The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  * * *

  ●

  In early August, I had to go to Toronto to help close my father’s estate. There were still loose ends. I asked Charles if he wanted to get together to give me a break from tying them up. He picked me up in his spotless white Volkswagen. I was excited to see him but soon felt a little confused. He seemed nervous, especially compared to how relaxed he was during our online conversations.

  We had planned to visit the David Dunlap Observatory, north of the city. He wanted to take me on a tour. I joked with him that I should probably be the guide, since it was the same observatory in which I’d spent two summers back at the University of Toronto. I knew every inch of the place. It was built in the 1930s, a majestic dome manufactured in England and shipped to the less-polluted skies of the colonies. It was perched on the top of a hill, surrounded by a protective canopy of ancient trees. Inside there was a massive seventy-four-inch telescope, the second-largest in the world when it began scanning the sky. The school had since sold the property to a developer, who had cut the observatory from his holdings and provisionally given it to the Toronto branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Which explained why Charles now had the keys.

  “Pressure’s on,” I said.

  I had told him that the library was my favorite room. “The library is off the tour,” he teased.

  At the observatory there were so many reminders of why I do what I do. I had learned so much back then. I had learned so much since. Despite our shared passion for the stars, Charles and I never spoke about its origins. We didn’t need to. You don’t need to explain your love for something to someone who loves the same thing. They already know your reasons.

  We took our first picture together next to that giant telescope. Afterward, Charles took me to dinner. He gave me a present, a small box. I opened it, and inside I saw the glimmer from a watch. It wasn’t a normal watch: it was an astronomer’s watch, with a white band and a big face. It had a sundial—given a specific location, it showed when the sun would rise and set—and a moon dial, too. I would be able to look at my wrist in the afternoon and know the phase of the moon that night.

  “Thanks for being my friend,” Charles said. He said it in a way that made me think that he was plumbing a deep sadness, a sadness that, so far, had been off-limits to me. I had resigned myself to a long-distance friendship. Emails, Skype, texts, maybe a visit whenever I happened to be in Toronto. Two people who could love the stars together. Now he had given me a watch—a watch that would make me think of him only every time I wore it, only every time I wanted to know the whereabouts of the sun or the moon.

  I was consumed with a single question: What were Charles and I?

  We finished our meal and he drove me downtown, toward Lake Ontario, where I had a hotel room waiting for me near the harbor. I was flying out early the next morning from the Toronto Islands. We pulled up outside the hotel. Charles turned off the engine, and we sat together in the car gone still. The air was thick. I felt as though I were being crushed under an enormous weight.

  I looked at my watch on my wrist and knew the phase of the moon and what I wanted to say. I wanted to send Charles a simple, clear message: We belong together. I didn’t know how to deliver it. I didn’t know how to begin crossing the gap between my theory and our reality, the gulf where so many good things go to die.

  I could tell that Charles wanted to say something, too, but he was having even more trouble coming up with the right words. We both almost said something so many times: that last swallow before real confession; so many nervous licks of our lips…We sat there for seconds that felt like minutes, and minutes that felt like hours.

  “Well,” Charles said finally, and I rose up in my seat. “I have a long drive home.”

  That was my cue to get out. I said goodbye and lifted myself out onto the sidewalk. It was cooler on the pavement in the middle of August than it had been inside that car. I took a deeper breath, and I watched him pull away.

  CHAPTER 18

  Clarity

  “Sara,” Bob said finally. “Do you know what I do when I need clarity? I run across the Grand Canyon.”

  It had been nearly two years since my tearful dinner with Bob Williams, and those words still echoed inside my head. There were many reasons why I couldn’t shake them. I had traveled a lot since Mike had died, but I hadn’t covered ground the way we once had, and I wanted to find the feeling we’d had when we’d paddled across Wollaston Lake: the intimidation of distance and the satisfaction of those who conquered it. With the Starshade on the horizon, I found myself drawn more and more to finite goals, to accomplishment. I also wanted to feel capable of achieving what I decided to achieve, to feel that my future was mine to decide. I needed to tax my muscles and test my resolve. The Grand Canyon was my kind of challenge. It was adventure as metaphor. There was a rim for each of my lives, divided by a chasm that was within me to cross.

