The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  "Well, the three I didn't kill before they surrendered. There are four bodies down there someone will have to clean up."

  "Good job, Miss Fox. Expect an invitation to my table tonight. Please do accept; I'd like to hear this whole story once you clear my bridge."

  "In all fairness, sir, these are some pretty poor examples of pirates."

  "Well, don't go downplaying yourself, miss. I'm sure they never expected to face you. I know your grandfather, you see, and I have a pretty good idea of the capabilities of all his granddaughters. He seems pretty proud of all of you."

  Raven blushed. "Thank you, sir."

  "You seem to have things well in hand, so I'll leave you to it. I'm breveting you to the temporary rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Merchant Service, backtimed to the start of this incident, so you've got some authority and cover for your actions if anyone has the temerity to ask."

  "Very well, sir. Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  Raven didn't wait to hear the response, but rigged the last hatch and opened it. Climbing through, she saw the bridge entrance one frame forward, just as she'd remembered, with the USS Star of the Orient's logo tastefully painted across the two blast doors. "Let's go!" she yelled, and heaved herself out of the hatch. The three spec ops followed, and (thankfully, she noted to herself) the rest of the passengers stayed safely behind.

  She got to the blast doors, found the little panel, and popped it open. Pulled out the two wires, connected them. The blast door external controls, which had been dark –

  Remained dark.

  "Fuck!" she yelled. "Anse!"

  "I see it," his voice came back from a nearby wall comm. "Jerry! Check the aux power panel, see if the bridge doors are kicked out."

  A few interminable seconds later, the panel lit up.

  "Sorry about that," said Anse. "Looks like they found a way to overload it when they locked it out. Either that, or they just fucked up in a way that was to their momentary advantage."

  "Thanks, Anse," replied Raven, relieved.

  "Be careful, it's not every day I get to watch a great-aunt do a door."

  Raven snorted. "Ought to be Delaney doing this," she muttered. "Okay, Pete, Blake, Rafe, stack on me. Anyone standing is a tango, anyone on the floor is a hostage, till we can prove otherwise." God, don't let me fuck this up. I wish this was over and they were already spaced, she thought, fervently. She felt a sudden adrenaline rush, like a wave of power washing over her, and grinned, involuntarily. They lined up behind her, pistols out. "In three, two, one," she punched the controls and the blast doors slammed open, "GO!"

  Chapter 2

  The Scholar

  "Professor Fox? Here are the books you requested."

  "Thank you, Carissa."

  "No problem, Professor. Melissa over at the library said everyone she asked was pleased to provide them for you."

  "I'm glad to hear that. Has Julissa been able to track down that obscure journal article I was trying to find?"

  "Not yet, Professor, but she thinks she may have a line on it through an acquaintance at Harvard. And Larissa thinks she may have a contact who may know something about it, too, but the contact is currently working a dig somewhere in the backwoods of Turkey."

  Professor Yehudit Wolff Fox frowned. "I thought Marissa had an ex-boyfriend whose mother's hairdresser or something worked for Neil Sherrill at the Hebrew University at one point."

  Carissa Quarters, the departmental secretary, nodded. "Yes, ma'am. Problem is, the ex-boyfriend, guy by the name of Parker, is off-planet at this time, and out of contact until –" she looked at her notes. "Hmm. Until at least December, 2250, from what we were told." She looked thoughtful. "I have an acquaintance at the University of Ioannina who might be able to help."

  "Let me guess. Her name is Alissa. Or Anissa."

  "No, ma'am, it's Illissa. Illissa Kalogeropoulos." Carissa rattled the name off flawlessly, and without a shred of irony.

  Yehudit sighed. "Very well, do what you can. I can live without the article but it would be nice to have a copy and be able to cite it."

  "Of course, Professor."

  Yehudit laid her mail on the stack of five books, picked up the whole shebang, and carried them into her office, admiring as she passed it, the sign on the door that said

  YEHUDIT WOLFF FOX, Ph.D.

