Reading the tea leaves
- January 1, 2025
Lucas —
One of the very first sketches I did for The Constant Star was for this very scene: Oba and Jea watching the shafts of light filtering down into the Orrery suddenly merge and coalesce into a mysterious diffraction pattern on the wall.
I was reminded of my own experience under a total solar eclipse in 2017: as the Moon crept across the disk of the Sun, light filtering through the trees cast crescent-shaped dapples on the ground.
(Not my pictures! I was too busy gawking at the sky… other folks on the internet with more presence of mind than me took them)
Or — if you’ve ever seen the sunlight filtered through your blinds, or through a narrow crack in the door:
I was thinking: so Oba’s been spending all these years trying to ‘read the tea leaves’, annotating the eons-old carvings on the walls of this ancient ruin with her own charts and scrawlings. She’s dedicated her whole life to decoding the orrery and its meaning — only to have the astronomical happenstance of the eclipse ‘point’ the way to the answer.