“You’re frightening her,” said the Fifth, the woman, who rose from her thick ledgers and approached her as one would a lost dog, slowly, speaking softly. She put her arm around the silent visitor. “Are you all right, milaya? What’s happened? Can you tell us?”

The girl, the lost dog. She pulled off the bandage on her right hand and showed the Fifth the wide swath of cut and seared flesh. Her passport.

“Nikolai Gerasimovich?” the old woman called in a trembling voice.

The Third came close and studied the hand. “I can get some iodine on it, but it seems to be healing.”

“What happened to you, dorogaya moya?” the starushka asked her, so kindly that the girl began to cry.

“She can’t stay here, if that’s what she’s thinking,” said the Fourth. “It’s not a home for mental defectives.”

“Speak for yourself, Valentin Vladimirovich,” said the First, the starman with the velvet skullcap, stroking his long moustache contemplatively.

The girl, the mental defective, pulled the starushka out into the hall, struggled out of her coat. Her hands flew to the buttons of her dress. She had to show her, the woman had to see. The old one tried to move away, so the girl hurried, pulled the woolen fabric from her shoulder, tearing at the dressings.

When the old woman saw the bandages, the terrible poetry, she understood that whatever had happened to the girl, whatever had chased her to the observatory’s heights, she could not be sent back down. The girl fell to her knees and kissed the starushka’s hand, kissed the hem of her rusty black dress, her laced boots. The girl wept wordlessly. Words had flown from her like birds fleeing a fire, an explosion. The old woman pulled the girl to her feet. “Don’t worry, devushka. Nobody will send you away.” The visitor, the mute, clung to her. With much patting and clucking, the old woman sat her down on a bench in the cold hall, lined with portraits of men with telescopes and astrolabes and compasses, then went back into the room, and closed the door. She heard their voices, discussing, arguing. Who was she? How could they feed her? Rations were bad enough as they were. But sitting there on the hard bench as before the headmistress’s door, the girl vowed she would not be sent away. There was nowhere else in the world for her, not a square inch in the world of Once-Had-Been that would permit her feet to rest. Only in the stars, among these Ancients, this precious, silent island drifting above the world could she find safety.

The old woman returned, gestured for the girl to follow. Back in their warm study, the Second had prepared a small slate, as one would use for schoolchildren, upon which he’d written the alphabet. “Can you read?” he asked. He pointed to his eyes, then the slate. The girl didn’t want to be dismissed as an idiot. She needed them. She had to be seen as useful. She was young, she was strong, she could read. She nodded.

“What’s your name?”

She began to point to letters. M. The starushka smiled triumphantly. A. R. “Mar,” said the old woman.

Impatient, the Fourth began to guess. “Maria.” She shook her head. “Marta. Martina.”

The Second chimed in over the slate. “Marina?”

God, no. Anyone but her.

“Marusya?” said the Fifth.

Marusya. It meant bitter. Yes, that was her name. She allowed them to baptize her like Achilles in the black waters of the Styx. Leaving only the heel. She wondered what that would prove to be. But for the rest, sealed in darkness, Marusya be her name.

Thus the girl, the visitor, the vagabond, scarred and renounced, stepped away from all that she had been. Left herself behind like a glove dropped in a train station. What she found was—silence. She wrapped it around herself like an Orenburg wedding-ring shawl. So light, so soft, so warm. Her life now could pass through a wedding ring.

Marusya woke early. Collected their firewood, breaking it from branches before she found a few precious tools still left in the shed—the empty pegs evidence of a larger store, vanished now. To the credit of the thieves, or someone else’s foresight, the departing gardeners or Red Guards hadn’t stolen everything. A couple of spades and hoes hung scattered, a rusty saw, a hatchet, an ax, a large hammer, and a wedge. Most important, the observatory’s well was good and deep, the water blessedly clean—it didn’t have to be boiled to drink! She could not imagine such luxury. She washed their clothes, took their ration cards down to the village, and walked the mile back up, their food on her back, bread and potatoes and herring, deflecting the prying of the housewives with shrugs. She did everything she could to justify her presence there, ate as little as possible.

The place had been terribly neglected. The servants and most of their colleagues had left after October’s battle on the Pulkovo Heights. The rest left when Bolshevik miracles failed to manifest themselves. The girl swept and scrubbed, sewed underwear, darned socks, boiled sheets, dragged bedding out to the yard, hung the quilts and beat and beat them. The dust could have spawned a new galaxy.

The days warmed, and one by one she seated the Ancients outside in the new wildflowers and washed and trimmed their hair and their beards to their specifications—the First liked his in the style of the tsar, of medium length and gently rounded at the bottom. The Second favored his double ax heads. The Third liked his hair trimmed short, but shaved himself. The Fourth was so ancient that his beard was spare and wiry, like a goat’s, but he would permit only half an inch of trimming. Soft old hair, light as dandelion floss in her fingers. The starushka, Ludmila Vasilievna, practically wept with pleasure as the girl washed her hair in the yard and combed it and let it dry in the sun, then brushed and braided it for her. Their mute servant cut their hornlike toenails with a pair of scissors the First Ancient kept in a leather case only slightly older than the moon. The girl saw many things they could have sold to make their lives more bearable, but it never occurred to them. In many ways, she felt these Ancients were her children, and she their young mother.

