Anvil of Fate

Chapter 4

Paul was driving his Civic as fast as he could but, in spite of the growing state of emergency, traffic on California Street was still as bothersome as ever.

“Where are all these people going at this hour?” he complained.

“More than likely trying to ferret out food and fuel, which is what we should be doing tonight as well. How much gas do we have?” Nordhausen leaned over and squinted at the gauge, comforted somewhat when he saw the tank was still over three-quarters full.

“Don’t worry,” said Paul. “There’s plenty of gas to get us where we have to go and back again. Many times over.”

“Yeah? And what if they do something crazy and shut down all the bridges? You’ll have to go all the way down through San Jose and back up the 880.”

“Focus your mind on the mission, Robert. It’s not the gasoline I’m worried about, but the power situation. The Arch sucks a lot of juice to run up at 100% on a Time shift. Rolling blackouts have already started in a number of cities. We may need to have all three backup generators up on standby—and that’s where the fuel becomes an issue. We had only about two hours worth left after Kelly’s mission. Well, we’ll still have plenty in this car by the time we get back to the lab. If I have to siphon it off to keep one of the generators running, I will.”

Nordhausen didn’t look happy about that, but he said nothing more for a while, his eyes shifting nervously from traffic lights to passing pedestrians hurrying about the in the late evening rush. They were clutching shopping bags, scurrying across the busy street between cars as they slowed for stop lights, and darting into open businesses. The liquor stores, he noted, seemed to be doing a brisk trade. He remembered reading a blog entry that listed the hundred items that would disappear first in any major crisis situation. Generators were at the top of the list, along with things most people simply took for granted and never gave a second thought: matches, water and water filters, candles, propane and lamp oil, soap and detergent, toilet paper, charcoal, firewood, all sorts of storable food, batteries, flashlights, bleach, coffee, aluminum foil, rope, clothespins and that all American favorite, guns with lots of ammo. He could clearly see people out buying these very things. A man hurried around a corner with a couple gallons of bottled water gripped under each arm. The professor felt that uneasy feeling of anxiety rising in his gut.

“Look what we’ve become,” he shrugged. “We have to buy our potable water in plastic bottles from a store.” Then he spied another liquor store. “That’s what we should be worried about,” he said. ”Beer and wine will make for some good bartering items when we aren’t enjoying them ourselves.”

Paul gave him a disparaging look. “I’ll open a bottle of Hahn ’06 when we finish the mission. We can celebrate with a good Pinot and a cheese fondue with toasted French Bread.“

Paul made a left onto Presidio and then quickly veered right onto Masonic Avenue, speeding up a gentle hill and bearing left to make the green light on Euclid and continue on. There was much less traffic here at this hour, though he got held up at the light on Geary. He continued down Masonic until he reached Turk Blvd, another east- west street that originated in the seedy Tenderloin district of downtown San Francisco and ran all the way out here to the University. He sped past the row houses in their characteristic flat pink, taupe, blue and yellow, leaning forward and squinting to see the street signs as he drove. A green sward of palm studded grass bordered with a long row of manicured hedges came up on his right, and he knew he had reached the university Lone Mountain Campus facilities.

When he saw the main pedestrian entrance, with two wrought iron lanterns on high squared columns lighting up the stairs and terraced gardens, he made a quick left and was lucky enough to find a parking spot at the end of the block. The Gleeson Library and Harney Science Center were directly ahead of them. Normally the place would be busy with student traffic, but it was largely deserted now. It was half an hour after sunset, but there was still a residual glow in the evening sky, with city lights coming up more prominently in all directions.

“Let’s go professor,” he breathed. “We’ve got some numbers to crunch.”

“The place is all locked up. What if the computers are shut down too, Paul?”

“They never shut down an Arion system,” Paul reassured him. “The damn things are running some application or another all the time. I’m just hoping five hours is enough time for me to verify this data set.”

“Data set? You mean to say you’ve got a retraction point in mind already? You know where Kelly’s supposed to be?”

They ran up the concrete steps to the building entrance and Paul fumbled for his pass key. “Being a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs does come with just a few perks,” he said with a smile. “You get free 24-hour access to most area science facilities, and ten hours a month on the Arion Network. I’ve got five hours left this month, but who’s counting tonight, eh?”

He went through the door, the gleam of the hunt in his eye as he looked over his shoulder. “I have an idea,” he said again in answer to Nordhausen’s question.

“Yes, and may I remind you that it was you and your ideas that started this whole mess in the first place.”

“Correct,” said Paul, walking briskly ahead, determined.

“And it was you and your ideas that started this damn Time war—”

“Correct again,” Paul came to a lab door and jostled with his keys. “And it’s me and my crazy ideas that will have to clean it all up.”

“What about Maeve?” Nordhausen said, an edge of caution in his tone.

“What about her?”

“Does she know about this?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well she damn near ran me through with an umbrella the last time we started a mission without her approval.”

“The last time you started a mission,” Paul corrected him.

“Well don’t think you’ll get any more latitude than I did. When she finds out you’re planning to spin up the Arch again, she’ll go ballistic!”

“No one has to know about this but you and me,” Paul said flatly. “Look… It’s simple. We either beat this thing and win, or we lose and we can start using the last of our fuel to round up supplies like everyone else out there, and it’s going to be a long, cold ride into a near Medieval existence in about a month, as I read it. So no time for quibbling with Outcomes and Consequences. What could be worse than the situation we find ourselves in now—Kelly gone and the whole country coming apart at the seams? And that’s just the beginning of it. This was planned, Robert. Tell me I’m paranoid, but I think reversing our intervention and restoring the Palma catastrophe was just their opening in this latest chess game. I‘ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”

“You and me both,” said Robert.

