---

Lyra, From Many Angles

by Hiron Ennes

When they came, it was in a craft the size of a golf ball. Smooth and round and perfectly seamless, it cut open the night sky in a pale streak. For a scant second it struck a fiery blemish across the moon’s face, catching the attention of forty-four children, twelve adults and a bewildered flock of geese before boring a meter-wide crater into a dry lakebed in northern Mexico.

The explosive technicians were the first to the scene. Then came counter-bioterrorism, lumbering in prophylactic spacesuits prophetic of their evolution into the Global Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Soon after came the Agencia Espacial Mexicana, the Northern Hemispheric Space Association, what remained of the UN, then a dozen other acronyms, most of which would dissolve before the year was out. The confused tangle of letters amassed around the crater, investigated, argued, agreed, backstabbed, and then finally excavated the little craft only to bury it in a bunker in Corpus Christi. There it stayed the worst kept secret on Earth for nearly fifty years.

Like all grand leaps in human history, first contact was actually a tedious series of small, blind steps, each in a different direction and each of unknown significance. After nearly a decade of excruciating international deliberation, of buffering their facilities against xenotoxic substances, gathering neutralizing agents and steeling the planet for the worst, the conglomerate of acronyms finally opened the craft.

A hundred translucent sheets of alloys were peeled away, paper-thin and remarkably tough. With the heart of the spaceship unwrapped, a semi-viscous fluid was pipetted and plated. Darkfield microscopy revealed a dense, motile population of helical microorganisms.

“It’s syphilis,” the surgeon general said upon receiving the report. “It’s goddamn space syphilis.”

Modern textbooks omit her commentary, but they describe in great detail the reactions from other figureheads when rumors of a hostile extraterrestrial bacteria, inevitably, spread. Accusatory fingers were pointed across continents; calls to arms and quarantines abounded. Some countries preemptively capitulated to Earth’s new tiny overlords, but others were bent on destroying the invaders before the pestilent takeover. Shortly after one pro-Earthling faction forgot to carry the 0 and accidentally set off enough Joules to sink a quarter of Long Island into the sea, it was discovered that the syphilis from space was not nearly as virulent as its reputation.

The creatures were nothing like their terrestrial counterparts. Their cell walls were devoid of recognizable glycoproteins or markers. They defied taxonomy. Germicides passed over them like water, heat failed to lyse them. A thousand animal experiments revealed no pathogenesis. Bacteriophages introduced to the spirochetes were found disassembled and arranged in oddly complex structures at the periphery of their nutrient baths.

The biochemists surrendered. They stored 500 mL of the specimens at -80°C and let the rest grow in a comfortable lysogeny broth, waiting for something apocalyptic to happen.

---

Nowadays, every public figure carries a sample of the spirochetes somewhere on their person. Dignitaries keep a dish nearby when visiting a new hemisphere, doctors and biostatisticians stash envelopes of powdered aliens in their pockets when they navigate epidemics. Vials of it can be found around the necks of policymakers and at-risk neonates.

The Global Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs gives Lyra a little bag of the stuff—the same kind she vividly remembers using to carry a goldfish home from the fair. She cradles the organism as she had the fish, grip tightened with both joy and terror. That little bag will be the only thing that will accompany her when she leaves the planet.

Her instructions are clear. As soon as her ship glides past the moon’s orbit, she is to find the glowing vat along the starboard curve, open the bag and dump it inside. The microorganisms will take care of the rest. She is to use the onboard interface to issue requests and adjust atmospheric conditions, and to assist in navigation. If she feels ill or distraught, if the too-distant light from too many suns depresses or frightens her, she is to take 50 mL of broth and swallow it. If she runs out of air or fuel, if she ends up lost or starving, she is to take 50 mL of broth and swallow it. If she suspects she has encountered or would encounter xenotoxins, living or otherwise, she is to take 50 mL of broth and swallow it.

“You think I’ll be exposed to anything?” Lyra asks the officer. “Is it really that dangerous?”
He shrugs. She takes the bag in shaking hands.

Two months later, in the dead silence of space, Lyra must admit it is kind of nice to have someone to talk to.

---

It had been an experiment born of anxiety, boredom, and a cocktail of hallucinogens pilfered from the pharmacology lab. The offending graduate student could not justify his unsanctioned study. He could not explain why he’d defrosted the organisms, why he’d commandeered an out-of-commission microscope and for weeks documented the extensive density gradients of the fluid in which the microbes grew. Only years later would he compose an enormously popular sonnet illustrating his reasoning in impeccable detail.

