Cradle. Part 4

Winters gently nudged his son awake. "Hap," he said softly, "it's your dad." Henry Allen Pendleton Winters rubbed his eyes and then sat up quickly in bed. "Yes, sir," he said, "is anything wrong? Is Mom all right?"

"No," his father answered, and then laughed. "I mean yes. Mom's all right. Nothing's wrong. I just wanted to talk."

Hap looked at the clock beside his bed. "Ummm, well, okay, Dad. What do you want to talk about?"

Winters was quiet for a moment. "Hap, did you ever read the copy of the script that I got for you and your mother, the one from my play?"

"No, sir. Not much," Hap replied. "I'm sorry, but I just couldn't get into it. I think maybe it's above my head." He brightened. "But I'm looking forward to seeing you in it tomorrow night." There was a long pause. "Umm, what's it about anyway?"

Winters stood up and looked out the open window. Beyond the screen he could hear the gentle susurration of the crickets. "It's about a man who loses his place with G.o.d because he can't or won't control his actions. It's about . . ." Winters turned his head around quick1y and caught his son eyeing the clock. A sharp emotional pain raced through him. He waited until it had abated and then drew a breath. "Well, we can talk about it some other time, son. I just realized how late it is."

He walked to the door. "Good night, Hap," he said.

"Good night, sir."

Vernon Winters walked past his wife's room to the third bedroom at the end of the hall. He undressed slowly, now even more aware than before of an unfulfilled longing. He thought for a fleeting second about waking Betty up to talk and maybe . . . But he knew better. That's not her style, he said to himself, never was. Even before when we slept together. And after Libya and the dreams and tears at night who could blame her for wanting her own bedroom.

He slipped into his bed in his undershorts. The soothing melody of the crickets enveloped him. And besides. She has her G.o.d and I have my despair. There is nothing left between us except Hap. We couple as strangers. both fearing any discovery.

10.

"THE communication room will close in five minutes. The communication room will close in five minutes." The disembodied, recorded voice sounded tired. Carol Dawson was weary herself. She was talking to Dale Michaels on the videophone. Photographs were strewn all over the desk underneath the screen and the video camera.

"All right," Carol was saying, "I guess I agree with you. The only possible way for me to decipher this puzzle is to bring all the photos and the telescope recording unit back to Miami. "She sighed and then yawned. "I'll come up there first thing in the morning, on the flight that arrives at seven-thirty, so that IPL can get an early shot at the recorded data. But remember, I must be back here in time to pick up the golden trident at four. Can the lab process all the data in a couple of hours?"

"That's not the hard part. Trying to a.n.a.lyze the data and piece together a coherent story in an hour or two will be the tough job. "Dr. Dale was sitting on the couch in the living room of his s.p.a.cious condominium in Key Biscayne. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a magnificent jade chess board with green and white squares. Six carved chess pieces were still on the board, the two opposing queens and four p.a.w.ns, two from each side. Dale Michaels paused and looked meaningfully at the camera. "I know how important this is to you. I've cancelled my eleven o'clock meeting so I can help you."

"Thanks," Carol said automatically. She felt a trickle of irritation. Why is it, she thought while Dale talked about one of his new projects at MOI, that men always demand grat.i.tude for every little sacrifice? If a woman changes her schedule to accommodate a man, it's expected. But if a man revises his precious schedule it's a big f.u.c.king deal.

Dale droned on. Now he was enthusiastically telling her about a new Inst.i.tute effort to survey the underwater volcanoes around Papua, New Guinea. Whew, Carol smiled to herself when she realized that Dale's self-centered focus was bothering her, I must really be beat. I believe I'm on the verge of being b.i.t.c.hy.

"Hey," Carol interrupted him. She stood up and started to pick up the scattered photographs. "Sorry to bring a halt to this party, but they're closing the room and I'm exhausted. I'll see you in the morning."

"Aren't you going to make a move?" Dale replied, pointing at the chess board.

"No, I'm not," Carol said, showing just a trace of anger. "And I may not ever. Any reasonable player would have accepted the draw that I offered you last weekend and gone on to more important things. Your d.a.m.n ego just can't deal with the idea that one game out of five I can battle you to a tie."

