The Letter From Rigel

The box smelled like old paper and cold attic. Great-aunt Nessa had labeled it in pencil: STARS, IN ORDER.

Inside were postcards. Not the souvenir kind. She had made them herself, gluing photographs onto card and writing a date on the back of each one. Maya spread them across the porch boards.

"This one says Rigel," Maya said. "And then a number. Eight hundred and sixty."

"Eight hundred and sixty what?"

"Just eight hundred and sixty." She turned it over. A blue-white smudge of light. On the back, in Nessa's handwriting: Rigel. 860. The letter is already on its way.

Soren found his own card. "Mine says Betelgeuse. Six hundred and forty. And then, she wrote, may already be gone. We won't know for a while."

"Gone where?"

"It doesn't say." He set it down carefully and pulled out his notebook, copying the words exactly, including the period.

They kept sorting. Every card had a star, a number, and a strange little sentence. Sirius. Nine. Still close enough to trust. Polaris. Four hundred and thirty. Old news by the time it reaches you. Andromeda, which wasn't a star at all but a faint oval, had the biggest number. Two and a half million. Nessa had underlined it twice.

"They're distances," Soren said slowly. "Not miles. The other kind. How long the light takes."

"Light-years." Maya picked up Rigel again. "Eight hundred and sixty years for the light to get here."

"So when you look at it tonight"

"You're seeing it from eight hundred and sixty years ago." "Soren. You're not seeing it now. There is no now. The now is in the box."

Soren looked at his card. Betelgeuse. May already be gone. We won't know for a while.

"That's what she meant," he said. "The light left. Like a letter. It's traveling the whole time. And the star could fall over the second after it sends the light, and the letter keeps coming anyway. You'd still get it. You'd read it. And the thing that wrote it isn't there."

Maya was already on her feet. "What time does it get dark."

It got dark slowly, the way autumn dark does, the blue draining out from the bottom. They lay on the cold boards with the cards on their stomachs and waited for the stars to come out in the right order so they could check Nessa's sorting.

The first one was Vega, bright and quick to arrive.

"Twenty-five," Soren read off the card. "Twenty-five years. So that light"

"Left before we were born," Maya said. "That light is older than us. It started toward us and then we happened, and it didn't know, and it just kept coming."

They found Polaris, low and steady. Four hundred and thirty.

"Four hundred and thirty," Soren said. "Nobody alive remembers when that left. The whole town that watched it go is gone."

"But it's still arriving." Maya sat up. "That's the part. It's still arriving. Right now, tonight, the light that left when there were no cars and no us and no this porch, it's finishing its trip. On my face. Tonight is its last night of flying."

Soren found Betelgeuse himself, up in the shoulder of Orion just clearing the roofline, a smudge of orange. He stared at it for a long time. Then he did the thing he always did when he didn't trust something. He looked away, then back. Then away, then back.

"What are you doing," Maya said.

"Checking if it's still there."

"It's right there."

"No." Soren sat up too. "That's just it. I'm looking at the letter. The letter is right there. I can see the letter. I cannot see the star. Nobody can. Not with the biggest telescope ever built. Everybody on this whole planet who looks up at Betelgeuse tonight is reading a letter from six hundred and forty years ago, and not one of us knows if the star that wrote it is still standing."

Maya picked up the card and read it again, out loud, the way you read something that has just changed. "May already be gone. We won't know for a while."

"It could have happened," Soren said. "It could have happened when knights were still around. The flash could be on its way right now. Crossing. And it might get here next year, or it might get here in a hundred thousand years, and either way we just have to wait by the mailbox."

"And we'd be the first to know," Maya said. "Us. Whoever's looking up. The light gets to a person's eye before it gets anywhere else. There's no announcement that comes first. The star tells you itself, in person, by going dark, and you're the only mail carrier on the route."

They lay back down. The sky had filled in completely now, far more stars than the cards in the box, hundreds Nessa had never gotten around to dating.

"How many of these," Maya said quietly. "How many right now, tonight, are already gone and we just haven't gotten the letter."

"Some," Soren said. "Has to be some. Out of all of them. Some of these are addresses with nobody home."

"And we're looking right at them."

"Right at them. Saying goodnight to people who already moved away."

Neither of them said anything for a while. The cold came up through the boards. Maya held Rigel in one hand and an undated star in the other and could not, no matter how hard she looked, tell which one of the two was a letter and which one was a friend.

The porch light behind them clicked on by itself, on its timer, and threw their shadows long across the yard. Soren reached over without looking and turned it back off, so the sky could come the rest of the way in.

Above them, Betelgeuse held its place in Orion's shoulder, orange and patient, finishing a journey it had started before anyone they would ever meet was born, and going right on shining whether or not there was still anything left behind it to shine.