What she had found was this: spectroscopic data from a cluster of stars in Cassiopeia, collected over four months as part of a standard survey, in which the polarization patterns of the received light varied in ways that correlated not with any known property of the sources but with the observational conditions on the receiving end. The longer a given instrument looked, the more organized the signal became. She had checked for equipment artifacts first, then systematic biases, then atmospheric effects. She had run the analysis eight times over three months. The correlation held.
She had not published it.
She had spent most of November 2002 trying to identify what she had actually found, and she had not been able to. The data suggested something she did not have language for: that the light was, in some sense she could not specify, aware of being received. She had called it, in the notebook she still kept in the bottom drawer of her desk, the attending behavior. She had never used the phrase out loud. She had locked the drawer on the thirtieth of November and gone home and made dinner and not thought about it for three weeks, and then she had thought about it again, and then she had gone back to normal work, and this had been the structure of the last twenty-two years.
The retirement lecture was in the Howell auditorium. Two hundred and twelve people, she had heard. Most of her department, emeritus colleagues, several current graduate students. She had given the lecture she had prepared, which was a careful retrospective of her contributions to variable star classification, and it was a good lecture, accurate and measured, and afterward there had been a reception in the atrium and she had shaken many hands.
A graduate student had found her near the end. Second-year, working on photometric surveys, earnest in the way second-years were. He had asked her what advice she would give her younger self. It was the kind of question people asked at retirements.
She had paused. She had been standing with a glass she was not drinking from, in a room full of people who had known her work for decades, and for a moment she had considered telling him. She had the words for it. She had been composing them, and discarding them, and recomposing them for twenty-two years, and she knew them well.
She had told him to follow the anomalies, because anomalies were usually where the field was about to move. This was true advice and he had written it down.
She drove home through clear air. The sky above the highway was open and full. She kept her eyes on the road.