"People have been known to make mistakes in the end-game," Dale answered, avoiding altogether the emotional content in her remark. "But I know you're tired. I'll meet you at the airport and take you to breakfast."

"Okay. Good night." Carol hung up the videophone a little brusquely and packed all the photographs in her briefcase. As soon as she had left the marina, she had taken her camera and film straight to the darkroom at the Key West Independent, where she had spent an hour developing and studying the prints. The results were intriguing, particularly a couple of the blowups. In one of them she could clearly see four separate tracks converging to a spot just under the fissure. In another photo the bodies of the three whales were caught in a pose that looked as if they were in the middle of a deep conversation.

Carol walked through the s.p.a.cious lobby in the Marriott Hotel. The piano bar was almost deserted. The lithe black pianist was playing an old Karen Carpenter song, "Good-bye to Love. " A handsome man in his late thirties or early forties was kissing a Rashy young blonde in a nook off to the right. Carol bridled. The bimbo must be all of twenty-three, she said to herself, probably his secretary or something equally important.

As she wound her way down the long corridor toward her room, Carol thought about her conversation with Dale. He had told her that the Navy had small robot vehicles, some of them derived from original MOI designs, that could easily have made the tracks. So it was virtually certain that the Russians had similar vehicles. He had dismissed the whales' behavior as irrelevant but had thought that her failure to find out if anything else was under the overhang had been a serious mistake. Of course, Carol had realized when he had said it, I should have spent another minute looking. Nuts. I hope I didn't blow it. In her mind's eye she then had carefully revisited the entire scenario at the overhang to see if there were any clues that something else may have been hidden there.

The biggest surprise in the discussion with Dale had come when Carol, in pa.s.sing, had praised the way the new alarm algorithm had worked. Dale suddenly had become very interested. "So the alert code definitely read 101?" he had said.

"Yes," she had answered, "that's why I wasn't that astonished when we found the object."

"No way," he had said emphatically. "The trident could not have caused the alert code. Even if it was at the edge of the field of view of the telescope, and that seems unlikely given how far you followed the trench, it's too small to trigger the foreign object alarm. And how could it have been seen under the overhang anyway?" Dale had paused for a few seconds. "You didn't look at any of the infrared images in realtime, did you? Well, we can process them tomorrow and see if we can figure out what triggered the alarm."

Carol felt strangely defeated as she opened the door to her motel room. It's just fatigue, she said to herself, not wanting to admit that her conversation with Dale had made her feel inadequate. She put her briefcase on a chair and walked wearily to the bathroom to wash her face. Two minutes later she was asleep on the bed in her underclothes. Her slacks, blouse, shoes, and socks were all stacked together in the corner.

She is a little girl again in her dream, wearing the blue-and-yellow striped dress that her parents gave her for her seventh birthday. Carol is walking around with her father in the Northridge Mall on a busy Sat.u.r.day morning. They pa.s.s a large candy store. She lets go of his hand and runs into the store and stares through the gla.s.s case at all the chocolates. Carol points at some milk chocolate turtles when the big man behind the display case asks her what she wants.

In the dream Carol cannot reach the counter and doesn't have any money "Where is your mother, little girl?" the candy store man asks. Carol shakes her head and the man repeats the question. She stands on her tiptoes and tells the man in a confidential whisper that her mother drinks too much, but that her father always buys her candy.

The man smiles, but he still won't give her the chocolates. "And where is your father, little girl?" the candy store man now asks. In the case Carol can see the reflection of a kindly, smiling man standing behind her, framed between two piles of chocolates. She wheels around, expecting to see her father. But the man behind her is not her father. This man's face is grotesque, disfigured. Frightened, she turns back around to the chocolates. The man in the store is now taking the candy away. It is closing time. Carol starts to cry.

"Where is your father, little girl? Where is your father?" The little girl in the dream is sobbing. She is surrounded by big people, all of them asking questions. She puts her hands over her ears.

"He's gone," Carol finally shouts. "He's gone. He left us and went away and now I'm all alone."

