Harvester Sun

The blind woman shaded her eyes against the sun. Many years ago, this sun had taken her sight, so now she turned her face to its warmth and gave thanks to it.

Though others would disagree, she felt fortunate that she had lost her sight earlier than most. In the years following the first flash, her other senses compensated for her lack of sight until she rarely missed her eyes anymore. She could see better than most just by paying attention to her other senses, and in a world of the blind, where only the very young could see, she could have been a powerful woman.

Instead, she lived on her mountain, raised her goats, sang her songs to the sun, and only rarely ventured into the village. In the village, they called her “that old crazy woman.” But she only smiled and nodded and did nothing to dissuade them in this belief, for that meant that the villagers left her alone on her mountain and did not seek her wisdom, as they did with the other old women.

When she awoke this morning, the woman sensed something different in the world, something tentative about the day, as if the dawn had not wanted to come. She hurried herself cleaning her hut, for she thought perhaps the sun would send a great flash today, and it was better not to have things lying about that could burn easily. During a great flash, many young people would lose their sight forever, and temperatures would briefly rise, and the bright light from the flash was known to start fires when filtered through the prisms of glass windows and bottles and the like. Those who ventured out were known to suffer painful flash burns.

But then she heard the sound, a constant low rumble like the chanting voices of a million distant monks, and she knew her cleaning was unnecessary. Today would indeed be different, but by its end, no one would be left to remember it.

The harvesters were coming.

The harvesters were massive machines created many decades ago by an arrogant and wasteful race to rape other planets of their resources after they had raped their planet of all of its own. Thousands of harvesters were linked together in space to form a vast, hungry raft. Their eternal mission was to hover above the sun’s other children (none easily inhabitable) and dredge every millimeter of their surfaces. They could completely denude the surface of a planet—mountains, oceans, even the atmosphere—in hours.

The harvesters were followed in their travels by the massive coolers, one to a planet, that would come and digest the naked core of the now-dead planet, cooling its lava and compacting its mass into usable chunks, the beautiful diamond hearts of the Sun’s murdered children.

Harvesters and coolers then made their way to the processing ships, whose great machinery separated useful elements from useless ones and supplied the home planet with everything it needed to live. Useless waste was fed to the Sun, aggravating its cycles and making the great flashes more frequent and violent than they had once been.

The great malevolent hum of the Harvesters grew in the old woman’s ears, though she knew most of the others on her planet had not yet heard it. When they did, she knew many would kill themselves rather than be devoured alive. Others would try to outrun the Harvesters, hoping that a miracle would break them in mid-meal, hoping that this planet, or a portion of it, would be spared above all others. A few would stand as pillars of salt, their blind eyes turned to the Sun, and accept their deaths.

The old woman prepared herself a simple meal—lamb sausage, some potatoes fried in lard, fresh bread with butter, and a glass of cool water. It was her favorite breakfast, and as it would be her last, she enjoyed it as she had enjoyed no other and ate more than would typically have been prudent. Then she dressed in her finest robes and jewelry and faced the Sun.

The hum was louder now, and beneath it, the horrible crunching, sucking, crashing sounds of a world being eaten. She knew there was panic in the planet's villages now, all of the villages that had not already been devoured. She was glad to be on her mountain. If they were in any state to think, the people of the village would now call her “old crazy woman awaiting death”.

A warm, unpleasant breeze began to blow, carrying the odor of death with it. She began to feel uneasy and considered going into her hut for the large knife. But she could not bear such a cowardly act. She must accept this fate—this punishment—as it came to her.

As the sound became deafening, the hair on her arms, neck, and head began to stand on end, began to be ripped from her body, she remembered.

She remembered many years ago, when she was young and worked with others to build great machines to save her dying planet. They explored all other possibilities, and creating the Harvesters and Coolers seemed their only viable solution. None of the other planets was easily inhabitable.

Someone had made a mistake, she thought. They had neglected to direct the Harvesters away from this planet, or maybe the Harvesters had malfunctioned.

Or perhaps there were no other planets left to devour in this galaxy.

Soon, as the old woman breathed what she knew would be her last breaths, she remembered a line from an ancient book she had read as a young girl, before the first great flash took her sight:

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”