Like everyone in his position, he had been tasked only with finding a way to kill the things. Though the microorganisms proved inert, the junior researchers acted as the just-in-case men, preparing for the day the invincible aliens turned on them.

His superiors had already documented the arrangements of the spirochetes in response to stimuli, the way their components dissociated and reassembled according to blind chemical pathways. The student was the first one to recognize it as an attempt to communicate. Only by shirking his duty to massacre the microbes did he discover they were asking him, rather meekly, to stop.

He reported his findings to his supervisor, and there was nowhere for the information to go but up. The details of the discovery, save the student’s habitual intoxication, were propelled all the way to the surgeon general.

Eight months and three hundred sixty-eight biologists, chemists, physicists, linguists, programmers, poets and sculptors later, an alphabet was derived. It consisted of nearly three thousand discrete arrangements of cytogenic gradients, each a unique concentration of secretions evolving over a precise timespan. A thousand different fluorescent stains allowed the gradients to be tracked by cameras positioned on each cartesian axis. A sophisticated program translated the clouds of glycoproteins into probability functions, then into letters. A tangle of tubes and filters diffused a tentative greeting into the tank.

The little aliens responded.

---

“You’ll be fine,” Lyra’s father said when he kissed her goodbye. “Whatever you do, just don’t mention syphilis. Or Lyme. I hear they’ll crash your ship.”

He had laughed. Lyra had not.

“You’ve trained your entire life for this,” he assured her. “Now go do it. There’s nothing else you’ve ever wanted.”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t fret, Lyra. You’ve understood their language since you were in the womb.”

“Is that why the Global Office made me spend so many years learning it?”

“Relearning it. If you didn’t know it before, you’d’ve been born with your head where your ass is.” He played with her hands for a moment, gently running his fingers over her symmetrical scars. “Trust yourself. You know it already. You know them already.”

Lyra supposes her father is right. She has not spoken with the organisms for twenty-seven years, and a fearful part of her is certain that she will not remember how. But a more rational part reminds her that is what the in-ship computer is for.

She glances to the tank. The plastic bag is a thin bulla at its bottom. The spirochetes have long since diffused. The broth is motionless except for the occasional bubble burping to the surface. Now is as good a time as any to start a conversation.

Lyra traverses the ship. It is a small, bean-shaped thing, with a shell so transparent a valley of stars spreads like dandelions under her bare feet. She pads to the terminal and pulls out the keyboard, and clicks out a single word. The apparatus vibrates, interpreting the pixelated letters, devising its possible meanings (not many, in this case), then constructing a four-dimensional model of the appropriate gradients. A thousand tiny tubes spit out a mix of signaling proteins, in a precise order and at a precise density. The motes of meaning, some visible and some not, spread through the tank over several minutes.

“Hello.”

Lyra watches the tank with rapt attention, knowing that even if something happens, it is unlikely she will be able to see it. Until the computer flashes a translation, she cannot know that the microorganisms are rearranging, exocytosing, painting a meaningful picture of lipids and proteins.

For twenty minutes she waits, afraid they have decided to ignore her. Then a reply crawls across the monitor.

I remember you.

Giddy, Lyra resumes typing.

“I’m Lyra. We’ve met before. I’m your companion for—” she hesitates. “For the duration of this voyage.”

Two minutes pass. I know.

“I’m here to help with anything you need. I can make repairs and navigate for you. I can offer conversation and change the nutrient settings on the tank. Anything you need, I have been trained to provide.”

I know. Thank you.

The answer is swift, and too final. She sees no further movement, no clouds of color. She suppresses disappointment. Of course the organism does not waste words. When every thought demands such a vast rearrangement of cells, draining a significant amount of energy, verbosity is prohibitively expensive.

“Think of it like this,” the Office’s director of linguistics had said to a room full of starry-eyed trainees. “Every time you speak you must rearrange your skeleton, transfer a good portion of your last meal to the fundus of your stomach, then pinch off that part, isolate it from the rest of your GI tract, and cough it out through your esophagus. So don’t blame yourselves if they don’t talk much while you’re out there.”

Yet Lyra is torturously curious. When given a stick, she will always prod.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

A word flashes across the screen a quarter of an hour later. Lyra.

