I collected my last pay at the front desk. The envelope was heavier than I expected. They had included the two shifts I thought they’d forgotten.
At the end of the corridor, my old cleaning cloths were leaning sideways.
They hung from hooks in the supply cupboard. The hooks hadn’t moved. The cloths pointed toward the stairs, as though somebody had left a strong fan running upstairs. I could hear no fan.
I had worked at the observatory for twenty-three years. The new cleaning machines were supposed to notice things like that. One was parked under the cupboard, its light blinking patiently at a floor that no longer seemed flat.
I went up to find my daughter.
Galia had taken a job there the year before. She liked being where nobody could say her father had got her the work, because nobody imagined a cleaner had arranged a research post. I liked being able to leave her a sandwich without making a special journey.
That evening she stood beside the survey screen with her sleeves rolled up. Wen was at the controls. He had a bag on his shoulder, ready to leave, but one hand stayed on the desk.
“Dad,” Galia said. “Wait by the door.”
The room sloped. It had never sloped before.
Through the open dome above us, the telescope pointed into the night. A broad dark line ran across Galia’s map. It curved around the edge of the screen and came back at the bottom, a belt across the whole sky.
“What broke?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said too quickly.
Wen looked at her.
“The map is meant to join all our separate pictures,” he told me. “The machine fits them together. It searches for shapes too faint to see in any one picture.”
“It’s found a shape,” Galia said.
“Or made one,” Wen said.
On the screen the dark belt widened. A ruler slid off the desk toward the telescope. Wen caught it with his foot.
He pressed a switch. The map stopped changing.
The ruler lay still. My shoulders relaxed, though I hadn’t known I was holding them up.
Galia reached past him and opened an old image. It was a single patch of sky, photographed the previous winter. No belt. She opened another. No belt there either.
“Until we combined them,” Wen said.
“That’s what finding something means.”
“Then why is the room moving?”
She did not answer.
A cup rolled slowly across the desk. It stopped at the edge, tilted and stayed there. It should have fallen. The floor pulled it one way and something beyond the dome pulled it another.
“Don’t start it again,” I said.
Galia stood with her hand near the controls. Tomorrow she was meant to present the survey. She had worked through winter, missed her cousin’s wedding, eaten sandwiches cold because she was always about to finish one more thing.
“I need to know whether stopping worked,” she said.
“It stopped getting worse,” Wen replied. “That is a thing we know.”
“The map might have caught up with whatever caused this.”
She set the survey running for one more pass.
I have thought about that choice every day since. I can tell you why she wanted it. I cannot make it a good choice by telling you.
The belt spread. Beyond the dome, stars went out along its edge.
I saw them go. They did not dim, and clouds did not cover them. One moment they were there. Then a strip of sky had nothing in it.
The telescope shifted toward that strip. Its motor whined. A drawer pulled open, spilling papers uphill.
Wen hit the stop switch. Nothing changed.
“It’s finishing the pass,” Galia said. “The ordinary pause lets it finish.”
“Then end it.”
She sat at the control desk. The chair slid under her. She caught the edge and pulled herself close enough to reach the keys.
Wen disconnected the screen. The screen went black. The telescope kept turning.
“Not the display,” Galia said. “The survey drive.”
She was typing. I could no longer see what she read. Wen connected the screen again, planted both feet against the desk and held it steady.
There was a low sound overhead. It was not a voice. It was the dome’s metal frame bending.
I went to Galia. My shoes slipped on the smooth floor. I caught the back of her chair, and together we moved closer to the telescope.
She said a word I won’t repeat. It was entirely her own word, and I was glad to hear it.
“Nearly,” she said.
Wen’s bag rose from the floor. Its strap caught on his wrist. He pulled it down and pressed it under one foot.
“Leave the bag,” I told him.
He did.
The control screen showed a small question box. Galia pressed a key, then another. She had to confirm that the survey would end without saving the combined model.
Months of her work were inside that model.
She pressed the last key.
The motor stopped. The cup finally fell off the desk. It struck the floor and broke into three ordinary pieces.
The dark strip in the real sky stayed where it was. It stopped spreading.
Galia gripped my sleeve. I pulled her chair away from the desk. Wen came behind us, letting his bag go. The floor was still tilted. Ending the pass had not put the room back.
The main stairs led toward the telescope now. Down the other side was an emergency hatch onto the outside steps. I had cleaned those steps every Friday before the machines came. They were there for anybody. No code, no special card. Wen reached the bar first and pushed it open.
Cold air came in. We crawled to it because standing took us in the wrong direction.
Outside, the metal steps still ran down to the gravel yard. I held Galia’s arm. She held the rail. Wen came after us with nothing in his hands.
At the bottom, Galia looked up.
“I was going to put the model online,” she said.
“It’s gone,” Wen told her. “The external connection was off before the test. We didn’t send it out.”
She nodded. Then she sat on the gravel and cried. I sat beside her. The envelope bent against my hip, and for a moment I was annoyed about spoiling it.
Wen called the others to tell them to stay away from the building. He said we were outside. He did not say we were safe.
In the morning, Galia and I took a train out of the valley. My last pay covered both tickets. She slept against the window until the tracks curved past the foothills.
She woke when I reached across to pull the blind down.
“Is it still there?” she asked.
It was. The same empty belt we had seen when the drive stopped. It crossed more of the carriage window than the dome had allowed us to see.
I did not tell her it was only a missing patch of stars.
I pulled the blind the rest of the way down, and we sat with our knees touching until the train entered the tunnel.
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