In Cycles 435 and 436 wave after wave of disturbing information staggered the Colony. First there was the premature announcement that many extracolonial messages had been decoded. This disclosure supported the widespread rumor of multiple Powers in the galaxy, some of them far more evolved than the Colony. This frightening concept lingered for half a cycle before the Council of Astronomers, responding to these proliferating half-truths, finally announced that all but a handful of the messages could be ascribed to a single power, Power #2, whose center of activity appeared to be about two hundred light millicycles away. Shortly thereafter their next astonishing announcement unambiguously identified Power #2 transmissions coming from sources as far as one hundred and fifty light millicycles apart, or more than three times the diameter across the entire Colony Jurisdiction!
Between Cycle 438 and the receipt of the message, the Council of Leaders ignored advice that the Colony should carefully husband its resources while analyzing the impact of the discovery of the strange spaceship. Crash programs were instituted in advanced encryption, it is true, primarily to allay concerns that Power #2 might be monitoring all our transmissions. This action was widely hailed as a step in the right direction. However, at the same time the exploration of the Outer Shell was intensified, leading to the identification of the new Type E life forms and the subsequent, thinly disguised endangered species roundup. All suggestions to retrench and slow down the exploration program were ignored. In Cycle 442, in fact, the Zoo Complex created several artificial planets just for the conduct of genetic capabilities experiments with the Type E species.
Then came the Message from Power #2. So simple, so straightforward, so terrifying. It was coded in our most advanced encryption algorithm. It acknowledged our mutual awareness of one another and suggested opening up bilateral communications. Nothing else. End of Message. . . .
. . . It is not fear of hostility from Power #2 that motivates our objection to continued exploration in the Outer Shell. On the contrary. We as historians think the nascent concern about the possible aggressiveness of Power #2 is unfounded. Study after study has shown that there is a significant positive correlation between high aggression coefficient and inability to evolve into a society with a purview greater than a single solar system. In fact, the probability that a society as advanced as ours could have retained aggression and territoriality as constituents in its overall psychological makeup is vanishingly small.
Nevertheless, such monumental events as the receipt of the message from Power #2 call for reflection and synthesis, not additional exploratory activities. We should be using our resources to study and understand the entire range of impacts that the message will have on our society, not squandering them on bold repatriation schemes. It is a question of priorities and once again the advocates of frontierism, exalting new information and technological development over the stability of the society, are blind to the downside risks of their endeavors. . . .
FRIDAY
1
NICK Williams woke up at five o’clock in the morning and could not go back to sleep. His mind was too active, racing over and over the events of the day before and the possible outcomes of the day ahead. The same phenomenon had occurred often when he was in high school in Virginia and then a few times later, at Harvard, usually just before big swimming meets. If he had too much excitement running through his system, his brain would not turn off enough to let him sleep.
He lay in bed for almost another hour, alternately trying to coax himself back to sleep and indulging his fantasy that what he had found the day before was just the first item in a vast cache of valuable treasure. Nick loved to fantasize. It was always easy for him to see, in his mind’s eye, all the scenes in the novels that he loved so much to read. Now for a moment he imagined headlines in the Miami Herald announcing his discovery of a hoard of sunken gold off the coast of Key West.
Around six o’clock Nick gave up trying to sleep and climbed out of bed. The little exercise bag was next to the dresser. He pulled the golden trident out to look at it, as he had done four or five times the night before. What was this thing? he asked himself. It must have had some practical use for it’s too damn ugly to be ornamental. He shook his head. Amanda will know. If anyone can tell me where this thing came from, she can.
Nick walked across his bedroom to the sliding glass doors and opened the curtains. It was almost sunrise. Beyond the small balcony outside he could see the beach and the ocean. His condominium was on the third floor and had an unspoiled view of the quiet surf. Above the water a couple of brown pelicans soared in graceful formation, waiting for a chance to descend into the water and catch some unsuspecting fish swimming too close to the surface. Nick watched a couple in their seventies walking slowly along the beach. They were holding hands and talking quietly; a couple of times the woman broke away to pick up a shell or two and put it in a small Ziploc bag.
Nick turned away from the door and grabbed the jeans that he had dropped on the floor the night before. He pulled them on over his undershorts and walked into the living room carrying the bag with the trident. He put the golden object carefully on the table where he could study it, and then went back into the open kitchen to start the coffee maker and turn on the radio.
Except for the books, Nick’s living room was decorated just like hundreds of Florida seaside condominiums. The couch and easy chair were comfortable and bright, cream in color with a couple of light green ferns in the pattern for decoration. Two small paintings of water birds standing on an empty beach adorned the otherwise empty walls. Light beige drapes that matched the carpet framed the long sliding glass doors that led to the balcony with the rattan patio furniture.
