Mercer & Son

The waiting list for the 90-millimetre reached forty-one names in October, and Felix Mercer, who had run an optics shop in the old town for nine years and spent most of them learning the exact shape of the word quiet, stood in his stockroom among the delivery crates and totted it up: his best year ever, and the year after that would be better, and the year after that better again, all the way up, forever, for the worst reason in the world.

People wanted to see them before they went.

Nobody said it like that, at the counter. They said the grandchildren should know the sky. They said you couldn’t trust the feeds to show you a true colour. They said it was a good hobby for the winter, now the winters were longer, and Felix agreed that it was, and took the deposit, and added the name to the list, and did not say what he knew from nine years of watching people carry telescopes out of his door like something between a purchase and a wreath: that a whole city had begun, quietly, at scale, to visit the sky the way you visit a relative you have been told about, while there is still time, so that afterwards you can say you went.

Trade of the age. He had a waiting list full of goodbyes and a stockroom that smelled of packing straw, and in the back room, at the collimation bench, under the good lamp, his father was bringing a customer’s mistreated refractor back to true with a set of tools he kept rolled in green felt, like a surgeon, which he was not, or a watchmaker, which he was not either.

His father had been an Undersecretary, and then, for the last of a war, a captain; the old feeds carried both titles, and anyone could find them. What it said on the shop’s books was J. Mercer — bench, part-time, and what it said on the door, in gold leaf Felix had paid too much for nine years ago, was MERCER & SON — OPTICS, and every customer who ever read the sign got it backwards, and neither Mercer had ever once corrected them. The old man was the son on that door. It was Felix’s shop. It was the family joke that had never been said aloud.

The refund came in on a Tuesday: a man of about fifty with a three-month-old reflector, boxed back up with the care of the genuinely aggrieved.

“There’s less in it than the brochure showed,” he said. “I counted. The cluster on page four. I found it, I did everything right, and there’s less of it.”

“The brochure photograph is a long exposure,” Felix said. “The eye at the eyepiece never sees what the plate sees. It’s in the notes on—”

“Page nine,” the man said. “I read it. I’m telling you there’s less.” And he stood there holding the box, not angry, or not only angry — a man who had done everything right, followed every instruction, pointed a correct instrument at a correct address on a clear night, and been shorted anyway, and had nowhere to lodge the complaint except a shop.

Felix had a policy for this, because it happened, now, about once a month. The policy was his father, who came out of the back wiping his hands and asked the man which cluster, and got out the county atlas — the paper one, with the pencil marks — and confirmed, unhurried, that the man was quite right: two of that cluster’s outliers had gone below anyone’s seeing inside the decade, the survey had conceded one of them last spring, the plate on page four was eleven years old. “Your eyes are good and your instrument is honest,” Julian Mercer said. “The brochure is out of date. Almost everything is.” And somehow — Felix had watched this happen a dozen times and could not have written down the mechanism — the man left with his telescope kept, his refund unclaimed, and the atlas’s pencil marks copied onto a card in his coat pocket: the true current count, in an old man’s precise hand, of what there still was.

“You could sell them the new edition,” Felix said, after.

“The new edition is what upset him.” His father went back to the bench. “He didn’t want accuracy. He’d had accuracy. He wanted somebody to stand next to the loss and count it with him. That’s a different product. We stock it.”

Felix had been eleven when the Endurance went quiet.

Felix knew the shape of the whole thing now, the way everyone did — the feeds had spent years on it afterwards — but at eleven he had known only the household shape of it: that his father had gone up the well with a delegation and a ship, that messages came, and then that messages did not come. No wreck, no report, no date for the news to attach itself to. Just a schedule of relays that arrived empty, and then stopped being published, and a category the family had been moved into by people who were kind on the doorstep and finished their sentences out on the pavement.

His mother held the flat in Vevey together by force of routine. Felix held the other thing.

The telescope he had saved for himself, mostly, which mattered to him then in a way he could no longer fully inhabit, and his mother had made up the difference without being asked, which mattered more. A 70-millimetre achromat with a wobble in the mount he learned to damp with a folded beer mat. He was eleven, and then thirteen, and then fifteen, and he was not stupid, at any of those ages: he knew with complete clarity that you cannot see a ship in a telescope, that a hull is nothing at any distance that matters, that the instrument in his hands was in every measurable sense the wrong tool.

But the outbound lane had a bearing. The last fix had been published before the silence — one-nine-two by fourteen, out through Cygnus — and a bearing is a place in the sky, and a place in the sky can be pointed at, and pointed at again, Tuesdays and Fridays, in the cold, in his coat, on the roof of the building in Vevey with the mount’s wobble damped by a beer mat, for five years. The position was the only address the family had. You could not visit it and nothing could be seen at it and mail could not be sent to it. He watched it anyway. It was the wrong tool and it was the only one, and nobody had ever been able to explain to Felix Mercer, then or since, what else a person was supposed to do with an address except go to it.

