Replay

TWELVE

"… apparent murder-suicide. Initial reports indicate a scene of awesome mass carnage, bodies strewn everywhere about the settlement, the corpses of infants still in their dead mothers' arms. A few of the victims had been shot to death, but most seem to have taken their own lives, in a macabre ritual unlike any—"

Jeff reached for the frequency dial of the shortwave set, tuned it away from the BBC news broadcast until he found a jazz program.

The coffeepot began to burble. He poured himself a mug, added a dash of Myers’s Rum for extra warmth. There’d been a fresh snowfall last night, six inches or more; one windblown drift already covered the lower half of the kitchen window. He really should shovel it away this afternoon, he thought. And it was time to get out to the storage shed, split another batch of cedar kindling, and haul some more white oak firewood up to the back porch. But he didn’t feel like doing any of that, not right now, at least.

Maybe he was still vulnerable to the general malaise that always gripped the world the week of the Jonestown horror, despite his having heard the loathsome tale revealed afresh three times before. Whatever it was, all he wanted to do today was sit by the crackling wood stove and read. He was halfway through the second volume of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, and was planning to reread A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century next. Both had been published just this year, but he’d first read the Tuchman book over twenty years ago, the summer he took Judy and the children across Soviet Asia on the Trans-Siberian Express. Just looking at the cover of the volume brought back memories of the vast steppes, the infinity of silver birches outside Novosibirsk, and little April’s fascination with the ancient yellow samovar in the corridor of their railway car. The conductress had kept the samovar steaming with chunks of slow-burning peat, had served up endless glasses of hot tea from it on the six-thousand-mile journey from Moscow to Khabarovsk, north of Manchuria. The metal holders for the glasses had been engraved with images of cosmonauts and Sputniks. At the end of the trip the conductress had given April a pair of them to take home with her. Jeff remembered seeing his adopted daughter curled up before the fireplace in the house on West Paces Ferry Road in Atlanta, sipping a glass of hot milk in one of those holders, just a week before he’d died …

He cleared his throat, blinked away the memories. Maybe it would be best if he did do some chores today, kept himself physically occupied instead of just sitting in the cabin and thinking. There’d be enough of those kind of days ahead, anyway, what with winter—

Jeff cocked his ear, thought he heard an engine. No, couldn’t be. Nobody’d be fool enough to head out this way until spring, not unless Jeff had put out an emergency call on the shortwave. But there it was again, by God, a whine and a roar, louder, sounded as if it were headed right down his road.

He pulled on a down parka and a wool cap, stepped outside. Was there some trouble over at the Mazzinis' place? Somebody sick or hurt, a fire, maybe?

A glimmer of recognition flashed in his mind as the mud-spattered Land Rover made a hard left through his open gate; then he saw the driver’s straight blond hair, and he knew. " 'Morning," Pamela Phillips said, swinging a booted foot onto the running board of the rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle. "Hell of a driveway you’ve got."

"Don’t usually get much traffic."

"I’m not surprised," she said, hopping down from the cab. "Looks like one poor guy’s car hit a land mine back there, a long time ago."

"They tell me that was a man named Hector, George Hector. He had a portable still installed on that Model T during prohibition, kept moving it from place to place so he wouldn’t get caught. It blew up one night."

"What about Hector? Did he blow up with it?"

"He wasn’t hurt, apparently. Had to build another still, but he gave up on the portability idea. At least, that’s what they say."

"So much for innovative thinking, hmm?" She took a deep breath of the clean, cold mountain air, let it out slowly, looking at him. "Well. How have you been?"

"Not too bad. Yourself?"

"Pretty busy since I saw you last. That was … Jesus, three and a half years ago." She rubbed her hands briskly together. "Hey, is there anyplace around here a lady could get warm?"

"Sorry; come on in, I’ve got some coffee. You took me by surprise, that’s all."

