The Edge is Not the End
The Edge is Not the End appeared in the winter issue of After/Thought Literary Journal.
Voyager 2 is a space probe launched in 1977 to study a generational alignment of the farthest planets. It extraordinarily continued to fly after completing its mission, and in 2018 crossed the protective bubble of our solar system and entered the heliopause.
And finally she went through a wall of fire. (I call her she, but in truth we are speaking of a tiny machine built by hand and conversing in archaic Assembly language; it's that fragility and strength which make me choose to see her as female.) Almost fifty years ago she traveled past the planetary giants she was tasked to document, sending home her tourist photos, her traveler’s impressions of foreign worlds. But she wasn’t finished…
she had her heart set on more. Echoes of ancient starlight, the headiness and high of leaving one place and going to another, into the unknown: And what she found baffled her creators, the scientists, now a different generation than those who’d sent her forth. What she found beyond the heliosphere that protects our small planet was a blurred, fluctuating frontier, a liminal zone, turbulent and filled with noise…
What she found was the edge isn’t the end.
Overlapping zones of plasmic interference and erratic radiation spikes, ghostlike fluctuations of cosmic rays, a place between places, a world between worlds, and still she wrote home from the galactic wild, telling us the boundary is not a sharp border. She looked to the stars and dared whisper hello into that vastness.
She carries our stories, etched into a golden disc, the murmurs of earth: images of leaves and waves, of dolphins and trains; the sounds of rock bands and sitars, choral renditions of medieval plainsong, children laughing. She carries them hopefully as she ventures into the worlds beyond the heliopause, collects telemetry and data from plasma waves and magnetic fields and particle composition and energy…
and sends it all back to a small inconsequential blue planet orbiting a dying star.