Cradle (17 page)

Eschewing the caution suggested by many of the Committees, the Council of Leaders
had the enigmatic spaceship towed back to one of the developed cities of the Inner
Shell. There it was placed on display and analysed in detail. The initial conclusion
of the drones was validated. The spacecraft had not come from anywhere inside the
domain of the Colony. The Council of Engineers concluded that the technological capability
of the 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 spaceship 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 rumoured explanations
to the unanswered and disquieting questions raised by the spaceship. 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 Space 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 spacecraft
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 Shell. 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 spaceship 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 rumour 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 centre 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 analysing the impact
of the discovery of the strange spaceship. Crash programmes were instituted in advanced
encryption, it is true, primarily to allay concerns that Power #2 might be monitoring
all our transmissions. This action was widely hailed as a step in the right direction.
However, at the same time, the exploration of the Outer Shell was intensified, leading
to the identification of the new Type E life forms and the subsequent, thinly disguised
endangered species roundup. All suggestions to retrench and slow down the exploration
programme were ignored. In Cycle 442, in fact, the Zoo Complex created several artificial
planets just for the conduct of genetic capabilities experiments with the Type E species.

Then came the Message from Power #2. So simple, so straightforward, so terrifying.
It was coded in our most advanced encryption algorithm. It acknowledged our mutual
awareness of one another and suggested opening up bilateral communications. Nothing
else. End of Message….

…It is not fear of hostility from Power #2 that motivates our objection to continued
exploration in the Outer Shell. On the contrary. We as historians think the nascent
concern about the possible aggressiveness of Power #2 is unfounded. Study after study
has shown that there is a significant positive correlation between high aggression
coefficient and inability to evolve into a society with a purview greater than a single
solar system. In fact, the probability that a society as advanced as ours could have
retained aggression and territoriality as constituents in their 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 risks of their endeavours….

Nick Williams woke up at five o’clock in the morning and could not go back to sleep.
His mind was too active, racing over and over the events of the day before and the
possible outcomes of the day ahead. The same phenomenon had occurred often when he
was in high school in Virginia and then a few times later, at Harvard, usually just
before big swimming meets. If he had too much excitement running through his system,
his brain would not turn off enough to let him sleep.

He lay in bed for almost another hour, alternately trying to coax himself back to
sleep and indulging his fantasy that what he had found the day before was just the
first item in a vast cache of valuable treasure. Nick loved to fantasize. It was always
easy for him to see, in his mind’s eye, all the scenes in the novels that he loved
so much to read. Now for a moment he imagined headlines in the
Miami Herald
announcing his discovery of a hoard of sunken gold off the coast of Key West.

Around six o’clock Nick gave up trying to sleep and climbed out of bed. The little
exercise bag was next to the dresser. He pulled the golden trident out to look at
it, as he had done four or five times the night before.
What is this thing?
he asked himself.
It must have had some practical use. It’s too damn ugly to be ornamental
. He shook his head.
Amanda will know. If anyone can tell me where this thing came from, she can
.

Nick walked across his bedroom to the sliding glass doors and opened the curtains.
It was almost sunrise. Beyond the small balcony outside he could see the beach and
the ocean. His flat was on the third floor and had an unspoiled view of the quiet
surf. Above the water a couple of brown pelicans soared in graceful formation, waiting
for a chance to descend into the water and catch some unsuspecting fish swimming too
close to the surface. Nick watched a couple in their seventies walking slowly along
the beach. They were holding hands and talking quietly; a couple of times the woman
broke away to pick up a shell or two and put it in a small 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 underpants 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 colour, with a couple of light green ferns in the pattern for decoration. Two small
paintings of water birds standing on an empty beach adorned the otherwise empty walls.
Light beige drapes that matched the carpet framed the long sliding glass doors that
led to the balcony with the rattan patio furniture.

It was the books that gave the apartment some individuality. Along the wall opposite
the couch, between the living-room and the bedroom, was the large wooden bookcase.
It stretched almost all the way from the sliding glass doors in front of the balcony
to the bedroom door. Although the general appearance of the apartment was one of disarray
(newspapers and sports magazines strewn about here and there on the coffee table,
clothes and towels on the floor in the bedroom and the bathroom, dirty dishes in the
sink, the dishwasher standing open half full of dishes), the bookcase area was clearly
well maintained. Altogether there must have been four or five hundred books on the
four shelves of the long bookcase, all paperbacks, virtually all novels, and all carefully
filed according to category.

In front of each group of books, taped to the outside of the bookshelf, was a slip
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
(‘American, 20th Century, A-G’) right next to a dozen or more books by William Faulkner.
He had then selected for his bedtime reading a nineteenth-century French novel,
Madame Bovary
, by Gustave Flaubert. Nick had read the book once before, during his sophomore year
at Harvard, and had not thought that much of 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 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 flat 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 number 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 manilla
folders with filing labels inside. But almost all 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 anything
like any of the objects from the
Santa Rosa
.

At the bottom of the box Nick encountered a yellow manilla 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 × 11 picture of a beautiful
woman in her early thirties slid out and fell on the living room floor. It was followed
by handwritten notes, cards, a few letters in envelopes, and then about twenty sheets
of bond paper covered with double-spaced typing. Nick sighed. How was it possible
that he hadn’t recognized this folder?

The woman in the portrait had long black hair, lightly frosted in the front. She was
wearing a dark red cotton blouse, slightly open at the top to show a triple strand
of pearls just under the neck. In blue ink that contrasted with the red of the blouse,
someone with magnificent, clearly artistic handwriting had written ‘Mon Cher—Je t’aime,
Monique’, across the lower right portion of the photograph.