The Light That Hasn't Arrived

"There," Soren said. "Below the W. Three stars down, then left, into the dark part."

Maya swung the binoculars. The rooftop tar was still warm under them from the day. "All I see is more dark."

"It's not bright. It's a smudge. Like someone breathed on the sky and didn't wipe it off."

She found it. A faint oval, soft at the edges, the only thing up there that wasn't a sharp little point. "That's it? That's the whole galaxy?"

"Two and a half million light years away. The closest big one to us."

Maya kept the binoculars on it. "Say the light thing again. The way the book said it."

Soren had the book open on his knees with a phone flashlight propped against his shoe. "The light hitting your eyes right now left Andromeda two and a half million years ago."

"So I'm not seeing it now."

"You can't. Now isn't a thing you get to see. There's no now out there you could reach."

Maya lowered the binoculars and looked at him instead of the sky. "Two and a half million years. What were people doing two and a half million years ago?"

Soren flipped a page. "Barely people. The book says our ancestors were knapping stone tools. Hitting rocks against rocks to make an edge."

"So the light left when somebody was sitting on the ground hitting two rocks together." She lifted the binoculars again. "And it's been flying the whole time. The whole entire time."

"Through all of it," Soren said. "It was already on its way before there were words. It crossed all that empty space while everything happened down here. And it just got to this roof. To your eye. Tonight."

Maya was very quiet. Then she said, "Okay, but that's not the part that's bugging me."

"What's bugging you?"

"Turn it around." She handed him the binoculars and sat up. "The light I'm seeing left back then. Fine. But there's light leaving Andromeda right now. Tonight. This exact second, photons are coming off that smudge and heading this way."

"Sure."

"Where does that light go?"

Soren lowered the binoculars slowly. "It comes here. Eventually."

"When?"

He did the math out loud, the way he did, building it one step at a time. "It travels at light speed. The distance is two and a half million light years. So it takes..."

"Two and a half million years," Maya said. "To get here."

"To get here."

They both looked up. The smudge sat there, patient, not knowing it was being looked at.

"So the light leaving it tonight," Maya said carefully, "arrives at this roof in two and a half million years."

"Right."

"Soren. Will we be here in two and a half million years?"

He didn't answer right away. She watched him not answer.

"Not us," he said finally. "Obviously not us."

"Not us. Not anybody we'll ever meet. Not their kids' kids' kids, going down the line for so long you'd lose count." She pulled her knees up. "The book said something about that too. Read it."

Soren found the line. The phone light shook a little in his hand. "It says: humans as we know them have only existed about three hundred thousand years. Two and a half million years is more than eight times that long."

"Eight times longer than there have been people at all."

"Going forward," Soren said. "Not back. Forward."

Maya let that sit. Up the block a bus sighed at a stop and pulled away.

"So the light coming off Andromeda right now," she said, "is aimed at a roof where there's nobody who looks like us to catch it."

"Something might catch it."

"Something. Not a person. Not a person who knows what a person is." She tipped her head back all the way. "That light is leaving right now. On purpose, sort of. Heading exactly here. And it's going to miss everyone alive. It's going to fly the whole way, the whole two and a half million years, and arrive into a world that won't have us in it."

Soren wrote something down. His pen scratched in the dark. He didn't say what.

"And here's the thing," Maya said, and her voice had gone fast, "the same is true the other way. Whatever's out there in Andromeda, looking back at us, if anything is, they're not seeing us. They're seeing rocks and stone tools and ancestors. They get our light from the stone-tool times. And the light leaving us right now, the light bouncing off this roof, off us, off your stupid book, it's heading there to arrive when they're gone too."

Soren stopped writing.

"We're sending light at each other," Maya said, "that neither of us will ever be alive to receive."

The word hung between them. The whole sky was full of it, she realized. Every point of light up there was a message already in flight, already too old. "It's like the sky is a room," Soren said slowly, "full of letters. And every letter is addressed to somebody who isn't born yet. And every letter was sent by somebody who's already gone."

"And we're in the middle of it." Maya picked the binoculars back up. "Reading mail that was never for us."

They passed the binoculars back and forth without talking for a while. The smudge stayed exactly where it was, soft and old and patient.

"Hold it really still," Maya whispered. "Right on it."

Soren held it still.

"That's the oldest thing you'll ever see," she said. "And it already left. It's not even there anymore. We're looking at where it used to be."

Soren kept the binoculars pressed to his eyes, not moving, breathing slow, holding the two-and-a-half-million-year-old light steady against the back of his eye for as long as it would stay.