The Observer Effect

At four in the morning the dome was the coldest place on the mountain and the closest thing Cassie had to a church. She came up to be alone with the sky, which had never once asked anything of her, and she had been doing it for years before Rafael started keeping the same impossible hours.

"You're in my dark," she said, the first night, when his red headlamp swung across her charts.

"Sorry. I thought I had the dome to myself."

"So did I. For about a decade."

They divided the night after that, an unspoken treaty: he took the first half, she took the small hours. But treaties erode. He started staying. She started arriving early. They learned to work in the same red dark without speaking, two people and a telescope and the slow turning of everything.

"There's a thing I keep not saying," he told her, on the night the seeing was so good the stars stopped twinkling and simply burned. "And I've decided not saying it is its own kind of measurement. It changes the result."

Cassie kept her eye to the eyepiece. A galaxy hung there, eight hundred million years old by the time its light reached her cornea. Everything she had ever seen was already the past.

"Then say it now," she said, "while I'm looking at something far enough away that it won't be embarrassed."

He said it. The galaxy did not change. Everything else did.