In the musical triad, the center of gravity of the musical scale is the tonic and the dominant is the audible manifestation of centrifugal force. 

The tonic, dominant and attraction in Beethoven’s Largo Appassionato are heard as the love of the sea for the moon, an intense longing that can never be satisfied, of a passion and yearning for the unattainable.

Isaac Rice, ‘What is Music? Internal Government’, 1875

Psychic Wounds

   The gin and tonic seltzer’s bubbles rose silently to the surface of the highball glass left to sweat on the sofa table behind her as Vikki’s thoughts poured themselves out. She had dozed off to the melodic hum of the jack hammering outside her brownstone,  as crews chipped away at the centuries of built-up asphalt, to install the new utility lines.  Her daydream permeated her reality as the front door slammed, forcing itself shut from the change in pressure as the gusty blast of wind rushed  through the kitchen window.  She had remembered…

As the remaining vestiges of conscious thought receded into the dark corners of her mind, slipping, as though through a sieve out into the otherworld of reality, the paradigm shift to the inner world of consciousness began taking her into the deep folds of another space-time reality, the past. An unreachable life, submerged deeply in the rage of a current,  pulsed with the rhythm of her heartbeat, as each breath guided the lifeforce though her veins and through the river of time. Deeper into the flow of remembrance, her thoughts became embodied in the other place, the other time, the other Violet. 

She was pensively proceeding along the road, trying not to be seen against the stark backdrop of darkened trees whose leaves had fallen months ago. Their skeletal forms braced against the bitter cold and cutting wind, as if hand in hand, lined up along the way of a gauntlet, imposing themselves against her escape where they dutifully formed a phalanx and guarded the road. 

Wrapped in a mid-calf length wool winter coat and leggings, her tiny, gloved hand, held securely by her Papa, they walked along the gauntlet road together. The harvested fields on their left and the unpaved road bordered by barren fields on their right; were all surrounded by the forests.  The sentinels watched the torrent in time as the masses moved slowly along the gauntlet road toward the unknown.  Her simple ankle leather boots with laces and leather soles, crunched loudly in the frozen straw and dirt under her feet. She marched in lock step with the exodus, each step prompted by the pull forward on her left hand.  She held the violin case in a death grip in her other hand, clinging tightly to what she knew was an extension of her own soul. Her very essence was tied up in the twining of the strings. The horsehair bow was her sword used to carve out the sounds for which her soul could not utter the words. This was her link to the eternal source, her breath of life.

Coughing and choking she pleaded with the driver of the monster whose tracks and wheels towered over her, that she could not breathe.  “Je ne peux pas respire” She pleaded to deaf ears.  As the trucks enclosed around them in a circle, the tamer of the beasts jumped down from the reigns, indifferent to her pleading. She did not understand, why he did not care, that they could not breathe.  He seemed intent as his burly mass cut through them, toward the outside of the circle.  He had the appearance of a farmer with large, muscular, weathered face and hands, equally tormented by time. As  he lumbered through them, his untamed and stiff stringy hair hardly moved in the freezing air. He rushed out of the choking air, to a place outside of the circle of monsters wheeled by tracks and wheels, and diesel engines. 

Looking up toward her Papa on the left, out of confusion, she sought reassurance and instructions. Her father stood stoically, not speaking, not running, not moving. He held her hand. The choking air had dissipated, leaving them standing at attention for two men, on the other side of the road. They sat poised in their chairs, contemplating the means of their death. They were SS, she knew as much as that.  The man on the left was very tall and thin with an angular face and nose. He sat in his director’s chair with his legs crossed where his  shiny black leather boots met his knees.  His officer’s hat and sunglasses, worn to shield his eyes from the cold winter glare of the sun, glinted as he cast his gaze upon them. He chewed on his cigar as he waved his Walther PK-38 at them, turning it from side to side as he waited in ambivalence for them all to line up correctly. Involuntarily, the words spilled from her mouth, “ Papa! Papa!” As she turned to look back at the direction of the two men, instantly, everything was black and she was, no more. No more embodied in the past. 

