John Schettler - Meridian

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 smile. “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.”

“But how is that possible?” Paul scratched his head. “You can’t move someone in time without getting a pattern signature on them from the tachyon infusion. There was no signature on you, Kelly. You were never even in the Arch.”

Kelly smiled. “That may be true now,” he said with a wry smile, “but there’s one other way you can pick someone up. It’s very difficult, damn near impossible, in fact. They don’t like to do it—in fact they have a rule against ever doing it, except in special emergencies like this. You have to know exactly where the person is—and I mean exactly . If you can get that as close to a certainty as possible, you can move someone. Let’s just say our friends from tomorrow have had a little more time to refine things.”

“But how would they know where you would be,” asked Robert? “Lord, they would have to target a specific place with the spatial coordinates, at precisely the right time.”

“That they did.” Kelly looked at Paul. “They had a little help in working that out.”

They all looked at him, not understanding what he meant with that. There was a great deal more he wanted to tell them, but he tried to sum up the situation quickly.

“It’s like this,” he concluded. “They were able to pull me to the safety of the Nexus on their end before it dissipated. It gave them enough time to neutralize the Paradox Reaction—Just their way of saying thanks for what we had accomplished, I suppose. They were able to stabilize me—it took several hours in their time; it was years in this Meridian.”

“You mean there was still a chance they could lose you?”

“It was a very close call,” said Kelly. “I was gone for some time. You all finished out your ceremony here and lived many…” He caught himself, suddenly afraid to say more, then nodded his head to one side, coming to a new conclusion. “What’s the harm. I was going to say you lived many long years without me in this Meridian, but that’s all changed now. They asked me if I wanted to stay with them, or go back. That was an easy choice for me, but they had to spend a long time with the issue in Outcomes and Consequences before I finally got approval for the move. If they sent me back it would revise this Meridian again, you see. So this is all new!” He raised his arms expansively, as if to take in the whole of the world about them. “And it’s all ours.”