At the Center of your Orrery

We watch you wind the model up. Sitting on their little cushions on the floor, the kids all hold their breath, waiting for something extraordinary to happen. Some sort of spark, some sort of glow, maybe a bang or a whoosh.

I sit cross-legged on the floor amongst them, my knees hanging wide, far too tall for the child-sized cushion. I gaze up at you. I already feel a glow, the same one I feel whenever we smile at each other when we pass in the corridors or canteen, whenever we wave hello. The same one I felt when you reminded me that you’d love me to bring my class to see this.

You ask: See the sun? It’s so bright and bold, there in the center of everything?

They nod, waiting. I nod, hoping.

There are a multitude of little balls, painted plastic planets, tiny little moons, all stationary around two central domes, white and glowing. You finish winding, and your shoulders come undone as you let the machine go. It clicks and whirls, and the planets become active, orbiting the sun, and small moons revolve around them.

I say: Oooh.

The kids, following my example, say: Oooh.

But they probably don’t feel as much of the ooh as I feel when you smile down at the group’s sound. I doubt they feel the same ooh as I do watching you turn back to the orbs. The corners of your eyes crinkle happily as you watch little spheres clicking and ticking their way around your hand-wound device.

My breath catches as your attention comes back to us, though some of the littles have lost the plot. At least two of them are on the verge of complaining that this is boring, and one definitely needs a pee. I nod quickly at one of the other carers, and they nod back, taking the uncomfortably bouncing child out of the room.

You gesture expansively, fingers spread beautifully wide over the whorl of the orrery. You try to capture their attention again, just as you always captured mine. Ever since you came to my classroom to ask if we had any spare pieces of broken toys you could nab for your construction. When I said you could take your pick, when we talked about what you were building, what we are all building, where we are all going. A suddenly deep conversation about our hopes and fears, and my heart which felt fuller whilst we talked, then a little emptier when you left.

You say: It’s not just the planets and the stars. This is how our fleet is constructed, too. We built the needle in the middle, and a ring around it, and small ships that fly in orbit, protecting us, carrying spares of everything. Just in case.

You flick on a screen, and the kids settle down again. A black mirror, the perfect soothing apparatus. You don’t seem to notice their sudden quiet, just as you hadn’t noticed their restlessness. But I’m glad that I can hear you better, your soft voice, your quiet passion.

You carry on: See our trajectory? We’ll arrive here someday. See, here’s the sun, here are its planets, and their moons. Just like this. See?

I say: Uh-huh.

A few of the kids say: Uh-huh.

You add: We’ll move from these ships to the real thing, settle on the planets and the moons. Dozens of them, all potential homes. Our orrery will look like this again.

I say: Cool.

They agree. It will be cool.

We’ll make it to that system with a real sun, real planets, not just painted plastic globes on sticks and strings, ticking around mechanical axes. You tell them that there are worlds in this new system, planets not yet burning, not yet broken. You promise them a future.

I nod, but I’m barely listening. I know we tell them this, but I’ll never see this system, and neither will you. We both know this, really. You mentioned it when we organized the visit, your eyes filling with sadness, my belly filling with spins and nerves. Maybe these kids, so easily distracted by the screen, begging to have a go winding up the orrery, pushing each other off their little floor cushions, maybe they will see these moons and planets. Maybe they will bask under the glow of a real sun, and not just poke a plastic globe to see whether it’s hot.

You hold your palm near the handle, ready to wind it up again, to tell anyone who will listen that this is what the future holds.

I watch you, glorying in your craft, in the device you built to tell our story.

What I want to say is: Never mind suns and planets distantly circling, or the ships travelling through deep nothingness towards some unknown future.

What I want to know is: Later, after the class has all gone home, after you’re done packing away your mechanical promises, when our mobile world is quiet again, would you like to go for a drink?

What I’d like to know is: in the here and now, could we be on the same trajectory. Could it be me at the center of your orrery?