Ablation ✔️

1 - The Grand New Adventure

They had made a mistake – a monumental, astronomical mistake.

Dr. Talia Ernst stretched out across the window seat of her hab unit, collecting her sole pillow beneath her head for some modicum of comfort, and stared out into the night. The stars stared back, both familiar and foreign. Her whole life the stippling beauty of the night sky had provided her great comfort, but now she found no solace in its infinite expanse. That feeling of relief had been supplanted by a jumble of disparate emotions, the two most prominent of which were excitement and grief; and both battled for dominance. For only the second time in her life Talia found herself at a loss.

Above her a meteor streaked across the firmament, a "shooting star" disintegrating from the heat of atmospheric entry. There had been a time in the history of humankind when the term meteor had been defined in specific relation to its entry into, and subsequent ablation within, Earth's atmosphere, and as Talia watched in a mix of childlike wonderment and detached observation, she pondered the ego of that etymology.

The definition existed as a remnant of both a geocentric ideology and a pre-cosmic explanation of the universe, finding its root in the Greek metéōron. In that earliest form the word included a host of atmospheric phenomena from wind and rain to rainbows and, of course, meteors. Then came an understanding of the cosmos and the word meteor's expulsion from that family tree, but the geo-centrism of the definition remained. And then at last humankind reached beyond the confines of Earth, spreading across the solar system and even out into the icy hell of the Oort Cloud, and wherever humans spread as a species, if an atmosphere existed, then meteors followed and with them came the magic of the shooting star.

Talia closed her eyes and made a wish.

***

"Do you see it?" she asked.

"Umm... are you going to judge me if I say no?"

"Of course not," she said, casting a definitively judgey glance at her date, Milton Barnes. Handsome, if delicate, he wore an old-fashioned tweed jacket and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, both of which gave testimony to his status as a relic – especially the glasses. Tweed jackets had come in and out of fashion over the centuries, but after corrective surgery became the norm glasses had gone the way of the top hat and the parasol. The eccentricity of his dress made Talia want to roll her eyes, but it also intrigued her. Milton existed a man out of time, a historian immersed within the culture of his study. There was something endearing in his devotion.

"Just look there at Pisces, just a little down and to the left from the bottom star of the western fish's head," Talia continued, pointing up into the sky. "You can't miss it."

"Okay, so now you're just making stuff up. I mean fish heads?"

Disgusted, Talia cut her eyes at Milton. What an ignorant fool, she thought. How can he not know the constellations? The conquering of the stars was the driving mission of the current generation, the pinnacle of academia, and yet he knew nothing of them.

"One question. Do you ever lift your head from the page and just look at the universe above? Have you even ever seen the night sky?"

"In all fairness," he started, "that's two questions. And first off, no. Kind of need my nose in the books when that's where the history is. Plus we have people like you for the stars."

"People like me?"

"Yes. Dreamers, explorers, adventurers: the people who drive the expansion of the frontier. People like you."