The Loudest Quiet Thing

The car had a flat tire and Maya's aunt had gone walking up the road to find a signal. That left Maya and Soren in the back seat with one phone, a half-charged battery, and the windows down because the night was warm.

"Play it again," Maya said.

Soren tapped the file. It was a recording Maya's aunt had sent them weeks ago, made by some man with a backyard dish who wrote a newsletter nobody read. The sound came out of the little speaker like wind that had learned to hiss. Up, down, a long rough sigh.

"That's not a star," Maya said. "Stars don't sound angry."

"It's not sound at all," Soren said. "He converted it. Radio waves into sound so we can hear it. The thing itself doesn't make noise. There's nothing out there to carry the noise."

"So what's hissing."

Soren read the caption under the file, slow, the way he read things he wanted to keep. "Radio galaxy. He says it's called Cygnus A."

"Galaxy," Maya said. "So it's far."

"Far," Soren said. "He put a number. The light left it before there were people. Before there were apes."

Maya pulled her knees up. Out the open window the real sky was doing its quiet thing, all those pin-pricks not moving.

"Okay," she said. "But here's what I don't get. If it's a galaxy, it should be a little smudge. A dot. Why does a dot get its own recording."

Soren scrolled. There was a picture under the sound, the kind made by a radio telescope instead of a camera, colored in fake colors so a person could look at it.

He held the phone between them.

There was a small bright dot in the middle. And then, on either side, far out, two huge clouds. Like a creature with the galaxy as its tiny body and two enormous wings of fog.

"What are the wings," Maya said.

"He calls them lobes."

"They're bigger than the galaxy."

"Way bigger," Soren said. He read again. "He says the lobes are bigger than the whole cluster the galaxy lives in. Bigger than all of it. The galaxy and its neighbors and the space between them."

Maya took the phone. She put her thumb on the little dot and stretched her fingers out to the edge of one cloud and couldn't reach.

"That's wrong," she said. Not angry. Interested. "How does the small thing make the big thing. You can't blow a bubble bigger than the whole room you're standing in."

"Unless you blow really fast," Soren said. "And really long."

They both looked at the dot.

"What's in the middle," Maya said. "Of the dot."

Soren found the word and didn't believe it and said it anyway, because he says his guesses out loud. "Black hole. The caption says the jets come from a black hole."

"A black hole pulls things in," Maya said. "This is spitting things out."

"I know."

"That's backwards."

"I know," Soren said. "But look at the picture. There's a line."

There was. Now that he pointed, Maya saw it. From the dot to each cloud ran a faint straight thread, thin and exact, like someone had drawn it with a ruler across half the sky.

"The jets," Soren said. "That's the stuff coming out. He says it moves at almost the speed of light."

Maya went quiet. Then she said, "Play the sound again. While I look."

The hiss filled the car. Maya stared at the thin thread on the screen and let the hiss happen and somewhere in the middle of it she sat up straight and knocked her head on the roof and didn't notice.

"Soren. The thread is the answer."

"To what."

"To how the small thing makes the big thing." She pointed, fast. "It's not blowing a bubble. It's a hose. The black hole has a hose. It shoots the plasma out in a thin line, almost as fast as light, and it never stops, and it goes and goes until it slams into the empty space way out there, and then it piles up. That's the cloud. The cloud is everything the hose ever sprayed. It's been spraying for so long that the pile is bigger than the whole neighborhood."

Soren read ahead of her, found the number, and his mouth opened.

"What," Maya said. "What's the number."

"The lobes," he said. "He says some of them are millions of light years across."

"Millions."

"Our whole galaxy is a hundred thousand," Soren said. "The lobe is a hundred of us. Side by side. Made by one dot. By one hose."

Maya put the phone down on the seat between them, face up, so the picture pointed at the roof.

"It's still doing it," she said. "Right now. While we have a flat tire."

"We can't see right now," Soren said. He says the true thing even when the true thing is strange. "What we're hearing already happened. The hose we're listening to, the spray we're listening to, it left before there were people to hear it. The whole thing could be different now. It could be quiet now. We're listening to a hiss from a thing that maybe already stopped."

Maya looked at that.

"So it's the loudest thing in the whole sky," she said slowly, "and we can't hear it, because it doesn't make sound. And it's still happening, and we can't see now, because now hasn't arrived. And it's the biggest thing in the picture, and the part that makes it is a dot you can barely find."

"Yes," Soren said.

The hiss had ended. Neither of them played it again.

Up the road, a small flashlight bobbed. Maya's aunt was coming back, calling something about a tow truck in an hour.

Maya tipped her head out the open window and looked up at the real stars, the close ones, the quiet pin-pricks, and tried to find the place in all that black where two invisible wings the size of a hundred galaxies were still, maybe, pouring out of a dot, on a hose, at almost the speed of light, with the sound turned all the way off.