Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “The place is all locked up. What if the computers are shut down too, Paul?”

  “They never shut down an Arion system,” Paul reassured him. “The damn things are running some application or another all the time. I’m just hoping five hours is enough time for me to verify this data set.”

  “Data set? You mean to say you’ve got a retraction point in mind already? You know where Kelly’s supposed to be?”

  They ran up the concrete steps to the building entrance and Paul fumbled for his pass key. “Being a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs does come with just a few perks,” he said with a smile. “You get free 24-hour access to most area science facilities, and ten hours a month on the Arion Network. I’ve got five hours left this month, but who’s counting tonight, eh?”

  He went through the door, the gleam of the hunt in his eye as he looked over his shoulder. “I have an idea,” he said again in answer to Nordhausen’s question.

  “Yes, and may I remind you that it was you and your ideas that started this whole mess in the first place.”

  “Correct,” said Paul, walking briskly ahead, determined.

  “And it was you and your ideas that started this damn Time war—“

  “Correct again,” Paul came to a lab door and jostled with his keys. “And it’s me and my crazy ideas that will have to clean it all up.”

  “What about Maeve?” Nordhausen said, an edge of caution in his tone.

  “What about her?”

  “Does she know about this?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well she damn near ran me through with an umbrella the last time we started a mission without her approval.”

  “The last time you started a mission,” Paul corrected him.

  “Well don’t think you’ll get any more latitude than I did. When she finds out you’re planning to spin up the Arch again, she’ll go ballistic!”

  “No one has to know about this but you and me,” Paul said flatly. “Look…It’s simple. We either beat this thing and win, or we lose and we can start using the last of our fuel to round up supplies like everyone else out there, and it’s going to be a long, cold ride into a near Medieval existence in about a month, as I read it. So no time for quibbling with Outcomes and Consequences. What could be worse than the situation we find ourselves in now—Kelly gone and the whole country coming apart at the seams? And that’s just the beginning of it. This was planned, Robert. Tell me I’m paranoid, but I think reversing our intervention and restoring the Palma catastrophe was just their opening in this latest chess game. I‘ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”

  “You and me both,” said Robert.

  They reached the Arion terminal and Paul pulled out a chair to settle in for what might become a long evening. The professor gave him a frustrated look, but watched in silence as Paul connected Kelly’s Laptop and established a link to the system. A minute later the main Arion system screen came up and Paul entered his password in the interface.

  “One thing I can’t figure out Paul…” The professor stepped gingerly into his thought, not yet certain what he was asking. “You tried explaining it on the way over here, but I was just thinking of that first mission again. If we were the first people to ever travel in Time, how come we received a visit from the future that evening—well before we initiated our first operation?”

  “Absolute Certainty,” said Paul, extracting a new term he was adding to his lexicon on Time travel. We were dead set on operating, one way or another. At that moment, we had come to that choice with absolute certainty. It was inevitable that we would do what we decided. So the outcome of that choice was inevitable as well. Time travel was possible the instant we resolved to make it so.”

  Nordhausen frowned.

  “Think of it this way,” Paul explained. “You’re driving on a road and come to a tunnel. When you enter it you haven’t emerged from the other side, yet there is a strong likelihood that you will. Once in the tunnel you can’t go left or right, or reverse direction or even back out, as the traffic behind will not allow it. You have to go through. There are places on the Meridian like that, but since the course of the continuum is defined by choices and events, when we make a firm choice, a kind of tunnel forms in the stream of causality that restricts variation. The strength of our will and determination actually exerts an effect on causality! Let’s face it. We were going to travel in Time that night, to one place or another. It was the first ever attempt to shift in Time, a grand event and First Cause. We spent years and all our personal wealth on the project, and I was determined to get a result that night. It was therefore subject to the principle of Absolute Certainty.”

  “But that’s not what the visitor told us.” Nordhausen reminded him. “He said we were so despondent over Kelly that we never made the shift. We just shut the whole thing down. That’s why they had to come back and prevent Kelly’s death.”

  “He was wrong,” said Paul. “And understandably so. In spite of their vantage point in the future, they cannot know everything. You said yourself that we really know only 95% or less of everything that has happened. So they did not know, for example, that I had the Arch rigged to operate automatically that night, and send through a small robotic rover with a camera—just a quick in and out. It was all set up to run at midnight, come hell or high water. Time travel was going to become a proven reality. So the principle of Absolute Certainty took effect, at least as far as Time was concerned.

  “We were in the tunnel from the moment we started the final briefing session. The volcano on Palma was exploding at that very moment as well. That was also a grand event because it was going to work a radical transformation on the Meridians. So let’s just say Time was gracious and forgiving that night in allowing our visitor to get through the chaos of Palma and carry out his mission, even though Mr. Graves arrived seven years early. His patience saved Kelly, and we went through the Arch instead of my robot. Time travel became possible that night, and the rest, if I may say, is history.”

  “They they must have found a way to reverse our intervention on Palma even before we sent Kelly off to the sphinx!”

