her youth, as her gloved fingers guided her like a bobbing balloon—past an empty locker, then to a storage room.
A look inside: grav-boots all held neatly on shelves—she made a note to check later if there were any small enough to fit her; cartons of lens cleaners; panels of circuitry. The latter, and the thin layer of film that covered everything, nudged Hoshi’s lips into a slight smile. It was obvious no one had been here since the last astronomer left, all the scavengers taking the university’s word for it that there was nothing worthwhile remaining. It was all hers. There were other odds and ends in this storage room and the next two, most fastened tight onto shelves, only a few things floated free. Nothing of any particular value or interest, so Hoshi moved on, pausing only when she heard the groan of metal and sensed the station shudder. Perhaps the Streetcar didn’t have that handful of days.
She passed what served as either a conference room or a cafeteria—wherein hung the only bit of color she’d seen so far—paintings of Earth scenes arranged without any real sense of art. The Golden Gate Bridge highlighted by a fiery sunset, the Sydney Harbor filled with sailing boats, London at night, a wide-eyed child looking up at a seated statue of Abraham Lincoln, China’s Great Wall. None of the pictures were worth taking.
There were crew quarters, these far more spacious than on the other stations Hoshi had explored. There were no bunk beds or wall-nets. There were real beds with thick mattresses, comfortable-looking chairs, and desks—all bolted to a gray floor. She fumbled at a panel on the wall, and a heartbeat later a section on the ceiling glowed bright enough to light the room. She felt a gradual heaviness, and realized artificial gravity was kicking in. Earth norm from the feel of it. The University of Chicago astronomers had been patricians as far as scientists went—hence the fine room that served as their escape from work and zero-g. Likely, they had taken all of their meager personal possessions with them, save the snugly fitted sheets and blankets and quilts, the plush pillows tied down with ribbons. Hoshi didn’t bother to check the cabinets and closets. Her interests were elsewhere.
It took her nearly an hour to reach the main observatory, which occupied the entire upper level of the Streetcar. She had dallied here and there along the way. Incessantly curious, Hoshi inspected everything she passed. And she knew it could take her quite some time to properly inspect this room.
There were banks upon banks of instrumentation, and Hoshi began working controls she recognized—lighting the room so she could turn off her helmet beam, coaxing a livable temperature, bringing a little gravity to the place, though certainly not Earth norm. She felt more comfortable in a near-weightless environment. A slight thrumming indicated she’d found the oxygen system. It would take many long minutes, she guessed, for it to flood this room so she could remove her helmet. The station groaned again and shook.
Hoshi ignored the threat and glided toward an exterior wall, eyes as wide as the child’s at Lincoln’s feet. Spaced every three meters were telescopes, and she had but to nudge the controls to extend them through the Streetcar’s shell and really look at the stars. She nearly did just that, stopping herself halfway there when she spotted the large telescope at the far end of the room. The true prize of Auriga’s Streetcar—what she had journeyed here for. She felt her heart hammer in her small chest, and she hurried toward the telescope, the chill and ache washing from her body to be replaced with a youthful giddiness.
“How could men of science leave this behind?” she breathed—at once thankful they had so she could claim it, and sad that it meant nothing to them. “So old.”
More than two hundred years old to be precise, she knew. Hoshi had studied up on the station and its telescopes when she was younger, and again this year when she’d been ill.
The pair of forty-inch polished lenses in this one telescope were fashioned in 1891.
Three times the station had been refitted, and each time the lenses were placed in a new telescope. It was out of a sense of nostalgia that the astronomers must have continued to use the lenses—better, smaller ones had been developed in the centuries since and were doubtless in the other telescopes spaced throughout the observatory.
It was because of these antique lenses that the station had been named the Yerkes-Two.
It was in October of 1892 that Charles Tyson Yerkes, a wealthy Chicago businessman who owned the North Side Streetcar Company, was asked to donate funds to finance what would be the world’s largest telescope. The request wasn’t without precedent. In long ago times Galileo sought the financial support of Cosimo II de’Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany. Yerkes had in a sense been the Duke of Chicago.
Yerkes needed something to elevate himself in the public’s eye. In those years he was attacked daily in the newspapers for the way he ran his mass-transit empire and conducted his other business dealings. And so he agreed to this scientific venture, and went on to also fund an observatory in which the mammoth telescope would be housed.
Hoshi recalled from her research that it was in October of 1897 that the Yerkes Observatory was officially dedicated. Nestled in quaint Williams Bay, Wisconsin, it fell under the auspices of the University of Chicago. There were other telescopes there, of course, but none so large as the refractor with the forty-inch lenses. It wasn’t until 2025 that a larger telescope was built.
Hoshi would have liked to have seen the old telescope that the lenses were originally attached to—it was in a museum somewhere gathering dust. The observatory closed shortly before she was born, history reporting that the lights from a nearby dog racetrack and its parking lot caused so much havoc the stars could no longer properly be viewed.
It was the same all over Earth—from years back Up to this day. So much light. From the cities and streets and attractions. Lights everywhere to keep the darkness at bay. To keep the stars hidden. When she was a child, her parents took her to the top of the Tateyama Mountains. People used to stargaze there. But eventually the lights reached there, too, and the stargazers were relegated to only a few remote patches of desert. And later, they were relegated to… nothing. There was not a spot on Earth where one could stand and view the stars.
So the astronomers built satellites to compensate, the Hubble telescope being the first.
This way man could still view the stars, though not firsthand. The Hubble was designed to last only two decades, and—unmanned—it required an extensive number of people and hours to plot each movement of the satellite and its scope. Subsequent satellites had similar limitations, despite the ever-increasing technology. And so the Yerkes-Two was launched, in 2031.
That was why the station was plain, unremarkable. It was among the first several birthed—and the only one designed for stargazing, the only one from its day still in orbit. It was primitive compared to what had been crafted in the decades since and certainly compared to the others Hoshi had traipsed through. Primitive, but nonetheless functional, with a full crew of astronomers charting stars that men on Earth could only see in pictures because of the light pollution.
The Streetcar shuddered just as Hoshi activated the great telescope. She intended to retrieve these lenses, cut the gravity in the observatory, and maneuver her treasures into the hold of her skimmer. These lenses and the ones from the other telescopes, perhaps a few more trinkets, would be whisked away before Auriga’s Streetcar plummeted Earthward. She couldn’t take much, her ship being so small. But she could take what was historically important, what she would briefly covet and show to close friends, and what antique collectors would pay dearly for.
“Beautiful. Wonderful,” she pronounced, as she stared through the scope. Diamonds on black silk, she thought of the stars. So bright and visually intense, hypnotizing. She believed there was nothing more incredible than a vivid starscape. She blinked away tears as she continued to watch—so happy to see such distant systems, so grief-stricken to know that those on the Earth below could never experience this.
She took off her helmet, the air uncomfortably cool and the oxygen content satisfactory now, though laced with the artificial metallic scent that settled distastefully in her mouth.
She could see better without her visor in the way, though her breath feathered away from her face in a lacy fan.
Hoshi stared through the scope for what she sensed was hours, as her legs began to cramp and the ache returned to every inch of her body. The chill air that swirled around her face set her teeth to chattering. Couldn’t she coax more heat into the room? Later, perhaps. Too much to see to be interrupted.
She fixated on what were considered the constellations of autumn, as would be viewed from the middle north latitudes. Cassiopiea and Perseus. A curved line of stars that made up part of Perseus extended toward Auriga.
“Auriga the Charioteer,” Hoshi stated when she took in the large constellation. Auriga was the last of the autumn formations. The stars heralded the approach of winter.
