busy"To Refine the Sense of Time"
The planet was a tumult
of vents and crevasses spewing
water, chemicals, gasses, and steam.
Fluffy white deposits
turned the landscape
into a marshmallow world.
Minerals painted the skirts of
every spring and trickled
down the stony cliffs.
To the visiting humans
it promised an interesting trek,
perhaps resources worth exploring.
Then they tripped over a pile
of something that wasn't
mineral extrusions.
They found traces of tools,
here a shattered handle,
there a snaggletoothed gear.
Streaks fanned out from the bluff
in a different pattern, pointing
to something mysterious.
A hole, nearby, proved to be
square instead of round, its inside
spanned by crumbling braces.
To be sentient is to refine
the sense of time, bind it
to the engines of civilization.
Unexpected yet inescapable,
the conclusion came to them:
tools, tailings, and a mine.
There had been people here,
but not humans, digging
for the hidden riches.
They had come and gone,
leaving behind only traces
like humanity's own ancestors.
But this trail was still warm enough to follow.
* * *
Notes:
"A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one’s head like a hall clock."
— Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (1971), 81
A midden is a heap of everyday waste. Archaeologists love finding a midden because it contains a wealth of information about whomever made it. Also, people might hide their treasure but they rarely bother to hide their trash. This makes it among the more likely ways we could discover evidence of aliens.
August 3 2016, 13:03:35 UTC 4 years ago
Finding just the mine and no beings reminds me of Von Humboldt's exploits...
Well...
August 3 2016, 19:15:00 UTC 4 years ago