Journey Through the Stars - III

Your ship is old now. For countless eons, more than you can count, you've been traveling the void of space. Off on the starboard a pulsar comes up, emitting its constant beacon like a lone lighthouse on the edge of the infinite sea, radiating its light in a constant spin. You hear its pulsations on board:

"Oh God, it's beautiful," says the Captain, still weary, old in age and hardly there, it's felt. No one knows what goes on in the mind of the old man, only that he sits there looking at the stars, rarely breaking his slumbering, eternal gaze to issue a word or two. For the most part the mission takes care of itself; it's almost at mission's end. Home no longer exists; space is his home.

The racketous beating leaves the hull, and the distant, spinning light fades away from the dark view of the inner hull. It fades away into the myriad of off-colored stars, tinted with the decay of countless years like a silent graveyard whose lights are the spirits of the dead through which we wade. The ship is old, and she's been good, carrying out her assignment to the last, at one with the aging Captain of whose secrets she alone is shared. How beautiful the journey has been, now to die among the stars; one more light fading out.

The trip has been long and hard. Silence has settled around most of the ship; few of the original crew are left. For the old generation which left ages ago, it is the end.

Now you are deep. There is no sun here, no stars to light the path. You are so deep that there is nothing around you for hundreds of light-years. Color fades. Surrounded only by darkness. You are so far out... your eyes begin to see. In the distance, a luminous band comes to light; the Milky Way, slowly rotating in her cosmic path, and then another light; Andromedia. The skies are full of stars; of galaxies, sweeping and vast, of stars and pulsars, of nebulae shifting in the vast void, of countless stars and lights which you cannot account for.

It is a fitting song for your last moments. The vision burns into your eyes, the last light transmitted to your eyes a mirage of a million worlds and stars, of grand formations of cosmic medium, of the vast voids and vantage points from which your solitary ship now wades ever slowly through the infinite gulfs, to drift forever through time and space without end. No regrets, my friends. Old Captain sits in his throne, neither alive or dead, simply sitting there as if waiting, and petrified, for whatever he's been searching for. You look upon from the command deck for the last time, and then close your eyes. The music comes back to your ears; you remember all those times aboard when you heard the universe's song. Then it all turns to silence, like the ever void itself.

... the end