For Greg Stachowski, who asked.
________
She does her initial sketches in blue grease pencil; always has. She picked up the habit, she tells you, from an old friend who used nothing else, although you doubt if her friend ever sat up by the lakeside in the middle of a winter night, sketching moonlight on the water.
So you think she's a little peculiar. That's fair enough.
She thinks the same of you.
"So what, exactly, are you doing?"
"M42."
Click.
"For science?"
Whirr.
"No. That, I do back at the observatory."
Click.
"For art, then?" Her voice is mildly sceptical.
"For a hobby." You glance at the screen; too washed out.
Dial it back a bit to fifty seconds' exposure
"You have some odd hobbies."
"I have one odd hobby." You press down on the shutter again; the two second delay flashes the timer for a moment before snapping. "The others are socially acceptable."
"That is true." The grease pencil skitters across her sketchpad. Three strokes form the lake horizon; five more form the silver path running to the rising moon. "So talk to me."
"What about?"
"What's M42?"
Emission nebula. Green tint from forbidden transitions, stellar formation neighbourhood--
"Orion's sword."
Her pencil pauses midstroke, as the shutter clicks again.
"You were going to say something else."
"Nothing you'd be interested in. What do you see when you look up?"
"Dots. Sometimes people connect the dots and make stories out of them. You, I suppose, see something different."
"Very different. I see science."
"Hmm."
The camp is silent for a while except for the scratching of grease pencil across heavy paper and the click and whirr of the shutter, shooting gestating stars from a thousand light years away through 300mm at F/22.
"What will you do, when you're done?" She looks over her shoulder at you, silhouetted against the moon.
"Postprocess. Clean up the noise, adjust the contrast, make the myriad stars of the milky way appear in the middle of Orion's crotch like sequins on Michael Jackson. Maybe print it out and frame it and foist it onto a visiting dignitary at some point so he knows his presence is greatly appreciated."
She smiles then, her expression softening.
"You're not bothered, then." She turns back to her canvas. "That I clearly don't appreciate your work."
"Not as much as I thought I'd be."
"And what do you have to say in return?"
"About your work habits? Nothing worth the breath."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure." You lie back in the sleeping bag and trigger the shutter again, looking up at the brilliant lop-sidedness that is the Winter Hexagon. "I'm me, and you're you."
Click. Whirr. Click. Another exposure.
Ten down. One hundred and fifty to go.
That's all right. You have all night, and the tracker makes this almost mindless work.
"That's all there is to it?"
"Everything else is abstract thought, out of the reach of Sapir Whorf." You close your eyes and click the shutter again. One day, you really, really need to get down and automate this.
"Besides, I'd only think of something silly, anyway."
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