Hold Up the Sky

THE THINKER

THE SUN

He still remembered how he felt the first time he saw the Mount Siyun Astronomical Observatory thirty-four years ago. After his ambulance crossed the mountain ridge, Mount Siyun’s highest peak emerged in the distance. Its observatories’ spherical roofs reflected the golden light of the setting sun like pearls inlaid into the mountain peak.

At the time, he’d just graduated from medical school. A brain-surgery intern assisting the chief of surgery, he’d been rushed here to save a visiting research scholar from England who’d fallen on a hike. The scholar had injured his head too seriously to be moved. Once the ambulance arrived, they drilled a hole in the patient’s skull, then drained some blood out to reduce brain swelling. Once the patient had been stabilized enough to move, the ambulance took him to the hospital for surgery.

It was late at night by the time they could leave. Out of curiosity, while others carried the patient into the ambulance, he examined the several spherical observatories that surrounded him. How they were laid out seemed to imply some sort of hidden message, like a Stonehenge in the moonlight. Spurred on by some mystical force that he still didn’t understand even after a lifetime of contemplation, he walked to the nearest observatory, opened its door, then walked inside.

The lights inside were off except for numerous small signal lamps. He felt as though he’d walked from a moonlit starry sky to a moonless starry sky. The only moonlight was a sliver that penetrated the crack in the spherical roof. It fell on the giant astronomical telescope, partially sketching out its contours in silver lines. The telescope looked like a piece of abstract art in a town square at night.

He stepped silently to the bottom of the telescope. In the weak light, he saw a large pile of machinery. It was more complex than he’d imagined. He searched for an eyepiece. A soft voice came from the door:

“This is a solar telescope. It doesn’t have an eyepiece.”

A figure wearing white work clothes walked through the door, as though a feather had drifted in from the moonlight. The woman walked over to him, bringing a light breeze along with her.

“A traditional solar telescope casts an image onto a screen. Nowadays, we usually use a monitor…. Doctor, you seem to be very interested in this.”

He nodded. “An observatory is such a sublime and rarefied place. I like how it makes me feel.”

“Then why did you go into medicine? Oh, that was very rude of me.”

“Medicine isn’t just some trivial skill. Sometimes, it, too, is sublime, like my specialty of brain medicine, for example.”

“Oh? When you use a scalpel to open up the brain, you can see thoughts?” she said.

Her smiling face in the weak light made him think of something he’d never seen before, the sun cast onto a screen. Once the violent flares disappeared, the magnificence that remained couldn’t help but make his heart skip a beat. He smiled, too, hoping she could see his smile.

“Oh, we can look at the brain all we want,” he said, “but consider this: Say a mushroom-shaped thing you can hold in one hand turns out to be a rich and varied universe. From a certain philosophical viewpoint, this universe is even grander than the one you observe. Even though your universe is tens of billions of light-years wide, it’s been established that it’s finite. My universe is infinite because thought is infinite.”

“Ah, not everybody’s thoughts are infinite but, Doctor, yours seem to be. As for astronomy, it’s not as rarefied as you think. Several thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile and several hundred years ago on a long sea voyage, it was a practical skill. An astronomer of the time often spent years marking the positions of thousands of stars on star charts. A census of the stars consumed their lives. Nowadays, the actual work of astronomical research is dull and meaningless. For example, I study the twinkling of stars. I make endless observations, take notes, then make more observations and take more notes. It’s definitely not sublime as well as not rarefied.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “The twinkling of stars? Like the kind we can see?” When he saw her laugh, he laughed, too, shaking his head. “Oh, I know, of course, that’s atmospheric refraction.”

“However, as a visual metaphor, it’s pretty accurate. Get rid of the constant terms, just show the fluctuations in their energy output, and stars really do look like they’re twinkling.”

“Is it because of sunspots?”

She stopped smiling. “No, this is the fluctuation of a star’s total energy. It’s like how when a lamp flickers, it’s not because of the moths surrounding it, but because of fluctuations in voltage. Of course, the fluctuations of a twinkling star are minuscule, detectable only by the most precise measurements. Otherwise, we’d have been burned by the twinkling of the sun long ago. Researching this sort of twinkling is one way of understanding the deep structure of stars.”

“What have you discovered so far?”

