by Zach Smith

photos c/o NASA

I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, said Xarlox, as he reached out a beam of energy, that by a certain definition could be described as a hand, toward the probe.

Welcome home.

This relatively little rock, out in the vast outskirts of your solar system, this almost insignificant ball of ice, could be your final resting place.

It has been a long time for you at least. One hundred ten years since you were born, eighty-six years since your discovery, nineteen years since your death. Earth years I should say, less than half a year for this planet.

Me, I’ve been around longer than that, longer than the universe and the universes preceding.

It’s a good thing you weren’t Catholic. No, no. I have nothing against Catholics, but they generally do not cremate their dead, and they wouldn’t have schlepped your whole casket onto the probe. It would take up too much weight and too much room for what could have otherwise gone to engines, cameras, computers, extra Hydrazine Propellant or other things more important to science than the husk of the scientist who found this planet. The probe itself is not a whole lot bigger than a casket as it is. But cremation, well there was just enough room left over for a small snuffbox sized vial of ashes. Maybe that took up some extra space for something, but the gesture is out of this world.

I’m sorry, but how else could I have said it?

Where are we?

Don’t you know?

Oh yes, I’m sure it looks a little different up close.

The first time you saw this planet was on a blink comparator, flipping back and forth between pictures of the night sky, looking for a star that wasn’t a star, moving against everything else in the sky. When you first saw this place it was no more than a faint speck of light, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In your lifetime the biggest and best telescopes couldn’t show more than a fuzzy twelve pixel wide image of this planet. But now look at it.

That’s right, you, Clyde Tombaugh, who saw this planet first, gets to see Pluto in all its glory first. It will take a whole four and a half hours for the first images to get back to earth.

What did you think it would look like?

Did you think it would look like your moon?

Sure I guess it kind of does, in as much as any terrestrial planet, might look like your moon.

Pluto has its own moons too, by the way, five of them, kind of greedy for such a small planet don’t you think?

There’s Charon of course. The big boy, named after the ferryman of the river Styx. Discovered in your lifetime. It’s the biggest moon in your solar system, with regards to its host planet. It has a dark plain near its North Pole that will be named the Mordor Macula.

Did you ever read Tolkien?

The four other moons are less interesting.

Do you see them?

There’s Styx out that way and Kerberos behind it. I know they’re hard to see in the dim light, but since you are not looking with eyes but through the oculus of a metaphysical being, it’s a little easier to know them.

Nix and Hydra are over there, the bigger ones. Your astronomers found them about ten years ago. Unlike Charon, the other moons are not round.

But look at this, look at your planet, it has a heart. Have you ever seen such a thing in your life? A giant plain of snow taking up almost a quarter of the planet?

Pluto has an annual atmosphere when it is closer to your sun when it moves further away, and this planet moves quite far, the atmosphere freezes and snows onto the surface. Combine this snowfall with the tremendous tidal effect of that nearby massive moon, and it pulls the snow to the middle of the planet and forms the heart.

You couldn’t see that when you were flickering images back and forth in that dark room eight decades ago. Your earthling scientists couldn’t see it either, though they did know that Pluto had its lighter and darker regions.

Let me show you this planet you discovered.

You already know that they are going to name features of the planet after you, and for various reasons, I already know where and what those names are.

The heart is called the Tombaugh Regio. The best feature has your name, so put that feather in your cap Clyde.

The other side of the planet is the dark region that will be called the Cthulhu Regio.

Did you ever read Lovecraft?

The white center of the heart, the plainest of the plain, will be called the Sputnik Planitia.

There are mountains too. That one will be named Hillary Montes, for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mt. Everest, and that one will be Tenzing Montes, dedicated to Hillary’s Sherpa.

And where there’s mountains there are valleys.

The Djanggawul Fossae, this great ditch over here, is to be named after the sibling deities that created Australia.

This is the Elliot Crater, to be named not for T.S. Elliot and his apocalyptic poetry, but rather James Elliot who discovered this planet’s annual atmosphere.

