248

A Space Mythology...

The signal took four hours and twenty-seven minutes to reach Earth. By then, Devin Lane made coffee she wouldn't drink. Refilled it twice and taped a printout of the anomaly to the wall above her monitor.

It was the heart that got her.

Tombaugh Regio. The nitrogen ice plain on Pluto's surface shaped, uncannily, like a valentine. A thermal variance of 0.3 degrees above every predictive model since the re-analysis began. Small. Dismissible. She had written instrument artifact? in the margin of her notes three times already. But…the variance was consistent. It didn't scatter the way artifact readings did. It pulsed. Like a heartbeat.

Devin was not a dramatic person. She spent eleven years at JPL doing the work no one photographed. The comparison, the cataloguing, the long patient watching of numbers that mostly held still. She had a gift for it, her supervisor said, the gift of sustained attention.

The variance moved in a rhythm she couldn't explain. Not a random drift. More like breath?

She stayed until eight & then drove home in silence. The anomaly toying with her thoughts.

Their home was the kind of house that looked like two people with very different libraries agreed to share a space. Devin's side of the office was stacked with binders and starred printouts and two dead succulent plants she kept forgetting to throw away. Stellan's was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a reading chair with a lamp angled just so, and a map of the world's dragon mythologies pinned flat across the only wall that didn't have shelving. Red dots for fire traditions, blue for water, white for the cold-sky ones.

The white dots clustered at the edges of maps, at the places where old cartographers had simply run out of known world. Here be dragons, the old maps said. They had meant it as a warning.

Stellan was reading when Devin came in. His feet on the ottoman, book open across his chest. “Long day?” he said.

“Long day.”

She hung her keys. She stood in the kitchen for a moment without turning on the light. “Laika still up?”

“She said she was going to sleep at eight.” He turned a page. “I doubt she is sleeping though.”

Devin went down the hall.

Laika's room was never fully dark. She strung small white fairy lights around the window frame years ago and refused to take them down. Her room glowed with this permanent, underwater dimness that Devin found lovely. The walls were covered in drawings, like her dad. Laika drew Pluto the way other children drew horses or dragons. Obsessively, from every angle, in every medium she could get her hands on. Pluto blue and white and gray, Pluto in pencil and crayon and the expensive watercolors she'd gotten for her birthday. Pluto asleep. Pluto from above. Pluto with its heart visible. Pale bloom on its surface glowing like a lantern carried from inside.

Laika was eight years old. She’d been drawing Pluto's heart since she was four. She was at her desk with her field notebook. NOT a diary, she had explained carefully. There is a difference.

“Mom,” she said, without turning around.

“Mouse,” Devin said. “It's almost nine.”

“I know. I'm almost done.” A pause. “Is it the heart?”

Devin went very still in the doorway.

The thing about Laika was she had a way of asking questions that were already inside of you. She did it without knowing since she could talk.

“What do you mean?” Devin asked.

Laika turned around. She had Stellan's dark eyes and Devin's widow's peak and a small smear of blue pen on her left cheekbone. She looked at her mother the way she sometimes looked at the anomaly printouts Devin brought home and left on the kitchen counter. With the patience of someone waiting for a fact to catch up to what they already know.

“You always look like that when the numbers do something they're not supposed to,” Laika said. “You look like that right now.”

Devin opened her mouth. Closed it.

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of Laika's bed and said, after a moment, “What are you drawing?”

Laika held up the notebook.

Pluto. A new Pluto. One eye, barely open. A sliver of white against the blue-gray of its surface. “She's waking up,” Laika said. Simple. The way you'd say the cat is on the stairs.

“How do you know it's a she?” Devin asked.

Laika considered this. Then, with the gravity that eight-year-olds reserve for facts they consider obvious, “Only girls wait this long to finally be seen.”

Devin laughed and nodded her head as she embraced her daughter.

Stellan came to find them twenty minutes later because they hadn't come out. He stood in the doorway with his book still in one hand and looked at his wife sitting on his daughter's bed while his daughter showed her things in a notebook.

