Found the Year He Died

That last detail is the one every outlet repeated, and it is true. Henri Debehogne found the object on March 21, 1991, at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, eight months before Mercury died in London. But the coincidence did not announce itself. Somebody went looking for it.

Here is how this particular rock got chosen. When the proposal to name an asteroid after Mercury reached the Minor Planet Center, the working group was not short of candidates. The catalogue that autumn held roughly 483,000 numbered minor planets and had put names on about 20,500 of them. Call it four hundred and sixty thousand anonymous rocks, any one of which was available to be his. They picked 17473 partly, by their own account, because of its provisional designation: 1991 FM3.

FM. Freddie Mercury.

Except that is not what FM means. A provisional designation is a filing code, and it is fully determined by the calendar. The year comes first. Then a letter for the half-month of discovery — F is the second half of March. Then a letter and a subscript marking the object's place in that batch: M with a 3 means the eighty-seventh thing logged in that fortnight. 1991 FM3 says found in late March 1991, eighty-seventh in line. It is a clerk's convention for keeping a queue in order. It is as personal as a parking stub.

So be exact about what the catalogue did and did not do. It did not invent the coincidence. Debehogne really did find the thing in the spring of the year Mercury died, and no bookkeeping made that happen. What the catalogue did was concatenate. It took a date that meant nothing and a queue position that meant nothing and printed them as a single string, in which a year and a pair of initials sit flush against each other and read as one object. Two unrelated facts, rendered legible together — and legibility is what got mistaken for fate. Search four hundred and sixty thousand strings and something is going to turn up looking like providence. That is not a failure of the search. It is what a catalogue that size is for.

The obvious move here is to call that hollow. It isn't. Brian May holds a doctorate in astrophysics. He knows exactly what a provisional designation encodes; he could recite the convention from memory. He announced it anyway, gladly, and the room in Switzerland was right to be moved. Nothing was smuggled past anybody. The meaning was made in the open, by people who could see the mechanism working and chose to let it work on them.

Look instead at where the memorial actually ended up. Not on the asteroid. The asteroid is far too faint to see without serious equipment, entirely indifferent, and would carry the name of a shipping clerk or a war criminal with precisely the same enthusiasm. Nothing about it changed on September 5, 2016. What changed was a line in a circular published the day before by the Minor Planet Center, which operates out of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and which exists because people have agreed, for two centuries now, to keep a list.

That is the monument: a maintained record. Which means its permanence is not the permanence of stone but the permanence of an institution — contingent, funded, staffed, revisable, alive only as long as somebody keeps showing up. We reached for the rock because rock looks like forever. What we actually got was a promise to keep filing.

And a record that somebody maintains is a record with a door on it. The Minor Planet Center is not only a list; it is a body that decides which humans get fastened to which rocks — on a proposal, through a working group, subject to approval. Twenty thousand names against four hundred and sixty thousand blanks was never a shortage of rocks. It was a queue at a desk. Mercury's name was not found in the sky on September 4, 2016. It was admitted.

Which is where the other half of his persistence separates itself, and not only by being sturdier. "Somebody to Love" is not stored anywhere in particular. It is in a few hundred million heads, unbidden, reconstructable from a hum in a stairwell. No committee ratifies it. No observatory maintains it. Nobody had to approve the proposal. It survives by having been copied into people, which is the oldest and least revocable storage humans have ever built, and the only one whose admissions policy is that the song has to be good. Those are not two facts about it. The ungated store is the durable one because nothing has to keep showing up to hold the door.

The asteroid was there before him and will be there long after everyone who knows the name is gone. That is true, and it is usually said as though it were consoling. It isn't. The rock's endurance was never on offer to him; it was only ever standing nearby. What was on offer is a filing convention that happened to spell his initials, a catalogue somebody promises to keep, and a song whose next line you already know.