  PROFESSOR OF ANTIQUITIES AND ANCIENT LANGUAGES

  DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN

  DEPARTMENT OF MIDDLE-EASTERN STUDIES

  INDIANA UNIVERSITY

  "Seems like it wasn't all that long ago, I was a mere, lowly post-doc wandering these hallowed halls," she murmured. "Grandma was so pleased when they hired me, and even more so when they named me chairman." She placed the books on the desk, sat down, and started to open her mail.

  There was a knock at the doorway.

  "Come in," she said.

  A young woman entered, tentatively. Anymore, Yehudit reflected, that's how you knew someone was a "never been nowhere, never done nothin'" undergrad, really as young as they looked and not yet blessed with that youth in age given by nanos. No matter how much time went by, or how many years you sat atop the mountains of academia, freshmen and sophomores never, ever changed.

  At least, this one's name didn't end in "-issa", which had been a fad starting thirty or so years back, for which the world was now paying reparations in full. And she was a senior, so she really shouldn't be walking into the office like the world was about to fall on her head. The professor cocked an eyebrow.

  "Good morning, Sally," she said. "What can I do for you?"

  "I'm having a lot of trouble with this new lesson," said the girl, Sally Blustein. Nice Jewish girl from Indianapolis. Beautiful, yes, with a string of wanna-be boyfriends following her around most of the time, but also smart as a whip. Yehudit had great hopes for her.

  "Oh, the Akkadian cuneiform? My 'take two tablets and report in the morning' assignment?" chuckled Yehudit, relieved it wasn't something more esoteric.

  Not that Akkadian wasn't esoteric, but the tablets in question were just the Epic of Gilgamesh; if someone today couldn't translate that by the end of NELC 2063, Ancient Akkadian Myths and Legends III, they probably didn't belong in the Ancient Languages of the Near East program in the first place. Sally had aced the first two semesters of the class and was near-letter-perfect in every translation Yehudit had ever seen her make, so she supposed this was something to be taken seriously.

  "There is a sequence in the middle of the lesson," said Sally, "that makes no sense in context."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, here," said the girl, handing her the photocopied lesson sheet. A sequence of cuneiform blocks were circled.

  Yehudit slipped into didactic mode. "Okay, so how do you translate them?" she inquired.

  "That's just it," said Sally. "They do translate, they just don't make sense. 'The middle daughter must come to Egalmah immediately.' See, here, in Tablet III, sandwiched in between the line where Gilgamesh tells Enkidu they need to go to Egalmah, and the line where it says they took each other by the hand and went there."

  "What?" exclaimed Yehudit. She looked at the paper she held carefully; it was a photocopy of a photograph of the actual Gilgamesh tablet III, enhanced a bit for readability, and . . . holy shit!

  "Is this a joke?" she asked, quietly.

  Sally looked even more nervous. "N-no, Professor, it's not a joke. It's what you handed out in class. Why? Do you know what it means?"

  There was another knock at the door. "Professor Fox?"

  Yehudit looked up. "Yes, David?"

  David Goldstein, another of her students, held out the same lesson paper Sally had given to Yehudit. "Professor, there's a problem with this lesson, this one line makes no sense."

  "Let me see."

  He handed her his copy. It had the same added line.

  "Okay," said Yehudit, "I want the two of you to tell everyone you see from class to ignore that line. Just translate the rest. I will try to get to the bottom o
f this, but if it's a prank, it originated a lot higher in the food chain than you undergrads."

  "Yes, Professor," they said in unison, then looked at each other in horror, and backtracked out of the office.

  Yehudit sat and drummed her fingers on the desktop while she thought about it. After a couple of minutes, she got up, went to the bookcase, and hauled down her old and dusty copy of The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Vol. II, by A. R. George, 2003, and flipped to the back, where several of the plates were bookmarked. "I'll be damned," she breathed.

  She carried the book back to her desk, and fumbled around in her bag for her comm. Checking the contact list, she chose one and punched it in.

  "Kasim," she said, when he picked up. "As-salamu alaykum. Do you have a moment?"

  She listened.

  "I have a great favor to ask. Can you check on something for me?"

  She listened again.

  "It's an Akkadian question, from Gilgamesh. Would you look at your copy of George, the second volume, plate 64, and tell me if I'm going nuts?"

  Listened.