They reached the Arion terminal and Paul pulled out a chair to settle in for what might become a long evening. The professor gave him a frustrated look, but watched in silence as Paul connected Kelly’s Laptop and established a link to the system. A minute later the main Arion system screen came up and Paul entered his password in the interface.

“One thing I can’t figure out Paul…” The professor stepped gingerly into his thought, not yet certain what he was asking. “You tried explaining it on the way over here, but I was just thinking of that first mission again. If we were the first people to ever travel in Time, how come we received a visit from the future that evening—well before we initiated our first operation?”

“Absolute Certainty,” said Paul, extracting a new term he was adding to his lexicon on Time travel. We were dead set on operating, one way or another. At that moment, we had come to that choice with absolute certainty. It was inevitable that we would do what we decided. So the outcome of that choice was inevitable as well. Time travel was possible the instant we resolved to make it so.”

Nordhausen frowned.

“Think of it this way,” Paul explained. “You’re driving on a road and come to a tunnel. When you enter it you haven’t emerged from the other side, yet there is a strong likelihood that you will. Once in the tunnel you can’t go left or right, or reverse direction or even back out, as the traffic behind will not allow it. You have to go through. There are places on the Meridian like that, but since the course of the continuum is defined by choices and events, when we make a firm choice, a kind of tunnel forms in the stream of causality that restricts variation. The strength of our will and determination actually exerts an effect on causality! Let’s face it. We were going to travel in Time that night, to one place or another. It was the first ever attempt to shift in Time, a grand event and First Cause. We spent years and all our personal wealth on the project, and I was determined to get a result that night. It was therefore subject to the principle of Absolute Certainty.”

“But that’s not what the visitor told us.” Nordhausen reminded him. “He said we were so despondent over Kelly that we never made the shift. We just shut the whole thing down. That’s why they had to come back and prevent Kelly’s death.”

“He was wrong,” said Paul. “And understandably so. In spite of their vantage point in the future, they cannot know everything. You said yourself that we really know only 95% or less of everything that has happened. So they did not know, for example, that I had the Arch rigged to operate automatically that night, and send through a small robotic rover with a camera—just a quick in and out. It was all set up to run at midnight, come hell or high water. Time travel was going to become a proven reality. So the principle of Absolute Certainty took effect, at least as far as Time was concerned.

“We were in the tunnel from the moment we started the final briefing session. The volcano on Palma was exploding at that very moment as well. That was also a grand event because it was going to work a radical transformation on the Meridians. So let’s just say Time was gracious and forgiving that night in allowing our visitor to get through the chaos of Palma and carry out his mission, even though Mr. Graves arrived seven years early. His patience saved Kelly, and we went through the Arch instead of my robot. Time travel became possible that night, and the rest, if I may say, is history.”

“They they must have found a way to reverse our intervention on Palma even before we sent Kelly off to the sphinx!”

“Correct,” said Paul. “If Kelly had managed to succeed he would have eliminated their primary touchstone on the history. Yet Kelly failed. Time was just waiting for the outcome of his mission. After that the Paradox sweep calcified the changes made by the Heisenberg Wave, and we get this—”

He gestured to the city outside the building, where they could hear the distant rumble of cars, people shouting, emergency sirens, and even an occasional gun shot. “Our Nexus dissipated when we shut down the Arch the other night. We stepped outside into this nightmare, and it’s only going to get worse. But speaking of time, we’re wasting it here with all this talk. Let’s get to work!”

Nordhausen watched him keying in a few commands to call up his data set for the Arion analysis.

“Those are Kelly’s numbers?” The professor was curious.

“For the most part,” said Paul. “I’ve entered in a new spatial coordinate and programmed a series of potential breaching points for a retraction scheme, like a series of snapshots from a camera.”

“New spatial coordinates? Where?”

“The Sun Pyramid.”

That threw Nordhausen off kilter for a moment. “What? But there weren’t any pyramids at that point in the history. They didn’t appear for thousands of years!”

“Wrong again,” said Paul. “I’m using some new research a colleague of mine was just getting ready to publish. You remember those satellite infrared scans that discovered seventeen new pyramids? It was the work pioneered by Dr. Sarah Parcak. They found all these new pyramid sites buried under the desert sands, and thousands of new tombs and other ancient settlements. Well, this colleague was able to get time on a satellite and ran another series of deep penetrating scans. He hasn’t had time to review all the images yet, but last night I was able to get him to let me have a look at some of his raw data.”

“That’s what you were doing until two in the morning last night?”

“Right. He did a fairly broad scan series, and one of the satellite sweeps passed directly over the section of Cairo where our hidden sphinx was supposed to be—the very place we sent Kelly.”

“On infrared? The heat and ground clutter of the city would make it impossible to read anything buried there.”

“He was using ground penetrating radar as well. The sequence wasn’t supposed to kick in for another two minutes, when the satellite was scanning west of the Nile, where all the existing pyramids are sited, but for some reason it did. Consider it a Pushpoint, if you will. One of those little loose quirks that end up having dramatic repercussions. Well, it scanned the east bank of the Nile as well, and I took a close look at that data last night. Have a look at this!”

