Moonliner: No Stone Unturned (27 page)

It’s a sticky night and people aren’t sleeping well, expressed best by the repeated cries of a neighbor’s baby.  A dog howls in the distance, causing Cedric to drift back to the afternoon of his experiment, when he first succeeded in sending the message back in time, back to himself.  He reflects deeply on that afternoon, the sequence of events, and his transmissions.

The quantum reality is that time is not as standardized as we’ve been led to believe.  It’s relative to space, and therefore subject to a proximity factor.  Space we know is capable of warping, and thus so it time.

Cedric sits on his balcony gazing over his neighborhood, too tired from his day to be focused on anything.  He lets himself sink into a mindless stupor, and allows his vision to blur to clear his thoughts.  A bedroom light from one of the several high-rise apartment buildings in the neighborhood catches his eye.  It’s blinking on and off.  Some blinks are long and others are short, almost as if the blinking were orchestrated.  Cedric puts his sunglasses on to give Phaedra a look.

              “Can you see the blinking window?” he asks her.

              “Yes,” she answers.

              “Is it conveying a Morse Code message?” he asks.

              “Analyzing.  R-C-U-R, possibly, but inconclusive.  It’s stopped,” she responds.

              “RCUR, that doesn’t make any sense.  How about the signal in the news?  The one in the area of Voyager One.  Did that come from another planet?” he asks her.

              “I don’t know,” she responds.

              “I think it did,” he says.  “What else could it be?

He gets up, goes back into his apartment, picks up the commemorative coin and takes a really good look at it.  With all that has happened, he’s learned not to dismiss possibilities, regardless how remote they may appear.  He now wonders if the coin was a signal or a message from the past, and if there’s possibly more to unearth beneath the stone right now.

              “Can you play my messages?” he asks Phaedra.

              “You have four new messages,” she answers.  There’s a beep.

• “Cedric, Its Dr. Ridpath.  We missed you today at your preliminary review and the panel is growing uneasy.  I can’t make decisions for the panel Cedric, but I have some sway with them.  Please give me a call as soon as you get this so we can work this out,” the first messages is heard saying, followed by a pause, and another soft beep.
  
• “Cedric where the hell are you?  I
  so
  cannot believe you missed your prelim!  Give me a call,” Pender urges in the voice message.  There’s another pause and a beep.
  
• “Cedric, Dr. Ridpath again.  I’ve had the FCC in here asking me if we’ve been making any unlicensed transmissions.  They’ve traced them back to one of our transmitters.  You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”             
  
• “Cedric, I’ll be back Saturday night and rested if you want to play golf on Sunday morning,” Lennox can be heard saying.
  

Cedric sits in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the coin.

              “DOT-5,” he tells Phaedra.  A deep voice comes over his sound system.

“We’re now gonna be sending tourists to Mars, or at least into its orbit.  Could we be taking the space tourism thing a little too far?  What are your thoughts on this?  Give us a call at KDOT 5 Slide 34T and let us know.  We’ll be discussing this and other topics over the next few hours as the mercury continues to rise in a wave of heat with no relief in sight.

“And say, what’s up with that transmission NASA’s buzzing about?  I guess SETI is now in the mix.  What do you think?  Are we alone?  I know I am.  I’m pretty sure I’m on the wrong planet.  It’s now 10:38,” Flint Nikor, KDOT’s most popular DJ announces.

The humid air carries a fresh summer bouquet.  The night is calm. 

              “You have an incoming call from Lennox,” Phaedra announces. 

              “I’ll take it,” Cedric tells her; “hello Lennox, what’s up?”

              “Did you get my message?” Lennox asks; “I’ll be back by this time tomorrow if you want to play golf on Sunday.”

              “Why not?” Cedric answers; “sounds good!  So how’s the trip going?”

              “Meaningless,” Lennox responds; “completely devoid of meaning.”  They laugh.

              “You’re a perfect fit for the job,” Cedric tells him.

              “Have you taken another look underneath the rock yet?” Lennox asks.

              “Not yet no,” Cedric answers.

              “Even after finding the coin, you’re not curious if there’s something more to the story?” Lennox asks; “I mean this could be huge.”

              “Sure, I’m curious,” Cedric answers; “that’s not it.”

              “Then what is?” Lennox asks.

              “I’m reluctant to look for the same reasons I didn’t want to look the first time.  I don’t want the story to end.  My fear of not finding anything outweighs my curiosity,” he tells Lennox.  “The coin has extended my hope, but the closer I get to looking beneath that stone again, the more I can see how unlikely anything else will be there.  Why end the dream?”

              “Have it your way,” Lennox replies; “but something may lay beneath that stone right now and time is ticking.”

              “I know,” Cedric says; “I know and you are right.  I’ve gotta quit screwing around.  I have to go to school tomorrow afternoon to iron a few things out.  I’ll stop by the park and check the stone on my way.”

              “I’ll see you Sunday,” Lennox says, “back on earth.”

              “Alright, later Lennox,” Cedric responds and they both hang up.

Cedric steps back onto his balcony.  The stars are out, at least the few you can still see through the city’s light pollution.  Due south, Antares sits barely above the horizon, and just twenty-five thousand light years behind it, sits the galactic core.