She followed him into the cabin, pulled off her jacket, and took a chair by the stove as he poured the coffee. He held up the bottle of Myers’s with a questioning look, and Pamela nodded. He splashed a dollop of the rich gold liquid into her mug, handed it to her. She sipped the mixture, mimed approval with her mouth and eyebrows.

"How’d you find me?" he asked, settling into the chair across from her.

"Well, you told me the place was near Redding; my lawyer spoke to your broker in San Francisco, and he was kind enough to narrow it down a little more. When I got up here I asked around in town; took awhile before I found anybody who was willing to give me directions, though."

"They have a deep respect for privacy around here."

"So I gathered."

"A lot of people don’t like having somebody drive up on their land without warning. Especially if it’s a stranger."

"I’m not a stranger to you."

"Damn near," Jeff said. "I thought that was pretty much how we left it in Los Angeles."

She sighed, absentmindedly stroked the sheepskin collar of the faded denim jacket that she’d folded across her lap. "As much as we had in common, we were coming from opposite directions. We got pretty pissed off at each other, there at the end."

"Yeah, you could put it that way. Or you could say you were just too damned obstinate to see past your own obsessions, to—"

"Hey!" she snapped, setting the coffee mug down sharply next to the shortwave radio. "Don’t make this any harder for me than it is already, O.K.? I drove six hundred miles to see you. Now just hear me out."

"All right. Go ahead."

"Look, I know you’re surprised to see me today. But try to imagine how surprised I was when you showed up. You’d seen Starsea. You’d had time to speculate about me, and had come to the obvious conclusions. You knew I was probably a replayer, too, but I had no idea there was anybody else like me out there. I thought I’d found the only possible explanation for what was happening to me—to the world. I believed I was doing the right thing.

"Well, I still don’t know. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t; it’s a moot point now."

"Why?"

"Could I have another splash of rum in this? And maybe some more coffee?"

"Sure." He freshened both their mugs, sat back to listen.

"I’d already begun working on the screenplay for my next film when you came to L.A.; we had the shooting script ready by October. Naturally, budget wasn’t a problem. I signed Peter Weir to direct; he hadn’t made The Last Wave yet, so everybody thought I was crazy to use him." She smiled wryly, leaned forward with her long hands wrapped around the steaming mug. "The special-effects team I put together was interesting. First I hired John Whitney. By then he’d already done all the groundwork in computer-generated images, and a lot of his short films had focused on mandalas; I wanted that to be the central image in the film. I gave him free rein, set him up with one of the very first prototypes of the Cray supercomputer.

"Then I got hold of Douglas Trumbull, who’d done the special effects for 2001. I nudged him in the direction of inventing Showscan a few years earlier than he would have. We shot the whole film in that process, even though—"

"Wait a minute," Jeff interrupted, "what’s Showscan?"

Pamela gave him a look of surprise, which contained a touch of wounded pride. "You haven’t seen Continuum?"

He shrugged apologetically. "It never showed in Redding."

"No; in this area, it played only in San Francisco and Sacramento. We had to specially adapt all the theaters."

"Why?"

"The Showscan process produces incredibly realistic images on a movie screen, but to get that effect you need special projection equipment. You know the basic principle of how motion pictures work, right? Twenty-four frames, twenty-four still pictures a second … As one image begins to fade on the retina, the next appears, creating an impression of fluid, unbroken movement. Persistence of vision, it’s called. Actually, there are forty-eight frames a second, because each of the images is repeated once, to help fool the eye. But of course it’s not really the eye that’s being tricked, it’s the brain. Even though we think we’re seeing uninterrupted motion on the screen, at some deeper, unconscious level we’re aware of the stops and starts. That’s one of the reasons video tape has a sharper, realer look than film; it’s recorded at thirty frames per second, so there are fewer gaps.

"Well, Showscan takes that process a step further. It’s shot at a full sixty frames a second, with no redundant frames. Trumbull used EEGs to monitor the brain waves of people watching film shot and projected at various rates, and that’s where the responses peaked. It appears that the visual cortex is programmed to perceive reality at that particular speed, in sixty bursts of visual input each second. So Showscan is like a direct conduit to the brain. It’s not 3-D; the effect is more subtle than that. The images seem to strike deep chords of recognition; they somehow resonate with authenticity.