He pointed to the Arion system screen and Nordhausen saw a satellite image of modern day Cairo. Paul zoomed in on a position east of the Nile and, in the midst of the maze like streets and alleyways, there was a prominent clearing that resolved to a greenbelt park area as Paul zoomed in. In the middle of the park was a circular walkway, bisected on the vertical and horizontal by two more paths, which intersected at a concrete structure, a perfect circle with yet another object in its exact center.

“How’s that for a bull’s eye,” said Paul. “Now what does that look like there,” he pointed. “It’s the spitting image of the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, the sun. That, in itself would not be remarkable, but the deep penetrating radar found this, directly beneath the center point of that circle.” He tapped the keyboard and the next image came up. Nordhausen could clearly see the outline of what appeared to be a ancient ruin there, roughly square, but with an obvious center point. He had seen enough satellite imagery to recognize it as a possible burial site.

“Well, I’ll be…” he breathed.

“That’s a pyramid—or at least it once was a pyramid,” said Paul. “And this is the position of the Sphinx where we shifted Kelly, right smack in the middle of the Maadi district.” He pointed to a location slightly west of the greenbelt area. Paul zoomed out for a moment, his finger tracing a line due west across the Nile until it reached the site of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza. The two locations were on the exact same latitude.

“Damn,” said Nordhausen. “At first I thought there couldn’t be a pyramid here on the east bank. They’re all on the west bank, the place of the setting sun, Ra’s journey to the underworld. That was the whole point of the tomb itself—the pharaoh was to follow Ra to the underworld.”

“But there it is,” said Paul, re-focusing on the greenbelt area and superimposing the satellite image of the pyramid ruins. That object in the center of the circle is positioned dead center in the ruins that define this lost pyramid. And together, with our lost sphinx, we have what looks like an exact mirror image of the site at Giza!”

“They come in pairs,” breathed Nordhausen. “That’s what Maeve said when LeGrand first revealed the existence of the second Sphinx.”

“Right,” said Paul. “So I’m calling this the Sun Pyramid, situated at a point to greet the rising sun, the emergence and return of Ra on his journey into the heavens each day. And I’m betting our esteemed Mr. Ra-Mer is a nice dutiful Muslim as he goes out to greet the morning sun each day for prayer—right there, at those exact spatial coordinates, ten thousand five hundred years ago…”

Chapter 5

Four hours after they arrived at the Harney Science Center, the Arion system signaled that it had completed its analysis of the data and sent the resulting algorithms to Kelly’s notebook.

Paul had been sleeping in his chair, leaning forward on the desk, his head resting on his folded arms. Nordhausen was slouched in a more comfortable chair nearby. The computer played a series of gentle tones, and Paul awoke, rubbing his eyes and reaching for his glasses where they lay on the desk.

Suddenly a strange feeling came over him, and he thought he saw light and movement in the dark. A pulse of alarm stirred him awake and he turned, shocked to see someone walking briskly through the glass doors to the computer lab—literally! It was more like the image of a man, a wavering hologram that was edged with a luminescent blue sheen. As the image came through the glass Paul knew the man immediately, yet just as he was about to speak the image wavered and vanished. It was Kelly! He was there, for the briefest moment, and then gone, like a luminescent spirit haunting the darkened halls of the Harney Science Center. What had just happened?

He shook himself awake, rubbing his eyes. Was he dreaming? Was he so intent on recovering his lifelong friend that he had conjured him up from the last fragments of his fitful sleep? No, he thought, that was real, and his logical mind immediately set about to grasp an explanation. Was the ghost like apparition an attempted Time shift? They called their own recon shifts “spook jobs” for a reason, he thought. That was exactly how one would appear to a casual observer. Kelly was there, for the briefest moment, then gone again, but there was something about his movement and gait that led him to dismiss the idea of a spook job. He was walking, intent on something, not merely standing on fixed coordinates as one might do in a spook job.

It suddenly struck him that this was the very place that Kelly had been running the numbers for their first time shift! He had come here to the City because the Arion system at U.C. Berkeley was booked solid. Good Lord, he thought. Could I have seen an echo of that moment? How was it possible? That was a physical phenomena. The light from that image struck the retina of my eye…

There was a long final tone from his system console signaling the data run was complete. The Arion had verified his information as sound and downloaded it all right onto his laptop. He turned to his friend.

“Wake up, Robert!” he called. “Kelly is waiting for us, and we have little time to spare.”

Nordhausen struggled to rouse himself, and Paul was going to tell him what he had just seen, then thought on it and decided to keep the matter to himself for the moment. There was too much work ahead of them and too little time. He wanted to think about it before he shared it with anyone else. So he urged the professor along and they gathered their things and hurried away, stumbling a bit in the dark and quiet. The cold air outside shocked them both awake as the rushed up the street to Paul’s Honda.

“What time is it?”

“Just after one in the morning.”

“Four hours? Why did it take so damn long?”

“Never mind.”

He put the key in the ignition and was dismayed when the engine did not immediately turn over. “Oh no,” he said. “Another Pushpoint! It’s been doing that from time to time. Come on baby, you can’t do this now!”

The thought that his whole operation would be foiled by a faulty starter in his Honda would have been fitting justice given his theory that the really great events are all triggered, or prevented, by small and insignificant moments, happenstance, trivial occurrences all hiding in polarity with the momentous turning points of history.

He turned the key again, and this time the engine fired up and started normally. Nordhausen breathed a heavy sigh of relief but, even as he did so, they perceived a slight jolt. He looked at Paul.

