Chapter 3                        

01:11:24                

“Here are some items you brought with you from your home, which we salvaged from your vessel,” Kernel said, sliding a small stack of clothing across the table.

Adlakad took them and nodded with a “thank you.”

The droopy-skinned men weren’t being unfriendly towards him. In fact, everything around him was seeming much more sympathetic and inviting with each passing moment. Although the outside of the buildings were spattered with refuse and a thick buildup of grime, inside, the meeting room was tidy and decorated with pleasant, albethey minimalist, furnishings.

Not-Kernel jumped in, “Remember the refreshments. Remember hospitality.” He pointed to a message printed on the screen in front of him—a directive to remind his partner.

Kernel jolted up from his chair and rushed to the cabinets.

“Oh, of course,” Kernel said, “it’s easy to forget these very pertinent customs.” He pulled a few items from a cabinet and swung around to face Adlakad again. “This is a moss wine.”

There was a disturbing pale foam on the moss wine that dribbled over the edge of the decanter when Kernel set it down.

Adlakad wrinkled his nose. “That doesn’t look like any moss wine I’ve ever seen,” he muttered.

“Well, this is what we have,” Not-Kernel said unapologetically.

Kernel was already drinking from his glass. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked, looking sheepishly offended.

Adlakad didn’t know how to explain it. It just didn’t seem right. He didn’t want to be rude. He shrugged and lifted his glass. The moss wine smelled of mint and bleach, like it had been disinfected. Adlakad swallowed the first gulp, but tasted nothing, just a vague feeling of wetness. It even lacked the taste of water.

Adlakad didn’t know what to do with it. He hoped it wouldn’t make him sick. Kernel was staring, eagerly waiting for his response. “Delicious,” Adlakad said, feigning a sigh of contentment.

Kernel relaxed back into his chairs with a relieved nod.  

“We thought you’d like it,” Kernel said, “we’ve had people trying to make it for a long while.”

Not-Kernel chimed in, consulting his notes without looking up. “As I understand, this is something of a delicacy where you are from.”

Adlakad had nothing more he could possibly say about moss wine. “Is this all part of the experiment?” he asked.

Kernel looked at him with awkward guilt on his face. Not-Kernel’s wrist bleeped one whimpering tone. Adlakad sipped his tasteless wine and wondered how much longer he could take this.

*

Adlakad’s interrogators drew out their questions with tedious formality for the rest of the day. They covered the basics of Adlakad’s quite ordinary life experiences on Othera with painstaking detail. He explained that he’d been born, raised, and began his career in a moderately sized factory town on the northern continent.  Not-Kernel had a series of detailed questions that he’d been instructed to ask as part of the experiment—Adlakad’s childhood best friend’s height, his favorite teacher’s facial hair pattern, whether he brushed his teeth before or after breakfast, his father’s work schedule, and a whole host of other seemingly petty and impertinent details.

Slowly, Adlakad progressed through the important milestones of his life. He answered every question matter of factly without pride or shame, having repeated his life history to reporters and government agents thousands of times back on Othera. He’d been average in school, and hadn’t had ambitions to travel far from home. He’d joined a hyperfamily when he began his work as a cuisine machinery engineer. He only worked the minimum required of the vocation and spent a few days a month tutoring aspiring cuisine engineers. In his free time, like many Otherans, he entertained himself with a passing interest in the new discoveries in astronomy and took a handful of classes in cuisine machinery design.  He vacationed at the sea each summer, but abstained from most other holidays, preferring to keep a uniform schedule.

When he was twenty years old, he’d found slightly better than average success with a prototype for a couture nutritional bar processor, and was promoted into the ‘custom’ manufacturing line. He was stationed at a restaurant called Leinad the Lion in the Capital City to build equipment, which the eponymous chef engineer, Leinad, needed on site. By the time he’d met Solas, he’d been working at the Lion for three years.

