The station had been broadcasting the same lullaby to the colony ships for three generations, a soft, warbling recording meant to soothe children through the long dark stretches between waypoints, and somewhere along the way the words had drifted from the original, worn smooth by distance and repetition until they became something the crew’s own. Blinkle, blinkle, brown dwarf star, how we wonder where you are, the recording went, sung by a voice nobody could remember recording, and the children who grew up listening to it never questioned why the lyric didn’t match the songs their ancestors had once sung about a small yellow sun back on a world most of them would never see.
The star at the center of their system had been dimming for longer than anyone alive had been keeping track of it, a slow reddening that the older engineers still called a temporary phase out of habit, though the instruments told a plainer story every cycle. The colony had built its whole rhythm of living around that fading light, harvesting what warmth it could before the long cold stretches, teaching children to layer their sleeping mats and keep their voices low during the dimmest hours, as if quiet itself could be conserved along with the heat.
At night, when the recording played through the station’s speakers, the children would ask their parents why the star sounded worried in the song, and the parents, most of whom had grown up asking the same question, would say only that all stars grow tired eventually, and that tired didn’t mean gone, not yet, maybe not for a long while.
The lullaby always ended the same way, soft and unresolved, the star never quite located, never quite named as safe or finished, just held there in the last line like a held breath: blinkle, blinkle, through the black, someday, love, we’ll send you back. Nobody knew what that meant either, only that the smallest children always fell asleep before the final note.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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