Scenes from a diorama of tomorrow's world

...We piled into great earthships, huddled knees to necks in fast to-home ships, away, heavy with the promise of promise and promises to keep. No more the music of the spheres whose cadence to careen to, undulatory threads of light worn on our skins, but to the basics, to the beginning. To the brown nucleus we rushed, heeding light's pure admonitory instruction now understood: now not inviting, not beckoning, not free of encoding, but clearly, the stars were screaming, "flee- exeunt- away- to the mud, away from the stars."

The backwards fired light of a ship fired homeward burned some of us on the front, for our wistfulness drew us aft to see off our youth, and some of us on the back, for we were making already for bed.

Our flagship, our rusty hurtling can, was abbreviated in its regression full on the side, T-boned by the white, white moon, our earth mother's swat. Her empty nest was not advertising rooms for let, and the USS Heavy Retarder's trajectory was elided. She foundered side over side and hurt, but yet into the marble we first crouched on, Terra Firma. Goode Olde Worlde.

None were allowed by fortune to die on the Heavy Retarder, but we did find ourselves forever changed crashed deep in the mud of our first genesis, aching and sleeping in the awning of mud and, finally, lowered expectations. Those sons and daughters of heaven who found heaven too resplendent slipped, gymnosporous, into the eternal nap of a race's final convalescent groan for the sentenced duration of 1,000 forevers, free, at last, of the crushing expectations of mad and empty, needy and clinging, endless, endlessly promising and omnipossible space.

We and custom slept ever more deeply into the, conversely, crowded mud, we dull and slower children of heaven, we, promise's prodigals cast off.