  "My copy has an extra line in between lines 18 and 19."

  Listened.

  "No, I'm not pranking you, Kasim! I can send you a screen shot."

  Listened.

  "Hang on." She picked up her hand cam, checked to make sure the anomalous line was still there in her copy of the book, and photographed it. The photo was instantly transferred to her comm, and from thence to Kasim.

  She listened again.

  "Yeah, pretty anomalous, right? Does it show up in your copy?"

  Listened.

  "You'll check a couple more copies? Great, thank you so much. Please, text me back as soon as you can. I'm going to have to go to class but I want to get to the bottom of this. I've been using this plate for years and I have never seen this line. Thanks, Kasim. Ma‘a as-salaama."

  She clicked off, still bemused about the whole thing.

  The middle daughter.

  She was a middle daughter, number three of five.

  Why would someone want me to go to Larsa? And how the hell did they change my copy of the book?

  She picked up her comm again, and hit a low-numbered speed-dial.

  "Grumpaw? I need a really fast trip to the Middle East. Any chance I could get you to fly me to Iraq?"

  ◆

  After her class, which was interesting to say the least, and a quick drive from Bloomington to the Wolff's lake estate later, Yehudit, her grandfather, and Chris von Barronov all boarded the Frumious Bandersnatch and strapped in.

  "I always bring Chris along because he yelled at me one time about trying to drive this thing without a navigator," explained Wolff.

  "One time, two hundred-odd years ago," agreed von Barronov.

  "But he never objects when your mother drives it without one."

  "That's because your mother is smart, and doesn't try to time-travel."

  Yehudit couldn't help it. She started laughing.

  "This is exactly how Mom described working with you two on the trips to visit the Shizzle," she said, finally, after catching her breath.

  "Well," grumbled her grandfather, unrepentant. "Look at our results!"

  "Conceded," agreed Yehudit. "Now, here are the exact coordinates." She handed von Barronov a sheet of paper with geo coordinates out to six decimal places, neatly typed.

  "45 east, 32 north," he said, "which will do for the first approximation." He dialed in a few settings and nodded at Wolff. "Are we rotating?"

  "What's there?" the other man asked, reasonably.

  "Nothing but fuck-all as far as the eye can see," said Yehudit, authoritatively.

  The two men snickered. "Not likely, in that part of Iraq," replied von Barronov.

  "Well," sniffed Yehudit, "the area directly surrounding it is barren. There are farms all around it."

  "Flat as all hell, probably dozens of farmers' houses within eyesight," noted Wolff. "Been there. Long time ago, but been there." He looked at the dashboard clock. "It'll be dark by the time we get there, but even so, I think we'd best be careful and stay rotated out of sight."

  "Concur," nodded von Barronov.

  "Whatever it takes to get us there," agreed Yehudit.

  "Okay," said Wolff, "set it up, Chris."

  Von Barronov clicked a couple of verniers, then gave Wolff a thumbs-up.

  Wolff reached above his head, flipped the safeties out of the way, and grabbed the two big red switches. "Rotation in 3, 2, 1," he intoned, and flipped the switches.

  Instantly, the scenery changed from the inside of the Bandersnatch's hangar to a big, dark, earthen plot of nothing in Iraq. As Wolff had noted, it was after sunset, and this many miles from the nearest decent-sized town, there wasn't much light pollution breaking up the dark of night. He flipped a toggle and the aliglass windows changed over to a night-vision mode, which was annoying to look at, but beat not being able to see at all.

  "I've got things set so we can step out of the airlock into the correct line, if we want," said von Barronov. "What are we looking for, anyway?"

  "Like I said back at home, I'm not entirely sure," said Yehudit, "but I don't like a mystery in a book I know damn well did not contain a line in Akkadian cuneiform that said a middle daughter needed to come here."

  Wolff rolled his eyes. "Beam," he said, simply.

  "You called?" came a voice from behind them.

  Yehudit started. She turned around, adrenaline-rushed, and saw an old man standing there, wearing hunting clothes, or at least that was her first impression. "Who are you?" she gasped.

  "His name is Beam, and he's one of the Guardians," explained Wolff. "And he's probably the answer to your question."

