Robert Sawyer: Star Light, Star Bright

“Daddy, what are those?” My young son, Dalt, was pointing up. We’d floated far away from the ancient buildings, almost to where the transparent dome over our community touches the surface of the great sphere.

Four white hens were flying across the sky, their little wings propelling them at a good clip. “Those are chickens, Dalt. You know—the birds we get eggs from.”

“Not the chickens ,” said Dalt, as if I’d offended him greatly by suggesting he didn’t know what they were. “Those lights. Those points of light.”

I squinted a bit. “I don’t see any lights,” I replied. “Where are they?”

“Everywhere,” he said. He swung his head in an arc, taking in the whole sky. “Everywhere.”

“How many points do you see?”

“Hundreds. Thousands.”

I felt my back bumping gently against the surface; I pushed off with my palm, rising into the air again. The ancient texts I’d been translating said human beings were never really meant to live in such low gravity,but it was all I, and countless generations of my ancestors, had ever known. “There aren’t any points of light, Dalt.”

“Yes, there are,” he insisted. “There are thousands of them, and—look!—there’s a band of light across the sky there.”

I faced in the direction he was pointing. “I don’t see anything except another chicken.”

“No, Daddy,” insisted Dalt. “Look!”

Dalt was a good boy. He almost never lied to me—and I couldn’t see why he would lie to me about something like this. I maneuvered so that we were hovering face to face, then extended my hand.

“Can you see my hand clearly?” I said.

“Sure.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Daddy…”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two.”

“And do you see lights on them, as well?”

“On your fingers?” asked Dalt incredulously.

I nodded.

“Of course not.”

“You don’t see any lights in front of my fingers? Do you see any on my face?”

“Daddy!”

“Do you?”

“Of course not. The lights aren’t down here. They’re up there!”

I touched my boy’s shoulder reassuringly. “Tomorrow, we’ll go see Doc Tadders about your eyes.”

We hadn’t built the protective dome—the clear blister on the outer surface of the Dyson sphere (to use the ancient name our ancestors had given to our home, a term we could transliterate but not translate). Rather, the dome was already here when we’d come outside. Adjacent to it was a large, black pyramidal structure that didn’t seem to be part of the sphere’s outer hull; instead, it appeared to be clamped into place. No one was exactly sure what the pyramid was for, although you could enter it from an access tube extending from the dome. The pyramid was filled with corridors and rooms, and lots of control consoles marked in the script of the ancients.

The transparent dome was much larger than the pyramid—plenty big enough to cover the thirty-odd buildings the ancients had built here, as well as the concentric circles of farming fields we’d created by importing soil from within the interior of the Dyson sphere. Still, if the dome hadn’t been transparent, I probably would have felt claustrophobic within it; it wasn’t even a pimple on the vastness of the sphere.

We’d been fortunate that the ancients had constructed all these buildings under the protective dome; they served as homes and work spaces for us. In many cases, we could only guess at the original purposes of the buildings, but the one that housed Dr. Tadders office had likely been a warehouse.

After sleeptime, I took Dalt to see Tadders. He seemed more fascinated by the wall diagram the doctor had of a human skeleton than he was by her eye chart, but we’d finally got him to spin around in midair to face it.

I was floating freely beside my son. For an instant, I found myself panicking because there was no anchor rope looped around my wrist; the habits of a lifetime were hard to break, even after being here, on the outside of the Dyson sphere, for all this time. I’d lived from birth to middle age on the inside of the sphere, where things tended to float up if they weren’t anchored. Of course, you couldn’t drift all the way up to the sun. You’d eventually bump against the glass roof that held the atmosphere in. But no one wanted to be stuck up there, waiting to be rescued; it was humiliating.

Out here, though, under our clear, protective dome, things floated down , not up; both Dalt and I would eventually settle to the padded floor.

“Can you read the top row of letters?” asked Doc Tadders, indicating the eye chart. She was about my age, with pale blue eyes and red hair just beginning to turn gray.

“Sure,” said Dalt. “Eet, bot, doo, shuh, kee.”

Tadders nodded. “What about the next row?”

“Hih, fah, roo, shuh, puh, ess.”

“Can you read the last row?”

“Ayt, doo, tee, nuh, tee, ess, guh, hih, fah, roo.”

“Are you sure about the second letter?”

“It’s a doo, no?” said Dalt.

If there’s any letter my son should know, it should be that one, since it was the first in his own name. But the character on the chart wasn’t a doo; it was a fah.

Dr. Tadders jotted a note in the book she was holding, then said, “What about the last letter?”

“That’s a roo.”

“Are you sure?”

Dalt squinted. “Well, if it’s not a roo, then it’s an shuh, no?” “Which do you think it is?”

“A shuh… or a roo.” Dalt shrugged. “It’s so tiny, I can’t be sure.”

I could see that it was a roo; I was surprised that I had better vision than my son did.

“Thanks,” said Tadders. She looked at me. “He’s a tiny bit nearsighted,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.” She faced Dalt again. “What about the lights in front of your eyes? Do you see any of them now?”

“No,” said Dalt.

“None at all?”

“You can only see them in the dark,” he said.

Tadders pushed against the padded wall with her palm, which was enough to send her drifting across the room toward the light switch; the ancients had made switches that were little rockers, instead of the click-in/click-out buttons we build. She rocked the switch, and the lighting strips at the edges of the padded roof went dark. “What about now?”

Dalt sounded puzzled. “No.”

“Let’s give your eyes a few moments to adjust,” she said.

“It won’t make any difference,” said Dalt, exasperated. “You can only see the lights outside.”

“Outside?” repeated Tadders.

“That’s right,” said Dalt. “Outside. In the dark. Up in the sky.”

Dalt was the first child born after our group left the interior of the Dyson sphere. Our little town had a population of 240 now, of which fifteen had been born since we’d come outside. Dalt’s usual playmate was Suzto, the daughter of the couple who lived next door to my wife and me in a building that had clearly been designed by the ancients to be living quarters.

All adults spent half their days working on their particular area of expertise, which, for me, was translating ancient documents stored in the computers inside the buildings and the pyramid, and the other half doing the chores that were needed to support a fledgling society. But after work, I took Dalt and Suzto for a float. We drifted away from the lights of the ancient buildings, across the fields of crops, and out toward the access tunnel that led to the pyramid.

I knew that the surface of the sphere, beneath us, was curved, of course, and, here on the outside, that it curved down. But the sphere was so huge that everything seemed flat. Oh, one could make out the indentations that were hills on the other side of the sphere’s shell, and the raised plateaus that water collected in. Although we were on the frontier—the outside of the sphere!—we were still only one bodylength away from the world we’d left behind; that’s how thick the sphere’s shell was. But the double-doored portal that led back inside had been sealed off; the people on the interior had welded it shut after we’d left. They wanted nothing to do with whatever we might find out here, calling our quest forknowledge of the exterior universe a sacrilege against the wisdom of the ancients.