*

“And after that, the rest is Otheran history,” Adlakad said, leaning back in his chair with finality to draw his own Prologue to a close.

“What do you mean by ‘Otheran history?”’ Kernel asked.

Adlakad sat back up with a little surprise, “Oh, I just mean that since you knew who I was when I got here, you must know the story of what happened next. Solas and I are probably the biggest celebrities on Othera right now. Everyone knows what happened next.”

Kernel shrugged towards Not-Kernel.  “Is that good enough for you?”

Not-Kernel slowly peered up from his note-taking.  “Regarding persons of experimental interest,” he said, seemingly quoting something, “we only know what is publically visible.  This portion of the experiment is designed to interrogate data that may have subtly evaded our methods of detection.”

“So is that a no?” Kernel replied.

Not-Kernel gazed with a speculative smirk toward Kernel, “I thought you were here to be the one to pick up on subtext?  But I guess you were never as good at that as you presumed?”

Adlakad saw a flicker of anger flash across Kernel’s face before he could subdue it to his normal calm and wizened look.

Not-Kernel continued, “We are trying to figure out if we’ve missed anything important. Maybe there were some other activities or relationships that we aren’t privy to.  Don’t you have anything more to say?”

Adlakad thought to himself for a moment. What could he tell his interviewers that they hadn’t already heard before. He’d just spent six months wrapped up in the most extensively covered global political campaign in the history of his planet. His people had a history of transforming their political process into a global means of entertainment, but for the appointment of his position the competition and the media spectacle had been completely unprecedented. With a few exceptions, Adlakad hadn’t seen another person or left his house during all that time without an entourage of at least a few evaluators from either a government agency or some ‘independent third-party watchdog group.’

“I feel that I’m wrapped up in something extremely important,” Adlakad said to his interviewers, “I’m lucky enough to have the hopes of my entire world resting on me.”

“Yes, of course,” Kernel said, “but that is exactly what you said at your inauguration. You’ve repeated that description on…” he consulted the notepad in front of him, “...fifteen separate public speeches.  I must insist that you try your hardest to tell us how you really feel, and please do so in your own words.”

Not-Kernel looked down at his protocol sheet in front of him. “I don’t see anywhere where it is required to ask for how he feels or what he thinks in his own words,” Not-Kernel said, looking at Kernel as he spoke, “you can feel free to disregard my partner’s demands.”

Kernel dismissively flicked his hand toward Not-Kernel, and repeated, “Please, Adlakad, if you may, try to think about how you felt.”

Not-Kernel crossed his arms and shook his head in disbelief but remained silent.

“Take your time,” Kernel said.

Adlakad thought for one moment about his life a year ago.  Had he even stopped to process what he was caught up in? Had he ever even cared to think about it before it became his life?

He looked back up from his empty glass of moss wine. “Honestly, gentleman,” Adlakad said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever really tried to express how I felt.”

“That’s understandable,” Kernel said, “no one has ever really asked you how you felt before.”

“Actually,” Adlakad scratched his head as he began to remember, “there was someone else who asked me how I felt once.”

“Well,” Not-Kernel grumbled dismissively,  “I’m sure many people asked that, but, of course, it’s usually only a formality.”

“No, but he meant it,” Adlakad added, “he’s the only person who I ever thought really meant it.”

Not-Kernel broke attention from his notes to look at Adlakad inquisitively.  “And who was that?” he asked.  Adlakad was taken aback that something he’d said had finally sparked Not-Kernel’s interest.

“He was just some man I met,” Adlakad said, “I never asked his name.”

“And where was that?” Not-Kernel said, he was typing furiously at his notepad.  

“It was on the 4th planet.  I met him on the layover, waiting for my launch date.”

Not-Kernel flipped a switch and the wall at the back of the room lit up with a huge block of images.

“Stop!” Kernel yelled, “you can’t show him that yet.  What about the other researchers?”

“Oh be quiet, he won’t even understand what he’s looking at.  I just need to show him some images to get an identification.”

