Touchstone (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  Maeve was suddenly making a remarkable recovery from the stupor of her Time shift. “You did what?” She was up off her chair, parasol still in hand, and advancing on the professor with bad intent. “When did this happen?”

  Nordhausen looked from Paul to Maeve as she advanced, edging behind Paul’s chair to seek protection. “Alright… alright now. If you must know everything, I did it on that mission last July. You know, when I went to visit Reading Station. I wasn’t just sightseeing as I told you.”

  “Damn you, Robert!” Maeve took a quick swipe at him with her parasol, scoring a glancing blow on his shoulder. He ducked behind Paul, flustered and embarrassed.

  “It was the lost manuscript,” Nordhausen pleaded, “not the original. It was stolen on the train ride Lawrence took—“

  “I knew that was what you were up to,” Maeve’s eyes narrowed, and she swiped at Robert again, the parasol rapping hard on the back of Paul’s chair as he dodged.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Paul protested, but Maeve was angling for a better chance at getting the professor on the head.

  “Kelly!” Robert yelled. “Do something! Stop that crazy woman before she runs me through with that thing.”

  Kelly had a big grin on his face, and he simply folded his arms and smiled, leaning back in his chair as he struggled to suppress his laughter.

  “I’ll show you who’s crazy,” Maeve lunged forward with the parasol, plugging the professor right in the belly with a hard jab. He yelped in protest, but then simply held up his hands in surrender.

  “Alright, I give in. I did it, and I’ll never live down the shame. I was just a selfish man, hoping to rescue something from trash heap of history, and it all came down around me, to no good.”

  Maeve was ready to give him one last jab, but she relented, plunking the parasol down on the floor with a hard thump and leaning on it heavily. There was a moment of strained silence, then Kelly burst out laughing.

  “We knew you were after something,” he said. “Maeve did the follow-up research and narrowed things down. The only event that was even remotely significant was the loss of the manuscript. So, you actually found the darn thing, did you? And you mean to say you still have it?”

  “Yes, yes, I confess. It’s stored in a vault in my study. I know—the consequences could be devastating. Suppose it was meant to be discovered by someone else—years from now—when we are all gone. I’ve had that in my belly ever since.”

  “And you’ll get a lot more in your belly if you so much as think of another stunt like that again,” Maeve vented. “Next time I will run you through with this—or worse!”

  Nordhausen passed a brief moment of terror, imagining the full brunt of Maeve’s anger unleashed upon him for his misadventures, though he knew he would deserve every agonizing second. He had been headstrong, and foolish, and he deceived his dearest friends at the same time. The whole weight of time seemed to fall on him now and he slumped against the console behind Paul’s chair, deflated and clearly upset with himself.

  Maeve saw the expression on his face, but a gleam of mischief came to her eye as she looked at him.

  “Do you know he tried to shoot Napoleon just now,” she said to Paul.

  “What?” Paul looked at Robert, aghast.

  “Now, see here, Maeve. I did no such thing!” The professor was trying to defend himself, his eye still fixed on the parasol.

  “Oh, yes,” said Maeve, having her fun now. “Just after we manifested—before you moved us back on target. He waltzed right over, picked up a rifle, and he was aiming the damn thing out the window at Napoleon.”

  “I was not!”

  “I barely got to him in time.” Now Maeve smiled, unable to keep up the front of her anger, and satisfied that she had made her point with the professor.

  Paul looked from one to the other, and Kelly was still laughing, holding his stomach as he rocked back in his swivel chair.

  “Alright,” Nordhausen protested as he realized Maeve was playing out the moment for all it was worth. “Enough of this. You can think up some horror for me later, and I promise you I will submit to any punishment you decide to mete out. But the stone! We’ve got to figure this out! How could they pull off a switch like that? Could they have carved it elsewhere, at the target time, and then floated it to the site on the river?” The professor was trying to conceive the operation himself as he went along, filling in the gray with wild assumptions.