“What’s that, Doll?”, asked the Colonel. “Oh, nothing, Johnny. It was just a dream”, Vikki countered his inquiry with dismissal as she retrieved the soothing cocktail to dismiss her own tonic immobility.  “Tonic”, she mused. Her thoughts fixated on ‘Tonic’, as she stirred her drink. The ice in her glass swirled around the Maraschino cherry in pirouettes, adoring the center of their universe, like the planets around the sun. The equivalent of the musical triad’s tonic, and the tonic in her glass, the tonic for the Om, was our Sun.  Laughing to herself out loud as she walked over the wet bar and plopped another cherry into her glass, “Binary Stars!”. ‘Twins”, she thought. Just like she and Amy were, and Johnny and his brother. All solar systems are born as binary stars, or twins.  Some were even quadruplets, “Oh, gads!”, she thought, as she walked over to her desk sitting down to review her class lectures for her Monday morning class, tomorrow. She hated being a twin and loathed the thought of being a triplet or worse, a quadruplet! Pressing the highball to her lips, she wondered, “What is my tonic?”

As she pulled open the drawer of the eighteen-hundred’s French Provincial letter desk, the envelope Nikki had given her in Cayman, spilled its contents into the drawer. The faded red bandana securing the coins had slid out from the open envelope, revealing its contents. But something else caught Vikki’s eye. The edge of a note on letterhead from The Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco. She hadn’t noticed the note before. She had seen the coins, but had closed up the letter, and forgotten about it since she returned home on Friday. 

Vikki sat down at the desk, in her matching swivel chair, and pulled out the note to read. “V, I don’t have time to explain but need you to keep these coins for me. If you cannot reach me, then, it is possible something has happened. Please keep them safe until I return.  A.”  Vikki returned the note to the envelope and retrieved the coins from the drawer and the bandana. She laid the bandana out on the desk, to protect the surface from being scratched as she placed them on the cloth. 

She turned each coin over in her fingers noting its detailed engravings on the face and obverse and any wording, before placing each coin on the cloth in front of her. They were all similar, but not identical. Each coin had its own type of stone. Except one, which had one of each color.  There were several that depicted an ocean. The multicolored stone coin had a Cornucopia surrounded by the six stones. The last coin had an iridescent opal surrounded by the opal stones. Vikki reached into her pocket, where she had been carrying the solitary coin, she found in the safe deposit box, to retrieve it. She laid it down on the cloth next to the other coins. This coin had a violet sunrise, “Or was it a sunset?”,  she asked herself.

She sat back after looking at the coins as she sipped her gin and tonic.  She had been staring absent mindedly at the world atlas by Willem Blaeu, 1602 canvassing the wall of her study when it dawned on her. “They are places”, Col. D. whispered in her ear in a hushed tone under his breath, as he looked over her shoulder.  Vikki looked up to him in agreement, before returning her attention to inspecting each coin. She touched each coin to feel its texture in her hands before she returned it to the red bandana. She sighed as she said, “The Atlantic, the  Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, and the  Caribbean Sea”. The other coins were the sunrise, the sunset, and the North Pole. She was mildly amused as she closed the drawer and locked it.  “Safe, Amy”, she said placing the key in one of lady justice’s scales. The Themis statue was a graduation gift from Johnny, and she kept an eye out for him through the window overlooking the street, on top of the bureau behind the desk. “Gotta go, Doll”, she heard him say as he kissed her on the forehead and headed out the door, saying, “I’ll see you, when I see you”, as he disappeared again out of her life. 

The ’Gone

    Col. D. walked briskly through the corridor from his office to the E Ring of the Pentagon. Over the seven-minute walk,  he was joined by the rest of the cross functional team assigned to the electronic warfare cell. The Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Cell, (JIMSOC), was headed by Brigadier General Amanda Leigh and the  implementation to embed the technology with combatant commands was headed by Colonel Jason Edwards of the 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing. She was assigned to the Electromagnetic Battle Management by the U.S. Strategic Command, (STRATCOM) and the Defense Information Services Agency. 

Col. D.  was scheduled to brief the General and the rest of the team on the breach in the gateway at Svalbard.  Or more precisely, his brother’s willful failure to secure it as assigned and the results of his own efforts to redirect the signals causing the breach in the gateway. The invasion had already resulted in millions of ‘Om’ followers, and world governments were teetering on the brink of chaos as people realized, the truth. The answers to their one and only question, ‘Are we alone?”, was an unequivocal, “No. No, we are not alone in the universe”.  Broadly interpreted by the current administration as ‘We are not in control’, who presently wanted to know how we were approaching the problem. 

“What was the problem, exactly?”, the team asked him as they approached the double lined secure doors which led to the deepest confines under the wing in the basement level. “Kaon decay”, he reminded them, as they stood penciling in the notes which they could not bring back with them after the meeting. They would be subject to ‘destruction’ prior to their return to the main floor on the surface. After the five-minute ride down to the basement level, the team stepped out into the blue light of another corridor, before approaching their private and secured classified intelligence facility (SCIF). The SCIF within the SCIF of the Pentagon. 

