Anvil of Fate (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  “No,” Kelly frowned. “I’m telling you nothing has been written about it as of the moment of your query. You’ll note that everything the Golems fetch for us is from our present or the past. The history line ends with today’s date. The information is limited to the point on the continuum where the query originates. They can’t see the future, resonance or no resonance.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “If willful agents could know what is to come, then they could take preventative actions before those events happen and, if successful, they would immediately be exposed to Paradox. The event they prevented never happened, so how could they prevent it? No. Time seems to restrict all forward movement. You can only go back—to quantum arrangements that have already occurred. And you can return to your own milieu, as we obviously know, but you can’t go forward beyond the moment in which you live.”

  “Kelly went forward,” Nordhausen pointed. “Graves and the rest of them saved him from Paradox and pulled him out of this milieu into the future! And all the moments between our time and that future are quantum arrangements too.”

  “Well I didn’t say you could not be pulled forward to a specific time and location,” said Paul. “Hell, we just pulled Kelly forward over ten thousand years, to a specific location within a Nexus Point. My guess was that Graves and company simply moved him to a Nexus Point in their time as well, and kept him there—and a Nexus is a void in Time, so Kelly never really entered their milieu. He was in a Nexus the whole time. And yes, the line continues forward, but we don’t know what any of those quantum arrangements are. They are complete unknowns to us. We sent you to Rosetta, for example, only because we knew how to precisely code that time and place. But how do you code for an occurrence in Time you know nothing about? We could specify something in the math, but it would be a complete shot in the dark.”

  Nordhausen shrugged, and Paul went on.

  “Moving forward would require exact information as to time and location—information we just don’t have. Without it a person could shift right into the wall of a building, when we thought they were shifting to a safe vacant lot. The corona on the breaching bubble would probably destroy the inert mass there, allowing you to manifest, but you’d be stuck. There’s just not enough information to get a safe breaching point, even if it were possible to go forward. So we just cannot travel to the future, unless you want to do the Einstein shuffle and find a way to approach the speed of light for an out and back loop. But this is all irrelevant. While we stand here working out the theory, Time is holding her breath, waiting.”

  “For us?”

  “We’ve generated a Nexus Point here and, well, we aren’t just anybody, you know. We are willful operators—all Prime Movers and First Cause Initiators. We are the Founders, at least on this Meridian, and we’re sitting here with a functional Arch at our command, up and spinning at this very moment, and a good lead on what we think is happening in the history with this intervention. That’s power—tremendous power to change what happens with this event.”

  Robert raised his eyebrows, obviously in agreement as Paul continued. “This wouldn’t be the case if we were still scattered about the city here and the Arch was down. Then I think the Heisenberg Wave would probably generate much more quickly. But fortunately we are here. Remember what LeGrand said when he was trying to convince us to act last time? From here we can act with impunity. Time cannot decide the outcome for this Meridian until we do act, or fail to act, and this Nexus Point dissipates. Only then can the Heisenberg Pulse emit the wave and actually work the final transformation, and knit all these potential outcomes back into one continuum.”

  Maeve had a grim expression on her face. “So what we see here on the monitors is the likely outcome of what the Meridian will look like if we fail to prevent this tampering?”

  “Precisely,” said Paul.

  “Was this a side effect of the retraction scheme you ran for Kelly? Is it something we did?””

  “Absolutely not,” said Paul. “If the alert went out when you say it did, then we pulled Kelly out well after that. It’s clearly a counter operation. Our adversaries may have been working up plans along this Meridian for some time. Kelly says this Hamza fellow he encountered was making some effort at correcting the errors of Abdul Rahman. That’s hardly a description of an impartial scribe. They were obviously analyzing this battle, looking for the Pushpoint that led to the defeat of the Saracens.”