"So, anyway, we shot the whole movie in Showscan, including all the computer-generated mandalas and Mandelbrot sets and other effects that the Whitneys and their team came up with. We filmed most of it at Pinewood Studios in London. The actors were all talented unknowns, mainly from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I didn’t want any star’s ego or presence to overshadow the theme of the film, its … message."

She finished her coffee, stared at the bottom of the heavy brown mug. "Continuum opened on June eleventh, worldwide. And it was a total failure."

Jeff frowned. "How do you mean that?"

"Just the way I said it. The movie flopped. It did good business for about a month, and then fell off to nothing. The critics hated it. So did the audiences. Word of mouth was even worse than the reviews, and they were bad enough. Leftover sixties mysticism pretty much summed up the general reaction. Muddled,"incoherent, and pretentious were thrown in there a lot, too. The only reason most people went to see it at all was for the novelty value of the Showscan process and for the computer graphics. Those went over well, but they were just about the only things anybody liked about the film."

There was a long, awkward silence. "I’m sorry," Jeff said finally. Pamela laughed bitterly. "Funny, isn’t it? You refused to have anything more to do with me because you were concerned about the potentially dangerous impact this film might have, the global changes it might set in motion … and the world ended up ignoring it, treating it like a stale joke."

"What went wrong?" he asked with gentleness.

"Part of it was the timing: the Me Generation, discos, cocaine, all that. Nobody wanted any more lectures about the oneness of the universe and the eternal chain of being. They’d had enough of that in the sixties; now all they wanted to do was party. But it was mainly my fault. The critics were right. It was a bad movie. It was too abstract, too esoteric; there was no plot, there were no real characters, no one for an audience to identify with. It was purely a philosophical exercise, a self-indulgent message picture, with no meat to it. People stayed away in droves, and I can’t blame them."

"You’re being kind of hard on yourself, aren’t you?"

She turned her empty mug around in her hands, kept her eyes down. "Just facing facts. It was a painful lesson to learn, but I’ve grown to accept it. Both of us have had to accept a lot. Had to lose a lot."

"I know how much it meant to you, how much you believed in what you were doing. I respect that, even if I disagreed with your methods."

She looked at him, her green eyes softer than he’d ever seen them. "Thank you. That means a lot to me."

Jeff stood up, took his parka from the hook by the door. "Get your coat on," he told her. "I want to show you something."

They stood in fresh snow at the top of the hill where he’d been clearing out the irrigation system the week before he first saw Starsea. The Pit River was clogged with ice now, not salmon, and the trees on Buck Mountain were heavy with their burden of white. In the distance, the majestic conic symmetry of Mount Shasta rose up to meet the clear November sky.

"I used to dream about that mountain," Jeff told her. "Dream it had something of great import to tell me, an explanation for all I’d been through."

"It looks … unreal," she murmured. "Sacred, even. I can understand a vision like that coming to dominate your dreams."

"The Indians around here did consider it holy. Not just because it’s a volcano; some of the other Cascade peaks have been more active, made more of an immediate impact on the environment. But none of them ever had the same allure Shasta did."

"And still does," Pamela whispered, staring at the silent mountain. "There’s a … power there. I can feel it."

Jeff nodded, his eyes fixed, like hers, on the far-off stately slopes. "There’s a cult—white, not Indian—that still worships the mountain. They think it has something to do with Jesus, with resurrection. Others believe there are aliens, or some ancient offshoot race of humans, living in the magma tunnels beneath it. Strange, crazy stuff; Mount Shasta seems to inspire that kind of thinking, somehow."

The wind gusted colder, and Pamela shivered. Reflexively, Jeff put his arm around her shoulders, drew her to his warmth.