It was the books that gave the apartment some individuality. Along the wall opposite the couch, between the living room and the bedroom, was the large wood bookcase. It stretched almost all the way from the sliding glass doors in front of the balcony to the bedroom door. Although the general appearance of the apartment was one of disarray (newspapers and sports magazines strewn about here and there on the coffee table, clothes and towels on the floor in the bedroom and the bathroom, dirty dishes in the sink, the dishwasher standing open half full of dishes), the bookcase area was clearly well maintained. Altogether there must have been four or five hundred books on the four shelves of the long bookcase, all paperbacks, virtually all novels, and all carefully filed according to category.
In front of each group of books, Scotch-taped to the outside of the bookshelf, was a sheet of paper identifying the category. Nick had finished A Fan’s Notes on the boat on Thursday and had already put it back in its proper place on the shelf (in the category of “American, 20th Century, A-G”) right next to a dozen or more books by William Faulkner. He had then selected for his bedtime reading a nineteenth-century French novel, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. Nick had read the book once before, during his sophomore year at Harvard, and had not thought that much about it. However, he had been recently surprised to find the book on several lists of the ten finest novels of all time, ranking right up there with such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. Hmm. Perhaps I missed something the first time, he had told himself the previous night before deciding to read it again.
But Nick had not been able to focus on the magnificently detailed descriptions of life in provincial France a hundred and fifty years earlier. As he had followed the story of the lovely Emma Bovary, a woman for whom the stultifying sameness of her life was cause enough to have affairs that would eventually scandalize her village, the excitement of Nick’s own life, for once, kept intruding. He was unable to suspend himself in the novel. His mind kept returning to the possibilities offered by the golden object in the exercise bag.
Nick turned the object over and over in his hands while he drank his morning coffee. Then he had an idea. He walked back to the second bedroom, just opposite the kitchen and next to the laundry room, and opened the closet door. Nick used most of this closet as a storage area. In the corner
of the closet were four huge cardboard boxes of junk that he had brought with him when he had bought the condominium seven years earlier. He had never opened them even once in the intervening time. But he did remember that in one of those boxes were a bunch of photographs of the objects they had brought up from the Santa Rosa. Maybe if I look at those pictures, he thought to himself as he struggled to find the right container in the dimly lit closet, I will see something that looks like that thing.
He finally located the correct box and dragged it out into the middle of the living room. At one time its contents might have been well organized, for there were manila folders with filing labels inside. But almost all of the papers and photos and newspaper clippings had fallen out of their original places and were now scattered around the box in a loose jumble. Nick reached in and pulled out a clipping from the Miami Herald. It was yellow from age and had been crammed down into one of the corners. Five people, including Nick, were featured in a big photograph on the front page.
Nick stopped for a moment and looked at the photo and the caption. Has it really been that long? he wondered, Almost eight years since we found the Santa Rosa. The caption identified the five individuals in the photograph as the crew of the Neptune, a dive and salvage boat that had found an old Spanish ship named the Santa Rosa sunk in the Gulf of Mexico about fifteen miles north of the Dry Tortugas. Gold and silver objects worth more than two million dollars had been retrieved from the vessel and were piled in front of the happy smiling crew. From left to right they were Greta Erhard, Jake Lewis, Homer Ashford, Ellen Ashford, and Nick Williams.
That was before they started eating, Nick thought to himself. Ellen ate because of Greta, because it gave her an excuse in her own mind for what was happening with Homer. And Homer ate because he could afford it. Just like he does everything else. For some people constraints are the only thing that saves them. Give them freedom and they go berserk.
Nick dug deeper into the box, looking for a set of twenty or so photographs that showed most of the large gold items they had retrieved from the Santa Rosa. Eventually he started finding some of the pictures, in groups of four or five, in different parts of what was now becoming a hopeless pile at the bottom of the box. Each time he would find some more photos, he would pull them out, look at them carefully, and then shake his head to acknowledge that the golden trident did not look a thing like any of the objects from the Santa Rosa.
At the bottom of the box Nick encountered a yellow manila folder with a rubber band wrapped carefully around it. Thinking at first that this folder might contain the rest of the pictures from the Santa Rosa, Nick pulled out the folder and opened it hastily. An 8 x 11 picture of a beautiful woman in her early thirties slid out and fell on the living room floor. It was followed by handwritten notes, cards, a few letters in envelopes, and then about twenty sheets of bond paper covered with double-spaced typing. Nick sighed. How was it possible that he hadn’t recognized this folder?
The woman in the portrait had long black hair, lightly frosted in the front. She was wearing a dark red cotton blouse, slightly open at the top to show a triple strand of pearls just under the neck. In blue ink that contrasted with the red of the blouse, someone with magnificent, clearly artistic hand-writing had written, “Mon Cher — Je t’aime, Monique,” across the lower right portion of the photograph.
Nick bent down on his knees to pick up the scattered contents of the folder. He looked at the portrait carefully, his heart skipping a few beats as he remembered how beautiful she had been. He started to sort the typed pages together. At the top of one of the pages was written, in all capital letters, “MONIQUE,” and then underneath it, “by Nicholas C. Williams.” He started to read.
