Whose Fiction

"Who contrived these tales anyway? Old fuddyduds?", said the First Citizen, a fine, upstanding, modern, young lady. Unrelieved black sky surrounded her horizon to horizon.

The second said, "It is the stuff that has been preserved and passed down the generations uncountable." She sounded a little reticent herself but wanted to convey these antedated recordings to her young friend for her information.

"Preserved?', snorted the First Citizen. "It strikes me, as a solid citizen of sound mind, that whoever bent their minds to this must have been inbriated on preservatives or mass hallucinogenics. Why, all we have to do to disprove this bunk is look at the sky. Don't you see? As we all see every time, the sky is always pitch dark. Not a speck to be detected there ever. And they claim these are rational people raving about pinpricks of lights in the firmament? What kind of fermented substances were they consuming that fermented their brains to come up with this scenario?"

The second pressed, "It is said our predecessors long ago could look upon the firmament filled with "stars", as some called them, and further, with a little imagination take their fingers and trace outlines of some the "stars", and some of those lights were constellations with billions of stars, and claim there were figures amongst the billions that could be traced in the sky and put names to those."

"Imagination, you say?", scoffed the First Citizen. "I assure you that I am and will remain a solid citizen and won't be bent by this outlandish rubbish. I am as rational as anyone!  Look around you. You can see that for all 360 degrees there is not a speck to be seen anywhere. The entire firmament is pervasively dark and has been for as long as anyone can remember and that is generations. If I did not know you and your profession as librarian, I would consider we have a little chat with someone  to look at your mind, if you were someone who just walked up to me. There is nothing out there to spend time looking at or wasting on far seeing devices. Nothing there! Imagination could only fabricate such buffonery. You would not consider presenting this to the fine minds of our citizenry would you? That would be seditious!

"Just stop and think, not for many of my parent's and other people's generations has there even been a whisper that something that is light in the sky been spotted out there. There is no thermal combustion. The cosmos is virtually at thermal equilibrium. There simply hasn't been anything see to attest to make any claim. Don't make a fool of yourself, my friend."

"You are right, my friend, not for many, many generations has there been any report of anything seen in the sky. Yet, found in extremely old records there are reports that there were very dim lights seen that were believed far away. The then scientists said there is a history of receding bodies of light that had been visible for billions of years but due to expanding space they would recede beyond detection of each other. Even much older records imply that once we were all part of a star system and on a planet orbiting a star which had a natural satellite that shone in the dark. It is handed down of records of where they believe we came from. You see, my friend, it is important to keep an open mind, and perhaps be open to information that at one distant time things were different or that our predecessors resided at a different location with different conditions."

"Now look you." said the First Citizen, "I also had a good, solid education and believe me there was not a whisper in my science classes that we live amongst lights, no problem. I will even press a finger against my eyeball. I see light now, stars, shapes and even connecting forms and I don't even have to use my fingers to make a tracing. So that is not so hard for anyone to do afterall. Is that satifactory to you?"

"Now, please give some credence to this. I am in no more position to give veracity to this at our present situation than you. I convey records. We are both far removed and inaccessible to the world these people lived. Yet, these are records, voluminous records of that time and place and should be accorded proper consideration as much as we give our own. It may be due to them that we are as we are in space.