Ariadne lay back on the weathered wood of the pier. The book rested on her chest, rising and falling with her breath.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

And then she thought of the final pages of Cosmos , where Sagan wrote about the Voyager spacecraft—how it would sail through the silent dark for billions of years, carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, the sound of a mother kissing her child, and music from a planet that had only just learned to look up.

But Ariadne went for the books.