The white morning stunned my eyes. They burned as I gazed out at that vast, colorless desert of ice. Winter had come in one night and buried me. Some death is sudden like that, giving no warning; takes men in their sleep like the snow took me. How? I cannot say. It seemed as if by magic, for the other day had not a hint of frost nor single dancing flake nor any of the more subtle portents a man long lived in the country grows to know.
My eyes burned, and I stood dazed as the coldness swept into my little hovel.
My claptrap of a radio got something of a signal, and I heard the astonished weathermen. That was a change, not the weathermen being astonished at the weather, but for once being astonished along with them. I suppose this is what people who listen to them regularly feel.
No one understood until nightfall, and most city folk wouldn’t have known save we bumpkins took the time to tell them. They couldn’t see, gathered around their warm light, what we, scattered out in the winter’s dark, discovered: The stars had changed.
Few men know what that is, what it is to look up and be alone, to be a stranger under an alien heaven. I suppose astronauts, if any of them get as far as we, will in some sense be prepared for it, or if not prepared, at least know to expect it. I suppose the first men to see the northern lights shimmering in the sky would have felt something as I.
But the children being born now, they will only know this alien heaven. Their dreams will be guided by these strange signs their fathers never knew. There are many wonders in this new world, for it is a quilt work done by some great force unknown to us.
Bordering our patch of earth, westward as it were, there is a sudden change of land from our simple forests and low plains into hardened stone devoid of any growing thing but the most stubborn of lichen. There are obvious signs of roads and the like which speak to inhabitants, but we have never met these neighbors if they live. The only animal life in that place are strange, leathery birds which I cannot help but call dragons. There is a temple there also, with great halls and tall, pointed doorways. There are no windows for the sun, and it is dark in the temple; we found no worshipers in it.
Northward, we find a dense jungle of thick purple trunks which seem all to be so interwoven by both root and bough as to be one great living thing. There is a lake there, covering most of the area, more a swamp than anything, of a sweet yet deadly aroma. Music too, if you’re still and quiet enough; you can hear the trees singing of death in that candied nightmare. The skeletons of many diverse and unintelligible things lay entangled below those waters, and if they died as the men I saw died, they died smiling and giggling and laughing, drowning themselves in the juices of this living thing’s stomach. The skull’s sardonic grin is, in this case, no mistake.
And what to the south? I do not know why it was chosen among all the others. We have spied in the distance some very strange places we have yet to go, but the south is yet stranger still than all we’ve seen. It is a great shining landscape of metal which seems alive in parts. Here at least we have had some contact with neighbors, though they tell us little. As you walk among their odd trees and amid their forests, you find yourself reflected back by many a strange and unnatural angle, and these distorted reflections have tried to speak with us. We have not yet really understood each other, nor, in our human efforts, have we realized with what we are communicating. There is little more to recount other than how we tried to bring back with us something resembling a fallen leaf, but as soon as it crossed the border, it melted in our hands; dissipating quickly thereafter, it floated away as a cloud back to its own part of the quilt.
There is one last cardinal to consider, and it leads to the sea. Following the main road which had been brought with us, going from that lightless temple, you find it abruptly swallowed by the one familiar thing I have found under this new sky. The deep unknown is also here, blue and cold. There is a slow traveling moon which glides over us, and brings with it a gradual and growing tide. That moon stands over us now, green and weird. The waters, I can see, are still rising. The others cannot see it as I see it, for they only will see that the waves move in and out. How can it be rising, they ask, when it is already flowing away? But I can see; I can measure. Each wave comes in a little farther and goes out a little less; and the moon still stands above us. The tide is rising, and I know not how far. Perhaps this is why there are so few people on this quilt work world, perhaps a flood comes to cleanse the specimen of the annoyance of living things.
Some death is slow like this, gradual, and the dying refuse to see.
Tale Told 