Adlakad walked to the back of the room to inspect the images flashing across the screen.

“These are all the people we have a record of you speaking with on the 4th planet,”

“How could you know about all this?” Adlakad asked.  His eyes fell on a an image of Solas as it flicked past, and he felt a lump catch him in the throat.

Not-Kernel ignored Kernel’s glare.  “I’m sorry, I can’t answer questions about how we perform our experiments.  Just tell me if you see the man who asked you about how you feel.”

“There!” Adlakad yelled as a man’s image popped on screen next to a label Q48054, “that’s him.  What does the Q48054 mean?”

Both Kernel and Adlakad looked to Not-Kernel as if he’d have some kind of answer.

“That’s a good question,”  Not-Kernel said, “I’ll need to look into that.”

Kernel scoffed, “I thought you were supposed to have all these connections mapped out for us?  But I guess you weren’t ever as good at interconnectivity as you thought you were.”

Not-Kernel laughed mechanically, but it was clear his colleague had cut into his pride more deeply than he wanted to admit.  He tapped a button and the wall at the back of the room flickered to show a large collection of partially overlapping circles.  A red dot appeared near the middle of the screen.  

“My colleague is mocking me for missing this connection in my map of your life.  That dot represents where you sit in the political system of Othera, or rather, where you used to sit when you were there,” Not-Kernel said.  He let the image sink in.  “There’s your hyperfamily,” he continued, gesturing to a small knot of lines overlapping around the red dot.

        Adlakad was shocked.  “How do you know all this about me?” he asked.

“Do you see that thin, brown line?”

Adlakad nodded.

“That is your connection to Solas.”

The thin, brown line connected from Adlakad’s red dot to another blue dot on the far side of the display.  The blue dot was tangled in a much thicker web of lines than Adlakad’s lonely red dot.  

“What’s the point of tracking all those connections?” Adlakad asked.

Not-Kernel breathed in rapidly before speaking, his eagerness to share his considerable knowledge clearly getting the better of his former resistance to answering questions. “The politics of Othera are complex, subtle, omnipresent, and obsessively designed for a balance of fairness and effectiveness.”

“Here we go,” Kernel said, rolling his eyes.

Not-Kernel ignored him, redoubling the volume and rapidity of his speech. “There are hundreds of cross-cutting political establishments each with different criteria for inclusion or exclusion, different goals, and different performance metrics.” The diagram zoomed out to show even more circles criss-crossing. “No single political group is considered a subsidiary of another.  Instead different political groups collaborate to negotiate contracts, pacts, treaties, and laws, which are all really the same thing: economic agreements.”

“That sounds complicated,” Adlakad said.

“It is.  But it wasn’t always so bad,” Not-Kernel said, “an historian’s job has gotten a lot harder after the genocides.”

Adlakad looked down in embarrassment.  Kernel shook his head to keep Not-Kernel from going on.

“What?” Not-Kernel snapped, “it’s only a history lesson of his own damned civilization.  It’s not like I’m telling him something he shouldn’t know already.  There’s nothing that prohibits talking about his planet's history in the protocol.  I checked.”  He turned his attention back to Adlakad.  “You’ve heard of the Second Democratic Genocide, right?”

Adlakad did vaguely remember that from school.  “After the Second Democratic Genocide, Othera abolished democracy,” he said.

Not-Kernel stood up taller with a sanctimonious bearing. “No, they abolished democracy by popular vote,” he said, “since it was really nothing more than a form of populistic madness, anyway.”

Kernel threw his arms in the air, and blurted out a loud cough. “Well, I certainly don’t need to hear you pontificate about this again.”  He reached the door and stepped midway through it, stretching his arms.  “I’m going to take a little walk and let you draw your graphs.”  Then, catching his hand on the door and turning back inside, “This has always been his problem, you know, treating it like a little simulation and not the nuanced story it is.”

