“I have a key,” Paul said firmly. “We’ll just let ourselves in.”
“Oh yes, excuse us sir, we’re time travelers and we need as few hours on your machine here…” Nordhausen was trying to be sarcastic but Paul just fixed him with a determined stare and he relented. “You mean to say you have a mission planned? Is that why you’ve been carrying Kelly’s laptop around the last three days? You’ve got research? You think you can send us off to some desert again and reverse all this—prevent the Palma event from happening? In this mess?“ He jabbed a thumb at the open door where the City noise seemed louder, more cacophonous, with a tinge of uncertain anxiety in the normal backwash of cars and people. There were more horns, people shouting, car alarms going off, emergency service sirens, all adding a sense of urgency to the moment.
“I have an idea about that too,” Paul said again, “but we’ll need Kelly, so getting him back is the first order of business. He’s the only one who can handle the programming for a new mission.”
Nordhausen blinked. He started to say something then stopped and took a last swig of his now warm Tsing Tao beer, setting the bottle down on the table with a hard thud.
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You think Kelly’s alive, god only knows why, but you do. And I know you’re stubborn enough to hold to that, his obvious absence aside. But it’s just denial, Paul. You’ll have to admit it eventually. You’re just making it harder on yourself with this.”
Paul said nothing, folding his arms defensively and pursing his lips. The professor gave in and gestured to him with an open hand. “OK, OK, I’ll go along with this for the moment. But what makes you think he’s alive? At least tell me that.”
“Why should he be dead?” Paul started. “It’s not denial, Robert, just positive thinking. Why should I assume he’s dead just because we couldn’t hold the quantum fuel together for a safe retraction? My bet is that he is still safe at his mission location.”
“What, having tea with the Assassins, like you were in Masyaf when you fell through the Well of Souls? That’s a stretch, Paul, not to mention that his mission location is over ten thousand years in the past. You explained it all to me yourself—he’s likely to have wandered off his initial manifestation point, and he could be anywhere in the area now. He could be kidnapped and hustled away to some stronghold like you were. Hell, these people are smart. They managed to stop Kelly, foil our intervention and reverse Palma all in one throw of the dice. They obviously know who Kelly is, and how important he is to the success of our endeavor here. Don’t you think they’d make damn sure he was well away from his manifestation point so we’d be unable to pull him out? Better yet, they could end the whole affair by simply cutting off his head!”
“They didn’t cut off my head,” said Paul.
“Well they should have.”
“When you were captured by Rasid and his men at Wadi Rumm they didn’t cut off your head.”
“Well they should have,” Nordhausen remained adamant.
Paul smiled, reaching for Kelly’s laptop where it sat on the unused chair at one corner of the table. “I need to show you something,” he said quietly. “I’ve been doing some digging around in the history.”
Nordhausen tapped his fingernail on the table top impatiently. He watched as Paul opened the laptop and poked at the touchpad to call up a file.
“OK,” said Paul. “You did your thing with the Rosetta stone and you claim you can read hieroglyphics, right?” The professor gave him a suspicious look. “Then read this…” Paul swiveled the laptop around so Nordhausen could get a look at the screen. The professor leaned in, squinting at the image there, suddenly curious. There were two symbols in a characteristic oval cartouche. One was a circle with a dot or another smaller circle in the center. The second looked a bit like a styled letter A, three strokes, with the left vertical side extended and curved below the horizontal stroke.
“That’s Ra,” the professor said at once as he pointed to the circular character. “It’s the symbol for the sun.”
“Right,” said Paul. “And the other one?”
Nordhausen thought for a moment. “That would be the symbol used to indicate a pyramid, a burial chamber, as they were all basically tombs.”
“What could it mean?” Paul urged him on. “What do those two symbols in tandem spell out? Sunset? The sun dying and going to its tomb in the underworld?”
“No, no, no,” Nordhausen pointed at the circular cartouche surrounding the two symbols, and noted that they were stacked one above another. “The cartouche was used to isolate characters and indicate a name. It’s someone’s name, probably an important figure that the rest of the glyphs are talking about. Where did you find this? I’ll need to see it in context to tell you what it means.”
“Exactly!” Paul clasped his palms together as he spoke. “Now…You said that first symbol was Ra, Atum-Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun. What’s the second symbol called, the one describing a pyramid?”
“Well the ancient Egyptian name for pyramid is Mer in some translations. It means tomb: pa mer. Others think the Greeks got involved in the etymology, by describing the pointed tops of ancient wheat cakes with the word ‘pyramis.’ But remember, the Greeks weren’t even around when the Egyptians started with all of this. So the prevailing wisdom is that the word has other origins. It’s all related to the sun cult one way or another—to Ra. Some even interpret the word to mean ‘fire in the middle’ and claim the notion of a pyramid arose from ancient volcanoes, the fire in the middle being obvious in that image.”
“Right!” said Paul. “You really do know this Egyptian business, don’t you.” He smiled. “So what do we have here, my friend. Sound out this name phonetically. Ra-Mer. You have to pronounce that first syllable with a long a, but does it sound familiar?”
Nordhausen frowned. “You aren’t serious.”
