What Came Back Down

Here the sun went at twenty-seven past six, the sky clear to the edges, nothing in it to hold the colour, and nobody looked up.

Two hundred and seventy light-years out a star that swelled and shed its outer self has burned down to a white coal.

What it threw off, it had made in its last years, slowly, the way a dying star makes things: zinc, copper, niobium.

Most of that should have kept on into the dark. Something near it, they think a second star, pulled it back round into a ring, and the ring set into a world the size of Jupiter, four days and a bit to go round.

Now the wind off the star is stripping it, and the metal falls back where it was made. That was how it was first noticed: Hubble, the late nineties, metal in the light where no metal had any business, and close to thirty years before anyone knew it was the star's own, handed back.