When Emma saw the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn with her almost naked eye, she felt a great relief: they had not all been making it up, Copernicus and the rest of them. The planets, space, they really were out there doing the things that she had read about them doing. It wasn’t a grand conspiracy built to replace the God conspiracy (which she was fairly sure was still a conspiracy, just maybe a psychologically useful one). Tears welled up and a lump stuck in her throat. She’d seen so many images of the planets, sherbet candies shaped like Saturn, gods shaped like Jove. She did her best to keep the tears from welling over. What a fanciful thing to weep at, she thought—did she think she was some kind of Victorian? Emma observed in herself the way two different knowledges felt. She had read about the planets, the rings, the solar system before, and she would have said that she believed in those things, believed they existed. Now that she had seen them, she doubted the conviction of her prior belief. It was as though her whole life she’d been holding her breath, without realising it, waiting to see if she’d been fooled, waiting for the illusion to end, the possible world’s physics to come crashing in on themselves, and now she could finally breathe out.

Seeing is believing, she thought to herself: corny. Emma had read that to the Aymara—that indigenous people who live in the high Andes who think of the past as being in front of them and the future behind them where they can’t see it—it was really important whether you had actually seen something or not. It was so important, in fact, that it was marked in the language. Every language marks some aspects. Romance languages mark gender, for example. It is a necessary component of speech to denote what gender something is. Even with recent interventions like -x or -@, gender itself is still being marked. In English, though, gender is not obligatory. An example of something obligatory in English would be… tense, in verbs. We must indicate when a certain action took place. Whereas in Mandarin, context as well as aspect markers can be used (but need not be used) to demonstrate when an action took place. In Mandarin tense is not obligatory. In Aymara it is marked whether or not the speaker literally saw an action happen. Someone might say, “Maria painted this wallpaper (but I did not see her do it),” for example. If someone doesn’t denote the not-seeing, those who hear her would think she was boasting, inflating her own ego, telling a story about a possible world as though it were the real one and she could get away with it, making someone or something up inside her head. Researchers Miracle and Yapita observed that the Aymara often respond with incredulity to written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’—was the author actually there?” “‘Planets eventually, in the space of the universe, collide.’—who has ever seen such a thing with her own eyes?”

Michael Lockwood, the esteemed author of Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe, might agree with the Aymara in this sense. The formation of the moons is quite uncertain, though Lockwood would claim this is because the past itself is uncertain, not just that we didn’t see it. Of course, it’s lovely to consider how when we look at space we are looking at the past, stars long dead lightyears away. Seeing might be believing, but just how many worlds is it possible to peek at at once?

As Emma gazed up at the celestial bodies, the heavenly spheres as they had previously been known, she thought about how she’d read that Jupiter’s centre may be a giant diamond. This she could not confirm, but the presence of Jupiter she could. Or rather, she could not confirm it but she believed it. She believed it the way she believed in a cherry or a grapefruit, the way she had faith in her feet upon the ground. The universe was more tangible than it previously had been, smaller perhaps or maybe closer. More friendly. Winking at her across the cosmos. And this was the exact opposite of a painting, which was a thing designed to look like something. This was instead a thing that was anterior to itself, the light already old, the body already having careened on through the cold desert of space.