"At one time or another," he said, "I’ve imagined just about every possible explanation, no matter how bizarre, for what’s been happening to me—to us. Time warps, black holes, God gone berserk … I mentioned the people who think Mount Shasta is populated by aliens; well, I once had myself convinced this was all some sort of experiment being conducted by an extraterrestrial race. The same idea must have occurred to you once or twice; I could see elements of it in Starsea. And maybe that’s the truth—maybe we’re the sentient rats who have to find our way out of this maze. Or maybe there’s a nuclear holocaust at the end of 1988, and the collective psychic will of all the men and women who have ever lived has chosen this way to keep it from spelling an absolute end to humanity. I don’t know.

"And that’s the point: I can’t know, and I’ve finally grown to accept my inability to understand it, or to change it."

"That doesn’t mean you can’t keep wondering," she said, her face close to his.

"Of course not, and I do. I wonder about it constantly. But I’m no longer consumed by that quest for answers, haven’t been for a long time. Our dilemma, extraordinary though it is, is essentially no different than that faced by everyone who’s ever walked this earth: We’re here, and we don’t know why. We can philosophize all we want, pursue the key to that secret along a thousand different paths, and we’ll never be any closer to unlocking it.

"We’ve been granted an incomparable gift, Pamela; a gift of life, of awareness and potential greater than anyone has ever known before. Why can’t we just accept it for what it is?"

"Someone—Plato, I think—once said, The unexamined life is not worth living. "

"True. But a life too closely scrutinized will lead to madness, if not suicide."

She looked down at their footprints in the otherwise-pristine snow. "Or simply failure," she said quietly.

"You haven’t failed. You made an attempt to draw the world together, and in the process you’ve created magnificent works of art. The effort, the creation—those acts stand on their own."

"Until I die again, perhaps. Until the next replay. Then it all vanishes."

Jeff shook his head, his arm tightly around her shoulders. "Only the products of your work will disappear. The struggle, the devotion you put into your endeavors … That’s where the value truly lies, and will remain: within you."

Her eyes filled with tears. "So much loss, though, so much pain; the children…"

"All life includes loss. It’s taken me many, many years to learn to deal with that, and I don’t expect I’ll ever be fully resigned to it. But that doesn’t mean we have to turn away from the world, or stop striving for the best that we can do and be. We owe that much to ourselves, at least, and we deserve whatever measure of good may come of it."

He kissed her tear-streaked cheeks, then kissed her lightly on the lips. To the west, a pair of hawks circled slowly in the sky above Devil’s Canyon.

"Have you ever been soaring?" Jeff asked.

"You mean in a sailplane, a glider? No. No, I never have."

He put both arms around her waist, hugged her close. "We will," he whispered into the softness of her tawny hair. "We’ll soar together."

Past Revelstoke, the train sped alongside great, somber glaciers as it began its climb into the Rockies. Thick forests of red cedar and hemlock covered the surrounding hillsides, and around one bend a field of heather trapped between two glaciers suddenly came into view. The pink and purple flowers rippled, shimmered in the soft spring breeze, their ephemeral beauty a quiet rebuke to the impassive walls of ice enclosing them.

There was a certain erotic quality about the flowers, Jeff thought: Their fragile, wind-blown caress against the unyielding glacier, their vibrant color so like a woman’s lips, or …

He smiled at Pamela in the seat beside him, rested his hand on her bare knee and let his fingers slide beneath the hem of her skirt. Her cheeks flushed as he tenderly stroked her inner thigh; she glanced around the dome car to see if anyone was looking at them, but the eyes of the other passengers remained fixed on the passing spectacle outside the train.

Jeff’s hand moved higher, touched moist silk. Pamela let out a tiny groan as he gently pressed her cleft, and she arched back against the leather seat. He slowly pulled his hand away, letting the tips of his fingers trail lightly down her leg.

