1

LOTTE

JANUARY 2015

It is the scorpions scuttling across her chest that wake her; her windbreaker whispers and shifts with their movements. She thinks it is rain at first, her half-asleep mind convinced by the sounds of pattering. Wary of the sharp stones digging into her elbows, Lotte props herself up, her eyes on the sky. Not a cloud in sight, just stars popping loud, multiplying in whichever direction she turns, and the moon tossing glare across the desert.

It can’t be rain; she is in one of the driest places in the world. Even during the height of what they call the Bolivian winter, no deluge has ever made its way down here, not in living memory. During the day, snow cracks light off the sides of distant mountains crowned with solemn volcanoes; just twelve kilometres away, the Pacific runs far wider than eyes can take in. There is water all around, but not in the air, not here.

That noise again, delicate, sounding now like a bird hopping about in the undergrowth, and Lotte looks around, letting her eyes adjust as she waits for understanding. Watch and wait — she knows it well enough. On a nearby ridge the four squat shapes of the observatory’s main telescope are silhouetted like office blocks against the sky. The mountain has been flattened here into a platform, so the units of the Very Large Telescope can move about on their tracks; she isn’t as far from civilisation as she might like. Twenty kilometres away, at Cerro Armazones, they are building the Extremely Large Telescope — the unimaginative names never fail to make her smile. As the telescopes get bigger, language struggles to keep up: there is the Giant Magellan Telescope planned for Las Campanas, and the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which had proven just too overwhelming to build. Even the radio telescope being erected across the deserts of Australia and South Africa has a requisitely derivative name — the Square Kilometre Array — having, as it will, a square kilometre of collecting area. It is a constant challenge for astronomers — how to comprehend and communicate the immensity of everything they hold dear. Words are not big enough.

Lotte coughs and swallows, her lips tight and mouth dry. There is so little humidity that the air steals whatever it can, wicking away any moisture a body dares emit. It was here that Pinochet built his concentration camps, repurposing old nitrate mines deep in the Atacama Desert: low dormitories hunkering in the sun, alien in the red desert sands. She cannot fathom how anyone survived out here without the humidified enclosure of the observatory residence, though survival was not exactly what was on the Pinochet regime’s mind. Those camps sound eerily similar to the old detention centres back home — Curtin and Woomera — places so far from the lights and life of cities that they are just as ideal for holding the unwanted as they are for watching the night skies. Pinochet’s political prisoners would track and identify the constellations rolling above; dream of the freedom they might one day attain. Lotte doubts that Australia’s asylum seekers, now marooned on island prisons far from the mainland, are even allowed outside at night.

She is reaching for her water bottle when she sees them, ruby-edged in the moonlight. Almost a dozen, perched on her chest amongst the hills and valleys of her jacket, and there, further down, on her jeans, each one smaller than her hand, an army of neckless thugs. Not a single scorpion is moving now that they have her attention, seemingly indignant at their exploration being interrupted. Their tails are raised in parentheses, a synchronised swimming team of attack, and Lotte is mesmerised, impressed by their aggressive righteousness. Then, a scratch at her collar.

She scrambles to her feet, abruptly shaking the scorpions off, jiggling at the sleeves of her jacket and dancing about. Are they poisonous? They must be, why the hell else would they have tails like that, pincers at the ready? For holding hands? She stops moving, alert to any possible activity against her skin, her breath sharp in her chest. The air is thin up here. Even after almost five years she still finds herself wheezing if she walks up the road to the control room of the VLT instead of catching a ride on the shuttle. Walking isn’t strictly allowed — no one wants any kind of accident, not this far from proper medical help — but everyone understands the need to get out once in a while, to stretch your legs and pretend you have somewhere to go other than the telescope platform or base camp. There is a gym at the residence, and a swimming pool in the lobby, its water feeding the air while the surrounding palm trees sway hopefully, oblivious that the sky they are reaching towards is capped by a glass dome, and covered at night by an umbrella that unfurls to block the residence light so it doesn’t interfere with the observatory. They’d held a staff Christmas party there, paper hats and Christmas bonbons strewn about the atrium, the babble of heavily accented English and Spanish hanging in the air, the occasional outburst of laughter or exclamation in any number of languages. Her team had toasted Lotte to send her on her way; five years of service, and she had little to express but gratitude for their dedication and hard work. Promises of meeting again that would be fulfilled by circumstance of employment rather than any genuine attempt at friendship — such was the nature of the job, people coming and going from all over the world. She would miss them; she would miss the work more.

