We paused a couple of metres from the glow. The girl stood beside us, smiling at our wonder.
She said, “Go on, approach. Touch. Join with the Ultimate.”
Maddie said, “I don’t think I dare.”
I stared at the light. Its glow blurred my vision. It was pulling at me, drawing me towards it. I felt an ache in my chest, a longing.
Matt stepped forward first, reaching out, followed by Hawk. Not to be left out, I joined them. My heart was beating fast and I realised that I was shaking.
I reached out, slowly bringing my flattened palm to the light as if in some bizarre form of greeting. Beside me, Matt and Hawk matched my gesture. Together, we laid our hands upon the Column.
I was not sure what to expect: my senses told me to anticipate warmth, even though I knew that reports indicated the light was cold. Beyond the physical, I think I expected to commune with some higher power, be granted the Secret, or at least be flooded with sensations of joy and peace.
None of these things happened.
What did happen was that I felt a sudden, freezing cold shoot through my body, and I was filled with the strangest sensation. It was an alien feeling, a feeling so other that it had no analogue in the human realm. I knew, suddenly, that I knew nothing, that I was minuscule in the vastness of the expanding cosmos—that existence was a mystery I had no hope of fathoming.
And the odd thing was that, instead of being filled with existential despair at the futility of our collective plight, I brimmed with joy at the fact of my humanity, my ability to experience the day to day wonder of being alive, my friendship for the three people at my side.
For Maddie had joined us now, and had touched the Column with her bare hand.
She smiled at me. “I’m touching it,” she whispered, as I stepped back from the light with Hawk and Matt and watched her.
She remained there for a full minute, hand raised, beatific smile on her face. Then she closed her eyes and backed away.
I looked at the others. Matt said, “Not what I was expecting, but…”
“It’s given us something,” Hawk said. “Not sure quite what…” Maddie said softly, “Our humanity?” She smiled at us. “I felt, I really felt it, our smallness, the vastness, and it didn’t hurt.” She fell silent.
The girl was at our side again. She gestured back towards the rent in the fence and we followed her.
As we were about to step through, she touched my arm and said,
“Well, will you help the Yall?”
I stared at her. “What?”
The others had stopped and were watching us.
The girl smiled. “Last night,” she said, “they requested your help, and in return they would soothe your dreams. Well, will you accede to their request?”
I shook my head. “I… I don’t know what they want,” I stammered, and hurried through the fence and back to the car.
As we were driving back through the sector, Matt broke the silence, “What was all that about?”
Hawk turned and regarded me. I sensed Maddie’s gaze on me, too.
I said, “I thought it was a dream. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I dreamed… thought I dreamed… that I was visited by the apparition. It asked for my help, and said it would stop my nightmares in return.”
“Nightmares?” Hawk asked.
I gripped the steering wheel. “Nightmares about my daughter,” I said. “She died three years ago.”
Hawk reached out and touched my arm. Matt said, “But the apparition didn’t tell you what it wanted?”
I shook my head. “No. Nothing. It just asked for my help.”
We made the journey back to Magenta in relative silence, stopping once at a small settlement for a meal. I could sense my friends’ curiosity. I wondered if they felt I might be holding back still more from them. The atmosphere was uneasy, camouflaged by forced small talk.
A couple of hours later we arrived home and, as if by tacit consent, returned to the Mantis and checked the monitoring equipment. It was blank; the ship had not been visited in our absence.
I opened a bottle of wine and we sat in the lounge, discussing the events of the day. We agreed that we were on the brink of something vast—too vast, Matt said, for us to fully apprehend, and I was visited once again by the feeling I had experienced when touching the Column, of the smallness and at the same time of the wonder of my humanity, and I felt hope.
We discussed what we had experienced, compared our feelings, and came to the conclusion that we must be patient; that the Yall had contacted us for a reason, and that we must wait for them to make that reason apparent.
Matt laughed.
Hawk turned to him. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Matt said. “It’s almost as if we’ve been chosen—chosen by the Yall. But what if we’re as deluded as all the crackpot cults back there?”
I said, “You mean, we’re just another bunch of cranks?”
Maddie was shaking her head. “I know what I felt,” she said with conviction.
For the next hour or so we drank and chatted. Matt told us about the planets he’d visited, and Hawk matched this with stories of his piloting days, though he said nothing about the Nevada run. Maddie told us about her childhood in England, and I waxed drunkenly about the beauty of British Columbia. To their credit, none of my friends asked about Carrie.
At one point Hawk said, “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon, go over the crate again.”
“And if the apparition visits you again tonight,” Matt said, censure in his eyes, “ask how you can help it, okay?”
I smiled. “Yes, sir.”
In the early hours, with no evidence of apparitions that night, I left them drinking and dragged myself off to bed.
In the event I spent a restful, dream-free night.
TEN
The storm season came swiftly to Magenta Bay.
On the morning after our pilgrimage to the Golden Column, I woke late and dragged myself through to the lounge. I expected to find my friends sprawled out on the couches, the worse for drink. But the lounge was empty, the debris of the night before cleared away. I made breakfast and ate it staring through the viewscreen at the dark clouds piled a mile high out over the bay. The rains had already started, pocking the sands and reducing visibility to around ten metres, and the waters of the bay heaved and churned sickeningly. An hour later the wind picked up, became a gale that howled around the contours of the Mantis.
By noon, however, the cloud had dissipated and the rains stopped; the sun was out, drying up the rainwater and giving Magenta a sparkling, pristine aspect. This would set the pattern for the next month, morning storms followed by brilliant afternoons, until the hot season of high summer set in for six months.
I checked the monitors, but found nothing. I wondered how I might fill the afternoon ahead, then recalled Matt’s invitation to view his latest creation.
Matt lived in a secluded, wooded area beyond the Community Centre dome, at the end of the opposite headland. He always took the short route into Magenta, diagonally bisecting the bay on his wave-hopper. But the thought of taking the ground-effect vehicle over the water, even though now it was as calm as a mill pond, filled me with dread. I left the ship and drove the long way around the bay instead, passed the Community Centre and cut through the pineanalogues to the beach and Matt’s split-level dome.
It was an impressive sight, sparkling like a dewdrop in the light of the sun, backed by verdant woodland and fronted by the rouge sweep of the beach. I came to a halt before the timber steps that led up to the big veranda, with views of both the open sea and the circle of the bay.
I climbed out and walked up the steps, the sun hot on my face. I thought back to the tiny package I had delivered to Matt a couple of days ago, the artist’s materials from Mintaka, and I wondered what he had managed to create in the interim.