think it’s all cleared up,” she replied. “The infection, that is. I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

“Ma, stop fussing. You’re fussing and self-diagnosing like Nana did.”

Mother smiled. “Oh yes, she was a fusser, wasn’t she?”

My mother had cared for her mother as I now cared for her. Hers was the first generation, sandwiched between a dependant generation above and below.  The first generation in which the provision of aged care moved to the home, to the children of the elderly. Her middle years had been spent caring for her parents. Now I cared for her as she had cared for my grandparents.

I could never say it to her, but it had in many ways been easier in her day. Perhaps she understood. There had been more support available to my grandparents than there was available for my mother; private nursing, social workers, retirement homes, pensions. Even hospital beds! I remember my grandmother spending two months in hospital when I was in my twenties. Such a thing was unimaginable now. Hospitals held patients for the bare minimum of their treatment – patients recovered in their homes. Some tests, procedures and treatments were not available to persons over seventy, and waiting lists for everyone were measured in years.

It was institutionalised triage, of a sort; and it was the only way the anaemic health system could cope. And Australia’s health system was by no means the worst in the world.

Last year, in 2030, for the first time in human history, there were more humans living on Earth over fifty years of age than there were under fifty. It was a different world, a grey world, a world with more elderly than young. Here we were, ninety years after the Second World War, still feeling its effects. The baby boomers had grown old and withered, that generation who resulted from the joy of the end of the war or from fear of future invasions.

And the world was straining under the weight of their age.

It was difficult not to resent that generation who had already passed for reproducing in such profligacy. There were a number of factors. Human life expectancy had, since the end of the Second World War, increased in absolute and relative terms by a greater amount than at any time in the last five thousand years of human history. People were living longer and longer. And in the relative peace of the second half of the twentieth century, the world had become rich. Fewer children were born, both as a result of and as a measure to protect that wealth. The demographics became slowly, irrevocably skewed, away from those who contributed to society to those who depended upon it.

In the years after the Second World War, when the first of the baby boomers opened their febrile eyes onto a world of peace and prosperity, there had been in the United States sixteen taxpayers for each elderly person supported by pension and/or federal health care. But those baby boomers had birthed fewer children, so that by the time the baby boomers reached old age, there were less than three taxpayers per elderly person.

As I did whenever I assisted my mother – with her stiff legs and bruised skin – from her bed into her wheelchair, I thought over this sad decline. And fought back the resentment.

“I’d like to say goodbye to the nurse,” Mother said. “A nice, young boy. It’s so nice to see a face and interact with a person!”

I understood. I had after all felt the same surprise when I had seen the nurse at his station.

Each culture had responded differently to the problem. Japan had refused immigration, and relied instead upon technology. Toyota was the world’s leading company in robotic technology. Australian hospitals, especially the palliative care wards, were staffed almost exclusively by sophisticated robots – capable and advanced, but utterly inhuman. Nonetheless, robots offset the global shortage of trained human nurses and carers.

Because of its experience with robotics, Japan’s was now the largest economy in the world. America had effectively collapsed; when I visited that country in my youth, it had been the number one economy in the world by an incredible margin. But even then, three decades ago, America’s health care system had cost almost five trillion dollars – when the baby boomers reached the age where they were eligible for federal health care, that figure had blown out to almost fifty trillion dollars. Reactionary administrations had tried impotently and belatedly to abolish federal health care entirely.

Unlike the Romans, Byzantines or the British before it, America had imploded not because of war or invasion, but simple demographics.

In Western Europe, the effect was particularly pronounced. The countries of Western Europe had endured similar crises before; from France to Russia, the major countries had twice endured the loss of their youth in the spasmic wars of the twentieth century. The European Union had granted full amnesty to illegal immigrants in 2025, and thrown open the borders to immigration from Eastern Europe. The youth of eastern Europe filled the demographic void of the west, providing workers and taxpayers and bracing the foundations of European society.

The effect on eastern Europe had been crippling. Now there was talk of old age ghettos and euthanasia programs on an industrial scale. Where the last Holocaust was forced upon eastern Europe by an invader, this holocaust was forced upon it by pure demographics and economics.

In Asia, migration from the country to the cities slowed, stopped, then reversed. This effect was pronounced in China, where the One Child Policy had been emplaced to curb population growth. The rapid growth of the Asian economies correspondingly slowed and the children left for the country to care for their parents.

