Sunrise on Cerro Paranal

Camila was supposed to close the dome at sunrise. She closed it. She wrote up the night's observation log. She put on a fleece for the cold morning. Then she climbed the stairs to the catwalk and walked out, with Polly on her shoulder, into the air.

The sun was not yet up. The Milky Way was fading behind a band of blue at the eastern horizon. The Atacama spread below them, a vast dim plain in the predawn, with the four white domes of the VLT on the summit ridge.

They did not speak for some minutes.

"This is the last good moment of the night shift," Camila said finally. "Right before sunrise. Everything is done. The data is on its way to Germany. The dome is closed. I have not yet thought about whether I will eat anything for breakfast or just sleep. Right now it is just light coming up."

A pale line on the eastern horizon, behind the Andes, sharpened. Then it became a glow. Then the first arc of the sun appeared.

The colour of the light was different from any Polly had seen before. It was not the orange-pink of sunrise at lower altitude. It was almost white, almost violet, with a quality that suggested it had not had to travel through any of the haze and water vapour that softens lower sunrises. It was sun-light without the editor.

The domes lit up first, then the catwalk, then Camila's hands on the railing. Polly felt the warmth on her chest. The air, which had been just-above-freezing all night, began to lift.

Camila put one hand gently on Polly's back. "You will leave today," she said. "I always know when a visitor is going."

Polly tilted her red head.

"Thank you for being here this week," Camila said. "It is rare. The next visitor will be a graduate student doing a PhD. Then a journalist. Then another astronomer. None of them will be a parrot. I will remember the parrot."

Polly thought about all the people Camila had had as company on this catwalk, and all the people she would have. They were a long line. Polly had been one of them, for one week. She liked the idea of being a moment in the run of someone's career, the way Camila and the others would be a moment in hers.

A second person came out onto the catwalk, in a green ESO polo. Diego. He carried two thermoses of coffee. He handed one to Camila without saying anything. He nodded at Polly. He stood with them as the sun fully rose.

When it was up, Polly stretched her blue-teal wings. She lifted from Camila's shoulder. She circled the four domes once, very slowly, to fix them in her memory. The light off the white paint was almost too bright to look at directly.

Then she banked east, toward the Andes, and let the morning wind carry her up.

The Atacama dropped below her. The domes became four small white spots. Then they were gone. The desert spread out and out and out. She could see, very far on the eastern horizon, the volcanoes of the Andes, and beyond them, the great green smudge of the Amazon basin starting.

She thought, as she flew, about how the light from a galaxy forty-seven million years away had been waiting in the air around her all night. She thought about a small black beetle drinking fog three weeks late. She thought about Camila on her catwalk, ready to do it all again tomorrow.

She pointed her beak toward whatever was next.