‘Dr. Richards’, he was introduced to the Colonel. ‘Sir”, he replied as his own hand was grasped in a firm threat, reminding him of his duty to remain silent regarding the private knowledge previously shared with him in Svalbard. “This is Dr. Grey”, he gestured toward a small elvish man on his right, in deference to the ancient custom observed in more chivalrous times of swordsmanship as the place of honor of a superior officer.  “Dr. Grey”,  Col. D. repeated his name to trigger his memory to recall it when asked, as he shook his hand before sitting down next to his assistant, Andy. 

“Colonel Jameson, have we secured the gateway then?”, asked the Brigadier General sitting at the head of the table with both hands clasped tightly together, in reflection of her own resolve to never release a word of this meeting to the world.  “Yes, Ma’am. I believe we have, for now”.  He breathed in cautiously, as he knew his answer was not what the General wanted to hear. “I can say with confidence, Ma’am,” he continued, “We have identified the source of the breach, and the means to counter it, and prevent possible undesirable signals from forming. “I see”, the General replied. “So, is it an ‘intelligent’ signal, Colonel?”, she asked, as her elbows braced her for the answer of the unknown threat. “It’s possible, Ma’am”, Col. D. acknowledged. The signal, the Universal Om, also resonated on the same vibrational frequency as neuron connections in the brains of humans and animals. All living consciousness was vulnerable to the risk of being ‘controlled’ by the signal. The Colonel explained to the group how the brain reacts to signals, based on the neuron science. He used a simple example, “The Garifuno Drummers, of Belize”, he started, “The rhythmic drummers entrance the listeners, and they are essentially in a ‘tonic state’, and subject to the suggestions of…others”, he explained. 

“We are safe, for now”, he finished as he handed his brief to the General and went on to explain the Doro’s and the MRKBA, and their own ability to ‘tune’ the signal based on the form of the spectrum of color. He took them in depth into the occurrence of the new frequency of the Om. “The ‘violet’ notes, the notes between the cracks”, he explained were harmless to hearers. His concerns were if there were an intelligent signal being emitted, and if any messages were being ‘received’ by those tuned into it. Not everyone vibrated at the same frequency. So, not everyone was subject to the same vulnerability, based on the signals being sent. “It’s really like turning up the white noise to counter tinnitus”, but on a more technical scale”, he added.  “So”, the General summarized, “We need to identify those who are ‘susceptible’ to this new ‘violet’ signal, is that right?”, she said as an order.

 “Alright, Colonel. Keep us briefed on any new activity in the gateway”, she said as she handed him a new file marked JIMSOC. “This is your next mission for the gateway, and the Doro’s. Review it and get back to me with the plan to implement the strategy for that objective”, she finished as she stood up to leave the room. “Ma’am”, the Colonel said, as he stood, before sitting back down to review the contents of the file and develop the plan with the cross functional team, before adding the file to the ‘destruction’ bin with all of their other notes. 

Pure energy of intellect, illuminating in its proper habitation the middle region of the heavens: and from this exalted situation scattering its light, it fills all the celestial orbs with powerful vigor, and illuminates the universe with divine and incorruptible light.

Book VII, Chapter XVI

                The Six Books of Proclus, the Platonic Successor, on the Theology of Plato by Proclus

The early September morning was refreshingly cool as students hurried to their first classes of the day at Georgetown Law School in Washington, DC.  Vikki noted the marked difference between the returning classmen and first year law students. The seasoned J.D. candidates navigated the highly politically charged atmosphere of the campus in a spirit of evergreen confidence while toting their café latte’s and leather attachés. They graced the landscape in distinct contrast to their lower classmen whose heavy burden borne them as barren deciduous branches dressed wet in the cool breezes from the Potomac. Twining together, they each twisted in the season’s nascent state. 

