John Schettler - Golem 7

“No,” said Maeve. “Methinks ‘tis neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring.”

“What do you mean?” asked Paul.

“Just an old English proverb,” Maeve explained. “Fish was eaten by the clergy, pious as they were. Flesh was eaten by those who could afford it, the wealthy classes, and the dried and kippered herrings were left to the poor. The expression lists the foods eaten by every class of society, and it was a therefore metaphor for something that encompassed every possibility. But I don’t see fish, flesh or anything else here. There doesn’t seem to be any possible intervention you could run, short of getting hold of a weapon and firing on the trawler while she was still out in the harbor.”

“Paul’s got a .22 rifle in the storage cabinet,” said Kelly.

“I know,” Maeve frowned. “Well you won’t sink it with that! Forget the rifle. That’s not what bothers me about this scenario. It has an odd smell about it. Maybe this whole thing is a red herring.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know… something with a ripe odor that pulls you in and turns out to be rotten,” Maeve said flatly, half serious, half joking.

“Oh, I know what a red herring is,” said Kelly, “but how does that apply to this situation?”

“OK, let’s start knocking down Paul’s dominoes,” Maeve folded her arms, the pose she often took when launching into battle over Outcomes & Consequences. “It’s clear that Sheffield is important to the outcome of the air attack on Bismarck , but this scenario is pretty shaky—don’t you agree? I mean, even if the trawler does force Gneisenau to berth elsewhere—“

“As it obviously did,” Kelly pointed at his computer screen.

“And even if the Germans do decide to pick this night, of all nights, to sortie out—“

“As they obviously did,” Kelly countered again.

“Then how do they have any control after that point? How do they assure that Sheffield is ordered to take the lead in Force H?”

“She had the damn radar!” said Kelly.

“True, but that’s still a very wide variable. Wasn’t there another cruiser in Force H? It could have taken the lead, or the whole fleet could have kept station together. Lots of possibilities there. And how would they have known Renown would develop a problem with her number nine bearing on the main turbine shaft and reduce speed? And how could they assure that Sheffield would not be informed of the speed change? That’s another variable a mile wide.”

“They could have sabotaged that bearing,” Kelly suggested.

“Which is another kettle of smelly fish altogether,” said Maeve. “Then, assuming all their educated guesses pay off here, how can they assure Gneisenau decides to even attack, and further, that Sheffield is actually hit in the battle that ensued—hit so decisively that she is put out of action.” She raised her chin, fixing Kelly with her patented “I dare you” stare.

He raised a finger, as if to say something, then simply said. “I’m hungry. Is there any of that bread in the kitchen? A peanut butter sandwich sounds really good about now.”

“With apple jelly,” said Paul, laughing. “Alright, Maeve. What you say makes sense. The angles on those variables are really too wide here. The dominoes appear to fall neatly onto one another when we look at the outcome of these events, but hindsight is 20-20, and as you so ably demonstrate, getting them to do so is another matter entirely when we push from the other direction. This could be a red herring after all, at least insofar as our efforts are concerned.”

That thought was very troubling, because this seemed the most obvious Pushpoint of all those Paul had identified in the Bismarck saga. The more they looked at the history, the more difficult things became.

“This is getting frustrating,” he said. “The history is a house of cards here. It seems all too easy to pull one out and send the whole lot tumbling down, but trying to put things back together again is daunting. For that matter, I still don’t see how they could have known Bismarck would sink the transport carrying Thomason either. The variance angles are just as wide on that as anything we’ve been discussing about Sheffield .”

“They may not have had a hard and fast plan,” Maeve suggested. “It could be that they are simply running scenarios—effecting alterations—and then looking at outcomes. When they get something they like, they let it stand.”

The comment spun Paul around, suddenly very interested. “Then you suggest they just decided to intervene like this and save Bismarck , then looked at the consequences? Why pick this battle? There are millions of places on the Meridian where they could intervene. Why Bismarck ?”

“We’ve answered that,” said Maeve. “It’s in the genealogy of our suspected terrorist. “If they discovered how he died, as we easily did, then they would just have to try any intervention that might increase the odds of that ship being sunk, the Prospector . Who knows? Maybe they were just trying to save the German battlecruiser at Brest, and the effect it had on the fate of Bismarck was just gravy. It could even be that they selected this Berber scout—the father—simply because he died in WWII. If they could reverse that, restore him to the continuum and get a son, then they would have a person that simply didn’t exist in our Meridian. Ever try to track down a killer who never lived?”

“I see your point,” said Paul. “So how would they put things back in order if they didn’t like an outcome? Suppose they save him and he never goes on to sire the terrorist.”

“You’re worried he might impact future events if left alive? Well… don’t we call them Assassins? They’d simply eliminate the man and move on to another intervention scenario. They can always keep trying,” said Maeve. “We can only assume they succeeded this time. Who knows how many interventions they may have tried before they got this little nightmare to work.”

“But how could they know—“ Paul cut himself off, struck by a sudden realization.

“Resonance!” he said excitedly. “If they were in a Nexus Point, and it was deep enough, then we could have a situation much like the one we faced at Tours a few days ago. Remember? The Nexus was so deep that the Heisenberg Wave took a long time to build up. It didn’t take effect immediately. Eventually it became strong enough, as a potential energy, to begin influencing events very close to the intervention point on the Meridian. That’s why there was no battle underway when I first shifted into the historical site at Tours. The Heisenberg Wave was so big it had already altered that part of the continuum, but its main energy release was held in abeyance—perhaps by the very same Nexus Point we established during that mission!”

“Well if I were Mother Time I would shudder every time someone spun up an Arch facility,” said Maeve.

“Exactly!” said Paul. “We’re still in defensive mode here now, trying to figure out how they assured the rise of this new terrorist. But on offense it’s a whole different ballgame. We could spin up the Arch to establish a Nexus Point, then run any intervention we choose, sample the Resonance in the Golem Stream, and see if we like what we get. It’s as if you get to make a move against a computer in Chess, see the outcome, and then just reset things to that position again if you make a bad move.”

On their last mission Paul made the alarming discovery that Kelly’s Golem search programs were able to perceive and report on information from a potentially altered Meridian. Once the Nexus field was operating, they seemed to occupy a kind of safe zone in the stream of Time where they were immune to the effects of alterations. The Golems had access to information from all possible Meridians passing through that Nexus. In due course they would come to reach a “weight of opinion” about the outcome of an intervention, which was the most likely outcome based on the total information available. Paul got the idea watching various computer models try to predict the projected path of a hurricane. As the information grew more certain, the various paths converged, and the outcome became fairly predictable. And as they learned from their associates in the future, information was much easier to transmit across Time than objects of mass. The Golems were seeing information from potentially altered Meridians resonating in the data stream.