“How far is it?”
“5.1 parsecs, 16.6 light-years. The sun’s twinkling from seventeen years ago has just reached it.”
“So we have to wait another seventeen years?”
“People’s lives are bitter and short.”
Her last sentence touched something deep in his heart. His eyes, blown dry by the winter wind, suddenly teared. “Indeed. People’s lives are bitter and short.”
“But at least we’ll still be around to keep this sort of appointment again.”
He stared at her dumbly. Did she really want to part ways again for seventeen years?!
“Excuse me. This is all a bit overwhelming,” he said. “I need some time to think.”
The wind had blown her hair onto her forehead. She brushed it away. She saw into his heart, then laughed sympathetically. “Of course. I’ll give you my number and email address. If you’re willing, we’ll keep in touch.”
He let out a long breath, as if a riverboat on the misty ocean finally saw the lighthouse on the shore. His heart filled with a happiness he was too embarrassed to admit to.
“But… Why don’t I escort you down the mountain.”
Laughing, she shook her head and pointed to the domed vacation villa behind her. “I’m going to stay here awhile. Don’t worry. There’s electricity and good company. They live here, forest rangers… I really need some peace and quiet, a long time of peace and quiet.”
They made their quick goodbyes. He followed the snow-packed road down the mountain. She stood at Mount Siyun’s peak for a long while watching him leave. They both prepared for a seventeen-year wait.
THIRD TIME
After the third time he returned from Mount Siyun, he was suddenly aware of the end of his life. Neither of them had more than seventeen years left. The vast and desolate universe made light as slow as a snail. Life was as worth mentioning as dirt.
They kept in touch for the first five of the seventeen years. They exchanged emails, occasionally called each other, but they never met. She lived in another city, far away. Later, they each walked toward the summit of their own lives. He became a celebrated brain-medicine expert and the head of a major hospital. She became a member of an international academy of science. They had more and more to worry about. At the same time, he understood that, with the most prominent astronomer in academic circles, it was inappropriate to discuss too much this myth-like thing that linked them together. So, they gradually grew further and further apart. Halfway through their seventeen years, they stopped contacting each other entirely.
However, he wasn’t worried. He knew that, between them, they had an unbreakable bond, the light from Altair rushing through vast and desolate space to Earth. They both waited silently for it to arrive.
ALTAIR
They met at the peak of Mount Siyun in the dark of night. Both of them wanted to show up early to avoid making the other wait. So around three in the morning, they both clambered up the mountain. Their flying cars could have easily reached the peak, but they both parked at the foot of the mountain and then walked up, as if they wanted to re-create the past.
Mount Siyun was designated as a nature preserve ten years ago, and it had become one of the few wild places left on Earth. The observatory and vacation villas of old became vine-covered ruins. It was among these ruins that they met under the starlight. He’d recently seen her on TV, so he knew the marks that time had left on her. Even though there was no moon tonight, no matter what he imagined, he felt that the woman before him was still the one who stood under the moonlight thirty-four years ago. Her eyes reflected starlight, making his heart melt in his feelings of the past.
She said, “Let’s not start by talking about Altair, okay? These past few years, I’ve been in charge of a research project, precisely to measure the transmission of type A twinkling between stars.”
“Oh, wow. I hadn’t let myself hope that anything might actually come from all this.”
“How could it not? We have to face up to the truth that it exists. In the universe that classical relativity and quantum physics describes, its oddity is already inconceivable…. We discovered in these few years of observation that transmitting type A twinkling between stars is a universal phenomenon. At any given moment, innumerable stars are originating type A twinklings. Surrounding stars propagate them. Any star can initiate a twinkling or propagate the twinkling of other stars. The whole of space seems to be a pool flooded with ripples in the midst of rain…. What? Aren’t you excited?”
“I guess I don’t understand: Observing the transmission of twinkling through four stars took over thirty years. How can you…”
“You’re a smart person. You ought to be able to think of a way.”
“I think… Is it like this: Search for some stars near each other to observe. For example, star A and star B, they’re ten thousand light-years from Earth, but they’re only five light-years from each other. This way, you only need five years to observe the twinkle they transmitted ten thousand years ago.”
“You really are a smart man! The Milky Way has hundreds of billions of stars. We can find plenty of stars like those.”
He laughed. Just like thirty-four years ago, he wished she could see him laugh in the night.
“I brought you a present.”
As he spoke, he opened a traveling bag, then took out an odd thing about the size of a soccer ball. At first glance, it seemed like a haphazardly balled-up fishing net. Bits of starlight pierced through its small holes. He turned on his flashlight. The thing was made of an uncountably large number of tiny globes, each about the size of a grain of rice. Attached to each globe was a different number of sticks so slender they were almost invisible. They connected one globe to another. Together, they formed an extremely complex netlike system.
He turned off the flashlight. In the dark, he pressed a switch at the base of the structure. A dazzling burst of quickly moving bright dots filled the structure, as though tens of thousands of fireflies had been loaded into the tiny, hollow, glass globes. One globe lit, then its light propagated to surrounding globes. At any given moment, some portion of the tiny globes produced an initial point of light or propagated the light another globe produced. Vividly, she saw her own analogy: a pond in the midst of rain.
“Is this a model of the propagation of twinkling among the stars? Oh, so beautiful. Can it be… you’d already predicted everything?!”
“I’d guessed that propagating the twinkling among the stars was a universal phenomenon. Of course, it was just intuition. However, this isn’t a model of the propagation of stellar twinkling. Our campus has a brain-science research project that uses three-dimensional holographic-microscopy molecular-positioning technology to study the propagation of signals between neurons in the brain. This is just the model of signal propagation in the right brain cortex, albeit a really small part of it.”
She stared, captivated by the sphere with the dancing lights. “Is this consciousness?”
“Yes. Just as a computer’s ability to operate is a product of a tremendous amount of zeros and ones, consciousness is also just a product of a tremendous amount of simple connections between neurons. In other words, consciousness is what happens when there is a tremendous amount of signal propagation between nodes.”
Silently, they stared at this star-filled model of the brain. In the universal abyss that surrounded them, hundreds of billions of stars floating in the Milky Way and hundreds of billions of stars outside the Milky Way were propagating innumerable type A twinklings between each other.
She said lightly, “It’s almost light. Let’s wait for sunrise.”
They sat together on a broken wall, looking at the model of the brain in front of them. The flicker light had a hypnotic effect. Gradually, she fell asleep.