Vikki had arrived early to prepare for her lecture on Torts and stood looking over the campus from her fourth-floor office window, sipping her café Americano, when her office phone rang. “Victoria Theist”, she answered.  “Oh, hey yeah, no, I mean, yes”, the voice on the other end of the line stammered in west coast vernacular she often heard when her sister spoke. “Pardon me?”, she inquired of the caller.  “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you, but is this Vikki Theist, Amy’s sister?”, the caller asked. Vikki walked toward her office chair as sat down before returning her attention to the caller. “Yes”, she replied awaiting further inquiry. “Oh, hi, great!”, the caller said relaxing. “This is Mark. I’ve been leasing a loft in the City to Amy, your sister”, he stated his cause for calling her.  “I see. How can I help you?”, Vikki charitably offered.  “Well, I’m, calling because” he paused, uncertain of his reason for concern or for calling her. “She’s missing”, he said flatly.  “Oh”, Vikki replied. “Are you sure?”, she furthered the line of inquiry. “I received a letter from her just a few weeks ago”, she said recalling the note that said, ‘something may have happened’.  “No, yeah, well, you see, the thing is, that was me. I sent you that note”, Mark corrected her. 

Vikki leaned back in her chair realizing that ‘something’ may have indeed happened to Amy. “Well, when is the last time you saw her?”, Vikki asked trying to establish a timeline.  “Well, you see, I don’t really ever see her. I only stay at the loft when I am on call. I’m an anesthesiologist” ”, he explained before continuing, “And well, the last time I saw her? Six months ago.  But she leaves me the lease payments in a basket on the kitchen table each month, except for last month and this month. So, that would be sometime in early July when she may have disappeared”, he said as he calculated the time in his mind. “I know she travels for work, so I didn’t think anything of it, until now”, he rationalized. “I’m sorry. Have you seen her?”, he asked. 

Vikki tried to remember the last time she actually saw Amy. It was at her graduation, two years ago. “No, no, I haven’t seen her either”, she said apologetically, thinking to herself, ‘why am I apologizing to him?’.  “So, you sent the letter?”, she said searching for answers.  “Yes, she left me a note and that envelope, and the book”, he said remembering his message from her letter. “She asked me to take it to Cayman on my next trip. We go every year, my wife and I”, he added. “Did you get the book?”, he asked. Vikki, shifted in her chair, uncomfortable with his line of questioning. She was not confident in his claim to be ‘Mark’, and thought to herself, ‘this could be anyone’, before she replied. “I see. Well, thank you for the call, Mark. I will contact her company. Like you said, she may be on travel or on assignment”, she agreed.  “Is there anything else?”, she asked looking down at the Cartier their father had given to both she and Amy, on their eighteenth birthdays and recalling the epitaph engraved on the back, “Time is of the Essence’. It referenced the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 and the Union and Pacific Railroads creed, ‘time, not money, was of the essence’.  “No, no, that’s all, just thought you should know”, he said bewildered at her apathetic resolve.  Amy was caring and empathetic, unlike her sister. “They are like night and day”, he thought shaking his head as he hung up the phone in the emergency room at the University of California San Francisco Medical center near Twin Peaks.  

“Good morning, class”, Vikki said looking up across the amphitheater filled with over three hundred students. Her eyes poured over the seats melting their frigid minds like vermouth swirled around the ice cubes in a martini. Not shaking them up, but smoothly stirring the interest of her timid students, and adding a twist of bitters, before straining their attention. “Welcome to Torts”. 

After her first three classes, Vikki returned to her office, to make a few phone calls. She thought to call Amy’s office and find out if she was away on travel on an audit assignment.  As she walked toward her small back corridor to her first-year law professor’s back office, she saw the two chairs in the hallway outside her office door were occupied.  She walked past them without looking down to enter her office, preoccupied with thoughts of Amy. “Professor Theist?”, the young man and woman stood as she walked past them. Turning back, Vikki saw them. “Marcus? Chelsea? What are you doing here?”, she asked surprised to see them again at all. “We are first year law students”, Marcus explained as Chelsea added, “We’re in your class”.  “Oh, yes, that’s right”, Vikki lied saying ,”I remember you mentioned it…before…at Svalbard”, she finished as she turned the key in the lock of her office door. She recalled most of what happened over that weekend as a bad dream, that was only now a blur in some distant memory.  “I’m so glad you stopped by”, she lied again.  “We should meet up after class, and catch up”, she said as she opened her door, and stood shoulders squared against the door frame, guarding the entrance. “Great”, Marcus replied.  Pressing her for a meeting, he suggested, “Clyde’s off of M Street. We’ll be there Friday, at Eight?”, he asked as he stood facing her and waiting for a response. Raising her eyebrows, Vikki, surprised by his insistence, said, “Oh. I see. OK, then, Friday at Eight”.  “Yeah”, Marcus confirmed, before turning to depart with Chelsea in tow, saying, “See you then”.  Vikki could hear Chelsea chastising him for his arrogance as they walked back down the hallway to leave.

