John Schettler - Touchstone

Maeve prevailed at last and managed to pull him away. LeGrand turned as the two travelers started away, but his attention was soon drawn to the stone again, and the growing effort to recover it from the rubble. Khalid saw them leaving as well, Nordhausen pulled along by Maeve as they fled through a low arch in the walls, seeking a way back to the inn where they had spent the night.

“I can’t believe it!” Nordhausen breathed as they went. “It’s not the stone—but yet it was the stone. It has to be. Yet it was something entirely new! There was no Greek writing on it, and not a single word of Demotic script that I could see. The whole thing was—”

“Later, Robert. We have to get out of sight! I’m feeling very strange.” She paused briefly, struggling with her skirts and looking about her to see if anyone had noticed them. They had reached the edge of a grove of palms interspersed with a few banana trees cultivated in the fields before a small adobe farmstead. There was no one around, the commotion of the discovery acting like a magnet and pulling in all the locals to the frenzied activity at the dig site.

“How is this supposed to work?” asked Maeve. She pulled hard on Robert’s arm when he did not answer her, shaking him from his reverie.

“What?”

“How does it work, Robert? Do we have to get back to the breaching point? Do we have to go all that way? When will it happen? How much time do you think we have left?”

Robert realized she was talking about the retraction. “How much time? The retraction is scheduled for tomorrow morning!”

“Perhaps so… but I’m feeling… quite odd just now. I think my integrity is slipping.”

“Really? Well its probably just the sun, and all this excitement, and the dust. But, to answer your other question, I don’t think we need be anywhere close to the breaching point. Paul and I wandered very far during that first mission, and I took the train from London to—well, never mind that. The point is: it could happen anywhere… at any moment, I suppose.” Now he was looking around, realizing that it would be best to find some secluded spot where they could wait out the remaining hours.

“Over there,” he pointed to a cart path that led along the fringes of the thick palm grove. “That way looks promising.”

As they started toward it they heard a voice calling after them and turned about. Khalid was rushing over the parched ground, his lavender fringed robes flowing behind him.

“That’s done it,” Robert exclaimed. “Come on, we’ve got to give him the slip!” But Khalid was fast upon them, hastening up and calling for them to wait.

“It’s no use,” said Maeve. “He’s seen us, and he can follow us easily from this point if we make a run for it. Besides, the heat is appalling, and these skirts are a nuisance.”

“Friends, wait!” Khalid came up, breathless, but smiling with relief. “Oh, what a day!” He beamed at them. “Did you see it? Did you see it?” His hands trembled as he spoke, and he seemed to gaze at the sky as he praised Allah aloud, tears watering the corners of his eyes.

Robert did not know what to make of him, or his reaction, but Khalid was quick to explain. “It is wondrous, a miracle beyond my wildest hopes! We thought to find it broken—that is the middle way, the path of struggle and many hard years of strife and woe. Yes, I know you had hopes here as well. You came for the discovery, of course, for the stone. Forgive my deception earlier, but we all walk behind a veil, do we not? Believe me now when I tell you that there is sorrow in my heart at what you have witnessed. Forgive me—forgive us all, but there was no other way. We worked it, day and night, and the best we could achieve was a hundred years of enmity. But something has changed! Yes! A great transformation has occurred. It is all made new again, even as it was on the day our sword was first drawn in anger. Imagine my surprise! I was sent to keep watch, and now I must go to bring this news to my people. Oh, day of days! Allah be praised. We worked it, and now we may walk this world redeemed, with shining eyes and heads held high .”

“What in the world are you talking about?“ said Robert.

“Of what do I speak? Of a great day… but yet, more of a little thing that works the miracle. A’athreh ib dafra.”

“Look here, you have been very gracious, but we simply must be on our way.”

“Forgive me,” Khalid held up a hand. “ A’athreh ib dafra. It is a saying among Arabs. It means: with a stumble and a kick. Such is the way of it. Small things, a stumble and a kick, but the harvest is great. Still, I am sorry for you, I will weep for you—you must believe me. Tonight I will pray to Allah that he will take you in the palm of his hand, and preserve your lives. Yes, you must go now. No one will be the wiser. Take that trail and you will find a barn behind this farm. There you may rest until the time of recovery. And may Allah go with you through all the days that remain.”

What was he talking about? Nordhausen kept running Khalid’s words over and over in his mind. He seemed possessed, like a man enraptured, but buoyant, alive, exhilarated by the discovery that so baffled the professor now. The lines of the script still burned in his recollection. What did they mean?

He looked at Maeve, hoping to find support for his confused state of mind in her unshakable logic. If anyone would know what to make of this, it would be Maeve. She was watching Khalid go now, hastening away, back toward the site of the discovery. Already the word had begun to spread that something extraordinary had been unearthed at the base of the wall. The French soldiers could be heard shouting in the distance, and Nordhausen, with the history in mind, knew that they would be dragging the Rosetta Stone to the tent of General Menou, where the slab would be carefully cleaned and examined before being transported, by river barge, to Cairo.

He remembered how Maeve first wagered that, if the stone were intact, the trip from Rosetta to Cairo would have been the ideal time for someone to inflict the damage. But that whole line of argument was meaningless now. The original Rosetta Stone inscribed the same message in each of three different languages. This stone held only one language—it was completely covered by the ancient hieroglyphics… no Demotic… No Greek… It was completely useless as a key to translating the glyphs… completely useless…

His attention was shaken when Maeve suddenly swayed, as though overcome by the heat, and fell. Robert stooped to help but, as he did so, an unaccountable chill shook his frame. He knew at once why he was becoming so light headed. Maeve looked at him, her features frozen with an expression of panic. He reached for her hand as the haze of a blue frost materialized about them, transforming into the shimmer of a multi-colored aurora. There was a sensation of falling, and he felt Maeve’s hand tighten. The retraction scheme was kicking in! Kelly and Paul were pulling them back through the Arch at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. But why now? They still had a hours to wait—unless something had moved his friends to retrieve them at once, with an untimely urgency that added yet another chill to the moment at hand.

“I just don’t see howthis could be possible,” said Paul. “The haze in trying to alter the stone prior to its discovery would be intense. How would they know where to look for the damn thing?”

It was four o’clock on a gray September afternoon in Berkeley, and the growl of the generator turbines had finally subsided as the system reduced power. Paul was still keeping the Arch active on standby, with the generators running at 70% until the retraction was complete. Then he would take them down to 50%, just enough to maintain the electromagnetic field the Arch would create—enough to sustain the thin, protective boundaries of the Nexus Point it welled in the flow of Time.