Astrid the Astronaut's Arc

Chapter 14 of 15

The sphere kept its watch on Echo the next morning, and Astrid left it to him. She walked the grounds instead. Visitors were arriving in twos and threes. A man stood alone at the arch, reading the numbers. A woman sat on the tower steps with her hands in her lap. A boy pressed his face to the telescope and said nothing when he stepped away. Each of them looked struck. None of them looked at each other. Astrid had built every room for one person at a time. That was the flaw. The awe landed, then stayed trapped inside the body that felt it. People came out quiet and drove home quiet. Whatever they had seen, they carried alone. She needed a room where strangers could feel it in the same breath, or Space Haven would keep making private astronauts and no shared sky. She went to the glass amphitheatre at the north edge of the grounds. The walls were clear. The tiered seats faced open sky. She had used it for lectures and left it half-finished. Today she opened the gates and posted a single sign: Sunset. Bring nothing. By dusk about forty people had come. They sat scattered, one per row, the way strangers sit. Astrid stood at the front. She did not explain the planets or the scale or the numbers. She said, "When the sun drops behind the ridge, I want you to say out loud one thing you are carrying. Not to me. To the person beside you. Then listen to theirs." A man laughed once, uncomfortable. No one moved seats. The sun dropped. The glass walls went pink, then violet. Astrid nodded at the woman in the front row. The woman turned to the stranger next to her and said her mother was dying. The stranger said he had lost his job in April. The sentences moved down the rows, slow, then steady. A boy said he was scared of high school. An old man said he missed his wife. Nobody fixed anything. They just heard each other under the same darkening glass. Astrid dimmed the interior lights. Above them, the projector she had rigged that afternoon threw a single figure across the dome of sky — a winged shape she had painted for the children's show, wings the colors of the aurora, arms open. It was not real and everyone knew it. That was the point. One made-up thing they were all seeing at once. "Now look up," she said, "and know the person beside you sees exactly what you see." They looked up together. She heard the intake of breath ripple down the tier. Not private this time. Shared. When the lights came back, people were talking to the strangers next to them. Two women exchanged numbers. The boy was still looking up. Astrid locked the gates behind the last of them. The ritual worked. Now she had forty people who would tell others, and no room large enough for what came tomorrow.