The Brightest Thing That Ever Was

The clouds had won. Priya had said so around midnight, when the last gap of sky sealed over, and now she was coiling cables by headlamp and muttering that the universe owed her one clear night.

"You can look at old stuff," she said, sliding her laptop across the picnic table to Maya and Soren. "Anything with a catalog number. Just don't sneeze on it."

Soren opened his notebook. Maya opened the laptop.

"This one's just a dot," Maya said. She had clicked the first thing she saw. A single point of light in a black field. "You dragged all this gear out here for a dot."

"That dot," said Priya, not looking up, "is farther away than anything you will ever look at. Read the number under it."

Soren leaned in. "It says the light left it twelve billion years ago."

"So we're seeing it late," Maya said.

"You're seeing it young," Priya said. "That light is older than the ground you're sitting on."

Maya sat back. Soren wrote the number down and underlined billion twice.

"Okay," Maya said. "But it's a dot. Stars are dots. Why did you save a dot."

Priya finally stopped coiling. "Zoom the label. Tell me what it's sitting inside."

Soren did the zooming. A faint smudge came up around the dot, a soft grey blur that Maya had thought was just the edge of the image.

"There's a fuzzy thing around it," Soren said.

"That fuzzy thing is a galaxy," Priya said. "Hundreds of billions of stars. The whole thing. And the dot in the middle is brighter than all of them added together."

Maya frowned. "Brighter than the whole galaxy."

"Brighter than the whole galaxy by a lot," Priya said. She went back to her cables. "I'm getting cold. You two argue about it."

"How much is a lot," Soren said, to no one.

Maya was already counting stars in her head, which was impossible, so she stopped. "Say the galaxy is a stadium full of people all shouting."

"Okay."

"The dot is one person in the middle."

"Okay."

"And you can only hear the one person."

Soren looked at the smudge. "That's not how loud works."

"I know it's not how loud works. That's why it's weird." Maya pointed at the screen. "What makes it that bright. Stars can't do that. If a star did that it would just be a star."

"It's not a star," Soren said slowly. He was reading the corner of the image where Priya kept her notes. "The label says the middle is a black hole."

Maya turned to him. "Black holes are dark. That's the whole point of them. That's in the name."

"I know."

"You can't see a black hole. Nothing comes out."

"I know," Soren said. "So it isn't the black hole we're seeing." He tapped the pencil against the notebook, then stopped. "It's the stuff falling in."

Maya went quiet. "Say that again."

"The black hole is at the middle. It's dark. But there's a whole galaxy of stuff around it, gas and dust and torn-up stars, and it's all falling in. And it can't fall straight in. It has to spiral."

"Like water down a drain."

"Like water down a drain, but the drain is a black hole the size of a solar system." Soren's voice had gone careful. "So the stuff piles up. It swirls faster and faster and it rubs against itself."

"And rubbing makes heat," Maya said.

"Rubbing makes heat. And this is so much stuff, going so fast, that the heat is" — Soren looked for the word and didn't find one — "it's the brightest thing there is. It's the last thing all that matter does before it's gone. It shines on the way down."

Maya stared at the little point of light. "So the darkest thing in the universe."

"Makes the brightest thing in the universe," Soren said. "Right next to it. At the same time."

Priya had stopped coiling cables again. Neither of them noticed.

"That's why it's a dot," Maya said, and now she was talking fast. "The galaxy is huge and spread out and dim because it's a whole galaxy spread thin. But the bright part is tiny. All that light is coming out of one little place, one drain, so from here it packs down into a dot and drowns out everything around it. The biggest thing hiding in the smallest spot."

"And the light left it twelve billion years ago," Soren said. "So the drain is done. All that stuff finished falling in a long time ago. The bright part probably switched off ages back."

Maya looked at him. "So it might not even be bright anymore."

"It might not even be anything anymore. We're just now getting the shout."

The fire had burned down to orange. Maya put her finger near the screen without touching it, over the fuzzy grey ring around the dot.

"All those stars," she said. "A whole galaxy of them. And you'd never know they were there. The one bright drain in the middle is so loud you can't even see the stadium." She was quiet a second. "I like that the loud thing isn't a big thing. It's a small thing doing something impossible."

"You would like that," Soren said, and he wasn't being mean, and she knew it.

Priya came over and looked at the two of them looking at her twelve-year-old data on her dying laptop.

"You know what most people say when I show them that dot?" she said. "They say, is that all. They want the pretty spiral pictures."

"Is that all," Maya repeated, like it was the strangest sentence she'd ever heard.

"Every time."

Maya turned back to the screen. The dot sat there, patient, twelve billion years old, brighter than everything it had eaten.

Soren closed his notebook halfway, then opened it again and wrote one more line.

Maya reached over and tilted the laptop lid down until the bright dot narrowed to a slit and then to nothing, and the valley went fully dark, and every star that had been washed out by the little screen came back over their heads all at once.