“It’ll be a while before we discover anything. For now, we’ve only observed the twinkling of the star that’s the easiest to observe—the sun. We can do this for years while we gradually expand out to the rest of the stars…. You know, we could spend ten, twenty years taking measurements of the universe before we make any discoveries and come to some conclusion. This is my dissertation topic, but I think I’ll be working on this for a long while, perhaps my whole life.”

“So you don’t think astronomy is dull, after all.”

“I think what I’m working on is beautiful. Entering the world of stars is like entering an infinitely vast garden. No two flowers are alike…. You have to think that’s a weird analogy, but it’s exactly how I feel.”

As she spoke, seemingly without realizing it, she gestured at the wall. A painting hung there, very abstract, just a thick line undulating from one end to the other. When she noticed what he was looking at, she took it down, then handed it to him. The thick, undulating line was a mosaic of colorful pebbles from the area.

“It’s lovely, but what does it represent? The local mountain range?”

“Our most recent measurements of the sun twinkling, it was so intense and we’d rarely ever seen it fluctuate like that this year. This is a picture of the curve of the energy radiated as it twinkled. Oh, when I hike, I like to collect pebbles, so…”

The scientist was only partially visible in the surrounding shadow. She looked like an elegant ink line a brilliant artist drew on a piece of fine, white calligraphy paper. The curve’s intelligence of spirit filled that perfect white paper immediately with vitality and intention…. In the city he lived in outside the mountains, at any given moment, more than a million young women, like a large group of particles in Brownian motion, chased the showy and vain, without even a moment of reflection. But who could imagine that on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, there was a gentle and quiet woman who stared for long stretches at the stars….

“You can reveal this kind of beauty from the universe. That’s truly rare and also very fortunate.” He realized he was staring and looked away. He returned the painting to her but, lightly, she pushed it back to him.

“Keep it as a souvenir, Doctor. Professor Wilson is my advisor. Thank you for saving his life.”

After ten minutes, the ambulance left under the moonlight. Slowly, he realized what he’d left on the mountain.

FIRST TIME

Once he married, he abandoned his effort to fight against time. One day, he moved his things out of his apartment to the one he now shared with his wife. Those things that two people shouldn’t share, he brought to his office at the hospital. As he riffled through them, he found a mosaic made of colorful pebbles. Seeing the multicolored curve, he suddenly realized that the trip to Mount Siyun was ten years ago.

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 wall: 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.

Now it was all clear: The two identical twinklings occurred eight years and six months apart, just long enough for light to make a round trip between the two stars. After 4.25 years, when the light of the sun’s twinkling reached Alpha Centauri A, the latter twinkled in the same way, and after the same amount of time, the light of Alpha Centauri’s twinkling was observed here.

She hunched over her computer, making calculations and talking to herself. “Even if we take into account the several years where the two stars regressed from each other, the result still fits.”

“I hope what I said doesn’t cause you too much worry. There’s ultimately nothing we can do to confirm this, right? It’s just a theory.”

“Nothing we can do to confirm this? Don’t be so sure. That light from the sun twinkling was broadcast into space. Perhaps that’ll lead to another star twinkling in the same way.”

“After Alpha Centauri, the next closest star is…”

“Barnard’s Star, 1.81 parsecs away, but it’s too dim. There’s no way to measure it. The next star out, Wolf 359, 2.35 parsecs away, is just as dim. Can’t measure it. Yet farther out, Lalande 21185, 2.52 parsecs away, is also too dim…. That leaves Sirius.”

“That seems like a star bright enough to see. How far is it?”

“2.65 parsecs away, just 8.6 light-years.”

“The light from the sun twinkling has already traveled for ten years. It’s already reached there. Perhaps Sirius has already twinkled back.”

“But the light from it twinkling won’t arrive for another seven years.” She seemed to wake all of a sudden from a dream, then laughed. “Oh, dear, what am I thinking? It’s too ridiculous!”

“So you’re saying, as an astronomer, the idea is ridiculous?”

She studied him earnestly. “What else can it be? As a brain surgeon, how do you feel when someone discusses with you where thought comes from, the brain or the heart?”

He had nothing to say. She glanced at her watch, so he started to leave. She didn’t urge him to stay, but she accompanied him quite a distance along the road that led down the mountain. He stopped himself from asking for her number because he knew, in her eyes, he was just some stranger who bumped into her again by chance ten years later.

