‘Well,’ I said. ‘I think my absorption spectrum must be hazy.’
‘No,’ Diana said. ‘I think it’s much like anybody else’s.’ She took a Waldglas beaker out of the display cabinet and glanced at me. She may have seen a hurt expression because she shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Okay, maybe yours has a few more black lines. You were always interested in all sorts of stuff, weren’t you?’
I shrugged. ‘It runs in the family.’
‘Fact is,’ Diana said, breathing on the knobby green glass, ‘it’s probably thanks to you I spend so much of my life fourteen thousand feet above Hawaii looking for I-R stars.’
‘It is?’ I said. /
‘Yeah,’ Diana said, smiling at the glass as she polished it. ‘You remember the night there was Helen, me, you, Lewis and Verity and ... Darren? We were up in the observatory?’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘You got really stoned and started gibbering about how fantastic the universe was?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I confessed.
‘Well, you were pretty ripped,’ Diana said. She handed me the beaker. ‘But you were coherent, mostly, and you were really enthusiastic. I mean you even shut Lewis up; you just raved about how amazing astronomy was. You meant cosmology, but what the heck. You were just bubbling with it.’ She brought a second Waldglas beaker out of the cabinet.
‘Huh.’ I filled the beaker with polystyrene beads, found a box big enough to hold the two beakers and put the first one carefully into its bed of little white infinity symbols. ‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’
‘Oh, you were just so fascinated with it all. Especially with stellar evolution. That had obviously really blown your mind. “We are made of bits of stars!” you shouted.’ Diana laughed a little. ‘You’d been reading about all that stuff and it just tickled you pink. You told us about how the sun and the solar system were made out of the remnants of older stars that had blown up; how the elements that made up the world had been made in those ancient stars, and that meant our bodies, too, every atom. Jeez, I thought you were going to explode.’ She handed me the second beaker.
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Well, I sort of remember that, I think.’
Actually, I wasn’t sure I really did at all. My recollection of that evening got very hazy after the bit where Verity had pretended to tell me my fortune.
‘ “We are made from bits of stars! We are made from bits of stars!” you kept yelling, and went through it all: super novae scattering heavy atoms; the debris swirling through space, other novae and supers sending shock-waves through the debris, compressing it; stars forming, planets; geology, chemistry; life.’ Diana shook her head. She extracted a thin, delicate, old-looking flute of a wine glass from the display case. ‘And Jeez, you made me feel ashamed. I mean, dad had built the observatory for us; it was a present, in a way. And we hardly used it. We went up there to smoke dope. And here you were, knew all about this stuff, and actually made it sound interesting. You were really gone on the idea that we were stuck down here on this one little planet and still just savages really, but we’d glimpsed the workings of the universe, worked out from light and radiation what had happened over the last fifteen billion years and could talk sensibly about the first few seconds after the big bang - even if the jury has gone back out on that idea nowadays - and could predict what would happen to the universe over the next few billion, and understand it ...’ Diana held the wine glass up to the light, and cleaned it with the cloth. ‘You were pretty scathing about religion, too; tawdry and pathetic in comparison, you said.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t necessarily buy that, but you made me ashamed not to have used the telescope more. And so I did, and then I got some books on astronomy, and found out a lot of it was about maths, which I was good at anyway, though somehow the fact astronomy was about numbers and equations as well as stars and telescopes hadn’t occurred to me. But anyway, that was the start of it, I was hooked. Been a star-junkie ever since, Prent, and it’s all your fault.’
She flashed a shocked expression at me and handed me the glass.