What the Stars Say

Even though Darius had seen the stars in Flagstaff several times, they always took his breath away. The dark sky city mandate made them appear incredibly crisp and twinkling. The sight was so beautiful it almost distracted the feeling of his fingertips going numb in the winter chill. He rubbed his hands together and turned towards Nelida, who had just finished assembling her telescope.

“That should do it. Let’s see.” She bent over the hulking contraption, tilting it carefully. “Here’s a nice binary star system we can start with. Wanna look?”

“Alright, what am I supposed to see?” Darius walked over to the telescope and bent down, trying not to touch it. The first time he went stargazing with Nelida, he had made the mistake of resting his full weight on the body of the telescope, losing sight of an apparently very interesting star. Nelida didn’t get mad at him, but he could tell by the set of her shoulders and her quietness that his mistake had bothered her. Now, he held his breath while hovering over the eyepiece, letting his eye adjust to the lens.

He saw two specks of light, the outline of their steady shine swallowed by the infinite blackness made miniscule in the eyepiece. He didn’t really see how they were different from the other stars in the night sky. “Interesting.”

“Right? This is a pretty good visual binary, so it must be relatively close to us or far enough apart from one another to appear as two distinct stars. Sometimes binary star systems rotate so that one star eclipses the other, and sometimes they’re so close that the gravitational force of the denser one pulls the less dense one towards it, creating one star.”

Usually Darius politely listened to Nelida while she geeked out, but something about the stars made him listen closer. “So are binary stars rare?”

Nelida shook her head. “No, they’re actually pretty common. Single star systems, like ours, are rarer. Actually…”

Darius looked up at the sky, suddenly breathless at its bigness. He was enough of an English major to eschew the hackneyed star symbolisms, but he couldn’t help the fondness welling up inside him when he thought about how most stars had a star companion while burning silently in the vacuum of space.

 “And that’s why the asteroid predicted to end humanity is set to collide with earth tomorrow.”

Darius nodded. “Wait. What?”

Nelida chuckled. “I knew you weren’t listening.” She adjusted the telescope. “What were you daydreaming about? How the light in the darkness symbolizes hope in our deeply flawed world?”

Darius frowned, shoving his hands under his armpits. “No.”

She looked over and sighed. “Sorry, sorry. Do you wanna tell me what you were thinking about?”

He burrowed his face deeper into the long collar of his jacket. “Maybe. You gonna make fun of me?”

“No. I promise I’ll be the least robot-Nelida I can be.” She mimed a robot stance, then rubbed out her imaginary stiff joints. Darius laughed. He appreciated her humor, especially because of its quirkiness. He took a deep breath, tucking his fingers deeper under his arms.

“Okay. I was just thinking, humanity kind of reflects the stars in a way. You said most stars were binary. Well, most people have partners. People they love or people they like hanging out with. It’s like companionship isn’t just a human invention, but a fundamental aspect of the world.”

Nelida pressed her lips together, nodding. “Mhm.”

Darius knew that face. It was the same face she made when he dissected the literary implications of putting creamer in his coffee (which he now realized was a little far-fetched). “You don’t agree with me.”

Nelida kicked the frozen grass with her converse. “No, it’s fine.”

Darius huffed. “Neli. Come on. Tell me you see it at least a little bit.” He watched her raise her eyebrows and look up at the stars, walking in a small circle. She faced him again, shrugging her shoulders. 

“It’s not that deep, Darius. It’s just science, how matter is most likely to take shape in a certain environment. I mean, it’s measurable, predictable even. And I think you need to be living for it to be considered companionship.”

Darius looked at the ground. “You don’t know if stars are alive or not,” he grumbled.

Nelida scoffed. “I know. Nobody does. Because they’re literally on fire. Nothing could survive on a star, at least nothing with DNA.” She grabbed her binoculars hanging from her shoulders. “We should just get back to stargazing. It’s a pretty clear night so we might be able to see the Milky Way.”

Darius nodded his head, wandering off to the left and breathing in the sharp air. He knew he should let the matter drop, but it remained lodged in the front of his brain, waiting to be picked out and dissected. He knew he was onto something, could feel it in the way digging into the idea made his heart pump a little quicker and made his limbs feel weightless. He just needed to find a way to make Nelida see it like he did. He bit his right thumbnail, mind reeling with what Nelida had said and what he thought. It’s not that deep, Darius. Companionship isn’t just a human invention. He smiled, turning back to Nelida.