Vikki tried unsuccessfully to contact her sister. Amy’s firm was reluctant to disclose any personal information regarding her whereabouts but did offered to ask human resources to verify if there was a notice of resignation, or if she were on assignment, saying “I can have our HR reach out to her and ask them to have her contact you, if that would help?”, the voice on the other end of the line offered. “Yes, thank you”, Vikki acquiesced, and provided her contact information.  She wanted to make one more phone call before she headed to her firm across the bridge on the other side of the Potomac, in Crystal City. “Charlie?”, she asked as the calm voice on the other end of the line answered. “Yes. Hi Violet”, Charlie replied. Impatiently, Vikki thought to correct him but didn’t have the time to insist that he call her Victoria instead of Violet. “Charlie, yes. I only have a moment but need to ask you to help me understand what you meant when you said, ‘Amy trans mutated’.  What did you mean?”, she asked expectantly. “Transmutation”, Charlie corrected her. “It means that she evolved. She changed form by raising her vibration.” He summarized the principle of mentalism for her, quoting, “Mind (as well as metals and elements) may be transmuted, from state to state; degree to degree; condition to condition; pole to pole; vibration to vibration. True Hermetic Transmutation is a Mental Art.”, he quoted from the Emerald Tablets, and the Kybalion. “But what does that mean, exactly?”, she pushed.  “Well, ‘that’ is a longer conversation”, he corrected her.  “I see”, Vikki, defeatedly accepted his response.  “Well, thank you, Dr. Richards. I was just wondering if possibly something did happen to her”, she explained her rashness. “Please accept my apologies, but I do have to run”, she offered before thanking him and hanging up the phone. Charlie, returned his phone to the receiver on his desk at the USGS office in Oregon, as he acknowledged to himself, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear’. “She is ready”, the hoot owl in his head told him. 

She arrived at her firm, where she was a junior associate at A & P, Allen and Portman, an hour  before her two ‘o clock meeting with her client, ‘Elements’ to make final preparations and review of her notes. The firm specialized in government contracting and  her area of expertise was Maritime Law, which for the time being was also the prevailing law regarding Space. Her current assignments revolved around reviewing international treaties within the scope of maritime law as it applied to space exploration and satellites.  Her client was interested in asteroid mining and was a global firm who wanted to find out who they would owe taxes to and who would ‘own’ the natural resources if they were successful. Finishing her review of the client file, Vikki gathered the files to head to the conference room, as the senior associate dropped a file on her desk, saying, “New client”.  “Great, thanks, Jack”, she replied. Jack was a Rockstar at the company, and he had taken her under his wing to mentor her and made sure she had the caseload to prove herself. She glanced down at the file before stepping out to her meeting, it was marked,  CRISTAL, Inc., (Constellation Resource International Space Topology and Asteroid Locator). 

~

Prometheus lighted his torch at the chariot of the sun

Hesiod's Theogony (507–616 BC)

Col. D. opened the file marked JIMSOC to review the new mission and assignments given to him by the General. The brief notes identified the discovery of a deep space crystal which was recovered from inside the Dragon Capsule returned from the last Doro’s mission. The crystal was a ‘red diamond’, they were calling, ‘Dragon Fire’. They had discovered its properties of enhancing frequencies. They called it ‘FLASH’, ‘Frequency Link Amplification of Signal and enHancer’.  The properties of the crystal enabled the neurological ‘linking’ of combatant teams. The teams of nine called ‘ennead’s, would be ‘tuned’ into the crystal frequency together, in a hyperbaric chamber set to space conditions to activate the Dragon Fire. Once activated, the teams were able to communicate at will, via, ‘FLASH’, mentally.  They were tuned to receive a ‘FLASH’ of the perceptions of the other team members, e.g. Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Speech, Emotions, and Thoughts. Each perception ‘FLASH’ depended on what frequency the link was tuned to receive, either one or all. They had discovered the ‘FLASH’ traveled over vast distances, unimpeded, like the whale songs transmitted across the Southern Ocean.  It was a code that could not be broken or accessed by anyone not in the tuning chamber.  The Enigma of the Space Era. Secure.  No wires, no computers, no radios.  Secure communication. The mission was to reprogram the Doro’s to the last coordinates of the last flight before it was returned on the Dragon Capsule and confirm the location and source of the Dragon Fire crystals. 

