Silent, it moved through the heavens, a massive city, dark and lifeless, its hundred towers a blocky shadow passing over the stars. Once the hub, the very nexus, of the civilized universe; desolate now, and deathly silent. No one remembers why. No word ever comes out of that massive grave. At first, they thought she was destroyed. Records I have decoded, logistics. It’s how I pinpointed the day. Ships arrived, cargo holds ready to deliver food to millions, but her orbit was empty. The first reports of her wanderings came generations later, an eclipse here, a sudden radio silence there, and now her course has been plotted. She drifts, a carcass, but the carrion birds which fire their rockets and land on her have never returned. Into her darkness they fall.
Such a mystery, to the prudent, is best ignored; the wise of that race wrote it off as a great, but fully tabulated, loss. And yet, some hearts burn when they hear the tale or when they first see her silhouette there on their screens. I suppose we have been written off too; it is known that some fools, like me, cannot resist that darkness, her silence is invitation irresistible. The gravity is too strong for some of us.
I have tried probes and scans. I have set off bombs around her, flashing like lightning over her dark shape, a megaton camera flash that reveals nothing. I can discover nothing except my own fever. I must know. I have grown tired now of the mediums which claim to be able to cast their minds’ eye about. Not one of their reports coincides with each other, though I think that one, a boy, full of fear, who convulsed himself in fits during the séance—was it just a good performance?—his is the only report I suspect I will prove. For making me half-believe him, I plan on taking him with me. Whether that is punishment or reward… oh well, all is prepared now.
He spoke of pale creatures, once human, who wander listless and dreamless and silent, as silent as the shadow of the dead city, who hunger. They do not die. In those countless eons, they have not found death. No succor satisfies, but they still search through the wasteland of their home. What may be found in that vision, what truth there is in this ghost story, we shall learn.
Tale Told 