The door slid closed, and Adlakad and Not-Kernel were alone staring at each other.  Not-Kernel turned to the notepad to consult the protocol in front of him.  

“Nothing in here about what to do if your co-experimenter just walks out,” he said, “I suppose he’ll just have to deal with the committee when they find out.”

Chapter 4                                 

01:15:04                

“For the stability of our planetary system and our ways of life, we must continue our exploration beyond our solar system, and we must do so at once.”

Craff raised his arm above the crowd and held his hand level to emphasize “stability.” After a prolonged moment of silence for dramatic effect, he realized his hand was actually trembling and quickly returned it to his side.

On any other day, Solas, seated in the audience gathered around Craff, would have shook her head and rolled her eyes at the incongruous, rambling arguments that he was spouting. But today, she knew her every move was being watched—that even the slightest hint of disapproval could spread through the gossip factory of the Grand Counsel and stymie her whole plan. The Grand Counsel was sometimes strangely unpredictable, even for Solas, who’d studied their machinations for years.  She turned her head for a moment to scan the faces around her.  She told herself she just wanted to survey the Counselors’ reactions, but she knew what she was really looking for.  She shivered when she saw.  Her closest friend on the Counsel, Ateinia Ilimitado was already staring back intently at her.

Ateinia was just as unpredictable as the rest of the Counsel, and Solas hadn’t been sure she’d even attend today.  To be honest, Solas knew that she didn’t deserve to have her there.  Ateinia had staked so much on her already—far more than her professional assessment would ever have allowed.  Ateinia was only there because of the life they’d lived before all of this.  That was such a long time ago, Solas had to remind herself.  She turned back toward Craff, keeping silent, and nodding gracefully at his idiotic pandering.

Craff’s assistant advanced his slideshow to the final slide of bold text: Join us and vote to discover the mystery at the edge of the solar system! Craff raised his voice again, louder than before, echoing out his final call to action over the auditorium, “Never before have we had such an opportunity to outpace our earlier efforts and improve our planetary well-being. The time is now to vote to redouble our efforts and continue our extrasolar space program. The future will remember our great decision today, and 15 millennia from now, our descendants will thank us for making a continued Otheran civilization possible.”

The Counsel sat silently in the balconies surrounding the main floor. They didn’t even bother with the formality of a few stomped feet of appreciatory applause.

After perhaps ten seconds of staring and frowning, one of the Counselors broke the silence, “But, why, would you say, should we do this now despite the horrible return on investment from your last failed expedition?”

Craff smiled charmingly, and cast a glance towards Solas. Earlier that morning, after Solas learned that Craff was going to be presenting this case to the Grand Counsel, she had forced him to rehearse in front of her for three hours. After eviscerating his speech’s factual inaccuracies and politically tone-deaf banter, Solas had moved on to the real problem with Craff’s approach: he hadn’t changed anything in his pitch since the beginning of the last mission. She predicted that this would be the first thing asked after his dismal presentation. Craff, like always, had failed to listen to Solas and, like always, Solas was right.

Another Counsellor continued the thought. “Yes, young man, how should we believe in this project after that woman’s failure,” the old Counsellor said, gesturing toward Solas, “Whatever happened to the ship of Adlakad, and why should we not expect the same results?”

The muffled guffaws were becoming less and less muffled as each new member joined the conversation. Craff, as per the rules of Counsel, would not be allowed to answer the rhetorical responses until a five minute gag period had passed. He gripped his speech notes tightly as the Counselors up in the balconies began to sit up and address the government astronomers and economists below.

“We should hear what the scientists think,” yelled one hidden Counsellor from the back of the auditorium, “let them speak their minds before us ignoramuses weigh in.”

The ten astronomers all shifted in their seats, looking towards Solas to speak up. After all, for nearly five years, Solas had been the face of the newly established field of astronomy. In many ways, Solas was considered the only true astronomer on Othera, and the only person to have developed any understanding of what the stars might be. The rest were merely former space transit engineers who’d fallen in love with her mission (and with Solas) when she started advocating for the study of the stars.

