Moonliner: No Stone Unturned (14 page)

              “How about a game of golf tonight?” Lennox mildly suggests.  “I can get us a tee time at seven with a few guest passes I got from work.”

              “No thanks,” Cedric answers; “I don’t feel like playing golf today.”

              “How is your thesis going?” Lennox asks, thinking it a healthy idea to help Cedric focus on his work to get him through his rough times.

              “It’s moving right along,” Cedric answers, knowing that it’s not.  “I’ve been really busy with it, crunching numbers and so on.”

              “Is there anything I can do to help,” Lennox offers.

              “No, I’m good,” Cedric answers.

              “Because I can transmit a message from the moon if you’d like,” he tells Cedric. 

              “I don’t have anything to transmit now,” Cedric answers.  “The transmissions that Nikki made for me where a complete failure.  Nothing at all showed up on my instruments.  Frankly, now I’m out of patience, energy, and ideas.”

              “What about that stone?” Lennox asks Cedric.  “Did you ever look under the stone in the park to see if anyone replied to your message?”

              “No, I haven’t,” Cedric answers as he lies down on the sofa, now wishing he had never mentioned it.

              “Are you going to?” Lennox asks.

              “I don’t think so,” Cedric answers; “I’d rather leave it undisturbed, at least for now.”

              “The stone was Nikki’s idea, wasn’t it?” Lennox asks.

              “That’s right.  It was the way her mind worked,” Cedric adds.  “The stone, though just a silly idea of hers, now represents the only unfinished event between us, unearthed, waiting to occur.  It’s the only living connection I still have to her.  Given the remoteness of potential for finding anything connected to my transmissions beneath it, I’d rather live in the potential with a remote
perhaps
than face the empty reality that very likely lies beneath.  I’d rather simply leave it a mystery.”

“Too soon huh?” Lennox surmises.  “Oh well, if anything is sitting out there now beneath that stone, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.  I suppose it doesn’t matter when you check anyway.”

“Yes and no,” Cedric answers.

              “What do you mean by that?” Lennox asks.

              “Hypothetically, were the transmission to be received some time ago and a response left under the stone, the closer my next transmission to my original transmission, the better my odds are of establishing any two-way communication with whomever may have left the message under the rock.”

              “How so?” Lennox inquires.

              “These transmissions are incredibly precise, yet have exponential margins of error.  I can easily and precisely repeat the transmission, which according to my calculations, would land it at precisely the same point in time in the past, plus any elapsed time between my two transmissions,” Cedric explains.

              “You can’t adjust for any lapsed time?” Lennox asks.

              “Not accurately, no,” Cedric replies; “Maybe after decades of successful, heuristic research and development, but any attempt I make to fine tune these transmissions to compensate for time would send the signals somewhere way off their temporal target.”

              “So what if there’s something under the stone?” Lennox asks.

              “There’s nothing under the stone,” Cedric responds.

              “I think you should take a look.  Who knows?  I’m definitely curious,” Lennox says.  “It’s up to you though, however you want it.  Or however she would have wanted it I guess,” he adds to be polite, not meaning anything by it.  Those few words, however, have a huge impact on Cedric, for he knows all too well what Nikki would want him to do, and the pain of ignoring her instincts.   

The two get off the phone and Cedric sits back on his sofa, thinking.  There’s an undeniable spark of curiosity in him as well, but a spark that would instantly extinguish at the turning of an empty stone.  He wonders what he should do.  Not looking beneath would leave the eternal question, leaving Cedric blissfully ignorant.  Looking would potentially answer that question, but very likely with an empty answer that he just isn’t prepared to receive.

Cedric stands next to a white wall, staring at a clock.  The clock is running backward.  He’s relieved to see this, knowing that time is running backward, back to her.  The clock speeds up and Cedric begins to smile.

              “Soon,” he says to himself; “I’ll be back there soon.”

              “Your bath water is ready,” Phaedra says as the clock comes to a stop.

              “What do you mean?” he asks; “were going back to her.”

              “Your bath water is ready,” Phaedra again says, but Cedric can’t understand what she means.

Cedric awakens abruptly, gets up, and goes into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.  In a tub full of bubbles, he sits thinking about everything; the transmission; Nikki; Lennox’s curiosity.  He so knows that Nikki would want him to follow through, to look under the rock.  Naturally, why else would she suggest it?  And if she is still out there somewhere, as his calculations suggest, then she still wants him to take a look beneath the stone.  It’s as if he’s been given another chance to follow her instincts.  His smile quickly fades, however, with the fast setting reality that he’s going to the park to flip a stupid stone, all with some hope of finding a message left for him from somewhere back in time.  And to think this is his last scientific option.