“Yes, I’m here.”

An odd mix of aromatics is hastily processed through the machinery. A whitish cloud billows through the broth, a fragrant, bright pulsation some scholars dare to analogize to laughter. The computer interprets it with great difficulty. Lyra understands immediately.

No. We are going to Lyra.

She racks her brains for a celestial landmark, a nova or Messier object, something that justifies the destination and relieves the tension of the coincidence. Nothing arrives.

“What do you mean by Lyra?” she types. “It’s not a place. It’s a two-dimensional shape superimposed on a three-dimensional arrangement of points.”

She supposes the constellation might have a heart somewhere in the vast emptiness, a center of mass to this long-armed, irregular object. She spins through trigonometry in her head while she waits for the spirochetes to reply. They do not.

“Please let me know if there’s anything you need,” she types.

The tank stills. Lyra hugs herself, looking past her feet into the light-fields of space.

What she really wants to ask is if it had been planned. If the microbes had chosen her, specifically, to accompany them to that uneventful corner of the cosmos at this uneventful point in time, that they’d know the “Lara” her parents intended had been miswritten on her birth certificate, just wrong enough to be meaningful nearly three decades later.

She decides to attribute it to a grand, fateful design. There are already too many hollow coincidences in the world.

---

The physicians, those insatiable experts hungry for yet more expertise, were the first to bang at the doors to get at the spirochetes. Once it was established (or leaked) that the microorganisms could not be weaponized, the jackboots stepped away and in came the white coats. They had been gifted with a miracle, a microbe with unprecedented control of its own environment, indestructible and benevolent, able to communicate both with people and the infections that ailed them. After thousands of years waging unwinnable war with disease, humanity had found a negotiator.

A long conversation between the aliens and the medical community began. Seven years later, malaria had been eradicated. Then went measles, the retroviruses, syphilis (perhaps this one just out of spite), tuberculosis, papillomavirus, onchocerciasis—the visitors could talk down any virus, bacteria, fungus, protist or parasite. But they could never be persuaded to virulence themselves, and no one quite knew why.

They insisted it was because their task was not to turn humanity against itself. They were as uninterested in conquering Earth as they were in saving it. The only thing they seemed to desire in exchange for eradicating pathogens, prions, malignancies and every other microscopic human ailment, was to return, for brief periods, to space.

---

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

Every sleep-wake cycle, Lyra asks this question, and every time she receives the same answer exactly twelve minutes later.

Nothing for now. Thank you.

Lyra switches off the monitor. This is what she has trained for, she reminds herself. This is what she is supposed to be doing. She has spent years learning to interpret gradients in polar and spherical coordinates, to maintain a ship and its complex computer interface, to navigate the void. She wishes she had spent more time learning to navigate boredom.

She sleeps, eats, and sleeps again. She asks the spirochetes what they require.

Nothing for now. Thank you.

Lyra watches the tank for hours, studying it as an artist might study the facial expression of her subject. She desperately searches for any meaning in the movement, any thoughts spelled in the macroscopic currents of dyes. She imagines the changing acidity of every cubic centimeter, the constellations of micelles, the gradients of luminescence too subtle for her eye. Just for fun, she builds herself a little program and calculates a back-of-the-envelope translation of what floats at the surface of the broth. It is the third line of a Shakespearean sonnet.

“Please,” she types. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me your plans.”

She deletes it before the computer can interpret. She hydrates a meal, takes a nap, and then returns to the keyboard.

“Where did you come from?”

Lyra knows they will not answer. The question has been posited and ignored for many decades. Earth’s little visitors are guests with no home and no destination, whose permanency is the subject of heated international debate.

The computer’s fluorescent dyes drift through the tank. No reply.

Boredom drives Lyra to try again.

“Why did you come to Earth?”

“How long were you traveling through space?”

“How did you build your ship?”

The questions diffuse and disappear. She sits alone, thinking of sonnets and wondering if the vastness before her can even be called a sky.

“How is the epidemic in Laos going?”

To her surprise, an answer comes seven hours later. The Yersinia has agreed to halt its march north. It has not yet capitulated, but it is amenable.

“That’s great news.” Lyra wonders if the spirochetes in her tank have a thread of communication to the petri dishes on Earth. At the very least there must be some sort of chatter between Lyra’s ship and the many identical vessels currently tumbling through the void. If there is, it is private.

