Seven Hundred

The radio between stations made a sound like a clock that had lost its mind.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, too fast to count, too even to be anything alive.

"Leave it," Maya said. Her dad reached for the dial and stopped.

The announcer came back over the ticking. A pulsar, he said. A dead star, spinning, sending a beam past Earth each time it came around. The clicks were the beam. Each click was one whole turn.

"That's a recording of a thing turning," Soren said slowly. "That fast."

"How fast," Maya said. Not really a question. She was already tapping her finger on her knee, trying to match it, falling behind immediately.

"He said some go seven hundred times a second."

Maya stopped tapping. "Say that again."

"Seven hundred. A second." Soren had his notebook open on his lap, though the car was too dark to write in. He held his pen anyway. "That's the part I don't believe. Spin anything seven hundred times a second and it flies apart. A bike wheel. A merry-go-round. Anything."

"So why doesn't it."

"That's what I'm saying. It should."

They rode through a stretch with no streetlights. The ticking kept going, patient, faster than a hummingbird's wings, faster than Maya could even imagine her own hand moving.

"How big is it," Maya asked.

Soren thought. "He said a city. Like, the whole star squeezed down to the size of a city."

"A city." Maya turned to look at him in the dark. "A whole sun?"

"More than a sun. Heavier than the sun. Squeezed to a city."

Maya was quiet. Then: "Then it's heavy wrong."

"Heavy wrong?"

"You're thinking about it like a merry-go-round. A merry-go-round is mostly empty. Wood and air and bolts." She put both hands up like she was holding something. "This is a sun in a city. Whatever a spoonful of that is, it's not a spoonful of anything we've ever held."

Soren sat with that. "He said a teaspoon would weigh a billion tons."

"A teaspoon."

"A billion tons. On Earth."

Maya laughed once, surprised, the way you laugh when something is too big to do anything else with. "A teaspoon. Like for cereal."

"Like for cereal."

She held her empty hand out flat over the seat and looked at it. "You couldn't lift it. Nobody could lift it. It'd go straight through the spoon. Through the floor."

"Through everything," Soren said. "There's nothing on Earth strong enough to be the table you set it on."

The ticking filled the car. Maya's dad was driving and not saying anything. "Okay," Soren said, and she could hear him climbing toward something. "Okay. So why doesn't it fly apart. You said heavy wrong. Keep going."

"What holds a merry-go-round together when it spins?"

"The bolts. The wood holding the bolts."

"Right, and that's weak. That's just stuff. Atoms barely touching." Maya was talking faster now. "But a teaspoon weighs a billion tons because there's no empty in it. It's pulling on itself. All of it pulling on all of it."

"Gravity," Soren said.

"Its own gravity is the bolts." She closed her hand. "It's holding itself together by being so heavy. The thing that should rip it apart is the same thing keeping it whole."

Soren found that he had written one word, blind, in the dark, just to feel the pen move. He didn't know what it said. "That's why it can spin that fast," he said. "It would tear any normal thing apart. But it's not normal. It's pulling inward harder than the spin throws it out."

"Barely," Maya said. "I bet barely. I bet some of them spin a little too fast and the edge wants to leave."

"And can't."

The tick-tick-tick went on, and now it sounded different to both of them. Not like a clock that had lost its mind. Like a clock that was the only sane thing for a thousand light-years, ticking off turns of something the size of their town that weighed more than the sun.

"Wait," Soren said. "How far away is it."

Maya hadn't thought of that. "Far. Has to be far."

"So that ticking." Soren leaned toward the radio. "That happened. It already happened. That's an old sound. That star turned seven hundred times while we were saying one sentence, but it did all that turning a long time ago and the clicks are only getting here now."

"They've been flying here the whole time," Maya said. "The whole time we've been alive. Longer."

"Longer than people."

They both went still. The car moved through the dark at a speed that suddenly felt like nothing, like standing still, like a snail measuring itself against a thing that turned its entire enormous self seven hundred times before you could finish the word seven.

"It's still doing it," Maya said quietly. "Right now. While we're in the car. It's turning and turning and we can't hear that part yet."

"We're hearing the old turns."

"The now-turns are still coming."

Soren looked at the radio like he could see through it, out past the roof of the car, out past the streetlights coming back now, out to a city-sized thing made of nothing-but-itself, spinning faster than any wheel could survive, throwing a beam across the dark each time around, the way it had since before there were ears to hear it.

Maya put her hand flat against the window. Outside, the dark fields went by slow.

Inside the car, the ticking kept perfect time, seven hundred of them while she breathed in, seven hundred more while she breathed out.