The scorpions disperse, skating camouflaged over rocks and pebbles. It is low now, the moon, skimming the horizon, and if she stays out long enough, another hour perhaps, she’ll see it burn deep orange toward the mountains. Dare she sit down, or will the little fuckers come back? Properly awake, she is alert to the sounds of the desert now — the slippery trickle of sand over rock, the hum of the wind crossing the ridge of the dune.

Lotte stamps her feet together, trying to get a little warmth into them; it always seems impossible during the mild, sunny days that it will be so cold at night, but the Atacama is a place of extremes. Especially in one regard. Lotte tips her face to the sky and drinks in the view. Millions of stars fill the vast space above the mountains. She spots the Scorpius constellation easily: riding high, its brightest star is tinged red, holding the place of the creature’s heart. Eight hundred times the size of the sun, and it looks like nothing, hundreds of light years away. It seems impossible that the desert scorpions wouldn’t know of their colossal namesake, watching over them and chasing Orion through the sky since the beginning of their existence. Its tail curls from the Milky Way, the sting marked by the paired Cat’s Eyes stars. At least ten planets have been discovered in that constellation alone, and Lotte is proud of her role in this. But it isn’t even a drop in the ocean: a conservative estimate places 160 billion planets in the Milky Way itself. There’s every chance one might prove as habitable as Earth, and no chance at all. So much work to be done. But not by her, not right now: tomorrow, Lotte will be down the mountain and taking the bus to the airport at Antofagasta; a flight to Santiago, and then another to Australia. She’d been back just once in five years, briefly, to sort things out with Vin and renew her visa. But she’d avoided almost everyone else, hadn’t even told them she was in the country. This time, though, she doesn’t know how long she will be staying. And she doesn’t think she’ll be able to do it alone.

The sky has been her constant companion over the last five years, even if she sometimes forgot it was there — her nights were spent in the fluorescent-lit control room, comparing data and plotting the following night’s observations; her days were spent sleeping in one of the comfortingly austere rooms at the residence. Odd how little time astronomers actually spend looking up at the sky — just looking, not measuring, or plotting, or reading.

Slung between two hills and buried underground, the residence building is a bunker by any other name, and if it weren’t for the internet, a person could spend months in there unaware as to whether the outside world was collapsing entirely. Since she’s been here, it feels like every time she goes online, the planet is reaching for its endgame: Ebola breaking out across Africa; airplanes disappearing or being shot down; schoolgirls being abducted en masse. Not to mention the bushfires, earthquakes, and floods, as biblical as any gospel writer could hope for. All of it happening within 40,000 kilometres, yet somehow seeming so much further away than the celestial bodies her work is concerned with.

Until recently, Lotte had spent less and less time on the internet: the voices increasingly histrionic, the world both despairing and incredulous as events seemed to spin out of control. Yet to an observer like herself, nothing substantial had changed. Like other planets, the Earth’s history could be understood in chunks of thousands of years, its current period one of unremarkable stability.

