John Schettler - Nexus Point

“You’re afraid they might—“ Maeve expressed the logical conclusion to Paul’s fear.

“Try to get rid of us?” Paul came out with it. “The thought has crossed my mind, in spite of Rasil’s mercy in sparing Robert. We have to assume that there will be people in the future who would see us as obstacles in their scheme. That makes us targets as well.”

“Lord,” said Nordhausen, “They could just go back in time and murder our grandmothers. It’s the Terminator all over again.” He tried to be glib, but there was real fear in the prospect he had suggested. “For that matter, what’s to stop them from pulling a 9-11 and sending someone back to fly an airliner into the Arch complex here?”

“Time,” said Paul. “She may have something to say about all this as well. We’re Prime Movers, people. We were the ones who first discovered how to travel in time. Even if they could pull something like that off, or rig it so we were never born, then what—how would they come to the knowledge of time travel without our research on the Arch?”

“Someone else might come up with it,” said Nordhausen. “That was common all through history. Elisha Gray was researching the telephone, just like Bell. The two of them rushed to the patent office just hours apart. The first manned flight had several close competitors; hell, even the top secret Manhattan Project had rival groups in both Russia and Germany working to build the bomb.”

“Your suggesting someone else may be working on time travel technology—even as we speak?”

“It’s a possibility. And from their vantage point in the Ninth Age, they would certainly know about it.”

“Well,” Paul sighed. “We were there first. Graves came back to us , right? So I’m betting we are all Prime Movers. In that case, it may not be so easy to tamper with our life histories, as we did to poor Rai’d Husan al Din when we reversed Palma.”

“But wasn’t he a Prime Mover as well?”

“A Free Radical,” Paul corrected. “He worked a Radical Transformation on the Meridian, but his influence was completely destructive. We, on the other hand, appear to be essential elements in the discovery of time travel. We may even be imperative.”

“How do we know that they haven’t already killed us? I mean, in some future event,” he explained. Nordhausen was not yet convinced. He looked at them, somewhat disturbed.

“My only hope is that we are all so significant to Mother Time that we will cast deep shadows—shadows so impenetrable that our presence in the time line will be difficult to tamper with.”

The significance of what Paul was saying spread to the eyes of his compatriots. An air of weighty seriousness settled on the room. “So,” Paul concluded, “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.” They all nodded agreement, but Nordhausen was already thinking about Paul’s last statement.

A touchstone, he mused. Yes indeed! He was still turning over the hieroglyphics in his mind, and an idea began to bubble up. There were lots of discoveries that failed to survive to his present day. Many artifacts had become lost, damaged or destroyed. Perhaps he could use the Arch to have a look at them first hand, and find out more about Rasil’s scroll. If it was indeed a rubbing, as he suspected, it seemed to him that some of the history was written in stone. The more he thought about it the better it sounded in his head, though he did not want to bring his idea up in committee just yet. He had an inkling of where he might find a good cache of old stone carvings from Egypt that had been lost to his day. This was going to be great fun, he thought. Great fun indeed!

One of the most challengingthings about time travel stories is the fact that they are all about change—about cause and effect, and the outcomes that derive from alterations in the flow of that causality. History, as we know it, is the slow, sedate flow of those events, as written down or dug up by a handful of writers, scholars and archeologists. But history, said Henry Ford, is bunk—it is really only a point of view, and a very limited one at that.

Take the history of the world as seen through the eyes of any given culture, and it will read quite differently. Each culture has its own moral and social systems, its own religious beliefs and creed, and a set of imperatives that drive it forward into the future. Inevitably, these cultures come into contact with one another, and conflict ensues. For us in the West, our history has been, in fact, a succession of these encounters and conflicts, leading at last, (as we like to think) to the supremacy of the modern Western cultures that make up our “First World.”

Yet we should not jump to too many conclusions about the surety of Western values and their eventual domination of the earth. The great cultures and peoples of the world have been grinding against one another for millennia, and the whole of U.S. history, for example, would not even span the length of the T’ang Dynasty, one of ten or more ruling dynasties that rose to supremacy in China over the centuries. While the West holds out its values as “inalienable rights” granted by God to a sea of equal men, it can be said that this claim bears as much weight, in history’s eyes, as that of the Pharos of Egypt, who thought themselves divine.

To be certain, there is gold in the ideas that have come from the West: democracy, freedom of expression, rights of privacy, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They have been echoed in documents and ideas since the time of the Greeks, through the Magna Carta and shouted on the voices of the French and American revolutions. (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!)

I finished the first draft of Nexus Point over the 2003 July 4 thweekend here in the United States, listening to the pop and sizzle of fireworks exploding in the night sky. I smiled to think that they were a symbol of rockets and bombs exploding during moments of great crisis in our own brief history, with the hope that our flag, symbol of our union and freedom, would still be there when the show ended.

As I write this our nation has seen two quick wars in recent years, ostensibly fought to deliver those freedoms to an oppressed people—though I have my doubts about that. The invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq can be seen as just the latest chapters in an age old conflict between the “West” and the Muslim world.

It could be that we are seeing the values we hold dearest slowly eroding with the weight of corruptions like commercialism, profit motive, loss of privacy, and the erosion of our civil liberties at home, with a foreign policy that borders on imperialism and forced hegemony abroad—quite the opposite of what our founding fathers intended. History will tell, at least in this Meridian.

Parallels between the time of the Crusades and our era come to mind easily. Meridian , written just after the 9-11 attack, begins with a devastating plot by radical Islamic terrorists, which is eventually foiled, ironically enough, at a moment in the time of the Arab uprising of 1917—the first modern expression of their desire for freedom from Western Colonization by the British and Turks. In Nexus Point , the cult of Assassins Paul stumbles on at Castle Massiaf is based on a real group that infested the highlands of Syria, holding out in fortresses and secret redoubts. They were led by a mysterious figure called the “Old Man of the Mountain” – Sinan.