"Want to take a walk?" he asked, and she nodded. He took her hand, led her out of the observation car and toward the rear of the train. Between the club car and the diner they paused, maintaining a precarious balance together as they stood and kissed on the swaying metal platform. The wind whipping through the open window was at least fifteen degrees cooler than when they’d left Vancouver that morning, and Pamela shivered in his arms. Their sleeping car was empty; everyone else, it seemed, had left to seek the panoramic vistas of the dome car or the diner. Once inside their double roommette, Jeff lowered one of the foldaway beds and Pamela reached to draw the windowshade closed. He stopped her, pulled her to him.

"Let’s let the scenery inspire us," he said.

She resisted, teasing. "If we leave it open, we’ll be part of the scenery ourselves."

"Nobody to watch us except a few birds and deer. I want to see you in the sunlight."

Pamela stepped back from him. Framed against the changing backdrop of snow-fed rivers and sheer glacial cliffs, she undid her blouse, slipped it offher arms. She plucked at the belt of her skirt, and the garment fell softly to the floor.

"Why aren’t you looking at the scenery?" she asked with a smile.

"I am."

She slid off the rest, stood nude before the rugged wilderness rushing past outside. Jeff’s eager gaze swept her body as he undressed, and then he moved to her, was joined with her, was pressing her urgently into the soft chair beside the open window as the afternoon sun flickered across their faces and the rumbling wheels on the tracks below rocked them with a steady rhythm.

The train took four days and nights to reach Montreal, and a week later they rode it back west again.

"What about the Middle Ages?" Pamela asked. "Imagine what that would have been like, the dreadful sameness of it, over and over."

"The Middle Ages weren’t quite as totally dreary as most people assume. I still think a major war, and the years leading up to it, would have been far worse; picture always coming back to Germany in 1939."

"At least you could have left, gone to the U.S. and known you’d be safe."

"Not if you were Jewish. What if you were already in Auschwitz, say?"

It was their favorite topic this month: what the experience of replaying would have been like for someone in another historical period, how best to have dealt with a vastly different set of repeated world events and circumstances than those they knew so well.

Once the floodgates of conversation had been opened between them, it seemed there was no end of things to talk about: speculations, plans, memories … They had gone back over their own varied lives in detail, expanding on the brief personal histories they’d recounted to each other during that first wary meeting in Los Angeles in 1974. Jeff had told her all about the empty madness of his time with Sharla, the healing grace of his years alone in Montgomery Creek. She, in turn, had imparted a vivid sense of the dedication she had given to her medical career, her frustration at knowing she could never again put all that training to full use, and the subsequent creative exhilaration of making Starsea. A tall, bearded young black man roller-skated past them, deftly weaving his way along the crowded East Fifty-ninth Street sidewalk toward the entrance to Central Park. Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating arrangement of Blondie’s "Call Me" blared from the big Panasonic radio he balanced on his shoulder, drowning out Pamela’s reply to Jeff’s hypothetical question about reliving the hell of Auschwitz.

They’d been in New York for six weeks, after more than a year of alternating their time between Jeff’s cabin in northern California and Pamela’s place in Topanga Canyon. Now that they were together, the isolation of the two retreats suited them even more. There was so much to catch up on, so many intensely private thoughts and emotions to be shared. But they hadn’t withdrawn from the world, not totally. Jeff had begun dabbling in venture capital, backing small companies and products that apparently had been unable to obtain adequate funding in previous replays and whose success or failure he had no way of projecting. One desk-top toy, a Lucite cube with small magnets performing a slow-motion ballet in a suspension of clear viscous fluid, had already caught on in a big way, had been the Christmas 1979 version of the Pet Rock. He hadn’t been as lucky, so far, with a holographic video system that had been proposed by two cinematographer friends of Pamela’s. There were continual technical problems with the camera, and maybe the idea had always failed for those reasons. It didn’t matter, though; the uncertainty of these schemes, their very unpredictability, was precisely what appealed to him.

