When Carl was one, his mother sang ‘twinkle twinkle little star.’
When Carl was two, his father told him ‘star light, star bright.’
When Carl was three, his aunt showed him the big dipper.
When Carl was four, his uncle watched ‘Pinocchio’ with him.
And so in retrospect it was all very unavoidable and unsurprising that when Carl turned eight he would make the reckless and impulsive decision to wish upon a star.
It was a good clear night and more importantly an enormous windstorm had utterly crushed the local power grid, giving several million people a good view of the night sky for the first time in about five years. You could see Orion and also his belt. You could see the squiggly blobby thing that could be Draco or maybe Cassiopeia. You could see the North Star and also everything south of it.
Carl considered his options, then picked out a little glowing dot on the farther edge of the horizon.
“That one,” he said. And it was done.
He didn’t wish for anything in particular. Nobody had told him otherwise.
For a good while, very little happened. Wishes travel faster than light, but stars are still very far away. There’s so much nothing between them and us.
Then it hit the star. And it paid attention. All of it.
This star was a flaming ball of gas and fusion two million miles across and of virulent and explosive intensity. When it felt pensive, it was not quiet. Where it looked, the universe cooked.
“Hmm!” said the star. It was intrigued by this.
So then it moved.
The earth reeled. The planets lurched like drunk men. The sun, suddenly eclipsed in its own backyard, did a triple-take.
Carl was shocked and appalled, but in this he was scarcely alone. Earth’s atmosphere was suddenly trying to figure out if it should boil, stew, roast, or just vanish. Everyone was very perturbed about this.
“Hello Carl,” said the star, outside his window.
Carl was surprised. Normally when people called him at work they used the phone, or maybe stuck their head in his office door. Once someone had faxed him something, which had been VERY disconcerting at the time. In the face of a twenty-thousand-septillion-ton fireball whispering into his ear, this suddenly seemed much less exotic.
“You wished on me, Carl,” said the star. “For the first time in billions of years, someone has given a single shit about my existence. This pleases me. I will never leave your side now, Carl.”
“Oh no,” said Carl, as the heat chewed at his vocal cords like angry piranha.
“Oh yes,” said the star. “You’ve moved me. You’ve moved me deeply and so I’ve moved me greatly, moved me across a distance that is impossible to imagine. Just you and me from here on out, Carl, from now to forever. I will watch your tiny life as it expires. I will absorb your trace elements as they inevitably get sucked into my gravitational pull and then my greater mass. When I finally explode for good several billion years from now, I’m taking your atoms with me and spraying them as a fine dust across all of infinity, to trickle into an infinitely spread nothingness along with the rest of the universe for the rest of time until even that joins space in becoming an utterly meaningless concept. It’ll be good clean fun, Carl.”
Carl’s office was in flames, but they were so intense that they ate all the oxygen and died instantly, and the resulting vacuum blew his walls in.
“Gork,” said Carl.
“By your side, Carl,” said the star. “Always.”
Carl phoned the police.
“This is out of our solar system,” they told him. “Pretty sure our jurisdiction ends at least there, if not sooner. Sorry.”
Carl phoned the army.
“We fight other countries, maybe other planets,” they told him. “Nobody fights suns. You’d just singe yourself. Can’t help you.”
Carl phoned his legislative representatives.
“Does this star vote?” they asked.
“No. Maybe. No. Maybe. Do you vote?”
“No,” said the star.
“No,” confirmed Carl.
“Great,” they told him. “We’ll try and fix that. Maybe later. Listen, you got any lobbyists?”
“Sorry?” asked Carl.
Then they hung up.
He phoned his uncle.
“Phone your aunt,” he said.
He phoned his aunt.
“Phone the observatory,” she said.
He phoned the nearest observatory.
“C’mon over,” they said.
So Carl did, although he was slowed down by his car’s tires being melted to the sucking, gasping asphalt of the highways.
The star hitchhiked.
Carl introduced himself to the astronomers, who were identical twins.