Somewhere in the fourth year, without meaning to, he stopped being a boy at a fix-point and became someone who was also good at optics. Collimation, eye relief, the discipline of the observing log — the grief had smuggled a trade in with it. When the Endurance came back — and there was no preparing for how that day actually went, the feeds shouting, the wreck under tow on every screen, the lists read out twice before the names meant anything — the son who stood in the crowd at the lakeside terminal was sixteen, and had a logbook on his shelf with five years of entries that all recorded, in effect, nothing observed, and had never once considered the record a failure.

They had not talked about it in the eighteen years since. His father had come home altered in ways the feeds had vocabulary for and ways they did not, and had gone out again within the season — there was a war to finish, and it had wanted him — and come home a second time when it was done, and done his remaining years in Geneva quietly and then not renewed anything, and one morning nine years ago had turned up at his son’s new shop with his sleeves rolled, and Felix had put him on the books, and that had been the whole negotiation.

The woman came in on a Thursday near closing, in a good coat, with the particular held-together look Felix could identify at forty metres now, and asked which of the instruments in the window could see Ashfield.

“My daughter’s on Ashfield,” she said. “Eight years. She has children I haven’t met. I thought—” she gestured at the window, the brass and the tripods, the whole hopeful arsenal of it— “something good. Whatever sees it.”

“Nothing sees it,” Felix said, gently. “Madame, an entire world at that distance is nothing at all. There’s no instrument on Earth that will show it to you. Anyone who tells you otherwise wants your money.”

The woman’s face did the small collapse he knew, and reassembled, because they always reassembled, and she thanked him and turned for the door, and Felix heard himself say, “Its star, though.”

The woman stopped.

“Ashfield’s sun is a star in our sky. Faint. You need to know exactly where to look, and you’d need dark — up on the Salève, out of the city glow.” He was already reaching under the counter for the 70-millimetres, the honest little achromat, the cheapest serious thing in the shop. “You can’t see her, madame. I want to be plain about that. You’ll see the star her house is lit by. It’s eight years’ worth of old light by the time it gets here — you’d be seeing the sun of the year she left. Some people find that worse. Some people find it—” he looked for the word his whole life had been about and did not find it, and finished, “—something. I can teach you the finding in one evening. It doesn’t need the ninety. It needs the position.”

Felix wrote the position on the shop’s card, in the shop’s ink: right ascension, declination, and under it, because the woman would not know what to do with coordinates on a cold hillside, the plain version — up from the bright pair, left of the little arc, third of the faint three, hold your breath and it steadies. He sold her the achromat and a beer mat’s worth of felt for the mount wobble, at cost, and did not fully understand his own accounting until, wrapping the tube, he caught his father watching from the door of the back room, cloth still in his hands, entirely still.

The woman left with the address of her daughter’s sun in her coat pocket. The bell over the door settled.

“One-nine-two by fourteen,” Julian Mercer said, from the back doorway. “Out through Cygnus.” And then, in the same level voice: “Tuesdays and Fridays.”

The shop went very quiet. Eighteen years, and neither of them had ever said it. The bearing proved nothing — the bearing had been published; anyone alive that year could have kept it. The Tuesdays and the Fridays had been written down in exactly one place in the world, in a young hand, in a book Felix had not seen since he left his mother’s flat.

Felix squared the wrapping paper on the counter, on its crease, twice.

“You’ll want to close up,” his father said. “Milo’s due at six about his instalments.”

Milo was eleven, and had been paying off the display 76-millimetre since June out of a biscuit tin — mowing money, bottle-return money, once, gravely, a birthday’s entire proceeds — and Felix had against every commercial instinct refused three separate adults who had come in wanting to simply buy the thing for him, because the boy had opened an account, and an account was a serious matter between parties, and you did not pay off another man’s telescope any more than you finished his sentences.

At six on the dot the bell went and the tin came in ahead of the boy like a ship’s boat ahead of the ship. The last instalment was four francs short. Milo counted it twice at the counter, went white, counted again.

“Delivery charge is waived within the city,” Felix said. “Four francs. It’s on the schedule of fees, small print, very authoritative. Count it once more.”

It came out even. Receipts were written. The 76-millimetre came down from the display shelf and was cased, and boxed, and the boy took the box carefully, with both arms, like something that could wake, and then had to just stand there a moment, holding it, being eleven, with everything still ahead of him and the whole sky still, mostly, there.

“What are you going to look at first?” Felix asked, because you always asked.

“Everything,” Milo said, with the flat scorn of a child answering an obvious question, and Julian Mercer laughed — one short note, rare as a comet, the collimating cloth still over his shoulder — and came around the bench and picked up the box, because carrying a customer’s first telescope to the door was, at Mercer & Son, and always had been, the junior partner’s job.

Felix cashed up. His father swept, having views about who swept. Out in the blue evening the streetlights came on down the old town, and above them, over the lake, past the glow, the sky stood over the water, short a little of what the brochures showed, and enormous anyway; and on the door the gold leaf said what it had said for nine years, MERCER & SON, in that order.