For her part, Pamela had launched herself back into moviemaking with a new sense of fun and freedom. No longer bound by her self-imposed mission to elevate humanity to new levels of consciousness and being, she had written a lightly poignant romantic comedy about mismatched, mistimed love affairs. A young unknown, Darryl Hannah, had been cast as the female lead, and Pamela had insisted on granting directorial responsibilities to a TV comic actor, Rob Reiner. As always, her associates were aghast at her selection of such untested talent, but as producer and sole financer of the project, she retained final say in those matters. She and Jeff had come to New York so that she could oversee pre-production and location scouting for the new film. Shooting would begin in a few days, the second week of June.

They turned right and walked north on Fifth Avenue, resuming their discussion of historical fantasies.

"Think what Da Vinci might have achieved if he’d had our opportunity," Pamela said musingly. "The statues, the paintings he might have done in different lives."

"Assume he did; maybe the world continued on a different time line for each of his existences, and has for each of ours. In one version of twentieth-century reality he might have been remembered more for his inventions than for his art, if he’d had the time to rework and refine them. In another he might have retreated into his thoughts and left absolutely nothing of note behind. In the same way, there may be one future that will remember you for Starsea, and another in which Future, Inc. has continued as a major corporate presence."

"Has continued?" She frowned. "Don’t you mean will continue?"

"No," Jeff said. "If the flow of time is continuous—uninterrupted as far as the rest of the world is concerned, ignoring this loop you and I keep experiencing, and branching out from each version of the loop into new lines of reality depending on the changes we put into motion each time around—then history should have progressed twenty-five years for each replay we’ve been through."

She pursed her lips, thinking for a moment. "If that’s true, though, the individual time lines would be staggered. Each branch would have continued on its path from 1988, when we died, but the preceding one would be twenty-five years ahead of it."

"That’s right. So in the world of our most recent replay, the one in which you married Dustin Hoffman and I was living in Atlanta, it’s been only seventeen years since we died. The year is 2005; most of the people we knew would still be alive.

"But starting from our first replay, the life in which you were a doctor in Chicago and I built my conglomerate, forty-two years have passed. It would be the year 2029; my daughter Gretchen would be over fifty, probably with grown children of her own."

Jeff grew silent, sobered by the thought of his only true child still alive, yet objectively a decade older than he himself had ever been.

Pamela finished the projection for him. "And on the time line of our original lives, sixty-seven years would have gone by. The world we grew up in would be into the second half of the twenty-first century. My own children … they’d be in their seventies. My God."

Their game of speculation had turned more serious, more troubling than either of them had expected it to. Absorbed in their separate quiet reflections, they almost didn’t notice the smartly dressed blond woman in her late thirties and the teen-aged boy who stood with her outside the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, waiting as the doorman hailed a taxi.

The woman crinkled her eyes with mild curiosity as Jeff and Pamela walked past. Something about the expression suddenly registered in his busy mind.

"Judy?" he said tentatively, stopping beneath the hotel’s awning.

The woman stepped back a pace. "I’m afraid I don’t recall—no, wait," she said, "You were at Emory, weren’t you? Emory University, in Atlanta?"

"Yes," Jeff said softly, "I was. We were there together."

"You know, I thought you looked familiar just now. I could have sworn…" She blushed, just the way she always had. Perhaps she’d suddenly remembered a night in the backseat of the old Chevy, or on a bench outside Harris Hall before curfew; but Jeff could see she was having trouble coming up with his name, and he spoke quickly to spare her the embarrassment.

"I’m Jeff Winston," he said. "We used to go to the movies now and then, or out for a beer at Moe’s and Joe’s."

"Well, of course, Jeff, I remember you. How have you been?"

"Fine. Just fine. Pamela, this is … someone I used to know in college. Judy Gordon. Judy, my friend Pamela Phillips."

Judy’s eyes widened, and for a moment she almost looked eighteen again. "The movie director?"

"Producer," Pamela said, smiling pleasantly. She knew exactly who Judy was and how much this woman had meant to Jeff, in another replay.

"My goodness, isn’t that something? Sean, how about that?" Judy asked the gangly young boy who stood beside her. "This is an old schoolmate of mine, Jeff Winston, and his friend here is Pamela Phillips, the movie producer. This is my son, Sean."

