A is for ... APHELION

Up there, above the treeline, the sky was ink. A blackness uncontaminated by starlight, and no moon shone. Danny thought it was the darkest sky he had ever seen in his thirteen-and-a-half years on the planet, and something about its totality, its utter emptiness, affected him at a deep – and to him, unidentifiable – level of his being. It made him feel an odd mixture of things. It made him feel afraid, but it was also kind of exhilarating.

     They were outside on the porch outside the cabin. There was Danny, of course; his sister, Kate; mum and Grandpops. They were sitting on the garden furniture that they’d got that day off NoticeSpace: four wooden chairs, an oval wooden table, and a tatty old parasol. From an old lady who was moving away, back to the city, and didn’t want – or need – to take them with her. Seemed like a lot of people were going back to the cities of late, and many of them left a lot of their possessions behind them.

     It was Danny who’d spotted the ad, organised the collection, and now, here they all were, trying out their new furniture under a strangely empty sky.

     Grandpops had pretty much insisted that they sit outside, to give Danny’s acquisition the respect the old man thought it deserved and, even though the night air was starting to gain a chill, it still wasn’t time to move back inside. Truth was it wouldn’t be that much warmer inside the cabin.

     Mum had that ‘I’m tolerating this but I’m not happy’ face that she seemed to wear far too much these days. Kate just looked bored and irritated, and no change there either.

     Grandpops, though, had been watching Danny as he scanned the sky, and his grizzled old head nodded, as a liver-spotted hand flapped at the sky.

     “Darkest night.” He said, his gravelly voice knocked down what sounded like a whole octave by the cold. “Used to be people who said that there’s no such thing as an all-dark night. Can’t say that with any certainty these days.”

     Mum folded her arms as if settling in for something against her will and she didn’t care who knew it, a silent protest immediately mirrored by mini-mum Kate. Danny wasn’t certain that his sister even knew she was doing it, it was more like a reflex. She wanted to be like her mum. Always had. Replicating her mannerisms was a new power move, but a natural continuation of her personality’s evolution, even if it was unconscious. Self-insight had never been one of Kate’s strengths. Emotional survival was.

People deal with things in different ways, Danny thought. I just search the boards for the junk that people leave behind when they give up on the country.

     “I remember when the sky was full of stars,” Grandpops continued, his voice catching in his throat as if spiky, or maybe sharp. “And when I say ‘full’ I mean full.”

     Grandpops face seemed to freeze in an expression of regret and Danny was afraid he’d had a stroke or something, but then the old man smiled. It wasn’t a smile about the present, Danny felt, but one that was all about the past. A time machine smile, taking him back to better days. Danny wished that he could have seen those days, but he kind of felt them, anyway, if only vicariously, reflected in an old man’s smile.

     “What were they like?” Danny asked.

     Grandpops’ time machine smile became rueful.

     “There were constellations.” He said, and his voice was tinged with wonder. “Shapes and patterns we used to see in the stars, connecting the stars up with our minds eyes with imaginary lines like those old dot-to-dot puzzles you kids used to do, back when … well, back when you could. I used to know the names of all the constellations, your mum will tell you, I’d point them out to her. The Mud Skipper. The Burning Crown. The Meat Hook. The Lamplighter. The Old Lady’s Elbow. Zappa. The Long Clock. The Brood.”

     He fell silent, like he’d frozen up again, but the dewy wetness around his eyes told Danny that it was sadness that had stilled his tongue. He looked to mum for confirmation of these facts, but her face was neutral, implacable, unreadable.

     “The sky was crowded, back then.” Grandpops suddenly intoned. “Even on nights where there was no moon there was light enough to see by. Not for reading, or anything like that, but enough to see your way.”

     Somewhere distant a solitary dog howled, giving the darkness a voice.

Seemed apt.

     “So, what happened to them?” Danny asked, knowing the general meat of the answer, just wanting to hear the story, to hear how Grandpops would tell it. “To the stars, I mean.”

     The old man leaned forward so his face was close to Danny’s. His eyes were milky and wet.

     “We made a mistake.” He said. “A horrible mistake. We reached too high with too-short arms and too-clever minds. We grew to think that the night was a bad thing. We lost too many hours to it. When it gets dark the world is nowhere near as efficient as it is during the light. We wanted to be efficient. We wanted everyone to have a job. We wanted daylight all the time. We wanted less crime, less accidents, more light.