CYCLE 447.

1.

AGAINST the deep black background of scattered stars the filaments of the Milky Way Galaxy seem like thin wisps of light added by a master artist. Here, at the far edge of the Outer Sh.e.l.l, near the beginning of what the Colonists call the Gap, there is no suggestion of the teeming activity of the Colony, some twenty-four light millicycles away. An awesome, unbroken quiet is the background for the breathtaking beauty of a black sky studded with twinkling stars.

Suddenly out of the void comes a small interstellar messenger robot. It seeks and finally finds a dark spherical satellite about three miles in diameter that is easily overlooked in the great panorama of the celestial sky. Time pa.s.ses. A close-up reveals activity on the satellite. Soft artificial lights now illuminate portions of the surface. Automated vehicles are working on the periphery of the object, apparently changing its shape. External structures are dismantled and taken off to a temporary storage area in the distance. At length the original satellite disappears altogether and what is left are two long parallel rails of metal alloy, built in sections of about two hundred yards apiece from the spare parts of the now vanished satellite. Each rail is ten yards across and separated from its matched partner by about a hundred yards.

Regular sorties to the storage area continue until the useful supplies of material are depleted and the tracks extend for a distance of almost ten miles. Then activity stops. The rails from nowhere to nowhere in s.p.a.ce stand as mute reminders of some major engineering activity suddenly abandoned. Or was it? From just below a prominent binary pair, the two brightest lights in the eastern sky, a speck emerges. The speck grows until it dominates the eastern quadrant of the sky. A dozen, no, sixteen great interstellar cargo ships with bright, flashing red lights lead a procession of robot vehicles into the region. The ghostly rails to nowhere are surrounded by the new arrivals. The first cargo ship opens and eight small shuttles emerge, each one moving back down the line toward another of the great cargo containers. The shuttles wait silently outside the huge ships while the entourage completes its arrival.

The final vehicle to arrive is a tiny s.p.a.ce tug pulling a long, slender object that looks like two folded j.a.panese fans joined together end to end. It is encased in a transparent and protective sheath of very thin material. Eight small, darting vehicles dance like hummingbirds along its entire length, as if they were somehow guiding it, guarding it, and checking out its health all at the same time.

The large cargo ships shaped like ancient blimps now open and reveal their contents. Most of them are carrying rail sections stacked in enormous piles. The small shuttles unload the sections, leaving them stacked, and set them in groups stretching for miles in both directions from the existing rails. When the rail sections are almost all unloaded, four of the shuttles approach the side of one of the remaining giant cargo ships and wait for the bay doors to swing open. From the inside of this cargo ship come eight machines that attack each of the four shuttles in pairs, breaking them carefully into pieces and taking the parts back into the dark of the cargo bay. A few moments later, an elongated complex of articulating machinery emerges from this great ship. Once released from the confines of the cargo carrier, it stretches itself into a long bench reaching almost a mile in length. Every hundred yards or so along the central platform of this bench, a smaller set of coordinated components form into highly organized local groups.

This is the automated, multipurpose construction system, one of the technological treasures of the Colonists. The entire system moves into place at the end of the tracks and its many remote manipulators begin to pull rail sections from the various stacks. Its sophisticated local hands and fingers deftly put the new sections in place and attach them with atomic welds. The speed is astonishing. An entire mile of new track is finished within minutes and the great builder moves to another group of rail section piles. The completed tracks extend for almost a hundred miles in s.p.a.ce.

Having finished with one task, the construction system undergoes its next metamorphosis. Tearing itself into pieces starting from the two ends of the long bench, the monolithic structure disappears and is reorganized into thousands of separate but similar components. These little antlike contraptions attach themselves in groups to individual rail sections. They measure carefully all the dimensions and check all the welds between adjacent sections. Then, as if on cue, the rails on the four ends of the track segments begin to bend and elevate, lifted by the antlike components. The rails twist upward, upward, bringing the rest of the track with them. The two long parallel lines are eventually transformed into a giant double hoop, over ten miles in radius, that looks like an amus.e.m.e.nt park ferris wheel suspended in s.p.a.ce.

