Little Universes by Heather Demetrios

Author:Heather Demetrios
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

24

Mae

ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Earth Date: 31 October

Earth Time (EST): 19:45

The Celestron CPC 1100 telescope cost my dad over three thousand dollars. We named her Lucy, for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

She’s one of the best telescopes money can buy: an eleven-inch diffraction limited Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope with an aperture of 280 millimeters, which means I can see craters on the moon. And the rings of Saturn. The bands on Jupiter, and its great red spot. The Orion Nebula.

Since we’re in an urban landscape, my images will never be as clear as they would be if I were in true darkness, somewhere like the Cape at night. Still, Venus is gorgeous tonight—bright and huge (with a surface temperature of 750 DEGREES!). The Big Dipper traces the sky with its ladle line of stars. Somewhere out there, past our atmosphere, stars are colliding and exploding and black holes are swirling all while Earth spins at 1,040 miles per hour. (This speed is at the equator. Here in Boston, at forty-two degrees north, it’s roughly 770 miles per hour, which seems fast—except Earth’s orbital velocity around the sun is 67,000 miles per hour. Which ALSO seems fast until you realize that the whole solar system—of which we are, of course, a part—is orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy at over 500,000 miles per hour. Which means all the humans on Earth are ACTUALLY moving through space at 140 miles per second. WE ARE SPEED DEMONS.) We spin and we spin, like whirling dervishes, swirling in our little pocket of the universe.

But no matter how hard I look, I’m not going to find my parents up there.

I wish I could believe in heaven, in a kingdom in the sky where Mom and Dad are staying at a resort, waiting for us to join them someday. I wish I could see them from my telescope. But I can’t. Actually, I don’t wish I believed in that. Because then that would mean that some god had allowed my parents and all those other people to die a horrible death. And, somehow, that seems worse than total annihilation.

My mother’s body is in a mass grave.

We don’t know where my father’s body is.

They were hurt. And scared. And alone.

These are the facts. I can’t change them, no matter how much I want to.

I close my eyes.

Sky mind. Sky mind. Breathe. Thoughts are weather. Sky mind. Breathe.

I wait until my mind is not swirling, and then I open my eyes, adjust the telescope, zoom in on the moon. Its incandescent light reaches us from 1.3 light-seconds away. It’s by far the largest satellite body in the solar system and the only one astronauts have set foot on. But I bet we’ll be on Mars soon. Dad said if his next book hit the New York Times bestseller list, he’d buy tickets for us to orbit the moon. Mom had said she could think of better things to do with half a million

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.