Waves of History

Maria

Rigel. Blue-white light so blinding that it would burn out the vision of any human within a hundred astronomical units. Maria stared at it, examining the light of the primary blue-supergiant star for a moment before shifting her gaze to the smaller, dimmer blue subgiant component/ Dimmer, certainly: only as bright as a few tens of thousands of sun-like stars.

One would have to be within fifty astronomical units of that one to go blind, Maria thought wryly.

The stars were stars like anything others, not even cataclysmic variables or latent supernovae (at least not for another few hundred thousand years) and were hardly worth her attention, but she felt drawn to them this day.

Rigel A had a planet, if it could be called such: it was a blob of semi-molten iron-nickel with lakes of lighter metal on the surface. The atmosphere, such as it was, was a thin covering of ionized iron vapor, and the world's chemistry was of pure metal.

Maria studied the planet and the tail of iron vapor that streaked backward along its orbit. Why am I here? she wondered.

She turned her awareness outward, down the electromagnetic spectrum of surrounding space. The interstellar medium was loud here, thanks to Rigel's potent output. She turned slowly in space, searching down the spectrum for something coherent.

A particular region of space was crackling with radio static, very faint. Maria squinted her radio vision at it. It was Earth.

She spun in space and stared at Rigel wildly. The star stared back at her as her thoughts whirled like one of the star's more violent storms. Eight hundred sixty-five light years.

She turned back to Earth, focusing on the megahertz band.

"Time is a wheel in constant motion," she whispered. "Always rolling us along..."

With a startled cry she took off at right angles to the Sol-Rigel line, following the transmission. The music resonated in her simulated brain. She'd heard it before, those songs from pre-Devastation Earth that had been lost to history altogether.

She changed her course, slipping off to the right, away from Earth, back through time. The transmission slowed, stopped, reversed, and a moment later, she had reached the beginning of the song. Before that, even: the announcement from the radio station playing the song, identifying the singer, and the song itself.

"At last I know," she said softly. and sat motionless and let the waves of history wash over her.

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