The Sirens' Last Lament

  Chapter 4 - The Tragedy of the Starship Diana

  It should not have happened. The odds made it nearly impossible. So much space, so much dark, expanded between the stars. So much cold. A vacuum suffocated so much of the cosmos. Yet we found the sirens upon our first jump beyond our solar system. We discovered the sirens after first surpassing the speed of light. We peeked upon only one alien world, and we were surprised to find others peeking back at us.

  We built the technology to bridge the stars. The light drive engine unlocked the cosmos to us. We could fold and twist space so that we might wink our eyes near Earth, and find ourselves lightyears away in the time it took us to reopen them. We held the power to explore all the far planets that our mathematics hinted orbited distant stars.

  Mankind didn’t immediately step out of the cradle. We moved carefully. We first launched drones towards the closest planet we hoped might be like our own, a planet with possibly liquid oceans of water swaying to an alien tide, a planet with an atmosphere that our lungs might hope to breath, a planet whose climate was neither too hot nor too cold. We launched our first drones to a planet upon which we might find new acres for farming, new plots for residential and commercial development, a planet of mountains and valleys not yet teeming with men.

  The men who gazed through those drones’ mechanical eyes must have felt amazed when they found such luxury on their first jump into the stars. That planet was not empty. The sirens inhabited that orb, and the sirens reached out to our robotic emissaries, curious to learn of the new being appearing in their sky. What must those sirens have thought when our machines unexpectedly arrived? Did they tremble to think our drones were sent by a race intent upon conquest? Did they cower for fear of an infection that such an alien object might introduce to their populace? Did the the sirens wail and cry that the appearance of those drones was a harbinger of doom foretold by their fates and traditions?

  Despite any fear those sirens may have held in their hearts, those aliens reached out to those robotic messengers of mankind. The sirens couldn’t understand the language of man those drones broadcast upon them. They could not decipher the letters and numbers of mankind’s language and mathematics buzzed by the drones. And so, the sirens reached out with what they loved most - they reached out with song.

  I’ll never forget the night my father told us to assemble in front of our home’s television, telling us we were about to witness the dawn of a new era, telling us we were about to hear the voices from our distant neighbors out there orbiting one of the uncountable stars twinkling over our heads. My sister sobbed. Perhaps she felt afraid, though I ran about the room in my excitement. I remember the anchorman’s face as he attempted to say something special, though I remember none of his words. I remember when the television turned dark, so that nothing would distract us from the melody that filled our home.

  The sirens’ music transformed us. The sirens’ song reached every nation, spoke to every village, played to every race of child and man. Many of us fell in love with the sirens’ song. Many of us trembled. But none of us fooled ourselves into thinking we would ever be the same.