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.”