THE GENIAL HUNTER
( Giovanni Agnoloni ITA )

They had known many lands and walked through isles of disappointment. They had stumbled down petrified paths of stars, slept in a comet’s tail and temporarily settled on forgotten planets. They were hopeless and tired: little time remained, before the Genial Hunter reached them for good. The gate of their past was open, now. They had no reason to hide, since their destiny was written. The Space Pilgrims were the last blossom of a long generation of explorers; people committed to travel in space in order to discover spots of universe where life might be found. Their ancestors had departed from Earth long ago, little before the first human colony was established on Mars. They had obtained a few successes, especially thanks to radio communications with invisible space tribes. But five hundred years later their scions had come to a halt, due to a terrible creature that had emerged out of nothingness. It was like an asteroid, but much more luminous. It could elude any rule of physics to pursue its aim: swallowing them. Incredibly intelligent, it always sensed their presence and never stopped chasing them. The Pilgrims had changed their behaviour a lot, and gone deep into hollow space territories to confuse their tracker. They had even lost awareness of their exact position, and wondered if they would ever return to Earth. But it had all proved useless.

Now they had decided to stop running and wait for their end. 757 years since the first mission, the last three explorers had resolved to land and remain on a small planet. It looked like the satellite of a missing entity, as it rotated around a dark centre of gravity. That seemed to be a black hole, yet it couldn’t be such, because its attractive force was too weak. However, the Pilgrims were so exhausted that they didn’t investigate any further. Once on the surface of that solitary ball in space, they got ready to receive the hunter.

They were three: father, son, and nephew.

“It’s going to be a huge impact, for sure,” the youngest, George, said.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” answered his uncle Gregory. “The final blow that will erase us, pushing our lives into a hole even blacker than this patch of stellar night.” Uncle Gregory had a poetic vein, a gift he possessed since his childhood, which helped him find a source of inspiration even in very difficult situations. His father, Gus, didn’t make any comment. He was a silent man by nature, and he used to communicate his feelings simply by changing the expression of his face. George turned to him, aware of the meaning of his blue look, at that moment. He felt despair growing in him. But they had to organize their life on the small satellite, for the time that remained to live. It was hard to prepare a camp in that psychological condition. Despite all their efforts, when the Hunter arrived it would be their end. In such a mood they began to dispose their tools on the satellite’s surface, while their spaceship rested at a short distance from them.

But, indeed, time was never going to pass. From their point of observation, they could see no asteroid approaching, and meanwhile abnormally long days elapsed. This phenomenon preoccupied them all, but most of all Gregory, who seemed to have understood the core problem.

“I believe we find ourselves in a solar system with no sun at all. Don’t you see that sort of black hole in the sky?”

“What do you think it means?” George asked him.

“The absence of a sun implies there’s no day or night at all. It is as if we never saw tomorrow; as if we could never die.”

 George got astonished at this revelation. He couldn’t help agreeing with his uncle, but he was terrified, too. “Now I see,” he said with a trembling voice. His uncle went on to explain:

 “We actually never feel the need to sleep, as if we were always stuck in the same moment. We seldom eat, too, and our mood is always the same: no happiness, no despair and no fear.”

George turned to Gus, who hadn’t uttered a word in all that endless time. His expression was constantly depressed, and it seemed to reverberate the pitiless dark mouth open if front of them, in the centre of that gravitational field. He understood, then, that the Genial Hunter would never arrive. He had consciously confined them on a piece of universe from which they would never escape, forcing them into a condition of powerless immortality. He knew that such a destiny was even worse than fearing death because of him. George realised all this, and finally exclaimed:

“We can’t remain here! The Hunter has framed us. We are prisoners of our fear!”

It was only now that Gus spoke, taking both Gregory and George by surprise: “Don’t speak like this, boy!” he warned. “There are things well beyond our intelligence, and we can’t challenge them like this!”

“What do you mean, Dad?” Gregory asked.

The old man replied in a softer tone: “Son, this is our situation: if we remain, we’ll never die, but we’ll renounce every pleasure or emotion that life can give. If we leave, we may lose everything. But we cannot simply decide which danger is worse by a mental measurement. We’d risk finding ourselves in front of something completely different from what we expect.”

“But why?” George questioned.

Gus returned silent. He looked weary, now. Gregory didn’t speak straightaway, as if he were thinking. But then he seemed to get the point, as his shining eyes revealed. And he explained to George: “I think I know what my father means, nephew. He’s saying that there’s an irrational component in the mechanisms of the universe. If we leave only because we think it is more convenient, we will possibly endanger our lives pointlessly.”

“But what should we do, then?” George insisted. “Remain here? We all agree about the fact that we have no destiny, on this satellite.”

Gus refused to reply. It was still Gregory who spoke:

“Listen, George, you know how much I love poetry, and you know how powerful the energy of life is. I believe that my father thinks we should wait until something happens, while you assume that the best thing would be to risk and leave immediately. I’d rather propose a compromise solution, which takes into account another factor.”

“I’ve never heard you speaking so philosophically, uncle,” Gregory couldn’t keep from commenting.

“Listen,” Gregory continued, ignoring his remark. “How do you feel, now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what is your state of mind, your wish, your hope? Do you have any hope at all?”

George carefully reflected. He had passed through deep states of crisis, during their immeasurable permanence on the satellite. He had lost notion of time, but one thing was sure: he had never definitely given up hoping he would one day get back home. He turned a moment to Gus, reading again surrender on his face, and he understood what his uncle meant. While Gus had lost his hope, and with it his energy, they still kept theirs. Thanks to it, the irrational side of universe would help, rather jeopardize their lives. He expressed his sensation to his uncle.

Gregory smiled in agreement. Then he said: “Our time has long expired, but we are living in an extra-limbo that protracts our lives forever. Yet, we don’t aim at immortality. We just wish to be happy in our lifetime.”

George felt tears coming to his eyes. He turned to Gus, and saw that he was crying, too. He realized that Gregory’s words, the words of a poet, had touched also the deep layers of his dusty soul. And he understood that the next thing they would do was to step back into their spaceship and leave.

As soon as they took off, George asked Gregory where they should go. They had reached such a remote region that no map could help them. They could rely only on intuition. They all closed their eyes, trying to imitate Gus’s typical attitude when he needed to reflect. The old man tried to sort something out together with them, now that he had apparently recovered his love for life. They then felt as if their brains were working together. It was a strange phenomenon, but sometimes it happened to the Pilgrims, who were somehow able to develop a sort of collective consciousness. And their intuition was very odd. While they kept their eyes closed, they all made out a radiant body approaching at a high speed. That was it! The Genial Hunter was again at their heels. But they did not panic. They had always trusted their intuition, so it wouldn’t fail this time, either. They saw it coming closer and closer, until it was in front of them, and they were ready to hear the explosion.

They opened their eyes wide. Now the asteroid, the very threatening presence which had pursued them for such a long time, had replaced the seeming black hole, and was shining like a sun. They realised their spaceship was re-descending toward the small planet, like a silent drone.

Astonished, the Pilgrims looked outside the windows, and recognized the outline of a familiar continent.

The Genial Hunter was their missing sun. It had just taken them back to Earth.