  “Again,” said Paul, “what would they do with the original? It weighed 720 Kilos. You might get away with carrying some small object back on your person, like our literary thief here, but not an object the size of the Rosetta Stone. No… this is worse than we think,” he said.

  Nordhausen waited, hanging on the unspoken conclusion that was evident in Paul’s voice. “Well?” he was unable to contain himself.

  It was Maeve who spoke up now, her eyes fixed on Paul this time. “There’s been a transformation,” she said, matter of factly. “That’s why you pulled us out early; that’s why you won’t let the Arch spin down, isn’t it, Paul? You’re keeping the Nexus Point open for us here, because you know things have changed. Has anyone been outside this room since we returned? Does anyone have the slightest notion of what the world looks like out there?” There was an urgency in her voice, and an edge of fear.

  Kelly wasn’t laughing any longer, and the four team members stood in silence, listening to the distant thrum of the generator turbines. Paul spoke next, his voice laden with the weight of Maeve’s deduction.

  “I’m afraid she’s correct,” he said. “The alteration to the stone is too pronounced, too radical. If what you are saying is true, and it bore no inscription in Demotic or Greek, then our adversaries have managed to pull off a major coup while we were dallying about with this Rosetta business. God only knows what they’ve done.”

  “What do you mean?” Robert looked at him, slipping out from behind the chair.

  “What I mean is this: you say you think the Assassins were using the glyphs as a code, correct? Then this whole affair has been aimed at preserving the secrecy of that language. Now, I don’t know how they accomplished it, but they’ve managed to permanently do away with the Touchstone that led to the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. That means their code is secure, and all the messages they’ve been sending back and forth through time will remain a secret. Who knows what advantage that has given them in the Time war—perhaps it was enough to swing things in their favor again.”

  “Yes!” Nordhausen put in loudly. “Khalid said something about a transformation—do you remember it Maeve? He said there was a miracle. They worked it, day and night, and the best they could achieve was a hundred years of enmity. But now something has changed! Khalid said it was all made new again!”

  “Khalid?”

  “Someone we met at Rosetta. In fact, we met two agents in place. One man, a fellow named LeGrand, was clearly an operative of the Order. I was a bit obtuse on that point, but Maeve saw right through him. Then we were approached by a second man, an Arab. Later, at the dig site, the two men spoke, and it was clear that they knew one another—as adversaries.”

  He gave Paul the details of their mission, and angled back to those final moments before the retraction pulled them out. “Can you imagine,” he began, “the man actually apologized. He asked forgiveness and said he would pray for us. I wonder what he meant by that?”

  Maeve looked at Kelly, who was rocking back and forth in his chair, a steady squeak punctuating each move.

  “What about the Golems, Kelly? I thought they were supposed to warn us of any variation in the Meridians.”

  “Good point,” said Kelly, getting up quickly. He went over to the history module, leaning in to inspect the console. “We haven’t heard a peep from the Golems.” He settled into a chair and began entering commands.

  “Is there a radio handy?” Nordhausen asked.

  “Radio? Yes we have a shortwave built into the history console there.”
Kelly pointed and Paul spun his chair around, fixing his eyes on the communications module.

  He reached out, his hand hovering over the dial as if it might burn him. Then he switched on the radio and they all hushed to listen. The speaker played a steady wash of static, which seemed to surprise Kelly at once.

  “I had that set to KPFA talk radio—94.1 FM. Has someone moved the dial?”

  Paul looked at the digital readout. The numbers were still set to 94.1. He checked to be certain the radio was receiving the FM band. Then he pressed the search feature and watched the numbers scroll. Static rippled through the speaker, until the signal strength located something and locked on. A man was singing in another language. The first thing that came to Paul’s mind was that he had stumbled across a Spanish broadcast channel, then the realization of what he was hearing struck him, and the color faded from his cheeks.

