vdB 16: The Octopus Nobody Cataloged

The universe, as anyone who has tried to photograph it will tell you, is mostly dark, and the dark parts are generally considered not worth mentioning. This is a mistake. It is the mistake the Galactic Registry of Noteworthy Objects had been making, efficiently and expensively, for about four hundred thousand years, right up until the morning a junior filing clerk named Oswin Tapp received a complaint from a cloud.

The complaint arrived as a very slow pressure wave, which took the Registry's translation machine eleven days to decode and a further three to apologize for. It came from the edge of what the inhabitants of a small blue planet called the Perseus molecular cloud, roughly a thousand of their light-years from home, and it read, in part: WE HAVE EIGHT ARMS. WE HAVE BEEN LISTED UNDER FOUR DIFFERENT NUMBERS. NONE OF THEM IS OURS. Oswin checked. It was true. A human named Barnard had written down two pieces of the cloud as 202 and 204, and later a human named Lynds, who in 1962 set out to catalog every dark patch she could find, called the same pieces 1451 and 1455. This is what happens when you describe an octopus one tentacle at a time.

Worse, the only thing nearby with a proper, respectable entry was a small blue smudge called vdB 16, which was not a cloud at all but merely some dust being lit up by an unremarkable ninth-magnitude star named HIP 16170. The star had done nothing to deserve this except stand next to the dust at the right moment, which, Oswin reflected, is also how most people become famous. The cloud, meanwhile, had spent ages quietly doing the single most interesting thing in the neighborhood: making stars. Buried in its arms were protostars too young and too swaddled to be seen in ordinary light, blowing jets of gas out through the dust like small furious children blowing bubbles through a straw.

Oswin drafted a reply. It explained that the Registry listed objects which were visible, and that being dark was, in the technical sense, the opposite of that. It explained that this was nothing personal. Then he deleted it, because he had just found, in the Registry's archive of Things Recorded by Primitive Species, sixteen hours of patient photographs made by a man on that same blue planet, who had pointed a small telescope at precisely this patch of nothing and waited until the nothing turned out to have a shape.

The man had given it a name that appeared in no catalog anywhere. Oswin looked at the photograph for a long time. Then he did something no clerk of the Registry had done in four hundred thousand years: he opened a new file, and in the box marked OFFICIAL DESIGNATION he typed the name in. The Dark Octopus wrote back to say thank you. Being a cloud, and having no sense of proportion, it took about a century to finish the sentence.

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