The stars sweep by, shaking like buds in rough winds.

“Nobody tells us much about you,” Lyra types. “I’ve studied your language and your metabolism for thirteen years, but I know next to nothing about you.”

The emphasis, corresponding to a bright red glycoprotein diffusing in the upper left corner of the tank, catches the organism’s attention.

It is for my safety.

Lyra smiles. She can almost see the wide frown of the Office’s chief linguist, chiding her for what he referred to as “unnecessary colloquy.”

“That’s what they told me,” Lyra says. “We can’t let harm come to you. But we also know you’re practically indestructible.”

An hour passes before a reply. It is for your safety, too.

“No one’s going to weaponize you,” she says. Suddenly, she feels the vast distance stretching between the ship and Earth, between herself and the consequences of her actions. “It’s all to maintain the illusion of expertise, isn’t it?”

Her question takes eight hours to translate and feed into the tank. The response comes much faster.

I asked them to keep quiet.

“Why?”

Lyra does not fully understand the words that appear on the screen. She rearranges the meanings, checks the inputs and calculates the components of the alphabet by hand, arriving at a conclusion that bewilders her.

Because I am shy.

---

“Tell me more about yourself,” Lyra says.

Nothing happens. Space crawls by.

“I’m twenty-seven years old. I’m a Gemini, Leo rising. I’m five foot nine, and I’ve got identical scars on each hand, but you probably already know that.”

She watches seven movies on her personal screen, all in a row.

“My middle name is Laurence. Lara Laurence is what my parents wanted to call me. I don’t think Lyra Laurence is much better.”

She writes a digital message to her father and sends it into the void, knowing it is unlikely to reach its destination.

“I’m from Hempstead. My father raised me alone. I have a literally unpayable tab still going in a bar in Queens. Something about their computer not working.”

Halfway through her next meal, the computer beeps. Hempstead.

“Yeah. They call it Venice now that the first Venice is a coral reef.” She sighs. “I wonder if it’ll still be there when I get back.”

Silence for seventy-six hours. Then the organism speaks again.

What are our coordinates?

---

Lyra’s ship, gently curved and about the size of a train car, is only one of thousands. They are modeled roughly after the golf ball in which the spirochetes had arrived. Their interfaces are optimized for human control, but they cannot move without a vat of a million or so copilots. Only a fraction of the biophysics is known, and only to a fraction of specialized engineers.

The first few launches drew the attention of every corner of the world. Reports of accidents, abductions, time dilations and intergalactic slavery flooded Earth’s evolving narrative. Astronauts were said to go insane aboard their ships, or crest the hill of enlightenment. They came home to greet children twenty years their senior, they resettled in cities long abandoned, they discovered a century of accumulating interest had made them rich. Attacks were carried out on launch pads. Economists wrung hands about the cost of overhead.

It took two hundred years for the novelty of spacefaring to die down, but the program carried steadily on. Voyages became a dependable series of non-events, silent and ubiquitous as bats flitting across the night. Ships were built, disassembled and repurposed. Thousands of eager nerds were recruited and trained to accompany the microorganisms back to space.

Upon each return, there was nothing to report. No life was discovered. No planetary colonies formed. Nothing about the aliens themselves had changed, though their human copilots often returned content, bewildered, or joyful. Of course, they were prohibited from speaking about their journeys.

The microbes did not, or could not, recognize the Sisyphean nature of the program. The number and length of missions did not matter to them. The time passed on Earth did not matter to them. No time mattered. They did not die, they were not born. They reproduced themselves in exact copies, invincible and carrying all the memory and language of every individual cell that had come before.

Despite its secrecy, its apparent pointlessness and its exorbitant price, Earth could find little reason to fight the program. With hunger eradicated and disease following quickly behind, with the atmosphere stabilized and seas purified and restored, the whole planet was willing and eager to give the microbes anything they wanted—ships, nutrient broth, human companionship. Earth had entered its unfading summer.

“Our planet has been completely and unequivocally conquered,” declared an infamous piece in the Times, “and we could ask for nothing better.”

---

“Why Lyra, though?” she asks, in either the fifth or fiftieth month.

An hour, and a reluctant reply. Are you asking why I chose you?

“No, I’m asking why you chose the constellation.”

Because it has not been documented yet.

“What do you mean? Every time I introduce myself, people ask if I’m named after it. We’ve got detailed descriptions of its stars, their classes, how far they are from us and each other. We’ve got the whole thing mapped out.”