     The Universe has only one substance and one supreme energy with an infinite number of manifestations of life

Nikola Tesla

The sun was about to dip under the horizon as Vikki looked up from her desk when Jack stepped in to her office. She had been reviewing the file from CRISTAL left for her earlier in the week. They were contracting with a new unit under the Department of Defense the that had just been stood up at the Pentagon, JIMSOC.  Electromagnetic Spectrum’s, and signal frequencies. “Hey, we are all meeting over at the dock in the morning for blue crabs and beer and a sail on my boat on the bay. Join us?”, Jacked asked, expecting a ‘yes’ answer. “Of course,” Vikki replied, thinking to herself, “There was nothing better than blue crabs and beer and sailing with Jack. Absolutely, yes”, she smiled to herself. Jack was tall, dark, and handsome, from a good family, and a good listener.  They had been having an office tryst for the last two years, and they were both content to keep it that way. No strings, no drama, and no future plans. It was a perfect arrangement for the time being.  “Time?”, she asked herself, checking her watch. She gave herself another hour of review before wrapping it up. She had agreed to meet Marcus and Chelsea at Eight ‘O Clock, and it was already half past Six, or as the Colonel would say, Eighteen-Thirty. She thought of him as she drove to Clyde’s.  He was the one for her. But he would always be unavailable, she reminded herself as she pulled into the rare open parking space off of M Street outside of Clyde’s, remembering, “All the good ones are taken”.

Chelsea greeted her at the entrance near the bar, saying “Hi Professor Thiest! We are back here”, she gestured with both hands holding beer mugs, toward the back patio.  “Great, I’m right behind you”, as she ordered a cosmopolitan.  Vikki made her way through the crowd as she walked toward the patio and found Marcus and Chelsea, sitting in the farthest corner in the back. “Hi again” she smiled to them as she sat down at the pub table. The sun was setting now, and the view over the Potomac was ablaze in golden light sparkling on the water. “Thanks for agreeing to meet us”, Marcus said standing as she sat down. Vikki thought to herself, “He’s going to make a good lawyer, no holds barred”. 

Marcus sitting back down, looked up from his beer after taking the liquid courage to approach his new professor with the confidence of a god. His wild blondish waves and locks of curls surrounded his olive sun kissed skin and emerald green eyes, which stood stoically on his square jawline and dimpled chin. He was on a full ride athletic scholarship for water polo, and carried himself like an Olympian, never denying his Grecian descent.

“Professor Thiest”, he started, before being stopped by Vikki, as she said, “Vikki”.  “Vikki”, he started again, “Have you been listening to the Om?”, he asked her. “Me?”, she questioned him. “No. Should I be?”, she asked wondering why he wanted to know.  “We have. We always do”, he said impressing upon her the importance of the Om.  “Anyway, that is not why we wanted to meet you tonight”, he said preparing his thoughts.  “It’s, well. I wanted to tell you this before, but the chance never really presented itself. But I wanted you to know. It was you I saw, in the cave at the Seahorse Mound, and the Indian Cave on Caicos”, he exhaled as he sat back in triumph as if to say ‘There. I’ve said it”.   

   “I see. But you know it could not have been ‘me’, right?” she prodded his response.  “Yes, I know. But it was you….or….someone that looks like you….like your sister?”, he suggested. “Amy?”, she questioned his reasoning.  “Tell me what you saw, Marcus”, she instructed him as she waited to hear why he thought it was her sister. Marcus described the siren in the lagoon, and the fever dreams, and how she led him through the underwater sea mound caves to the lyre. Vikki realized the lyre on the back of her coin depicted the same lyre Marcus had found. “Can I show you something?” she asked them as she grabbed her keys from her purse. “Sure”, they both replied.  She had them follow her to her brownstone hoping to shed some light on the reason for the coins. 

“Please, sit”, she said to them as she gestured to the sofa in the living room as she walked toward the kitchen. She returned, with a bottle of wine and three balloon glasses.  Chelsea poured them all a glass of the Chateau St. Michelle Merlot, as Vikki walked behind the sofa to her desk.  Marcus watched her as she retrieved the key to the locked drawer from the Themis statue on the bureau.  She returned with the envelope containing the coins.  “Themis”, Marcus noted, out loud. “The goddess of Justice. Divine law”, he continued.  “Wife of Zeus, but not the mother of the Muses. That is his other wife, Mnemosyne”, he finished. “Also, the Oracle of Delphi”, he added. Vikki opened the envelope and pulled out the faded red bandana that held the coins. She placed it on the coffee table and carefully unwrapping its folds to reveal the coins.  She watched intently at their reaction, as she picked up the coin, she had found in the safe deposit box, and showed them the obverse side. The side depicting the lyre, bound by two seahorses, Marcus’ lyre. 