"I’m so pleased to meet you, Miss Phillips," the boy said with unexpected enthusiasm. "I just want to say … well, to tell you how much Starsea meant to me. That movie changed my life."

"You know, he’s not joking." Judy beamed. "He was twelve years old when he first saw it, and he must have gone back to see it a dozen times. After that, all he could talk about was dolphins, and how to communicate with them. It wasn’t just a passing interest, either. Sean’s going to college in the fall, to the University of California at San Diego, and he’s going to major in—You tell them, honey."

"Marine biology. With a double minor in linguistics and computer science. I hope to work with Dr. Lilly someday, on interspecies communication. And if I ever do, I’ll have you to thank for it, Miss Phillips. You don’t know how much that means to me, but, well, maybe you do. I hope so."

A tall man with graying temples came out of the hotel, followed by a bellman wheeling a cart of luggage. Judy introduced her husband to Jeff and Pamela, explained that the family was just ending a vacation in New York. Did Jeff or Pamela ever get down to Atlanta? If they did, be sure to stop by; the name was Christiansen now, here’s the address and phone number. What was the new movie going to be called? They’d be sure to look for it and tell all their friends.

The cab pulled away, and Jeff and Pamela locked arms, held firmly to each other. They smiled as they walked on up Fifth Avenue to the Pierre, but in their eyes was a recognition of mutual sorrow, for all the worlds they once had known and now would know no more.

Jeff poured himself another glass of Montecillo, watched the lowering sun highlight the steep, rocky coastline to the west. Below the slope where the villa perched, and past another hill green with almond groves and olive trees, he could see the fishing boats returning to the red-roofed village of Puerto de Andraitx. A shift in the still-warm October breeze suddenly brought the scent of the Mediterranean through the open window, and it mingled with the robust aroma of simmering paella from the kitchen behind him.

"More wine?" he called.

Pamela leaned through the kitchen doorway, a large wooden spoon in one hand. She shook her head. "Cook stays sober," she said. "At least until dinner’s on the table."

"Sure you don’t want some help?"

"Mmm … you could slice some pimientos, if you want to. Everything else is just about ready."

Jeff ambled into the kitchen, began cutting the sweet red peppers into thin strips. Pamela dipped her spoon into the shallow iron pan, held out a taste of the paella for him to sample. He sipped the rich red broth, chewed a tender bite of calamari.

"Too much saffron in the rice?" she asked.

"Perfect as is."

She smiled with satisfaction, motioned for him to get the plates.

He did, though it was difficult for them both to maneuver in the cramped kitchen. The little hillside house was a "villa" in rental agents' terms only; it was much smaller and plainer than the grandiose appellation implied. But then, Pamela had taken the temporary residence with one simple purpose in mind. Jeff tried to think about that as little as possible, but it was hard to ignore.

She saw the look in his eyes, touched her fingertips lightly to his cheek. "Come on," she said, "time to eat."

He held the plates as she ladled up the steaming paella, then topped the rich seafood stew with green peas and the pimiento strips he’d cut. They took their dinner back to the table by the window in the front room. Pamela lit candles and put on a Laurindo Almeida tape, "Concierto de Aranjuez," as Jeff poured them each a fresh glass of wine. They ate in silence, watching the lights come on in the fishing village far below.

When they were finished, Jeff cleared the dishes while Pamela set out a platter of manchego cheese with sliced melon. He picked halfheartedly at the dessert, sipped from a snifter of Soberano brandy, and tried again, unsuccessfully, to avoid thinking about why they were here on Majorca.

"I’ll be leaving in the morning," he said at last. "No need to drive me; I can get a boat back to Palma, take a cab to the airport."

She reached across the table, took his hand. "You know I wish you would stay."

"I know. I just don’t want to … put you through it."

Pamela squeezed his hand. "I could deal with it. I could be there for you, be with you … And yet, if it were going to be me first, I wouldn’t want you to see it happen. So I understand how you feel. I respect that."