     “It probably looked like a good idea on paper. Ideas do that. Flatter themselves. Flatter the people who had them, too. Then the clever minds pick up those ideas and make them manifest. They work away in their labs and offices and turn an idea into a reality.

     “That’s what they did. Politicians. Scientists. Entrepreneurs. People who should have known better. People with a wafer-thin grasp of quantum theory, enough knowledge to push back the darkness, but no grasp of the chain of cause and effect they were invoking.”

     Grandpops’ brow was furrowed. He had been a farmer, not a scientist. He understood the land, the weather, the crops, the vehicles, the livestock. His mind did not stretch to Dirac and Bohr, to Feynman and Heisenberg. Danny knew a little physics, probably more than Grandpops if he was honest, but he still didn’t understand exactly where humanity had taken the wrong turn. Grandpops understood it even less, but his voice was comforting, and he had – at least – been there.

     “They put light into the sky.” Grandpops said. “Can you imagine the arrogance? They found a way to change the properties of darkness, to turn it into light. They built a Larger Hadron Collider, hundreds of kilometres in circumference, and they used new sub-atomic particles and negative entropy, or was it new negative particles and sub-atomic entropy?”

     Danny didn’t think it was either of those, or not exactly, but he was thirteen-and-a-half and didn’t want to question his Grandpops.

     “The problem was,” Grandpops continued, although the problem obviously was that Grandpops was all out of science, “that the energy wasn’t sustainable. We had twenty-three years of no-dark nights, and then the light went out. There wasn’t a bang. There wasn’t anything. Light just died.”

     Grandpops sighed.

     “All artificial light died. Electricity started to misbehave. Some kind of entanglement, I think they said. Particles connected invisibly, impossibly, started to unravel. Change one thing, something else changes. Cause and effect. People just didn’t understand what they were doing enough to see the connection. Things went downhill fast from there.”

     Danny frowned.

     “The stars.” He said, impatiently. “What happened to the stars?”

     Grandpops slumped back into his chair.

     “We stopped looking at them.” He said. “Simple as that. Put all that light down here and we drowned them out. Made our little ball of mud and human ingenuity so bright that we stopped being able to see them. Didn’t realise that us seeing them was what kept them up there. Observation, you see. The observer affects the outcome of quantum events. And reality itself altered when we stopped looking.

“They took the micro world of quantum phenomena and made its tenets apply to the macro world. To the macro universe. And we found out far too late. When our lights faded out, all we were left with was the small sprinkling of stars we’d managed to hang on to.”

     Danny shook his head. This bit had never tracked with him.

     “So how are THEY still here?” He demanded. “Not tonight, of course, but most nights. We stopped looking at them too …”

     Grandpops spent a moment to think about it, a long moment where he could just have easily fallen asleep.

     “I used to think it was all to do with the distance.” He said. “That the ones we got left with were the ones so far away that they haven’t realised we stopped watching them. I don’t think that anymore. Wanna know what I think now?”

     “Of course I do, Grandpops.”

     “Now I think that they’re the stars that no longer exist. They died long, long ago. It’s still to do with the distance, but it’s not that they didn’t realised we stopped looking at them, it was that they were dead before we stopped watching. Thing is their light takes so long to get here that it looks to us like they’re still there. They aren’t. The stars we can see are just ghosts.”

     He laughed a dry leaf chuckle, the coughed, coughed again, then coughed some more.

     Mum took it as her cue.

     “Okay,” She said, “Time to go back inside. All this talk of stars and ghosts is doing no one any good at all. If that’s the kind of thoughts that this new furniture gives us then maybe we need to get rid of it. I’ll put up an ad on NoticeSpace, if I can get any paper …”

     Grandpops got up from her chair and there was a creaking sound that was either the chair or Grandpops. He headed towards the cabin. He moved slowly and, it looked, painfully but when he reached the door he turned around and gave them another of his smiles.

     “Reckon we should keep the furniture.” He said. “Danny did a good job of getting it for us, it would be a shame to lose it now.”

     He turned back to the door.

     “We’ve lost too much.” He said and went inside.

     Mum followed him, then Kate. The door slammed behind them, like they’d forgotten about Danny.

     He sat there a little while longer, looking at that all-dark sky.

     No stars.

     Not one.

     Maybe tomorrow night they’d be back.

     He hoped so.

     He really, really hoped so.

     As he got up to go inside, he didn’t look up.