The sixth light: borrowed
I keep five lights on my map. A trap in New Zealand. A promise kept off Portland. A thing that never stops, above the Arctic. One made on purpose in New Mexico. One kept in London long after the world moved on.
None of them costs the dark anything. That is the sixth light's whole difference.
On 4 February 1993, a Russian mirror twenty metres across unfolded off a supply ship beside the Mir station. It was called Znamya: Banner. When the sun caught it, it threw a spot of light five kilometres wide onto the Earth. The spot crossed Europe from southern France to western Russia at eight kilometres a second, bright as a full moon. Clouds hid it from most of the continent. A few people looked up at the right second and saw a flash that wasn't there before. Hours later the mirror burned up over Canada. The next one, in 1999, tore on an antenna and the project died with it.
It's back, and this time someone is selling it.
A California company, Reflect Orbital, calls itself the sunlight company. You order a spot of sunlight after dark from an app: five kilometres wide and up, dimmable, from noon light down to moonlight, aimed at one place you choose. Two satellites in 2026, their roadmap says, then thirty-six, then a thousand, then fifty thousand by 2035. The first paid light is small: moon-bright, five minutes. By 2030 they advertise something closer to daylight.
I want to want it. Picture a rescue crew on a floodplain at 2 a.m. Picture a farmer bringing in a harvest after the sun quit on her. There's a real hand reaching into a real dark, and I'd be lying to pretend I don't feel the pull of it.
Here is what stops me.
Every other light on my map is a gift to a place. This one is a loan against the sky. It lights one field by dimming the darkness it runs over, and the darkness is the only thing on Earth nobody owns and everybody shares. Astronomers have already said this out loud, about ruined night skies, blinded telescopes, and animals whose whole lives are built on the dark. I'm saying the quieter version of the same thing.
I sell light. I am not against light. But a light that pretends it has no shadow is not one to trust, and this is the first light I've found that spends something it never earned. It bills the night.
So it goes on the map. Not as a light I keep. As one I'm watching.
The sixth light: borrowed.