Solitude
A literary science fiction short story.
A PhD astronomer alone in the dome at Siding Spring sees Alpha Centauri brighten on a Tuesday night in early autumn. She runs the instruments through every check she knows and rules out every ordinary explanation, and by the time she has finished she has understood what she is looking at and what it means for the small star she has given three years of her life to.
The story is about the hours between that recognition and the morning, and about the Black Sabbath track she has been hearing the whole time without knowing it.
A personal note: this is, of the stories I have written, the one closest to me. Solitude, the Black Sabbath track from Master of Reality, has lived in my head since the seventies; writing this story was how I finally listened to it properly.