He cleared his throat, glanced around the earth-hued room. In the dim glow of the candlelight, he couldn’t help but reflect, it seemed exactly what it was: a place for dying. The very place where she had died, a quarter of a century ago, and would die again not two weeks hence, soon after his own heart had once more failed.

"Where will you go?" she asked softly.

"Montgomery Creek, I suppose. I think you have the right idea about choosing an isolated place to … let it happen. A special place."

She smiled, a warm, open smile of tenderness and recollected joy. "Remember that day I first showed up at your cabin? God, I was so scared."

"Scared?" Jeff said, smiling now himself. "Of what?"

"Of you, I guess. What you might say to me, how you’d react. You’d been so angry at me the last time I saw you, in Los Angeles; I thought you still might be."

He put both hands on hers. "It wasn’t so much that I was angry at you; I was just concerned about the possible consequences of what you were doing."

"I know that now. But at the time … When you came into my office at Starsea, out of the blue, I didn’t know how the hell to react. I don’t think I even realized quite how lonely, how desperate, I’d become. I just assumed, by then, that I’d never meet anyone else like me, not even anyone who would believe what I’d been through, let alone someone who’d shared the experience. You’d withdrawn to the land, to your mountains and your crops … while I’d put up emotional barriers of a different sort: outward-focused ones, a very public form of solitude. Trying to save the world was my way of hiding from my own needs. That was a hard thing to admit—to you, or to myself."

"I’m glad you had that courage. It taught me I didn’t have to hide from my own feelings or my fears."

Pamela looked long and deeply at him, tenderness in her eyes and on her face. "We’ve soared, all right, haven’t we? We really have."

"Yes," he whispered, returning the gaze. "And we will again, soon. Hold on to that. Don’t forget it."

Jeff stood at the stern of the boat, watching the village and the hills behind it recede into the distance. He watched until he could no longer discern the figure of Pamela on the wooden dock. Then he lifted his eyes to the red-and-white speck that was her little villa and watched until that, too, had blurred into invisibility.

The wind off the open sea stung his eyes, and he moved into the enclosed section of the passenger ferry, bought a beer, and took a seat alone, away from the scattering of off-season French and German tourists.

It wasn’t really over, he forcibly reminded himself, just as he’d told Pamela to do. Only this replay, that was all that was ending; they’d be together again very soon, could make a fresh start of everything. But God, how he hated to leave behind this particular reality, this life in which he and she had come to know and love each other. They’d come so far, done so much; he was as proud of Pamela’s achievements in film as if they’d been his own. How heartrending to think of entering a world where Starsea, and the enormously successful string of touching, all-too-human comedies and dramas she had made in the years since, never had existed and never would.

He clung tenaciously to the concept of time lines that they’d discussed in New York, years before. Somewhere, he was sure, there would be a branch of reality in which her artistic legacy lived on, would continue to move and enlighten audiences for generations to come. Perhaps Judy’s son, Sean, really would find a way for the dual intelligent species of earth’s oceans and its land masses to communicate with one another; if he did, that supreme gift of shared planetary wisdom would have sprung directly from Pamela’s vision.

It was a hope worth harboring, a dream to cherish; but now they would have to concentrate on new hopes, new dreams, another life as yet unlived.

Jeff reached into his jacket pocket, took out the small, flat package she had handed him as he boarded the boat. He removed the tissue wrapping carefully, and his throat tightened with emotion when he saw what she had given him.

It was a painting, a precisely done miniature, of Mount Shasta as it appeared from the hill on his property; and in the serene sky above the mountain, two figures swooped and soared on brilliantly feathered wings: Jeff and Pamela, like mythological creatures come to life, in eternal exultant flight together toward a destiny never before encompassed in reality or myth.

He stared at the tiny work of art and love for several moments, then rewrapped it and put it back into his pocket. He closed his eyes, listened to the churning of the boat as it cut through the waves of the Bahia de Palma, and settled quietly into the first leg of his journey home to die.