Free The Stars Can Wait by Jay Basu

telescope upon it, finding that he had to step back some paces to let the creature come into focus in the lens. Now the spider was a mass of bristling hairs protruding from the round nub of body and the junctured skeletal legs. In a moment, though, the spider recovered itself and began to climb up its invisible thread, and Gracian could see its workings like those of a machine with its casing off: the synchronized flexures of the limbs, a set of tiny pistons; the pincers clutching, strong, enduring.
    It seemed to Gracian at that moment that there existed in the world two visions, each at an extreme. One saw the world from a great height or distance and the other from hardly any distance at all. Both visions were full of intricate sights, a whole universe of them, but normally these lay beyond the reach of man. The vision held and lived by men was a pale, weak thing compared to the other two visions, which, Gracian thought, might be called the true visions. The vision of man existed at neither one extreme nor the other but in an unrevealing haze between the two: an unlit, compromised vision, offering nothing beautiful to the eye.
    It was possible for man to gain passing access to the true visions, as he himself had done. Through the surrogate eye of a telescope this could be achieved, or through other means equally unsatisfying—a book of history, perhaps, that spoke of the great roll of ages, or the reflection in a morning dewdrop, or perhaps the view of the land on a clear day atop an empty tor. But for man to achieve one of the true visions, he must always forsake the other. Both universes at once, the far and the near, were beyond his grasp. See the grace of a spider’s movement and miss the structure of its body; see the structure, and miss the movement. One or the other. Such were the choices.
    If only, Gracian thought, there was a way of reconciling the two. To see truly and with both eyes together. Then what secret might be unveiled? What story might at last be told?
    But even in the urgent beating of his mind and of his heart, there beside the cool transparency of the window and the scrabbling of the spider, he knew this to be impossible. It was the fate of man to see with eyes unlike the stars’. Eyes weighted to earth, their scope always stopping short of forever.
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    On an evening soon after he had seen the spider, Gracian sat in his empty room thinking about Paweł. He had not seen his brother since he had given him the telescope, though he still half expected to meet him one afternoon leaning against the colliery gates amid the snow. He did not know if Paweł was holding his job in Osok, but he supposed from his lack of contact with the family that he was. His mother did not ask after him, though he knew her thoughts wandered frequently to her elder son, for when they did she would draw herself up, flexing her jaw as if to brace herself. One day Gracian had thought about visiting him, but had turned back embarrassed less than halfway to the Malewskas’ flat. If Paweł wanted to see him, he told himself, he would make himself seen. Until then, their lives were best left to trace their separate tracks.
    The evening was drawing close around him, and he sat on his bed with his boots off feeling the hardness of the mattress beneath him and listening to the wind blow the snow outside. The telescope lay some distance away from him, on the cabinet that stood beside Paweł’s bed. The round blank lens was facing at an angle toward him, and he saw his own face reflected, stretched upward and ghostly in the circular darkness. For a moment he did not recognize it; the chin was too defined, the cheeks too narrow, the eyes had about them an intensity. The image he saw was of a man and not a boy.
    He stood quickly, dug his hands into his trouser pockets, and scraped his fingertips against the rough inner cloth. Then he walked out of the room and paused in the hallway. He could hear his