“Is that the car?”

“You felt it too? I thought it was an earth tremor or something. Well, it’s no more than a three pointer. Let’s get moving!”

He put the Civic in gear and was pulling away when they both heard a cell phone ringing, muffled, yet near enough. Paul looked at Nordhausen.

“That yours?”

“I didn’t bring my cell phone with me,” the professor confessed. “Must be yours.”

“Damnit,” said Paul. “It’s in my briefcase in the trunk! Who’d be calling at this hour anyway? In any case, we’ve got to get this data to the lab as quickly as possible. That’s all we have to worry about now.”

The ringing stopped he pulled away making a quick left onto Golden Gate Avenue. A moment later they heard the phone ring again.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Robert. “Just get us to the lab in one piece.”

Nordhausen was worried about considerably more. They both were, though Paul hid his anxiety with constant energy and determination. But the professor had an odd sense of foreboding, and his stomach felt very unsettled as they raced back across the city to the Bay Bridge. An hour later they were safely back at the Arch complex at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. The system was up and running and Paul was riveted on the monitors, trying to watch everything at one time. The Golem module was winking out a red warning light, but he had no time to deal with it for the moment. They were going after Kelly and the retraction scheme was almost ready for full operation.

The main problem had been power. The first thing Paul did when they got back to the lab was fire up the quantum fuel matrix and feed in the energy required to create the singularity and the strange quantum threads that would spin off from it to fuel the Time shifts. That alone took enormous power resources, and it wasn’t long before the power company was on the phone about it.

Paul fended them off, saying he had a vital experiment underway for the next hour, and arguing that he had waited until this late hour to conduct his test, when the burden on the grid was minimal.

“Are you aware what this is going to cost?” Nordhausen had asked him. “They’ll probably jack up the rates a hundred fold with this emergency underway. I’m surprised they even gave you a permit tonight.”

“They didn’t give me a permit,” said Paul. “And they can bill me.” His focus was on the retraction scheme, and he had Kelly’s laptop feeding the numbers into the system, hopeful they would find someone at the other end. He had been able to get the exact spatial locus by calculating the height of the pyramid from the base signature it left in the ruins. There had been some discussion about the possibility that Kelly would be inside the pyramid, thus throwing off their calculations.

“How do you greet the rising sun if you’re inside a pyramid?” Paul argued. “There were signs of an obvious staircase in the image of the ruin. Nope. My bet is that he’s on top. I’ll set the first retraction sweep there and we can hope for the best.”

As to the time, it was a matter of calculating the exact time of sunrise at that location, and narrowing down the day of the year was the great variable. Paul decided to start with the exact date when they had inserted Kelly into that milieu, and then work forward. He was taking a look at each sunrise, day by day, in a series of snapshots that were analyzing mass densities at the programmed coordinates. Day one gave him a baseline, because he knew Kelly would not be there on the day he arrived. If the mass density varied on subsequent days, it could indicate the presence of a person at that location.

After a five minute sweep he had a steady baseline with no variation until about five weeks after insertion date. Then, to his surprise and delight, he got density variations day by day, like a string of pearls, and the mass was always the same, or nearly so, and more, it closely matched the data from Kelly’s last pattern sweep.

“He’s there, he whispered,” hoping he was correct.

He was.

Paul had his eyes closed, as if he was afraid to look at the screen when he engaged the system to open the continuum again. The professor leaned in over his shoulder to get a look at the monitor. There was a lot of green on the screen, which he took for a good omen, but he could not make any sense of the numbers otherwise. Paul opened his eyes, smiled, and gave him a thumbs up.

“It’s looking good, professor. We’ve got hold of someone. The pattern match was spot on. Get down there and see what’s up!”

Nordhausen rushed to the elevator, heading down to the lower level to see if their retraction scheme had worked. The professor approached the thick, yellow event horizon line with some trepidation, and a healthy dose of respect, yet could see nothing in the blue-gray mist. The Arch was thrumming and spinning, and he looked over his shoulder for support, but Paul was still up in the lab working the consoles as best he could.

Nordhausen stared in awe as Kelly came walking out of the frigid fog, his eyes closed, arms extended, feeling his way like a blind beggar in shepherd’s robes. He walked right in to the professor’s outstretched arms.

“Got you, my man. Rest easy, Kelly. You’re home, brother. You’re home, by God!”

Kelly opened his eyes, a bit bleary from the enormous Time shift, but obviously elated that his long shot gamble had paid off. “It’s about time!” he said, ironically.

Moments later they had him up in the lab wrapped in a warm blanket with a mug of fresh Peet’s coffee—Uzuri blend.

“Nordhausen,” he was saying, “you’re a genius! I knew you’d find those messages I carved.”

“Actually it was Paul,” the professor admitted.

“It was the Golems,” said Paul humbly. “I just gave them a nudge in the right direction and told them to look for any permutation of your name, among other things.”

“Yes,” said Robert, bowing low. “All homage to the great and powerful Ra-Mer, lord of the sun pyramid!”

They bantered back and forth a while, and Kelly shared the tale of his mission with them. “Can you believe that?” he finished. “There was a messenger scheduled to leave the archive with a rubbing just as I met Hamza. The bastard shifted out and blew the whistle on my mission, giving the Assassins time to program a counter operation. It didn’t take much—a bit like discovering Achilles and his myrmidons inside the Trojan horse I suppose. A few torches at that moment would have saved Troy. But in this case all they had to do was shift the next messenger in a day early with the news and be sure that they restored their flood gate after I sabotaged it. I suppose they could have just met me as I materialized and said sorry, Mr. Ramer but your mission is bunk and you are now our captive, but they didn’t. They let, me worm my way into the damn sphinx and do my thing. I wonder why?”