Much of her time is time spent looking at objects to confirm there has been no change, so that when there is change it can be accurately measured. Each observation holds potential significance, the possibility of a great uncovering. Over the years, her team has predicted with confidence that every red dwarf in the Milky Way hosts at least one planet, and that a quarter of these are likely to be habitable. Recently, they’d identified an Earth twin. Only slightly larger than Earth, and inhabiting the elusive ‘Goldilocks’ zone: not so close to its sun that all life would burn up, not so far away it would freeze. This discovery of a possibly liveable planet had lit up Twitter for twenty-four hours: how long might it take to get there? What would be found when we did? Fleeting dreams that promised a future once the human race had finished trashing Earth; musings about alien life forms and colonisation. It was nonsense, of course: all the team hopes to find is water, in some recognisable form. And they doubted even that was achievable, guessing early on that the planet’s makeup was most akin to that of Venus — scorching hot with a thick, soupy atmosphere. But Lotte cannot deny that she loves it when the public gets interested; when they can see, however briefly and selfishly, the worth of her work. It justifies all the hours she spends contemplating distant, barren worlds when, arguably, there are more pressing things to be doing for this world.

A fox looms out of the desert, disappearing as soon as Lotte moves her head to look at it. She turns slightly away and stares towards the ridge, relying on her peripheral vision in the dark. The fox reappears, a grey skeleton of a creature, the moonlight fraying its fur. The sound it releases is guttural — a purr almost, deep in the throat — and Lotte interprets it as a warning, taking a quick step back. What the hell is she doing out here all alone?

•

It was Lotte’s mother, Helen, who’d told her that retrospect works like a telescope: looking back in time to predict what will come — but never soon enough. The job that took Lotte to the Atacama Desert wasn’t really the beginning of the end; she is not that naive. The map of the end is always present, right from the moment of conception. A star’s lifespan is determined by its original mass, expanding as it runs out of hydrogen then helium, eventually collapsing and exploding, a neutron star or a black hole left in its place.

Knowing this — the inevitability of everything — as Lotte sat in the car park of the Siding Spring Observatory five years earlier, she wondered how the air could be so indifferent to what it wrapped itself around that it barely bothered to rustle the leaves of the languid gum trees. The few vehicles that were left in the visitor’s area crouched in flickering shade; dry leaves sidled up against each other beside the tyres. The children had gone mad, running and leaping at the treated-pine fence posts, kicking at the hardened clay ground and stomping on the ants that trailed, panicking, from one hole to another. The children’s faces were smeared with icy pole. Having spent too long trooping about the observatory, looking and not touching, they grabbed at anything they could reach, peeling strips of bark from the trees, kicking at exposed roots. Two or three of them were hanging from a broken bough, clowning, jerking at the branch, which clutched its leaves like a cheerleader’s pom-pom. The parents were squinting at their phones. Tapping. Swiping. A playground of boredom, the children unimpressed, the parents unaware, the observatory dome a disapproving matryoshka ghost looming over them.

Lotte sat in her car with the heat building, the key in the ignition. She’d just finished a week-long stint at the observatory and she didn’t want to turn the key, put the car in reverse, manoeuvre her way out of the car park to drive home to Canberra — it was too long to comfortably do in one day, too short to bother stopping overnight. But the university in Canberra ran and staffed much of the observatory, sited up here in the far reaches of New South Wales, so, first as a PhD student and later a researcher, it was a trip Lotte had made many times. And this would be the last for a while. Her car, a beat-up maroon Alfa Romeo, was eighteen years old. The air-conditioning only worked when she got above sixty, and the radio aerial had been snapped off the same night the badge had been prised from the hood. Twisting to check that there were no rabid children behind her, she turned the key. Best to get it over with.

She was coasting down the winding road, past the billboard of tiny Mercury, and onward towards Venus, when her phone rang. Vin. And with the thought of him came that all too familiar feeling of happiness tinged with something else she had refused, so far, to identify.

I just got your message, he said. I’m so glad you’ll be home tonight.

I will. The clouds are already massing, so we won’t get a clear view tonight. Luckily, I’ve already collected enough data; I can be home a day early.

