You can't see the Big from down here on the Dirt. Yeah you can, you tell me. Go up north! Go out at night! Look at all those stars, man. Nope. Sorry. All what stars? You're missing -oh, a few. And stars don't twinkle. And where's the colours?

I can stand at a rec-room viewport in Mosco City on Farside and see farther back in time than you can anyplace on the Dirt. There's starlight arriving from out there that doesn't have a star anymore, it's been travelling for so long. That orphan starlight just gets absorbed by your atmosphere. But out in the Big, if you're looking at the right tiny window of space at exactly the right time, you might see new light arriving here from stars that only ignited fifty-thousand years ago. I watched a stellar nursery bloom one day a year or two before the first war. Just because I could.

Spacers put telescopes everywhere, robotic and manual, watching the whole spectrum. We have to. Most of the time we track asteroids, space-junk(yours and ours) and ordinary, prosaic celestial objects. But we keep an eye on each other too. Everybody knows everybody else's comings and goings because we have to. But sometimes we aim the telescopes at the nebulae and it looks like we're just doing research. And for the most part we are. But we've been doing this for over fifty years, and we learn the signs. Sometimes, the word goes around. 'Cassie out at Linden 2033 says that stellar creche she e-mailed us about is definitely going to bloom soon. Time and coordinates follow.' Pass it on.