They gathered at moonrise like moths. The Third had made yellow dandelion wine they enjoyed before the evening meal. Marusya served them sorrel soup and spring onions and rationed bread and fed upon their learned conversations as they ate in measured bites, drank their thin soup. They spoke of colleagues in far-flung universities, at Freiburg and Berlin, at Greenwich and Cambridge, of discoveries in mathematics and physics and chemistry. They bemoaned the lack of contemporary publications. “When this is over,” said the First, “we’re going to be as antique as knee britches.” They made jokes about former students. Marusya remained quiet, alert, unobtrusive, and as adoring as a good German shepherd. She would have killed for them, she would have laid down her life.

They explained to her over their yellow wine that there had been scores of astronomers and other staff members living here before the revolution, but alas—sighs all around—the younger people preferred life “down below,” where they could continue their careers at the university. “Their wives and children hated the isolation,” said the Second, Boris Osipovich, “when travel became difficult—”

“Impossible,” said the Fourth, Valentin Vladimirovich, in his high, cracked, crabby voice. “Who could go back and forth five times a week? We used to have an automobile—remember that?”

“We had to choose,” said the First, Aristarkh Apollonovich, the director of the observatory. “The university or this.” He sipped his yellow wine, stroked his moustache. “Most chose to stay in Petrograd with their students and continue teaching. Only we stariki preferred our researches, though it wasn’t the easiest choice.”

“It was for me,” said Ludmila Vasilievna. “It’s too awful down there now.”

Marusya nodded her agreement.

The girl fell into the rhythm of the observatory. She liked it best when Aristarkh Apollonovich permitted her to climb the metal stairs with him and gaze upon some spectacle of the cosmos. The double star in the constellation Ursa Major, which the great Arab astronomers called the Horse and Rider. The Moving Group of stars in the Big Dipper—her silent tongue ran over the shapes of their names: Alioth, Mizar, Merak, Phad, Megrez, Alcor—like a stable of Arabian stallions… all moving together toward Sagittarius. Which showed that this constellation was not, like most, a mere appearance—stars superimposed in the same sector of the sky—they were in fact related. A family, born together around three hundred million years ago. The girl so loved to hear numbers like that, to contemplate the vast age of the universe. It somehow made life on earth seem less desperate.

This old man had been at Pulkovo Observatory for years. His specialty, the fingerprints of the stars: spectra and motion. He trained the telescope on great Jupiter and the glowing rings of Saturn. “See those rings? They don’t turn like a phonograph recording,” he said, spreading his fingers and rotating his hand. “Each ring moves at a different rate. This indicates they’re made of a flow of small objects. We discovered that here.” He stroked the wing of his moustache in a way that made her realize it was he who had made the discovery. This very man, the First, who gave her a guided tour of the seas and mountains of the moon, who showed her rising Venus and red Mars.

Sometimes he told her of his wife, who had died, and his son and grandchildren, who lived in Brazil—a distance more than light-years away now.

Ludmila Vasilievna continued to be her favorite. She brushed the old woman’s hair out every day and helped her into her bed after a long night’s cataloguing of the stars. She massaged her old feet and hands, which tended to arthritis, and brought her a cup of chamomile tea so that she would sleep soundly through the morning.

But soon Marusya discovered that the Third Ancient, Nikolai Gerasimovich, was to be her main charge. He was the one who actually needed an assistant in his work. A physicist and chemist who specialized in the composition of atmospheres, he was a passionate astrobotanist. She had never heard of such a thing. What plants could there possibly be in space? “When we travel, it’s not going to be a day trip to Novgorod, Marusya,” he explained, interpreting her quizzical expression. “We’ll have to take them with us. They’ll help us breathe, and feed us, and filter the air. And when we land, we’ll have to have something to start with, won’t we?”

She almost wept. This learned man really thought they were going to the stars. It had never occurred to her how optimistic scientists were. He spoke as if he would be on those ships himself, heading out into the cosmos, though he must have known that he would likely not live to see even the return of hot water. She followed him around like a little dog as he gave elaborate instructions on how to tend his plants—if you could call them that. Most weren’t even plants, just lichens and mosses and foul-smelling algae growing in washtubs.

Marusya could only imagine what a certain Petrograd speculator would say about this childlike fascination with mucky goo. “The Aztecs grew this very same algae centuries before Columbus,” said Nikolai Gerasimovich. “It’s the fastest-growing protein source on earth. They grew it on vast lakes, dried it in blocks, and ate it when food was scarce.” He gave her a chip off a cake. “Try it.” Without hesitating, she bit into it. It tasted like dirt and pond scum, but no worse than the dried deer pellets she’d eaten as a child, thinking them candies. She chewed and swallowed it nevertheless, not wanting to spit it out, since he was so proud of it. “Good?” She nodded. He laughed and ate some as well, chewing it up. “You’d do well to get used to it. We might have to eat this next winter if rations continue to erode and the garden proves insufficient. If only we had better laboratories… I’m working with simulations of various atmospheres—ammonia, sulfur. So much knowledge has been lost about the medicinal and nutritional value of substances we would never consider as food sources. Insects, for example.”

She glanced over at his screen-covered terrariums hopping with beetles, and realized in horror that he was growing them as food. He laughed when he saw her face. “They’re not bad, really. I learned to eat them in Java. They multiply at a wonderful rate in warmth and damp. The latter we already have, but the former…” He seemed positively nostalgic about entomological cuisine. Professor Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomogayush… Marusya wondered, if she had met him at a party in the capital of Once-Had-Been instead of at the Pulkovo Observatory, would she have thought him venerable or mad? “These insects, this algae, lichen, and fungus—this is most likely the fodder that will take us to the stars, my dear. Not asparagus and beefsteak.”