John Schettler - Nexus Point

Now Paul was truly disturbed. He took the words in, a look of disbelief resolving to fear and amazement… Crusaders, Castles, Assassins and Sheikhs… Horses, Knights, Saxons, Franks and nary a cell phone to be found… It sounded, for all the world, as if this man was plucked right from a chapter of Medieval History! He had to be joking, or carrying out this colorful extended metaphor in his manner of dealing with the world. Yet the map, the clothing, the odd incongruities that had cropped up in all their hours of conversation. It sounded as if… but it could not be so, he thought. It sounded as if… but no, that was impossible!

“Jabr,” he said quietly. “Tell me truly now, will you? What year is this?” It was a question he never thought to ask before. Why should he?

“The year? Five-eighty-three, Allah be praised.”

“What?” The look of incredulity on Paul’s face prompted Jabr to touch his knee and offer correction.

“Forgive me, you reckon the years differently. We count from the time of Muhammad, peace be upon him. All the West counts from the time of Jesus the Christ, peace be upon him. It seems every prophet has his followers. We turn our maps one way, you turn them another. Let me see,” his dark eyes rolled to the vaulted ceiling. “That would make this the year eleven-eighty-seven, as the Christians reckon.”

Paul just stared at him, saying nothing at all.

Nordhausen satin the mouth of the cave, staring at the russet colors of sun and shadow painting the canyon walls of Wadi Rumm. He was still trying to fathom the incredible revelation in Rasil’s words. The man had come here with the intention of making a time jump through a hidden Arch that was powered by the natural nuclear chain reaction in the guts of a bacterial colony. What genius! How many of these sites did they have secreted around the globe? Where did they all lead? Rasil seemed to indicate that this well, as he called it, was a one way journey, but he would not say where it led. Poor Paul. Was he lost in some distant past or flung forward into the future? How would he ever know?

I’m responsible, he thought. If I hadn’t dragged him out here… But that led him nowhere. Paul’s fate was the smallest part of the dilemma he now confronted. The prospect of a Time war was terrifying. Who knows how long it had been underway, or how vast was the scope of its influence.

Nordhausen realized that he had already become an unwitting soldier in that war, recruited and pressed into service by the appearance of Mr. Graves. A good name for the man. The Professor wondered how many graves he was responsible for unearthing and how many lives he had reanimated by their little stumbling sojourn to the Jordanian desert in 1917? The inverse of that equation was painfully apparent to him now. It was pressed into the weary features of this man Rasil. He had seen millions of lives extinguished in an instant from the safe, yet tortured vantage point of a Nexus.

Now the two of them sat in another bubble of uncertainty on the shifting eddies of Time. What would be left of the world he now knew when it finally burst? Rasil’s comment about the dogs having their bones before the night ran its course still bothered him. He could not help thinking of how both Graves and Kelly had vanished during that last mission. Was his life, his very reality at stake now?

Rasil sighed heavily. “I must take care of something,” he said. “I won’t be long. The men I have with me here are not initiates. They cannot be permitted to ride out the Nexus to the world now waiting to be born. So I will send them out into the desert, beyond the sphere of influence, and I must do so quickly. Otherwise the madness will take them, and their dreams will never be whole again. They are from this time and place. It is the least I can do for them to reward their service.”

“I understand,” said Nordhausen, though he hadn’t the slightest idea of what the man was talking about. Unless… he remembered Paul and Kelly discussing the Arch bubble one night over dinner. Without grasping all the physics involved, it seemed the operation of the Arch created a calm spot in the eye of time’s storm when an operation was underway, and it was limited in physical range.

“Wait here,” said Rasil. “I need not warn you of the danger should you leave the sanctuary of the Nexus. I will not be far. And do not try to follow your friend. You would only fall to certain death.”

“Indeed,” said Nordhausen, convinced that his hunch had been correct.

Rasil stood up, calling to the men in Arabic as he slipped out of the mouth of the cave. The three men started down the rocky slope, to make their way back through the winding crevasse to the valley. Nordhausen strained to watch them go. Rasil gave him a single backward glance, and then they hastened away into the gloaming of the dusk.

Trusting soul, thought Nordhausen, wishing he had the Glock pistol somewhere at hand. Was it in one of the satchels they brought with them, or did Paul have it? What would I do with the damn thing, he mused, hold this Rasil at gunpoint until he talks? Something told him Rasil would die first. He called himself the messenger. I suppose he’s on some courier mission to another time. But why?

Nordhausen looked around, his eyes widening when they fell upon a hiking pack that his Arab captors had been carrying when they arrived here. “Hello,” he said aloud to himself. “Now I wonder what I might find in there!”

He craned his neck, squinting into the gathering dusk for any sign of Rasil’s return. The land was empty and forlorn, and only the sigh of the wind through the winding fissure of sculpted rock gave any hint of life or movement. He crept toward the hiking pack.

A moment later he had loosened the straps and opened the main pouch. There were obvious things inside: a two liter canteen of water, something that looked like hardtack biscuits, and… he rummaged to grasp at a dark metal tube in the bottom of the pack, something like a map case, he thought.

He had it out and opened the simple twist-on metal lid at one end, pleased to see that there was a rolled document inside. He drew it out, surprised at the soft texture and the unweathered condition of the paper. No, this was made of something else, more like a papyrus scroll. His curiosity was piqued and he slowly rolled it open, amazed to see a series of odd pictograms that he immediately recognized as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The two dimensional graphics were drawn in neat rows down the page and he quickly set his mind on deciphering them.

He had always taken a great interest in Egyptian writing, and had many notebooks of the curious script moldering away in his office from his graduate student days. He had studied the language for years, teaching himself to read and write the script at one time—though it had been many years since he worked with it. He looked about for an obvious starting point in the document. The language had evolved over time, and there were five different phases stretching from Old Egyptian through the Middle and New periods, and then on through the Demotic and Coptic texts. This writing looked very ancient, probably from an early period.

He scanned the scroll, noting the direction the little ideograms were oriented to find an obvious starting point. The convention was such that the pictures always faced toward the beginning of the text. There were larger drawings here and there, and he knew that anything purportedly spoken by a figure or god they represented would also have all its pictograms oriented in the direction that figure was facing. One figure dominated, and he began to read, working his finger along the line of ideograms, which indicated objects and actions, and phonograms standing for phonetic sounds. It was not long before he was able to construct the text in his mind.