With the completion of the double hoop, the construction system again reconfigures itself. Some of the new elements of the system pick up the long slender object shaped like end-to-end j.a.panese fans. They erect it near the hoop (it is, not surprisingly, almost the exact length as the diameter of the hoops) under the careful surveillance of its hummingbird protectors. Then the object is hoist into place as a north-south spoke in the double hoop structure. Some of the hummingbirds produce unseen thin cables and anchor the spoke to the hoop structure at both ends. The rest of the tiny mechanical speedsters create a web that winds around the center section and connects the great antenna with the east-west axis of the hoops.

The antenna, now connected to its supporting structure, opens slowly at both the north and south pole positions on the hoop. Closer inspection reveals that the hummingbirds are actually pulling the delicate individual folds apart. The folds spread out until the entire interior of the hoops is covered with a mixture of mesh, ribbing, and amazingly complex local arrays. The initial deployment is complete.

The communication complex next goes through an elaborate self-test while its construction minions stand by in case any problems are encountered. The tests are successful and the station is declared operational. Within hours the phalanx of robot emissaries from the inhabited universe picks up all the stray metal lying around and packs it into one of the large cargo ships. Then, as swiftly as they came, the robot vehicles disappear into the blackness around the station, leaving the imposing hoop structure alone as a reminder of the presence of intelligence in the universe.

Around the vast Outer Sh.e.l.l, whose two hundred and fifty-six sections each contain more volume than the Colony, over one thousand similar upgrades have been made during Cycle 446 in an attempt to extend advanced communications capabilities to new locales. This is the last upgrade of a very difficult group in a region near the Gap. This group was delayed several times because of an unacceptably high number of manufacturing deficiencies at the nearest major factory over two light millicycles away. After several attempts to diagnose and repair the problems, eventually the plant had to be closed and virtually rebuilt from scratch. The total delay to the completion of the project was fourteen millicycles, just about what the Council of Engineers had predicted in their worst-case a.n.a.lysis that accompanied the Cycle 446 Proclamation.

As the big moment approaches, all normal activity in the heart of the Colony ceases. In the last nanocycle, there is no business activity, no entertainment. The s.p.a.ceports are even empty. At precisely 446.9, after two hundred millicycles of debate and discussion by the Council of Leaders, the governmental blueprint for the next era will be delivered and all intelligence in the Colony will be listening.

The giant transmitter is activated on schedule and the Cycle 447 Proclamation pours out at an information rate of a hundred trillion bits of information per picocycle. The actual data rate from the powerful source is much higher, but the information rate is reduced to accommodate requirements for both sophisticated encoding and error checks internal to the data. With the coding, only Colony receivers equipped with special decryption algorithms can unscramble the message at any level. And the internal consistency checks on each packet of data in the transmission reduce the probability of receiving an erroneous piece of information, even at an enormous distance, to practically zero.

Following the organization and agenda for The Proclamation established in the Era of Genius, between Cycles 371 and 406, the first microcycle of the transmission is a complete summary of the entire plan. Two hundred nanocycles of this summary are devoted to each of the five divisions governed by the Council of Leaders: administration, information, communication, transportation, and exploration. After a planned break of four hundred nanocycles, to allow receiver adjustments along the path of the signal, the transmission of the actual Cycle 447 Proclamation begins. On and on it goes. It does not stop until twenty microcycles later. Four complete microcycles are used for in-depth explanations of the major projects to be undertaken in each of the five disciplines. Of particular interest to the Committee for the Outer Sh.e.l.l, the group that governs the huge concentric region defining the most distant reach where the Colonists claim jurisdiction, is a plan from the Division of Exploration announcing the repatriation to the Outer Sh.e.l.l of almost a million species from Zoo System #3.

