Moths
A swarm of moths was tirelessly trying to get to the luring light of the bulb. However, the glass of the hexagonal lantern calmly resisted the efforts of the nocturnal insects.
The man already walked around the cottage several times, petting the wolfhound lying in front of the kennel, and returned to the entrance again. He looked at his wife sitting on the terrace. She was still reading by the light of the lantern hanging above the table.
"Let’s go to bed, it's almost midnight."
"Josef, you know I won't sleep until Jana comes back," answered the woman calmly.
Only a faint undertone in her voice suggested that she had said a similar answer many times that evening.
"After all, she is already nineteen...", he objected.
"Well, exactly because of that."
"Hani, we don't have to go to sleep right away..." said Josef with a slight hope in his voice. "That gig always ends around one o’clock. And the young one is already sleeping too."
"Not today, honey, sorry," answered Hana almost mechanically, her eyes still on the book.
So he just shrugged and went to the cellar for another bottled beer.
***
Little Peugeot stopped on the forest road. Even before the headlights went out and the engine went silent, the driver was already turned to the passenger and was exploring her lips with his. She was more than accommodating to his efforts. There was a buzzing sound of zippers on leather jackets, punk chains clanking, a reclining seat creaking. Jana let out a breath of pleasure as Lukas touched her most sensitive places.
She laughed happily. Lukas stopped.
"What is it?"
"Nothing… go on…"
"You were laughing..."
"When I'm happy, I laugh," she explained.
Lukas followed up where he stopped a moment ago.
When they emerged from the realm of pleasure after some time, Jana glanced at the on-board clock. There was still an hour left until her expected return home.
"We still have time," she whispered.
"That's good."
"Wait," she pushed him away.
“What, you didn't like it?” Even in the darkness lit only by the waning moon, he could see her eyes that said otherwise.
"Let’s go for a walk," said she.
Lukas awakened the romantic part of his nature and nodded.
They walked on a bumpy road that wound between the meadow and the western edge of the forest. Jana was wrapped around him like ivy on a tree.
"Beautiful night," he began. He cursed himself for not thinking of anything better.
"Yes," hummed Jana, satisfied.
They watched the night sky in silence for a while. Although the landscape around Blaník mountain is not disturbed by a lot of light pollution, few stars were visible. The bitten cake of Moon still had power.
"Look, a star is falling," Lukas noticed.
"Wooow…"
It's strange how the brief flash of burning cosmic dust still moves people.
They kept looking up, hoping that this meteor was not the only one this night.
"Look, there’s another," poked Lukas his finger into the sky.
"Where?" Jana turned her head.
"Wow, it's fast..."
The point of light was indeed moving unusually fast. But most of all, it didn't stop shining.
Before Jana could say, "Hey, it didn't go out...", the dot turned into a small bright spot. Then grew into an even brighter circle and then it formed a large intensely glowing disc, or rather an ellipse.
The glowing object slowed down and stopped in the blink of an eye. Unnaturally, improbably. Incredibly.
Especially since they didn't hear any sound. As if someone muted the volume button of the night crickets and owls.
Now the thing hovered motionless over the opposite hill about a kilometer away.
"You... you... can you see that?" Jana was shaking.
"Fuck," Lukas relieved his shock.
They stared at the glowing ellipse. Even at that distance, they recognized that the object must be over fifty meters wide.
Wordlessly, in unspoken agreement, they walked hand in hand towards the unidentified object.
***
Father was wrong about one thing. Miki didn't sleep.
"Sister can go to the gig, and I'm stuck here," he was scolding.
It was a warm May night and he was turning in the bed. Nothing helped to fall asleep. He even tried counting sheep in his mind for a while. He had never done this, he only tried it out of desperation and also out of curiosity to see if it worked.
It didn't.
After a long time, he ended up with a flashlight and his favorite comic book under the blanket. When the back of his neck hurt and his eyes burned, he tried to lie down normally again.
Nothing.
He didn't feel tired, nor he had the energy like on full moon nights. He had just a vague, weird feeling.
"I'll get over it." He threw on pants and shirt, took shoes in his hand and sneaked out of the window. It wasn't the first time he'd done it like that at the age of ten.
Within a minute he was already walking along the dirt road to the village, shoes on. Actually, he didn't know where his legs were taking him, but he was going to at least somehow distract the boredom from the never-coming sleep.
He slowed down. He looked up and watched the moon. Then he slowly looked around the sky. Despite his age, he already knew most of the constellations and had no trouble finding them in the sky. Suddenly a movement caught his eye. A flying point of uniform light suddenly appeared between Hercules and Drake.
