Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Read online

  The professor listened in silence, his intellect slowly pushing his emotions aside as he struggled to grasp what Paul was saying. He had gone from confusion, to elation, to outrage and now this. A nameless sadness seemed to settle on him, and he thought he was beginning to appreciate the tears in the eyes of his friends. “Then, you’re saying the visitor never came? But I remember the man!”

  “Yes, we remember him. We were protected in the void. Now Paradox is taking control of the situation and cleaning up any loose ends. Poor Kelly. Don’t you see, Robert? There was no Palma Event—not in the time continuum as it stands now. They never came back, because nothing ever happened. Yes, we all remember that Kelly’s life was spared by their intervention, but not in this time line—not in the world we have around us now. Paradox is real—that’s what the visitor tried to warn us about. I always thought is was just some impossible puzzle that would send your mind in an endless loop, but that’s not what Paradox is at all. It’s a natural force, a consequence, and it holds us all accountable for every action we take. Even if we remember the visitor, the change we made in the time line removed his reason for being here—cancelled out the effect he had on the continuum before we were all swept into the Nexus Point, because he never had any reason to come. It was as if he was never here.”

  “And he never saved Kelly.” Nordhausen’s voice faded away. He set the shortwave on the console and moved closer to Paul and Maeve, arms extended, reaching for them, gathering them in to a wide embrace. They drew together, joined in their understanding and their sorrow, and shared a long moment of quiet tears in the silence of the smoky room. At last the professor spoke, reciting one of his old favorites. It just seemed to hit on the nub of the moment, and whispered the only consolation he could offer. “Destiny has two ways of crushing us,” he said softly. “By refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.”

  30

  Memorial – Berkeley, California – The Present

  The green sward of the memorial park was broken by winding flagstone pathways, trimmed with well cultivated rows of carnations and roses. The sky was blue and clear, with a gentle breeze blowing in from the bay. Paul looked over his shoulder as he walked to greet the others, his eyes climbing the Berkeley Hills and reaching for the place where Lawrence Labs lay nestled there—a portal on infinity. He carried a small parcel under one arm, handling it with an almost reverent care. Up ahead, at the edge of a gently rising knoll, Robert and Maeve were waiting beside the freshly turned earth of a shallow grave. It was just large enough to hold the few things they had decided to inter here, for there were no remains of their friend to lay to rest.

  Kelly had vanished without the slightest trace, except for the single word on his notebook. There was nothing to fill a casket, or even an urn, but in keeping with the traditions they had lived with, they had all decided to bury a few tokens of his life here in a quiet setting, watched by the hills where he had lived most of his adult years.

  Paul greeted his companions with a half-hearted smile. This moment weighed heavily on him, for Kelly was one of those very few people in his life where the shared roots of a long friendship reached deep into the past, even to the days of his youth. Nordhausen also carried the burden of sorrow heavily. He was one of the same inner circle that bound Paul and Kelly together, and they had gone to college together at St. Mary’s College in Moraga over twenty years ago. It would be very hard for both of them to say goodbye. Kelly’s death, his disappearance, his absence, would leave a gaping hole in both their lives that seemed impossible to ever fill.

  It was said that Time would heal all wounds, but not this one, thought Paul. Not all the days and years that remained to him could measure the gulf that yawned in his soul. His friend was gone.

  For Maeve, the sorrow was twofold. While she did not share the long years of friendship that made up Paul and Robert’s history with Kelly, she had harbored a slowly germinating feeling for him, one that she had guarded and nurtured over the brief time she served with the team. Three years seemed all too short a time to come to know someone, but she had learned a great deal about Kelly from the volume of poetry he had published not long ago. She still remembered when she first saw it on his coffee table during one of their Outcome briefings on the planned Shakespeare mission. Her curiosity had been aroused, and she sought out a copy to have a secret look the following week. How surprised she was to learn that, in addition to the endless ciphers of mathematics and computer networks that occupied his working hours, there was another side to Kelly that he kept very private. He was an avid reader, a lover of classical music, and a poet!

  The hours she had spent with his verse, unbeknownst to him, had brought her into touch with this hidden, artful side of Kelly Ramer, deeply sensitive, wonderfully expressive, and laden with heartfelt understanding of the world. She read his poetry, taking it in a little at a time over the next month, and delighting in the secret tryst she had with his mind and heart each night before she slept. Oddly, she never said a word about it to Kelly. The business of their work together had not given her an opportunity to find the right setting, the right moment, to walk this new ground with him. But she knew, on some quiet level of her being, that his verse had wooed her heart in a way he might never have intended. She was falling in love with him, uncertain of her feeling, yet compulsively drawn to the flame his muse had ignited in her. Now he was gone. All she had left was the slim book of poetry under her arm—her token for the memorial service. She would read a few verses here and then lay the book to rest. It would be some time, she knew, before he really died. He would live in the feeling she still carried for years to come.