(The transmission of The Proclamation, a wealth of information that can be translated into language, pictures, sounds, and other sensory impressions depending on the receiving beings and the sophistication of their decryption equipment, is the beginning of the governmental process for each cycle. Based upon The Proclamation, regional bodies or administrative agencies with subordinate jurisdictions then adjust their plans for the cycle to be consistent with those announced by the Council of Leaders. This procedure is defined in detail in the Articles of Colonial Confederation.) The Proclamation is relayed throughout the Colony and the near reaches of the Inner Sh.e.l.l by means of giant communication stations along the developed transportation routes. These stations, actually information centers that store all Colony messages in their extensive libraries for as long as a hundred cycles, amplify and retransmit the signal to the next station in the pattern some ten light microcycles away. The edge of the Colony (and hence the beginning of the Inner Sh.e.l.l) was expanded by the Boundary Decree in the Cycle 416 Proclamation to include all points up to three light millicycles from the administrative center. Thus, by the time the Proclamation reaches the mammoth Zoo Complex, a combination of three stars and nineteen planets (four of them artificial) just across the edge of the Colony, the message has been relayed through three hundred stations.

The Committee of Zookeepers eagerly awaits the proclamation to find out the response to their recommended expansion of the Zoo Complex. They are surprised to find their proposal replaced by another repatriation plan. Once before, in Cycle 429, they had proposed an expansion of the zoo to handle the explosion of successful progeny created by the breakthroughs in adaptive genetic engineering during Cycles 426-428. At that time also their request had been denied and the Council of Leaders had recommended repatriation to solve the population problem. During Cycles 430-436 the population of the Zoo Complex was kept approximately constant by these regular transfers of common species back to their original homes But starting with Cycle 437, there was a rapid increase in interest in comparative biology. It was triggered by the discovery of a fifth cla.s.s of life form, called Type E by the Council of Biologists, in Section 28 of the Outer Sh.e.l.l. Subsequent expeditions to the same area showed not only that the dominant life type throughout Sections 28-33 was Type E. but also that Type A was surprisingly present as well in those sections. This was the first time that natural evolution in any region had shown a predilection for any kind of life form other than the Type A of the Colonists and its developed hybrids. The quest to understand these unusual creatures led to the endangered species expeditions in the Outer Sh.e.l.l in Cycles 440 and 441 and the creation, in Cycle 442, of several worlds specifically to study the new Type E life forms.

Many of these new species flourished in Zoo System #3, causing population and s.p.a.ce problems again for the Committee of Zookeepers. The s.p.a.ce shortage was especially severe and it was exacerbated both by the need to segregate all the Type E life forms and by their rapid reproduction. Therefore, at the beginning of the planning process for this Cycle 447, the Committee of Zookeepers had proposed their small expansion of the Zoo Complex, suggesting not only a fourth zoo system completely dedicated to Type E life forms, but also a vigorous campaign for completing the repatriation of all Colony and Inner Sh.e.l.l species with aggression coefficients below 14.

The Committee of Zookeepers are stunned by the scale of the Outer Sh.e.l.l repatriation plan contained in the Cycle 447 Proclamation. In a lively technical discussion catalyzed by the unexpected proposal, the dangers of returning the Outer Sh.e.l.l life forms to their original planets are vigorously rea.s.serted. The Committee decides tentatively to take an unusual step-to submit a Proclamation Variance to the Council of Leaders. In the draft variance the Zookeepers point out that many genetic experiments have been conducted with the new Type E forms, that the evolutionary possibilities for the new species are therefore uncertain, that the monitoring frequencies and test facilities in the Outer Sh.e.l.l are inadequate, and that the aggression coefficients for many of the group are not yet accurately tabulated Before they actually submit the variance, however, the Committee of Zookeepers realizes that someone must have pointed out all these factors in the original debates. So why was the repatriation policy promulgated? Was this part of some new overarching design that downgrades the importance of zoological information altogether? Or is the policy strictly political and possibly connected with the Message from Power #2?

2.

