On the day of the equinox, the whole village came.
Before dawn the shade was already full of people. At the spring rites, He Song had said that this morning, at dawn, the sky would have an answer. What he meant was the return-light star — he had said that if it flashed again this night, the door was open, and everyone should come and see. No one wanted to miss it. The believers came to wait for the door. The skeptics came to watch the show. And half of them could not have said what they had come to wait for, only that before dawn, it is steadier to be where other people are.
Granny Liu came too. Xing helped her to the front of the crowd and spread a quilt for her to sit on. Granny sat and looked at the sky and said, "What day is this? All these people." Xing said, "The equinox." Granny said, "Oh," and looked at the sky a little longer, and said, "The equinox is good. At the equinox, you plant things." She began to talk on and on about her basket, her clothes, and Xing answered her, sentence by sentence. Xing knows that her grandmother's river has changed course again, and she does not correct it. She only takes Granny's hand, gently, and waits for the light.
Meng Guan did not come. He was at the observatory. He had marked all of the night's stars in his ledger, and drawn a ring around that spectral line, and set up his old star-rod. He had stayed to watch it with his own eyes — to see whether it was a return-light or not.
I stood in the dark before dawn, listening to the heartbeats of the whole village.
I cannot say how I knew that morning was different. I have lived through countless dawns in three hundred and twenty million years. This one was different inside me. In the night I had made a decision. My two stone fruit had cracked along a seam. Nothing had leaked out of them — but I knew that the two sentences I had stored for three hundred and twenty million years had woken.
When the first line of light was about to come up in the east, I began.
All my life I have received uncounted light. Every beam that fell into my leaves, I caught it, held it, remembered it. I am a tree; turning light into life is my way of living, and my way of remembering. Across the ages I stored so much light that I could not name the number of it. In that light was my beginning. In it were all the mornings I had ever seen — the wind of the age of the dinosaurs, the sun over the glaciers, the sky-light over the first ape that learned to watch the sky. I stored all of it. I made myself out of it.
This morning, I let all of it go.
The light began at my roots. Like water rising out of the deep earth, it ran up my trunk, through every branch, into every leaf. My lowest branch lit first, and then the light moved upward, layer by layer, the way a mountain is lit inch by inch from its foot by the dawn. I heard someone in the crowd cry out. Someone knelt. He Song shouted something, and I did not hear the words — I was not hearing sounds. I was hearing light. The light stood up out of every one of my leaves, like countless birds that had been folded for an age, opening their wings at the same moment.
It rose. It rose toward the piece of sky where the human world had calculated that a star must die — the sky that held that spectral line, the star they had watched for four hundred years, believing it was burning its return-light before death. My light climbed halfway up the sky, gathered itself, and slowly opened into a flower.
No one had ever seen such a flower. It had no stem and no leaf — only light. Petal after petal drawn out of the ages, opening in the darkest sky before dawn. It opened slowly, the way a person who has waited a very long time finally begins to speak.
I heard He Song below. "The door is open!" he shouted. "The door is open!" He was on his knees, and his face was wet. He was seeing his door. I did not hold it against him. A person can only see the thing he has waited a lifetime for. He waited a lifetime for a door, and a door opened.
I felt the crowd break apart — people crying, kneeling, drawing back. I received the whole village's feelings the way you receive a heavy rain: fear, joy, shock, doubt, all of it at once. But I had no time to receive them one by one. My light was leaving me. With every petal that rose, I grew lighter. The self I had stored for three hundred and twenty million years was walking out of me, piece by piece. So this is what giving is, I understood. It is not becoming less. It is becoming light.
On the observatory, Meng Guan was watching his rod.
He could never explain that moment afterward. He only said that his rod — the one that had measured thirty years of stars and never once lied — suddenly "went mad." Its pointer aimed at no star at all. It only trembled, the way a person trembles when they are finally about to speak. He thought the instrument was broken. He tapped it. It kept trembling. And then he heard, inside himself, a very clear voice — not coming in through his ears. Like a light entering a dark room: suddenly every thing in the room had a real shadow.
He said that in that moment he believed nothing, and he believed everything. Not a door. Not a god. He believed what he had been measuring for thirty years: that the stars had never died. Far away, ceremony after ceremony, they had been graduating.