  “Morning, Paul.” Nordhausen was the first to break the silence. “What did you bring?”

  Paul looked at the parcel under his arm, thinking whether he wanted to say anything or not. He was carrying things that only the dearest of friends shared. Robert would understand, for his voice was one of those clowning on the CD copy of a tape the three of them had made over twenty-five years ago. “Something from the Eternal Tape Archives,” he said softly, and Nordhausen nodded his understanding, eyes betraying a gleam of wetness. Paul carried something else as well, but he would keep that to himself. It was another disk, this time an enhanced DVD file he had taken from the security camera system that monitored operations in the control room of their Lawrence Lab facility.

  He was always one to document things. The tape recording of the meeting they held in Nordhausen’s study the night before the mission had turned out to be instrumental in allowing future generations to discover why they never acted to reverse the Palma Event themselves. He often wondered what they heard on that tape. The visitor said there had been a phone call with news of Kelly’s accident. The grief that struck them all when they learned of his death had been so debilitating, that they lost that one brief interval where they could have acted to reverse the terrible vengeance of Ra’id Husan al Din. He was struck by the irony of it all—a real ‘damned if you do; damned if you don’t’ conundrum. Now, here they were, grieving Kelly’s passing as they might have in the old time line, in the lives they had all brought to that fateful meeting the week before.

  Along with his private archival copy of all their adolescent bantering, Paul also carried the visual record of the last few moments of Kelly’s existence in the Deep Nexus that had sheltered them all during the operation. Kelly was sitting on a chair by the communications console, with the most sublime expression on his face. He reached into his shirt pocket to pull out the dog-eared notebook he carried to catch and store errant phrases that often came to him in the course of his day. Many of them would end up in his poetry. This one was his last goodbye. Paul didn’t want the others to see the recording, though he had watched it over and over himself. No matter how many times he viewed it, the impact was always the same. He was there, alive and smiling at some great inner realization that was playing itself out in his mind, then he faded in a white mist, and was gone. Paul swallowed hard, emotion hobbli
ng his voice. “What about you?” He managed to get it out, gesturing softly to a box Nordhausen was holding.

  “A few mementos,” he said quietly. “And a bit of sheet music I wrote for him. I was going to try it on recorder, but I wrote it for piano. I’ll play it for you one day.”

  They passed a few moments in silence, and then Maeve decided to begin the ceremony, stooping to light the four wreathed candles that were set by the shallow grave. She reached for words, wondering if she dared to express her true thoughts. Then she decided that truth was the one thing she owed him now, in gracious thanks for all the moments he had given her with his poetry.

  “I loved him,” she said haltingly. Then she looked at Robert and Paul to let them see that in her face. “I found him in a place he never thought many people would look—in his verse. He kept it private for so long, but when I first read his poetry my whole understanding of the man was shaped anew. I would love to share a brief reading here with you. I know you’ve read it all before.”

  She opened her book and turned to the place she had marked. Then she began to read. It was a wonderful poem Kelly had penned about his experience riding at night in the front seat of the car with his father, a distant and mysterious figure that always seemed to haunt Kelly’s thoughts. They had stopped to see something in the sky—the Aurora Borealis, alive and moving in the night where they never expected it, above the back roads of Pennsylvania. She read from Kelly’s book:

  “On the horizon there was an airplane

  controlled by an invisible hand

  supported by nothing tangible

  its contrails extruded like webbing.

  What it that? the young me thinks

  as I stand in the backyard, before brothers,

  before school, before the inlaid mosaic

  that contains the days between

  that sight and this moment existed.

  It is as far away as yesterday

  a moment that returns on the prick of a pin…”

  The poem continued until it came to the sighting of the Auroras, and Kelly’s poem recounted the moment his father had held him up in his arms to see them for the first time. Both Paul and Robert knew it well and, as Maeve read, they could not help but think of the radiant light of the Arch and the amazing range of color and motion when they traveled through that portal.

  “Then sudden nimbus, glamour

  clots of color! The sky was on fire!

  My father lifted me in his arms

  to watch the green curtain that washed

  and streamed across the vivid sky

  immense and shifting and silent…

  At that moment he was a confidant

  who abandoned me in a place

  that was not an abode of daylight.

  “Through the years he tarried

  in my dreamtime on occasion

  as if to find a remembrance

  of things lost when he proclaimed

  the sky to me, as if to hunt

  for me in the viridian billow

  of imagination. You weren’t supposed

  to stay there. It isn’t holy, come back!

  his voice echoed from a distance…”

  Maeve’s voice broke at that point, choked with emotion. She could read no further, but repeated that last invocation, the words of Kelly’s father in the poem, but now her own. “You weren’t supposed to stay there… Come back!” Tears claimed her, and she lapsed into silence, but Paul knew the words of the poem by heart, and he recited them to himself while they waited, hearing Kelly’s voice in his mind.