  I also recalled Bob’s concern when he thought I might actually make an attempt. It was clear from my reaction that I was probably going to try. He called me the day after our meeting. “Sara, this isn’t easy,” he said. “It’s called the Grand Canyon for a reason. Whatever you do, don’t try to cross it in a single day.” It was a real ambition but an easy one to shelve.

  In the late summer of 2013, the boys had a couple of unscheduled weeks between the end of camp and the beginning of school. I was still fixated on the shortness of life. I asked Alex if he still wanted to make the 14,000-foot climb that he had once talked about so urgently. “Yes,” he said. I asked him to rate his desire on a scale of one to ten. “Seven or eight,” he said. The way he said it, soft and uncertain, made me think that his heart held a different answer.

  Alex was growing up so fast. He was eight years old by then. For about two years, he had seemed stalled in his growth, a little coiled bundle of muscle. Suddenly he had grown several inches and gained thirty pounds. The greater the mass, the harder it is to move. Maybe mountains had become taller in his mind than they once were.

  I wondered whether seeing an actual mountain would ignite some of his old feelings. I decided to take the boys to Colorado. Jessica would come along, radiating her usual enthusiasm, and I also bought a ticket for a young woman named Zsuzsa, a recent MIT graduate and hiker who had become another member of our extended family. I was still adopting stray adult humans the way I’d once taken in homeless cats. Zsuzsa needed a place to stay; I had empty beds in empty rooms, and I could always use more help around the house. She was also a character, claiming that her Russian father had trained her as though she might become an agent for the KGB. She said that she was built for danger. I had started to worry that our house would burn down in the middle of the night, and she insisted that she would save us.

  On our flight to Denver I looked out the window, down at the Rockies, and realized that we didn’t have anything close to a plan. I hadn’t even picked the mountain that Alex and I might climb. I looked down at their peaks and wondered: Which one of them will be ours?

  It didn’t take Alex long, after we’d made our brief survey of Colorado’s fortress-like summits, to decide against making a climb. He didn’t need to break world records anymore. Maybe that was part of his growing up, the distance widening between who he was and who he wanted to be. Whatever his reasons, I told him that was fine. I’d told Jessica and Zsuzsa in advance that we’d probably need a backup plan, and now we employed it. We’d drive to the Grand Canyon instead.

  We got as far as Grand Junction, Colorado, and bunked at a hotel. There was a pool and a small amusement park not far away. Max and Alex seemed done with sitting in the car. Over dinner, we decided that Jessica would stay in Grand Junction with the boys. Zsuzsa and I would keep driving southwest.

  “Sara,” Bob said finally. “Do you know what I do when I need clarity? I run across the Grand Canyon.”

  Zsuzsa did the driving. It was a spec
tacular trip out of Colorado, through Utah, and into Arizona. Earth is the most wonderful planet. We drove down from the mountains and across river gorges into the first fingers of desert. Trees became cacti. Green became brown; brown became red. The temperature, the light, the smell, the sounds, the feel of the wind: With every mile something about our surroundings changed. It didn’t feel like we’d crossed only a couple of state lines. It felt as though we had gone to sleep in one universe and woken up in another.

  I called ahead to a hotel on the North Rim and asked if they had any rooms. One was left. A sign.

  We pulled into the Grand Canyon Lodge, and it was one of the most gorgeous places I could imagine. The rooms feel like log cabins. Outside, the hotel clings to the edge of a steep cliff, the sky and clouds behind it turning every color. When night fell I found a quiet socket in the rocks and looked up. There is nothing like the desert to draw out the stars. I saw the constellations through the eyes of an ancient Greek: the stars an eternal mystery, the stars come to life.

