John Schettler - Golem 7

“It looks like tampering,” she said, “at least from our perspective, but it may not be that at all. We can sit here and discuss this all day until the power fails again and the generators run dry, but this is something we cannot know to a certainty. We just have to proceed on faith, as it were. We already know that if we shut down the Arch and dissipate the Nexus Point we’re living in an altered Reality. This whole effort is to try and reverse that, but don’t be surprised if I tell you that looks to be nigh on to impossible now. This damnable Time war is causing too many fractures in the continuum. Look at this situation here! We’ve changed things, they’ve done the same—both sides. If the Order is involved in this operation as well, then we have at least three open Nexus Points impacting these events. Who’s going to have the final say here?”

“We are,” said Paul.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because our position on the continuum antedates any Nexus that may be open in the future. Any change they make can never be certain as long as we’re here in their past capable of making an alteration to counter it before any of them were even born! Yes, there’s a damn war on, and it’s clear to us that both sides are trying to manipulate these events. We may see demons in every corner of the history now, but we know this is likely—they are tampering here, and it may involve more than we think or realize at the moment. I mean, why not just blow up the transport this Lt. Thomason is on? Why go through all these hoops involving the fate of the Bismarck? Hasn’t that occurred to any of you?”

“I must say,” said Robert. “We’ve been going round and round about magnetic pistols on the torpedoes, but a good Glock pistol with a silencer would be a much simpler solution than the things we’ve been planning here. The Assassins got that name for a reason. Yes, why couldn’t they just go back and find this man and kill him before he leads his raid at Bardia, and make an end of it that way? For that matter, why don’t we just go and arrange the unfortunate demise of an ancestor to this terrorist, Kenan Tanzir. We know who his father is, and I’ll bet we can find his grandfather as well. See what I mean?”

“The grandfather problem,” said Maeve. “If you kill his grandfather he never existed, and therefore you never had a reason to do so. Time’s solution seems to be to prevent that from happening, by some means.”

“Except in the case of a Zombie,” said Paul.

“A Zombie?” Kelly laughed. “What are you talking about? You’ve been watching too many movies, Paul.”

“Yes, a Zombie,” Paul explained. “The walking dead. Kenan’s father is supposed to have died, but the Assassins did something to prevent his death. He’s alive, a walking dead man now, and we’re trying to put him back in his grave so that the Heisenberg Wave that generates will re-arrange the quantum state of the universe to our liking. You can’t do the grandfather thing because in that instance you deny his existence completely and Paradox prevents your action. But you can kill a Zombie by restoring the moment of his natural death to the continuum. We did it with old St. Lambert and Grimwald just a few days ago. They were both Zombies created by interventions taken by the Assassin cult.”

“What about Ra’id Husan al Din?” asked Kelly. “We prevented his birth to reverse Palma the first time. We denied his existence completely with that act.”

“Did we? I’m still not sure exactly what we did on that mission, though we clearly got an outcome that reversed Palma. We certainly went nose to nose with Paradox in that event. You’re right. If we prevented his birth that what reason did we ever have to do so? I think Paradox made a compromise with us. It wanted you as wergild, Kelly. It accepted our intervention, but the price was your life, until Mr. Graves and his associates reneged on the deal when they snatched you away into a safe Nexus Point in the future. I’ve been thinking about that and it comes down to this: Time is not a zero sum game. It has rules, principles, yes, and it tries to enforce them but it doesn’t always succeed, and it never gets an absolutely perfect balance sheet. Like DNA itself, it makes mistakes, glorious and magnificent errors, and sometimes catastrophic ones, from our limited perspective. When they pulled you out, as far as Paradox was concerned, you were gone. It moved on, closed the wound in the continuum, and that was that.”

He tapped Kelly on the shoulder. “You’re supposed to be dead, if you’ll forgive my saying so again, my friend, but you are not just anybody. Orwell was correct, some animals are simply more equal than others. You’re a Prime Mover, Kelly. We all are. While that does not make us invulnerable where intervention is concerned, Time has difficulty getting its change orders filled when a major Prime is involved. Prime Movers and Free Radicals are particularly problematic where Paradox is concerned. They weigh heavily on the scale of possible outcomes. Time tries to balance her books, but sometimes she simply cannot do so. In that instance Paradox does what it can, an annihilating force. But we have clearly seen that certain factors can stand, even in the face of that awesome power.”

“You mean us?”

“Not just us, but any major Prime has power to resist change—even face down Paradox itself. Remember all those near miss assassination attempts against Napoleon in the mission we ran to uncover the Rosetta Stone? Remember how they took shots at him, but each and every one misfired?”

“Remember all the knives that went into Julius Caesar?” Maeve jibed. “He didn’t get a hall pass.”

“True, but we do not know his true status. We may think of him as a Prime Mover, but Time may regard him otherwise. And everybody dies, Maeve. That was his fate. Yet this I do know… A Prime Mover, particularly one protected in a Nexus Point, is like a rock in the stream. This is not always the case for Free Radicals like Ra’id Husan al Din. Given the intervention we made, Time looked at what was left of the situation, and sometimes she just has to take what she gets. She’s not all powerful. The alteration we worked was achieved by Grand Primes in a Protected Nexus. We have power too, and we’ve proved that over and over again. You are here, Kelly. Your life persists, in spite of the fact that Paradox would rather have you dead.”

Kelly shrugged, “I’m a Zombie!”

“Yes, but you’re a fairly good looking one as Zombies go,” said Maeve, relieving the tension. “Alright. It’s clear that we have an altered state now. We’re starting from an altered Meridian, and struggling to make changes that suit us to create yet another altered Meridian. Yet we’re slowly losing integrity on the Time line we came from, what we like to call the Prime Meridian. There have been so many interventions since we let this genie out of the bottle that I doubt if we will ever be able to put things back the way they were on the eve of the first experiment. And may I remind you that by attempting to reverse Palma we are not restoring anything, we’re simply creating something new. We knew that the minute Kelly stole up on us at his own memorial service. We’ve known it all along, so let’s dispense with this notion that we are the defenders of the continuum, trying to preserve its integrity. We’re not. We’re simply trying to push reality into a shape we like, relying on the nostalgic memory of that old world and the data in out RAM Bank to guide us. It’s as if we were dreamers, concocting our own private world.”

“All men dream,“ said Paul quoting T. E. Lawrence, ”but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible… We are the dreamers of the day,” he concluded, “and that,” he pointed at the massive titanium security door that led down to the Arch, “that gives us the power to make our dreams come true. Yes, we cannot imagine every circumstance, or foresee every consequence of what we do, but we act because we can, and then we, like Mother Time, will have to simply look at what we get and live with it.”