I thought my story was over—the end nothing like I thought it would be. But maybe I haven’t reached the end quite yet.
“Okay,” I tell her.
I sleep in the woman’s home.
We eat fish and a brown, citrus-tasting nut crushed into a paste, and she tells me her name—Palona. I sleep and don’t dream, and I’m grateful for it.
In the morning, Palona takes me in her narrow boat across the bay to another island, where several homes just like hers are built around trees at the shore. She tells me that the green spiky fruitgrowing on the trees keep the biting insects away, so they build their homes nestled against the trunks, they make fires in hollows in the sand to cook their fish, and they bathe in a freshwater stream that spills down from a mountain two islands away.
The boat slides ashore, and we make our way across the warm white sand to a small grass-sided structure situated by itself on the jagged point of the island, away from the others. “He was a private man,” she tells me, her skin gleaming like copper in the shaft of sunlight through the door opening. “He preferred to be alone, to study the sky. And he never joined us for gatherings or the half-moon feasts.”
Inside, I find that it’s nothing like Palona’s home. The Astronomer’s dwelling is littered with slats of wood, constellations painted on each one in bright blue ink. There is a table against the trunk of the tree, with rolled sheets of thick paper littering the top. I see no bed, unless it’s buried beneath the mess he’s left behind.
Palona leaves me, and I stand in the center of his home, feeling like I might cry. I’ve lost too much, the numbness like an ocean that will never recede. A pain that will never be dulled. And I don’t want any of this, to be here on this planet with these people. To pretend as if I can help them.
To start again.
I walk to the opening in the door and look out at the glistening sea, at the dozen islands I can see in the distance. These people have made a life here—a good life, it seems—but just like me, they will have to leave it behind. The twin suns arch across the sky, one a hint of blue, the other a duller orange than our own sun back on the planet I left behind.
I’ve lost everything.
The heartache like a tectonic shifting in my bones, rearranging who I used to be.
But as if by habit, a thing I know so well that it’s unavoidable, I turn and walk back into the Astronomer’s home. I sift through the scrolls of paper on his desk; I unearth a bed where more scrolls have been hidden underneath. I try to orient my place in the cosmos by studying his maps, learning the points of light he witnessed in their sky and charted during every season. I do it to distract my mind, to dull the minutes, the hours, that have become a thud in my skull. I do what I know: study the sky.
Their Astronomer might not have been a social man, but he was thorough, and every falling star, every flickering planet in their solar system, was meticulously recorded and marked. He left me a roadmap to follow, bread crumbs in every star he wrote down. He even has a telescope, but it’s much more detailed, more elaborate, than Mom’s. He did not make it himself. His telescope arrived with his ancestors on the ship, intact. Unlike the first Astronomer on my planet, whose telescope was lost when our ship tore through the atmosphere and crashed.
I also find notes about the shadow in their sky—but it was still only a small smear against the atmosphere when he made mention of it. He speculated what it might be,a black hole. But clearly he didn’t share this with the others before his death. Maybe he thought it was so far away, it would never reach them, pass right on by, only grazing their outer solar system.
The day turns to evening, and Palona brings me cooked white fish and green fruit. But I eat alone, a wax candle burning on thedesk while I read through a stack of detailed papers on the orbit of their tiny moon, so small that it hardly creates a tide in their calm waters. I press a finger to the space between my eyes. There’s so much—and not enough.
And I don’t know if there’s enough fight left in me to do what they need: to find another planet like this one, survivable, habitable. AGoldilocks planet, Mom called it. A place so rare and perfect, it’s nearly impossible to find. One that they can chart a course to. But I feel too battered. I need time, rest, to burrow myself in the dark of my mind and let myself grieve.
They think I’m a savior, but I’m too broken to be any good to anyone.
I push my half-finished plate away, the hunger replaced by an old, ever-present ache.
But within that pain, tucked inside it, is another feeling. One I remember from the valley, just before Mom died, a pulse just beneath the center of my ribs: a responsibility.
A role I might not want, but one I’ve been handed all the same.
I rest my cheek on the desk, staring across the Astronomer’s cramped home, at stacks of paper and wood slats and scraps of tree fronds. The desk wobbles beneath me, uneven on the woven grass floor. I tilt my gaze and notice something beneath one of the legs. A notebook, placed there to balance the table, keep it level. I prop up the desk and pull it free, flipping it open in my lap.
At first, it looks just like all the other notebooks written by the Astronomer, detailed logs of star patterns and declinations. But several pages in, he begins writing about something else.
Black holes.
He questions their origin, their movement through our galaxy. And he even poses a theory: Perhaps a planet could pass through one… and survive. Stretched thin, time made long and perilous, but on the other side, all might be restored.
I sink onto the grass floor, reading through the pages quickly, the candlelight making fractured patterns across the paper. At the top of a page near the back, reads:Black Hole Exploration.And below it, he has written out a calculation to define the celestial place where a black hole begins and ends.
If a planet was to survive passing through one, he had determined a way to calculate where it might be spit back out into some far region of the universe.
The breath drops into my stomach, and a torch ignites in my chest, followed by the rush of unstoppable tears. I stand quickly, clutching the notebook, and scramble out the small doorway. A bonfire is burning several yards down the beach, a dozen people gathered around it, eating, talking, laughing voices bouncing up to the night sky. I stop short, not moving toward them—a gnawing in my chest at seeing so many people, unaware of what I’ve lost, of what they, too, might lose—but one of the figures rises, noticing me, and strides across the beach.
Palona’s hair spins outward in the soft wind, and when she reaches me, she lowers her eyes to my face, an impossible aqua color in the moonlight. “What is it?” She already senses the gravity in my eyes.
“I think I know where we need to go.”
