How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [88]
Naïve, I thought. I remembered back to the days when I used to think the exact same thing. Wouldn’t it be nice to just think about science and not worry about its impact on culture? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just say the thing that makes the most sense?
A week after I got home, my phone rang, and out of the blue I was told by a member of a previously unknown IAU committee (the third planet committee? The fifth committee? I couldn’t keep track) that Xena was to be a planet.
He couldn’t reveal the details of the decision on the definition of the word planet, but he wanted to prepare me for the onslaught of publicity that would surely follow. As I was the only living discoverer of a planet, he thought it best that I stay humble.
Humble? I thought, and chuckled to myself. My one-year-old daughter had recently learned to mock me in a sign language she had made up herself.
While he had not meant to reveal details to me, he already had. The “only living discoverer” could mean only one thing. If the IAU was going to pick the two-hundred-planet definition, there would have been perhaps a dozen living planet discoverers. If there was only one, it was clear that the IAU had decided on the ten-planet definition that I had come to terms with myself. Xena was to top off an elite list.
“Do you think the rest of the astronomers will go along with this?” I asked.
I was quickly assured that they would. “I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few days. This is going to sail through the vote process.”
• • •
I went home that night and told Diane. We opened a bottle of champagne and drank to the amazing fact that I had discovered a planet. A planet. I had discovered a planet! After all of this time, Xena was officially going to be a planet, and I was officially going to be the only person alive who had found a planet.
Just then, Lilah walked around the corner from where she had been playing, saw the crutches under my arms, and immediately stuck out her hands and waggled her pointer fingers.
Okay, so I was slow, and I still had to crawl to be as fast as my one-year-old daughter. But I had found a planet. No one could take that away from me.
Chapter Twelve
MEAN VERY EVIL MEN
Living on the outskirts of Los Angeles with a clean sweep of the sky to the south of us, we have a very nice view of the standard flight path for arrivals and departures at LAX. Those things moving through the daytime sky that turned into lights brighter even than the stars at night held a special fascination for Lilah. Her sign-language symbol for airplane (arm held aloft with hand parallel to the ground) got much use. First it was just for those little moving dots in the sky, then it was for pictures of airplanes in books, and then, one very exciting day when Lilah was thirteen months old, it was for an airplane that she actually got to fly in. I spent the whole morning trying to prepare her for the mental transition:
“Look! Airplanes in the sky!” I said, as we got close to LAX.
“Look! The airplanes are driving around on the ground!” as we were moving through the airport.
“Look! That is the tunnel people take to get on to the airplane!” as we were at the gate.
“Look! We’re now inside!” as we sat down.
For what I had assumed would be a difficult cognitive leap, Lilah took it all in stride. Of course we’re inside the airplane and now flying in the sky, Daddy. What else would we be doing?
We were taking our first family vacation, two weeks on Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands, northwest of Seattle. Diane had lived on Orcas Island for her high school years, and her