Book 1: Chapter 2

What Dr Aedan wanted was for Linua to sit in front of a photograph on a computer screen and measure the size, luminosity and colour of various fuzzy blobs so that the star or galaxy each one represented could be catalogued and identified.

He must have run out of free student labour, or scared it all off with huge workloads.

The reason Linua normally followed Alnan around and helped out with cleaning—aside from the fact that Alnan was funny and interesting—was precisely to avoid this sort of thing.

She followed Dr Aedan out onto a metal staircase that was bolted to the side of the building. This led to the warm room, a boxy concrete office where all the computers involved in astronomical observation sat humming in rows. The telescope itself was situated several hundred feet above them, on the mountaintop, with the Observatory offices, museum and lecture room tucked in at the bottom of the cliff, so that the light from the buildings wouldn’t interfere with the light emitted by the stars.

There was one student in the room, but she was busy communicating over a radio with someone else up at the telescope, and using controls on the computer to make small adjustments to the telescope’s tilt.

Dr Aedan sat Linua down in front of a terminal, then dashed off back down the stairs, muttering to himself. He was stressed because he was in the middle of writing a paper. Linua scrolled to the top left corner of the image and started the painstaking work of recording the fuzzy blobs.

“One day,” the student said, coming to stand behind Linua and watching her work, “We’ll be able to do this all via a computer program.”

She sounded approving. Linua couldn’t help but agree that the idea of being replaced by a computer program was an attractive one, at least for this task.

“That would be nice,” she said.

The student hovered. She seemed to want to chat.

“I’m on my summer break from Shinboa University. I just started here. You’re a bit young to be a college student, though. Does your Dad work here?”

“I’m here on a voluntary basis,” Linua explained. “My grandmother arranged it. She wants me to become an astronomer.”

Grandmother had once been a famous astronomer herself, and so had Linua’s mother. Grandmother had no doubt that Linua would become one too. Grandmother was not the sort of person for whom feelings of doubt came naturally.

“Oh.” The student gave Linua a perceptive stare. “Do you want to become an astronomer?”

Linua absolutely did not. After what had happened to her parents the idea of spending the rest of her life studying astronomy made her feel sick. But it didn’t seem polite to say that to someone who was a student of that discipline herself.

Instead, Linua went to the default response you used when you were asked a tricky question by someone older, whom you couldn’t simply ignore, and shrugged.

The student seemed to interpret this correctly, because she said, “Seems a shame to be stuck here measuring coloured dots on a photo when you could be at home watching TV. I mean, I love it myself, don’t get me wrong, I wanted to do this since I was a little girl. But it can be a lot of hard work.”

What she didn’t like to say was that the only TV she watched were the programs Alnan tuned into on his tiny little black and white TV set in the janitor’s cupboard during his break. Grandmother didn’t let Linua waste time by watching any at home. Her day started at six in the morning and finished at half past ten at night, and there wasn’t a single part of it that didn’t have an activity planned into it.

Even being at the Observatory—a few hours of relative freedom—was supposed to be a means to an end. When Grandmother had been young, she had dreamed of being an astronomer, but she had been too poor to afford university. Instead, she had volunteered at the local Observatory each evening after school, and taught herself. The astronomers had been so impressed by her intelligence and dedication that they had hired her as an assistant, paying her a very tiny wage. Eventually, after she had captured images proving that one of the missing lifeboats from the ancient mothership was in a decaying orbit around the outer planet of Marduk, she had become a world-famous astronomer, and gone to conferences and produced academic papers.

Although it was planned for Linua to go to university, like her mother, Grandmother had wanted Linua to have the same exposure to astronomy she herself had had when she was Linua’s age. Therefore, from half past six to half past nine every evening, Grandmother had arranged for Linua to volunteer at the Observatory. When Linua had started four years ago she had spent her time following the astronomers around, collating the printouts, making cups of tea, and watching them recalibrate the big telescope. As her knowledge of maths and astronomy improved, she had also joined in helping to process the images which the telescope generated.

“So, you spend every night here doing this?” the student asked, gesturing towards the screen.

“I help Alnan too,” Linua said. “He’s the janitor. He used to be in the army. He tells loads of really amazing stories.”

The student blinked.

“Oh?”

Linua couldn’t actually remember how that had started. Following Alnan around had just seemed to happen gradually, until she was spending more time cleaning than she was sitting in front of a computer in the warm room. The astronomers who came to the Observatory usually did so for a very short time, so no-one had really noticed, and now everyone seemed to think of Linua as some kind of junior cleaner.

Except for Dr Aedan, who had been coming to the Observatory for years, and remembered when Linua had first started.

“Is your grandmother okay with that?” the student asked.

No, Grandmother had no idea that Linua now spent most of her time at the Observatory cleaning the floors and polishing windows.

“Er,” Linua said. “Sometimes I help Dr Aedan too.”

The one good thing about helping Dr Aedan now was that tomorrow, when Grandmother asked Linua what she had been doing at the Observatory, she would honestly be able to say she’d been cataloguing stars. Normally she had to make something up to cover the fact that she had been doing cleaning with Alnan.

The student gave Linua another knowing look.

“At least it’s nearly the summer holidays,” she said cheerfully. “Oh, wait, your Grandmother doesn’t send you here when you’re off school does she?”

Linua was vaguely aware that there was such a thing as summer holidays, because she’d read about it in books. She didn’t want to tell the student that she was home-schooled, or that it had simply never occurred to Grandmother to schedule a break in Linua’s study purely because it was the middle of the summer. It would make her life sound too weird.

“No,” Linua lied. She hoped that once it actually got to summer the student wouldn’t be around notice she hadn’t been telling the truth.

Happily, a crackle from the radio distracted the student back to her station, after which Dr Aedan returned and any further talk was purely related to their respective duties. There was no further opportunity to visit the vault, and at half past nine the car came to collect Linua and take her home. Grandmother was already in bed, as usual, so there was just Helged waiting in the kitchen with a covered tray of supper for Linua, consisting of Helged’s special home-baked biscuits and warm milk.

It was a sad indictment of Linua’s life that one of her favourite parts of the day was falling into bed, because it was the one place she wasn’t expected to do anything or be anything special. The only problem with going to bed was that the faster she fell asleep the sooner it would be morning again.

Linua hated mornings.