“What’s next?” he asked, spring in his step.

Nelida looked him up and down, suspicious. “Uh, I found a star cluster. It’s far away so it’s pretty dim, even with the new telescope I got.” She stepped aside so Darius could take her spot.

He bent down, stopping half-way to the eyepiece. “Actually, I don’t think I can look at this objectively.” He smiled as he watched Nelida’s face scrunch into a perfectly balanced combination of “what on earth is Darius on now” and “I wonder where Darius is going with this.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Could you take a picture of it with your phone?”

Nelida paused. “How is that any different—”

“Please?”

“Fine,” she groaned. She took her phone from her pocket, the dark glow reflecting off her chunky rings as she captured the shot. She walked over, zooming in on the picture for him, then holding out the phone.

He reached out to grab the phone, then stopped. “Hm, I don’t know. That phone was made by people, right? What if there’s something in the camera design that doesn’t allow an empirical shot of a star cluster?”

Nelida sighed. “Darius, you’re being ridiculous. If you want to think like that, my telescope was made by a machine made by a human. You wanna tell me it’s not reliable too?”

Darius pushed his palms into his cheeks in mock surprise. “Oh no! I didn’t even think about that! It’s almost like everything in every society is filtered through the extremely broad lens of the human experience.” He threw his hands in the air. “I guess that makes science pretty hard, right?”

Nelida pushed her balled fists into her jacket pockets. “There’s a difference between making unfounded connections and conclusions supported by data analysis, Darius! There is such a thing as fact and fiction!”

He tilted his head. “Oh?”

“Oh?” she mocked. “What are you even trying to do, besides make me angry?”

He pulled his hoodie down past his ears. “Tell me, why do you like looking at the stars so much?”

Nelida blinked. “I mean, because they’re millions of miles away and live lives longer than I can even imagine as a human—I mean, as a human empirically, because I only know—ugh.” She crossed her feet, then sank to the ground, resting her elbows on her knees. “Go ahead. Say you’re right about whatever you’re trying to prove.”

Darius chuckled. He walked next to her, sitting next to her so their knees bumped together. “I’m sorry I made you mad. I should’ve thought of a different way to get my point across to you.”

She knocked her shoulder into his upper arm. “Damn straight you should’ve.” She sighed. “But what’s your point? Something about humanity, I’m guessing?”

Darius nodded. “By now, you know I’m a bit of a romantic.”

“A bit? You thought two sugar packets were cute because somebody left them together on the amphitheater steps.”

“We don’t need examples,” he said quickly, feeling his cheeks heat up. “Anyways, humans are just romantic creatures. Heck, we had the Mars rover sing happy birthday to itself. Which was adorable.”

“It was pretty cute,” Nelida mumbled.

Darius smiled. “So, we do all these things, collect all these facts, for what? Why do we need all this information?”

“To better understand the world we live in.”

“I mean, besides that. Why do we uncover ancient artifacts, and make up mathematical formulas, and create more and more technology? Why do we care so much about what we don’t know, and why are we so intent on doing something with that information?”

Nelida shrugged. “Capitalism?”

“No! I mean, sometimes, but can you call building a sandcastle, or figuring out how to stack cards as actions fueled by capitalism? Don’t answer that,” he said, feeling her take a breath. “We do it because we’re curious. Because we’re human, and because we can’t help but think about the possibilities that surpass our own knowledge. We’re like little crows, collecting our knowledge into the nest of our brain so we can take it out and share it with other crows. If our very purpose in collecting knowledge is to share it with others, is it so bad that romantic ideology leaks into how we view the world? Especially when that line of speculation fuels us to examine that view even deeper?”

Nelida pulled her knees to her chin and turned her head to the side, resting her cheek on the tops of her legs. He didn’t know how that could possibly be comfortable, but he stayed silent, the space between them full.

“So being human doesn’t taint science, it fuels and inspires, and in some cases colors science a particular way.”

Darius nodded. “Being human does that to everything, not just science.”

Nelida sighed, suddenly splaying out wide on the grass. “You think too much.”

He laughed. “So do you.” His butt was numb and he was freezing, but he laid out with Nelida. They looked up at the stars, which twinkled, unfazed by their revelation. He hummed to himself in hushed contentment, glad he wasn’t a lone star in his little solar system.