  Zsuzsa and I had made the barest of outlines, but I was glad for our lack of preparation. I might have become anxious given more time to contemplate the details. We agreed that we would wake up early, tie on our boots, and shoulder our little backpacks. We’d carry water and sunscreen and snacks. If we needed more water, we’d drink from the taps at the springs that we would find on our way. There was a river down there, after all. We’d cross from north to south, spend the night at another hotel on the South Rim, and then make our triumphant return the next day.

  We woke up in the dark and made our way to the canyon’s edge. I thought we were about to do such a special thing, but we were far from alone. Close to a crowd had gathered at the starting line. I was disappointed but maybe also a little relieved. We were about to do something extraordinary that seemingly ordinary people could do.

  The sun broke over the horizon. I felt a little burst of adrenaline inside my chest. I nodded at Zsuzsa, and she nodded at me. We weren’t going to heed Bob’s warning. We’d hike the canyon in a single day. We took our first tentative steps into the canyon. Gravity soon began pulling us toward the bottom, like water finding the drain. Hours into our hike, Zsuzsa found the energy to break into a run. I followed. My feet began to blur beneath me. I felt sweat bead on my forehead, the good kind of pressure in my lungs. Zsuzsa let out a howl.

  “This is the best day of my life,” she shouted, deep into the canyon.

  * * *

  ●

  It’s impossible to look at its walls and not think about the passage of time. Geologists disagree about how long the Colorado River has been making its deepening, widening cut into the Earth’s surface, but the best guess is something like five or six million years. Today the canyon is 277 river miles long, and 18 miles across at its widest point. It is, at its essence, a very big hole, carved out grain by grain by wind and water running over sand and rock. It’s a testament to how monuments get built: little by little. The canyon’s walls, a mile high in places, have left about two billion years of geologic history exposed.

  With every few steps we took down from the North Rim, we leapt across centuries. There went my lifetime. There went the Spanish Civil War. There went the Renaissance. There went the Puebloans, and there went the Holy Roman Empire, and there went the Shang Dynasty. There went the origin of our species. There went the dinosaurs, and prehistoric reptiles, and the beginnings of life itself. Give the Colorado River enough time, and it might unearth the Big Bang.

  Zsuzsa and I also measured time in more immediate ways, most keenly as distance. The hike from the North Rim to the South is twenty-four switchbacking miles. With a miles-long descent. And somewhere over there, across the river, as long of a climb. We knew that the down is deceptive. It’s halfway, but it isn’t. Down is easier than up.

  We also measured time by daylight. We were racing the sun. That day was overcast, which was good as far as temperature was concerned. It was less ideal when it came to how far and how late we would be able to see.

  There is a bridge across the river at the canyon bottom. I looked out at the water on its endless course. It had been more than a decade since Mike and I had run that water, since I had waved up at the people who had watched us from that same bridge. I had a moment of sadness, the shadow of an ache. But it didn’t last long. I went to a different place. In some strange way, I could almost see my own ghost there, my younger self in the water, the years falling away. I knew everything that had happened to her, as though she were a stranger whose fortune I could read. I could see her in the river and call out and tell her. Should I tell her?

  The clatter and clomp of a mule train, carrying tourists to the bottom, broke my weird spell. They were led by an older man in cowboy clothes. He’s handsome, I thought, and then I found myself thinking about the thought. He’s handsome. That thought was a simple, involuntary reflex, a conditioned response to positive visual stimulus. That thought felt like its own kind of bridge. I might finally be able to cross from one side to the other.

  Zsuzsa and I were practically giddy. The three-quarter mark, the most desperate point in most journeys—so much ground covered, so much to go—passed in a cascade of good feeling. My legs felt great. My spirit soared. Zsuzsa and I talked about maybe even making our return that night. The clouds were clearing, and there was going to be a full moon.

  Then her knee began to bother her. She told me to go ahead. I made the climb out of the canyon alone. I sat on the rocks and looked out at its red walls in the last of the golden light. Just when I decided I should go back down after her, Zsuzsa finally climbed out, too. We had made it to the South Rim. It was crowded with tourists; I remembered Mount Washington, the drivers and the hikers and the difference between them. I would sleep in my clothes. I would sleep canyon deep.