That part wasn’t a lie. In the photo displayed on her mobile, which was mounted on the dash, Vin was smiling at her, but she could almost see the disappointment that would wash across him when she told him her news. She glanced at his perfect teeth, the cowlick that made his fringe either stick up or flop down, and which he kept threatening to shave off. His eyebrows that curved upwards like the Golden Gate Bridge, leaving him looking constantly quizzical. Maybe it would be easier to do by phone, to give him a chance to hide his true emotions. Which she was counting on him to do; she wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he pressed her, they both knew that.

Lotte pulled into the parking bay beneath the billboard of Earth, to let a LandCruiser travelling in the opposite direction climb past her up the narrow road.

Where are you at the moment?

His reply was garbled as his words bounced up to the satellite and back down again, distorted by the hundreds of kilometres between them. It was mid-afternoon; most likely, Vin would be sitting on the edge of his desk, one arm across his body, the other holding his phone. He would have kicked his shoes off as soon as he walked into his office; he’d be flexing his toes as he dialled her number. She knew him so well; surely he would understand.

I found a house we can look at, it’s got an open inspection tomorrow, said Vin, his voice clearing the static. It’s three bedrooms, with a study, and it’s probably only a twenty-minute drive for each of us because I could take the Parkway.

Lotte jerked the handbrake free, continued rolling down the hill. She would tell him tonight, in person. Right now, she needed to be moving, to feel like she was actually going somewhere. Vin kept talking at her; she picked up speed, and his words were lost beneath the glockenspiel of the gravel flicking up from the road, pinging against the car’s undercarriage.

That sounds great. Sorry, you keep cutting out — I’m going to have to go, I’ve got to get some petrol.

That’s okay, we can talk about it when you get home. What time will you be?

Hopefully by around ten.

Alright, drive safe. Love you.

Love you, too.

And if he heard the sigh in her voice, she hung up before he could say anything about it. The sun stepped behind a bank of cloud, and shadow lumbered across the national park. Lotte turned left at the T-intersection toward Coonabarabran, the jumbled topography of the Warrumbungles retreating to the horizon in her rear-view mirror. She would tell him about the job offer tonight, over a glass of wine. Or maybe it would be better left until morning.

Out on the flat, Jupiter thrust its portly belly towards the road, its festoons faded from years of relentless sun. Lotte noticed for the first time that its stripes were like a cat burglar’s shirt: fitting for a planet known as a stealth body, hiding from any radar courtesy of its lack of surface. There were nine of these in all, billboards with 3-D models protruding, haunting roadside rest stops at measured intervals all the way from Pluto at the Visitors’ Centre in Dubbo to the observatory at Siding Spring, where the main telescope represented the sun. Lotte had always felt disappointed by this. To have come so far and then be greeted by what was, essentially, a large white shed, rather than a massive yellow globe? It was something of a let-down, even with its domed roof.

Her own mother had been part of the group who’d created this series of billboards, prosaically named the ‘solar system drive’. All over the country, amateur astronomy groups raised money through sausage sizzles and raffles, passing a hat around at the end of talks at the local observatory, and earnestly pleading on local radio, and to anyone who might listen, that it was important to nurture children’s bona fide curiosity in the universe. Lotte had already moved away to university when the project started, and she recalled sketches strewn across the dining table when she came home to visit, detailing what each planet billboard would look like, how big they would need to be, what they could be constructed from. In the beginning her mother was adamant that the model would be an exact replica, thirty-eight times smaller than the real thing — the diameters of the planets, their location in orbit, everything had been calculated to a precise scale. By the time local-council regulations and the road authority had intervened, arguing over who’d be responsible for maintaining the recycled-plastic picnic furniture, and ensuring it wouldn’t distract drivers, the model had become skewed, more representational than scientific. At the time, Lotte had been embarrassed by her mother’s fanaticism for the project, the way she treated it as though it were serious scientific research when it was basically an overblown school-project diorama. Now she wished she had paid more attention.

