Sarah, Melissa and Jane are talking, they are talking about us. I know this because I am sitting upstairs, working on this story, the story of us, and I can hear their voices downstairs in the lounge, laughing and suddenly quieter, almost whispering.

What surprises me most is how comfortable Sarah and Jane are, holding a normal conversation with Melissa. Indeed, is it Melissa? Is my long-dead friend really back with us, or is it an illusion created in our minds by Gabrielle’s sorcery? 

I still don’t know. Now Sarah and Melissa meet often, in this house or in Gabrielle’s old house, which Sarah and I have started calling the “time capsule”. I have told Sarah about Gabrielle’s tale of space-faring and teleports, and she smiled, she smiled knowingly. 

“I have no doubt that Gabrielle’s knows a lot about stars and galaxies,” Sarah said. “And I know also that now you believe everything she tells you,” she added with a kiss on my nose.

I fear a conspiracy. The three – or is it four? – women in my life – my wife, my sister and my old friend back from the dead – are somehow conspiring to make me believe a fairy tale. The old space travellers, a civilisation of awesome power, colonising planets in not one but several galaxies… 

Last night, Sarah made tender love to me, the moon was shining a spectral light through our window, and I could see Melissa’s smile on my wife’s face. Am I being possessed? Is Melissa a devil? 

The three of them are having a good time and I feel a slight pang of jealousy, as if I were excluded from a very select club. Jane’s clear voice rises: she’s telling a story. My younger sister is so beautiful. I am surrounded by beauty, and afraid of interrupting their conversation. 

I asked Sarah if she thought the black holes tale made any sense. Her reply was slow to come, and she finally said: “Our physics breaks down on the horizon of a singularity: we have no way of knowing what goes on inside, or even if there is an inside…” She thought a little longer, then added, “The only thing I know is that their existence is more than a lose hypothesis, they must exist for the universe as we see it to make sense…”

Later on we talked about dark matter, and about experiments designed to prove its existence beyond doubt. Sarah thinks that Gabrielle has given me a very simplified view of what really happens in space travel. But she does believe Gabrielle comes from “elsewhere.” probably far away. Sarah’s theory seems to be that Gabrielle may come from our future. 

I am suddenly aware of silence downstairs, and then of Melissa’s voice, and I listen.

My friend is talking about the old town, our town, the narrow streets, the small shops and museums we used to visit. Jane asks her about the school. The school… There is something unreal about what they say, as if they were watching a film of my youth, as if they could access any second of my past.

I hear Sarah’s steps on the stairs. “Would you like to join us?” 

I sigh. Melissa and Jane are talking in low voices, deep in one to one conversation. There is a hologram floating above the reading table near the fire place. It takes me some time to recognise what it is: the old church in my town, in vivid relief. Sarah says “Melissa has a collection of those. It appears that they can reconstruct the past, too…” Then I realise the hologram shows the church as it was before the war, and my mind slides back to my childhood.

There is an orchestra in the street; people are dancing. Children in old-fashioned clothes play and horse carriages ride past a small group of people standing on the pavement. These are not my memories but someone else’s… 

I look at Melissa: her green eyes are fixed on me. She’s smiling, and Sarah’s hand is on my shoulder.

Picture source:

Assembled from a total of 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings of the telescope, this image of our nearest major galactic neighbor, M31, is the largest Hubble mosaic to date. The 1.5 billion pixels in the mosaic reveal over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the pancake-shaped disk of M31, also known as the Andromeda galaxy. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, Hubble is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in this 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand.

Hubble’s M31 mosaic image, taken by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program, is shown in context with a ground-based image of the entire galaxy. Despite the size of Hubble’s massive mosaic, it does not span even half of the galaxy.

NASA, ESA and Z. Levay (STScI/AURA); PHAT Mosaic: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team and R. Gendler; Ground-based Background Image of M31 (c) 2008 R. Gendler, used with permission

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