“Of course I am! Look at it. Two characters in a cartouche indicating a name, and they spell out Ra-Mer. That’s Kelly’s last name, Kelly Ramer!”
Nordhausen rolled his eyes. “Your whole theory is based on this? You’re telling me you think Kelly is alive just because this cartouche appears to sound out his last name? That’s pretty damn farfetched, Paul.”
“But there’s more!” Paul rotated the laptop and called up another file. “Can you read these?”
Nordhausen saw that there were many more hieroglyphics now, and he noted that they began and ended with the Ra-Mer cartouche. He spent some time looking the symbols over. “Ra-Mer comes…at the moment of the rising sun…make that dawn. It says Ra-Mer greets the dawn…forever and ever…make that eternally…at the appointed place.”
Paul gave him a satisfied look.
“It’s pretty damn thin, Paul,” Nordhausen protested again.
“Think for a minute,” said Paul. “If you were Kelly, lost in Egypt over ten thousand years ago, what would you do to try and signal your friends in the future? You would have only one reliable means of communication—the hieroglyphics! You would find a way to give your friends the one vital bit of information they would need in order to pull you out—your physical location at a specific point in time. We need both the temporal and spatial coordinates, to program a retraction scheme!”
Nordhausen was shaking his head. “Look, assuming he is alive somehow, do you think he’s just free to do whatever he pleases? He must have been discovered and captured before he could act. You think his captors are going to let him chip merrily away at stone walls, writing things they can easily read, and signal you his location? You’re daft!”
“No, just optimistic. You assume these messages were carved just at the time of his capture. They could have been written days, weeks, months or years after, when Kelly’s relationship with his captors may have mellowed considerably. My guess is that they would treat Kelly with the same respect and dignity he deserves as one of the Founders, a Prime Mover and First Cause Initiator. Their whole effort at changing the contin
uum through Time intervention depends, for a large part, on Kelly. And what was it your captor said—that they would not kill another Time traveler as a matter of policy?”
“To use his own words, he said it is not seemly for a Walker to strike down another. No doubt there are major consequences when you mess with Free Radicals—all Time travelers become Free Radicals on a mission, correct?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Paul agreed. “And in our case we’re more than Free Radicals. We’re Prime Movers and First Cause Initiators. It would have been a simple matter for them to assassinate us all once they discovered we were operating against them. But they can’t. The Outcomes and Consequences are too severe. So my bet is that they treat Kelly with the utmost respect, and that he finds a way to communicate through these hieroglyphic messages. “
Nordhausen thought deeply, then decided to accept Paul’s reasoning. After all, if there was anything they could do to save Kelly and reverse this horrible catastrophe again, then it was incumbent upon them to act, decisively, and with all courage and speed. Though it still seemed flimsy evidence to work with, he decided to let Paul have a run at his idea.
“So where did you get this image,” he pointed at laptop screen.
“A recent discovery,” said Paul. “I used Kelly’s Golem program to have the little buggers search for anything I could feed them that would identify Kelly.”
The Golems were a name Kelly had given to a program he disseminated over the Internet that could, at his command, use the power of every computer they were installed on to conduct data searches. It was a super Google, as it were, collecting Internet data from every search engine and web source it could find and comparing it with a live RAM Bank that was constantly infused with real time energy to preserve a record of the history. The Golems would then note any anomaly or variation. In effect, the RAM Bank was their touchstone, their hold on the Meridian as a baseline of reliable data. It was a permanent record of the way history was written before Palma. The team could then use the Golems to do real time searches of the Internet and report any variance from the data they had stored in the RAM Bank. Any point of conflict in the data would indicate a possible meddling point by the adversaries at war with one another on the Meridians of Time.
The variations would be reported to the project team members via special cell phone alert, allowing them to spin up the Arch and actually create an artificial Nexus Point through engineering, where they could safely analyze what was happening and plot an intervention mission if one should become necessary. The team had made a pledge to defend the Time line they knew as history before the Palma event occurred. As any intervention affecting Palma would have to occur in that history, they could act to prevent tampering, by either side.
“Never mind how I found it,” said Paul gesturing to the image on the screen. “The Golems put me on to it and I followed up with a raft of discrete search algorithms. Suffice it to say that this Ra-Mer figure has no representation in the original RAM Bank. He’s an anomaly, and a very, very ancient one at that. These carvings were found behind a false door in the Tomb of Mehu. No one paid them much heed, and scholars were not able to discover who he was—at least that’s what the Golems find now.”
“The Tomb of Mehu?” The Name was familiar to Nordhausen. “That’s nowhere near old enough to hold an artifact from the milieu where we sent Kelly.”
“Yes, that threw me off at first as well,” said Paul. “Then I discovered that this tomb site once belonged to someone else. It seems Mehu was a bit of a hermit crab. He was remodeling the tomb of Pepi the first king of the 6th dynasty.”
“Still not anywhere close to our target time for Kelly.”
“Right and good,” said Paul. “But Mehu had come upon an old, old carving, and he thought it especially sacred, the writing of Amun-Ra himself, or so the research goes now. It was so precious to him that he built a new door in the tomb with an inscription dedicating the chamber beyond to his son, but there was no chamber beyond—just six feet of solid granite. So the door was false, and no one gave it another thought for centuries. Millennia in fact.”
