John Schettler - Touchstone

The man turned to him, with real warmth in his eyes. “The first time we spoke of the dawn when you questioned me about the sura I quoted at our greeting. I can see you are confused. Do not worry. This place—this time—has but two possible outcomes. Either you succeed in your quest, and this place is destroyed, or you fail, and we live on. You are experiencing a moment of dissonance, that is all. The echoes of each possible outcome join together now to create this moment in your experience. Come… we have so little time together. Will you not walk with me? We will go out and greet the dawn, and perhaps, if you are willing, we might offer a morning prayer of thanks, as all men should do when they are given a moment like this one.”

He started away, gesturing for Kelly to join him, and Kelly felt himself pulled along, as if by an irresistible curiosity.

“Then you knew I was coming… You expected me.”

“Yes, this time, at least. And we have set aside the logs and closed the lock on the hidden stream. Rest assured, your death does not await you within these chambers as you feared. That possibility has been closed…”

“What do you mean?”

“The first possible outcome—that you should succeed and the flood comes upon us here: I have seen it as well. I still recall the image of your face and voice in the hall of records when the waters came, and how we clung to one another when the torrent came upon us. Thankfully Salim was at hand at that very moment.”

“Salim?”

“Yes, one of our messengers. He was here to make his delivery of the fourth age, and set to leave just when you arrived. So it was that he returned with knowledge of all that you would work here. It was all in play, you see, his coming and going at that moment. And so it was meant to be this way all along. The other side strives mightily, but here we are once more, taking this long walk through the heart of the beast, out to greet the dawn. Oh yes, forgive me, I have not told you my name, though I am sure you may already know it.”

Kelly knew the man now.

“You are Hamza,” he said, the word appearing in his mind as he reached for it. “You are the keeper of records, the Scribe, the maker of days that are set in stone.”

“You remember!” Hamza beamed with delight. “I told you my name as we clung to one another before the end—in that other time, the possibility we have ended once and for all.”

They walked through a low arch, and Kelly could discern the gray light of dawn ahead of them. Soon they were up a long flight of rough hewn stones and out of the Sphinx, emerging from a nook near his right hind leg. The cold rain fell upon them, and the wind played with their robes.

“The tempest is upon us,” said Hamza. “This is no place to pray but, if you could see far enough, that is the way to Mecca, or at least the place where Mecca will rise up in ages hence.

Kelly squinted, the rain washing his face, and mixing with tears that welled at the corners of his eyes. They learned of my mission when Salim was sent back on routine courier assignment. He knew it all now, remembered it all, as if the contact with Hamza had shaken the hazy coils of recollection in his brain, and set them in motion. The fog of uncertainty was finally lifted in a golden moment of complete awareness. Salim was pulled out, and informed the other side of these events. Somehow, some way, they were able to run yet another intervention andsend someone back to preserve the integrity of the lock on the stream below. He had little doubt that the logs he had lashed to the flood gate below were set aside by now, as Hamza told him, and the hatchways closed to seal out the flood that was pouring down from the gray heavens above.

And so now, instead of a watery death with Hamza the Scribe, he would survive this moment—though he could not be certain that any other future still remained for him.

He turned to Hamza, tears in his eyes. “How long…?”

Hamza smiled. “We have a little while yet. Your friends will try to call you home soon, though you may not feel the place to be a home in your heart when you return. They will make an error, a very small one of course, but then little things have great consequences—or so we have learned. You will make your return, to a moment when Time may best decide your fate. I will pray for you, my friend. Allah is merciful to all who abandon the errors of unbelief, and hear his words.”

He pointed east, to Mecca, and began to speak, in a low voice that grew ever more certain, and laced with strength and purpose.

“How fixed is the order holding together this material universe above and below us! Yet it must give way before the vast, unfathomed Truth in which man will see his past and future in true perspective. To God he owes his life and all its blessings…”

The voice faded away, and Kelly could feel the strange sense of feathery lightness that accompanied Time shift. He was going home.

Kelly awokefrom a short nap where he lolled on the table at the college library. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked up at the clock on the wall. Lord! It was half past six already. Vague recollections of a dream fled from him as he stirred awake. He remembered a face, a voice, a prayer, yet none of the words made any sense to him now. He had dozed off, waiting for his computational run to download to his laptop computer, and now it was surely finished.

He got up, walking quickly through the glass doors to the computer lab where he had his laptop docked in a data recovery bay on the Arion system. Sure enough, his download had concluded twenty minutes ago, and he was surprised that no one had come to find him. Time on an Arion system was in high demand these days. He had to come all the way into the city to use this system, as the closer facility at U.C. Berkeley was booked solid for the day. Thankfully, there were still time blocks open here, probably because of the Memorial Day weekend, he thought.

He rubbed his palms together, as much for warmth as in anticipation of the data he now had secure in his laptop. The solutions to his convoluted algorithms were well in hand, now he just had to get to his Subaru and brave the Bay Area traffic to make the meeting at Nordhausen’s study by eight. He had to get out of the city, on a rush hour Friday night, over the Bay Bridge and up to Berkeley, and all in this maddening late spring rain.

As he carefully packed his laptop into its carrying case, an ominous rumble of thunder confirmed his worst fears. The freeways were going to be a nightmare. In spite of his nap, he was still tired, and hungry, but there was no time for a meal now. It would take him all of ninety minutes or more to get to Berkeley under these driving conditions.

He zipped up his satchel case and rushed out of the lab, heading for the staircase that would take him down to the lower floor. When he reached the upper landing he had the strange feeling that he had forgotten something. He paused suddenly, nearly tripping up a young female student, who smiled and maneuvered around him.

Something was wrong. He could feel it. Something was out of place… He entertained the notion for a brief moment, and then started down the library stairs, dismissing the thought as nonsense.

Overfive thousand miles and eight hours to the east something was wrong. Three men were walking down a long tunnel at the back of a hillside, dug into the side of the island mountain. Outside, the quiet stars shone in the sky, and the tiny village below them lay sleeping as the hour struck half past two in the morning. It would be the last hours of peace for this island, the home to one of the three men for long generations.

Palma, in the Canary Islands, was once a secret getaway and waystation for the old Arabic traders, and Ra’id’s family had purchased land there, a small farm and hillside villa, ages ago. Over the centuries it had been passed on, from one generation to the next, and now served as a convenient vacation retreat and lodge of prayer in the trying times of the year 2010.