What Carried the Line On

The ones that go through aren't keeping anything from us. The same weakness lets them leave a burning place without being turned, cross the dust between galaxies without being turned, enter the planet on the far side and leave by the ice without being turned. Being hard to stop and holding the line straight are one fact, counted from either side.

So the quiet isn't a silence. Nothing was asked of them. A road isn't keeping quiet about the cars that don't take the exit.

Once in a great while one meets a nucleus in the ice and doesn't so much end as hand itself over. What comes out is a muon, heavier, charged, still going nearly the way the first one was going, and faster than light can travel in ice, so it leaves a cone of blue along its whole run, past string after string of glass frozen in to wait.

They don't read a point. They read a corridor of light a kilometre long, and the corridor leans toward wherever the first one came from.

Your own eye does this with every photon. It takes the one that stops in it and calls that seeing, and nobody faults the retina for keeping still in the dark.

In September of 2017 one corridor leaned toward a galaxy whose core was flaring when the telescopes turned to look. It isn't much yet. It is two roads agreeing once, which is how anyone has ever known they were seeing.