After they said goodbye, she walked up toward the observatory. Her white lab coat swayed in the mountain breeze. Unexpectedly, it stirred up in him how it had felt when they’d said goodbye ten years ago. The sunlight seemed to change into moonlight. That feather disappeared in the distance… like a straw of rice, sinking into the water, that someone desperately tries to grab. He decided he wanted to maintain that cobweb-like connection between them. Almost instinctively, he shouted at her back:

“If, seven years from now, you see Sirius actually twinkles like that…”

She stopped walking and turned toward him. With a smile, she answered, “Then we’ll meet here!”

SECOND TIME

With marriage, he entered a completely different life, but what changed his life thoroughly was a child. After the child was born, the train of life suddenly changed from the local to the express. It rushed past stop after stop in its never-ending journey onward. He grew numb from the journey. His eyes shut, he no longer paid attention to the unchanging scenery. Weary, he went to sleep. However, as with so many others sleeping on the train, a tiny clock deep in his heart still ticked. He woke the minute he reached his destination.

One night, his wife and child slept soundly but he couldn’t sleep. On some mysterious impulse, he threw on his clothes, then went to the balcony. Overhead, the fog of city lights dimmed the many stars in the sky. He was searching for something, but what? It was a good while before his heart answered him: He was looking for Sirius. He couldn’t help but shiver at that.

Seven years had passed. The time left before the appointment he’d made with her: two days.

SIRIUS

The first snow of the year had fallen the day before, and the roads were slippery. The taxi couldn’t make it up the last stretch to the mountain’s peak. He had to go, once again, on foot, clambering to the peak of Mount Siyun.

On the road, more than once, he wondered whether he was thinking straight. The probability she’d keep the appointment was zero. The reason was simple: Sirius couldn’t twinkle like the sun had seventeen years earlier. In the past seven years, he had skimmed a lot of astronomy and astrophysics. That he’d said something so ridiculous seven years ago filled him with shame. He was grateful that she hadn’t laughed at him there and then. Thinking about it now, he realized she had merely been polite when she seemed to take it seriously. In the intervening seven years, he’d pondered the promise she’d made as they left each other many, many times. The more he did, the more it seemed to take on a mocking tone….

Astronomical observations had shifted to telescopes in Earth orbit. Mount Siyun Observatory had shut down four years ago. The buildings there became vacation villas. No one was around in the off-season. What was he going to do there? He stopped. The seven years that’d passed had taken their toll. He couldn’t climb up the mountain as easily anymore. He hesitated for a moment, but ultimately abandoned the idea of turning back. He continued upward.

He’d waited so long, why not finally chase a dream just this once?

When he saw the white figure, he thought it was a hallucination. The figure wearing the white windbreaker in front of the former observatory blended into the backdrop of the snow-packed mountain. It was difficult to make out at first, but when she saw him, she ran to him. She looked like a feather flying over the snowfield. He could only stand dumbstruck, and wait for her to reach him. She gasped for air, unable to speak. Except that her long hair was now short, she hadn’t changed much. Seven years wasn’t long. Compared to the lifetimes of stars, it didn’t even count as an instant, and she studied stars.

She looked him in the eyes. “Doctor, at first, I didn’t have much hope of seeing you. I came only to carry out a promise or perhaps to fulfill a wish.”

“Me too.”

“I almost let the observation date slip by, but I never truly forgot it, just stowed it in the deepest recesses of my memory. A few nights ago, I suddenly thought of it….”

“Me too.”

Neither of them spoke. They just listened to the gusts of wind that blew through the trees reverberate among the mountains.

“Did Sirius actually twinkle like that?” he asked finally, his voice trembling a little.

“The waveform of its twinkling overlaps precisely the sun’s from seventeen years ago and Alpha Centauri A’s from seven years ago. It also arrived exactly on time. The space telescope Confucius 3 observed it. There’s no way it can be wrong.”

They fell again into another long stretch of silence. The rumble of wind through the trees rose and fell. The sound spiraled among the mountains, filling the space between earth and sky. It seemed as though some sort of force throughout the universe thrummed like a deep and mystical chorus…. He couldn’t help but shiver. She, evidently feeling the same way, broke the silence, as though to cast off her fears.

“But this situation, this strange phenomenon, goes beyond our current theories. It requires many more observations and much more evidence in order for the scientific community to deal with it.”

“I know. The next possible observable star is…”

“It would have been Procyon, in Canis Minor, but five years ago, it rapidly grew too dark to be worth measuring. Maybe it drifted into a nearby cloud of interstellar dust. So, the next measurable star is Altair, in the constellation Aquila.”

