Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (37 page)

       Kelly and Paul decided to let him stew. It
was just a little slap on the behind for his headstrong ways, and he knew he
had it coming. Days later he was back in Berkeley, elated to find that Paul was
alive and well, and amazed at the tale he had told. Tonight they would meet for
the final debriefing, and there was something he wanted to check in the library
before he showed up.

       When he opened the door the others were all
seated at the conference table, half way through a cup of dark, rich coffee.
“Major Dickason’s blend?” he asked.

       “Arabica Mocca Sanai,” Paul chimed. “I
developed a taste for it with my friends in
Massiaf
.
My, you’ve been busy, Robert. I had no idea you were so industrious.” He
thumbed at the far wall of the study where an immense, looming shape was
mounted on a sturdy oaken frame riveted to the wall. It was the Ammonite,
glistening under a sheen of protective lacquer that accented every calcified
line of detail in its near perfect state of preservation.

       “Splendid, isn’t it? I got men on the job
the instant I was back. You didn’t think I was going to leave it baking in the
hot desert sand, did you?”

       “We had a hard time trying to decide whether
to leave you there,” said Maeve.

       Nordhausen placed his hand over his heart
and proffered a humble bow. “Mea culpa,” he smiled. “Well, I suppose we should
get started, and I hope this finally settles the argument over whether we
should shut the whole thing down or not.” He looked askance at Paul. “You
aren’t taping this session, are you? I don’t want any unexpected visitors to
show up for coffee in the heat of our discussion here and send us gallivanting
off to the cretaceous.”

       “No tape, no cameras,” said Paul. “In fact,
no one was told of our meeting here today. It’s not in any log or appointment
book, and we should be discretely safe in the covering mists of time. No future
historian will know this conversation ever occurred.”

       “Unless they run a spook job on this place
tonight,” said Kelly, prompting a laugh from Maeve.

       “I’ll never forget the look on your face,
Paul,” she began. “There I was, half naked and draped in a bed sheet, just
trying to keep a hold on myself when I suddenly saw you gawking at me across
the room!”

       “Quite an amazing specter,” said Paul, “or
so it seemed at first. I finally put the clues together, however: the lights,
the cold mist, and you, my dear. I think I recognized you on some level,
strange as the moment was.”

       “Which leads us to my point,” said Kelly. “I
think we may have discovered the truth behind all these reputed sightings of
ghosts and spirits through history. If your hunch is true, Paul, if there is a
Time War being waged, then the two opposing sides might be running recon
missions into any number of milieus. That means we might get a glimmering of
what they are interested in, of what they are up to, simply by researching
ghost stories.”

       “Good point,” said Maeve. “Most of what we
call history is really lost in shadow. Just as we hope there will never be a
record of this meeting, 99.9% of everything that has ever happened still
remains unknown to us. If we decide to get involved in this, then it’s very
likely I’ll be donning my little white sheet again and again, and frightening
the wits out of people in the process.”

       “So you’re calling it a Time War now,” said
Nordhausen. “I thought the very same thing.”

       “It certainly seems like that,” said Paul. “These
people thought I was a member of some nefarious group they called ‘the Order.’
I think this Sami figure I told you about was positively set on killing me. It
was clear that someone was using the sink at Wadi Rumm to send operatives back
to the time of the Crusades.”

       “Right to that little band of Assassins at
Massiaf,” said Maeve. “What  a nifty place to recruit from.”

       “Quite,” said Nordhausen. “In fact this
Rasil fellow  was muttering something under his breath at the end about
Sinan—the Old Man of the Mountain, as the Crusaders knew him. Rasil called himself
the Messenger, and I don’t think he was just being artful in that. He was
supposed to be taking messages through the Well to Massiaf—probably the odd
scroll I came upon in his satchel.”

       “You figure he was doing this on a regular
basis?” said Kelly. “That makes sense. He was taking Sinan instructions or
something.”

       “Well it certainly would explain a lot of
the folk lore that surrounds that man,” said Maeve. “Legend has it that he had
a strange clairvoyance, and seemed to know what was happening—or what was going
to happen in the events of his day. He would receive letters from important
figures and simply dictate his response to them without even opening the
message. The odd thing was that his responses answered the content of the
original message, line by line, if the stories hold water.”

       “I think you’re on to something there,
Maeve,” said Paul. “Let’s assume Sinan was an agent, permanently posted in that
time milieu—a very critical period in the conflict between the West and the
Muslim world. I had the distinct impression that a few of the other people I
met were privy to the whole time travel thing: certainly the Kadi, and I would
guess that the Sami would be in on it all as well. Now that I think of it, Jabr
must have known something too. He spoke modern English! He called it the Saxon
tongue, but even the Middle English of Chaucer’s day would be virtually
unrecognizable to our ears in this time—and that was more than a century before
Chaucer. If fact, he called me a Walker, and said he was one as well. Maybe he
meant Time Walker.”

       “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.”