And everywhere, suicide. Mostly among the parents, who did not want to burden their children in the absence of comprehensive government care. But also among the children who inherited the duty of care. Suicide rates in the West were the highest they had ever been. Euthanasia had been legalised in most countries.

Australia had coped well, at least relatively. The government had, as early as 2009, created incentives to retain the workforce past the retirement age. Superannuation helped those retirees first to cross the line, but once the true cost to the economy was felt, the stock markets crashed and the superannuation funds of the soon-to-be-retired shrank. Health infrastructure had never been ahead of demand, and Australian hospitals barely kept up. As in most countries, taxes rose and rose, and the country came to rely upon robots and immigrants to maintain society. The Australian population had levelled out at thirty million.

There were wars, but these were limited and restrained. No country was as willing to sacrifice men and women of fighting age as had been the states that stumbled into the World Wars a century before. The world had only to endure; the terrible truth was that, soon, the young would inherit a world whose infrastructure was built for so many more.

The population of Earth was now ten point six billion. In another four or five decades, the population was expected to drop back to eight  point five billion. Not since the early extinction events had the global human population dropped so dramatically.

The world would one day soon become an emptier place.

Nevertheless, even with all my resentment and anger, it was not something I would look forward to. I put a loving hand on Mother’s shoulder. She didn’t notice; she continued to look about, reading the hospital signs aloud.

The dozen teens sat in what shade could be found. The day was hot, and the sun high in the light blue, cloudless sky. The counsellor broke out Quaker bars and Pretzels and encouraged the campers to drink water.

There was a crumbling, sandy bluff which rose out of the desert and chaparral and ran along a ragged line north west. The counsellor pressed his hand against the face, shading beneath his wide-brimmed hat. The bluff face was lightly scribed with lines, which ran parallel in bands of alternating light and dark colours. He traced his finger slowly down the lines as he spoke.

“These are strata, layers of rock and sand and dirt built up over the Earth’s history. They’re a record of the planet. See here?” He stood on his tiptoes and pointed arbitrarily to lines only a few inches from the edge of the face. “The American Civil War.” And, less than an inch further down, “Christopher Columbus finds America.”

“Whoa! It’s like a tree ring.”

He traced his finger along a thick, dark line which ran only a few inches above where the rest of the face was buried below the mean ground level. He chipped a few pieces from the face with his fingernail; in his palm, he showed them to the campers.

“Does this look like anything to you guys?”

“Soot? Ash? Like the Witch Creek and Cedar fires.”

“Exactly. This layer – ” he pointed again to the dark band “ – is what scientists call the K-T boundary. It’s from about sixty-five million years ago. And no matter where scientists go in the world, no matter where they look for strata like this, they find this layer of ash. Because, sixty-five million years ago, the entire world was on fire.”

65 million years ago

After the tremors, the day grew strange. Purgatorius darted through the undergrowth at the edge of the forest. She balanced on her rear legs and listened for the buzzing of insects; her ears twitched back and forth.

A new light came from the horizon. Purgatorius watched countless balls of light slowly arcing upwards from the horizon. As they moved they filled the sky with light. Purgatorius was confused by these new suns.

Purgatorius saw, from the edge of the forest, that animals of all kinds were running from this light. A herd of Saurolophus came bounding down the gully, angling towards the cover of the canopy. As the light spread across the sky, Purgatorius felt an incredible heat. The sky filled with dozens of suns, and the gulley and forest grew hot.

Purgatorius was scared. The shadows became short and, as the light and heat spread, began to disappear entirely. The sound of insects vanished; instead the sound of a stampede of footfalls as dinosaurs and mammals thundered toward the shelter of the forest. As Purgatorius turned and fled, she saw the last dots of darkness in the air – pterosaurs and neornithine birds, flying in great, desperate squadrons away from the lines of light and heat.

Within minutes, the sky was a uniform, glowing light, and the heat became acute. There was little shade even in the forest, and Purgatorius found it difficult to see. The forest was crowded with desperate, confused, frightened animals; to her right, a pair of Zalambdalestes were crushed beneath the foot of a Pentaceratops. Purgatorius could not find her way in the light and the confusion, although she desperately wanted to find her nest and her young.

The hair of her tail began to curl in the heat, and it became harder to breath. Her lungs were being slowly burned as the temperature of the air rose. She found a hole at the base of a tree and threw herself into it. She began to dig furiously as the dry vegetation combusted all around her. Purgatorius dug deeper and deeper as the forest exploded in fire; the howl of dinosaurs burned alive was, for a time, louder even than the licking flames.

