The Stars With Nothing In Them

The dome had gone quiet the way a swimming pool goes quiet after everyone gets out. Maya was still lying back in seat fourteen with her knees up. Soren was two seats over, looking at the projector in the middle of the room, which was still glowing faintly orange where the bulb hadn't cooled.

"She didn't finish," Maya said. "The guide. She said the first stars were different and then the bell rang and everybody got up."

"Different how, she said."

"She said they had nothing in them." Maya put her hands behind her head. "What does that even mean. A star with nothing in it."

Soren got out his notebook and clicked his pen, though he didn't write yet. "Stars aren't nothing. They're hydrogen. The sun is mostly hydrogen."

"Right. So what's missing."

He thought about it. "Everything else?"

"Try the projector," Maya said, sitting up. "There's a remote on the rail."

The remote had a sticky button that said SKY and a wheel that said TIME. Soren turned the wheel backward and the painted stars on the dome started to slide. Not move across, exactly. Thin out. The longer he held it, the emptier the dome got.

"Keep going," Maya said.

"I am. There's a number in the corner." He read it out. "Thirteen billion years. The stars are basically gone."

"They can't all be gone."

"A few left." He leaned forward. "Big ones. Blue ones. The dome's making them blue."

Maya stood up and walked down to the rail so she could see the whole ceiling at once. There were maybe a dozen stars left, and they were enormous and very blue and very far apart, with huge black gaps between them.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Why blue."

"Blue is hot. Hotter than the sun. Way hotter."

"And why are there so few."

Soren clicked the pen again. "Maybe these are the first ones. Maybe there weren't very many yet."

Maya was quiet, looking up at the gaps. "The guide said nothing in them. Listen. If these are first, then nothing has happened yet. No star has done anything yet. So the only stuff that exists is the stuff from the very beginning."

"Hydrogen," Soren said.

"And helium. The beginning made helium too, I read that."

"And a tiny bit of lithium." He wrote those three down. Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Then he stopped, because the list was so short it looked wrong on the page. "That's it? That's the whole shelf?"

"What do you mean the whole shelf."

"Like a pantry." He held up the notebook. "Three things. There's no carbon on this shelf. There's no oxygen. There's no iron."

Maya turned around fast. "Soren."

"What."

"There's no iron."

They looked at each other across the dim seats.

"Iron's in blood," Maya said.

"Calcium's in bones. Calcium's not on the shelf either." He was writing now, quick. "Oxygen's in water. Carbon's in. carbon's in everything. Carbon's in us."

"None of it's been made yet." Maya said it carefully, like she was setting a glass down on the edge of a table. "At the part you're pointing at. None of the stuff people are made of exists anywhere. The whole universe is three things and they're all gas."

"So there's no planets," Soren said.

"There's no planets," Maya said. "You can't make a planet out of gas. Rocks are the other stuff. The shelf stuff. The not-yet stuff."

Soren wrote no planets and underlined it twice and his hand was not quite steady. "Okay but then where does the shelf come from. The carbon and the iron. Somebody put it on the shelf. We have it. So it got made."

Maya looked back up at the dozen huge blue stars. "The guide said they exploded."

"She said that at the start. Before the bell."

"She said they were so big they only lasted a little while. A million years, she said. She made it sound short."

"A million years is short?"

"For a star it's nothing. The sun's been going for way longer than that." Maya put her hand on the rail. "They're huge, so they burn fast, so they die fast. And when they die." She stopped.

Soren found the TIME wheel and turned it forward, just a touch. On the dome, one of the enormous blue stars swelled, went white, and burst. A ring of brightness pushed out into one of the black gaps and didn't come back.

"There," Maya whispered. "That's the shelf. That's where it comes from."

Soren had stopped writing. "The star makes the heavy stuff inside it. While it's burning. And then it blows up and throws it out."

"Into the gaps," Maya said. "Into the nothing."

He turned the wheel a little more and another blue giant tore itself open, then another, each one flinging a faint shell of light into the dark, and where the shells crossed, the dome painted thin specks, new and small and ordinary-colored, the first not-blue stars.

"Those are next," Maya said. "The ones after. They get to be made out of the shelf. They get planets."

Soren looked at his three-item list, then at the bursting stars, then back down. "The first ones never had any of it," he said. "They couldn't have planets. They couldn't have anything around them. They had to die first, so the iron could get out. So somebody later could have iron in their blood."

"We're later," Maya said.

"We're really late."

Maya lay back down on the floor by the rail so the whole dome was over her, the blue giants and the rings spreading out and the small new specks lighting up in the dark behind them. She held her own wrist up between her eye and the ceiling, the place where you can almost see the blue line under the skin.

Up on the dome, another first star reached the end of its million years and opened, and the iron in Maya's wrist had once been in a star exactly like that one, thrown into a gap, waiting for her.