I tried to find a solution to the mass deformation of the spheres by consulting the Third Harmonic of Bellatrix, but all he offered was a string of words as long as a comet’s tail and a token gravitar.
“Someday a door will open and expose to us the glittering mechanism that operates this universe,” I said.
Eustachia shook her head in disgust.
* * *
Noticeable deviations in our dreams were sending the ship into a centrifugal spin.
Eustachia said, “Two bodies revolving mutually about their barycenter must always maintain the same relative distances from each other.”
“But that isn’t the point of two bodies mutually revolving,” I countered.
“What is it then?” she asked.
“We must first correct our orbit, Eustachia,” I said, and calmly left the room.
* * *
“Eustachia,” I said, “do you know that even now I have trouble establishing the true orbit of the moon?”
“Because of its many perturbations, the eccentricity of the moon’s orbit changes frequently, but over many years its mean value we have learned is 0.0549.”
“And the anomalistic month?”
“27.555 days,” she said, but I still didn’t believe her.
* * *
We lay under an ocean of sheets.
“Do you think this configuration can last?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “Everything can remain altogether unchanged.”
“And the problem get solved?”
“The many-body problem can be easily solved when one body feels the predominant gravitational force of another body,” I replied.
She pulled the sheets off my head.
“You look like an oblate spheroid,” she said.
* * *
I crushed out a cigarette on the chair’s aluminum leg. Outside the window interstellar dust and nucleoids compressed into a dimly lit space which flowed like lava across the chromosphere.
Eustachia held up her hand. Each finger contained a silver ring with an imbedded eyeball.
“In spirit,” I said, “the generalized theory of gravitation and the value of typical gravitational scalar far away from a rotating celestial body should depend on the conditions already existing in the universe.”
“In spirit, in spirit,” Eustachia said and spat at my feet.
* * *
I made notes on the K dwarf or subdwarf of SS Cygni.
The outbursts, I noted, occur at odd but predictable intervals. The distended envelope about fills the critical volume governed by the mutual gravitation of the K star and its blue companion.
“Are all dwarf novae binary systems?” I wondered.
We stared out the window at the approaching gray light, my arm around Eustachia’s shoulders.
“Maybe it’s a young cluster.”
“No,” Eustachia said, “it’s the heatdeath all over again.”
* * *
It was the ionizing hydrogen that led us to the actual edge in the last H II region and Eustachia, patchy and irregular in the crepuscular light, was the first to realize the nebula was optically thin. But what does it matter now, I wondered, as we plunged through the nebulium lines, away from the brightness of other wretched bodies flaming out one after one.