“The wonder of life lies in its unpredictability. Each of our lives is irrevocably changed by the things we cannot have possibly forecast. We walk out of the door every morning to go to work or to class or even to the grocery store, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred we return without anything having happened that we will remember even a month in the future. On those days our lives are swept up in the banality of living, in the basic humdrum cadence of everyday existence. It is the other day, the magic day, for which we live.
“On this magic day our character becomes defined, our growth is accelerated, our emotional transitions are made. Sometimes, maybe once in a lifetime, there will be a string of these magic days, one after another, so full of life and change and challenge that we are completely transformed by the experience and our souls become suffused with a boundless joy. During that time we are often overcome by the simple and incredible miracle of just being alive. This is the story of one such magic period.
“It was spring break in Fort Lauderdale. Our swimming season had just finished at Harvard and my uncle, as a present for my twenty-first birthday, offered to let me use his condominium in Florida for a couple of weeks so I could unwind from the twin rigors of studying and swimming practice . . .”
Nick had not looked at these pages for almost ten years. As he read the first few paragraphs he remembered, vividly, the ecstasy in which they were written. It was two nights before the party. She was at some social function that night, would be too late, would come by first thing in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. It was the first night in a week I had been away from her. He stopped for a moment, old emotions twisting around inside him, making him feel dizzy and slightly nauseous. He read the first paragraph again. It was also before the pain. Before the incredible goddamn pain.
For almost thirty minutes music had been playing on the radio. Nick had heard it, he knew it was there, but he could not have identified any of the songs. It had been background music. Now, just at the moment when his memories of Monique were the most poignant, the Miami “classic rock and roll station, WMIM, 99.9 on your FM dial,” played Cyndi Lauper’s haunting 1984 hit “Time After Time.” The music seemed to increase markedly in amplitude. Nick had to sit down and grab a breath. Until the song, he had been able to deal with his memories of Monique. But somehow that song, the one he had played on the cassette player in his car almost every night as he had made the drive from Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach to see her, carried with it all the youthful love, joy, fear, and anger that had marked the entire affair. Nick was overwhelmed. As he sat on the couch and listened to the song, hot tears welled up in his eyes and then ran softly down his cheeks.
“. . . Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick, and think of you . . . Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new . . . Flashback, warm nights, almost left behind . . . Suitcase of memories . . . Time after Time.”
2
YOU say, go slow, I fall behind. . . . The second hand unwinds . . .” Brenda leaned over and turned the volume down on the cassette player. “It’s me, Mr. Stubbs, honest. Brenda Goldfine. Don’t you recognize me?” She was shouting at an old man in a blue uniform who was sitting on a stool in a small circular tower in the middle of the road. “And that’s Teresa Silver in the back. She’s not feeling too well. Come on, open the gate and let us through.”
The security guard climbed down from his stool and slowly walked out in front of Nick’s old Pontiac. He wrote the license number down on a note pad and then came around to Brenda’s window. “All right this time, Brenda, but this is not according to the rules. All visitors coming into Windsor Cove after ten o’clock at night must be cleared ahead of time.”
At length the guard raised the gate and Nick moved his car forward again. “The guy’s really a pain in the ass,” Brenda said to Nick, smacking her gum as she talked, “Christ, you’d think he owned one of the places or something.” Nick had heard about Windsor Cove. Or rather had read about it. Once when he was over at his uncle’s home in Potomac, Maryland, there had been a copy of Town and Country magazine on the table and he had read about the “gracious life of Windsor Cove.” Now, as he drove past the estates in the most prestigious section of Palm Beach, he was awed by the personal wealth displayed.
“Over there. That’s Teresa’s house.?
?? Brenda pointed at a colonial house set back about a hundred yards from the road. Nick drove into the long semicircular driveway and eventually stopped in front of a walkway leading to the front of the house. It was an imposing place. Two full floors, six white columns over twenty feet high, an opulent door whose top half was an arched, stained glass window of a white heron in flight against a blue sky filled with fleecy clouds.
Brenda looked in the back of the car where her friend was passed out. “Look, I’d better handle this. I’ll go up and talk to Mrs. Silver and explain what happened and everything. Otherwise you could be in deep shit. Sometimes she jumps to conclusions.”
By the time Brenda reached the front door to ring the bell, it had already opened. An attractive woman in a red silk blouse and a pair of chic black slacks was waiting. Nick guessed that she had probably been called by the security guard. He couldn’t tell much about the conversation, but he could see that Teresa’s mother was asking questions. After a couple of minutes, Brenda and the woman came back to the car. “You didn’t tell me she was still passed out,” Nick heard a surprisingly husky voice say. There was also some kind of accent, European perhaps. “You know, Brenda, this is absolutely the last time she can go anywhere with you. You just can’t control her. I’m not even sure that you try.” The voice was angry but not strident.