“That would have been easy,” LeGrand explained. “But it would have taken time and, as simple as it sounds, it would have been risky. So, we encrypted the data in the video stream of this disk when we found it—the one we already had.” His eyes flashed at Kelly now, with a knowing glance. “We timed everything to sync well with the computers of your age. Now all you have to do is play this DVD through your system control module, and the entire operation will be perfectly coordinated as the video plays itself out. It was really quite devious. The R & D people are to be complimented.”
“I don’t understand,” said Kelly.
“You will,” LeGrand said softly. “At least I hope you will.” His eyes softened as he spoke.
Paul looked up, a conclusion plan on his face. “It’s the DVD we placed in your memorial site, Kelly. That’s why the grave site was tampered with. The Assassins were on to your plan as well, and they were trying to get at the DVD to prevent its discovery. Am I right?”
“Close,” said LeGrand with a smile. “It may be that the Assassins have a clue to what we are about to attempt, but they had nothing to do with the incident at Mr. Ramer’s memorial. We did that. Our agent in place for this milieu was instructed to secure it at all costs. We had to be sure we got to the DVD first, you see. It caused a bit of a ripple in the Meridian, and yes, the danger to your friend was very real, but you and the professor fixed that by publishing the backup you had hidden here in the lab. We kept the original, and we encoded it with our mission parameters… And there you have it.” He pointed to the disk in Kelly’s hand.
26
They all looked at the DVD. Paul remembered the moment when he first discovered it, while archiving data from the Palma mission. Watching Kelly working in the lab as he struggled to get the travelers back on target after the disastrous keystroke error that sent them to the late Cretaceous had brought a tear to his eye. He knew then that it would be the only fitting tribute he could offer at Kelly’s memorial.
“How far back is it,” he said. His eyes fixed on the disk. The prospect of another mission was daunting, but he knew they would have to try. Robert and Maeve had only just returned from Rosetta. He was the only other experienced traveler here with a quantum matrix signature on file in the system database. Kelly had never shifted using this equipment.
“A bit beyond the excursion to Rosetta,” said LeGrand. But not nearly as far back as your runabout after the KT event. Quite remarkable, if I may say.”
“How far,” Paul asked again, and his tone said get to the point without any uncertainty.
LeGrand heard the impatience, the urgency in Paul’s voice, and was suddenly very serious. “We make it 10,500 B.C…. or thereabouts.”
Maeve had an uncomfortable expression on her face. “Good then,” she said. “Are you ready, Monsieur?”
“What… Me?” LeGrand gave her a bemused smile. “Oh, I’d love to go,” he explained, “but it’s really quite impossible. I can’t pull a double shift, I’m afraid. Nothing has been programmed, and time is already waiting for me back home.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to some unseen future. “She won’t allow me to switch trains here. It’s out of the question.”
“Just as I suspected,” said Maeve unhappily. “So you want one of us to go in your place. You want the burden of all we might accomplish, and the blood, on our hands.”
“Really, Madame, must you be so gloomy?”
Nordhausen spoke up, tossing a new idea into the argument. “Why don’t you just raid the location of the site in your time? If you know where it is, just get together an assault team and storm the place.”
LeGrand stroked his chin. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We’re no longer in control of our time. They are! Besides, even if we could destroy the site in our time it would do us no good. The damage to the Meridian has already been done by then. No…The moment is now…the question is now. The other side has just moved a Pushpoint, something very old, and lost and utterly insignificant, save for its effect on the discovery of the Rosetta stone. We haven’t the time to find out where or how they accomplished that, so we came up with this counterstrategy as a last hope. You only get one chance, you know. It’s a bit like Judo. Your adversary makes an attack, and you must respond, then and there, and find the leverage to use his own energy against him. Soon the transformation will be complete, Paradox will have run its course, and we would be living in a nightmare world again—believe me, I know of what I speak.”