“They were just being careful,” said Paul. “There may have been another Pushpoint somewhere along the way, and they wanted to be sure of your intent. Once you did what you came to do, without mishap or any irregularities, our cards were on the proverbial table and they could then be certain that the floodgate was the Pushpoint, protect it, and brief this Hamza figure.”

“Yes,” said Kelly. “In about an hour now he’ll be wondering why I haven’t come to the second morning prayer. Things became so routine there that my minder was getting lazy. He didn’t follow me to the Sun Pyramid this morning like he often does. But in time they’ll realize I’m missing…” His mood suddenly darkened, almost as if he could perceive Paul’s subtle disquiet. His friend was looking at the wall clock, a bit distracted.

“Speaking of time,” Paul said quietly. “You probably should know what’s happened here… on this Meridian.”

“I know,” said Kelly. “Palma happened again. I trust you have the Arch spinning?”

“Don’t worry, my friend,” Paul reassured him. “We’re safe in a Nexus Point. But we’ve given the slip to more than Hamza and his merry band of scribes. We’ve pulled a fast one on Time itself by pulling you out, and we’ve got to figure out something here, and fast. Otherwise…”

“Right,” said Kelly. “I’m the odd man out. Time has no place for me in this Meridian any longer. If Palma happened, as you say, then I’m supposed to be dead and buried. I’ve had nightmares about it for weeks.”

“Thankfully I’ve worked up a whole set of queries the last few days,” said Paul, “and the Golems have been busy, but we’ve got a few problems. First off, the Internet is still up and running but, as you might expect, there are a lot of servers down on the east coast, all the major hubs there are off line and probably will remain so. The system was originally designed to withstand a nuclear attack, so the redundancy is saving us for the moment. But you know the old saying: ‘Things fall apart…”

“The center cannot hold,” Nordhausen finished.

“So the community of Golems has taken a hit as well,” Paul continued. “I reckon you’ve lost 18 to 20 percent of the installed user base.”

“That still leaves enough for what we have to do,” said Kelly.

“Good… Now the second problem. Electricity. It’s been holding fairly steady, but the power company was already complaining about the load when I spun up the Arch for the retraction. We’re at 50% power now, just enough to safely maintain the Nexus, but power is going to be an issue if we have to operate again tonight.”

“Tonight?” Nordhausen had a sheepish look on his face. “But we’ll need research time on an Arion system. You mean to say—”

“Exactly Robert. Tonight. How long do you think I can keep the Arch spinning at this power level? If anything happens, and we lose power here, I’ve got three backup generators all on emergency standby. The first will kick in the instant we dip below 40% power. It has two hours fuel. The remaining two will sit in the bull pen and I’ll bring them on line when that first one runs out of gas. But I won’t get more than an inning or two out of either one, as the fuel situation is pretty bad. I told Robert that we can siphon the fuel from our cars if we must, and that’s our last reserve. We parked them in the underground garage, well within the sphere of influence of the Arch.”

“Right,” said Kelly. “It’s a real bitch closing out a game when your starter fails you in the third or fourth inning.”

“Which is why we have to get busy. I know this is going to be hard on all of us, particularly you Kelly. But we’ve got a lot to do here, and… well, we’ll need Maeve. I’d like to give you both a little time together but I’m afraid we don’t have much to spare.”

“I’ll call her,” said Kelly. “It’s going to be a bit of a shock to her when she finds I’m alive. I hope this wasn’t too hard on her—on any of you. But thank you for believing in me… in my life.”

Paul just smiled, and they sat there, quiet for a moment. Then Kelly was up off his chair, suddenly energized. “Get the Golem reports up on the history module! Let’s see what’s wrong. I’ll call Maeve. And Nordhausen—make some more coffee. It’s going to be a long morning.”

Paul smiled and flipped a console switch to activate the history module. The Golems had been trawling the Internet for hours now, searching for anomalies and comparing them to the preserved record of the original history in the active RAM Bank. He settled into a chair and turned on the reporting application. The instant the module activated an alarm went off again.

“Christ almighty!” Paul rushed over to the monitor with Nordhausen on his heels. “We’ve got a major alert. Why didn’t we get a call on the cell net?”

“The damn phone is in your briefcase, Paul. Remember?” And it did ring, twice, just as we were leaving the Harney Science Center.”

“Right,” said Paul, but their attention was immediately riveted on the screen. The lines of amber and red on the data chart were a bad sign. Something was terribly amiss, and the Meridians were showing stress fractures all over the screen.

“Good God,” said Nordhausen. “We’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest when we pulled Kelly out! They must be running some kind of counter-operation, and with a vengeance.“

Paul thought for a moment. “No, if those cell phone calls were coming from the Golem alert system, then the variations were detected well before we pulled Kelly out. I saw the red warning light on the Golem Module, but there was no time to deal with it until now. Kelly was my only priority. But you may be right that someone’s running an operation.”

The system was set to display a series of horizontal bars, each one coded by subject: Politics, Sciences, Arts, Religion. The list ran down the left margin of the screen. The top of the chart displayed dates in 100 year increments, the rightmost being set to the early years of the 21st Century, their time. They could know nothing of the centuries beyond this moment, but had a good look at the past. Green lines indicated very little variation in the Meridian for the given subject area, the darker the color the better. Amber indicated minor variations, which would grow progressively darker through the orange spectrum until they turned red, a major variation.