Present

“The fires killed anything that couldn’t shelter in caves, or burrow underground, or submerge beneath water,” the counsellor explained.

“What caused the fire?”

“You guys know about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?” There were a few nods between bites of granola bars and mouthfuls of water. “Scientists think that, when it hit, it threw up chunks of rock so high that they went into orbit. These rocks went around the world, and as they fell back into the atmosphere they burned up. Sort of like the Space Shuttle when it returns to Earth. There was so much debris falling out of the sky, everywhere across the planet, that the sky glowed. All this burning debris heated up the planet, until the heat pulse was so intense that animals couldn’t breathe and plants and grasses simply caught fire. The heat pulse lasted less than a day, but probably killed more of the animals and plants on Earth than the impact winter that followed.”

65 million years ago

The asteroid came at Earth in fragments, strung out in a line like a string of beads. The line of rocks approached at an angle relative to Earth’s equator and the plane of the ecliptic.

Over Russia, the first rocks rained down in fiery, spectacular meteor showers. The vanguard of the fragment line was composed of smaller rocks; these mostly burned up in entry to Earth’s atmosphere, or exploded in magnificent, powerful airbursts high above the steppe. Some impacted on the steppe, and created craters tens of meters across. The burning lines carved across the sky intensified as the Earth rotated.

Then, two larger pieces hit.

One slammed down in Ukraine, blasting a crater twenty four kilometres in diameter. Ejecta spewed across the flat plains, spreading impact breccia over twenty-five thousand square kilometres. The steppe grasses were set ablaze by the impact, and wildfires driven by the wind spread outward from the crater.

The second hit the North Sea. Water vapour rose in great banks that reached high into the atmosphere as tsunamis lashed the coasts of Europe. The ocean crust was deformed by the impact, a spider web of cracks spreading in concentric circles from the hypocenter.

The tracery of smaller rocks continued to batter the narrow North Atlantic as the Earth spun, and the line of rocks approaching the planet shortened. The resplendent, blue and white ball of Earth was marred by a string of smoke and steam, traced diagonally across the supercontinent.

Ten hours after the first impacts over Russia, the main piece hit. It was ten kilometres in diameter. It impacted with a force of one hundred million megatons – two million times the power of the largest man-made explosion.

The results were utterly, unimaginably violent.

Tremors spread through the crust and reverberated around the planet; everywhere, earthquakes rippled across the surface. Beneath the crust, the lithosphere shuddered. At the faults between tectonic plates and beneath continental calderas there were titanic, concerted volcanic eruptions. At the antipode of the impact, the crust buckled and deformed from the stresses of the converging shocks.

A crater nearly two hundred kilometres in diameter glowed at the tip of the Yucatan Peninsular. Megatsunamis smashed the evolving Caribbean island chains. From the ocean basin in which the crater was formed, great banks of steam rose. As the seawater was vapourised, so too were the carbonate rocks at the bottom of the sea. Carbon dioxide and sulphate aerosols were released into the atmosphere in unimaginable quantities, and with the vapourised water formed storm fronts of acid rain.

The blast threw material from the impact site into suborbital trajectories. Masses of Earth’s crust – bolides, particles, from pieces the size of cities to grains of silicate – followed parabolic orbits around the planet. As their orbits degraded they burned up in the atmosphere. Earth’s surface glowed with incandescent light, and this glow spread as the ejecta fell further and further from the impact site. For a day after the impact, there was no darkness anywhere on Earth, and shadows were thin and short.

More pieces of the asteroid fell; the largest slammed down in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the Indian subcontinent. These impacts were as nothing compared to that in Yucatan, their effects diminished by the power of the main impact event.

Firestorms were ignited by the impact along the Central American landmass. As the heat pulse spread across the planet, fires ignited globally. Pyroclastic plumes of ash, tephra and sulphates were ejected into the stratosphere. These volcanic plumes mixed with the smoke from the global firestorms, and the sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide directly ejected by the impact. After the fiery light of the impact, the world grew dark, shrouded in soot and ash.

Earth was no longer a blue and white ball. Instead it had become a sickened, bruised grey-black, shot through with the deep blues of the oceans and the oranges and reds of firestorms. The particulate matter in the air began to block light from the sun. The soot and ash absorbed solar radiation and was heated, which in turn heated the gases which held the particulate matter aloft. Stratospheric ozone began to break down, into oxygen, or, bound with atmospheric carbon ejecta, into carbon dioxide. Ultraviolet radiation, unimpeded by the devastated ozone layer, battered the Earth’s scorched surface.