The look in his eyes revealed real fear now. “Islam will have spread the world over,” he said softly. “The West will be overthrown… everything, democracy, capitalism, the artwork, music, literature—remember what the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan? That was just an appetizer. They will tolerate no other religion but Islam… There is no God but God, and Allah is his name, and Mohamed is his prophet—over, final, done. You have no idea what it will be like. It’s not going to be a simple book burning raid here and there. Fahrenheit 451 is nothing compared to the destruction of our culture that will follow if Palma is allowed to re-occur. That’s what they did, you see. They’ve worked it so that Palma happens—just as it was supposed to. Oh, believe me, we’ve done our very best to prevent that. It’s been a real struggle, but we’ve held them at bay. Now the advantage conferred by their hieroglyphic code is just enough to give them the edge.”
“Yes!” said Nordhausen. “It was written on the stone… here, let me remember… ‘Through the ages now he comes to a mystery: one death gives birth, a great wind upon the face of the sea, in a place forever hidden where the lions roar: ‘mine is yesterday, and I know tomorrow.’ A Great wind upon the face of the sea: that must be the tsunami sequence generated by Palma!“
“A place forever hidden where the lions roar,” said Paul. “That has to be a reference to the Sphinx—or both of them.”
“Mine is yesterday, and I know tomorrow.” Nordhausen continued. “An obvious reference to the past, where they’ve hidden a record of all future events. But what does the first part mean?” He looked about, hoping to find the answer with one of the others.
“We believe it refers to Mr. Kelly,” said LeGrand matter of factly.
Kelly looked at him, confused? “Me?”
“I’m afraid so,” said LeGrand. “It was your death that prevented the others from acting to reverse Palma. ‘One death gives birth—to the whole of their dastardly plan, and the destruction of the entire Eastern Seaboard of this continent. That was what we sent Mr. Graves to undo—to prevent that one death—your death.”
He reached up to wipe the sheen of sweat from his brow. “But now they’ve found another lever,” he said. “It changes everything again. This last twist is fatal to our cause—unless we act here and now. We will be reduced to a bare handful of dissidents in our time, hiding out, constantly on the run, hounded into caves and hidden sanctuaries. Storm the site with an assault team? Try showing your white unshaven face in Old Cairo today, in the district known as Maadi, if you get the significance of that name, and see how you fare! Do you honestly think we could get to the place if this transformation takes effect? The Assassins have it completely encircled. The Fedayeen commandos guard it night and day. Their secret police are everywhere—or at least they will be if we don’t act to prevent them. From this moment forward they will begin to use the advantage they have gained. They’ll post a watch on the site, send agents all throughout the continuum to guard it.”
“Then won’t it be guarded now?” said Robert. “I mean, on this mission you have planned to the second Sphinx?”
“Perhaps,” LeGrand admitted, “but we’re targeting them just as they establish the place—a secret chamber beneath the Sphinx where their scribe will carve out the key Nexus Points in the whole of human history. That’s what they were using as a guideline. That’s why we could never figure out how they could still resist us when we destroyed the last of their Arch complexes in our time. They’re damn conniving—cunning beyond our ken. They
used these Oklo reactions to build hidden transfer gates—they call them wells. We’ve only found the one thanks to you, at Wadi Rumm, but there have to be others, and we’ve no time to look for them now.”
“And what if we destroy this hidden chamber? That’s what you want us to do, correct?” Paul wanted to get a glimpse of the outcome should they decide to undertake the mission.
“If you can,” said LeGrand. “It’s underground, and we’ve enough information to formulate a possible plan of attack. We found it in their own literature… the hidden stream that carries the walkers to the chamber of Time. The whole place is underground, you see, but it’s very close to the Nile. That area has been a problem in Cairo for generations. The water is leeching through the limestone and migrating under the city. We did research—no time to go into it all, but they’re using a series of locks on the river—the underground stream. All it will take is a little nudge, just as it should. The Pushpoint is one of the levers that opens the locks. We’re certain of it.”