She drove into Coonabarabran, turned right at the clock tower, and drove out again, the small town traversed in under a minute. And to think, she wouldn’t be back here for at least twelve months. The excitement built in her gut — a position at the International Astronomical Observatory; it was what she’d been working towards all these years. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with being in Australia; on the contrary, Australia had some of the clearest skies and most useful equipment in the world. But to be in Chile at the IAO, and to be working on the newly launched planet-hunting project? It would put her right in the thick of things, give her a basis for all the other research she wanted to do. Surely Vin would understand.

Anaemic-looking, Uranus clung hopelessly to its billboard background of midnight-blue sky as Lotte drove by. She could guess what was in the pithy description printed beneath the fibreglass model: something about Uranus being the only planet tipped on its side, its axis running almost horizontal so it seems to trundle about the Sun, rather than gracefully twirl. These were the kind of descriptions her mother used when she gave talks at the local observatory, animated and passionate. Lotte remembers sitting in the back row, both proud and slightly embarrassed by her mother’s zealous delivery. Uranus’s vertical ring system is so dark it’s unable to reflect the meagre sunlight the planet receives, thus remaining near invisible, Helen would tell the audience with awe, her enthusiasm impossible to resist.

A position at the IAO: her mother would have been proud.

•

Five weeks after leaving Siding Spring, and only a few days before Christmas, Sydney’s streets were overrun with anxious shoppers. She had sailed into the waiting room that morning full of confidence, only to be told that her appointment had been delayed until four o’clock. Anger and a curt manner had not helped: in the kindly-yet-firm tone for which she had surely been hired, the receptionist told Lotte to come back later. Lotte had tried to reason with her: she’d come all the way from Canberra, what was she to do all day? Not to mention, the information she was there for would already be sitting in her medical records. The receptionist could even glance at it if she wanted, she could give Lotte a little hint — positive or negative — and she would be on her way. The receptionist had turned back to her computer, lips pursed, and Lotte had slunk out of the room, defeated.

In a department store, she bought a new pair of shoes as a gift for herself; she liked them very much. The heels of the shoes unfurled beneath her own, nudging her hips forward, an invitation. She pictured Vin bending down to unbuckle one strap and then the other, his delight infused with serious intent. They were lipstick red, a small buckle on the ankle of each, and she wore them out of the store. On the street, the glass-fronted shops blasted their chill at the passers-by.

Snatches of frenetic electronica sailed over the crowds, scrapping with the Santa-hat-wearing Salvation Army choristers stationed at the entrance to a mall. The smell of cinnamon drifted from a churros shop, followed too quickly by the cold reek of salmon, sushi rolls laid out on a cushion of frilly lettuce. Her stomach clenched and revolted, scrambling at her ribs. Feeling faint, Lotte lunged toward the curve of a metal bench, but a doughy woman who already sat there heaved her shopping bags onto the only empty bit of seat.

Can I sit for a moment?

But the woman rifled through her bags, determined not to see or hear Lotte, who paused, swallowing down her sudden nausea, and then walked on. She had no reason to be nervous, she told herself. Whatever she would find out in the appointment would be simply information; it wouldn’t change what was already inside of her. Her ankles were tentative in her new shoes, forcing her to mince when she wanted to stride. Suddenly, it was all too much. The tears came on without warning, her face tense and teeth clenched as she tried to keep from sobbing. Searching for sanctuary, Lotte veered into the lobby of a large hotel, catching a glimpse of her own startled face in the revolving door. Dropping onto a couch, the impetus to cry left as swiftly as it had arrived. Why could the day not go as planned? How was she to get through the hours of not knowing until four o’clock? She was supposed to get her results and drive back to Canberra. All the information at the ready — and then, finally, she would tell Vin about the job.