Solas wrinkled her brow in a pensive and beautifully thoughtful look, but she remained silent. She felt the urge to survey the Counselors circled around her, but she couldn’t afford to.  

Delf, Solas’s youngest and most inspired student was seated just next to her. She started to stiffen in her chair, confused at Solas’s silence, but brimming with enthusiasm she prepared to address the Counsel herself. Delf had nearly begun to speak, when a commanding glance from Solas brought her back into silence.

An older, curmudgeonly space engineer finally spoke, “Perhaps, to keep us honest, we should first hear what the economists have to say.”

None of the economists even looked up from their dossiers except for one. He spoke in a perfunctory tone. “The economists have nothing to say until the astronomers can give us some estimates of the value of anything they’ll find out there.”

A round of laughter emanated from the Counselors seated above. Another economist, chuckling, spoke next, “But in all seriousness Counselors, all we can really say is that if we have another failed mission, the wasted resources will be decreasing our system’s survival by 41 plus or minus 3 years.”

At this, the entire chamber erupted in noisy “boos” and stern sounding protestations.

An elderly Counsellor raised his voice over the noise.  “I know none of you want to hear from an old dog like me,” he said shuffling out into the aisle, “but I just want to remind you all about what we were celebrating last week on Extinction Day.  Before that last mission, it had been 989 years since anyone had voyaged beyond the 8th planet. Back then, wiser Counselors than you or me had determined that both the 9th and 10th proto-planets possessed no resources worth the cost of attainment.  That was why our much more responsible forebears ratified in the global constitution that there would never again be a wasting of energy on exploration beyond the 8th planet.”

The old Counsellor, like most old Counselors, wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know.  Everyone already knew that the inhabitants of Othera and the 4th and 8th planet moons would survive in their closed interplanetary habitat for another 14,536 ± 153 years. This was an established fact based on models that had never been wrong by more than 1% in almost six centuries. The Extinction Day that the old Counsellor referred to was the annual holiday that celebrated the predicted day, 14 millenia in the future, when their solar system would no longer sustain their existence.   It wasn’t until Solas’s masterfully executed global campaign that those most fundamental assumptions had been questioned for hundreds of years.

Delf stood up from her chair and barked back at the Counselors. “These star studies are an entirely new business,” she said impulsively, “and we need more time to contemplate our results and see if we’ve overlooked something.”

“It wouldn’t be proper to start making wild claims already,” another astronomer continued.

One of the elder Counselors spoke next. “At least from my position,” she said, “there won’t ever be any practical uses to these sky charts.”

Many more Counselors loudly agreed. “We’ve never seen any value to this either. No one on the northern continent has seen anything come from this at all.”

From the floor, an economist looked up to speak mechanically, “One thing we have noted is a 14% change in the reallocation of resources toward Otheran investments on the 6th planet. The manufacturing process on the 4th planet definitely siphoned value from Othera.”

Another Counsellor from a wealthier district resisted. “With our moon and the 4th planet colonized, and the energy extraction satellites orbiting the sun, are we really sure we won’t tap our resources sooner than we believe?”

Four or five of the more highly opinionated Counsellor’s and scientist began speaking over each other, vying to force their opinions’ imprint on the debate.

“Our models have worked so perfectly for hundreds of years. Why gamble on these astronomers?”

“The economists have it right if anyone does.”

“And those stars are so far away.”

“And we should map them all first if we want to find the closest ones.

How do we know the astronomers have it right?”

With some pain flashing across his face, Craff began nodding back and forth between the warring Counselors. It was rare for this many politicians to maintain a vested opinion in the outcome, but, then again, so many rules of Otheran politics had been broken since the astronomers came on the scene. Surprises no longer came as a surprise anymore.

“I think we should focus on Othera’s affairs before we start more exploration.”

“Or at least settle the disputes of the 4th planet.”