  One by one the same awareness came to each of them as they listened. They were hearing the chant of the muezzin as he sung the call to prayer from the minaret of some distant, unseen mosque. His voice rose and fell, filling the silence of the room with a haunting chorus that deepened to a feeling of impending calamity. The lingering echo of the singer’s voice seemed to taunt them now, rising and falling through the intermittent static of the radio. Then the signal faded, unable to penetrate the magnetic aura of the Arch that surrounded them, and was gone.

  Part VIII

  Chaos

  “Chaos umpire sits.

  And by his decision more embroils the fray.”

  —Milton: Paradise Lost II, 907-909

  22

  Paul looked at Kelly, who was hunched in thought as he tapped away at the history module controls. It was clear that something was wrong there.

  “That’s odd,” said Nordhausen. “Could we be receiving a signal from the Middle East on the FM Band? Are you sure you don’t have the thing set to a shortwave channel? I often get foreign broadcasts when I browse the wires in my study. In fact, I listen to the BBC every night.”

  “No, this is an FM signal. I’m certain of it,” said Paul.

  “How very odd,” said the professor. “Atmospheric conditions must be ideal for an FM signal to go that far.”

  Paul said nothing. He was suddenly very interested in Kelly at the history module. “What’s up with the Golems?” He leaned in to inspect the computer console.

  Kelly just looked at him, then squinted at his monitor again. His face was a mixture of perplexity and disbelief.

  “Come on,” said Maeve. “What do the little critters say about all this?”

  Kelly gave a sigh and swiveled in his chair to face them. “I’ve got no variance flags on the RAM bank, no Golem warnings at all.”

  “Great,” said Nordhausen. “That means this isn’t a major transformation after all. The Golems have found nothing amiss.”

  “Yes, and let me tell you why.” Kelly’s voice had a warning in it now. He looked at them, his eyes shifting from one to another, even as the conclusion he was arriving at grew more certain in his mind. “The net must be down…”

  The words seemed to linger in the air when he spoke them. He saw the faces of his friends crease with concern.

  “What do you mean?” Robert spoke up first. “What do you mean the net is down?”

  “I’ve been trying to query the network,” said Kelly, but I can’t seem to get a response. There’s over 100,000 machines out there on the net with my Golem program installed, but I can’t connect with a single IP address. It’s very strange.”

  “You’re saying the Internet is down?” Nordhausen had an unbelieving expression on his face. “How is that possible? I mean, it was designed to survive a nuclear war, wasn’t it?”

  “Theoretically…” Kelly was thinking hard now. “There’s no one single hub on the net that could bring the whole thing down if it failed. It’s a widely distributed network, with hundreds of thousands of servers scattered all over the world.”

  “Then the problem must be local,” said Robert. “Check your connection, Kelly. You’re the networking guru.”

  “I have checked it—give me some credit, will you?”

  “Then it must be the damn ISP.”

  “No, it’s not. We have no ISP. We’ve got a direct high-speed optical fiber link, right into the backbone of the Internet.”

  “Then what’s the problem? Is your machine in order?”

  Kelly held up a hand, fending off the professor as he came up to the history module. “You don’t understand,” he said as firmly as he could. “The hardware here is fine. I just ran system calls on every lab console. Our RAM bank memory is holding true, no problem there, but it’s the net, I tell you. It’s not there…”

  Nordhausen just looked at him, a half smile on his face, fading with each second against the resolve in Kelly’s voice. “Not there?” He repeated the phrase, unbelieving.

  “I can’t get a response from my Golems because there’s no network traffic,” Kelly explained. “No network traffic of any kind. My query packets are being generated, but they all time out with no response from the network.”

  “This is absurd,” said Nordhausen. “How could the entire Internet be down?”

  Paul was off his chair and heading toward the stair well. The professor had turned to him for an answer to the dilemma when he saw him go. “Paul?” The plaintive twang in Nordhausen’s voice was plain to hear. Somewhere, deep inside, he was possessed with the notion that this was all his fault. It was his insatiable curiosity, after all, that had started the whole thing. He had to take that train ride to steal Lawrence’s lost manuscript… he had to go back to have a look at the Rosetta Stone in the British museum. While Paul had tried to comfort him, explaining that nothing he did could have caused a major transformation, the professor was still nagged by guilt, and the look on Maeve’s face did nothing to assuage his embattled conscience.