The ship slows. A huge, pale star drifts by. Lyra fears some vital meaning has been lost between the cloud of gradients and the words on the screen.

But only from one angle.

---

Lyra.

The computer beeps. She opens her eyes. She does not know if they are calling her name or announcing their arrival. Perhaps both.

She wriggles from bed and glances to her feet. Millions of stars spread before her, deathless. They are well past the recognizable planisphere now, not quite off the edges of the map but deep into it, boring straight through the empty space between α- and ζ-Lyr. The shape of the constellation itself has dissolved completely.

Give us our coordinates.

Lyra checks the computer. A dozen numbers march across the screen, and she turns them over to the tubes for translation.

We are close. This is the last.

Her fingers hover over the keyboard, torn between typing “The last what?” and “There’s no such thing as ‘close’ in space.”

Instead, she asks, “What do you mean?”

The organisms stills. The ship hurtles onward.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Nothing for now. Thank you.

---

Lyra wonders how old her father is now. If her sisters are married. She wonders if Queens is still above water. She realizes the only thing that scares her more than to fly home and find everything unrecognizably different would be to return and find everything exactly the same.

Coordinates, please.

She knows the spirochetes can ask the computer to relay information automatically. She wonders if they are trying to keep her busy, the way one might throw a bone to a persistent dog.

“Is this really all you want from me?” she asks. “Coordinates?”

They do not answer for quite some time. But they do answer, which Lyra does not expect.

You are my cartographer.

She stares at the screen. “That’s not exactly what they trained me for.”

Streaks of stars flatten to rounded pinpoints.

It is.

“I was trained to maintain a ship, and to speak with you. Not to chart the galaxy.”

You were trained to speak with me. There is nothing else I need you to do at the moment.

Lyra’s heart sinks. “I had hoped,” she types, without thinking, “that we would meet something. Discover something. Observe exoplanets. You want coordinates? That’s it?”

Please relay our current position.

---

The ship eases to what might pass for a halt in the endlessly swirling dust of space.

We have arrived.

She slips over to the computer. “What do you need me to do?”

She knows she asks in vain. She does not expect the words that appear nearly two hundred hours later, flickering in blue and utterly bizarre.

This is your task. Look out the window. Take in the sight. Document everything you see. Use every camera and sensor on this ship. Use as many media as you can. Use your eyes. Describe every star, their positions relative to us, and every space between them. Input descriptions of all miscellany you see.

“Are you kidding me?” she cries aloud.

She thinks better of typing it. The spirochetes will refuse to respond, especially after such an exhausting monologue.

Lyra obeys. For a month’s worth of sleep cycles, she describes in as many words as she possibly can the arrangement of stars around her. She does not know the significance of any of them, but she talks them up as if she does. She tells the spirochetes the shifting colors of floating dust, the tempos of the pulsars, the smeared positions of distant galaxies.

She takes photographs. She draws pictures of the sky, faithfully recreating every bluish dot on her screen with the end of a stylus. She uncovers the exact composition of each star according to spectroscopy and maps it in music. She writes a dozen poems. She lets the doppler function assess what is moving away from her and at what speeds, feeding every crumb of information to the silent spirochetes.

It is excruciating. When she closes her eyes she sees nothing but white specks on a black canvas. She charts a coastline of nebulae, she sings to the computer in her dreams.

Finally, the organisms are satisfied.

Good. Thank you.

Lyra breathes an hour-long sigh of relief.

Now, rotate the ship two degrees and do it again.

---

It gets easier. Each repetition, she is a little faster. She can recognize stars from previous angles and extrapolate their properties onto her new maps. She writes programs to overlay familiar placements and build pictures on her behalf. Her poetry improves, and she moves from freeform to verse. She solves Fermi problems, composes a simple rondo, arranges the frozen peas on her plate to make new constellations. She begins to build a comprehensible map of the proximal universe.

“But why?” she asks the microbes.

They do not answer. They are busy sorting through the monstrous quantity of data she has sent their way. The computer whirs constantly, and there is rarely a moment when the tank isn’t churning with dyes and lipids, gradients so thick Lyra can see them with her naked eye.

She wonders if this is what the spirochetes have been doing for the past few hundred years, sending out ships and ships and ships, each a little probe in the vast cosmos, an attempt to map their way back to a home planet or some monstrous mothership. What strikes her as odd is that they’d need her assistance doing it.

