Now, he gestured vaguely.
"You see that white part over there?"
I squinted.
"The thing that look like a stain?"
"Exactly!"
He seemed proud, somehow.
"This is the Milky Way, a part of one of its arms, actually. Back in the days, you could see a good chunk of it, as if splitting the sky. Millions upon millions of stars."
"I know, I said because I had learnt my astrology lessons."
"Good!"
Again, that pride, and happiness.

"The thing is, we harvested many stars, created others from gas giants to harvest them, and make many more explode with S-Bombs nowadays. Before that, we just hurled big asteroids – the size of the Moon or even greater – to destroy planets or send them away in the cold vacuum of space by modifying their orbits. But that was long and costly."
I did not interrupt him, even though I'd learnt that in History classes.
"My ship is capable of doing that, but we now prefer to gather resources with it. More useful. The thing is, launching an S-Bomb requires to send a stealth ship, which is risky. We don't want to lose 'em."
He shook his head.

"Must be working, though. Otherwise we would not be seeing as many supernovae and the sky would not bear those big chunks of light that obfuscate everything! he exclaimed with a weird anger."
He then exhaled softly.
"Do you know why I'm telling this to you?"
"No. Not really."
He turned towards me and his eyes were glittering. A supernova was reflecting in one of them.
"Because I want you to remember what it was like before. Before the war. Just like my mother told me about snow. About its smell, feel, noise. Crunchy, she said, but fabulously soft. She wanted, I think, to preserve a fragment of what was. To believe it existed."

"I want you to remember what the sky looked like when I was a kid, before it was ignited. If we don't destroy it, we will soon put lights everywhere and won't be able to..."
He stopped. Swallowed. Made a wide gesture encompassing the sky.
"You understand?"
"Yes daddy, I simply replied."