Star Plucker StudiosThe studio
It comes from Liu Cixin’s novel Death’s End.
An alien whose job is listening for other worlds picks up a message. We sent it by plucking our own sun like a string. To the alien it sounds clumsy, like a bard on a rough country zither, and so it gives us a nickname: the Star-Pluckers.
We took it as a job description. Reach for something far too big, and play it for anyone who’ll listen.
Sound on.
At golden hour on a mountaintop, a young woman in a long coat walks up a rock ledge, away from us, towards the low sun. The view drifts slowly to the right, and across a misty gulf a giant radio dish comes fully into view on the next peak, standing still, its bowl already turned to the sun.
Closer, she sits on the edge of the ledge and watches the dish. Its feed begins to glow, slowly, and she turns her head to the sun. The feed pulses three times and sends a thin beam of light across the sky to the sun.
Close on the sun, the beam strikes it. The sun’s edge shivers like a plucked string, the beam quivers and fades, and a ring of light spreads out from the sun. Four seconds later a second ring follows.
Wide over a valley at dusk, seen over her shoulder as she sits on the ledge, with the radio dish and its station still standing on the next peak to the right, just where they stood before, the bowl facing the sun. Rings of light keep spreading from the sun, across the sky and down over the land. As the first ring passes, the windows of a valley town light up and its woodsmoke glows. Then a lantern lights beside a snowbound log croft on the fell to the left of the dish, and then a cottage window lights in the dark hollow between her ledge and the dish’s peak, with someone inside, listening.
Close on the sun, low over far mountain ranges. A thread of light climbs from it to one small star high in the sky, and the star flares when the thread reaches it.
The star glides back down the thread towards the sun, the spreading rings fade away, and a deep rose rim and three rings are painted round the sun, stroke by stroke.
The sun and its star rest together as the Star Plucker Studios mark. The star glints once.