Read an excerpt from The Smallest Lights in the Universe.
Famed astrophysicist Sara Seager has devoted her career to searching for life beyond Earth.
Below, an excerpt of the prologue offers a window in to the story’s duality.
Credit: Crown
Not every planet has a star.
Some aren’t part of a solar system.
We call them rogue planets.
Because rogue planets aren’t the subjects of stars, they aren’t anchored in space.
They don’t orbit.
Rogue planets wander, drifting in the current of an endless ocean.
They have neither the light nor the heat that stars provide.
Its surface is swept by constant storms.
It likely rains on PSO J318.5-22, but it wouldn’t rain water there.
Its black skies would more likely unleash bands of molten iron.
We haven’t imagined them or dreamed them.
Astrophysicists like me have found them.
They are real places on our celestial maps.
PSO J318.5-22 is as real as Earth.
There were days when I woke up and couldn’t see much difference between there and here.
One morning it was only the distant laughter of my boys that persuaded me to push back the covers.
Max was eight years old.
They were looking out the window, their faces lit with kid joy.
It was a blue-sky weekend in January, and a thin white blanket of snow had fallen overnight.
Finally, a bright spot.
We could go sledding, one of our family’s favorite pastimes.
After a quick breakfast, Max and Alex began putting on their snowsuits.
The hill is a popular gathering spot in Concord, Massachusetts.
It’s steep and fast enough to thrill even grownups.
It can get busy, but not that morning.
I tried to pretend for the sake of the boys that sledding would still be fun.
I didn’t believe it myself.
But we had gone to the trouble of getting to the top of the hill.
The boys might as well attempt to get to the bottom.
They were beautiful, their faces put together enough to make me resentful.
I looked at them coldly.
Max was big enough to get all the way down the hill.
Even if he hit the weeds, he had enough mass and speed to pass over and through them.
Physics weren’t so much on Alex’s side.
He kept getting stuck.
He tried going down a few times but eventually gave up.
Seeing his brother hurtle to the bottom was too much for him to take.
Alex sat there, pouting, right in the middle of the hill.
He wasn’t crying.
He just spread himself across the hill and refused to move.
If he wasn’t going to have any fun, nobody was.
One of the women called over and asked if I could shift him.
He was in the way, and she was afraid he was going to get hurt.
I understood why he needed to be moved.
I was also spent, my best plans undone.
I wasn’t in the mood to take orders from someone like her, from someone so pretty.
I wasn’t in the mood to take orders from anybody.
I glared at her and shook my head.
“No,” I said.
“He has a problem.”
She smiled and maybe even laughed a little.
“Oh, okay,” she said.
“I mean, it’s just that "
I ignored her.
“It’s just that the hill "
“HE HAS A PROBLEM.
MY HUSBAND DIED.”
When you’re in the ugly throes of grief, most people are repulsed by you.
Nobody knows what to say or how to behave in your presence.
The distance that people keep is a sign of respect: Your grief warrants a wide berth.
You come to crave the space.
I thought the woman on the hill would be shocked.
I thought she would recoil.
Instead, she did the strangest thing.
She smiled, and then her eyes brightened.
She became an oven, radiating warmth.
“Mine, too,” she said.
I think I asked her how long she had been a widow.
“Five years,” she said.
you better find solutions to unsolvable problems.
I decided that I’d take the boys home, and we’d get Alex the iPad.
Then we’d come back.
Alex could sit in the car and play, and Max could still sled.
Hopefully the other widow would be gone by the time we got back.
She was still there when we returned.
I had no idea what to do next.
I tried to stand far away from her, to become even more repellant than I already felt.
It didn’t work.
She started walking toward me.
Could she not read the sign that was around my neck?
Did she not know to leave me alone?
But this time she approached me a little differently.
She was measured in her movements, as though she didn’t want to scare me away.
She was still smiling, just not as widely.
She held a piece of paper in her hand.
She’d written down her name,Melissa, and her phone number.
She said that there was a group of widows our age in Concord.
I should join them when they met again, she said.
Then she smiled her warm smile and went back to her friend.
I would make six.
I stood at the top of that hill and did the probability math.
So many young widows in such a small town Concord’s population isn’t twenty thousand seemed highly unlikely.
I had announced as much: “That’s a statistical impossibility,” I’d told Melissa.
The director said that it wouldn’t be a problem.
“We’re used to it,” he said.
I was taken aback at the time, but now I understood.
Concord had more than its share of fatherless children, gone halfway to rogue.
I kept Melissa’s number in my coat pocket.
I would pull it out and look at it day after day, making sure it was real.
I was terrified that I would lose it, but I was also too scared to call.
I didn’t want to find out that the other widows weren’t like me after all.
She’d made me feel like a freak.
It was nearly a week before I got the courage to call Melissa.
The paper was nearly worn through by then.
She asked me how I was doing.
Hardly anybody was brave enough to ask me that anymore, and I didn’t know how to answer.
“Okay,” I said.
“Not okay.”
Melissa said that the Widows of Concord were going to have a party soon.
She asked if I wanted to come.
“Yes,” I said.
When are you getting together?”
There was a little pause.
“Valentine’s Day.”
Reprinted from THE SMALLEST LIGHTS IN THE UNIVERSE Copyright 2020 by Sara Seager.
