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 hobbling 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:
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.