Silas Hiram 4 - Silas Sees Sol

Silas was standing in his attic/observatory and the sky had just darkened enough to see the stars to the west. Mind you, this takes place on "New Earth" later called Helome by the Vuduri. He is staring across a gulf of over four light years.

"Silas turned to the west. He could see the Milky Way in all its glory spanning the entire sky. That he could see it at all with his naked eye amazed him, even though it shouldn’t. Back on Earth, in Pennsylvania, they had long since lost that ability even on the darkest of nights. Many of Silas’ friends had never even seen the Milky Way, but most did not care. Silas did."

"He searched and searched until finally he found what he was looking for. Sitting very low on the horizon was the zig-zag of Cassiopeia. He held his right hand up, straightened his arm and used his hand to blot her out. Even lower on the horizon, partially obscured by the mountains to the west, he found the inverted V of Perseus and with his left hand, he blotted him out as well. He extended both thumbs to form a frame and within that frame was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. If Mary were here, he’d tell her that it was not as beautiful as her, of course. On this night, it was only the eighth brightest star in the sky, but to him, it was the most important. He knew its name was Sol, but he just thought of it as The Sun. And though he could not see it, he knew he was looking at Earth."

"He stared at Sol for a long time, waxing nostalgic. He knew why he and Mary were here. He knew why they had chosen to raise their children on this alien world. The pollution, the overpopulation, the natural disasters, the wrecked ecology, the continual random acts of violence loosely called terrorism; these were the problems that had driven Silas and Mary and the other colonists to seek refuge among the stars. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t miss his ancestral home, knowing none of them would ever see it again. Earth was the birth-world of his species and that would never change."