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.