“Certainly, we can do more good by focusing our attention on the missed opportunities here.”

“Not to mention that debacle on the 8th planet’s moon that we consistently ignore.”

“We’ve all heard the suggestions about the increases of efficiency that would be possible if we restructured the politics of the 4th planet as well.”

“Yes, yes, but we also know about the potential friction to the restructuring. At least star charts have some consensus.”

"Consensus? You call this consensus?"

“At any rate, we should focus on the matter at hand. The issue on the table is whether to incur the cost to build another space vessel. Plain and simple.”

“Yes, most of the scientists agree, however, that it will take time before we understand how to analyze something so far away.”

“We could be getting caught up in something that it would be cheaper to solve from right here.”

“And maybe they don’t obey the same laws as our sun. Then we’ll never understand until we get there.”

“That could easily explain the discrepancies in our records.”

“Then, anything we decide on today would certainly be wasted.”

“I agree that we’ve certainly wasted enough resources on these personal fascinations.”

“Now, now, we heard the arguments before, and concluded the potential value of the former mission certainly outweighed its costs.”

“Well, let’s just make sure we’re listening to the merits of the argument this time, and not the arguer.”

“Not that the arguer has any particular merits on this subject anyway.”

Solas sat patiently as the anger in the room redoubled and wandered ever closer to her own character assassination.  She couldn’t speak up.  If the tempest of mudslinging and dredging up past mistakes swirled around the room one more time, all the Counselors would be voting on their emotions.  She still had hope.  Amid the flurry of Counsellor voices, she still hadn’t heard Ateinia speak up.  At the thought of Ateinia, Solas let a contented smile inch up along the edges of her lips.

One of the senior Counselors stepped down to the edge of the balcony and raised his hands.  "Counselors, I move that we suspend this topic for another day.  We've clearly heard more than we can handle today, and the worst thing to do would be to continue in this atmosphere."

The approval votes almost immediately began ticking up on the board to the side of the auditorium.  Craff began to shout up to the balcony. “No, this is unfair!” he exclaimed, but the Counsellor’s just rolled their eyes and shouted back down to him to keep quiet. Solas’s gaze fell back to the floor. No one would hear the clever arguments she had taught to Craff the day before. Two assistants silently walked to the front of the hall and escorted Craff out of the auditorium through his protests.

Delf looked to Solas, questioning why she remained silent. The jeers continued from above, and suddenly Delf began to hear Solas’s name repeated in angry tones. As Solas’s stern gaze remained locked on the spot where Craff was standing, Delf began to understand Solas’s silence. There was nothing that she could say that would dissuade them. They had heard her arguments before. They would never listen to her again. They would never listen to Delf either.

Solas couldn’t bring herself to look toward Ateinia again, but she could sense that the moment was coming.  Either Ateinia would address the Counsel, or the entire discussion would be over.  Solas couldn’t dare to take a breath, her mind racing with the question of whether the only person she had ever loved still cared enough to help her.

Some of the economists began to stand and pack their things. “I believe that about finishes this discussion,” the elder economist said flippantly toward the astronomers. The Counselors had retaken their seats and were waiting for the formalities of the discussion to be drawn to a close.

“If you’ll allow me a moment,” a demur, sovereign-sounding voice echoed out from the far end of the chamber.  Solas’ chest swelled with an inward, silent sigh of relief.  Ateinia, stood up from her chair in the far corner of the room. She spoke up more loudly to re-quiet the bickering.

“Yes, yes Counselors,” Ateinia began, “we heard all these points before, when arguing with Solas more than a year ago. And as you no doubt recall, I was one who argued most strongly for the value of the expedition.”

