John Schettler - Nexus Point

“You think they all came from another time?” said Kelly. “From the future?"

“Sinan perhaps, but not Jabr, unless he was very devious. Yes, he spoke modern English, but he claimed he was taken to a far place to learn it. And he seemed clueless about things that any person from the future would take for granted. I asked him if I could make a telephone call and he was completely in the dark. In fact, he didn’t even recognize the King of Diamonds for what it actually was. No, I rather think he was recruited from that milieu."

"Isn’t that tampering? Wouldn’t that cause all sorts of complications in the Meridian?”

Paul thought for a moment. “You forget that the future researchers had a great deal of knowledge about their recruits. They may have been very selective. They may have brought him forward in time somehow, and then sent him back with his new training. Time plays a zero sum game. She apparently tolerates the movement of people from one milieu to another—even major figures like ourselves, if I may be so bold—as long as she can balance her books in the end.”

“Weird,” said Kelly. “So these guys had this natural power source in that water borne bacteria. What was it you called it?”

“An Oklo reaction. They’ve only found one that I know of, but this incident leads me to think that there may be others. The power source can persist for millions of years, as long as the bacteria colony is sustained. What a perfect way to mount operations at points on the continuum before there would be an adequate power source. Apparently they were able to use the Well Of Souls, as they called it, at least once a month.”

“Not any more,” Nordhausen put in.

“Don’t be so certain,” said Paul. “It was destroyed on this Meridian—at a given point in time. How long has it been there, though? It’s conceivable that someone could go back to the same spot—say last year—and use the Well to go through again. There’s no way we could prevent it, as we’re stuck on this side of Rasil’s demolition, constantly being pulled forward away from that event in time.”

“Right,” said Nordhausen. “Then Rasil was just spouting me a load of rubbish with his sadness over the destruction of the Well. He said he was from the ninth age and that I was from the seventh, so he obviously came back to use the Well at this point on the continuum. What’s to stop him from doing what you suggest? Ah, perhaps we could go through ourselves, and see what they’re up to!” Nordhausen rubbed his hands together, excited by the prospect. Maeve was going to say something, but Paul beat her to the punch.

“I wouldn’t advise that,” he said. “We couldn’t visit the site last year, or in any year in which we lived, for that matter. Time won’t allow that. One version of professor Nordhausen running about is quite enough, I think. No, we’d have to go back well before our births, and who knows when they set up that site? It could take any number of spook jobs, as Kelly calls them, to nail that down. Besides—we have the Arch right here in Berkeley.”

“That brings me to the whole point of my research,” said Robert. “Remember my call, Kelly?”

“Who could forget it. You sounded positively frantic.”

“Yes, well I was rummaging about in Rasil’s satchel, and I found this scroll—all in Egyptian hieroglyphics. They were very old. In fact, I was just trying to isolate the fragments in the data files over at U.C. Berkeley.”

“What did you find?” Maeve was immediately curious, and she wanted to keep a tight rein on the professor after all he had been up to in the last few months.

“It’s what I didn’t find,” said Nordhausen. “They’ve got every last line of discovered hieroglyphic text on file now, and I know enough about the script to replicate what I saw in that scroll. Using characters dating from the Old Kingdom, I was able to draw out most of what I remembered. I scanned the images and ran comparison query’s in the database, but there were no hits on those phrases.”

“It could mean that this Rasil had something from another Milieu.” Maeve was racing on in her thinking. “If he was a time traveler, then this could have simply been a waystation for him.”

“Right,” said Paul. “You saw how Kelly was able to use his Golems to isolate my arrival time in June of 1187—that was damn genius.”

“If I don’t say so myself,” Kelly smiled. “That’s what you pay me for, boss. I run the numbers.”

“Yes, but my point is that if we could get wind of a breaching point on the continuum, then so could anyone else in the future, if they had comparable technology. Maybe Rasil dropped into our time first to throw his adversaries off the track.”

“A bit of cloak and dagger,” said Maeve.

“Well, I certainly saw plenty of both during my visit to the Castle of the Assassins.”

“Then you suppose they might be using the hieroglyphics as a kind of code?” said Nordhausen. “That would explain why the passages don’t exist in any discovered writings. But I had the distinct impression that the characters I saw were a rubbing—as if they had been pressed onto the scroll from an original stone carving. It was very odd.”

“It’s all very odd,” said Paul. He rested his chin in hand and they lapsed into silence. The obvious question was percolating in all their minds. Kelly was the first to pour a cup.

“Assuming all this is correct: that we have some kind of conflict underway; probably being waged by people in the future using our own damn technology—”

“And assuming someone found out what we did about Palma,” Robert carried on, adding a touch of cream in the cup.

“Then what are we going to do about it all?” Maeve stirred things to their obvious conclusion. They all looked at Paul. “Your turn, maestro,” she quipped. “You dreamt all this up, remember?”

Paul smiled. “You know, you looked real good as a guardian angel,” he teased.

“I saw her first!” Kelly put his arm around her and Maeve gave him a knowing wink, leaning in to his embrace.

“Well,” Paul began, his voice taking a more serious tone. “We’ve got Kelly on board, and with ideas like his Golems and that dual RAM bank setup we’ve got a handle on the history as we know it, and a tripwire to warn us if it starts to change.”

“Did it change?” Nordhausen looked from one to the other. “I haven’t had a chance to see if Paul mucked up the Crusades or not.”

“No,” said Maeve. “Apparently he was very well behaved. Oh, we had variance readings popping up all through the Meridian while we were in the Nexus. I had a chance to read a few before I volunteered to become a ghost. There was certainly something up. One file was very strange. It seems there was at least one enterprising historian out there who had the history another way: Reginald was assassinated and the battle of Hattin was never fought. I was distracted by your phone call, Robert, and when I looked at my screen again the file was gone. One thing led to another, and we got swept up in the plan to rescue Paul. Then, as soon as we ran the retraction, the lines all returned to green.”

“Yes, that was quite odd,” said Kelly. “The data banks began to synchronize when the Nexus started to dissipate. My Golems settled down and everything seemed normal. We poked around in the pivotal events of that year. The battle known as the Horns of Hattin was fought in early July, and the Christian army was slaughtered. With the castles emptied of their garrisons, it was a simple matter for Saladin’s victorious troops to overrun the entire region. They took it all: Palestine, Tripoli, the Kingdom of Jerusalem.”

“That’s how I remember the history,” said Robert. “So you mean Paul’s trip didn’t change a thing?”