John Schettler - Nexus Point

By God, thought Nordhausen, by holy God! What have I done? I insisted Paul come with me on this little adventure and then…

“Where?” He leaned forward eagerly, eyes searching his Arab companion’s face, eager for the answer. “Where did he go?”

“I cannot reveal that.”

Nordhausen sat up, flustered. “Why not? You just said that we were both safe here in a Nexus Point, right?”

“Yes, we are safe—but the whole world is now at risk again, my friend.” He gestured expansively at the terrain about them. The tall weathered walls of Wadi Rumm towered silently over them, brooding down with just a hint of distain and reproach. The earth sat, with infinite patience, and endured the constant insult of man.

“What does that have to do with it? We are completely alone. You said your guards don’t understand a word we’re saying. Come now. Where has he gone? You must tell me.”

Rasil’s eyes narrowed, and he stroked the dark stubble of his beard. “Do you realize the trouble you have caused here already? I was to jump at the setting of the moon!” He pointed to the heart of the cave, a flash of anger returning to his eyes. “Then you come fluttering out of the sky with the Jordanian Air Force at your heels. I thought you were a tourist at first, until I saw your cargo sled. You tell me, what is it you were carrying? Equipment? Must I have my men dig it up?”

“Dig it up? Damn it man, I told you what it was. It’s a fossil. An Ammonite. If you don’t believe me then go dig it up yourself. You talk about trouble? We were minding our own business until you came along. Now where is my friend?”

The Arab set his jaw, as if stifling a rising anger. “We cannot quarrel here,” he said. “You think we are without means, without resources after Palma failed. But, as you have seen, we are more capable than you may realize.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The war was going badly for you. In fact, we believed that the issue was nearly settled at Palma. But it can never be so, yes? It can never really be written while we struggle with one another. One side or the other must prevail. You and I are warriors, meeting here in the stream of life. Yet, now a chasm has opened and your friend has fallen through. It is not for us to quarrel like spoiled children. He is the master of fate now, and we must simply wait.”

The professor was trying to sort through the man’s words, and slowly, by degrees, the meaning was dawning on him. Rasil was clearly angry about what had happened here, yet he was forcing some truce on his emotion. A moment ago he wanted to kill me; now he accepts parley. It was as if he saw himself as my opponent in some way. Yes. He said it himself.

“What war do you speak of, Iraq? Iran? You mean the fighting in Syria last year?”

“Do not be coy,” Rasil berated him. “The American occupation of the Holy Lands in this timeframe will be short lived, I assure you. The Romans tried, and failed, just as the Byzantine Empire failed after them. All of Europe failed with their pathetic Crusaders. The French thought to carve out a kingdom there once. They held it for nearly ninety years, but Salah ad Din took it back. We saw to that by letting a mongrel wolf live out his fate, when we could have killed him at our whim. No matter! Now, in this age, the West comes to our land once more. First the British, then the Americans. It will not last. You will see. We had the solution in hand once, at Palma. We will find another, soon enough.”

The man’s words seemed to brand Nordhausen with sudden realization. He was speaking like they were mortal enemies. It was as if there was an ongoing struggle between two factions for the long-term control of the world. What was it he accused me of earlier? He said I was a member of some order. Now he was talking about Palma. Could he be one of the original conspirators? Could it be that they’ve got their hands on the Arch technology somehow?

“Palma? You mean you were in on that?”

“It was our master stroke!” Rasil’s eyes gleamed. “Yes! I have told you I am from the ninth age. I was a part of the world that Palma made possible. I tasted the fruit of that victory—the grandeur of Islam that spanned the whole of the globe. Oh, you tried to reverse our achievement for many decades, but always failed. The alerts would come in and we would rush to the safety of our Nexus Chambers to wait and stand the watch, looking for transformation. It never came. I tell you that we were beginning to think we had bested you at last. The Shadow was so impenetrable around the island of Palma that it frustrated your every attempt to reach a criticality on the Meridian. You could not get through—nobody could, and nothing that happened after mattered. The key event was at Palma.”

The look of satisfaction on his face suddenly withered and he returned to the posture of guarded watchfulness, eying Nordhausen with suspicion. “At least that is what we believed. Then the alarms came in again—just another feeble blow, we thought, the last death rattle of the Order. Imagine our surprise when we emerged from the shelter of our chambers and found the whole world was lost to us once more. Everything shattered, vanished, gone forever…”

Nordhausen gaped at the man and, to his great surprise, he saw how Rasil’s eyes clouded over with tears. The consequences of the mission to reverse the Palma event had been annihilating. This man knew them—he had been protected in a Nexus Point when it happened. Now everything he had been saying connected in the professor’s mind, and he nearly gasped with the awareness of it all. Time war! This man was talking about a struggle between some nefarious Arab faction and a group he called ‘the Order.’ They were at war, running missions into the past to alter the course of history one way or another. One side prevailed for a time, and Islam spread throughout the globe, the West destroyed by the awful catastrophe of the tsunami sequence generated by the Palma event.

Like a massive rock hurtled into the ocean, the ripples of change surged forth from that all consuming moment and made an end of Western history. Graves said it himself—they were desperate. They couldn’t get through the Shadow. Paul talked about that, and now it finally made sense to the professor. Palma was so decisive, so final in its effect, that the remnant of Western civilization struggling to be reborn risked all on one last operation. And they came to us, he mused, to me. I was a part of their plan all along; with Paul and Kelly and Maeve. We still don’t even know what we did, but it turned this man’s world on end—it changed everything.

He looked at Rasil, saw the tears, the pride as he struggled to control his emotion, the dignity of the man. He knew. He saw it all happen, and saw it all lost. It was as if all Western history had been re-written in a night.

“Do you have any idea what we lost?” Rasil’s voice was a whisper now, and he stilled himself, head lowered with the shame of his tears.

Nordhausen reached out and placed his hand on the man’s knee. “Forgive me,” he said softly. “This is a hard business.”

Rasil nodded, recovering his composure. He placed his hand on Nordhausen’s for a moment, and the two shared a brief understanding. “A hard business,” he repeated. “And it needs hard men. My tears were unseemly. But you see why I cannot reveal the breaching point to you here—you understand now, one hard man to another.” He withdrew his hand and the professor folded his arms. They sat there for a moment in the mouth of the cave, feeling very cold and alone.

“So, what do we do now?” said Nordhausen.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“Until the resolution, and it will not be long, I fear.”