"What are we looking at?" he said.

"Mom's numbers are doing something they're not supposed to," Laika said.

Stellan looked at Devin. Devin looked at the wall.

“Tell her about Níðhöggr,” she said.

He came in and sat in the beanbag chair that technically belonged to Laika. It made a great settling sound under him. He put his book down.

“Níðhöggr,” he said, in the voice he used for real myths, “is the dragon who lives at the outermost shore. In the Norse tradition; the real one, not the one they sell in airport bookshops, it sleeps at the roots of the world-tree. It doesn't destroy. It maintains. It holds the boundary between what is ordered and what is not. Between the known world and the dark beyond it.”

“When it wakes?” Laika asked.

“When it wakes,” Stellan said, “it means the age is turning.”

“Pluto's orbit is elliptical,” Devin said. “Highly elliptical. Tilted seventeen degrees off the plane where the rest of the planets travel. Every 248 years it crosses inside Neptune's boundary — it comes toward the light, briefly, then retreats. It has an atmosphere that freezes solid when it goes dark and exhales back into gas when it approaches the sun.” She paused. “The Norse called the boundary dragon's breath the winter at the edge of the world.”

Stellan was quiet.

“The Mongolian Luu,” he said finally, “the cold-sky dragon — it moves in cycles no human calendar can hold. It doesn't act for people. It acts for the order of things.”

“What does it do?” Laika asked. “When it wakes up? What does it actually do?”

“It takes inventory,” Stellan said. “Or that's the closest translation. It checks. It has been there since before the age began and it will be there when the age ends and when it surfaces — when it breathes — it is asking the same question it always asks.” He looked at Laika. “Are you still in order?”

Laika looked at her notebook. At the one eye, barely open.

“She knows we're watching,” she said. “This is the first time anyone's been watching.”

---

The meeting at JPL the next morning had twelve people in it. Four of them with terminal degrees, and it accomplished nothing. Devin sat at the end of the table and watched her colleagues. The thermal variance was an artifact. The pattern in the infrasonic data — filed eighteen months ago, rediscovered in the re-analysis — was almost certainly instrument interference from the probe's own systems. The apparent surface movement in the four-hour imaging window was a known issue with the camera array at that distance. Everything had an explanation.

None of them were satisfying. She was a scientist. She understood the difference between personal resonance and data.

Pluto's orbital period, 248 Earth years. The last time it had been in this position, there were no instruments to record it. No one to notice the warmth. No probe hurtling past at 14 kilometers per second, its cameras open, its receivers running, catching something in the data that twelve people in a conference room were now explaining away.

The Welsh tradition, Stellan told her, doesn't say the dragon appears. It says the dragon resurfaces. It was always there.

Devin went back to her cubicle. She sat down. Looked at the printout taped above her monitor, the heart, the warmth, the pulse.

She did not write “instrument artifact?” this time.

---

That night, Laika taped her newest drawing to the bedroom window. Facing out. She pressed it flat against the glass with both palms and stepped back to look at it. Pluto, half-lit, the heart glowing, one eye just barely open. Patient. Ancient. Wistful.

“So she can see we were watching too,” Laika said.

Devin stood in the doorway. She thought about 248 years of darkness. Silence, of a frozen heart slowly churning through the long night at the edge of everything. She thought about all the wakings that had come before this one. Her daughter, born into two languages and made a third one herself. The language of field notebooks, dragon myths, and data printouts retrieved from the recycling bin.

“She'll see it,” Devin said.

It took four hours and twenty-seven minutes for light to travel between here and Pluto. The Cold One was out there at the edge, taking inventory, asking the old question in the dark. For the first time in 248 years, in all the ages of watching, something on this small planet looked back.

A girl with her hands pressed flat against the glass.

Nasa New Horizons photo of Pluto's ‘dragon scales’.

My creativity runs on TEA. Lots & lots of tea.

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