  “Where are you going?” He called, following after his friend.

  “The observation deck,” Paul said flatly. “It’s only two flights up, and the Arch effect should still encompass the dome. I’m going up to have a look outside.”

  “Good idea. Let’s have a look outside.” Maeve started after him, but Kelly remained behind, hunched over his keyboard as he stroked his chin in thought.

  Paul led the way into the stairwell and up a few short flights of stairs. He reached for the door at the top, and Nordhausen saw a slight tremor in his hand. Then he took hold of the latch and pushed hard. The door opened with a metallic squeak and Paul went through. Robert and Maeve crowded close behind him, as if his presence would offer them some protection from whatever they would find on the other side.

  The room was very cold, and completely dark. There was an acrid smell in the air, like ozone on a smoggy day in the city. Nordhausen saw Paul grope for the light switch, and it flicked on. Their gaze was immediately drawn to the far wall, where a series of windows marched in a circle at the base of a shallow dome.

  “What time is it?” Nordhausen asked an obvious question, for there was inky darkness beyond the panes. He stepped to the edge of the dome, feeling the cold grow more pronounced as he approached the glass.

  “It’s half past four, in the afternoon,” said Paul.

  “What? Is it storming? Why is it so dark? Look at it, Paul, you can’t see a thing out there. Is that fog or are we just socked in with overcast?”

  “Weather report was for clear skies, sixty five degrees,” Paul said matter of factly. “You were just telling me how the atmospheric conditions had to be ideal for an FM signal to reach us from the Middle East. That’s the bay side of the dome there, Robert, and we should be able to see the sun starting to set over the city by now.

  “Sixty-five degrees? Come over here! It’s freezing out there! It must be a freak storm that blew in off the ocean. What else?”

  Paul came to his side, immediately noticing the chill. Maeve hung back, her arms folded tightly against the cold that was ever more penetratin
g now. There was a flash of light outside the dome, lending support to Nordhausen’s suggestion.

  “See what I mean?”

  “I’d like to,” said Paul “but I don’t think that’s lightning.” While it looked like a tempest was raging outside, Paul could not believe his eyes.

  “Not lightning? Come on, Paul, come to your senses.”

  “It’s green,” said Paul. “Ever see green lightning? And don’t tell me it’s the Aurora Borealis. We would never see them this far south. Besides, I’d recognize them at once.” Paul had served a three year stint as a teacher in Alaska when he was just out of college.

  “Not lightning?” Nordhausen repeated the objection again, unbelieving, but his own voice quavered, and now the cold was sending chills all though his frame.

  “Feel that…” Paul’s breath was frosty. “This is San Francisco, Robert. That’s arctic cold. Ever feel that here before?”

  Nordhausen turned to him, shivering. “Are you saying something’s happened to the weather now? Are you saying the world is spun off its axis and this is the North Pole? Damn it! What’s going on here?”

  “Let’s get back downstairs.” Paul tugged at him, pulling him back from the opaque murkiness beyond the windows. Maeve was pale and cold, clearly worried as they retreated to the door.

  “What does this mean, Paul?” Nordhausen’s voice was punctuated by the clatter of their footsteps echoing in the stair well, but Paul said nothing, deep in thought.

  When they reached the bottom and opened the door they were surprised to see that the consoles seemed alive again. Lights were flashing to the staccato electronic beep of the computers. Nordhausen beamed when he saw it, smiling with relief. “He’s got the net back. I told you! It was just a local problem after all—must have been the storm.” He rushed toward the consoles, gleeful to have a plausible explanation in hand at last. But Paul’s trained eyes scanned the room quickly and came to another conclusion that had escaped the professor entirely.