The Astrolabe

The Astrolabe

It was the worst flood the village had experienced since records began. The stream normally ran through it like a silver artery, festooned with drooping pale green willows it had pools for sticklebacks and voles to congregate, peppered with the flashing electric blue dunking of kingfishers. This joyful arena of ever-changing fantasy was just like the one of his boyhood.  He had fallen in love with it when house hunting for a pied-a-terre. 

And now it had turned into a fifty mètre wide anaconda of brown twisting torment. Gardens had been swallowed whole,  stone-walled houses had water half way up their midriffs, submerging ground floors and leaving some villagers - including him - temporarily stranded on upper floors. 

He had bought the two up two down cottage in the village unseen. He had an income that exceeded his wildest expectations. When he was still at Art College, he’d sold a series of motion graphic animations of amusing fantasy characters having adventures in a funky spaceship - to one of the biggest global streaming networks. Having conquered 164 countries, his colourful characters were better known than pop stars. Commercial spin-offs flourished. Royalties flooded in. His agent said he would never need to work again if he could manage to eke out a living on a few hundred thousand pounds a year! 

So why else did he buy the cottage? It would be his inspirational hideaway where he could write, draw and generally create. He would be in constant contact with his child-self. After all, the imagination of those years had been responsible for the cartoon characters that had made him a rich twenty five year old, in the first place! 

When he was eight years old, out one weekend with a net and jam jar, catching fish in the stream he saw a perfect stone disc on the sticky clay bed. Perhaps nine inches in diameter, it was thickly encrusted. When he picked it up it proved heavy for its size. He washed some clay off and dropped it in his little rucksack and took it home to the garden shed, where he kept all his unusual finds: feathers, bones, coloured glass, dead insects and stones. The following weekend saw him cleaning his latest discoveries so he could display them with labels in his glass ‘museum’. The disc was more intriguing than he had guessed when he first saw it. It was creamy white, very smooth and covered in scratches. His imagination saw it as a flying saucer, battered from galactic voyages,which could carry micro-aliens on adventures through space and time. 

When the flood waters had receded and he’d cleaned up the ground floor - luckily the tiling had saved the house from extensive damage - he carried down everything he’d been forced to store in the spare bedroom. This included the glass case with all his childhood finds. He’d brought it here from his London town house, thinking there would be more catalysts for cartoon ideas among its trophies. He set the case on a table under the east window. The morning sun lit it up beautifully. The objects inside it were picked out by the early rays in all their colours and shapes. 

It was then, when he cleaned it properly for the first time, he realised that the scratches on the disc were not  random. They were deliberate markings. He captured it on his mobile phone and did an image search on the net. It was no small surprise when the nearest image proved to be an astrolabe some 5000 years old! Recent work on a similar one in the British Museum had established its age because the configuration of the stars etched upon its surface showed a night sky judged to be from that time in Earth’s history. However, his stone disc, though most likely an astrolabe, under a magnifying zoom showed different possible constellations altogether. He pondered whether to hand it over to the authorities, but some inner desire to have and to hold, made him decide against it. 

He began filing the new images of the stone in the folder where he’d archived his original Art School photos. Here he experienced a secondary perturbation of surprise. The image was not identical to the one he had photographed then. Basic background features remained but there was a definite left-right drift of some of the markings across the stone with old ones disappearing and new ones replacing them on the left. This drift had occurred within the last eighteen years. 

His fertile sci-fi tuned mind went into hyperdrive. How could this be? It suggested that his stone astrolabe was somehow recording a changing firmament and it was not Planet Earth’s.  Holding it in his palm, it proved heavier than it looked, as he already knew. It must contain some sort of metal. The surface was eggshell smooth. And here was his third surprise. When he ran his fingers over it, the markings proved, in fact, not to be etched upon it at all. They were integral to it. So what did that mean? He could only think of one possibility. 

The stone was a living instrument. A constant scanner of an alien sky. What sky? Where? The Earth’s galaxy? Beyond? What had been in his possession for all these years? An artefact, a proof of alien life, the knowledge of which might precipitate an unprecedented shift in human consciousness. We are not alone. He could see the headlines. Once again he faced the dilemma of whether to hand it over. Logically and even morally, could he do anything else? As a citizen of Earth, surely it was an obligation.

He opened the East window and placed it on the windowsill. With the sun on it, it seemed to be transformed from inert to alive . He went to make coffee. From the kitchen he heard a kind of breathy whisper, like the gushing of air from a released valve. He went back. The noise wasn’t his imagination. The astrolabe was vibrating on the wood sill. Coming closer he saw a display of star configurations wax and then wane until it disappeared. As it waxed again it revealed a second tableau. The two ‘skies’ were alternating. The first was of alien heavens, the second was Earth’s familiar night sky with the Plough and Venus and the Milky Way. 

He placed a hand on it. Immediately, how should he describe it? He was electrified. He may as well have been bound in copper wire and a small current passed round him. He fizzed with full body micro-detonations.  The astrolabe twisted its position and settled in a more propitious alignment.The effect on him was instantaneous. He was transported to a different space and time, one which he could sense but not register in its totality. With his forefinger still touching the astrolabe, he looked up and above him was the alien sky it was depicting. He looked down and the chart shifted. The windowsill reappeared. He looked up again and above him stretched the Milky Way. 

He had no idea how long he was immobile, his finger in contact with the instrument. It felt as though time itself had fled. All the while the back and forth imaging continued. When he returned to consciousness it was with the bizarre realisation that he had been acting as an unwitting agent in the transmission of Planet Earth’s cosmic coordinates to alien heavens. He had been a biological dynamo feeding the astrolabe and powering it. 

He stepped back. What was done was done. It could not be undone. Wherever the astrolabe had come from, its makers now knew exactly where Earth was, and that sentient creatures inhabited it. 

He did not feel particularly patriotic as far as Planet Earth was concerned. Even as he was coming to terms with the extraordinary, even terrifying turn of events, his brain was alive and frantic with jostling ideas for a new cartoon series. He sat down.  The, a sudden intuition made him put on the tv news.

Except - there was no news! Only a caption, replicated in various wordings on all terrestrial and streaming stations:

“Owing to unprecedented circumstances, this channel is off-air. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.”

He looked across at the astrolabe. It was glowing. He walked over to the window and stared up at the sky. He touched the astrolabe. Immediately, he saw a swarm of tiny silver flecks forming a scintillating corona around the sun. He took his hand away. They disappeared. He touched again. There they were again, now magnified to show details of silvery fins and tails.

He took the astrolabe outside and sat on the torn stump of an oak snapped by the flooding. The irony was that the freak flood of cascading waters had led to a sequence of events culminating in this. His hands shook. He looked down. 

The astrolabe practically leapt in his hands.