“And these locks existed that long ago?” Paul had an incredulous look on his face.
“Only one,” LeGrand confirmed. “The others were built over the long generation as the river intruded on the location of their site. That’s why we’re sure of the Pushpoint. There’s only one lock at this target date.”
Silence enfolded the room, broken only by the hum of the lab consoles.
“Very well,” said Paul, looking at Maeve. “The others have just returned. I’ll go.”
LeGrand smiled warmly. “Very noble. It is just what we would expect of you,” he said. “But I’m afraid that your preparation might take more time than we have.” He eyed the clock again.
“But there’s already a quantum signature for me in our database here.” Paul repeated the logic that had led him to volunteer. “And Robert and Maeve have only just returned. They’ll need time to recover.”
“All true,” said LeGrand, “but first we would have to re-calibrate your signature, and then merge the data with the mission parameters we have programmed on the disk. There would be changes and, as Mister Ramer would be quick to point out, that would take computer time—more than we can spare.”
Kelly looked at him, a realization dawning in his eyes. “Then it’s me you want,” he said matter of factly. “You already have my signature encoded on the DVD, don’t you.”
LeGrand nodded, his breath abated, waiting as he watched the others for any sign of protest. Paul could see that his hand was shaking a bit as he fingered the hem of his gray cloak.
“Let’s get started then,” said Kelly. “You’ll have to resample my signature when I’m exposed to the particle stream, but if I know my methods and procedures like I think I’m going to, you’ll have an algorithm already encoded on the DVD to handle the data merge.”
“Precisely,” said LeGrand, greatly relieved.
Kelly was already edging his swivel chair up to the control console, all business. Maeve had a pleading expression on her face, close to tears, but she said nothing. There was a tense silence in the room. Kelly was opening the jewel case to remove the DVD while he toggled system switches.
“I’ll clear the necessary RAM,” he said. “Paul, would you check on the particle infusion chamber? I’m worried about the quantum fuel situation. Robert, you can be useful if you would get with Mister LeGrand here and figure out what I’m supposed to do. I’ll be half an hour here setting this thing up, and that won’t leave me much time…”
He looked at Maeve, and saw the tear streaking her cheek, his own eyes glassy as he swallowed hard. “And would you come down to the Arch with me, love?” His voice broke as he spoke those last words.
Robert leaned in to Paul. “Will it really be that dangerous?”
Paul just looked at him. Then he took him by the arm, walking him away from the lab console. “It’s like this,” he said softly. “If he’s fails the mission, we’re all exposed to Paradox, and who knows what will happen when the Nexus dissipates here in a few hours.”
“And if he succeeds?”
“In that event it will be Kelly’s fate on the line. The transformation he works will begin over 12,000 years ago, and ripple forward. It’s very likely that events will stand as we see them now, and there will be no attack at Palma by Ra’id Husan al Din. Understand? He’ll be the one exposed to Paradox again, just as he was after that first mission.”
“But we’ll still have the DVD,” said Robert. “And we published the whole thing to the web. If that survives, what’s the problem?”
“The DVD has location data for Kelly to be pulled from the lab on May 28th, 2010, at precisely 4:10 A.M. It’s September now, and he’ll be somewhere east of the Nile, in the year 10500 B.C.”
Robert’s eyes suddenly registered the dilemma. “Then the Order will just have to intervene again—like they did the last time. Don’t they have his coordinates on that DVD? I’ll speak to LeGrand!”
“Quiet down,” said Paul. He took a deep breath and looked his friend square in the face. “They would have to know exactly where he is—exactly—in both space and time, if they are to intervene again.”
“No problem,” Robert reached for one last rope, even though he could feel himself sinking into the realization of what Paul was driving at. “We’ll pull him back here and they can just scoop him from the Arch when he returns. That’s a location that we can cement in the history from this moment forward. I’ll resolve here and now to publish the exact coordinates, just like we did the DVD. As for the time, they will know that from our own system chronometers when he re-materializes here.”
