John Schettler: Touchstone

It was scarcely less coldon the street than passing through the Arch. Nordhausen shivered in his heavy overcoat. It occurred to him that his clothes seemed to be completely frozen, much colder than the air, perhaps an effect of the time travel. He rubbed himself vigorously, trying to put some body heat back into the linen, wool and fur that a prosperous gentleman wore against the damp chill. The air was sour, acid, with heavy drops of floating moisture. He had never thought about how a pea soup fog would smell. Welcome to the industrial revolution, he thought.

There was no doubt, this was not the Cretaceous. Kelly couldn’t have botched the numbers this time, because he didn’t even know about this trip! Yes, Nordhausen had promised never to do anything of this sort again, but really… What harm could come of a little visit to Old London—just a sightseeing tour; a brief weekend? He would hardly be gone from Berkeley half an hour and they wouldn’t even miss him. That was the plan and, without any nonsense from Kelly and Maeve, everything would be just fine. This time he was spot on target, obviously in London, on a sidewalk, along a short street surrounded by generous four story buildings faced with stone, marble and plaster. Gas streetlamps shone feebly through the fog in the late afternoon, hazing over the view ahead. Dusk came early in this northern latitude, he reminded himself.

The city was noisy! A racket of wheeled traffic jostled on some nearby invisible block, and he was conscious of the susurrus of human activity that the vast city generated. There were no cars, but he realized what a lot of noise people made underneath the roar of city traffic.

In spite of his excitement, Maeve sat on his shoulder like a bothersome crow. He knew exactly what she would say if she ever found out about this mission. “What on earth were you thinking?… You did what?…”

Nonetheless, the die was cast, he was here for forty-eight hours, so he had better do what he could to avoid causing any problems, like forestalling the First World War or some other calamitous event. He didn’t see how he could change the Meridian if he simply laid low and went about his business as quietly as possible. He knew Maeve wouldn’t buy any of these rationalizations, and that was making him very careful.

Yes, he knew he had joined his hand with those of the other three team members to give his solemn oath. He could hear Maeve’s words, still whispering in his mind even now: “…I’ll say this: if we don’t shut this thing down, and I don’t see how we can with this war business, then we weigh in on the side of Mother Time… We know how things are now. It’s the world we believe to be our own—at least I do. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need something to hold onto each day; something I can use to make sense of the world. There’s enough uncertainty out there as it is. If we get involved, it must be to preserve the past as we know it now—to put a stop to this time war by foiling their efforts, if we can… only we do it with more sense and direction. We keep watch, and we plan, and we get it all right. Understand?”

Maeve’s point was well taken, but there was a thrill to time travel that she didn’t seem to embrace. Perhaps the brief experience she had while running Kelly’s first “Spook Job” to find Paul had not been enough to get her hooked. She hadn’t really time traveled—at least not to a place where she could open her eyes and breath in the air of a new world. She hadn’t camped under Jurassic skies or shared a meal with men who had died before she was born. And he was willing to bet she hadn’t opened her eyes during that first brief jump either.

Still, there was something to be said for her logic about the situation now. Time war! The thought still sent shivers along Nordhausen’s spine, and the London fog was quick to reinforce them. He drew his overcoat about him tighter, still thinking about something Maeve had said.

We know how things are now… Was that so? The thought that unseen adversaries from the future were creeping along the deep Meridians of time was more than unnerving—it was terrifying. What might they be about? If Paul’s experience after his haphazard stumble into that cavern in the Jordanian Desert was any guide, they were up to a great deal. That nest of Assassins had been festering away in the year 1187 and planning to meddle with the history of the Crusades! Might there be other nests; other key Nexus Points on the Meridian where the Assassins were setting up new operations?

Time war…

Maeve was quite correct. In order to fight that kind of battle one had to have some clear hold on the world before they set to meddling and changing things. Kelly’s RAM bank, and the nifty Golem program he devised to constantly monitor the Web, was a step in the right direction. To tamper with history you needed something, anything, as a sure reference point to measure your success or failure. The first mission, when they struggled to reverse the Palma disaster, they had to rely on their own living memory of Lawrence’s narrative in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom . Now, with Kelly’s RAM bank functioning as a kind of constant memory, they had some hold on the moment, some tether on the way things were supposed to be. Surely the Assassins would have faced this problem as well. What were they using? What was their reference point?

That thought brought Robert back to the intent of his mission. Yes, he had always wanted to see old London, but there was more to his weekend plans than a simple jaunt through the foggy streets of Dickens’ era. No, Paul said something that got him thinking, and he was following up his hunch before he brought all this to the others. “…we’ve got our Arch, and Kelly’s Golems, and the RAM bank idea gives us a good touchstone on the history. Now we stand the watch.” Robert remembered how they all nodded agreement, but he was soon thinking about Paul’s last statement.

A touchstone, he mused. While he waited out those anxious hours in the Jordanian desert he had encountered a man named Rasil, the Messenger, as he called himself. Apparently, this fellow had intended to take a little jump through the cavern they had stumbled upon in Wadi Rumm. What an ingenious idea! The technology of the Arch required enormous energy and computing power to work its magic but, somehow, the Assassins had figured a low tech way to achieve the same result. They used the quirky nature of a strange bacterium with an appetite for Uranium ions. Paul called it an Oklo reaction.

It took a month or more, but the subterranean pools of radioactive water were enough to generate the power required for a jump—a precisely calculated jump—from one particular point to another. How they figured it all out and secreted the equipment in the desert was still a mystery, but the cavern in Wadi Rumm was a one way jump to the time of the Crusades—right smack into the midst of Castle Massiaf, the key base for Sinan’s Assassins in that region. Unwittingly, Paul had taken the ride in Rasil’s place, and it was only the incredible ingenuity of Kelly and Maeve that brought him home.

Robert remembered how he wrangled with his captor, Rasil, and that brief moment when he had managed a glimpse into the other man’s haversack. In addition to the satellite phone he had used to alert Kelly and Maeve to their dilemma, he had found an odd scroll, inscribed with strange writing that he immediately recognized. He was still ruminating over the hieroglyphics he had seen there, and an idea began to bubble up. The scroll was obviously a message of sorts. Maeve’s voice was back, her words echoing in his mind as he replayed the conversation from their last meeting.