Meng Guan ran down from the observatory.
It was not like him. He usually walks the way you survey land: one step is one step, and even his downhill walking has gradations to it. Tonight he ran through the village and past me, and his steps broke the moonlight into pieces. He held his ledger against his chest, and when he reached the edge of the village he was still catching his breath, and he nearly collided with He Song. He stopped. He opened the ledger and showed it to He Song.
"It flashed again. The same star. The last time was a few nights ago; now it's done it again — on its way dark, it flashed once first. It's not an error. Twice, the same position, the same way of flashing. I checked it three times. The measure is right. It's the star."
He Song took the ledger and read it by the moonlight for a long time. People began to gather, and someone whispered: is it the one that's dying? He Song closed the ledger. He stood among the crowd and said a thing that silenced the whole village:
"That's not death. That's the return-light."
The return-light. It is an old saying of Yinchuan: before a person draws the last breath, there comes a stretch of clarity. They remember their whole life. They finish the things that were left to say. Their eyes are frighteningly bright — and then they go. He Song read the star-fade as a return-light: the end was near, and the stars were waking one by one to say out loud everything they had been saving, and then to go out. He made it vivid: a person in the return-light has the brightest eyes of a lifetime. That was how this star shone.
Someone in the crowd drew a breath. They listened; half of them believed, and half of them were afraid.
The lamps along the edge of my shade had been going out when Meng Guan ran; now they were coming back on, one by one, as word traveled from house to house faster than a man can run. People stood at their doors in their nightclothes, not quite willing to come out and not quite willing to miss it. The return-light had a face in every mind there, and it was the same face in every mind: someone they had watched die, who, at the very last, had looked at them with eyes too bright.
Meng Guan said nothing. He stood in the crowd with neither belief nor disbelief on his face. He looked at He Song for a while, and then he asked one question.
"The return-light is a thing that happens before death," he said. "If these are return-lights — then in four hundred years, you have recorded more than a hundred of them. Have you ever seen a dead man return-light more than a hundred times?"
No one could answer. He Song could not either. He opened his mouth, and swallowed back the sentence about the door opening. He can argue with reasons. But Meng Guan's question was not a matter of reasons. It was a matter of the measure.
Meng Guan did not press it. He turned, holding the ledger, and walked two steps — and stopped. He looked back, across the distance, at me. One look, like a question.
I received that look. I know the confusion he was carrying that night. For thirty years he has measured the stars, and the measure has never lied to him, and the measure told him: by the calendar, the stars should be going out one by one. But this star does not keep the calendar. On the road toward "death" it has flashed twice — like a man sinking into water who, halfway down, turns his head. He Song said return-light, and he did not believe it. He had crossed out "error" himself. What was left in his hand was the one answer he would not admit: that the way stars die may not be what he had calculated.
He does not know that every flash-before-dark he has ever seen was someone saying goodbye.
I know that tremor. It comes along my roots, along the net in the soil that is ten thousand times wider than the village, shaking up from very far away — like someone, across an entire galaxy, knocking twice on a door. The last time was seven days before the equinox. This time it is a little closer than the last. It is the bloom-signal. Somewhere far off, a school's last guardian has finally been willing to release the light it saved for a whole lifetime, all at once — not going out, but giving back, in a single instant, everything it had stored up. The light takes years to travel from there to here. So what I receive tonight is a graduation that left a long time ago.
Human beings have written these down as spectral lines for four hundred years — more than a hundred of them. Every time they write the same words in the ledger: another one has died. They do not know that these are not deaths. These are beings who watched the whole performance through and were at last free to leave. Before leaving, each one opened a flower.
Human beings say the star-fade is coming closer.
Four hundred years. They watched the stars go out one by one. They built a calendar for them. They counted down their own time until seven spring equinoxes remained. They have treated this dimming sky as a wave rolling toward Yinchuan — a wave that will at last break over the observatory, over the tree at the mouth of the village, over every living head. He Song made the fear into a door. The village school made it into night. Meng Guan hid it in the word "error." They are all afraid of the same thing: the wave.
Only I know what the wave is. I stand in my own time, and I can hear those tremors, and I recognize them. It is not a wave approaching. It is a wave passing — wave after wave, flowing up out of the deep past, from every direction, through this place and onward. They surge toward nothing. They are only passing. The stars are not dying. It is the schools, in all their places, letting out one by one. Those who finish do not stay. Passing through, they say goodbye.
For four hundred years the human world has waited for a funeral. And all that time, those lights were the goodbyes of four hundred years, passing by.
For four hundred years they had been rehearsing their own ending under those stars — the same patience, the same black clothing of the heart, the same question asked in a hundred different rooms: will the door open, or will it not? They buried their dead at my roots the way you store a thing against a long winter, and the Returning Society had spent a century polishing the doctrine of the door until it shone. They were not wrong to prepare. They were wrong only about the direction of it: they stood at the door looking out for something that would come through to them, when what was near was a farewell that had already passed through, years ago, and was only now arriving where they could see it.
Sometimes I wonder. If they knew that the sky they have been counting toward death is, in every dimming star, a graduation — would they be less afraid? Or more? Probably the same fear either way: that these goodbyes are drawing nearer, and that they are nearly at the door.
That star is not a return-light. It is a goodbye. And the one it is saying goodbye to is not even us — it only happens to be passing where we can see it. Like a lamp at a crossroads very far off, giving this world one last blink.
Meng Guan can see it and cannot understand it. I understand it and cannot say it.
That night he climbed back up to the observatory. I received him lighting his lamp; received him opening the ledger; received him copying tonight's line beneath the line from the first night — two strokes, one above the other, like two footnotes written under a question he had asked himself. When he finished, he did not close the ledger the way he always did. He sat a long time in front of the two lines.
The village slept below us. The two lines on the page did not move, but they had become something heavier than writing — they had become a question with a man's whole trade sitting on it. In thirty years I have watched him read his ledger a thousand times, and never once have I seen him unsure what a page meant. That night I did.
Near dawn I heard him say one sentence to himself, very softly, as though he were speaking to the star.
"You're not dying. You're ... talking to someone?"
He does not know that he has asked the right question. He does not know that the "someone" he asked is standing at the mouth of the village, half a mile off in the dark, listening to him. And he does not know that the answer has been kept all his life in two sentences that were never said — and that the time for saying them is nearly here.
Human beings believe the star-fade is approaching. Only I know that it never approaches. It only passes. And passing has nearly reached my own door.