“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.

THINKER

She flew against a great, boundless gray river. This was the river of time. She was flying toward time’s source. Galaxies like frigid moraines floated in space. She flew fast. One flutter of her wings and she crossed over a hundred million years. The universe shrank. Galaxies clustered together. Background radiation shot up. After one billion years had passed, moraines of galaxies began to melt in a sea of energy, quickly scattering into unconstrained particles. Afterward, the particles transformed into pure energy. Space began to give off light, dark red at first. She seemed to slink in a bloodred energy sea. The light rapidly grew in intensity, changing from the dark red to orange, then again to an eye-piercing pure blue. She seemed to fly within a giant tube of neon light. Particles of matter had already melted in the energy sea. Shining through this dazzling space, she saw the borders of the universe bend into a spherical surface, like the closing of a giant palm. The universe shrank down to the size of a large parlor. She was suspended in its center waiting for a strange particle to arrive. Finally, everything fell into pitch darkness. She knew she was already within a strange particle.

After a blast of cold, she found herself standing on a broad white plain. Above her was a limitless black void. The ground was pure white, covered by a layer of smooth, transparent, sticky liquid. She walked ahead to the side of a bright red river. A transparent membrane covered the river surface. The red river water surged under the membrane. She left the ground, soaring into the sky. Not far away, the blood river branched into many tributaries, forming a complex network of waterways. She soared even higher. The blood rivers grew slender, mere traces against the white ground, which still stretched to the horizon. She flew forward. A black sea appeared. Once she flew over the sea, she realized it wasn’t black. It seemed so because it was deep and completely transparent. The mountain ranges on the vast seafloor came into view. These crystalline mountain ranges stretched radially from the center of the sea to the shore…. She pushed herself up even higher and didn’t look down again until who knows how long. Now, she saw the entire universe at once.

The universe was a giant eye calmly looking at her.

She woke suddenly. Her forehead was wet. She wasn’t sure if it was sweat or dew. He hadn’t slept, always at her side silently looking at her. Sitting on the grass in front of them, the model of the brain had exhausted its battery. The starlight that pierced it had extinguished.

Above them, those stars hovered as before.

“What are ‘they’ thinking?” she asked, breaking the silence.

“Now?”

“In these thirty-four years.”

“The twinkling the sun originated could just be a primitive neural impulse. Those happen all the time. Most of them are like mosquitoes causing tiny ripples on a pond, insubstantial. Only those impulses that spread through the whole universe can become an actual experience.”

“We used up a lifetime, and saw of ‘him’ just one twinkling impulse that ‘he’ couldn’t even feel?” she said hazily, as though still in the middle of a dream.

“Use an entire human civilization’s life span, and we still might not see one of ‘his’ actual experiences.”

“People’s lives are bitter and short.”

“Yes. People’s lives are bitter and short….”

“A truly insightful, solitary person.”

“What?” He looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Oh, I said ‘he,’ apart from completeness, is nothingness. ‘He’ is everything. Still thinking, or maybe dreaming. But dreaming about what…”

“Let’s not try to be philosophers!” He waved his hand as though he were shooing something away.

Out of the blue, something occurred to her. She got off of the broken wall. “According to the big bang theory of modern cosmology, while the universe is expanding, the light emitted from a given point can never spread widely across the universe.”

“In other words, ‘he’ can never have even one actual experience.”

Her eyes focused infinitely far away. She stayed silent for a long time, before speaking. “Do we?”

Her question sank him into his recollection of the past. Meanwhile, the woods of Mount Siyun heard its first birdcall. A ray of light appeared on the eastern horizon.

“I have,” he answered confidently.

Yes, he had. It was thirty-four years ago during a peaceful moonlit night on this mountain peak. A feather-like figure in the moonlight, a pair of eyes looking up at the stars… A twinkling in his brain quickly propagated through the entire universe of his mind. From then on, that twinkling never disappeared. That universe contained in his brain was more magnificent than the star-filled exterior universe that had already expanded for about fourteen billion years. Although the external universe was vast, the evidence ultimately showed it was finite. Thought, however, was infinite.

The eastern sky grew brighter and brighter, starting to hide its sea of stars. Mount Siyun revealed its rough contours. On its highest peak, at the vine-covered ruins of the observatory, these two nearly sixty-year-old people gazed eastward expectantly, waiting for that dazzling brain cell to rise over the horizon.