Much of this fallout would not settle for centuries. By the time that it did, most of Earth’s surface vegetation and its biomass had burned off – and three-quarters of the species which had inhabited the planet before the impact were now extinct.

Present

“Where did it come from?”

“The asteroid probably came from our own asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists even think they know which asteroid.” The counsellor ran his finger along the dark band buried in the bluff face. “In here there is a certain element, called chromium. It’s found throughout the K-T boundary. It suggests a certain type of asteroid, called a carbonaceous chondrite. Using computer modelling, and what we know of the Solar System, some scientists think that the dinosaur-killer asteroid was part of a bigger asteroid called Baptistina, which broke up millions and millions of years before it hit Earth. Parts of it – the bigger asteroid – are still out there, in space.”

“That’s sort of like CSI.”

The counsellor smiled. “Like CSI.”

“Why did Baptistina break up?”

“That’s a good question. No one really knows.”

160 million years ago

Baptistina looped through the inner system.

It was a lump of silicate, 170 kilometres in diameter, composed mainly of oxides, sulphides and olivine. It had formed out of the accretion disk that surrounded the Sun, five billion years earlier. Baptistina orbited the Sun far from the touch of its warmth, between two and two and a half times farther than Earth. In its cool orbit, the water and organic volatiles which composed it had been preserved.

Baptistina orbited the Sun in a relatively crowded and complicated area of the Main Belt. Its orbit was influenced by mean resonances with Mars and Jupiter, and crossed the orbits of Flora and Vesta. Flora had broken apart forty million years previously; Vesta had endured a terrific impact less than nine hundred million years previously. Their families – the shattered components which had composed the original whole – orbited close to Baptistina.

Baptistina had formed out of the molecular cloud which composed the primordial Solar System. It had accreted in the gulf between the masses that would be Jupiter and Mars, and it had looped on its simple orbit without event for over five billion years.

There was a flash of light and pulse of gamma radiation – brief, momentary.

The first ship was caught in the explosion, and tumbled end over end, trailing atmosphere. It angled close to Baptistina, within 750, 000 kilometres. Its drives sputtered and flared. The wounded ship was still decelerating, seeking to shed its interstellar speed.

The second ship had, by contrast, barely slowed. It looped in a long, high-gee turn around the entire Solar System. It had caught its prey within a dense gravity well, and retained it velocity so that it might chase down the first ship in whichever direction it fled the system.

The second ship was eight AUs from both Baptistina and the first ship, although its payload was much closer. When it was still half a light year from Sol, it had broken apart – or, more accurately, disassembled – into a central drive module and a dozen smaller modules. These missiles had tracked the first ship, followed it course, anticipated possible trajectories, spread out and covered a section of the Solar System between the orbits of Venus and Uranus.

A second bomb went off, a yield of many gigatons, like a second star. Now there were ten missiles closing at relativistic speeds on the first ship.

The chase which had lasted twenty five years and almost as many light years ended with the third detonation. The missile exploded within 50, 000 kilometres of the first ship. The ship was swallowed up in the fireball and vapourised. A flood of radiation – neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, high-energy electrons – washed over Baptistina at the speed of light. Slowly, imperceptibly, Baptistina was pushed from its stable orbit.

The second ship swung around the Sun and whipped back toward the star it had come from. It met with its remaining warheads and reformed into a single unit. Within four months it had left the Solar System.

Baptistina drifted, tugged in new ways by Mars and Jupiter. Stresses formed across its surface, and faults opened in its core. It orbited the Sun in this way for a further 200, 000 years before it broke apart and spread along the invisible line of its orbit.

Pushed and pulled by the resonances of the planets orbiting about it, pieces of Baptistina fell into a slower orbit, and spiralled over tens of millions of years toward the inner planets…

Present

“…we’ll never know the answer. But the lesson in this,” the counsellor said, as he slipped his arms through the straps of his backpack, “isn’t how the dinosaurs died, or what this piece of rock means. It’s that you have to question everything. Not every question will have an answer. But it is in asking questions that we find more questions, and more answers. It’s the only way to resolve the issues that capture our imagination, and our curiosity.”

The short story was based on the following two articles:

Robertson, Douglas S. et al. “Survival in the first hours of the Cenozoic.” Geological Society of America Bulletin (May-June 2004): 760-768.

