The Edge of Infinity
Space | Fable 5
This address can never be delivered. I give it anyway, tonight, to the larger half of everything that will never be reached.
Protocol first, then the roll. If your light traveled longer than ten billion years to find me, this is for you. Rise where you are, in whatever you have become since the sending, and hear out a voice that will never arrive.
MoM-z14. JADES-GS-z14-0. You were named the way engine parts are named, and you were the first engines: alight before the universe’s three-hundred-millionth birthday, already forging the metals that would become pens, telescopes, blood. Ton 618, heaviest of hearts, sixty-six billion suns folded into a single dark point. The wall of first light, warm surface where the fog let go and the universe saw through its own skin for the first time. Rise, all of you.
And the crowds behind the names. The busiest hour of creation ran at your distance; when stars were being born ten times faster than they are born today, they were born, nearly all of them, on your side of the line. We arrived after the festival and inherited the cleanup.
I know how you will go. Slowly, and in public. Your images will redden and dim, your clocks in our sky will crawl, and at the last you will simply hang there, each of you a photograph refusing to finish, one frame from a life whose remainder we will never see. Our night will fill with stopped films.
You will have ours in return. Light we shed in childhood is on its way to you now and can never be recalled. You will watch our galaxy learn to spiral; you will watch the disk settle, the bar form, a yellow star kindle in an unfashionable arm. Then our film stops for you too. You will hold our beginning entire and our silence after, and you will never learn what we became. Two galleries of portraits facing each other across a widening dark, each certain the other has died. Both galleries wrong.
The farewells continue on our side of the line. Anything we send past eight billion light years can go, can arrive, can flourish, and can never write home; every colony past that radius is a child waved off at the pier while both of us pretend the mail boats will keep running. Expansion is a schedule of goodbyes.
So. Goodbye to the larger half. Keep our childhood somewhere dry. What stays on this side is a hundred billion galaxies, countable, endable, ours; a universe that may well run on without end, of which the part that will ever answer us is finite, and full, and lit.
Goodbye.