The moon is full, appearing bigger than usual.  Cedric takes it in for a moment, then goes back inside.  He lies on the sofa and pulls a light blanket over himself. 

              “Lights out please,” he tells Phaedra.  The lights dim and the room is silent. 

              “Waves please,” Cedric then requests of her.  The sound of ocean waves fill the room’s background.

Exhausted Cedric clears his mind by thinking of Nikki, and a time when the two of them were sitting on the beach in Lincoln City, Oregon.  They were just watching waves crash onto the shore, one by one, powered by the moon.  It’s now a place in Cedric’s mind, where he can drift to when he wants to relax or to sleep.  Tonight, however, he isn’t simply trying to relax.  Instead, he’s trying to invite Nikki into his dreams by creating an ambiance that stimulates memories of her.  He’s doing this with the hope of increasing his chances of having her appear in his dream.  He’s beckoning her.

After a few minutes he finds himself breathing in deep, rhythmic unison with the waves.  A minute later, he’s out cold, sound asleep. 

Moonliner
5:04

A man screaming vulgarities somewhere far away wakes Cedric, and apparently that same damn dog that’s been howling in the night as well.  The stars are fading in the wee hours of the dawn’s twilight.  There’s a hint of ocean in the air coming in on pre-dawn, summer breeze.  You can hear it move through the trees, and then you can’t.

After a few seconds of silence, the morning’s first bird starts to chirp, too loudly.  Cedric stares at the ceiling, knowing he won’t get back to sleep now, not in the summer when the sun comes up this early.  Besides, he slept well throughout the night.  His self-hypnosis must’ve put him right to sleep.

The hypnosis failed, however, to induce a dream, or at least not a memorable one.  Cedric knows that time is healing his deep wounds; his appetite has returned; he sleeps through the night without any lucid dreaming.  Time, however, is also erasing Nikki, which haunts him.  Without her, there doesn’t seem to be any essence to his life, or life itself for that matter.  He now sees the human race as nothing but an ant farm caught in some fruitless, insipid lifecycle, tucked nicely away on a blue planet that’s hurtling through space at destructive speeds.  We’re insignificant specs on a spec of a spec.  Our measly thousands of years of human history pale in comparison to the billions the planet has endured, and we’d be lucky to survive thousands more of the billions to come.

Then he sees the moon still in the sky to the west, just above the horizon.  The air around it is getting lighter, reducing it to a whiter, less distinct object.  The earth is rolling into the light and the moon will soon roll out of sight, if the morning sky doesn’t obscure it first.

With his work on his mind, Cedric gets up, turns on his orbiting graphs and begins shuffling them around again, looking as frustrated and confused as ever.  He knows he has to get something together to take to the department, and soon.  They’ll only excuse so much.   

After shifting graphs around for almost three hours, he reduces them to his blue-beam device and drops it into his pocket, then just stares out his balcony door in a moment of tranquility.

              “What time is it?” he asks Phaedra.

              “It’s eight fifty-seven,” she replies.

              “I gotta get going,” he tells her, now realizing he needs to use the school’s photon acceleration tubes to complete his outline.  It’s a Saturday but he knows the lab should be open.

Late summer is apparent all around, most noticeably in the dead grass and the parched vegetation.  The sun is back again and the mercury is on the rise.   Cedric’s Skytrain slithers across the valley on its elevated track.  The train car’s thermostat controlled air conditioning kicks on high, indicating another hot day ahead. 

As the train glides into Park Station, Cedric grapples with the idea of getting off to take another look under the stone.  It would be, he reasons, the optimum point in the day to do so, knowing well the layout of the station and how much easier it is to access the park should he get off an inbound train. 

It’s time anyway, he thinks, to indulge the fantasy.  It’s time to discover the reality beneath the stone.  His hopes of the stone covering a connection to the past have faded over time, despite finding the coin.  Time does that to a pessimistic mind.  For Cedric, this has simply become something that he has to check off his to do list before getting on with his life.  It’s a final step toward healing.

He gets off the train mid platform, alone in the Saturday morning lull, takes the long escalator up and exits into the park.  He stops at the edge of the trail that takes him to Lost Lagoon.  He’s hit again with déjà vu, hard, for the first time in a while.  This time it even changes his visual perspective of the park.  The air is tinted yellow.  It’s dream-like.  He has stood here before, in the same spot looking at the same green trees swaying in the wind.

Time slows.  Everything around him is in slow motion.  He watches cyclists rolling along the park’s stone seawall, still spellbound by déjà vu.  This time he sees a world rolling beneath the cycles, instead of cycles across the ground. 

The world slows and the cycles speed up, snapping Cedric back into his day.  He smiles, happy that his déjà vu is back.  Could it mean something?  Why does it come in waves?  He really doesn’t know.  He only knows that it’s real whatever it is, very real.

At the tip of Lost Lagoon, he again spots the very bench on which he sat with Nikki not even three weeks ago.  It’s their bench and it’s unoccupied.  Realizing that this dream may all be over in a few minutes with the flip of a stone, Cedric takes a moment from the day and a seat on the beloved bench.  He thinks of Nikki.  This was all, after all, her idea.