The Wrong Star

The lights over the soccer field came on before anyone came back. Soren sat on the top bleacher with the ball in his lap and a library book open across his knees, because practice was delayed for wet grass and nobody had told him how long delayed meant.

The ball was old. Somebody had drawn on it in permanent marker, tracing the black shapes with white numbers the way you might label parts of a machine. Twenty white patches. Twelve black ones. Soren had counted them twice, the way he counted most things, and both times he got the same answer and did not know why it mattered.

The book was about two chemists in 1985. They had not been trying to make anything beautiful. They had been trying to copy a star.

Soren read that part again slowly. There are old carbon stars, the book said, huge and cooling, that blow soot and gas out into space in long red clouds. The chemists wanted to know what carbon does out there, in that heat, in that emptiness, with nothing to hold it in a shape. So they built a little machine to burn carbon with a laser and let it cool the way it might cool in the wind coming off a dying star.

They were doing star chemistry in a room on Earth. Soren liked that so much he had to stop reading and look at the field for a while.

When carbon cools, he knew, it usually makes ordinary things. Soot. Graphite, the gray in a pencil. Sometimes, under enormous pressure, diamond. Sheets and flakes and dust. That was what the chemists expected. That was the whole point of copying the star.

Instead the machine kept making one thing over and over. Sixty carbon atoms, clumped together, refusing to come apart. Not fifty-nine. Not sixty-one. Sixty, again and again, like the star had a favorite number.

The book said the chemists were stuck for days. Sixty atoms would not lie flat. They would not stack. Whatever the sixty were doing, they were doing it in a shape nobody could draw.

Soren looked down at the ball in his lap.

He did not decide to look. His eyes just went there, the way they went to the thing that was behaving wrong before the thing that was behaving right.

Twenty white patches. Twelve black ones. Every white patch a six-sided shape. Every black patch a five-sided shape. The fives and sixes fit against each other with no gaps and no leftover edges, and the whole thing closed up into a ball that did not need anything inside to hold it round.

He put his thumb on one corner where three patches met. Then he found the same kind of corner on the far side. It was the same. He turned the ball and it was the same again. Every corner on the whole ball was exactly like every other corner. There was no top. There was no bottom. There was no special place.

Soren stopped turning the ball.

The chemists, the book said, had been staring at their sixty atoms trying to make them lie flat, and one of them thought about a stadium roof, and one of them thought about a soccer ball, and somebody bought a soccer ball and started counting.

Sixty corners. He checked the book. Sixty. One carbon atom sitting at every single corner where the patches meet. He counted the corners on the real ball in his lap, lost his place at thirty-something, and started again, and it did not matter that he lost his place because he already believed it.

The most symmetrical molecule anyone had ever found. That was the phrase in the book. The roundest possible way to arrange that much carbon. Not a shape a person invented. A shape the carbon chose, out in the red wind of a star, because it was the shape that closed.

Soren held the ball up against the field lights.

Somewhere above the lights, above the wet clouds, there were old stars right now shedding carbon into the dark, and some of that carbon was quietly folding itself into this exact ball, sixty atoms wide, too small to see, floating in the cold with no top and no bottom and no special place, the same shape as the thing in his hands.

The chemists had gone looking for a star. They had built a machine to fail at everything except being a star. And the star had handed them back the roundest object in chemistry, an object so patient it had probably been making itself for billions of years before anyone on Earth thought to count its corners.

Soren was the kind of person who counted corners. He knew that about himself. He knew people found it strange, the counting, the going-back-to-check, the not being able to leave a number alone until it told him something. He had always half suspected he counted things nobody needed counted.

The two chemists had won the biggest prize in science for buying a soccer ball and counting it.

He heard the far gate clang, and voices, and cleats coming up the wet path. Practice, finally. Soren closed the book but kept his thumb inside it to hold the page.

One of the older kids jogged past and slapped the ball out of his hands to carry down to the field. It bounced once on the bleacher, once on the step, and rolled out onto the bright grass, turning over and over, every corner passing through the light exactly like every other corner, a small round piece of star chemistry going where it was kicked.