Nothing is as certain as death.
At first, the image is just a blur in the darkness, so Jeanette refocuses her telescope and the blob becomes clear and sharp. A young girl, twelve years old, in a blue and white gingham dress. She’s immobile, fixed against the blank, dark background. But when she was alive, she never stopped moving.
Now, and for ever more, she hovers just above the event horizon of the black hole. And when Jeanette tries to reach out to her, she’s not really there. All that’s left is this last photo of her, static on a summer’s day in the garden. The day before she fell out of this universe. The day before she drowned.
During the late afternoon when Jeanette goes out to check for clouds in the sky, she looks at the mountains and finds herself disliking them for their perfection and unreality. The rocks are too jagged, the sky too uniformly blue, everything is too precise here. There are no distractions, no bushes or grass to blur the lines of the earth, no birdsong to break the air. She wants to scuttle away and burrow under imaginary damp leaves and into forgiving earth. She longs for the imperfections of Edinburgh, with its uneven pavements, and dirty shop fronts. She misses the unpainted windows of her flat, even the stains on the carpets. Shortcomings go unnoticed there. Here, everything stands out in sharp relief against the mountains.
That night the sky is cloudy and they can’t do anything. The telescope is set up and calibrated and the list of objects to be observed is marked in different colours according to priority, but they just have to wait for the cloud to clear. It happens regularly even at such high altitudes, but there’s still a sense of uselessness and fatigue in the control room.
At this telescope, the control room is off to one side, curved around the edge of the dome. There are no windows, so it feels small and claustrophobic. She wishes they could actually work inside the dome, but this hasn’t happened in Chile for several years now. The heat from their bodies would make the air shiver and distort the images formed by the telescope mirrors, so they’re hidden away in the control room. There’s still one telescope in Australia where the astronomer has to sit in a small metal cage behind the primary mirror. She did that once, when she was a student, and remembers the view of the sky with the stars flashing past as she swooped around the dome, and the exhilarating feeling of being on a fairground ride in the dark, with the cage rattling around her.
At three in the morning she’s eaten her sandwiches and drunk a lot of coffee. They have to wait here all night, just in case the sky does clear. Now the wind is picking up, which may be a good sign; it may sweep the cloud off the mountains.
She gets up and walks around the room for a bit, but then Maggie sighs and puts down her pen. They look at each other but don’t speak. Jeanette decides to leave the room.
It’s not that dark outside, in fact the cloud diffuses the moonlight and smears it out across the sky. Jeanette stands just outside the door and listens to the wind. It has a curiously tinny sound as it bounces off the metal domes; someone might be rattling a baking sheet in the sky.
She sets off down the path that leads away from the telescope. She knows she shouldn’t be wandering around by herself at night without telling anyone where she is going. Those are the rules here. It’s supposed to be dangerous. But Jeanette has had enough of the control room; out here is better.
But out here is too windy. She can barely stand up, she’s forced to return to the telescope. She stumbles back up the narrow tarmac path, and by the time she reaches the telescope she is out of breath. She pushes at the door to the control room, but as it opens she can hear voices; Mags and the telescope operator. She listens for a moment; the voices are hushed, as if they’re telling each other secrets. She doesn’t want to listen any more. She shuts the door and creeps around the curved side of the dome until she comes to another door. When she opens this one, it takes her straight into the dome.
Inside, she stands looking up at the rectangle of sky. She’s still on the circumference of the room, and when her eyes get used to the dark she sets out for the centre, where the telescope is. She has to resist an impulse to reach out and stroke it, as if it were an animal shackled to the concrete floor. The dome judders as the wind picks up and she wonders if it could be unpeeled from its base and made to sail into the sky.
The thin amount of light in here can only glint off small pieces of things. It hints at something else, larger, buried in the darkness. A nest of wires coils out of the back of the telescope and snakes away across the floor to the door on the far side. Beyond that is the control room. Here in this mysterious space, it seems impossible to go through that door and enter a world of fluorescent light, stained coffee cups, and other people. Perhaps she can shelter here, at least for the rest of tonight.
But suddenly there is a tearing, crashing sound above her, not safely in the sky, but right here in the dome. And as she stands, terrified, the light that she has grown used to diminishes and disappears. She is in darkness. And it’s not the velvet-soft darkness that she imagined, the darkness that would wrap itself around her and make friends with her and stroke her face. This darkness continues to be filled with a sharp noise, no longer from above her but right behind her. Something cold strikes her face and she screams. She falls to the floor.