  "I'm more than just a Guardian," Beam pointed out, seemingly annoyed.

  "Yep, you are," replied Wolff, evenly, "but not to someone who is not read in. Remember, we had this discussion before."

  "Indeed." Beam sighed heavily, and turned back to Yehudit. "You are the middle daughter of the Lion of God, correct?"

  "I am, but what's that got to do with the price of seaweed on Coleridge?" asked the woman, bewildered. "And what the heck is a Guardian?"

  Beam ignored everything but her acknowledgement. "I am sorry I had to meddle with your textbook. It has been restored. But it got you here and did so without the need for me to reveal myself – or so I thought," he said, glaring a little at Wolff. Yehudit still looked bamboozled.

  "Relax," said Wolff. "It did get her here. The truth is, while it's been obvious for some time that other timelines exist, if only because it's known Ariela came from Timeline One, we don't emphasize or really even talk much about the Great Simulation and the Guardians." He shrugged. "It's been easier to hush that up than to explain it, and in so explaining, lobbing a virtual nuke at every religious tradition in the world. So we didn't do any revealing until I decided your joke had gone on long enough."

  "It is not a joke," pointed out the Guardian. "There is something here only your middle granddaughter can find. It is hidden even from me except for a very tiny disruption in the Mesh."

  "Which is compartmented, Beam," pointed out Wolff, evenly.

  Beam now looked exasperated. "You hide this from your own granddaughters, even knowing what you know, and have known, for two hundred years?"

  Wolff shrugged. "When it becomes necessary to explain, we do so. We did with Delaney, and you know that."

  "Yet you have four other granddaughters with the power, in different ways to be sure, but with the power nevertheless."

  "What 'power', pray tell, would that be?" inquired the object of their discussion. "And when are you going to explain things like, 'Great Simulation', and 'Guardians'?"

  Wolff turned to his granddaughter. "Yehudit, have you ever felt something manifest itself to you that seems, hmm, supernatural, or magical, or whatever the hell the kids are calling superpowers these days? I quit reading comics years ago. Reality became strange enough."

  "Well, no, Grumpaw, I . .
. " began Yehudit, somewhat hotly, before a strange look came over her face. "Wait. Wait. The dig."

  "Which dig?" asked von Barronov.

  "There was a dig at Tel Afek. Northern Israel. When I was a sophomore. It's a site that's been dug for, jeez, I don't know, three hundred or more years? To the point where it's basically little more than a tourist dig today. Anyway, that's when I realized I had a sort of preternatural ability to point at a spot and find something significant buried there." She looked embarrassed. "A couple of times doing that, I could shrug it off as luck. When I realized it wasn't going away, I had to start avoiding the cool stuff and let the other students digging around me find it. I didn't want to become an object of study, myself."

  "Did it repeat?" asked Wolff.

  She nodded, emphatically. "Oh, yeah. Every dig I've ever been on, after that. In fact, you're parked right on top of a motherlode of something; it's big, and it's probably gold and silver and precious jewels covering an iron or bronze object, probably dating back to Nebuchadnezzer or even earlier. I imagine the only reason nobody's ever found it, is it's down about fifty feet. I think the rivers gradually silted it over during flood seasons."

  "You've never been here, right? Larsa, I mean."

  "Nope. Never. Even though most people think I have, because of my interest in the languages and antiquities of the ancient world."

  Beam said, impatiently, "That's all well and good, but what else do you see, more toward the center of the area where Egalmah was?" He pointed.

  "Why can't you see it?" asked von Barronov.

  "I told you, all I can see is a little fold, like a tuck taken in spacetime. If that's better than what I said before. It appears to have been deliberately hidden."

  "By whom?" asked Wolff, patiently.

  "That will become clear when we find it."

  "I'll make the point that I can't see it at all. And I've got what I've always assumed was full control, just like Yuz8!rfk. Chris, can you see it?"

  "Nope. I can see a long way down, but I don't see what Beam's talking about."

  "I see an . . . anomaly," said Yehudit, carefully. "It's two miles down, and it does look like something is folded over it. Wait. What are these lines? It looks like a grid, but in 3D. I've never seen anything like that before."