Do you see that ditch over there? The one with the steep sides? That will be the Hekla Cavus, after the Icelandic gate of hell.

This one here is called the Kupe Vallis, in honor of Kupe, the Peloponnesian demigod explorer and legendary discoverer of New Zealand.

Such a rich tapestry of tales these names do tell.

Small planet isn’t it? But a well-liked one, and more than a little controversial.

Why is it so well-liked?

Maybe it was because in the textbooks every other planet was well photographed, except for this one. Its mystery made it the last great refuge for imagination in the solar system.

More planets were discovered after this one.

Sedna, an interesting little planet, whose orbit takes more than ten thousand years, whose path of travel is nearly cigar-shaped, and whose nearest approach to Pluto is as close to Pluto as Pluto is to your sun.

Eris, who orbits your sun almost vertically compared to the rest of the planets.

And there are even more: Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, and Gonggong.

There was even some debate on the moon Charon, with arguments that it was a planet itself, entangled in a double planet system with Pluto.

With all these discoveries people began to question just what a planet was.

During the debate, one definition of a planet was that it was massive enough to form into a sphere. A simple rock is too small to condense into a planet.

The other definition is that it has to clear the area around it, and in the orbit of Pluto, there is too much other material.

A lot of people wanted to keep your little planet as a planet, despite its size and faults. That should make you proud Clyde, for how much people loved your discovery.

Unfortunately, the International Astronomical Union, downgraded Pluto to a “dwarf planet.”

Had they kept Pluto a planet, an actual planet by definition, it would have added about a dozen more planets to your solar system. Ceres would have been added to the list between Mars and Jupiter.

What was it you we’re looking for when you found this planet anyway?

Planet X right?

The big missing planet that scientists thought was causing some phenomena in the outer solar system.

You found something, but it wasn’t Planet X, Pluto is too small to be the answer, and then Planet X was written off as a problem with the mathematics used to predict it.

Believe it or not, interest in Planet X has been coming back. New maths, based on new observations of newly discovered bodies floating about at the edge of the solar system, indicate that there really ought to be another big planet. They call it Planet Nine, and although other theories may disprove its existences it is currently estimated to be ninety-six percent likely to exist.

This Planet Nine would be a terrestrial planet, five to ten times the size of your earth. Some of your scientists guess that it might be the core of a gas giant that was ejected from the pre-Neptunian region, some say it was pulled from another star, or perhaps it was a rogue planet.

Rogue planet isn’t quite right, I would call it an orphaned planet or better yet a rescued planet. A planet alone and by itself in interstellar space, that found a forever home with your solar system, but decided to stay (as it were) in a room that few people go into, keeping to itself, quiet and scared that it will be abandoned again if it makes itself more visible.

That’s just the way I like to put it, you don’t have to think of it like that.

You may have noticed that time has not moved since you arrived here at this cold little planet. Not that there is an easy way to mark time this far out in the solar system, you’ll just have to trust me.

The New Horizons probe is at the same coordinates as when you left it.

Do you want to jump back on the probe? It’s your choice.

There is much more too see, no matter where you go, much more to see here on the planet you discovered, and more to see out there.

The probe is going to pass by Ultima-Thule, a very interesting contact binary planetoid. Do you know how Pluto is in an unusual arrangement with its big moon Charon? Well imagine if Pluto and Charon were touching, but both generally kept their shapes.

There are other planetoids to visit after that, and eventually, the probe will leave the solar system altogether.

But you could stay here too. I’m sure eighty-six years ago when you first discovered Pluto, you had no idea that it might be your resting place. It was so far away, and few earthlings can even claim that their remains are on a planet different from the one they were born on (dwarf planet or not).

So what is it you want?

Stay here or see more of the universe?

Ah yes, that’s what I thought you’d say.

XXXX

Zach Smith, from the suburban Philadelphia area, has published several excellent stories with us, the most recent of which was “Tales Along Turtle Heart Road.”