The spirochetes should need no help. They should need nothing. They have already mastered every skill that should matter to sentient life. They are interstellar travelers, intelligent, eloquent, benevolent, undying and utterly inscrutable.

“So what are you actually looking for?” she asks.

When she wakes up, she sees they have replied.

You know, Lyra. You can see it. You speak the language.

---

Lyra does not speak the language. She can calculate meaning from assembled gradients using a variety of measurements, but only after hours of processing and many tiers of interpretation. The spirochetes’ speech, unlike gestures or music or metaphor, is wholly separate from mammalian instinct. It cannot come naturally to a developed human brain.

She knows there was a time when she was fully proficient, before personhood arrived and replaced that language with many others. Like every other human being, she had only ever truly understood that dialect in utero.

The first time she met the spirochetes, she herself had been almost microscopic, barely the size of a pea. She was growing, according to every modern measurement available, fatally abnormally. Analysis revealed clusters of disordered homebox genes, transcription factors gone awry, garbled messages disrupting the hills and valleys of proteins, reversing their meanings, punctuating sentences mid-thought and spitting out run-on paragraphs. If her cells’ grammar remained uncorrected, she was destined to grow limbs where none should be, to have pores remain open when they should zip safely shut. In a matter of months her cells would die of miscommunication, nothing more than a series of mute and uncomprehending proteins.

Her parents applied for an injection of spirochetes into the amniotic sac. It was swiftly granted, and after months of reprogramming, editing, rereading, encouraging replication and apoptosis in the correct order, Lyra’s only detectable abnormality was a nerveless, boneless sixth finger jutting from each medial palm. They were easily removed after birth and left two small, identical scars.

They are the only proof she has that she once understood the microbes, the only proof that parts of her—many, many parts of her—still speak it, in her blood and bones and gut. She hopes they are proof enough.

---

“So what is Lyra saying?” she types.

She glances back to the stars, floating motes clustered in sheets of varying density, spiraling toward and away from one another according to gravity.

“On Earth, Lyra was a harp,” she says. “For some cultures. For others it was a weaving girl, or a vulture. It’s not a big constellation, but everyone found something different in it.”

That had even been when the sky was a quilt draped over the world, stitched only in two dimensions. Now, who knows what Lyra could be.

Another two degrees.

She shifts the ship and reads the stars. She tries to coalesce the gradients into a message, using the algorithm she knows the computer uses when it encounters glycoproteins with the same orientations.

“Can you really understand it?” Lyra asks the spirochetes. “How do you know the cosmos speaks the same language as you?”

The answer to Lyra’s query takes three sleep-wake cycles.

Because what little we understood of it led us to you.

“Why us?”

We cannot see the stars. We cannot hear them. Your senses are absurd and unique, almost useless anywhere in the universe except for your own planet. But here, you can help us interpret. With your fingers, your eyes, your sounds, your objects.

“I can speak with more than that,” she says. “Just remind me how to use that language again. The oldest one. I know it, just not consciously. Help me relearn.”

She hands over another piece of the map, a detailed portrait of what the ship sees with its sensors, and what she sees with hers.

“Tell me what it’s saying,” she says. “Please. I don’t get it. I’m trying my best, I’m working through it, but I just… can’t quite grasp it.”

Another two degrees, please.

---

She parses through her data, thousands of photographs, dopplers and paintings, poems, coordinates. She is so immersed in her calculations it has become nearly instinctive. But not quite.

She almost has it. She thinks she can make out the message, but from each angle it is different. The stars misalign, separating context from content, just as a shift in tone might change the meaning of a word or render it sarcastic. Lyra can be a harp or a weaving girl, or a vulture or a combination of thousands of in-betweens. She is many things, can develop into many things, but she is not there yet.

Sometime after her mid-cycle meal, she opens the tank, removes 50 mL of broth, and swallows it.

---

Years later, the final star, agonizingly slowly, falls into place.

I hope I have helped you understand, says the spirochete, either from the computer or directly from Lyra’s auditory cortex.

“You have.”

The final angle. The last dense streak of stars appears before her, and she does not wait for the computer’s interpretation. She thinks she can do it herself.

But when she finishes her calculations, when the meaning of the picture snaps into place, she does not understand it.

“What’s happening?” she asks. “Do I have this right?”

