Twilight Farms in the Asteroid Belt

The next night after dreaming about the drowning prophet, I had this dream.

It was on the huge capital city of a decaying interstellar empire. The capital itself was run down. It had grand old architecture and futuristic architecture too but it was subject to the late-stage processes of physical and moral decay we are all familiar with at that stage in a civilization. It was dirty.  It was shabby.

There were refugees. They were simple rural folk of the founding stock of the empire, perhaps even from elsewhere on the planet. They had fled their homes because of natural disaster and because of the devouring of all things that happens in decaying, corrupt polities. Like everyone and everything, they had gravitated to the imperial center.

I will pass on describing the atmosphere of the dream at this point, but it struck me immensely. The cobble stone streets, the stone and brick and stucco buildings rising many feet high only a step or two from the road. The heaps of trash. The gleaming metal arches crossing half the sky overhead. The broken drones. The sullen police standing by and staring vacantly at the middle distance.

The refugees were widely disliked by both the high and the low in the city and as the dream began a number of them were being casually chivvied through the nighttime streets by street gangs.

There was a man they were particularly after who had some sort of preeminence among the refugees, though he was also simple and uneducated.

Turning down one street he saw a door opening directly onto the street for a large imposing structure. Blank towering walls, fortress type architecture. His pursuers were close behind. He stepped in and the refugees with him came in also.

It was a college. Inside the door was a hall, the entrance area for the college, and it so happened that the dean of the college was standing there. The rural refugee and the dean recognized each other with some shock. Brother? Brother?  They were literal siblings.

The dean quickly took charge. He ordered the door guarded and instantly on the spot announced the creation of a new technical training program of which these refugees were the first admitted students, which offered them some legal status and legal protections. Over the next few days he gathered all the refugees in to that enormous college building.

The professors and staff were very unhappy with the decision. They hated the refugees too and were aware that doing something to help them was low in status and even dangerous. But in these late stages of social decay, no one was able to do anything effectually to oppose the energy and formal central authority of the dean. They went along with it, sullenly, only semi-cooperatively, but they went along. Some of them, without losing their bitterness, even found some meaning and purpose in the teaching they were doing. The college was revitalized somehow.

The teaching itself was something new. The refugees were being taught to colonize a region of space with many asteroids near each other, as if floating, but where unaccountably there was air and warmth and even humidity throughout, as if in some pastoral twilight.

The refugees graduated and left to settle.

Several years later the dean came to visit his younger brother. He flew in to see a dark asteroid with a lit up house and a lit up greenhouse. He stepped out into the comforting warmth and the humidity of growing things. His brother greeted him.

The first thing his brother noticed was that on top of his dean’s robes, on his chests were rows of medals.

“I see father has died,” the younger brother said.

“Yes,” said the older brother. “I have inherited all his authorities.”

The next thing that happened was peculiar. The dean had a sort of hat in his hand, tall and conical and very ornate, like an Orthodox bishop (I think). He put it on his head and said, “I am also the patriarch now. I have come to bless your children.” There were many children of those people. He blessed them all.

That was the dream, save one postscript. My dreams do not usually have postscripts, but this one did.

In their isolated area, free from the contaminations of the empire, the refugee people regained the strength and character their people had once had, and sent back to the Empire the men and women who rebuilt it and made it whole again.