  “Correct,” said Paul. “If Kelly had managed to succeed he would have eliminated their primary touchstone on the history. Yet Kelly failed. Time was just waiting for the outcome of his mission. After that the Paradox sweep calcified the changes made by the Heisenberg Wave, and we get this—“

  He gestured to the city outside the building, where they could hear the distant rumble of cars, people shouting, emergency sirens, and even an occasional gun shot. “Our Nexus dissipated when we shut down the Arch the other night. We stepped outside into this nightmare, and it’s only going to get worse. But speaking of time, we’re wasting it here with all this talk. Let’s get to work!”

  Nordhausen watched him keying in a few commands to call up his data set for the Arion analysis.

  “Those are Kelly’s numbers?” The professor was curious.

  “For the most part,” said Paul. “I’ve entered in a new spatial coordinate and programmed a series of potential breaching points for a retraction scheme, like a series of snapshots from a camera.”

  “New spatial coordinates? Where?”

  “The Sun Pyramid.”

  That threw Nordhausen off kilter for a moment. “What? But there weren’t any pyramids at that point in the history. They didn’t appear for thousands of years!”

  “Wrong again,” said Paul. “I’m using some new research a colleague of mine was just getting ready to publish. You remember those satellite infrared scans that discovered seventeen new pyramids? It was the work pioneered by Dr. Sarah Parcak. They found all these new pyramid sites buried under the desert sands, and thousands of new tombs and other ancient settlements. Well, this colleague was able to get time on a satellite and ran another series of deep penetrating scans. He hasn’t had time to review all the images yet, but last night I was able to get him to let me have a look at some of his raw data.”

&nb
sp; “That’s what you were doing until two in the morning last night?”

  “Right. He did a fairly broad scan series, and one of the satellite sweeps passed directly over the section of Cairo where our hidden sphinx was supposed to be—the very place we sent Kelly.”

  “On infrared? The heat and ground clutter of the city would make it impossible to read anything buried there.”

  “He was using ground penetrating radar as well. The sequence wasn’t supposed to kick in for another two minutes, when the satellite was scanning west of the Nile, where all the existing pyramids are sited, but for some reason it did. Consider it a Pushpoint, if you will. One of those little loose quirks that end up having dramatic repercussions. Well, it scanned the east bank of the Nile as well, and I took a close look at that data last night. Have a look at this!”

  He pointed to the Arion system screen and Nordhausen saw a satellite image of modern day Cairo. Paul zoomed in on a position east of the Nile and, in the midst of the maze like streets and alleyways, there was a prominent clearing that resolved to a greenbelt park area as Paul zoomed in. In the middle of the park was a circular walkway, bisected on the vertical and horizontal by two more paths, which intersected at a concrete structure, a perfect circle with yet another object in its exact center.

  “How’s that for a bull’s eye,” said Paul. “Now what does that look like there,” he pointed. “It’s the spitting image of the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, the sun. That, in itself would not be remarkable, but the deep penetrating radar found this, directly beneath the center point of that circle.” He tapped the keyboard and the next image came up. Nordhausen could clearly see the outline of what appeared to be a ancient ruin there, roughly square, but with an obvious center point. He had seen enough satellite imagery to recognize it as a possible burial site.

  “Well, I’ll be…” he breathed.

  “That’s a pyramid—or at least it once was a pyramid,” said Paul. “And this is the position of the Sphinx where we shifted Kelly, right smack in the middle of the Maadi district.” He pointed to a location slightly west of the greenbelt area. Paul zoomed out for a moment, his finger tracing a line due west across the Nile until it reached the site of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza. The two locations were on the exact same latitude.

  “Damn,” said Nordhausen. “At first I thought there couldn’t be a pyramid here on the east bank. They’re all on the west bank, the place of the setting sun, Ra’s journey to the underworld. That was the whole point of the tomb itself—the pharaoh was to follow Ra to the underworld.”

  “But there it is,” said Paul, re-focusing on the greenbelt area and superimposing the satellite image of the pyramid ruins. That object in the center of the circle is positioned dead center in the ruins that define this lost pyramid. And together, with our lost sphinx, we have what looks like an exact mirror image of the site at Giza!”

  “They come in pairs,” breathed Nordhausen. “That’s what Maeve said when LeGrand first revealed the existence of the second Sphinx.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “So I’m calling this the Sun Pyramid, situated at a point to greet the rising sun, the emergence and return of Ra on his journey into the heavens each day. And I’m betting our esteemed Mr. Ra-Mer is a nice dutiful Muslim as he goes out to greet the morning sun each day for prayer—right there, at those exact spatial coordinates, ten thousand five hundred years ago…”

  Chapter 5

  Harney Science Center, USF Saturday, 1:00 A.M.

  Four hours after they arrived at the Harney Science Center, the Arion system signaled that it had completed its analysis of the data and sent the resulting algorithms to Kelly’s notebook.

  Paul had been sleeping in his chair, leaning forward on the desk, his head resting on his folded arms. Nordhausen was slouched in a more comfortable chair nearby. The computer played a series of gentle tones, and Paul awoke, rubbing his eyes and reaching for his glasses where they lay on the desk.