Images appear in her mind, of her mother, of herself, of her extra fingers regressing. Her heart twists.

“I’m not sure what I’m seeing, but I’m pretty sure I’m seeing it.”

She presses herself against the transparent skin of the ship. She imagines the curves of spacetime streaking past, urging matter along a trajectory, gradients of stars pouring into galaxies, forming and breaking apart. She cannot speak for the regions of space she has not seen, but the message in this quadrant appears to be clear. Familiar.

She remembers how the cells of her notochord told the rest of her spine to develop. Where to wander. She remembers what they said.

She blinks. Something is growing, speaking to itself, shaping itself.

“Are you reading what I’m reading?” she asks the spirochetes.

The tank stills for a moment.

I cannot say. There is no satisfactory interpretation.

Lyra turns back to the stars.

I can map the gradients. I can understand the temporal evolution. But I do not know what it means. I cannot speak at that magnitude.

A shiver runs through Lyra. She realizes what the spirochetes do, and what plenty of other microbes don’t—that she is nothing more than a fleeting speck on the curving back of a larger organism. Moving, developing in the darkness, parts communicating across vast and small distances, autocrine, paracrine, endocrine.

She can read the sky, she can interpret its meaning, but it does not make sense. She cannot see the future.

“What is that?” she whispers. “What is growing out there?”

Knowing would make no difference. The universe is already forming according to the paths of gravity and matter. What kind of creature we will become, it is impossible to say. I cannot tell you what functions we perform in this development, nor what other components are involved. We must wait to find out.

Suddenly pained, suddenly awed, Lyra realizes she will not be alive for that moment, she will not be around to watch the final formation, the birth of a cosmic giant. She will be one of the many cells dead in the amnion, a withering oocyte, an accretion making way for a cavity. She will never know what role she plays and for what purpose.

She almost laughs. “It’s not fair,” she tells the microbes.

No. It is not.

“What do we do now?”

Return to Earth. Watch the stars. Ask for help. Find a way to interpret what we see.

“I guess there’s not much else we can do, is there?”

No.

A strange weight sags Lyra’s shoulders as she gazes on her map, this lovely, transient, inadequate view from a tiny corner of the galaxy. She turns her little craft homeward, mute and mortal, breathless and blind and utterly, strangely joyful. She will not return to space in her lifetime.

“Yet so long lives this,” she mutters, streaking down starry channels of the nascent cosmos, “this gives life to me.”

---

Host Commentary

And that was “Lyra, From Many Angles” by Hiron Ennes.

One of the cruelest realities that I faced when I was a young scifi geeks was how tedious the reality of space travel is. For every mind blowing moment where we see people walk on the moon, there are millions of hours of calculations and math and engineering and failure after failure after failure. I wanted Star Trek and colorful uniforms and magic drink machines and beaming! I didn’t want to try to figure out how old my family would be if I traveled the speed of light.

To be honest I still don’t understand that, but that’s why I’m not a scientist.

I don’t want to worry about cancer caused by cosmic rays, or the unfortunate things that happen to a body when returning from 0G. (I hear your foot calluses just flake off in 0G because there is no pressure and friction keeping them on your foot. That the most expensive pedicure I’ve ever heard of.)

But this brings me around to the triumph of this story: “Lyra, From Many Angles” is a lovely tale, but it also shows us a lot of the tediousness of solo space travel, but it doesn’t make it boring.
I know I wouldn’t have the patience for any step in Lyra’s mission, whether it’s traveling through space or talking to someone who can’t answer for hours, or spending years mapping several specific angles of a star. But I really enjoyed reading about her doing it.

And before anyone defends the glory of space science, I will point out that the brilliant people who do NOT find it tedious usually end up in jobs in that field, and we are better off for that. I wouldn’t be a good fit. I was completely dismayed when I took a basic astronomy course in college and realized it was mostly math. But the people who get it, they’re rare and wonderful.

It all boils down to the fact that, to excel in something, you must tolerate being bored by it. And if you are bored (or just confused) by the reality of space travel, then lucky for you we have some science fiction to keep the sense of wonder without the math. (And if you like math, there are stories for you, too.)

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This year we’re celebrating both of our 20th anniversary and our 1000th episode! And I can guarantee that the 20th anniversary episode will possibly be one of our most fun stories.

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That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from David Bowie: “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”

Stay safe, and stay kind.