The Long Way Out

The cardboard box had a hole in the wrong place, so Maya was making a second one.

"It's not lining up," Soren said. He held their first box at arm's length and squinted at the white square taped inside it. A tiny smear of light wobbled there, too dim to be a sun and too blobby to be anything.

"Pinhole's too big," Maya said. "Make it smaller, the picture gets sharper. Smaller hole, less light, but sharper." She poked a fresh hole with a pin, barely a breath of a hole, and angled the box at the sky.

A clean dot appeared on the white square. A perfect little circle of sun, with one curved bite taken out of the top where the Moon had started crossing.

"There you are," Maya said to the dot.

They sat down on the warm tar paper of the roof. Soren wrote the time in his notebook. The eclipse would take more than an hour, the chart said, and they had reached the boring middle part where you wait and the bite grows so slowly you cannot see it move.

"My uncle says that light is eight minutes old," Soren said. "The sunlight. It left the Sun eight minutes ago. So we're seeing the Sun how it was eight minutes back, not how it is now."

"Okay," Maya said. She was watching the dot. "That's far. Eight minutes of going as fast as anything can go."

"Light goes around the Earth seven times in one second," Soren said. "And it still takes eight minutes to get here from the Sun. That's how far away it is."

Maya frowned at the little circle of light. Something in it did not fit, and she felt the not-fitting before she could say it.

"But that's only the trip across space," she said slowly. "That's the easy part."

Soren looked up from the notebook. "What do you mean, the easy part?"

"The space part is empty. Nothing in the way. Light just goes." Maya tapped the box. "But the light gets made deep inside the Sun, right? In the middle. The hot part."

"The core," Soren said. "That's where the fusion is."

"So it has to get out first." Maya pointed at the dot, then drew a line in the air from its center to its edge. "From the middle of the Sun to the surface. Before it can even start the eight minutes. And the Sun is packed. It's not empty in there. It's stuffed."

Soren went quiet in the way he did when something had snagged him. He looked at the dot on the white square. He tried to picture light shoving its way out through all that crushed, glowing material.

"How long would that take," he said. It was not really a question. It was him handing the problem to the space behind his eyes.

"Has to be slow," Maya said. "It can't just go straight. It keeps hitting stuff. Bouncing."

"Like a marble in a jar full of marbles," Soren said. "You can't roll it across. It knocks off every other marble. It goes a tiny bit one way, gets bounced back, goes sideways, comes back."

"A drunk walk," Maya said. "My mom called it that once. When you stagger and every step is random and you barely get anywhere."

Soren was already doing the thing he could not help doing, which was trying to feel the size of it. The core to the surface was a real distance, but if every step got knocked sideways, the marble might take a thousand steps to move forward by one. A million steps. He could not finish the number in his head. The inside of his head felt too small for it.

"Guess," Maya said. She knew that face. "Just guess. How long to get out."

"A year," Soren said. Then he heard himself and shook his head. "No. Longer. The bouncing is so bad. A hundred years."

Maya looked at the little circle of light sitting on their cardboard. Calm. Ordinary. A bite out of the top.

"More," she said. "It feels like way more."

Later, at home, they would look it up, and the number would be so large it stopped sounding like time and started sounding like a country. Roughly one hundred thousand years for the energy to claw from the core to the surface. And then, only then, the eight clean minutes across empty space to land on a square of cardboard on a roof.

But they did not know the number yet. Right now they only knew it was enormous.

"So the dot," Maya said. She leaned over the white square. "This light. The going-across part is eight minutes. But the energy in it. The actual stuff. Started getting made before there were people."

"Before there was writing," Soren said.

"Before there were cities. Before there was anything that could wonder about it." Maya put her finger near the dot, not touching, just close, the way you hold your hand near something warm. "It's been trying to get out this whole time. The whole time. And it finally got out about eight minutes ago, and the first thing it did was come here."

Soren did not write that down. He wanted to, and his hand even moved toward the pencil, but he stopped, because writing it would mean looking down at the page instead of at the dot.

The bite in the circle had grown while they talked. The Moon had eaten farther across the Sun without either of them watching it move. That was the strange part, Maya thought. You could not catch it moving. You could only catch that it had moved.

"It waited a hundred thousand years to be eight minutes old," Soren said.

"And we made a hole the size of a pin," Maya said, "so we could see it."

The dot trembled a little on the cardboard as a breeze moved the box. Maya steadied it with both hands and held the circle of ancient light still on the white square, the dark bite slowly widening at its edge.