But this wasn’t a normal night.

Where Venus ought to have been there was a bright, smudged disc, not quite symmetrical.

“Holy God,” she said.

“I think,” Henry said, “that Venus has exploded.”

The call didn’t wake Monica Beus, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been asleep.

“Yes?”

Monica. It’s me. Alfred.

Alfred Synge: astronomer, colleague, lover back when they and the world were young.

“Where are you?”

Kitts Peak. The observatory. Have you seen it yet?

“What?”

Take a look out the window.

She lay for a minute in the stale warmth of her bed. The insomnia was the worst thing, for her, about the diagnosis.

Breast cancer. What the hell kind of thing was that for her to contract? Her breasts had gotten her nothing but unwelcome attention when she was younger; she was of a generation that had been encouraged to use them as little as possible for what they were intended, which was to suckle children; and now some cosmic ray, a random piece of debris from some long-gone supernova explosion, had come whizzing across space in order to zap her just so…

If any of it made sense, it might be acceptable. But it didn’t. If she had no stake in the world — if her son, Garry, and his family, didn’t exist — it might be reasonable. But she did have.

She missed the ability to sleep, though. She longed for the ability to turn off her mind, the constant thinking, like a camera watching the world that never let up.

But sleepless or not she was warm and comfortable here, her aches and pains fooled into silence for a while, and she felt reluctant to climb out into the harshness of the cold, vertical world. And for what?

“What is it, Alfred? A lunar eclipse? A meteor shower?” Alfred did get a little carried away with his profession at times. It was enviable, a man whose job was his hobby, his passion. Also a little irritating.