Overture (Earth Song) (2 page)

The sun had fallen below the horizon as Mindy Patoy glanced out her office window to take in the city’s vista. Portland, Oregon was situated in just the right location to afford year-round sunsets and this spring evening was no exception. Red and orange streamers leapt from the west to race across the sky in a display few East Coasters would ever see. She would know, after all, having been born in Boston.

Her
desk in the modest-sized import/export firm where she worked was by far the most cluttered of any to be seen. It was not just the huge stacks of shippers’ forms and trade papers; there was also dozens of photographs in every type of frame imaginable. Mindy was better traveled than the average British spy. There was a picture of her shaking the hand of Dr. Edward Kristof with the deep valley of the Arecibo Radio Astronomy Telescope in Puerto Rico as the backdrop. Next to that picture was one of her climbing a treacherous path on a Hawaiian island to reach a homemade observatory delightfully named Mahi Mahi. There was also a candid shot of her stuffing a slice of pizza in her mouth between study sessions at MIT. Still another shot of her hamming with a bunch of her fellow graduate students outside of Effelsberg, Germany. On and on they went, documenting her treks.

She
hardly spared the pictures an occasional glance these days. More than once she had nearly packed them away and had gone so far as to bring in a box to take them home. The box now resided in the bottom of her desk and the pictures remained untouched. The unspoken truth was they represented a life she had lost not of her own choice. It was times like these she missed it dearly. Her phone rang and she answered.

“
Patoy here,” she said routinely.

“
What are you still doing there?” asked a warm and familiar voice. She smiled despite her dark mood.

“
Working.  Why aren’t you still here, Jake?”

“
I’m not working. What I
am
doing is staring at a couple pounds of prime rib with all the trimmings slowly reaching room temperature.” Mindy scrunched her face up and hissed silently. She’d completely forgotten that tonight was their one-year anniversary.

“
Oh, is that tonight?” she said lamely.

“
Yeah, tonight. You’re hopeless, you know that?”

“
I do, and I’m sorry. That absolute quota entry is only a week away and I was just trying to finish the out-of-port preparations. I really just completely forgot that our first date was a year ago.”

“
Daniels isn’t paying you nearly enough. I know it was also five years ago tonight that you were fired from-”

“
I don’t need to be reminded of that tonight, I really don’t.”

There
was a short pause over the phone. “It’s my turn to be sorry. I was just missing you and a little peeved that I cooked all this food. I guess I’ll just give it to Charlie. Here boy, come and get it!”

“
No, not your damn hound!” she cried in mock panic. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“
You better, he looks really hungry.”

“
I will,” she said and hung up. It took effort to step away from her desk, but she told herself that the overwhelming dedication she tried to heap onto her job was just a way of covering the pain and the shame of her old life. She couldn’t help but think about the past as she shut her computer down and went to get her coat. How far could one woman fall in such a short time?

Five
years ago she had been a young if not world-renowned radio astronomer and astrophysicist. Her college experience had started with a lust to learn archeology. She’d loved the old movies about Indiana Jones and his swashbuckling adventures to discover lost treasures. The truth of archeological study had quickly sobered the twenty-year-old Boston girl. Two semesters with her nose buried in ancient history texts followed by a boiling hot summer in Mexico digging through what had been a Mayan garbage dump ended her affair with archeology.

Next
came architectural engineering. The thought of her name on bridges, towers and other lasting monuments was attractive. This field lasted almost a year, just like the last one. A month long internship spent copying and re-measuring drawings at an architectural firm near the university ended that line of study just as effectively as the Mayan dump had ended the other. She realized that there was little chance she would ever design famous buildings or gain any renown. Two years of college were gone and Mindy Patoy had yet to find her future career.

As
she rode the elevator down to the basement parking garage, a smile stole its way onto her face. She was remembering the trip when she found both her first love, and her second love. Her then boyfriend had talked her into joining him for a month during the summer that he spent as student intern at the Mt. Laguna Observatory outside San Diego. She had considered it a foolish waste of time but went along anyway because she was falling in love.

Students
were not supposed to bring animals or girlfriends along on these trips, but she was not the only uninvited guest at the intern’s lodge that summer. Many of the interns did not sleep alone. To her boyfriend’s chagrin he slept alone while she slept in a cot a few feet away. He spent his evenings watching a screen displaying the image captured by the 24” telescope; she sat next to him and kept him company while catching up on her magazine reading. She remembered silently thanking God she’d never taken astronomy.

Then
something startling happened. The telescope focused on the Great Crab Nebula for quick image clarification adjustment. The nebula was nearby and the brightest object available. When Mindy glanced up from her month-old copy of People magazine the large high definition LCD screen showed the distant nebula in all its spectacular detail. Her jaw dropped and her magazine slid to the floor unnoticed. “What is that?!” she asked in awe.

“
A nebula,” he had told her with the indifference of someone who had seen it a hundred times.

“
It’s beautiful,” she said, moving even closer to take in the entire image. He lifted an eyebrow and used the computer to call up some archived images from the observatory’s logs. Her breath came in gasps and her eyes got so wide they hurt. Some of the images she had seen before, but never in this large or sophisticated of a display. The images were breathtaking. She was hooked.

