The Arrival Board

The first thing Maya did was cover the word NOW with her thumb.

Dr. Vale saw her from across the observatory roof and made the sound adults make when they are carrying too many important things and one more thing has become a child.

The sign over the telescope station said THE SKY RIGHT NOW. Under it, the new display glittered with labels for the winter stars. Sirius. Rigel. Betelgeuse. Polaris. Deneb, low and pale in the northwestern gap between buildings.

Maya kept her thumb on NOW.

Dr. Vale hurried over with a coil of orange cable around his shoulder. His hair was flattened on one side from the headset he had been wearing all afternoon.

“Maya,” he said, “the sponsors arrive in twelve minutes.”

“It’s not right,” Maya said.

“The cable?”

“The word.”

Soren crouched beside the display, where a panel had popped loose. He had a screwdriver in one hand and his paper notebook balanced on his knee. The notebook looked like it had survived rain, lunch, and several ideas too large for it.

Dr. Vale shut his eyes for half a second. “It means the telescope is showing the sky live.”

Maya lifted her thumb. NOW flashed cheerfully.

Soren looked up. “Live from when?”

Dr. Vale opened his eyes.

“That is not the kind of sentence sponsors enjoy,” he said.

The roof was full of useful machines trying to be ready. The dome motors hummed. The telescope woke and turned its long white neck toward Orion. A line of small guidance drones blinked green along the safety rail, ready to help visitors find constellations without tripping over cables. Downstairs, people were already making the lobby sound like a jar of bees.

Maya tapped Betelgeuse on the display. The orange dot pulsed.

“Not now,” she said. “Arriving now.”

Dr. Vale set down the cable. “I know. You know. Soren knows. Most people have come for cocoa and a look at Saturn. If I put a paragraph on every star, nobody reads it.”

Soren wrote something, then crossed it out hard enough to tear the page a little.

“What if it isn’t paragraphs?” he asked.

Dr. Vale checked his wrist screen. “You have nine minutes to invent a better universe.”

“That part’s already done,” Maya said.

She went to the old ticket machine by the stairwell. It had once printed numbered slips for planetarium seats before the observatory upgraded to eye-track reservations. Now it printed crooked labels if you kicked the side panel exactly once.

Maya kicked it.

The machine coughed awake.

Soren came beside her and opened his notebook to a page headed distances, though there were arrows, smudges, and one drawing of a star with teeth.

“Sirius,” Maya said.

“Eight point six light-years,” Soren said. “So the light left when we were two.”

Maya typed. ARRIVED TONIGHT. LEFT WHEN MAYA AND SOREN WERE TWO.

The machine spat out a strip.

“Vega,” Maya said.

“Twenty-five years.”

“Left before us.”

“Before our parents met, maybe.”

Maya printed. ARRIVED TONIGHT. LEFT BEFORE WE WERE BORN.

Soren flipped pages. “Polaris is about four hundred thirty light-years. It depends on the measurement, but about that.”

Maya typed slower. ARRIVED TONIGHT. LEFT BEFORE TELESCOPES WERE COMMON.

Soren looked at her.

“What?” she asked.

“That one is good.”

She grinned and kept typing.

For Betelgeuse, Soren hesitated.

“About five hundred to six hundred light-years,” he said. “It’s hard to pin down exactly. Big red supergiant. It will explode someday, but nobody knows when.”

Maya’s fingers rested on the keys.

“So if it exploded five hundred years ago,” she said.

“We might not know yet,” Soren said.

“If it exploded yesterday.”

“We definitely wouldn’t know.”

The ticket machine hummed. The roof did not get quieter, but the space around them did.

Maya looked up at Orion rising over the apartment towers. Betelgeuse was a bright orange shoulder in the giant. It looked immediate. It looked like a lamp someone had just switched on. But its light had crossed empty dark before Maya’s grandmother was born, before the oldest person Maya had ever met was born, before the city had this observatory, before the roof under her shoes existed.