And the screen was blood red.

Paul stared at it, aghast. He clicked on the line for religion and a popup box appeared to indicate the percentage of variation. The number was alarmingly high, 87.9% deviation from the RAM Bank data! And even as he watch the figure was ticking deeper into the red. 87.93%… 87.95%… He selected a button that would display key missing elements and was stunned by the first few entries. Judaism, Holy Catholic Church, Church Of England, Quakers, Coptic Orthodox, Methodist Church, Reformation, Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church, Pentecostals, Anabaptists, Baptists, Mormons, Hasidism, Bahai’ism… The list ran on.

“What does this mean?” Nordhausen was shocked. “It’s listing the Holy Catholic Church in deep red. Does that mean—”

“It’s gone,” said Paul, equally dismayed. “Along with all the other branches of the religion. Christendom has been literally wiped off the Meridian!”

Chapter 6

“That’s impossible!” The professor could not believe what he was seeing. “You can’t just eradicate an entire religious paradigm like that. What could they have done?”

“Oh? How many offerings have you burned to Zeus lately?” said Paul. “The religions of the Mayans, Romans, and Greeks, were basically wiped out a thousand years ago. I’m sure there are residual elements of Christianity in the world this data comes from, but the organized religions of the Christian West appear to have met their end. Judaism too… but when?” He began to scroll backwards in time, following the line and noting the color lightening to ochre, orange, and amber as he scrolled back through the centuries. He overlaid the political spectrum in another screen layer, seeing the same basic pattern.

“Looks like Columbus never discovered America either,” he said flatly. He continued to scroll back along the Time Meridians until he saw the lines lightening and color shifting to green around the beginning of the 8th century.

“There!” Nordhausen pointed to the demarcation of green and yellow. “Zoom in on that century.” A click of the mouse displayed the whole of the 8th century on the screen now. It wasn’t long before the solid green began to fade and resolve to amber.

“What was going on, Robert? You’re the historian.”

The professor looked up at the ceiling, digging for facts in his memory now. “Well, Europe was still divided, east and west, with the Byzantine empire still intact and the remnant of the barbarian tribes, Visigoths, Lombards, Franks, Bulgars all in the mix in central Europe, and Nordic influences pressuring England.”

“What about Islamic history?”

“The Umayyad Dynasty was building up a fairly significant empire, when they could stop quarreling amongst themselves. They had crossed into Spain and Italy, and were also waging war with the Byzantines… Just a moment,” he had a sudden thought. “What was the date now?” Instead he pointed. Zoom in there, Paul, just where the green resolves to that lime color, then avocado yellow.”

“What is it?” Paul could not suppress his curiosity.”

“It has to be that period, make it 730, or there abouts.”

Paul selected the decade 730-740 and the screen refreshed to display those years. The color coding was much more detailed now.

“Yes,” said Nordhausen as he stroked his chin. “It was a fairly significant time. The Venerable Bede had written of the signs in the heavens, a comet that appeared in 729 that indicated mankind was threatened with calamities by day and night. But the real threat to Europe was right there,” he pointed. “I did a unit on this for the university. I was basically teaching the history as defined by significant military conflict of the given era. You would have loved it. But, in any case, Odo of Aquitaine had been fending off the Islamic incursions across the Pyrenees into France. He stopped them at Toulouse in the early 720s when he caught them by surprise, but ten years later they were back and he suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of the River Garonne. It was a massacre. The scribes wrote that God alone knows the number that were slain there. Odo had been a bit of a loose cannon, stubbornly independent in Aquitaine, unwilling to ally himself with the Franks to the north, but this setback chastened him severely. He was forced to seek help from Charles, the Frankish Mayor of the Palace, and had to pledge his fealty to secure his support. Together they raised another army and marched south… Can you give me a map?”

Paul was able to get a Google map up on an adjacent screen, zooming in on central France. “Where?” he asked.

“Poitiers,” said Nordhausen definitively. “Poitiers! Sometimes called the Battle of Tours as well. It was actually fought about here,” he pointed, “at the confluence of these two rivers between the two cities. Closer to Poitiers, I suppose. Charles and Odo prevailed, and it put a stop to these incursions once and for all, at least in this region.”

“Which Charles are we talking about?” asked Paul.

“Why, Charles Martel, of course. The Hammer! He earned that name right here in this battle. Good, old Charles. He established the fiefdom system, trading land for loyalty and pledge of arms, raised a fairly professional army, and he had been squeezing the wealthy church lands and monasteries for money and resources as well. In fact, that’s what brought the Moors north. This was just a raid at first, possibly to avenge their losses of against Odo earlier, and to punish him for allying himself with a rival Islamic warlord, a local Berber called Manuza. Odo had married away his daughter to him seeking to mend fences. As Manuza had a stronghold in the Pyrenees, he served as a breakwater against the Umayyad Caliph, so Odo could settle that front and turn his attention to Charles in the north.”

“Who was the Caliph?” asked Paul.

“Zoom in on the time line… There,” the professor pointed. “Abdul Rahman. Yes, it’s all coming back now. Manuza is eliminated, probably assassinated, and Abdul’s invasion across the Pyrenees followed right after that. I guess he was out for a little payback against Odo, but also to fatten up on plunder as well.”