It had been over a month since she had accepted the position at the IAO, but still she hadn’t found the right time to tell her husband. Every Saturday was spent at auctions and open-for-inspections, Vin determined to take advantage of those vendors who wanted their property decisions settled by Christmas. To Lotte, the houses all looked the same. Bedrooms, bathrooms, garages. All of the necessary and much of the superfluous; nevertheless, Lotte managed to ask the right questions, share due considerations. She would only be away twelve months, she reasoned. She found herself leaning toward the houses that needed renovation — the more complicated the better, as if Vin could be distracted from her absence with a torrent of tradesmen and visits to Bunnings.

In all the years they’d been together, Vin had only ever been supportive; yet that didn’t stop Lotte from swallowing the words down, and failing to even hint that by the end of January she’d be halfway across the hemisphere. He’d be insulted to think she was ‘asking’ him for permission, she told herself. Which she wasn’t, of course — she was simply telling him she’d been offered a prestigious twelve-month position that happened to be in Chile. He could come over in the middle; they could travel to Machu Picchu, and the salt plains of Bolivia. Hike in Patagonia; he’d love that. And still, she hadn’t told him.

Lotte pulled out her phone, but it wasn’t Vin she called.

Hello!

Hi! How’s things?

Good. Guess what? I’m in Sydney for some Christmas shopping. What are you up to? Lotte blinked away her tears, and settled back into the couch. She watched an older couple scurry out of the revolving doors into the hotel lobby, looking startled by the wheeled suitcases that chased them.

You should have told me you were coming, said Eve. I would have taken the day off work.

It was a last-minute thing. I thought there might be a few things I’d need before I go overseas.

I’m so jealous. I’ve heard there’s some excellent mountain biking in Chile. Down south, I think.

As long as you’re not thinking about that road in Bolivia that all the tourists go down. Hundreds of people have died there.

Amateurs! Eve laughed. So, what did Vin say about it all?

Lotte didn’t answer. She watched the couple advance to the service desk, lean over their luggage to talk to the concierge. As one man spoke, the other rested his hand on his partner’s shoulder.

You haven’t told him, have you?

Lotte could hear Eve’s disapproval, imagine her steely-eyed gaze.

What are you waiting for?

I don’t know, said Lotte. He’s just so intent on this house-hunting thing, I feel bad telling him I won’t be there for the next year.

He’ll be fine. He’s always fine. It’s only for twelve months.

I know. I will tell him. Look, do you want to grab a drink tonight? I’ve got a thing at four, but it should only take half an hour. We can have a Christmas catch-up.

Sorry, I can’t, said Eve. I’ve ... I’ve already got plans.

A date? Who? Tell me!

No one you know.

I’d hope not! I want to hear all about it. Are you sure you don’t want to come to Vin’s parents’ for Christmas lunch? You know you’re always welcome.

Thanks, but no, I’m going to take the van, head out of town. When do you leave for Chile?

End of January. Lotte watched the couple head to the lift, now liberated of their luggage. Come and stay with us before then, okay?

That would be great. Just make sure you tell Vin, alright? Tonight.

Promise, said Lotte. Talk soon.

When she hung up, the ill feeling returned. She considered her reflection in the mirrored column opposite. Straightened her shoulders, lifted her brown hair off her shoulders and tied it up with an elastic from her wrist. She had been eating badly, working nights to avoid Vin, and it showed in her skin, too pale for summer. What sometimes, to her eye, looked voluptuous now looked heavy, dragging. She really should do some exercise, but even the thought of those endless, repetitive hours bored her.

•

Four years ago, the summer her mother was dying, Lotte had given up making any effort with her own health. Helen had been admitted to hospital after her final round of chemotherapy, fatigued and nauseous, her body telling her what her mind already knew: this time, the treatment wasn’t working. It was the middle of summer, the accumulated heat of each day lingering into the next. Lotte’s dad was working mornings at the council offices while Lotte slept in her childhood bed, willing the day not to start. After breakfast, she would walk up the town’s wide main street, the thick northerly wind buffeting every surface so that breathing was like drinking. When Lotte came into the hospital ward she would count the heavy, nodding heads of the roses outside her mother’s window, noting any casualties that had occurred since her previous visit. At the base of each bush was a brass plaque, the hospital beautification committee unperturbed by the thoughts that might haunt a patient looking out the window and seeing a roll call of names and paired dates.

