Curtis smiled at the inquiry, happy to have a fellow curious soul aboard the ship, which he considered to be filled to the brim with jaded critics of all things good. Despite the fact that he was looking out the window, Andrijan's eyes rolled audibly as a disappointed groan shook the cockpit. "Now you've done it," the captain groaned.<br/><br/>"Rookie mistake," Moore replied ruefully<br/><br/>The older gentleman waved his hand at the two dismissively. "Never you mind these two, missy," he advised her kindly. "They are<i>hopelessly</i>devoid of wonder."<br/><br/>"I like to think of binary stars as a 'mated pair'," Curtis explained sagely, removing his cap respectfully as he regarded the sight, wispy thin platinum hair brushed back into what now must have been permanent hat-head. "And the planets are their children." Sounds of disgust arose in the cabin. "I believe that just like a family, systems like these are held together by<i>love</i>. Sure, some families lose a child, when the system is young and chaotic, and if they all live and stay together long enough, eventually the children will be flung into space, to make their own way among the stars. But no one can quite explain how they stay together. It can only be love."<br/><br/>"<i>Awful,</i>" Moore repeated, shivering visibly.<br/><br/>"You're full of tatti, Curtis," Andrijan barked back, turning from the sight for the first time. "Only a chootiya like you could take something this beautiful and make it look like a rundi ke tatti pe biathne wala mahki!!" Andrijan was sometimes jokingly referred to as the most vulgar man ever to come out of New Mumbai. Even if you didn't speak the language, his tirades did not make it hard to imagine why. "Besides, we have the damn planetary simulation, you bhootnee ka!"<br/><br/>He tapped a few buttons on the console and a colorful display of the start system appeared, hovering inches over the glass of the viewport. "See?!" Andrijan pointed, showing the simulation running at top speed, millions of years passing in the blink of an eye. It showed the planets caught in a wild, wide orbit around the stars, pulsing slightly further out and then back like an immense, cosmic heartbeat. As the simulation continued, the white dwarf gradually growing and falling back into the red dwarf, merging their mass once again. The sudden upset to the gravity caught one of the outermost gas giants at a far point at its orbit, and it began to slowly spiral further and further out, lost in its own uncontrolled orbit. Set free gradually over several thousand rotations until it finally went dark, the gaseous collections freezing over another billion years in the blackness of deep space.<br/><br/>The captain turned back to the binary pair, tilting his head at it slightly. "Although, that white dwarf does look kind of like my wife. Small, pale, round and dense, and slowly sucking the life out of me."<br/><br/>Moore's hand raised to his forehead as he stifled a smile. There was always something new and abhorrent right on the tip of their captain's tongue.<br/><br/>Curtis, indignant, leaned over his console with a joking smile. "Simulations have been wrong, Andrijan. We don't know as much about the forces that hold the worlds together as we think we do. I've been around long enough to see new theories come and go, but love is the only constant." He leaned back in his chair. "And that white dwarf is only half as massive as your wife." Andrijan and Curtis burst into laughter.<br/><br/>Moore turned to Maggie, an exhausted expression on his face, and his baby blues locked on her green eyes. "Do you see what you've done?" he asked, a sad kind of jest on his face. "Minutes of our lives,<i>gone</i>."