Marcus and Chelsea both took audible gasps as they realized there must be a connection to the coins and the lyre. “May I?”, Marcus asked, as he reached out for the coin. While he was immersed in the details of the coin, Chelsea began to arrange the coins on the cloth. “Yes”, Vikki encouraged her, “They seem to represent places”, she said. They each looked up toward the atlas on the wall and tacitly agreed to explore the idea. Vikki stood up reaching toward it, taking it off of the wall, and placed it on the floor. They each placed the coins on the atlas, unravelling the puzzle. 

When they had finished, they looked and saw the form of the six-pointed star. The upward triangle was formed by the Opal coin at the North Pole. The lower left point by sunset in the west, with the deep scarlet stones, either of rubies or garnets. The eastern point was formed by the violet sunset, the lyre coin with the amethyst. The overlaid inverse triangle was formed with the lowest point at the Caribbean Sea coin with the orange stone and the upper right was formed at the point of the Pacific Ocean with the sapphire stone, and the right point it the Atlantic was the coin with the green stone, the emerald. The last coin, the amber stone formed a cross section between the two overlaid triangles, in the Gulf of Mexico. 

They each sat on the floor around the atlas silently, asking the questions, “What is this? Why is this? How is this, possible?”.  Marcus broke the silence first. “Wait”, he said putting up his hand in a motion to pause. Looking around, he asked Vikki, “Do you have a note pad and pen?” “Of course, yes, on the desk”, she gestured toward the stack of legal pads in a rainbow of colors on the desk. Marcus got up to find the notepad and pen and returned, sitting down again in the triangle they had formed around the atlas on the floor. He was sketching something out on the paper. When he finished, he showed them what he had drawn, asking “What do you see?”. “A star”, Chelsea responded.  “Yes, a six-pointed star”, added Vikki.  Marcus, shaking his head, flipped the legal pad sheet over the top to reveal a blank page and began to draw again. Finishing, he showed them again. “An ‘A’”, said Chelsea.  “Yes, an ‘A’”, Marcus affirmed the correct answer. He then drew something else on the same page, and again showed the pair sitting around the atlas. “A ‘V’”, said Vikki. “Yes”, Marcus said again visibly excited.  He then drew another page, this time showing them as he drew, the A, and then placed the V over the A. “The Star”, he said as he watched for the two to make the connection “Amy, and Vikki”, they said together.  “Yes, and the cross bar of the ‘A’ is this amber coin. See?”, he said pointing to the atlas. 

Silence now filled the room, pouring into the void of their lack of understanding. They sat sipping their wine, looking at the atlas, contemplating what the arrangement of the coins meant. “OK. So, let’s figure this out”, Vikki started.  “What do all of these places have in common”, she asked no one in particular. “Themis” started Marcus. “They are all ‘Natura’. Natural places, and Themis is the goddess of Natura.  “Oceans” said Chelsea. “But that would be ‘Oceanis”, and that is all the way back to the Titans”, argued Vikki. “Not Oceans”, Marcus jumped in. “Seas”, he corrected as he continued, “And what lives in the sea?”, he looked again at his two friends sitting around the atlas. The atlas was designed by Dutch cartographer Willem Blaeu, whose workshop was famous for creating table-top globes in pairs, terrestrial and celestial.  This atlas was a copy of the  celestial globe, with its sea monsters prominently displayed over the oceans below the constellation Cetus. “Cetus, also known as Cetacea’s, for whales”, he summarized. 

“But what does any of that have to do with the Om, or the lyre?”, insisted Chelsea as she continued, “I think we are off the mark”.  The lyre is connected with Orpheus, and he is connected with Muses”, she said trying to regroup the conversation back toward the focus of the lyre, as she pointed toward the violet coin at the sunset point in the west on the map. Vikki, inspired, reached out to trace the line between where Chelsea had pointed in the west, across the globe to the east, toward the sunrise coin. “Here”, she said, as she touched the coin laid over the southernmost point of the North American continent in Key West. “Let’s start here, at the sunrise”.  “What?”, Chelsea asked, “In Key West? That is where this all started” she flustered.  “What are we looking for? What are we hoping to find there?”, she asked indignantly. “Chaz”, said Marcus with some realization of his involvement in this journey. “Chaz is in Key West”.  “Alright. Then let’s talk to him, and show him what we found”, Vikki said, pondering their response. “We could do that”, said Marcus. “Over Columbus Day weekend?” he inquired. “We could do that”, Vikki agreed.  “OK, I’ll contact him and set up a charter for that weekend”.  They all agreed.