  “It was more a forfeit than a real defeat,” said Maeve. “At least the way I read what’s been written about it. Apparently the scouts and levees Charles sent to infiltrate the Moorish camp managed to stir up enough commotion that a substantial portion of the force attacking Charles broke off and rode back to protect the booty they had plundered on the way up the valley. The rest of the army saw this and thought they were retreating. Abdul Rahman was outraged, and he personally threw himself into the fray to try and rally his men. He was surrounded by the Franks and killed.”

  “That was pretty much a fatal stroke against the army then,” said Paul. “A badly managed force is one thing, but a leaderless army would not have posed a significant threat any longer, particularly against a man of Charles ilk.”

  “Right,” said Maeve. “When Abdul Rahman fell in battle, the Saracens broke off the attack altogether and fled. They all retired to their camp site to protect their plunder. Charles fully expected them the renew the battle the following morning, but they slipped away that night, a headless, defeated army heading back to Spain.”

  Nordhausen had followed Paul’s Time theory as best he could. He didn’t quite grasp it, but if History was waiting on them now, he would do his part to move things along.

  “The importance of this encounter cannot be understated,” he said. “Charles may not have truly earned his nickname here, but in subsequent years he is relentless in opposing further Muslim incursions. He learned from this battle and began to develop his own heavy cavalry, with stirrups to aid the untrained riders, and within five years he had some fairly reliable horsemen.”

  “But I thought the invasions ended here at Tours,” said Paul.

  “In a broad sense, they did,” the professor continued. “But the Muslims tried landing by sea at Narbonne again four years later in 736, and Charles Martel was ruthless confronting them. And he hounded them out of Provence as well, wiping out Muslim bases in southern Gaul. His son, Pippin the Short, finished what he started, and of course then we get Charlemagne, his grandson.”

  “So if Charles dies, or fails at the Battle of Tours, everything changes,” said Paul. “That’s what the Golems are picking up from information in the Nexus. That much is clear. But now comes the hard part. Where’s the Pushpoint? What do we have to do to preserve the integrity of this Meridian? Or, stated another way, what in the world did they do to change the outcome of this battle?” He looked from Robert to Maeve, but neither one spoke.

  Maeve went to the history module and began typing a few searches. “Suppose they tried to prevent the birth of Charles,” she began.

  “God, that could lead us anywhere,” said Robert. “You could go back generations and knock off a distant ancestor. These people are a cult of Assassins, right? That’s what they do for a living.”

  “But that is very dangerous,” said Paul. “If you deliberately eliminate someone from the continuum, you are also eliminating all his descendants, not just the one you may wish to target, and you are eliminating all their respective descendents as well. It gets exponential, and the farther back in Time you go the more dangerous this is. You know the old saying…everyone knows someone, who knows someone…”

  “But we prevented the birth of the terrorist Raid Husan al Din,” said Nordhausen.

  “He was unmarried, and had no descendents,” said Maeve. “I challenged LeGrand on this, and he confided the information. Husan Al Din was a Free Radical.”

  “But Charles Martel is another matter entirely,” said Paul. “He’s a Prime, and you don’t mess with Primes, right
Maeve? You drilled that into our heads early on. So my bet is that they could have done nothing to threaten the birth and early life of Charles. No. The Pushpoint has to be somewhere else.”

  Kelly had been listening intently, and he was tapping his desk with a thought emerging in his mind. He had been talking with Hamza about the archive, wondering where they would find the space for all the information they needed to store. Then he remembered the scribe telling him about the auxiliary stones they were carving and moving to other locations. That’s how he was able to get his name out there and get the attention of Paul and the Golems!

  “Wait a second,” he held up a hand. “Hamza said he was only carving the main narrative there on the archive walls. He said the details of an event would be carved on a stela and moved elsewhere. There just wasn’t enough room there, and they didn’t want all their eggs in one basket either, particularly after I showed up. But here’s the interesting part—he had a way of coding in the location of the stela. Yes, he showed it to me. What was that symbol he pointed out.” He pinched his lower lip, trying to remember.