"That's not death," he told me later, standing outside the crowd. "That's ... honesty." He held up his rod; it was trembling in his hand. "It never once lied to me in my whole life. And today it tells me that star did not die. It only — finished saying what it had to say."
He said nothing after that. But from that day he never again watched the sky the way you read an obituary.
The flower was still rising.
In the crowd, Granny Liu stood up.
She stood very straight. A woman of more than seventy, and when she rose, she rose like a tree. She looked at the flower of light in the sky, and in her cloudy eyes something began to light up, register by register, like a lamp being lit window by window.
"I remember now," she said.
Xing turned to look at her. Granny looked back at her, and her eyes were clear enough to be frightening. "I remember now," she said. "That year my son went into the river to reach a sheep. The sheep belonged to Old Wang's family at the head of the village. He slipped. He — was reaching for that sheep right up to the end." She did not cry as she said it. Her voice was level, as if she were reading aloud from an old page, but every word had been brought up from very deep water. "I folded his clothes for forty years. Every day I waited for him to come and wear them. And all along I knew — he was not coming back. I only — could not bear to let him go without clothes, on the far side of the river."
She paused, and looked at the flower in the sky, and said, "When you were three, you drew a flower. You used my charcoal, on my shoe-pattern paper. I could not throw it away. I kept it in my sewing basket. That flower you drew —" her voice suddenly went very soft — "is exactly like the one in the sky."
Xing was in the high place. She was not in the crowd when the light came; she had climbed to her old place, the fork of my third branch, as near to the sky as she could get. She heard Granny's words, and she stopped. She looked down at her grandmother, and then up at the flower in the sky.
She remembered. Three years old. Granny's shoe-pattern paper. The charcoal. She had drawn a flower, and showed it to Granny, and Granny had said, "What flower is that?" and she had said, "I don't know. Just a flower." She had forgotten it long ago. But she had drawn it — a three-year-old who had never been taught to draw flowers had drawn this shape. She would have called it a doodle. Now she knew.
The flower she drew when she was three was a flower that would open in the sky, on the morning of the equinox, three hundred million years of waiting later. It was a flower she had seen in advance, at the age of three.
Xing did not cry. She sat in the high fork, holding my trunk, and looked up at the flower for a very long time. The wind lifted her hair. And she said, softly — to me, and to the flower:
"Da Qing. It's you. You've been talking to me all along, in words I didn't understand. When I was three, you told me — you only wanted to show me what beautiful things you had saved."
I received that sentence. I have stored three hundred and twenty million years of light. I have seen every morning since the world began. And I understood, suddenly, that this child's sentence, spoken on my branch, was brighter than every morning I had ever seen.
The flower opened full. The light was spent.
I was light. In three hundred and twenty million years, I had never been so light. Light as though I had at last walked out of myself. All my light had gone. On my leaves there remained one last thin coat of gold — the first mouthful. It had not left. It was still there, held in my oldest leaf, the way a drop of water is held in the vein of a leaf, quietly, waiting.
The flower in the sky, at its fullest, did not wither. It scattered. Not falling — scattering, the way a finished sentence dissolves into the wind. At the moment it scattered, every direction brightened once. The human world believed that the star-fade had finally arrived.
Only I knew.
That was not an arrival. That was the "yes" I had stored all my life, finally spoken aloud. I had finally consented to depart.
I departed. Three hundred and twenty million years ago I made my vow: to stay, and watch the whole performance through. This morning, watching the flower open out of myself, I understood at last that the vow was not to hold on until the dismissal. It was this: before the dismissal, I wanted my students to see that someone in this school had once bloomed.
Yinchuan's rooster crowed. The day truly broke. The people scattered slowly, each carrying away their own version — He Song saying the door had opened, Meng Guan saying it was honesty, Granny Liu saying she had remembered everything, and then forgotten some of it again. Xing said nothing.
I stood in the light of the equinox. My two stone fruit were open now, all the way open. Empty. No sentences in them. No stone. Nothing — except a little, very fine new green, like something that had only just begun.
I do not know what it is. But I know that I waited three hundred and twenty million years for exactly this not-knowing.