  Suddenly a strange feeling came over him, and he thought he saw light and movement in the dark. A pulse of alarm stirred him awake and he turned, shocked to see someone walking briskly through the glass doors to the computer lab—literally! It was more like the image of a man, a wavering hologram that was edged with a luminescent blue sheen. As the image came through the glass Paul knew the man immediately, yet just as he was about to speak the image wavered and vanished. It was Kelly! He was there, for the briefest moment, and then gone, like a luminescent spirit haunting the darkened halls of the Harney Science Center. What had just happened?

  He shook himself awake, rubbing his eyes. Was he dreaming? Was he so intent on recovering his lifelong friend that he had conjured him up from the last fragments of his fitful sleep? No, he thought, that was real, and his logical mind immediately set about to grasp an explanation. Was the ghost like apparition an attempted Time shift? They called their own recon shifts “spook jobs” for a reason, he thought. That was exactly how one would appear to a casual observer. Kelly was there, for the briefest moment, then gone again, but there was something about his movement and gait that led him to dismiss the idea of a spook job. He was walking, intent on something, not merely standing on fixed coordinates as one might do in a spook job.

  It suddenly struck him that this was the very place that Kelly had been running the numbers for their first time shift! He had come here to the City because the Arion system at U.C. Berkeley was booked solid. Good Lord, he thought. Could I have seen an echo of that moment? How was it possible? That was a physical phenomena. The light from that image struck the retina of my eye…

  There was a long final tone from his system console signaling the data run was complete. The Arion had verified his information as sound and downloaded it all right onto his laptop. He turned to his friend.

  “Wake up, Robert!” he called. “Kelly is waiting for us, and we have little time to spare.”

  Nordhausen struggled to rouse himself, and Paul was going to tell him what he had just seen, then thought on it and decided to keep the matter to himself for the moment. There was too much work ahead of them and too little time. He wanted to think about it before he shared it with anyone else. So he urged the professor along and they gathered their things and hurried away, stumbling a bit in the dark and quiet. The cold air outside shocked them both awake as the rushed up the street to Paul’s Honda.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after one in the morning.”

  “Four hours? Why did it take so damn long?”

  “Never mind.”

  He put the key in the ignition and was dismayed when the engine did not immediately turn over. “Oh no,” he said. “Another Pushpoint! It’s been doing that from time to time. Come on baby, you can’t do this now!”

  The thought that his whole operation would be foiled by a faulty starter in his Honda would have been fitting justice given his theory that the really great events are all triggered, or prevented, by small and insignificant moments, happenstance, trivial occurrences all hiding in polarity with the momentous turning points of history.

  He turned the key again, and this time the engine fired up and started normally. Nordhausen breathed a heavy sigh of relief but, even as he did so, they perceived a slight jolt. He looked at Paul.

  “Is that the car?”

  “You felt it too? I thought it was an earth tremor or something. Well, it’s no more than a three pointer. Let’s get moving!”

  He put the Civic in gear and was pulling away when they both heard a cell phone ringing, muffled, yet near enough. Paul looked at Nordhausen.

  “That yours?”

  “I didn’t bring my cell phone with me,” the professor confessed. “Must be yours.”

  “Damnit,” said Paul. “It’s in my briefcase in the trunk! Who’d be calling at this hour anyway? In any case, we’ve got to get this data to the lab as quickly as possible. That’s all we have to worry about now.”

  The ringing stopped he pulled away making a quick le
ft onto Golden Gate Avenue. A moment later they heard the phone ring again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Robert. “Just get us to the lab in one piece.”

  Nordhausen was worried about considerably more. They both were, though Paul hid his anxiety with constant energy and determination. But the professor had an odd sense of foreboding, and his stomach felt very unsettled as they raced back across the city to the Bay Bridge. An hour later they were safely back at the Arch complex at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The system was up and running and Paul was riveted on the monitors, trying to watch everything at one time. The Golem module was winking out a red warning light, but he had no time to deal with it for the moment. They were going after Kelly and the retraction scheme was almost ready for full operation.

  The main problem had been power. The first thing Paul did when they got back to the lab was fire up the quantum fuel matrix and feed in the energy required to create the singularity and the strange quantum threads that would spin off from it to fuel the Time shifts. That alone took enormous power resources, and it wasn’t long before the power company was on the phone about it.

  Paul fended them off, saying he had a vital experiment underway for the next hour, and arguing that he had waited until this late hour to conduct his test, when the burden on the grid was minimal.

  “Are you aware what this is going to cost?” Nordhausen had asked him. “They’ll probably jack up the rates a hundred fold with this emergency underway. I’m surprised they even gave you a permit tonight.”

  “They didn’t give me a permit,” said Paul. “And they can bill me.” His focus was on the retraction scheme, and he had Kelly’s laptop feeding the numbers into the system, hopeful they would find someone at the other end. He had been able to get the exact spatial locus by calculating the height of the pyramid from the base signature it left in the ruins. There had been some discussion about the possibility that Kelly would be inside the pyramid, thus throwing off their calculations.