As
the days of her boyfriend’s internship passed, she was inexplicably drawn into the wonders of astronomy. Hours after he left the observatory she was still there, sitting with the next shift of interns, watching what they did and reading their books. Two weeks later she'd learned more about astronomy than her boyfriend had learned in two years. The summer internship ended and he left without her. Mindy was granted her own internship at the observatory. A month later she changed her college to the University of San Diego, and her major to Astronomy. She had finally found her passion. “Wonder what ever happened to that boy,” she thought as she climbed into her aging car and drove from the garage. Being a customs broker wasn’t so bad. It was certainly better than working for a living.

The
streets of Portland were nearly deserted, as would be expected on a late Sunday evening. As she pulled onto I-5 and aimed her car south she heaved a sigh of relief to be heading home. The house they'd shared for a few months was only ten miles south of downtown, but it was far enough to make for comfortable rural living. Knowing Jake was there with her made it even more enjoyable. For the first time in five years she was beginning to enjoy herself again. 

As
she left the last mini mall behind she passed a large hill on her left. She did her best not to look, though as usual found her head turning to gaze up at the peak. She saw the same concrete domed observatory every day. With it came the same feelings of loss and resentment. As Mindy continued south she stole a final glimpse of the structure in her rear view mirror before turning a corner and leaving the view behind. There were times that being a customs broker felt like the worst job in the world.

Victor sat on a bench just out of range of a streetlight, curious about what was going on in the center of the meadow. One of the park’s largest open areas, it was more than two hundred yards across and from where he sat, all Victor could see was a bright glare of light. There didn’t seem to be anyone else watching, but it was hard to tell because of the stark difference between light and dark. With the casual indifference of a person still under the influence, he stood up and strolled across the damp grass.

The closer he got, the more intense the light became. As he got closer, Victor could hear strange humming and buzzing sounds coming from near the source. The brightness of the lights and the unusual way they seemed to move made him think it was a movie set. There were film crews around Central Park almost every week. He and his friends were experts in mooching snacks and other perks from the Hollywood types. The thought of free food emboldened him, so he moved still closer. The light was now so intense it held him back like a physical wall. It left him even more confused.

He began walking around the source to see if it was less intense from the other side, but instead found himself back where he started. It was uniform from all sides. “This is strange, man” he said. Victor looked around to be certain no one was watching him, then he closed his eyes and tried to walk toward the light. It was so powerful it hurt right through his eyelids. In a few steps, he fell to his knees and covered his eyes with his hands.

“It can’t be that bright,” he mumbled, getting up and turning before swiping at the dew clinging to his worn jogging suit. Frustrated, he yelled “Who’s there?” Instantly the lights went out. Plunged into sudden darkness, Victor spun and stumbled backwards, preparing to run.

There was a whine followed by a bone-chilling reverberation and then all was silent. Emboldened by not having a security guard come running at him, Victor yelled, “What are you doing in there? I’m going to call the po-po!”

His night vision was slowly returning. Where the lights had been blazing, now appeared one of the many Central Park statues, and a lone figure standing beside it. The figure was not quite as tall as a man, had a body that somewhat resembled a horse, and was using strangely jointed arms ending in three digit fingers to hold a glowing rod. Its head turned toward him and Victor felt a jolt of fear and disgust as he found himself looking at a head with no nose, no mouth, and a pair of lidless almond-shaped eyes.

“What are you?” Victor moaned. The thing regarded him briefly with its shiny eyes before turning. It walked fluidly on its four legs to the statue, which resembled a marble column and pointed the glowing rod. The center of the statue pulsed deep purple. Victor was becoming less terrified and more amazed by the moment. He’d seen this kind of special effects in movies, but some part of him knew it took many hours and a powerful computer to make it believable. This was live, here, in Central Park.

The statue became a dais fifteen feet wide and ten feet deep, and shaped somewhat like the eyes of the strange creature. The sloped sides were smooth and only interrupted by cuts up both long sides for three steps. “What are you?” Victor asked the creature for the second time.  The creature took several steps towards the strange glowing apparition. Victor shook his head against the improbability of such a thing walking as its joints worked in directions and ways Victor had never thought possible. It made the glowing rod disappear into a small pouch worn around its waist, and turned back to regard him once more. Though it had no mouth, Victor imagined it was smiling. Its head gave a disturbingly human nod and it turned, walking gracefully up the three steps to the top of the dais.

Its feet had three knobby toes and no visible nails. Victor was marveling at how they adapted to the steps when the creature was thrown into stark relief. A brilliant white circle of light had sprung into life over the dais. Within that circle floated a myriad of constantly changing symbols. As Victor watched, the creature reached and touched one of the symbols. It changed its shape as the being twisted it and then pulled the design along the surface of the circle like someone dragging an icon on a computer desktop. When it reached another symbol, the big circle flashed purple and there was a new scene. Through the astonishing portal awaited a strange green-tinted sky in daylight. He looked away and the park was still dark as night.

Victor opened his mouth to say something but the creature had already stepped into the image to arrive on the other side. “Holy fuck,” he said as the being walked down the steps on the opposite side and out of view. Victor moved sideways to try and bring it back into focus, but then the tableau flashed and disappeared leaving only the milky, white dais behind.

With legs that quivered from pent up energy, Victor walked up the ramp. As his foot touched the top, the brilliant white circle jumped into existence again. Only now there was no sign of the strange world on the other side. He examined the circle and its smaller cousins with difficulty. They were glowing brightly and the park was dark. There were pictures like drawings floating around the edge of the big circle, images that reminded him of the symbols the Egyptians had used in their pyramids. From somewhere behind him came the warble of a police car moving in his direction.