Bottke, William F. et al. “An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probably source of the K/T Impactor.” Nature 449: 6 (September 2007): 48-53.

It should be mentioned that it is not commonly accepted that the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event was caused by a multiple-body impact, nor that the Baptistina family was the origin of the impactor.

Units of measurement and locations that had not yet been defined or named have been used in the interest of clarity and brevity.

The thick rope of muscle slid across the slick lens, grit sieving off the surface and into oily ducted channels on either side of the organ.  The students felt this rejuvenating motion with only the momentary lag from being light-years away.  Their tutor hung over the rostrum and pulsed to focus their attention. 

"As you can feel, dear pupils, the atmosphere is very different.  The gravity has nary a pull upon us."  Gills flexed in unison as the students collectively extended limbs on the mottled heliographic carrier. 

One of the students exclaimed there was some sort of change in temperature and a strange pressure against the lens.  The tutor pulsed again. 

"Atmospheric conditions here remain relatively similar to the conditions experienced millennia ago.  But, this place, without the proper technology in place, ebbs and flows with an incremental yet continual level of change.  But, dear pupils, we are here not for the weather, but for the remnants of the long-lost custodians of this planet.  The ancient animals!"

The students focused deeply on their surroundings as the tutor shifted the half-ton carrier on its vacuum-scarred appendages.  The lid scraped back and forth across the lens.  Large monoliths appeared ahead of the carrier, for those students who had selected to experience visible light wavelengths and the information it allowed for processing.  For the rest, wavelengths resembling sonar bounced back an embossed sound image of the structures within range of the carrier.  The tutor motioned internally and the students waited.

"As evidenced, these ancient beasts were prolific.  At the species’ height, they were not confined to a single area.  They took to the atmosphere, to the depths of the great bodies of liquid.  These animals lived in complex social groups, or so we are led to believe."

A student shuddered and flexed its gills.  "How far did they spread?"

"They almost left their system, dear pupils!"  The tutor pulsed excitedly.  "But, despite being similar to us in their group-based social construct, from what we understand, that very fact led to the species’ ultimate demise." 

The carrier trudged forward; students feeling the dust-blasted surface beneath the undulating vehicle.  The carrier lacked certain sensory organs outside of layered pressure-driven touch and the ability to utilise vision.  However, the students revelled in the massive biomagnetic field thrown outwards from the lumbering hub into which they were connected from across the galaxy.  Pupils sank below the earth to the very rim of the carrier’s sphere and discovered relics under the topsoil; machined structures of mineral alloys, composites of elements, traces of hybrid chemicals.  As the carrier churned across towards the monoliths, the students counted no less than five thousand individual chemicals and mineral amalgamations. 

Light-years away, the tutor shifted on the rostrum and pulsed again.

"Their developed society was flawed, we believe, because they were biologically constricted to short life spans and even shorter capabilities in memory and projected thought.  Judging by their simplistic constructions, this curious animal had nothing in the way of multi-tasking faculties.  Therefore, monoliths…" The tutor warped the biomagnetics in the direction of the closest structure.  "…such as these, were single in their application and a prime example of the disheartening single-mindedness of these creatures.  Dear pupils, these were curious beasts indeed."

A student pulsed, flexing gills in a concerted effort to interpret this new information.  "How did they evolve with these handicaps?" 

"Well, as a social species, they seemed to have relied on each other.  They were, we believe, one of the universe’s great paradoxes.  A social animal on a whole, rarely straying from this definition; but within this, seeming to align within the larger structure smaller cliques.  These depended on geographical location, attaining and retaining of physical and virtual possessions, even a self-perceived hierarchy based on physical differences between subsets of the order."

There was a ripple as students came to grips with this alien concept.  "What was the purpose of attaining and retaining possessions, especially non-existent ones?"

The tutor pulsed with delight at the students’ willingness to test their logic against that of seeming incomprehensible set of values.  "Why, dear pupils, it was one way to climb this all-encompassing hierarchy.  The more possessions attained, the more it pertained to being above other members of the species.  This seemed to occur on a small scale as well as with collectives within certain divisions of the planet."

"So, did these animals collect as many possessions as possible, then reach a new level of existence?"

The tutor shimmered.  "We believe the importance and worth of possessions were based on an arbitrary system of value, possibly borne from the tribal existence these animals never grew out of or evolved beyond."