IN keeping with the laws of the Colony governing the dissemination and preservation of important historical information, the official commentary of key Council-level organizations accompanies the transmission of the Cycle 447 Proclamation. Of particular interest to those involved in the Outer Sh.e.l.l repatriation project are the following excerpts from the report of the Council of Engineers: . . . The earliest repatriation to the Inner Sh.e.l.l was done on almost an ad hoc basis, simply transporting the life forms, en ma.s.se, to their original region or another of similar environment in a nearby sector. This was accomplished by conducting a roundup of the tranquilized creatures at their zoo habitats, loading them into huge cargo vessels maintaining internal conditions equivalent to the habitat, and then dispersing them at their new home. This process worked adequately for small transfers over short distances. It was also cheap. However, it had many severe deficiencies that rendered it almost useless for sustained operations.

First and foremost, the ontogenetic development of the creatures was completely interrupted by the repatriation procedure. They were frightened by their removal, disturbed by their necessarily reduced locus of movement during transit, and, once situated in their new locales, bothered by even minute differences from their earlier homes. Their memories, even if electronically cleansed, retained an intense sense of 1098 that undermined their adjustment. All these conditions taken together led to a marked phylogenetic increase in aggression coefficient, across the board, that did not significantly damp in some of the species for ten to fifteen generations. . . .

. . . From the point of view of s.p.a.cecraft design, both the size and distance of the proposed transfers precluded using mature specimens long before the biological and developmental problems were thoroughly understood. When the Cycle 432 Proclamation called for increased repatriation within the Colony and the Inner Sh.e.l.l, there was some panic at the Council of Engineers because it was thought that transportation vehicles on a near planetary scale might be required. Fortunately, the Committees on Biological Engineering and Advanced Robotics proposed that future transfers be accomplished using suspended zygotes together with new versions of the superintelligent robots serving as zoo monitors.

After a few early problems with the zygote technique, It was more or less perfected, at least for the Types A and B life forms 90 prevalent in the Colony. Repatriation success ratios for the last ten cycles are very high, even for the more difficult types C and D. However, such success ratios should not be expected in the implementation of the Cycle 447 Proclamation. Not only are some of the target life forms the newest and least understood in the Zoo Complex, but also they will be repatriated, in many cases, to a distant, poorly doc.u.mented biological environment where monitoring is as infrequent as every three or four hundred millicycles. Some of the more advanced Type E forms have amazingly short life spans for lntelligence, as little as five or six millicycles, which means that fifty to a hundred generations may elapse between progress checks. . . .

. . . But all in all it is a magnificent challenge for engineering. Many transfer vehicles will fly well outside the standard transportation infrastructure and therefore must be able to forage raw materials on their own. Conditions at the target worlds may have changed, so adaptability and the processing of new information will play a critical role in the design. The electronic components will have more failures due to the long flight times, meaning that extraordinary fault correction systems must be developed and tested. . . .

And from the Council of Historians: It is useful to begin our mostly negative comment on the Outer Sh.e.l.l repatriation plan by reminding all Colonists that our Council includes the longest continuously active intelligence pool of any Council In the Directory. Two of our groups have direct memories of the Era of Genius through many generations of biological refresh. Thus it is natural that our approach to any proposed project is to a.s.sess its merit in terms of its role in the overall evolution and/or strategy of our society. It is not our desire to dampen the youthful zeal that thrills at the acquisition of new knowledge or the prospect of great adventure; rather, we would like to place a sense of perspective on all Colony endeavors and measure the future impact of any perceived changes in basic policy. . . .

. . . The proposed repatriation scheme is still another step in the dangerous folly of unbridled frontierism that began, in our opinion, with the Boundary Decree of Cycle 416. Instead of discussing the details of the proposed plan without reference to its historical context (there are excellent descriptions of the elements of the plan in the report by the Council of Engineers - some of the significant short-term risks are listed in the report by the Council of Biologists), we wish to delineate its dangers by including it in our broad indictment of the entire genus of adventures sp.a.w.ned by the Boundary Decree. . . .

. . . The justifications advanced for frontierism always sound good on the surface. Its proponents point out that societal change is produced by new information outside the ordinary sweep of events, that frontierism is essentially aimed at producing this kind of new knowledge, and that the resulting change in perspective that comes from a 'new view of the universe' forces the proper and regular rea.s.sessment of our culture.