As her mother’s body had shrunk, Lotte’s had grown. She could see her choices reflected in its sway and give, her waist soft and seemingly limitless beneath her own curious fingers. She’d gone up at least two dress sizes since her wedding six months before. She knew exactly what was to blame: hastily racing across to the shopping-centre food court and eating hot chips and dim sims, so as to avoid sitting down to lunch with her father. Cheese-and-salami panini in the hospital canteen, mugs of sweet and foamy chai lattes and, most of all, the odd, firm coolness of the protein-enhanced puddings that were tucked onto her mother’s tray with every meal. Lotte had acquired a taste for these puddings, unsure whether they actually dissolved or simply dispersed around her mouth. The pastel strawberry and banana flavours reminded her of childhood, a place she would rather be, even as her ballooning thighs and belly took her further from it.

One morning, squashing spoonfuls of pudding against the roof of her mouth and counting the roses, Lotte didn’t notice her mother was crying until a nurse appeared by the bedside, dabbing at Helen’s cheeks with a tissue.

Is it the pain, Helen? asked the nurse. Would you like something more for it? Just let me know if you do.

No, no.

Helen attempted a smile. She bared her teeth, loose in their gums, and Lotte watched, horrified, afraid that her mum might fall apart in front of her. Every part of her body was rickety and rattling, with too many empty spaces.

The nurse did not comment on Lotte’s silent presence, nor on Lotte’s seeming inability to wipe away her own mother’s tears.

Are you uncomfortable, is that it?

The nurse tugged at one of the three pillows her mother was leaning against, jammed in so tightly they seemed poised to catapult her from the bed. A plastic sheet crackled beneath the starched hospital linen, reporting on every movement.

I just …

Lotte looked away, not wanting to watch her mother scrabble about for words. So often Helen started a sentence only to trail off, unaware that she was leaving it unfinished, growing irritated if prompted to continue but upset if no one seemed to be listening. Lotte had taken to waiting silently, seating herself just out of her mother’s direct line of sight; she was having trouble masking her boredom. Taking tiny spoonfuls, she concentrated on her pudding, following it around her mouth with her tongue as it disintegrated.

Or is your mouth dry? Just take a little sip, dear, you’ll feel better.

The nurse held a plastic cup with a straw to her mother’s lips. Lotte looked back just in time to see the water, mixed with whatever else was in her mother’s stomach, splash over her chest as she spluttered and vomited.

Whoops! A little too much, maybe. We’ll just clean you up.

Sorry, sorry.

Helen’s face crumpled as she looked down at her chest then up at the nurse. She had become meek in front of the nursing staff — apologising for any inconvenience she was causing, prefacing every comment with: when you have a moment. You’ve never been so kind to us, Lotte had joked, after her mum had simpered at a nurse who’d brought an extra blanket. I never needed to be, remarked her mother, showing for the first time just how defeated she was.

It’s okay, these things happen, said the nurse. She turned to Lotte, nodding at the cupboard.

Can you just grab one of your mother’s nightgowns?

Lotte found a nightgown, then helped by holding Helen’s slight body forward as the nurse changed her, staring at the wall, not wanting to see the intrusions on her mother’s abdomen. Extrusions was more accurate. The wide tube of the colostomy bag and its stent; the stubby opening where the chemotherapy had been delivered once the IV had proved ineffectual.

You can go, said Helen, as Lotte gently placed her back onto the pillows. You don’t need to stay with me all day. It’s bad enough that your father’s been working these ridiculous hours, let alone you coming all this way. You should be at work, you can’t let things slide just because you’ve got a contract now. You’ve got to keep up with the others.