“This was all in the Golem report?” Nordhausen was amazed.
“This and more,” said Paul. “Mehu cleverly used this false door to hide a very ancient artifact away from curious eyes. There was no chamber dedicated to his son there, but there was a small enclosure, at a lower level of the tomb, and it held something quite unusual—a very ancient carving of old hieroglyphics. More than a hermit crab, Mehu was a bit of a plagiarist as well. Because he copied some of the figures and characters he had seen on the artifact onto his own tomb carvings. Oh, it made no impression outside academic circles, very small circles at that, but the Golems turned it up when I told them to search for any permutation of Kelly’s name. Bingo! The entire sequence from Mehu’s tomb was later found to be attributed to the original carvings of this Ra-Mer figure!”
“How old,” asked Nordhausen. “This has to be well before the 6th Dynasty to have any relevance.”
“Well, researchers are now saying this artifact appears to be one of the oldest instances of hieroglyphics ever found. They’re saying it is over 6,000 years old, their best guess I suppose, but I think they’re wrong. I say it’s well over ten thousand years old, written by Kelly Ramer himself as a message to us that would survive through the ages and broadcast one thing—his exact physical location at dawn each morning in the milieu where he resides at this very moment, alive and well.”
Part II
Retraction
“This world . . . ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measure going out.”
— Heraclitus, Fragment 20
Chapter 4
California Street, En Route to USF, San Francisco – 8:45 PM
Paul was driving his Civic as fast as he could but, in spite of the growing state of emergency, traffic on California Street was still as bothersome as ever.
“Where are all these people going at this hour?” he complained.
“More than likely trying to ferret out food and fuel, which is what we should be doing tonight as well. How much gas do we have?” Nordhausen leaned over and squinted at the gauge, comforted somewhat when he saw the tank was still over three-quarters full.
“Don’t worry,” said Paul. “There’s plenty of gas to get us where we have to go and back again. Many times over.”
“Yeah? And what if they do something crazy and shut down all the bridges? You’ll have to go all the way down through San Jose and back up the 880.”
“Focus your mind on the mission, Robert. It’s not the gasoline I’m worried about, but the power situation. The Arch sucks a lot of juice to run up at 100% on a Time shift. Rolling blackouts have already started in a number of cities. We may need to have all three backup generators up on standby—and that’s where the fuel becomes an issue. We had only about two hours worth left after Kelly’s mission. Well, we’ll still have plenty in this car by the time we get back to the lab. If I have to siphon it off to keep one of the generators running, I will.”
Nordhausen didn’t look happy about that, but he said nothing more for a while, his eyes shifting nervously from traffic lights to passing pedestrians hurrying about the in the late evening rush. They were clutching shopping bags, scurrying across the busy street between cars as they slowed for stop lights, and darting into open businesses. The liquor stores, he noted, seemed to be doing a brisk trade. He remembered reading a blog entry that listed the hundred items that would disappear first in any major crisis situation. Generators were at the top of the list, along with things most people simply took for granted and never gave a second thought: matches, water and water filters, candles, propane and lamp oil, soap and detergent, toilet paper, charcoal, firewood, all sorts of storable food, batteries, flashlights, bleach, coffee, aluminum foil, rope, clothespins and that all American favorite, guns with lots of ammo. He could clearly see people out buying these very things. A man h
urried around a corner with a couple gallons of bottled water gripped under each arm. The professor felt that uneasy feeling of anxiety rising in his gut.
“Look what we’ve become,” he shrugged. “We have to buy our potable water in plastic bottles from a store.” Then he spied another liquor store. “That’s what we should be worried about,” he said. ”Beer and wine will make for some good bartering items when we aren’t enjoying them ourselves.”
Paul gave him a disparaging look. “I’ll open a bottle of Hahn ’06 when we finish the mission. We can celebrate with a good Pinot and a cheese fondue with toasted French Bread.“
Paul made a left onto Presidio and then quickly veered right onto Masonic Avenue, speeding up a gentle hill and bearing left to make the green light on Euclid and continue on. There was much less traffic here at this hour, though he got held up at the light on Geary. He continued down Masonic until he reached Turk Blvd, another east- west street that originated in the seedy Tenderloin district of downtown San Francisco and ran all the way out here to the University. He sped past the row houses in their characteristic flat pink, taupe, blue and yellow, leaning forward and squinting to see the street signs as he drove. A green sward of palm studded grass bordered with a long row of manicured hedges came up on his right, and he knew he had reached the university Lone Mountain Campus facilities.
When he saw the main pedestrian entrance, with two wrought iron lanterns on high squared columns lighting up the stairs and terraced gardens, he made a quick left and was lucky enough to find a parking spot at the end of the block. The Gleeson Library and Harney Science Center were directly ahead of them. Normally the place would be busy with student traffic, but it was largely deserted now. It was half an hour after sunset, but there was still a residual glow in the evening sky, with city lights coming up more prominently in all directions.
“Let’s go professor,” he breathed. “We’ve got some numbers to crunch.”
Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series) Page 3