She had accepted that Jim was not the only troubled person in the room.
His heart might contain more turmoil than hers, but she was as empty, in
her own way, as he was in his. When they’d met in Portland, she had
been a burnt-out cynic, going through the motions of a life, not even
trying to identify and fill the empty spaces in her heart. She had not
experienced the tragedy and grief that he had known, but now she
realized that leading a life equally devoid of tragedy and joy could
breed despair. Passing days and weeks and years in the pursuit of goals
that had not really mattered to her, driven by a purpose she had not
truly embraced, with no one to whom she was profoundly committed, she
had been eaten by a dry-rot of the soul.
She and Jim were the two pieces of a yin-yang puzzle, each shaped to
fill the hollowness in the other, healing each other merely by their
contact.
They fit together astonishingly well, and the match seemed inevitable;
but the puzzle might never have been solved if the halves of it had not
been brought together in the same place at the same time.
Now she waited with nervous excitement for contact with the power that
had led Jim to her. She was ready for God or for something quite
different but equally benign. She could not believe that what she had
seen in the pond was The Enemy. That creature was apart from this,
connected somehow but different. Even if Jim had not told her that
something fine and good was coming, she eventually would have sensed, on
her own, that the light in the water and the ringing in the stone
heralded not blood and death but rapture.
They spoke tersely at first, afraid that voluble conversation would
inhibit that higher power from initiating the next stage of contact.
“How long has the pond been here?” she asked.
“A long time.”
“Before the Ironhearts?”
“Yeah.”
“Before the farm itself?”
“I’m sure it was.”
“Possibly forever?”
“Possibly.”
“Any local legends about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ghost stories, Loch Ness, that kind of stuff”
“No. Not that I’ve ever heard.”
They were silent. Waiting.
Finally Holly said, “What’s your theory?”
“Huh?”
“Earlier today you said you had a theory, something strange and
wonderful, but you didn’t want to talk about it till you’d thought it
through.”
“Oh, right. Now maybe it’s more than a theory. When you said you’d
seen something under the pond in your dream. . . well, I don’t know
why, but I started thinking about an encounter. . . .”
“Encounter?”
“Yeah. Like what you said. Something. . . alien.”
“Not of this world,” Holly said, remembering the sound of the bells and
the light in the pond.
“They’re out there in the universe somewhere,” he said with quiet
enthusiasm. “It’s too big for them not to be out there. And someday
they’ll be coming. Someone will encounter them. So why not me, why not
you?”
“But it must’ve been there under the pond when you were ten.”
“Maybe.”
“Why would it be there all this time?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s been there a lot longer. Hundreds of years.
Thousands.”
“But why a starship at the bottom of a pond?”
“Maybe it’s an observation station, a place where they monitor human
civilization, like an outpost we might set up in Antarctica to study
things there.
Holly realized they sounded like kids sitting under the stars on a
summer night, drawn like all kids to the contemplation of the unknown
and to fantasies of exotic adventure. On one level she found their
musings absurd, even laughable, and she was unable to believe that
recent events could have such a neat yet fanciful explanation. But on
another level, where she was still a child and always would be, she
desperately wanted the fantasy to be made real.
Twenty minutes passed without a new development, and gradually Holly
began to settle down from the heights of excitement and nervous
agitation to which the lights in the pond had catapulted her. Still
filled with wonder but no longer mentally numbed by it, she remembered