Stary Story

Before I say anything else, I just want to point out that I have been around this part of the galaxy a few times, so there aren't too many phenomenon out there that I haven't seen. And by phenomenon, I'm not talking about your average solar flare or overweight red giant; I've seen some pretty interesting things, like black holes dancing or asteroid fields bigger than Canis Majoris. So yea, I've seen things.

But one galactic year, when I was passing by some local nebulas, I saw something that surprised me in a way that no star has ever been surprised. So there I was, just moseying along in the Orion Arm, which is my favorite segment of the galaxy to hang around, and tearing out of some small nebula below me comes some tiny young upstart star, flying up all tangled in molecular clouds. I keep my pace, though she's coming right at me, because I figure she'll see me and turn aside. But she doesn't pay any attention! She zooms right past me, almost getting caught in my orbit, and she's emitting ion trails at the top of her lungs, without a care in the universe. Something like this had never happened to me. There I was, a white main sequence star, which makes me one of the brightest in this neighborhood, and this little bunch of gas just comes and pushes me off course! She might as well have been a protostar!

In any case, after she noticed that her trajectory was distinctly altered by my gravitational field, she hooked herself around a nearby cluster and came back. Boy, I was surprised when she came back, especially since I was pretty sure I'd never see her again, nor did I want to. As she neared, I realized that this girl was the brightest ball of fire I had ever seen! I rarely see a star as bright as myself, but this one was something else. She glowed a majestic deep blue, with an ultraviolet emission that was off the charts! She had to be an O-class star, something I have never seen before, and again, I've been around for quite a while.

Having come within range of my heliosphere, she gave me a wink and settled into a loose binary orbit. That's right, her diameter was only slightly less than mine, but her blue corona definitely fell into the "slimming" category.

"Hey, sorry about the flyby, I'm kinda in a rush."

"No kidding. I almost skipped a solar cycle."

"Hey, I said I was sorry."

"... It's alright. I was just surprised, that's all."

"Bright guy like you? I bet you've seen wilder. You can't be younger than twenty million years. Oh, not that you look old or anything."

"Ah, well thanks for the compliment, I think. I'm Sirius."

"Carina. But everybody calls me Blue. I'm not sure why."

"Ah... yes. Enchanted. Where are you headed, Blue?"

"I'm heading out of the plane of the Milky Way."

"Wait, what? You mean you're trying to leave the galaxy?"

"Yep. I want to see what is out there that hasn't been seen here."

"But have you seen everything that there is here?"

"Well, no."

"How about you stay here a while and I'll show you some things I'll bet you never thought possible."

"Maybe."

"Come with me for a bit. Just a couple hundred thousand years. Trust me."

"You said your name was Sirius?"

And just like that, we were together. I had never expected to become a binary star, but after that encounter we hugged so close together that sometimes I wasn't sure which flares were mine and which flares were her's. We journeyed far and wide and saw anything that you could imagine, from neutron stars to pulsars, from brown dwarf clusters to red super giants. The whole time I just couldn't believe my luck at having met a star so bright, so luminous, that some times I believed that we could waltz right by black holes without even deviating from our course.

But all the while, though she was seeing things she had never before imaged, I could tell that at her core, she was just burning to go. She had never mentioned again her earlier intention after we had set off together, but I knew it was still present. Where exactly you would end up out there above the plane, I didn't know, and she probably didn't either, but that didn't stop her restlessness. Eventually, I parked us down out midway in the Cygnus arm and turned to look at her.

"What's wrong? You've been breaking out in sunspots so often recently. What's on your mind, Blue?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Well, actually, that's not true. I've been looking out at the space up there all these years, and with every new thing that we come upon, I just want even more to just soar up out of here and find something even more amazing."

"Oh, Blue. I've spent all this time trying to show you that there is plenty here for you, that we could travel the rest of our star cycles together without ever needing anything else, but I can see now that all this has been only a detour for you. Is there nothing I can do to convince you to stay here with me?"

"...I'm sorry, Sirius. But I've got to go."

"Well, I guess this is goodbye. You were the best and brightest binary partner I've ever had."

"Yea. So long."

Even after she had left for the heavens, I could not help but gaze longingly after her. I idled there in her wake for almost two million years before I was able to move on, caught in the tide of the galaxy's rotation. I never saw her again, and nobody I spoke to after that had any recollection of ever seeing a small but spectacularly blue O-class star who could charm her way out of any black hole cluster with just a glimmer.

Eventually I tried to go back to my previous routine of scouring the Milky Way for new sights in order to occupy myself, but nothing ever had the same appeal without Blue orbiting beside me. The eons passed slowly, and soon I approached the end of my main sequence. Even now as I look back, there was no greater period of my lifetime than those few years I spent drifting wildly about with her. It wasn't that I saw the craziest sights of my life during those years, or even that I was young and in my prime. Truly, if we had journeyed all that distance and found absolutely nothing, my solar spectrum wouldn't have decreased at all, and that was because of Blue. She was the kind whose orbit only comes by once in a lifetime, a spectacular specimen of a star, a dream so beautiful that you want never to wake from it.