“He was settling all the family business.” Paul put things in terms the Godfather might best understand.

“Quite so,” said Nordhausen. “The Moors overran Navarre, then stormed up through Aquitaine to Bordeaux, taking that city as well. Odo tried to stop them and was soundly defeated. But Charles Martel was a man of considerable military skill—one of the great strategists of his day I suppose. You know the military history.”

“Right,” said Paul. “I tend to think he had more will power than military prowess, but the end result was the same. I don’t really know much that happened before, but I remember this battle now. The Moors had the finest heavy cavalry in the world at the time. It was their premier weapon in the attack, the forerunner of the European knights. But the use of the stirrup was not widely adapted in Europe yet, a nifty invention that allowed horsemen to wield heavy weapons and still maintain some control over their mounts. So at this time most European armies were mainly composed of infantry forces, with a few light horsemen in support.”

“Well, this is it then,” said Nordhausen. “Is there anything amiss prior to this time on the Meridian?”

Paul quickly zoomed back out and they saw that the lines on the chart remained solid, deep green. He checked politics, sciences, arts, all good.“The battle of Tours,” Paul said softly. “I think we found our crisis point. They’re targeting this event. Probably trying to change the outcome of this battle.”

Kelly was back, a distressed look on his face. Paul thought to ask him how the call to Maeve went, then decided to let that be still for the moment. Kelly had been through a lot tonight, and things were likely to get very stressful as the morning progressed.

“You OK?” he asked.

Kelly nodded. “What have we got?” He composed himself and gestured at the screen, eager to get a look at the Golem report.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Paul started.

They told him what they had found and Kelly’s eyes lit up with sudden recognition. “Hamza and I just had a conversation about this period a few days ago! In fact, that was the segment of the history he had his men working on all week.”

He told them how he would come to the chamber of records and play devil’s advocate as Hamza supervised the carving. “They were real busy,” he said. “Messengers were coming and going all the time. I know they must have had the history on computers in their day, but they were making damn sure this permanent record was being carved and preserved. These people are serious about this shit, Paul. In fact…” He held up a finger, remembering something Hamza had said.

“Hamza and I disagreed on the recounting of this very battle. He seemed to think the Moors lost because of some other reason, not the military prowess of Charles. Paul, do you know anything more about it?”

Paul had been a student of military history for over twenty-five years, and often passed the time designing conflict simulations of famous historical battles. “Richard Berg put out a design on this battle and I played that a few times,” said Paul. “Charles stole a march on old Abdul, who was advancing rather heedlessly after his crushing victory over Odo earlier that year. His men had split into several raiding columns and were plundering the countryside. His supply trains were also well behind him. Warned by Odo, Charles quickly assembled his army and marched south, avoiding the main roads so as to remain undiscovered. Then he chose the ground, there between those two rivers, I remember it now. He had a slight elevation advantage, and cover of a nearby woodland area. He drew his men up in a square, a tight Phalanx to defend against the enemy heavy cavalry, behind their shieldwall, and he stolidly blocked the road to Tours, and the Abbey of St. Martin.

“When Abdul Rahman arrived he was surprised on two counts. First, he did not expect to meet any further organized resistance after defeating Odo, and second, his enemy had chosen the ground, and the time of battle, both obvious advantages. Abdul may have been brash, but he wasn’t stupid. He wisely decided to wait, refusing to attack while he bought time to gather his raiding columns and bring up the main body of his army. Attack too soon in this battle as the Moors and you really get hammered by the Franks.”

“But he got hammered anyway,” said Kelly.

“Well,” Paul thought deeply about it. “The professor here is going to have to do some digging on this in the RAM Bank but, if I’m not mistaken, it was a near run thing. No European infantry had ever really stood up to this kind of heavy cavalry when it was properly mobilized on attack. Odo prevailed ten years earlier because the cavalry was not used effectively and never got a chance to concentrate against him.”

He ran his hand through his thick brown hair, recalling the history as best he could. “This time Abdul Rahman waited to assemble his scattered units, a full six days, and then sent his heavy horsemen against the Franks on the seventh day. Charles won the waiting game. He had prompted his enemy to attack him on ground of his own choosing, but that cavalry was a formidable force. At one point they broke through the ranks of the shieldwall, aiming to kill Charles, but his most loyal troops fought fanatically to save him, barely stopping the charge. The accounts of the battle are sketchy at this point, but in my simulations the Moors regroup and reassemble for another charge. They eventually best the Frankish infantry, putting them to route late on the first day of the battle. But that’s not what happened in the history we know.”

“Right,” said Kelly, reading from the RAM Bank now. “All hell breaks loose. Abdul Rahman gets embroiled in the fighting and he is killed by the Franks. The Moors retreat in dismay and pull out under cover of darkness that night. Charles, the Hammer, has his victory and a new name.”

Nordhausen was quick to a terminal, calling up references on the battle. ‘Then was he first called “Martel,” for as a hammer of iron, of steel, and of every other metal, even so he dashed; and smote in the battle all his enemies.’—That’s from the Chronicle of St. Denis.”