  “Give me a piece of paper!” He was looking around and spied a notebook and pen across the desk. “OK, Robert, what the hell does this mean?” He drew some Hieroglyphic symbols on the paper and handed the notebook to the professor. He had drawn a line of birds, and a circle with an X inside.

  “Where did you see this?”

  “Never mind that now, what does it mean?”

  Nordhausen was puzzled for a moment. “Must be phonetic,” he muttered. “Sau… “

  “That’s it!” Kelly remembered. “Zau. Hamza said the details of this event were to be carved on a stela and sent to another location. This is its location code. Where is Zau?”

  Maeve was at the history module. “I’m going to take a chance and assume it’s somewhere in Egypt, and fairly close by the archive site,” she said. “These stones were not that easy to move.” A moment later she had a reference.

  “Ah…Zau, the ancient Egyptian name for Sais. A place called Sa el-Hagar today. It’s in the Western Nile Delta.”

  “Sais?” said Nordhausen. “That’s odd. If I remember my Herodotus, that’s the grave of Osiris, god of the afterlife and resurrection. But those ruins were ransacked by the peasantry after the old temple sites and ancient religions were banned when Rome adopted Christianity under Theodosius the First. It’s a fairly ancient site, though. The Greeks believed it was built by Athena, and antedates the great deluge that supposedly destroyed the lost realm of Atlantis.”

  “They were just usurping stories of Neith,” said Maeve. “She was an Egyptian goddess of war. Sais was her proverbial home town and the origin site of the cult that worshiped her.”

  “Well, Neith also had a lighter side,” said the Professor. “She was also a primordial deity associated with the first waters of creation—a great mother goddess. And in other interpretations she is depicted as the goddess of the loom, weaving all the strands of the world together to make a whole. She was supposed to do this each day. And incidentally…” The professor turned to Kelly. “Neith was thought to be the Mother of Ra. Having no husband, she was therefore a virgin goddess who nonetheless gave birth to, quite literally, the sun of the heavens above. Sound familiar?”

  Maeve was looking the information up. “Plutarch said that when this deity was subsequently identified with Athena, an inscription was carved at her shrine that read: ”I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.”

  “Damn,” said Robert. “How’s that for a description of Mother Time herself—she weaves the strands of the Meridians together to recreate the world each day. She knows all that hath been, all that is, and all that shall be.”

  “And we’re the first mortals to have raised her veil,” said Paul. So where is all this leading us? What’s the significance of this site at Sais?”

  Nordhausen thought for a moment, then something occurred to him, a sudden conjunction of worrisome thoughts that had been nagging at him since that moment at Rosetta when he first laid eyes on the altered Rosetta stone.”

  “Sais!” He said. “Yes! It was an ancient temple site. That’s where they would have published Ptolemy’s decrees.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kelly.

  “The damn Rosetta stone!” said Nordhausen. “We’ve always known it didn’t originate at the fort where it was found at Rashid—at Rosetta. It was obviously brought there from somewhere else. These proclamations were published at significant sites, places of worship and cultural centers. Many historians believe the Rosetta stone probably came from Sais, and as I said, that site was pilfered by the peasantry when the Romans converted to Christianity. The temples were all torn down and literally became quarry sites for other building projects. The Rosetta stone probably came from the Temple at Sais and was just stuck into the walls as part of the fortifications built at Rashid.”

  Paul snapped his fingers, suddenly very focused on what Nordhausen was saying. “Find out who built those fortifications, Maeve.”

  “Hold on a second, let me run a quick search.” She had the information in short order. “Qaitbay, a Mamluk Sultan in the fourteen hundreds. He was a general and commander of a Mamluk army, but also renowned for his many architectural building projects. He built all over the Middle East, from Mecca to Jerusalem to Cairo—“

  “To Rashid,” said Paul. “How interesting.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Kelly.