Marcus and Chelsea and Vikki said their good nights as Vikki watched them from the door as they walked from her brownstone to their ride share. As she turned to go back inside, she was alarmed by the quiet calling of her name like the sound of a hoot owl, “Violet. Violet. Violet”. She looked around before closing the door and saw him standing across the street under the streetlamp as he began to walk across the street toward her. It was Dr. Richards. “Dr. Richards, I was just about to retire for the evening”, she started, before he could insist on coming in. “This will just be a moment”, he asserted. “All right”, she said gesturing for him to enter with her armed lowered in a open display of welcoming. He brushed by her, his light summer jacket fluttering in the late summer breeze as he entered to sit down on the sofa. “Can I get you a drink?”, she offered being a good hostess. “No. Thank you, I’ll just be a few minutes”, he said looking down at the atlas on the floor and the coins laid over it. Vikki, unresponsive to his visual inquiry, remained silent until he ceased questioning her actions, and pivoted back to the original intention of his visit. 

“You had asked me about Amy”, he began. “I wanted you to understand, more fully, what it means, ‘transmutation’. He went on to explain his theory that Amy’s soul, her essence, her vibration was a Muse. She had been on an esoteric journey, and during her meditations, she had discovered that we are one essence with many levels of vibration. She had lowered her own essence’s vibration enough to pull down the intonation of her own essence. She lowered herself. “The tuning of a string, on a musical instrument, requires first to tune down the string, lower it’s vibrational frequency before tuning it up again to the desired note”, he expanded the concept for her before continuing. “Before she could raise her vibration to attain her true self, a Muse, she had to lower herself”, he looked at her intently to see if she was following what he was saying.  “So, what does that mean?”, Vikki asked him, not understanding how this translated into their real world. “I cannot show you”, he returned his eyes to the atlas, as he spoke, “But there is a bridge between the ‘real world’ as you put it, and where she is now”.  “There is an ancient theory, from Proclus, that sirens are planetary souls. These celestial souls attract and harmonize others, other vibrations and they aspire to be Muses”, he explained again before continuing. “My theory of Amy is that she lowered her vibration from a Muse, to a Siren, in a ‘transmutation’. She did this to reunite the essence of Orpheus with Eurydice in Hades. The Spheres’ of Light we saw that night, in Svalbard, where their essence, their souls released”, he stopped, eyeing the bottle of wine left on the table. 

“The story of the Muses and Sirens is quite interesting. Are you familiar?”, he asked her. “No, not really”, Vikki said shaking her head.  “Ah, well, let me enlighten you”, he said sitting back. “The Sirens had a contest with the Muses in song and the price they paid for losing to the Muses was in effect a relinquishing of part of their own essence. You see, the Muses took the Sirens’ feathered wings, and wore them as a garland ornament on their heads. It is how they control the psyche and senses of others”, he said, as he poured the last of the bottle of Merlot into Chelsea’s glass left on the  table and took a sip. “That is also why the Sirens have a ‘shriek’ instead of a song”. “You know”, he said as he stood up. “There were nine Muses, and nine Sirens”, he said as he walked toward the door to let himself out, winking at her as he left. 

Vikki remained sitting on the sofa, as she whispered, “Good night, Dr. Richards”,  to herself  as she tried to process what he was saying.  “One essence. Many levels”, she repeated his words to herself as she cleaned up the glasses in the kitchen sink. She returned to the living room to collect the coins and placed them back in the drawer of her desk. Locking it, she again hid the key in the scales of Themis. Rehanging the atlas on the wall, recalling what Marcus had said about the table-top globes, “One celestial, and one terrestrial”. “So”, she thought, “there are physical representations of the nine Sirens and Muses in the ‘real world’. One celestial, the planetary souls, and one terrestrial, the physical or lower vibration of the celestial souls here in the terrestrial.” Her head was spinning, and she wasn’t sure if it was from mixing the wine with her cosmopolitan or if it was the revelations of the night, she mused as she ascended her stairs to her third-floor master suite to retire. As she laid in her bed, she couldn’t stop hearing what the good doctor had said as he winked at her, ‘There are nine”, realizing she also possessed nine coins.