(Pluto Is | Is Pluto) A Planet!

A song from an imagined musical about the ninth planet. A pewter orrery on a theatre floating in space, and Pluto singing from the end of the longest, wobbliest arm. When the Astronomer sings, a cold light comes from the wings and throws a huge, faceless shadow across the stars: a telescope, a broom for a planet that won't clear its lane, a ruler, a gavel. Pluto answers with moons galore, cryovolcanoes for stage pyro, and a heart. Then they changed the rules. The arm swings down, the enamel "9" falls and bounces, and the cosmos keeps cooking. The children's drawings stay pinned to the cloth. With the theatre empty there's only the ghost light and a chalk orbit, traced from 1930 and stopped in 2006, a third of the way round. Not even one birthday. And the cake is a lie. Then the curtain opens onto real space: past Neptune to the real Pluto, backlit in its blue haze by a sun the size of a speck, with Tombaugh Regio beating at 80 BPM. "Please don't forget me." The stars come back on warm. "My heart may be ice, but it beats just the same." Music, lyrics and visuals carbon: st33v™ silicon: la Cremonde An amphiSapient Production CC BY-NC 4.0 MMXXVI