The sky stopped being a ceiling.

It became arrivals.

Not one message, either. Millions. Some eight minutes old. Some years. Some centuries. Some older than every story humans had ever told twice. All of them landing on the same little roof and pretending to be tonight.

Soren was staring at the same orange star.

At school, people sometimes grabbed his notebook and said, “Just remember it.” They said paper was slow. They said his answers arrived late because he wanted all the steps first.

He tore off the Betelgeuse label himself.

ARRIVED TONIGHT. LEFT AROUND FIVE HUNDRED TO SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO. PRESENT STATUS UNKNOWN.

Maya read it and nodded once.

Dr. Vale came back with a tablet under one arm and a frown already prepared.

“No,” he said, before reading.

“Yes,” Maya said.

“No to anything that makes visitors think the stars are fake.”

Soren handed him the Betelgeuse label.

Dr. Vale read it. His frown changed shape.

“Present status unknown is accurate,” he said. “Uncomfortable, but accurate.”

“That’s the best part,” Maya said.

“It is not the best part for donors.”

“It’s the only honest part,” Soren said.

Downstairs, the lobby bees grew louder. Dr. Vale pinched the bridge of his nose.

“One sentence per object,” he said. “No panic. No pretending we know what we don’t know. And if anyone asks whether Betelgeuse exploded already, you say we do not know, because the news has not reached us.”

Maya was already running to the display.

They covered THE SKY RIGHT NOW with a strip of black tape. Soren printed a new title in block letters. THE ARRIVAL BOARD.

They stuck labels beneath the stars. The display changed from a map into something like a station wall. Moonlight, one and a quarter seconds. Sunlight, about eight minutes, though the Sun was below the horizon now and the card waited for morning. Sirius, childhood. Vega, before birth. Polaris, before telescopes spread across the world.

Then Soren pointed to a smudge on the deep-sky preview screen.

“Andromeda,” he said.

The observatory’s main telescope could show the great galaxy as a pale oval with a bright core and dust lanes like fingerprints. On very dark nights, away from the city, people could see it with their eyes as a small blur. Not one star. A crowd so large that counting it would be like counting sparks in a bonfire by name.

“Two and a half million light-years,” Soren said.

Maya did not type.

Soren did not either.

Two and a half million years ago, no one had built a city. No one had made a telescope, or a ticket machine, or black tape to cover a wrong word. The light from Andromeda had already left while creatures on Earth were walking on feet that were not quite human feet yet.

“And in that many stars,” Maya said, “some are gone.”

“Some have been born too,” Soren said. “We just can’t see that news yet.”

The ticket machine waited with its green cursor blinking.

Maya typed. ARRIVED TONIGHT. LEFT BEFORE HUMANS WERE HUMAN. MANY SENDERS HAVE CHANGED.

Soren watched the words come out on the warm paper.

“Changed,” he said.

“Not gone?” Maya asked.

“Some gone. Some exploded. Some collapsed. Some became something else. Changed covers what we know without acting like we were there.”

Maya printed it.

Dr. Vale read the Andromeda label and made a small sound that was not a complaint.

The first visitors came up the stairs. Their voices spilled onto the roof and then thinned as they saw the dome open. Dr. Vale began his welcome speech, the one about looking up together, but people were already drifting toward the strange new board.

A woman in a silver scarf touched the Sirius label. Someone laughed softly at the Moon’s one and a quarter seconds. A man started to ask whether PRESENT STATUS UNKNOWN meant the telescope was broken, then stopped with his mouth still half open.

Maya stood by the rail, bouncing once on her toes.

Soren held the last label between two fingers. Betelgeuse waited for its card.

Dr. Vale looked over his shoulder at them. He did not nod like a teacher in a lesson. He nodded like an engineer letting a bridge take weight.

Maya held the Betelgeuse card under the orange dot on the board.

Soren slid the card into the rail. Beside it, an empty hook swung under the label OUTSIDE THE MILKY WAY. Above the open dome, the red star shone.