  He watched while Maeve closed her book, setting it in the shallow grave. Nordhausen placed his box there as well.

  “He was a great friend,” he said.

  “A brother,” said Paul.

  “But he was always late,” said Maeve with a half smile lending a little light to her eyes.

  “And he botched the numbers!” Nordhausen laughed now, and the moment lightened for them all. The distant sounds of the city all around them intruded on the silence. Paul looked and saw a dark limousine pulling into the park, and he gave it no second thought, another caravan to Auld Lang Syne.

  He stooped and hovered over the four burning candles, giving Robert and Maeve a subtle glance to seek their approval. They nodded, and he reached out to pinch the tip of one candle, watching the thin curls of smoke that had once been such a vibrant flame. They dissipated on the light morning breeze, gone forever. Three candles remained, still burning, yet diminished.

  ‘Time is the fire in which we all burn,’ thought Paul, recalling a favorite maxim. At that moment he felt a shudder, and the strange sense that he had lived this moment before. He hunched his shoulders, standing up, and somewhat surprised to see that Robert seemed to be looking around him, as though aware of something odd in the setting; something vaguely disturbing.

  “Did you feel that?”

  “I felt something,” said Paul. “Did you feel it, Maeve?”

  “Was it an earthquake?”

  “Not much of one if it was,” said Paul. “Just the slightest ripple at my back and then this odd sensation that something had happened.”

  Someone was approaching the knoll, wending along the curved flagstone pathway, face shrouded in the eaves of a coat, flowers in hand. Another mourner, thought Paul, though he could not see any other ceremonies staging on the grounds. It was probably someone come to lay flowers on his mother’s grave. He fingered the parcel he had brought, and stooped to lay it in the shallow grave next to the other tokens. When he stood up he was surprised to see that the interloper had come up behind them. Someone must have ordered flowers, he thought; perhaps Jen, or Tom, or one of the other project team members.

  Someone spoke and they all turned to greet the stranger. “Well,” said the voice, “I now have the dubious distinction of being the only person to ever actually show up late for his own funeral!”

  Paul’s heart leapt at the sound There was no mistaking it—Kelly! He was filled with an elation unlike any he could remember in his life. How could it be? He was alive. He was here! Robert and Maeve beamed with joy. Their astonishment had given way to emotion and, one by one, they embraced him by the knoll, tears of sorrow becoming the outward sign of their delight and wonder.

  “You had better light that candle again, Paul,” said Kelly. “Then I’ll tell you what happened and we can all go over to Peets and have some coffee.”

  They were flabbergasted, but Paul’s mind immediately began to try and reach for understanding, the tenets of his time theory dressing out the possibilities in his thinking. When Kelly began to speak, however, they could hardly believe what he was telling them.

  “They pulled me out.” He began at the moment of his disappearance there in the lab. “Can you believe that? I thought I was dying—I thought Time was making good on its claim to my life at last, but they pulled me out.”

  “What do you mean?” Robert was too shocked by Kelly’s appearance to even begin to reason things out.

  “The Nexus was failing here, at our point in the continuum where we had been safe in the lab all those hours. You changed the time line—at least one of you did. I had been thinking about it all night. If you guys fixed this thing, then what reason would the visitor have to come back and save me?”

  “Paradox,” said Paul.

  “Bad ass Paradox,” Kelly reinforced him at once. “But as long as I was in the void, in the Deep Nexus, I was safe. It began to dissipate when you came back through the Arch. It was then that I knew my time had come. I was feeling light headed—very strange; all thin and distended, like a vapor. I closed my eyes and, to my surprise, I woke up on a glistening metal table, surrounded in a cone of yellow light. I thought I was about to meet my maker at last, but you know who leaned in to say hello? The visitor! Damn, was I shocked.”

  “You mean Graves?” Robert was catching up, his mind following in the wake of his emotion.

  “Hell yes!” Kelly gave them his famous sm
ile. “You know what he said? Get this: ‘Did you find the note in my coat?’ The guy says this and I nearly shit my pants!”

  That was one thing Paul loved about Kelly. For someone with his eloquence of expression when he turned his mind to poetry, he was wonderfully common and unassuming when he was excited, and could swear with the best of them. It was the magnificent duality of the man that made him what he was. He could listen to Mozart in one ear and Pink Floyd in the other.

  “It took a while for me to understand what had happened,” Kelly went on. “The Nexus was failing in our time, but they created the whole damn thing when they sent Mr. Graves back in the first place. In their time the Nexus was still holding firm. They’ve been at this a while, you see, and the equipment they have there is phenomenal. Paradox was the problem. You said it yourself, Paul: Paradox was waiting to clean up after our mischief, and I was right at the top of the list. Our friends from tomorrow knew that, however, and they pulled me out—in the nick of time, if you will.”