  That evening, Zsuzsa decided that she couldn’t make the return. Her knee wasn’t up for it. She was disappointed that she’d have to take the long bus ride around.

  I’d walk alone. Early the next morning I found the start of the trail back down and waited in the dark for the dawn. I started with the sun. I ran down into the canyon and reached the bridge at the bottom. The handsome old cowboy was there again.

  “I saw you yesterday,” I said.

  His white teeth shone out from under the brim of his hat.

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was a surreal moment. He said it so easily. I didn’t feel like he was hitting on me; I felt like he was playing things up for the tourists around him. But he sounded sincere, as though he were stating another geological fact for them. I smiled the widest smile. A cowboy’s love and my heavy legs lifted me from the bottom of the canyon and into the climb. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and the dust out of the corners of my mouth. I tried not to look up. I focused on the rocks in front of me, layer after layer. Here come the dinosaurs. Here comes the Spanish Civil War.

  Zsuzsa was waiting for me on the other side. I took a long shower, and we sat down together for the most satisfying meal. I felt electric. I felt ecstatic.

  The next morning, we began our drive back to Grand Junction. Zsuzsa took the wheel and I eased my seat back, my body heavy with lactic acid and pride. I watched the desert turn back into forests, canyons on their way to becoming mountains. I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to explain to Jessica and the boys what the trip was like, or how that journey had allowed me to know exactly who I was, exactly then.

  “Sara,” Bob said finally. “Do you know what I do when I need clarity? I run across the Grand Canyon. In a single day.”

  I called Bob as soon as I had reception. Although we spoke once in a while, I hadn’t even let him know I was going.

  “Hi, Bob,” I said. “I made it.”

  I’d made it, and that’s when I knew. It had never been a problem of distance. It was only a matter of time.

  CHAPTER 19

  Flashes of G
enius

  In science, sometimes your hunt for one thing leads you, or someone else, to something better. At our best, scientists are explorers.

  I could still feel the Grand Canyon in my legs when school started up again that September; I felt strong in a way that I hadn’t for a long time. As soon as I’d returned from the trip, Charles and I had started our constant communication again—email, text, Skype, phone—picking up as though we’d never spent that awkward eternity in his Volkswagen. We had settled on being pen pals, and I decided that was for the best. Instead I poured my heart into the Starshade, prepared to return to teaching, and plunged back into my favorite research. I vowed never to think that we’d reached the edges of our maps.

  Kepler had been busily charting its thin slice of the galaxy, a swath of sky in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, and delivering a steady stream of hopeful discoveries. Fourteen previously undiscovered exoplanets had been confirmed at the end of August, bringing us to about 150 named new Kepler worlds, with thousands more candidate planets waiting in line for validation. The volume of discovery allowed our community to start finding patterns in planetary systems; we were able to conduct our version of a census. It was more than stamp collecting after all. Astrophysicists who were interested in how planets form, for instance, now had so many more examples to study.

  I left that work to others. I wanted to push deeper into the new frontier. My research into biosignature gases with William Bains had taken a surprising new turn. I thought about which gases other than the obvious ones—oxygen, methane—we might see as a sign of life, and I was struck by how many gases are the products of biology. With the exception of noble gases like helium, which are inert and nonreactive, I wondered whether every single gas might be produced by life. I pitched my theory to William, who immediately dismissed it as ridiculous. But I countered: Every gas that exists in Earth’s atmosphere, even those detectable in parts per trillion, can be made by living things. They usually have nonbiological sources, but life can make them. William decided my notion was slightly less ridiculous than he’d first thought, and along with a brilliant postdoc named Janusz Petkowski, we put considerable work into proving my crazy idea. We decided to head over to Harvard one afternoon to present our case to the biologist Jack Szostak, a Nobel laureate. Jack listened politely to our PowerPoint presentation, and then named one gas, off the top of his prizewinning head, that is not the exhaust of life.