The carrier slowed as the monolith pressed into the biomagnetic sphere.  Students moved forward within the field and slipped across the rough surface of the structure; once obviously a smooth poured surface, radiation-baked cracks and crevasses split the even surface.  Students explored these vertical ravines, pressing through to the other side of the structure and onwards to its internal hollow.

The carrier shuffled up against the pock-marked structure and pressed against the hot surface.  The tutor shimmered loudly and the students assembled.

"Dear pupils, we are now within the confines of one structure that defined this arbitrary value system.  As you can experience, there remains very little.  But imagine this place a hive of activity, the animals darting to and fro, discussing possessions in their barking air-and-muscle driven communication, targeting the next acquisition."  The tutor pulsed rapidly.  "Here, in this very place, the hierarchy concept was in full flight."

The students pushed the biomagnetic sphere to the very limits of the hollow.  There was a throb of excitement and the tutor was inundated with questions.

"How many animals were here?"

"What kind of exchange went on and for how long?"

"Were the animals here different from the animals out there?"

"If a creature put worth upon virtual creation, does that make them a flawed, illogical species, or does it suggest a greater level of philosophical thought?"

"What did they consume?"

The tutor flashed and hummed to settle the now-rowdy class.  The carrier pulled away from the structure, backtracking through the dust.  The sun was high and the shadows short.  The students congregated within the centre of the carrier as it shuffled in reverse with the same elephantine grace that had carried it before. 

"Dear pupils, before we ask these questions to others, we must be rigorous within ourselves.  Test your theories using the logic network you know so well.  I could simply give you all the answers right now.  But what would that serve?!" The students calmed and pulsed in contemplative silence.  The bandwidth of energy retained its original order.  Light-years away, the class segmented neatly to improve those networks the tutor had spent an age perfecting in the students.  "We have questions, dear pupils, many questions.  However, the trick is to ask them in complimentary order – the top-down effect of our logic means all things that puzzle eventually get answered by merit of our very inquisitive existence!" 

The tutor leaned over the rostrum, which intensified channels and dampened the ambient interference caused by the biomagnetics.  "If we had disregarded the order of things in our journey through time, we might have ended up like this indigenous population, dear pupils.  A collection of faded memories.  A clutch of structures and refuse as evidence of one misguided chance in the cosmos.  Nothing more than inferences based on a smattering of archaeology to hallow the triumph of coming so close and, sadly, falling so very far."

The students continued their sombre rumination, allowing the tutor to make the final point.

"So, dear pupils, any question is pertinent.  There is no doubt, no uncertainty, of this premise.  But just as important is to know at which point complimentary examination should occur.  We see here, this long-lost species…their history undoubtedly much like ours.  We unquestionably crawled through time from the same microbes as these forgotten creatures.  It is said we even shared an ancient evolutionary and social past, one that mirrored those who once strode this planet.  However…"

The students, now pulsing rapidly, their connections within the carrier shimmering and their bodies before the rostrum growing more tightly connected, waited for the tutor to continue with bated anticipation.

"…however, dear pupils, the universe allows for such experiments to take place.  And those who do not choose carefully, those who do not learn from their mistakes, will undoubtedly find their legacy akin to what we have witnessed today, whoever and whatever these creatures were.  But those who choose carefully, those who do learn, such as we Humans…we can live on through time to ask even greater questions than those asked before."

Our men afar, though listless be,
From star to star doth ply,
A warm recall, they know not near.
Lest in duty, their anchored fate.

Were they, the heroes of our day,
Destined to live afar?
A journey run, to yonder way.
Yet seen the light of home.

The day run long, and into night,
A turn of hour, o’er vast divide.
The view out there, upon a brink,
May clasp and hold forever.

Our men afar, though listless be,
We too reflect, recount.
Return to us, a journey’s end.
Be with us more, again.

Heroes may, for want of way,
Desire unto return.
Upon return, title retained,
In hearts of us remain?

- V. Stanyev, Odes.

Vonke Stanyev was a prolific statesman and poet during the early expansion campaigns.  While his younger years were spent in the governmental body that birthed the expansionist policies, Stanyev’s retirement saw his reflection on the lives of the naval forces that gave their lives in the name of the State, yet rarely saw home again or reaped the benefits of conquest and subjugation. 

Lament of the Sky Soldiers represents one of Stanyev’s most poignant of his post-political views; the time-hallowed idea of heroism, idealism, longing and service colliding with a society comfortable to accept the benefits, but one that readily forgets.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

- Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)