Paul sighed, a look on his face that said he wished it all could be so. “He can’t re-materialize here,” he said, his eyes watering over. “We haven’t the quantum fuel to get him there and back again. Even the outbound shift is going to be cutting it very thin. Besides, this is a Nexus Point—a conditional Nexus, Robert. It is temporary. Time is waiting for the outcome. If he succeeds, and Palma never happens, then we never had a reason to run this mission. So the Nexus will dissipate rather quickly.“
“But we came back from the Hejaz on the first mission,” Robert protested.
“That was the first mission,” said Paul. “The initial breach of time was a grand event, a first cause, if you will. It was therefore not subject to the full weight of Paradox, and we were able to return because our place in the continuum was not altered. But that was not so for Kelly. If Palma doesn’t happen, then Graves never came back to save him, and Kelly is… gone… Nothing that fails to survive the Paradox sweep after Palma will survive in this Nexus when it dissipates. The Meridian we were in when we first returned from the Palma mission will be restored—only this time they won’t have Kelly tucked away safely in the future for us… And this time, when we stand at that memorial site to remember what he did for us, they’ll be no one to steal up behind us and dance on his own grave.”
27
“So we’re back to this,” said Robert, with a fallen expression. “It’s Kelly again, at the edge of annihilation, and all because of my meddling.”
“Why do you think that way?” Paul tried to console him, but Robert just shook his head.
“I had to have my precious manuscript…had to see Old London to breathe in the milieu of Sherlock Holmes. Now look at it. The moment I stepped into the grand gallery of the British Museum and saw… or rather felt the obvious vacancy there, I knew something was amiss. The Rosetta stone was gone, and I knew in my gut that I had something to do with it. It was me, Paul; my damnable fascination with history, and books, and opera, and all the rest. I sat there in the bar and toasted with Oscar Wilde! I consorted with Primes, as Maeve would have it, and now look at this affair.”
“Don’t be silly, Robert. We’ve already determined that your missions have caused no significant change in the Meridian. You merely happened upon this Time war, that’s all. It was mere synchronicity. The real culprits are the terrorists—on either side—who keep meddling with the hist
ory.”
“I suppose,” said Robert, needing some consolation now. “But what makes us any different, Paul? We’re the ones meddling now, and we’re paying a hell of a price for it—we’re giving them Kelly, for God’s sake, or humanity’s sake—and not even that. We’re taking sides here. Anything we do to save the things we love will wreak havoc on another culture. It’s maddening!”
Paul was silent, the gravity of his friend’s words finally reaching him on an emotional level. “Perhaps Maeve was right all along,” he said softly. “Perhaps we should have never started this thing, but it seems that this mission will finish it—one way or another. Yes, we are taking sides, I suppose. But what else can we do? We’re being asked to choose now—between the promises made by two possible futures. We have an eye on one, as it springs from our own culture, our own understanding. We haven’t seen the other, a world ruled by fundamental Islam, but we’ve seen enough of it to hazard a guess as to what that would be like. And we have LeGrand’s word as well. In the end, this is Kelly’s choice. If he wants to do this, then how can we stand in his way? In spite of all of that, there is still some truth to what you say. This has to stop. We cannot allow any future meddling in the Meridian again. After this, I’m shutting the whole thing down.”
~
Kelly was half an hour getting ready. The sudden realization that he was about to embark on a mission had primed his system with the adrenaline of anxiety. He was burning it off, fidgeting with the system console to be certain all the equipment was in order. He cleared as much RAM as he could find, and keyed in some backup subroutines.
All the while the great weight of what he was about to attempt began to drag on him. A read of the DVD video for embedded data produced the coordinates, in both space and time. He found himself staring at the numbers, disbelieving them. The temporal coordinates were going to take him over ten thousand years into the past! He was going to take one small step in the Arch tunnel and emerge in pre-dynastic Egypt! What would he do there? What would he find?
Touchstone (Meridian Series) Page 23