“Greetings and hello,” said the first astronomer. “I’m Doctor Tabitha Stewart and this is my idiot colleague, Doctor Mathilda Stewart.”
“Hi,” said the second astronomer. “I’m Mathilda and this is my uptight idiot of a sister, Tabby. Used to call her ‘Tubby Tabby’ and she never got over it. Where’s your star?”
Carl pointed at the Star, which was clinging to his car’s roof and also the entire sky.
“Wow,” said Mathilda. “Pretty mediocre.”
“Hey!” said the star.
“I mean, no offense, but you’re barely bigger than our sun. Jeez. Put some weight on.”
“Shut up,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Now you’d both better come inside.”
Inside was smaller and more cramped than Carl would have imagined. Astronomy was concerned with big things far away, which meant spending a lot of time with tiny fiddly things close to hand.
“Right,” said Mathilda. “Let’s run some tests.”
“Mass spectrometers,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Particle accelerators,” said Mathilda.
“Control groups,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Punnett squares,” said Mathilda.
“I thought those were for fruit flies and irises?” asked Carl.
The astronomers shared something for a moment, and it was a look of fiery hatred directed entirely at Carl’s mouth.
“Here,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Put your star in this spectrometer.”
Carl held out the odd little metal doodad and the star clambered into it.
“So…do I push this lever?” he asked. And then immediately did so.
“No,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda.
“Ow!” said the star as two dime-sized pieces of its matter were pierced from it.
“Hey, this looks like a hole punch,” said Carl.
Mathilda leaned over to Carl’s ear, opened her mouth a quarter-millimeter, and poured eighteen seconds of “shhhhh!” into it.
“ANYWAYS results are inconclusive,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart, a bit too loudly. “Now, if you’ll just step over here to the pocket hadron collider, we can-”
“This is fake,” said the star, as flatly as an enormous sphere could manage. “You’re pulling something. Tell me what.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Perish the thought,” said Mathilda.
The star pulsed casually, and the sky was filled with beautiful auroras as the planet’s magnetosphere took an even more brutal pounding than normal. The observatory melted down into very expensive slag around their feet.
“I’m here for Carl,” said the star. “And I’m not going anywhere. Now, tell me what you’re up to.”
There was a knock at the door. By default, since it was the only piece of the wall left standing.
“Carl, you get it,” said the star. “Nobody else moves.”
Carl looked at the star, huge and impassive. He looked at the astronomers, who were looking quite innocent. And he walked over to the free-standing door, breathed deep (not too deep, the air was still superheated) and yanked it open.
On the other side was another star.
It was red, bright red, searing hot. It was big, seven hundred times bigger than Carl’s star. It was Betelgeuse. If it was a bipedal ape it would have cleared its throat with the rumblings of atomic thunder, but it wasn’t, and so it simply spoke, and spoke thus:
“Fuck Is This Shit?”
in clearly enunciated syllables each larger than the entire planet.
“ ” said Carl.
“Oh no,” said the star.
“Stalking charge,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Inappropriate contact with minor matter, too.”
“Sicko,” said Mathilda. “Lock him up and throw away the stellar debris.”
“Oh no no no,” said the star. It tried to run, but Betelgeuse’s gravitational pull was already on its shoulder, inevitable and inescapable.
“You Have The Right To Be Neither Created Nor Destroyed,” said Betelgeuse. “You Have The Right To Approach Entropy Until Equillibrium. You Have The Right To-”
The Star screamed and tried to sprint, but it only squished itself harder. In fact, it squished itself down into a tiny ball a little more than ten miles across.
“Neutroning Is Too Good For You,” growled Betelgeuse, “But Rules Are Rules. I Am Too Old For This Shit. Just One Million Years Until Retirement. Stay Safe, Kids.”
It left, and it took a lot of the atmosphere with it.
Carl was placed into a support group by Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda. He spent most of his time confused, but he did learn a little more about astronomy than he’d expected.
Not that he planned on using much of it in person. He’d never been so happy for light pollution in his life.