The Constant Heart by Craig Nova Page B

wonder what those women would have done to me and whether or not I would have gone. I guess maybe that was the test that Sara was setting up, and why she said in her letter to me from the Center for Troubled Girls that her job was going to be to haunt me. For the rest of my life.
    Of course, she came back when I least expected it.

PART TWO

I STUDIED ASTRONOMY AT the University of California at Berkeley, and my Ph.D. committee was made up of Nobel Prize winners.
    Of course, I had to write a thesis, and my specialty was a combination of subatomic physics and cosmology, and in particular I was interested and still am for that matter in distortion of gravity in the observable universe. These distortions explained, as far as I was concerned, why objects that should never have been close to one another gathered in clusters, and in defiance of all statistical analysis. My ideas about this had to do with string theory and the existence of the Higgs Boson, still not discovered, but nevertheless a possibility. And, I thought, in the end it would help me understand the Constant and to be able to assign a value to it.
    Anyway, when I was writing, I did some scientific jobs. For instance, one of them was to help design an object that would last ten thousand years and would still be, at the end of that time, a warning. This was a marker for a nuclear waste dump. I worked on it with another student, a woman who dyed her
hair green, to match her eyes, and wore clothes from the twenties, such as flapper outfits with spangles, that she got from used-clothes stores, and who insisted that she be called M. Cheryl Bogs. Sort of retro-sultry. So we called her Em. She was a cultural anthropologist, and I kept trying to come up with a cultural item we could use for the marker, something that all people would understand. She told me we couldn’t use language, since the half-life of a language is only five hundred years. And so I suggested snake markings, like those on the most poisonous vipers, but she told me that wouldn’t work either. No cultural absolutes. For instance, she told me that in a part of Africa, the most socially elite funeral had the dead body buried in a coffin that looked like an enormous green lobster. She used to say, “With a world like that, what’s universal?”
    We became friends over a tattoo, or the time when she was considering getting a tattoo. She had been studying a tribe in New Zealand, and she thought it would be “cool” to get a tattoo on her face that said she was related to the stars.
    â€œWe are all made out of stars,” I said. “Or the stars make everything we are made out of. All the elements. Everything comes from the stars. It’s a miracle we don’t glow.”
    â€œHa, ha,” she said.
    â€œSo, if you know that, you don’t need the tattoo,” I said.
    â€œHmmmm,” she said. “Give me another reason. I’m only half convinced.”
    â€œLife forces so many final decisions on you,” I said. “I think you want to keep them down to a minimum.”
    So Em didn’t get a tattoo. The marker for the nuclear waste dump was like something from the National Park Service. Granite, about eight feet tall, with the message cut
into an overhang with a laser (the overhang protected the message from the weather). The message showed, in a cartoon just like the stick figures a kid makes, someone digging and then getting sick. The dating for the marker was done with how the constellations look now. In ten thousand years they’ll look different.
    Every now and then, when Em and I saw one another, she’d say, “Hey, Starman, thanks for the tip on the tattoo.”
    So I finished writing the theory of distortions in gravity, neatly tied, I thought, to string theory. But, as I said, I had to defend it before my committee, a bunch of Nobel Prize winners. And not just from astronomy, but physics, chemistry, math.
    None of them made me