Moonliner
3:05

With a window seat on the Skytrain, Cedric stares out at the city as he zips through a downtown corridor and into the central tube, where his scenic view changes into a series of laser generated advertisements.  They’re commercial pollution, but the ads do lower transportation costs.  The city has learned to live with them.

              “Next stop Park Station,” an automated woman’s voice announces.  Cedric gets up and stands by the door as the train slides into the station.  For the first time since Nikki’s crash, he feels like he has something important to do.  He’s up, showered, shaved, and sober for a change.

That said, his rational side doesn’t want to be doing this, even though he has rationalized that he should.  It’s just such a reach; such a shot in the dark.  There had to be better ways to waste time. 

Then again, there’s the big
what if
that Cedric wants to leave hanging. 
What if
?  Cedric laughs a little to himself as the train comes to a complete stop and the doors open.

                “What if?” he whispers to himself, then laughs again a little down inside. He gains composure, then walks along Park Station’s long underground platform, up the escalator and into the park. 

He has thought about the overwhelming improbability of anything being under the stone to the point that he’s already felt most of the pain of rejection.  Every time he has imagined turning it over, he has hit a harsh reality, based on probability.  There’s simply probably nothing beneath it.  So why relive a recurring negative?  Maybe it really is time to turn the stone and put this issue to rest.  Besides, he knows that he has spent far too much time pondering this lousy stone.  It’s become a minor obsession and stands in the way of his thesis.  It holds only sentimental value for its connection to Nikki.  Flipping it now clearly seems like the logical way forward.  Furthermore, if Nikki would want him to do it, she must want him to face whatever lies beneath, then move on.

He sits alone on Nikki and his favorite bench by Lost Lagoon, basking in the final moments of an innocence that now has to move into the past, into the drab realm of experience.  He was afraid of coming here but is now at peace, feeling time slow way down.  Ducks quack on the Lagoon as a few inline skaters steadily roll by on the bike path.  Cedric hardly notices; activity doesn’t seem to reach him.  He sits in his daydream.  It’s a calm, beautiful morning.  It again blows Cedric’s mind to think that he had just sat in the same spot with Nikki not two weeks earlier, under the same tree, in the same season, even in the same month.  So near, yet so far.  Everything looks the same yet so different from his perspective. 

The mouth of their favorite trail on the southern tip of Lost Lagoon has filled in with more vegetation.  It almost conceals the trail completely from the park, making it even more inviting to Cedric.  On usual years, this close to August, the park is far dryer than it seems to be this year, likely due to the wet spring and periodic well timed showers between its waves of heat.  It’s still so green this year, so alive.

Cedric enters the trail and walks slowly toward the large stump that sits just in front of the stone.  The path is overgrown and teeming with thick, silky spider webs, forcing him to constantly wave a stick in front of his face to break them.  Still, better the stick than his face.  It doesn’t appear that anyone has walked down the path recently, but it’s hard to tell.  Things refresh rapidly this time of year. 

He stops twice along the trail to swat at mosquitos.  The deeper into the trees the more heavily infested.  It’s much worse than the last time he was here.

Cedric finally arrives at the large tree stump.  Sure enough, the moon shaped stone sits next to it, half embedded in the ground.  It certainly doesn’t appear to have been disturbed either.  In fact, the way it sits in the ground, it doesn’t seem to have been disturbed in years and years.  If something’s under it, he thinks, then it’s been there for some time.

He loosens the stone a little with his foot then squats down next to it. 

              “Sorry Nikki,” he says under his breath, knowing he’s about to close the last open connection he has with her.

Cedric lifts the stone out of it’s now loosened, form-fit crater in the surface of the planet, where it seems to have sat snuggly for some time.  He sets it down beside its large divot.  Cedric takes a deep breath, then looks into the large depression to unearth whatever the stone has been concealing over time.  The moment is surprisingly more intense than he ever imagined it would be.  The intensity quickly fades, however, as he sees nothing beneath the stone.  Oddly, however, there’s a small, thin, perfectly circular indentation in the ground beneath where the stone had sat. 

Cedric again finds himself within an instant memory.  He’s been here before, looking under the stone and finding nothing, then finding something. The memory is so intense that he has to take a few seconds and let it pass.

As he goes to put the stone back in its place, however, something catches his eye; a metallic object stuck to the bottom of the stone itself.  The intensity returns. Cedric pulls the object, a coin from the bottom of the stone and wipes it off with a neckerchief.  He puts the stone back in its fitted location and makes his way to Nikki and his favorite hidden grove of trees.  There, he sits on a tree trunk, pulls out the coin and takes a close look at it.

The coloring within the coin’s laser engravings has faded, but the laser engravings themselves remain clearly legible.  The embossed images and the number ten have weathered significantly, but remain clearly legible.