History is usually in general agreement with the advocates of frontierism and that is doubtless why this repatriation proposal and similar other previous exploration activities have been so enthusiastically supported. However, there are limitations to the benefits redounding from new information, especially when frontier investigations reveal knowledge that is either inimical to the fundamental structure of the society or beyond the comprehension of the most learned groups. In these cases the diffusion through the society of the new information is unsettling, instead of being enriching and uplifting, and actually undermines the security of the established inst.i.tutions.

A perfect example of what happens when frontierism is embraced without constraint can be seen in the events of the last thirty cycles that led to the receipt of the message from Power #2 in the middle of Cycle 444. The Boundary Decree initiated the process by establishing, in effect, a new Jurisdictional domain for the Colonists. The old central Colony had no rigorous boundary. Significant development extended out to only two light millicycles distance from the administrative center. The outermost permanently maintained station was at that time a mere ten light millicycles away. The Decree of Cycle 416 regularized the nearby universe, creating four concentric worlds and expanding the central Colony itself to a radius of three light millicycles. Three specific Sh.e.l.ls were also created, with the Outer Sh.e.l.l defined to be the entire region between twelve and twenty-four light millicycles away from the administrative center.

This Outer Sh.e.l.l contained fifty thousand unexplored star systems in a volume a thousand times greater than that of the old central Colony. During the period between Cycles 425 and 430, almost half of the major initiatives identified in the cyclical proclamations were involved, in one way or another, with the exploration of the Outer Sh.e.l.l. (It should be pointed out that during those five cycles there was also doc.u.mented speculation that such a rapid expansion in our knowledge base might have unforeseen ramifications, but the negativists, as they were called, were drowned out by the collective fascination with the exploratory binge.) men, in Cycle 433, our new cla.s.s of interstellar drones, specifically designed to study and categorize the many worlds of the Outer Sh.e.l.l, encountered a large, quiescent s.p.a.cecraft of unknown origin. Careful in situ investigations were unsuccsssful in their attempts to correlate the engineering components of the s.p.a.ceship with any known technological base for a s.p.a.cefaring species.

Eschewing the caution suggested by many of the Committees, the Council of Leaders had the enigmatic s.p.a.ceship towed back to one of the developed cities of the Inner Sh.e.l.l. There it was placed on display and a.n.a.lyzed in detail. The initial conclusion of the drones was validated. The s.p.a.cecraft had not come from anywhere inside the domain of the Colony. The Council of Engineers concluded that the technological capabillty of this builders was roughly equivalent to that of the Colonists in the early Era of Genius. But when had it been made? And where did it come from? And most importantly, who had made it?

By deciding to bring the dead s.p.a.ceship back to civilization, the Council of Leaders basically guaranteed that the unsettling question of its origin would remain uppermost in the minds of the Colonists. This unbridled quest for any and all information again worked to destabilize the culture. The entire society was rife with rumored explanations to the unanswered and disquieting questions raised by the s.p.a.ceship. The dominant opinion was that the craft had been a Colonial prototype, never put into production, that had somehow been omitted from the official Encyclopedia of s.p.a.ce Vehicles. This opinion was consistent with the general tendency of the Colonists to believe they were innately superior to all other life forms.

It might have been possible to let the doubts and fears about the unknown s.p.a.cecraft diminish to nothing, but the Council of Leaders resuscitated the collective anxieties by announcing, in the Cycle 434 Proclamation, that the largest new project of the Colony would be the design and eventual deployment of a new generation of receiver arrays in the Outer Sh.e.l.l. The purpose of these arrays would be to intercept and decode any coherent radio messages that might be emanating from inside the Gap. It was a clear indication that the leadership believed the silent s.p.a.ceship to be of extracolonial origin.

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 a.n.a.lyzing the impact of the discovery of the strange s.p.a.ceship. Crash programs were inst.i.tuted 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 Sh.e.l.l 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 Sh.e.l.l. 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 const.i.tuents 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 h.o.a.rd 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 d.a.m.n 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 gla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 soph.o.m.ore 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-s.p.a.ced 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 cla.s.s 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 ba.n.a.lity 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 "cla.s.sic 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 ca.s.sette 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 ca.s.sette 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."