ALPHA CENTAURI A
The hospital’s young employees’ group had a spring outing. He cherished this outing particularly, because it was getting less and less likely they’d invite him again. This time, the trip organizer was deliberately mysterious, pulling down the blinds on all the coach windows and having everyone guess where they were once they arrived. The first one to guess correctly won a prize. He knew where they were the instant he stepped off the coach, but he kept quiet.
The highest peak of Mount Siyun stood before him. The pearl-like spherical roofs on its summit glittered in the sunlight.
After someone guessed where they were, he told the trip organizer that he wanted to go to the observatory to visit an acquaintance. He left on foot, following the meandering road up the mountain.
He hadn’t lied, but the woman whose name he didn’t even know wasn’t part of the observatory staff. After ten years, she probably wasn’t here anymore. He didn’t actually want to go inside, just to look around at the place where, ten years ago, his soul, hot, dry, and as bright as the sun, spilled into a thread of moonlight.
One hour later, he reached the mountaintop and the observatory’s white railings. Its paint had cracked and faded. Silently, he took in the individual observatories. The place hadn’t changed much. He quickly located the domed building that he’d once entered. He sat on a stone block on the grass, lit a cigarette, then studied the building’s iron door, spellbound. The scene he’d long cherished replayed from the depths of his memory: with the iron door half open, in the midst of a ray of moonlight like water, a feather drifted in….
He was so completely steeped in that long-gone dream that when the miracle happened, he wasn’t surprised: the observatory’s iron door opened for real. The feather that once had emerged from the moonlight drifted into the sunlight. She left in a hurry to go into another observatory. This couldn’t have taken more twenty seconds, but he knew he wasn’t mistaken.
Five minutes later, they reunited.
This was the first time he’d seen her with adequate light. She was exactly as he’d imagined. He wasn’t surprised. It’d been ten years, though. She shouldn’t have looked exactly like the woman barely lit by a few signal lamps and the moon. He was puzzled.
She was pleasantly surprised to see him, but no more than that. “Doctor, I make a round of every observatory for my project. In a given year, I’m only here for half a month. To run into you again, it must be fate!”
That last sentence, tossed off lightly, confirmed his initial impression: She didn’t feel anything more about seeing him again besides surprise. However, she still recognized him after ten years. He took a shred of comfort in that.
They exchanged a few words about what had happened to the visiting English scholar who’d suffered the brain injury. Finally, he asked, “Are you still researching the twinkling of stars?”
“Yes. After observing the sun’s twinkling for two years, I moved on to other stars. As I’m sure you understand, the techniques necessary to observe other stars are completely different from those to observe the sun. The project didn’t have new funding. It halted for many years. We just started it back up three years ago. Right now, we are only observing twenty-five stars. The number and scope are still growing.”
“Then you must have produced more mosaics.”
The moonlit smile that had surfaced so many times from the depths of memory over the past ten years now emerged in the sunlight. “Ah, you still remember! Yes, every time I come to Mount Siyun, I collect pretty pebbles. Come, I’ll show you!”
She took him into the observatory where they’d first met. A giant telescope confronted him. He didn’t know whether it was the same telescope from ten years ago, but the computers that surrounded it were practically new. Familiar things hung on a tall curved walclass="underline" mosaics of all different sizes. Each one was of an undulating curve. They were all of different lengths. Some were as gentle as the sea. Others were violent, like a row of tall towers strung together at random.
One by one, she told him which waves came from which stars. “These twinklings, we call type A twinklings. They don’t occur as much as other types. The difference between type A twinklings and those of other types, besides that their energy fluctuations are orders of magnitude larger, is that the mathematics of their curves is even more elegant.”
He shook his head, puzzled. “You scientists doing basic research are always talking about the elegance of mathematics. I guess that’s your prerogative. For example, you all think that Maxwell’s equations are incredibly elegant. I understood them once, but I couldn’t see where the elegance was….”
Just like ten years ago, she suddenly grew serious. “They’re elegant like crystals, very hard, very pure, and very transparent.”
Unexpectedly, he recognized one of the mosaics. “Oh, you re-created one?” Seeing her uncomprehending expression, he continued. “That’s the waveform of the sun twinkling in the mosaic you gave me ten years ago.”
“But… that’s the waveform from a type A twinkling from Alpha Centauri A. We observed it, um, last October.”
He trusted that she was genuinely puzzled, but he trusted his own judgment as well. He knew that waveform too well. Moreover, he could even recall the color and shape of every stone that made up the curve. He didn’t want her to know that, until he got married last year, that mosaic had always hung on his wall. There were a few nights every month when moonlight would seep in after he’d turned out the lights, and he could make out the mosaic from his bed. That was when he’d silently count the pebbles that made up the curve. His gaze crawled along the curve like a beetle. Usually, by the time he’d crawled along the entire curve and gone halfway back, he’d fallen asleep. In his dreams, he continued to stroll along this curve that came from the sun, like stepping from colorful stone to colorful stone to cross a river whose banks he’d never see….
“Can you look up the curve of the sun twinkling from ten years ago? The date was April twenty-third.”
“Of course.”
She gave him an odd look, obviously startled that he remembered that date so easily. At the computer, she pulled up that waveform of the sun twinkling followed by the waveform of Alpha Centauri A twinkling that was on the wall. She stared at the screen, dumbfounded.
The two waveforms overlapped perfectly.
When her long silence grew unbearable, he suggested, “Maybe these two stars have the same structure, so they also twinkle the same way. You said before that type A twinkling reflects the star’s deep structure.”
“They are both on the main sequence and they both have spectral type G2, but their structures are not identical. The crux, though, is that even for two stars with the same structure, we still wouldn’t see this. It’s like banyan trees. Have you ever seen two that were absolutely identical? For such complex waveforms to actually overlap perfectly, that’s like having two large banyan trees where even their outermost branches were exactly the same.”
“Perhaps there really are two large banyan trees that are exactly the same,” he consoled, knowing his words were meaningless.
She shook her head lightly. Suddenly, she thought of something and leapt to stand. Fear joined the surprise already in her gaze.
“My god,” she said.
“What?”
“You… Have you ever thought about time?”
He quickly caught on to what she was thinking. “As far as I know, Alpha Centauri A is our closest star. It’s only about… four light-years away.”
“1.3 parsecs is 4.25 light-years.” She was still in the grip of astonishment. It was as if she couldn’t believe the things she herself was saying.