It’s fine, Mum. I want to be here. Besides, it’s university holidays — it’s always quieter this time of year.

This isn’t much of a holiday.

Her mother closed her eyes then, letting her head drop to the side, and the nurse scribbled something in the folder at the end of the bed before leaving the room.

Seriously, Lotte. Just go.

Mum, stop it.

It was yet another version of an argument they’d had many times over the last few years — ever since her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. From the beginning, Lotte had wanted to move home to help. Not sure that her father could cope, not sure that her mother would want him to. But Helen had insisted that everyone carry on as normal; she didn’t want the world to come to a grinding halt, just because of an illness. She’d beaten breast cancer, she’d beat this one, too.

Will you at least promise me you’ll bring Vin down to stay? Her eyes opened, showing a tiny spark of eagerness. He shouldn’t be up there all alone.

Okay, Mum.

Good. Helen smiled. Now, tell me about your new project. How many exoplanets do you hope to find?

We’re not sure. It’s hard to find them; they’ve only found two with this new technology. It relies on the Doppler effect — a planet’s gravity will have an effect on its host star, making it wobble. So we watch the stars, and when we detect that movement from their wavelength, we know there’s a planet nearby.

I would have thought you had a much fancier way of finding them these days. It seems so old-fashioned.

No need to reinvent the wheel, Mum.

And what do you do when you find them?

We calculate their size and mass by measuring the eccentricity of their orbits: the tilt of their orbital plane, and their resonance, or how they move in time with others in their system. There’s a lot to consider.

It’s like scoring ballroom dancing, Helen pointed out, delighted. You’re awarding points for measurements that could seem arbitrary, but are vital to those in the know.

Lotte laughed at her mother’s version: Helen could always make the most complicated scientific concepts graspable. She had a habit of using astronomy metaphors to explain things that had nothing to do with astronomy, and while it had bugged Lotte in the past — it was too whimsical, too quixotic — increasingly, she had found herself doing it. Watching her mother’s decline over the last few months, her desperate lurching from one effort to another, had made Lotte think of planets, greedily grabbing at anything that came near — a satellite, a comet, a space shuttle — and turning it into a moon to keep them company. As she became more unwell, Helen dropped and picked up projects at random. She told Lotte that there were certain books she just had to read, but then they would be discarded by the bed when her mother picked up her knitting, needles furiously clacking until they, too, were put aside. She was the same with her friends: asking them to come and visit, and then having nothing to say, making it obvious she was impatient for them to leave. Lotte watched with sympathy and despair, unable to change her mother’s trajectory, knowing what all these attempts at diversion were trying to conceal.

This would be Helen’s last visit to the hospital. They all knew it.

You don’t need to be here all the time, Helen said after a long silence. You should be back at the observatory. It makes me feel like you’re waiting for something.

Even now, her mother managed to look formidable. She stared at Lotte defiantly, daring her to say it. Since the cancer had returned, it had refused to respond to any treatments. The palliative-care team had come to do their assessment yesterday; they were at the house now, installing a hospital bed and drawing up schedules with Lotte’s father.

I am waiting. Lotte forced down her annoyance, tossing the empty pudding container into the bin. Waiting for you not to be so bloody difficult.

This, at least, drew a smile; her mother could only ever take ‘difficult’ as a compliment.

Go on, Lotte. Go outside, enjoy some sun. For me at least. I’ll still be here when you get back.

They both ignored the fact that she wouldn’t be able to say that for much longer.

•

Sitting in the hotel lobby, Lotte looked at her watch. It was only late morning; she had hours to fill before her appointment. Four years since her mother’s death, and what had Lotte achieved? A bounty of publications, but nothing truly extraordinary — that’s why she needed to go to Chile. All her work, years of it, would come to nothing if she couldn’t discover proof of the planets her research pointed to. To be part of something so big — Vin would understand. And time might be running out. She pulled herself up from the couch and walked back out into the fray.