The professor leaned back, thinking. “So this marks the high water mark of Islamic incursions into Europe,” he said. “A few dissent, though most historians agree that if Charles had been defeated decisively here, as Paul seems to think is possible, then there would have been no significant military opposition to the Muslim incursion into France. Some scholars argue that Abdul Rahman was never intending to push any farther, only to pillage the riches of the Abbey of Saint Martin of Tours, and state that this was merely a raid for plunder. The abbey was one of the most significant cultural and religious centers in Europe at this time. Its loss would have been broadly symbolic of what would likely have happened to the rest of Gaul. And this raid was already a thousand miles north of Gibraltar! A victory here would have probably seen the invaders winter in Tours or Poitiers and renew their advances in the spring, possibly reinforced from Spain. Unopposed, it’s my belief that they would have just kept on coming. And look at the damn screen, gentlemen.” He finished, folding his arms.

“My God!” Kelly was scrolling forward, seeing the rapid color change from yellow to orange and then red. “Apparently they did keep on coming.” He moved to a nearby terminal to query the information retrieved by the Golems. “The name Charles Martel produces no search results after this. He was at the battle, but in the altered history he is killed in the fighting, so he never gets that moniker ‘Martel, the Hammer’ attached to his name….”

“There you are,” said Nordhausen. “No Pippin II. No Charlemagne.”

Kelly continued: “The Saracens sack the abbey, get a taste of central France, and then eventually sweep north, heavily reinforced by additional armies coming over the Pyrenees the following spring. Damn-it! Hamza was talking about this very battle. What was it he said? He was going to carve it faithfully so that the errors of Abdul Rahman might be corrected.”

“That’s it, then,” said Nordhausen. “This is where they’re running an operation, and they’ve found one hell of a Pushpoint somewhere in the history.”

“Right,” said Kelly. “Charles gets his ass kicked here, and the invaders sweep all Christendom before them, essentially doing a right hook into the Balkans and outflanking the Byzantines as well. Isolated and besieged from two sides, the Byzantine empire falls twenty years later. The Umayyad Dynasty is now the preeminent power on earth, unchallenged.”

“What about China and India?” asked Paul.

“There are already Islamic campaigns underway in India by this time,” said Nordhausen. “As for China, the Tang Dynasty was nearing its end. In another twenty years it takes a death blow from a dissident general, An Lu Shan, who marches into the capitol at Chang’an, and ushers in a period of great confusion in China. Their old regional enemy, Tibet, comes over the mountain passes into the Tarim basin and chokes off the Silk Road trade routes. China is in no condition to resist anyone at this stage. If the Islamic armies push into Central Asia, and I’ll bet they do in those Golem reports, then Tibet may have held out, but the population of China was reduced by nearly 80% during this period. There’s nothing they could have done to effectively oppose the growing Muslim dominance.”

“So this makes the battle here at Tours an even more significant event,” said Paul, “coming as it does on the eve of the fall of the Tang Dynasty. What about the Mongols? Genghis Khan?”

“Much later,” said Nordhausen, “That’s in the thirteenth century, and we haven’t time to read that period now. We’ve found our crisis point. It’s here! They lose it all! There’s no Enlightenment, no Reformation, no Renaissance. The Assassins, or whoever they are, have found a way to win the Battle of Tours, and the results make the damage caused by Palma look pale by comparison. In fact, they probably have no reason to initiate an operation against Palma after this. Didn’t you say Columbus never discovers America a moment ago?”

“Let me check it,” said Kelly. “Here… It’s discovered by Shams ad-Din, the great Moroccan Berber explorer, and he finds it nearly a century before Columbus does in the history we know. The Americas… well, they wouldn’t be called that in this altered time line. But the new world gets colonized by the Muslims, not the Europeans, who are completely assimilated into Muslim-Islamic culture by that time.”

“So there’s no Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, and no Declaration of Independence, and no United States of America?” Paul was really shocked now.

“Kaput,” said Kelly, still typing very fast and reading Golem search links. “No references to those keywords at all in this altered historical data stream.”

“Now we know what we were perceiving on the observation deck just after we pulled Robert and Maeve back from the Rosetta Stone mission,” said Paul. “You’re right, Robert. Palma means nothing now, because if this happens they have no reason to try and strike at American power with an operation like that. They already control the whole continent! So they’ve run an even bigger intervention and found something really terrible in the events surrounding this battle. It changes everything, a truly Grand Transformation. This is the most significant alteration of the continuum we have ever seen. It’s utterly catastrophic, at least insofar as Western culture is concerned.”

“Then we’d bloody well better get a handle on what happened at that battle,” said Nordhausen, pointing at the screen. “Forget the Golem reports, Kelly. It’s the RAM Bank we need now. That’s our only record of the history as we know it. We’ve got to find out how Charles gets his hammer and prevails at Tours.”

“I can tell you that right now,” came a voice, and they all spun around to see Maeve standing behind them. Her eyes were red with recent tears and she looked this way and that as she walked slowly into the room, treading lightly, with a soft, halting gait. The look on Kelly’s face was one of agony and deep love as he watched her coming slowly towards them, talking as she came.

“Charles knew he was outnumbered, and that his infantry would be hard pressed against the Muslim cavalry… He was very nearly captured in the first grand charge of the heavy units, but the previous night he had observed the enemy’s preoccupation with the booty they had pillaged…” She was closer now, eyes still strangely distracted. “So he sent out scouts…” Her voice was breaking. “He sent scouts to stir up trouble in the camp. They were worried about the baggage and supply trains, and all… and…”

At that moment she reached Kelly, who stood up as she lunged forward, throwing her arms around him, in tears.

Paul and Robert watched in silence, their own emotions wrenched by the scene. Kelly held her, whispering something in her ear. “A hundred years,” he said softly, reassuring. “Don’t worry Maeve… Don’t worry, I’m home…”