Kathleen Goonan: Crescent City Rhapsody

“Excuse me,” the man said. “My name is Zeb. May I sit down?”

Tamchu forced himself to be polite. “Of course.”

The man placed a bedraggled notebook on the table and sat. His beard and hair were gray. “I couldn’t help noticing that thing you’re wearing around your neck.”

Thing ! “This is a work of art created by a very great artist.” Tamchu suppressed the urge to hide it beneath his shirt.

“It… it reminds me of something,” said Zeb. “Would you mind if I looked at it more closely?”

Tamchu looked at him, seething with suspicion. “Why?”

“Where are you from?” asked Zeb.

Tamchu said nothing. He bowed his head and continued eating. Maybe this man would just go away.

“Let me show you what I do,” said Zeb and opened his notebook. He turned it around so that Tamchu could see two pages of numbers and symbols. “I’m trying to figure something out. That… work of art makes me think of it.”

“Why would that be?” asked Tamchu, feeling unaccountably jealous.

Zeb looked at the piece hungrily from across the table. “It’s something about the proportions. Almost as if it were… an edifice of thought. Perhaps even… directions.”

Studying him, Tamchu relaxed. The man’s eyes were thoughtful, yet sharp. They were friendly, honest, open. His weathered face told Tamchu that his life had been hard, yet to have a hard life and still have eyes not marred by hate or malice… that was unusual in Tamchu’s experience. He had a clear center to him, a place where anger and revenge had never existed. That showed in his eyes. He allowed Tamchu to look into his eyes for a long moment, and this too was unusual. Sometimes eye contact elicited resistance or might be a show of force or intent. His gaze was an act of revelation and trust.

Tamchu lifted Illian’s sculpture from his neck and handed it to Zeb.

Zeb held it and looked at it for a while. Then he closed his eyes as his fingers explored it, turning it this way and that. He opened his eyes and smiled. He looked exceedingly satisfied, perhaps even a bit astonished. He said, his words slow, “It is… a map of a galaxy.”

“What do you mean?”

“A galaxy is—”

“I think I know what a galaxy is. A… neighborhood of stars.”

“I guess that will do,” Zeb’s smile was gentle and not the least condescending. “This has distances and angles. But different somewhat than what they are today. Shortened. Maybe a bit skewed.”

“What do you mean?” Tamchu did not know what to think of this. Illian had studied the location of stars in a galaxy and mapped them? Well, it was not that surprising, actually, not half as surprising as many things about her.

“I surmise that this is a map from light-years ago—or at least light-minutes. A great time ago. It will take me a while to figure it out. And there are some interesting additions as well.” The man’s hands trembled slightly. Tears stood in his eyes.

“Are you all right?” asked Tamchu, sorry that he had been rude to this man, who was actually quite extraordinary.

Zeb began to laugh then in a frightening fashion, wild and high. He shook his head silently for a few moments, without stopping, as if he could not stop, then changed abruptly to a nod. “Oh yes, yes, I am perfectly all right! Perfectly! I’ve been perfected, you see! It’s just been so long. So very long. And it happens in such interesting stages. As if I’m still growing. You know, like you have stages of growth you go through and when you think you’re grown up and an adult there are still stages that you can’t possibly see and perhaps there are more human stages and possibilities…” He mopped at his face with his napkin. The waitress brought a glass of iced tea and looked at Zeb with concern.

“Why do you cry?” asked Tamchu as the waitress walked away.

“I have a lot to be sad about,” said Zeb. He squeezed lemon into his tea and took a long drink. “And I have a lot to be happy about. Sometimes I cry because I’m very happy. It’s kind of equal, I think, the sadness and the happiness. But I’ve had very few moments in my life when everything seemed perfect and this is one of them.” He sighed deeply and smiled once again at Tamchu, leaning back in his chair.

“I think that I can understand that.” This man was like the Buddhist nun for Tamchu. Something flowed from his eyes and the world was alight again, the particles burning with an inner fire. He was here, and it was all right.

He had helped this man by making this long trip, and it was enough. He needed no other purpose. Zeb’s perfection was generous. It reached out and pervaded him as well.

Jason sat in the café, sipping a cold beer and eating raw oysters. The smells of hot grease and spilled beer mingled. A spasm band on the corner sent the beat of that captivating, yet liberating rhythm through the open doorway. He could not remember having ever felt this way, and the feeling continued to last. It was one of slow controlled euphoria. But it was more than that. Things were coming together in his mind that he didn’t even know how to express.

Yet, no matter how euphoric he felt, there was a new sharp loneliness that he did not understand.

He pushed aside the basket heaped with empty shells. It looked as if he still had some time to kill. Marie had asked him to drop by the café, saying that she wanted to have a meeting, of sorts, and treat everyone to dinner. She’d intimated that she had something important to reveal. But he’d gotten hungry a bit early.

Something caught his eye a few tables away. Two men were looking at a strange sculpture that sat on the table.

He stared at it. How was it possible for this spatial thing to echo this rhythm? Yet it did. And not only that, it had been made by someone else, someone who understood.

Someone who had felt the same rhythm, perhaps, as long ago as he had.

Maybe Abbie had been right.

He pushed back his chair and got up. He slowly approached the other table, thinking that he might be wrong, thinking that it was really too far to see and that his mind was playing tricks on him.

But no.

“Can I sit down?”

The man that looked Asian frowned, but the other man, an American, said, “Sure. Pull up a chair. I’m Zeb. This is—Tamchu?”

Tamchu nodded. Zeb held out his hand and Jason shook it. Tamchu reached for the sculpture.

“No, wait,” said Jason. Tamchu looked familiar. He realized that he had seen him last night with Kita and Hugo. “Do you mind if I look at this?”

“I suppose not,” Tamchu muttered.

“What do you think?” Zeb asked Jason as he picked it up and examined it.

“I don’t know. Why are you interested?” asked Jason.

“It seems to me that it possibly represents directions.” Zeb sighted down one angle, then another.

“ ‘Directions’?” Jason mistrusted the word.

“Yes. Directions to the source of the Signal.”

“What do you mean,” asked Jason, “ ‘the Signal’?”

Apparently, Zeb did not notice Jason’s sarcastic tone, for he continued in his friendly enthusiastic voice. “The original pulse cleared the way for an incoming signal, most of it out of the range of what we use for radio and television. It appears that different variations are still coming in from time to time. Here.” He pulled a notebook from the pack next to his chair and opened it. He turned to one of the pages. Jason noticed that each page, front and back, was full of equations written in a small careful hand. He turned the notebook to Jason and said, “Here. See this angle—” He pointed to a nexus on the sculpture. “Now look at this. This is one of the relationships that I got out of the original incoming data.”