The Counselors quieted, and all eyes turned to Ateinia as she left her pew and paced along the aisle.  She continued, “We know that for hundreds of years the citizens of Othera have been resigned to toil on this boxed-in planet. Before Solas, we had no hope of new adventures, or of the wonders that our people could explore in the furthest reaches of space. In the short year since this expedition was announced, we have seen our people face greater challenges than we have undertaken in five centuries. We as a people have been lifted up with new ambitions, new works of art, and a new sense of purpose. In this year, we’ve seen the greatest increase in our Otheran satisfaction index since that metric was designed. We’ve seen a decrease in the number of domestic disputes being handled by our court system.”

The previous commotion in the room had drawn to a standstill. Even the economists had begun to pay closer attention, and a few even began to nod agreeably with some of the points Ateinia had made. The mood felt like it was shifting.

“In Solas, we had found a truly great leader,” Ateinia continued, “A woman who could inspire the multitudes to change their very way of life. And one year ago, I decided, as did you all, to follow that genius vision through. Together, on behalf of our people, we began a glorious journey to the very end of our known world. And at the center of this entire plan is the one woman, my oldest friend, Solas.”

Solas turned and looked up toward the aisle where Ateinia stood. She had known Ateinia since they were children, growing up together in the wealthy suburbs of the Capital City. It had been Ateinia who first backed Solas and supported her bid to license astronomy as a branch of the Sciences of the State. They had known each other—and loved each other—for decades, and every member of the Counsel knew that.

“And as we have followed her every instruction, we should ask ourselves: How have we been rewarded today? What are the long-term ramifications of the changes she has made? Have our people been happier? Have our dreams been realized?”

Solas’s gaze fell back to the floor of the chamber. A dramatic pause wrapped around the Counsel chamber.

“No,” Ateinia said at last, “none of the changes that she promised have truly helped our society. In short, we understand now that this woman’s vision was an illusion. And now, what we have instead of those dreams is a world that no longer feels content with metered, predictable life that our society has spent centuries perfecting for its citizens.”

A few quiet gasps could be heard in the back of the Counsel.

Ateinia continued, “In response, those astonishingly high rates of satisfaction have dropped to their lowest levels ever. Our courts have been flooded with unprecedented and unpredictable numbers of cases, creating our worst logjam since the Great Deposition. And surely, as Solas failed us so completely, there’s no way to be convinced again. We have her to blame for the first failure, but we would only be able to blame ourselves if we listened again. I am convinced that these star studies should be suspended here indefinitely. We have already wasted resources and lives for this cause, and toward no ascertainable value. I move to suspend our research efforts for a minimum of 25 years to ensure that we no longer waste time on discussing these ridiculous star studies.”

The Counsel erupted in unencumbered applause. Counselors stomped their feet and cheered. Many shouted their agreement with, “That’s just how I feel,” or “Ateinia speaks for me.” All the Counselors were on their feet. Solas had no supporters left.

Craff, looking down at Solas from the door to the auditorium, clenched his fists tightly and dropped his head in shame. Solas remained silent with the pensive look on her face. But as the time drew on and the echo of applause and Ateinia’s last words faded into silence, the neutral, pensive look on her face slowly drooped down into a frown.

The proposition to suspend the activities of the Astronomy Association passed unanimously with no debate. Solas had relied on the surprisingly mercurial nature of the Counsel in launching her program, and as such, she'd always wondered whether the collapse would come just as quickly.

The Counsel was already adjourning, and most of the Counselors were filing out of the auditorium. Ateinia was already gone.

None of the astronomers could move. Terrified, they all looked to Solas for some clue as to what they should do next.

Delf whispered into Solas’s ear, “Did you want me to say anything?”

Solas didn’t look up so Delf continued, “I’m so sorry, I just didn’t know what to do. If I’d have known I would have said something earlier.” Her voice was trembling, mostly with fear, but also with a tinge of anger. How could the woman whom she’d entrusted with so much fail in a shameful silence? It felt impossible to understand, and in those moments, Delf felt the final pieces of her diminishing hope shattering in her mind.

Solas glanced at Delf, but could only muster a gentle shaking of her head. She rose from her seat and paced gently out of the emptied chamber.