Weird, we're away from flight corridors, thought Miki. As the light began to increase in intensity, he became even more alert.
Suddenly, the shining star, which was already the size of a tennis ball, began to descend to the ground. When it stopped just above the gentle slope of the opposite hill, the boy's jaw dropped.
As if in a trance, Miki set off for the landing spot.
He ran. He tripped many times on the way, but he didn't care. Nettles stung his face, stones scratched his hands. He ran, he had to see it up close.
He wanted to touch the thing so, so much. Explore it.
He could tell from a hundred paces that the thing was shiny, probably metallic. It reflected the moonlight, but at the same time gave off a blinding glow of its own. Miki stopped and covered his eyes.
Then he realized why he couldn't hear the night sounds.
The thing hummed. No, it was playing. Singing. He couldn't find the right word. Those foreign sounds formed a kind of melody that scratched the inside of the skull and twisted the brain's pleasure centers at the same time.
Then Miki noticed a pair of silhouetted figures.
At first, he was startled, before he noticed that the figures were coming towards the glowing ellipse, from the forest. They were people too, he recognized. One of them slowed down, but the other kept going as if in a trance, lured by the strange light.
When they were roughly the same distance from the object, he gasped for breath a second time.
He recognized Lukas by the punk's glare, so the other must be...
"Jana!" Fear gripped his throat, so his voice just whistled.
"Sister, don't go there!" Miki's instinct for self-preservation was stronger than the lure of the unknown object.
However, the girl walked closer with the same pace. And before Miki could scream again, she disappeared in a strange flash. As if she had fell in a trapdoor.
Miki fainted.
***
The interior of the spaceship was utterly quiet. The crew communicated on the telepathic phi brainwave band, which could not be disturbed by surroundings. However, if they wanted to, they could hear all life within a ten-kilometer radius on the epsilon band.
The first sent a thought to his companion: „Human in landing zone.“
He stood at the instrument panel, his large eyes staring at the outputs from the onboard sensors.
The other silvery-glowing being in the cabin stepped aside and touched a finger to another spot on the dashboard and replied with a thought too.
„Transferred to time pocket as usual. Retransfer in 500 time units, coordinates 3.5-26.0-0.2.“
They did not address each other by name. The cosmic coordinates and cosmic time of birth, which was actually creating the "name", were used exclusively for identification within the colony. The immense minds of these beings, who were able to understand the complexity of our eleven-dimensional reality, had no problem memorizing the telepathic imprint of the minds of several million of their fellow kind.
„Why someone always occurs? What attracts them so much? They follow like moths after candle.“
„And they would die just the same way.“
The fusion engine was lethal.
“Still… if I could still feel that emotion, I would envy them. For example their mating ritual.”
After disconnecting the genes for selected emotions, they understood what the subspecies felt, but they could not succumb to them.
“It’s a shame they can’t take care of their planet.”
“Think of it this way, if we have to do it for them, even if it’s in secret, at least you can watch them and… ‚envy’.“
“Although I don’t really understand it, why would you do that. Do you realize what they still have to go through? They’re still fighting over religion…”
“You’re right.”
They focused on their task for a while.
"At least someone exceptional is born from time to time who has it all sorted out in his head and we can pass on some of our knowledge to him," the first one recalled. "Trismegistos, Jesus, Newton, Souček..."
The second one replied: "I liked the last one the most. What a pity that-"
He didn't finish. The on-board artificial intelligence flashed an information hologram into the semi-darkness of the cabin. The communication supernetwork was sending an important message along the dark matter thread.
"Unexpected event. Supernova explosion in the second octant. Coordinates 44.103°; 35.658°; 2.540°. Distance 3,895,101 stellar units from the unicenter."
The same thought ran through both of their minds. "We can't miss such grand thing."
The first stated: "Besides, the task we came here for is already completed."
He began to turn on the interstellar drive.
The beings set off towards the luring light of the dying star...
***************
Some additional „lore“:
*the mountain Blaník in Czech Rep. is known for ocassional anomalies of various kind. There were sightings of strange phenomena, like people disappearing and emerging after years, while being only few days older. There is a legend that there is an army sleeping under the mountain which will wake up to defend the country in direst need.)
*Ludvík Souček was very clever physician and writer, he was studying inexplicable things in our world (pyramids, megaliths, UFO…) He wrote a few books about it and was ready to publish another, when he died (heart illness). However, his (only) manuscript of the last book was lost. Some say there was some explication of these worldly mysteria, so it may have been „lost“ purposedly…