第3章 Orbital Decay

The astronomy club meeting was a disaster. Elias knew this immediately, because the moment he walked into Room 214, he saw that only three people had shown up out of the twelve registered members, and one of them was asleep in the back row with a textbook on her lap and her mouth slightly open. The remaining two were Priya, who was organizing the club's star charts for the upcoming meteor shower season, and a sophomore named Daniel who had joined the club because he thought astronomy was cool and then discovered that it involved a lot of reading and very little actual stargazing and had since attended only two meetings. Elias stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the room, at the three people, at the clock on the wall that was ticking toward the end of the school day and the beginning of evening, and he felt the familiar weight of responsibility settle onto his shoulders. He was president of this club. He had been president for two years. He had built it from a group of seven disorganized students into something that looked, to an outside observer, like a functional organization with meeting minutes and a budget and a membership list that was current. And now it was being disrupted by a girl who did not belong to the club, who had no business in the observatory, who had touched his equipment and adjusted its calibration and possibly — Elias did not want to think about this, did not want to consider the possibility — had rearranged the telescope's pointing coordinates to display something that was not a sky. "Meeting is in progress," he said to the room, which was not true but was the kind of thing a president said when he wanted to establish authority in a situation where authority was being questioned by the absence of everyone he needed to authority over. "Please take your seats." Priya looked up from her charts. "Elias, you're early. The meeting doesn't start for another eight minutes." "I know." "Is everything okay?" He looked at her. Priya was the only member of the club who asked whether everything was okay, and she asked it with genuine concern, not with the polite detachment of someone who was asking because it was the social thing to ask. She was a senior, two years ahead of him in the club, and she had been his mentor when he had first taken over as president, teaching him how to run a meeting, how to delegate tasks, how to balance the demands of leadership with the desire to simply look at stars and talk about them with people who cared. "No," he said. "Everything is not okay." Priya set her charts down. "What happened?" "She touched the telescope." "Who?" "Mira Solano." Priya's expression shifted in a way that Elias had learned to recognize over the school year. It was the expression of someone who was processing new information and updating their model of reality, and when the update was complete, the expression settled into something that was not quite sympathy and not quite concern and not quite amusement, but some combination of all three. "Ah," she said. "That happened." "What do you mean, that happened?" "You mean you haven't figured it out yet?" She stood up and walked over to him, her books held against her chest like a shield. "Elias, she has done it three times now. She comes to the observatory, she touches the telescope, she leaves. And every time, the telescope is different. The first time she pointed it at the moon and calculated its exact position to within point-zero-one arcseconds. The second time she found a bug in the tracking algorithm that had been there since the telescope was installed, which means she knew the bug was there because you had never fixed it, which means she was watching you use the telescope and noticing things you were missing. And the third time — well, you saw the third time." Elias felt something cold in his stomach. "How do you know about the third time?" "Because I was here when you left, and I stayed to talk to Mira for a few minutes, and she showed me the coordinates on the display." Priya paused. "Elias, they're not pointing at the sky." "I know." "She said they were pointing at a pattern." "I know." "She said it was a message." Elias looked at Priya, and he saw that she was not joking. She was looking at him with an expression that was somewhere between concern and fear, and he understood, with a sudden clarity that made his heart beat faster, that he was not the only person in this school who was affected by whatever was happening in the observatory. "Mira said it was a message," he repeated. "From who?" "That's the thing," Priya said. "She didn't say. She just said it was a message, and when I asked her what it said, she looked at me for a long time and said, 'I'm still decoding it.' And then she left." Elias stood in the doorway of Room 214 for a moment longer, the sounds of the empty classroom around him, the ticking clock, the distant sound of a basketball bouncing in the gymnasium next door. He thought about Mira in the observatory, sitting on the bench beneath the telescope, her laptop open, her fingers moving across the keyboard as she decoded whatever message the stars had written for her. He thought about the coordinates, about the pattern, about the word that his name had formed in the language of light. And he thought about the fact that he had not been able to bring himself to ask her about it. "Daniel," he said to the boy in the back row, who had woken up and was looking at him with a mixture of confusion and apology. "Could you watch the room for a few minutes? I need to check something." "Sure," Daniel said, and went back to sleep. Elias turned and walked out of the classroom, down the hallway, toward the observatory, his footsteps echoing on the linoleum, his mind racing faster than his body could move. He had questions. So many questions. And the only person who could answer them was sitting in a room he had shared with her for less than a month, in a building she had made feel like hers, looking at stars that were telling secrets he could not yet understand. When he reached the observatory door, he paused with his hand on the handle. He could hear something inside — not the hum of the telescope's motors, not the click of the laptop keyboard, but a sound he had not expected. Mira was humming. It was a low, almost inaudible sound, a melody that was not quite a song and not quite a hum, but something in between, something that sounded like the sound of someone thinking out loud, of someone working through a problem not with their mind but with their body, with their breath and their voice and the quiet, persistent sound of a person who was trying to hear something the rest of the world could not. Elias opened the door. Mira looked up, and for a moment neither of them spoke, and then she said, "You are supposed to be at the meeting." "The meeting is empty." "The club is empty." "Then let's make it not empty." He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "Tell me what the telescope is showing." ---