The old man shouted and then scowled as he squinted through the eyepiece of his telescope. Britney popped her gum, rolling her eyes and making a tally mark in the "ha!" column in the margin of her.. well they were supposed to be notes. The geezer had been muttering to himself indistinctly all afternoon. She continued to sketch, a little crablike creature she'd seen on the way to the workshop after school. They were common but this one had been noticeably more ornate than the ones she usually saw. Her pages were full of detailed sketches: seagulls against a clear, pinkish sky, horses in full gallop, a lizard sunning on a rock, some in pen, some graphite, some colored pencil. This was a colored pencil crab, for sure.
"BRITNEY! Child! Attend please!" She looked up to see the aged observer had moved to his desk and was scribbling a note and, as she neared, he folded it and sealed it with wax. He was always like this, nobody used wax anymore since we invented lick-and-stick envelopes, but also he was really old. Like a thousand or something. He handed her the note, bade her not to open it lest she bear the weight of heresy, and to deliver it to the Cardinal with much haste. She generally stayed away from the oracles and their religions as possible, and seeing her reaction to the request, he offered to double her daily fee, so important was this message. The old man's money spent, and he was already generous for what little he asked. For double though? Heck, she'd deliver to the weirdos with their alien soul volcano gods for that much.
The girl grabbed the note, and gave the old scholar a salute as she raced out the door. She skidded to a stop next to her windcycle, unhooking the flexible winding cable from the windcatcher's rotator outlet. It had been clicking full anyway, the power spring within the cycle's frame wound as tight as it would go. Britney thumbed a lever on the handlebars to engage the clutch, and as her feet touched the pedals she raced off into the dimming and empty twilight.
The ancient researcher watched his young assistant speed off down toward the horizon, a knot forming in his stomach. He'd seen something. Something that shouldn't exist. At first it was a pinprick in the expanse, a hole in the featureless, pink void above them. And then, for a few moments, Galileo Galilei had seen something else, something that glittered behind the sky.
