THINGS FALLING from the sky often acted as a spur to thoughts on the fragility of the future.
Usually that particular commodity had a way of always being there, just a step ahead of everything, like a dropped winning Pulse Ball token rolling down a hill, flipping about in a teasing wind, or floating along a gutter until it reached the end of its visible journey as it disappeared into a very deep drain. Always out of reach. Unless there were strings attached.
Meteorites had been hitting the Face of the World for as long as anyone cared to remember. Only recently did memory come with intellectual appraisal, though that still depended on the witness.
Amid the endless sands of Greetiyah such things were sometimes deemed a nuisance for who needed more rocks? If it had been an icy comet of sorts, a cosmic snowball as some knowledgeable folk declared them to be, by the time a group of eager nomads had found the spot where the thing had fallen all that was left was a pit of sand with some dark, singing thing in the middle.
'A singing rock,' one goatherd observed sententiously on a very recent occasion.
'Just what we need to water the flocks with,' another sighed resignedly.
'What's it singing?' a third added, disappointment already so well established that other thoughts could come into play.
'Something about glass that don't break even if it rained from the sky, whatever rain is. Catchy tune though.'
'Sounds suspicious and, you know, alluring.'
'Really?' came an interested response.
The witnesses to this particular meteor strike paused on the edge of the crater to listen a moment longer. Then the singing stopped and the thing collapsed with a kind of tinkling sound like breaking glass.
'Well, that's that,' one said and began herding the goats away for it was nothing they could eat either. Thus they returned to the old trails to reacquaint themselves with bone-strewn landmarks and familiar things while regaling gullible listeners with tales of singing, and even dancing, maidens from the stars trying to lure them into sin.
If they had returned to the spot some years later they would probably have found flowers where before there had only been sand, and a pool of water bubbling up from cracked bedrock.
Shame really. It just seemed more comfortable for them to believe only the worst from such odd phenomena and those who might find the oasis where none had been before would merely be grateful for a splendid piece of luck without for a moment considering the origin of such an unexpected thing. Or thinking it might mean the end of the world.