The stars still fascinated him after all these years.
He could feel their light on his skin, little individual pricks as the star beams completed their journeys of dozens or hundred or thousands of years. Some of these beams were older even than him, he who had seen many hundreds of generations rise and fall on the world. He knew the stars so well that he could feel changes in the star beams over time; he knew when civilizations flourished and reached out from worlds around those tiny distant suns, and knew again when those civilizations were silenced.
He felt the vibrations of light from one particular star and his eyes clouded over. The star was, to most people, unremarkable. It didn't even hold a proper name; those who studied the stars knew it as KPD2055+311, a tiny point of light in the Cygnus constellation. He knew it by a name unpronounceable on this world, but what clouded his eyes was the distortion in the beam, from passing through a nebula... the painful reminder of when his own civilization was silenced thousands of years ago, shortly after his arrival. He involuntarily narrowed his eyes and peered into the darkness, picking out the purple form of the nebula. The humans called it the Veil Nebula.
He knew, of course, when it happened... his transceivers, like all of the Explorers, were tuned to wavelengths faster than mere light. But the perverse tricks of physics meant he could see his home for more than a century afterward, feeling the vibrations in the star beam of the electromagnetic variations of a world teeming with life. He was fated to watch with impotence as his world died, fifteen hundred years after it happened, thousands of years before this world's astronomers had even invented the first telescope or the human named Herschel first discovered the remnants of all that his civilization was.
"Come inside, Milo," he heard Stella call. They had spent nearly fifty years together, a long and contented life for her but too short a season for him. She was the 99th mate he had taken since his arrival; few had ever suspected his true nature, none after he perfected the chore of changing his appearance to match the rapid aging of the short-lived humans around him. How he longed to once again see the shores of home, ride the beams between his world and the outer colonies, see more than just the tiny biosphere available on Earth. But since his sun went nova, the technology to return him home, as well as home itself, was forever lost.
"Coming, dear," he called back, rising from the grass and turning his back on the stars.