  Paul sighed heavily. “Let me see if I can pull this together. We’ve got this hidden archive where the details of key events are being carved, and you tell me the location code carved on a stela containing details relating to the history surrounding the Battle of Tours was placed in the city of Zau, Sais, the ancient temple site where Ptolemy III also published his decree—the very same decree that was busted up when the temple was torn down and quarried away for use in other building projects.”

  “By a Mamluk Sultan architect,” said Maeve.

  “In the wall foundations of the site where they found the Rosetta stone!” Nordhausen had the epiphany as well.

  “Exactly!” Paul was energized now. “At least on the Meridian where we found ourselves after the Rosetta Mission. We always wondered how they could have run that intervention to alter the Rosetta stone so dramatically. One thought was that it was another stone, carved somewhere else and substituted for the decree of Ptolemy III. I think we may have our answer.”

  “The damn thing was carved by Hamza and the scribes!” Kelly leapt ahead. “And, by god, it relates directly to the events now involved with this Grand Transformation—that’s’ what the altered stone was describing, the details of the events surrounding the Battle of Tours!”

  Chapter 8

  Arch Complex, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Saturday, 3:50 A.M.

  “But why would they want that discovered?” asked Nordhausen. “It would give their enemies a means of learning the details and allow them to run a counter operation against their mission.”

  “No,” said Maeve. “The stela we saw at Rosetta was clearly not the proclamation of Ptolemy III. There was no Greek or Demotic on it, only hieroglyphics, and therefore this stone provides Western scholars no means of translating the old Egyptian language. Besides, it was discovered by chance, and only on the Meridian we were riding, as Paul noted. In effect, I’ll bet the West remains baffled by the meaning of the Hieroglyphics to this day in the altered data the Golems are fishing up now.”

  “Confirmed,” said Kelly, still typing rapid queries into the Golem module. “Look at this index title: Mysteries of Ancient Egypt Remain Unsolved.”

  “I agree,” said Paul. “That’s what gave the Assassins the advantage they needed to reverse our intervention at Palma. But in light of the catastrophic consequences of the Tours operation, it’s likely nothing will ever be dug up at Rosetta. If Charles loses at Tours there’s certainly not going to be an invasion of Egypt by Napoleon! So I’m c
oming to see Palma was designed merely as a quick jab before the big right cross. It was meant as a blow against the contemporary power structure of the future West, and perhaps even created as a powerful distraction. Once it happened the Order was aghast at the consequences to their end of the Meridian, and they focused all their resources on that problem, which included enlisting us as well.”

  “While the main attack was being planned here,” said Kelly, pointing at the history module, “at the battle of Tours.”

  “Yes,” Paul agreed, a note of finality in his voice. “Tours is the fulcrum that levers the entire Meridian. It’s one of the first major crisis points after the Muslims come roaring out of Arabia following Mohammed’s death. If Charles Martel fails to stop them at Tours, all of Christendom is subjugated to the Moorish Umayyad Empire. The New World is discovered and colonized by Muslim explorers, there’s no United states, and no need for Palma at all if this transformation is allowed to occur.”

  “Then I’m not subject to Paradox if the Nexus fails here?” Kelly’s eyes brightened hopefully.

  “Quite the contrary,” said Paul. “Now we’re all in the same boat as you are. The Heisenberg Wave that this intervention will generate is going to be awesome. There may still be a city here after it works the transformation. The natural harbor of the bay almost assures that. But I guarantee you, it won’t be called San Francisco, and there won’t be any Lawrence Berkeley Labs here. In fact, there won’t be any Paul Dorland! My ancestors immigrated here in the early 1800’s from Germany. Who knows if that even happened?”

  “God almighty,” said Nordhausen. “That goes for all of us. They’re going to eliminate the four of us as well in this attack—but wait a second—” He stumbled in his thinking. “How could that be? We’re the people who discovered Time travel. We’re the First Cause, the Founders of all this, correct? How could they run an operation that eliminates us? It would mean they never discover Time travel!” He looked at Maeve, head of Outcomes and Consequences, the question obvious in his eyes.