Anvil of Fate

Chapter 1

Kelly awoke, the sweat and torment of his nightmare still shaking him. It was the same dream again, echoing in his mind and dogging his sleep for three nights now. He had been working late at the USF Harney Science Center Arion system to finalize the numbers for their planned Time jump. They were going to see a Shakespeare play, the Tempest, but the news he heard on the radio as he drove back across the Bay Bridge changed all that.

Then he stopped near that 7-11 store when he got to the East Bay. Unable to find his cell phone, he was going to make a call to warn the project team. At that moment he thought he saw an old man in a gray trench coat stepping boldly in front of his car, but he blinked and no one was there. Kelly got out and, an instant later, a car came cascading around the street corner, skidding on the rain slick pavement. He was hit, and thrown against the metal pole of a nearby street sign, falling in a daze to the ground.

He could still remember the sound of music playing from the open door of his car… “Never stop the car on a drive in the dark.” Porcupine Tree: Arriving somewhere, but not here. He knew the music well, and it echoed now in his mind at the edge of that fading dream. An odd sensation of déjà vu came upon him, woven amid the guitars of the band. The lyric seemed to mock him: “Ever had the feeling you've been here before?”

He shook himself awake, chasing the dream from his mind. The pre-dawn light had awakened him, as always, and he was suddenly driven with great urgency. He had to get up and greet the dawn for morning prayers!

He gathered his robes around him, warding off the morning chill and stood up on unsteady legs. A moment later he was out of his quarters, and shuffling down the long stone passage towards a doorway. His guardian and minder, Assam, smiled with a yawn and made a respectful bow.

“Falaq, the dawn is come,” said Kelly, nodding back. The man made no effort to impede him, but followed quietly behind as Kelly hurried on down the corridor, out the door, and into the courtyard beyond. He breathed in the clean, cool morning air, amazed at the clarity of the lightening sky as he emerged from the rightmost front paw of the Sphinx shrine. Just ahead of him, starkly silhouetted against the sky, was the telltale shape of a Pyramid. He hastened to its edge, quickly climbing the stairs to the top.

In the distance he could hear the call of the Muezzin, beckoning the faithful to their first morning prayer. He was late, and had forgotten to wash and bring his prayer mat, but no matter. He would reach the top of the pyramid in time, breathless after his climb, but safely there and with minutes to spare. He took a moment to compose himself, then walked slowly to the center of the Pyramid and knelt to make his first bow in respectful prayer.

“Falaq – The Dawn is come,” he began. “In the name of God the most gracious, the most merciful. I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn.”

“From the mischief of created things,” came a voice from behind him. He looked back, expecting to see his minder, but instead it was Hamza, the scribe and curator of this complex.

“From the mischief of darkness as it overspreads,” said Kelly, “and from the mischief of those who practice secret arts.”

“And from the mischief of the envious one, as he practices envy.” Hamza bowed low, joining Kelly, close by his side now.

“Then let us rise in the protection of Allah, and greet the day,” Kelly finished just as the blazoning sun cleared the horizon, illuminating the vast, empty desert around them with tawny yellow light.

The two men watched in silence for a while, then bowed low before Hamza spoke again. “Ra comes in his endless round, to rise into the sky and take his place in the firmament. Such is the way our distant ancestors understand things. They knew nothing of Allah, praise his name, and the true creed delivered by Mohammed, peace be upon him, will not come to the world for millennia. Yet come it will, and I am here to make certain it stays.”

Kelly smiled. “It is a beautiful day,” he said. “Will you be working the wall again today, Hamza?”

“As I must,” said the scribe. “You may join me if you wish, and we can have another of our discussions concerning the record of days.”

“You’ve finished your carving of the age of the Prophet, yes? It’s amazing the progress you have made in recent months. What is the story today then?”

Hamza smiled. “I recount the time of the Banu Umayyah, the Sons of Umayyah to say this in your words. Some of my people call this Caliphate the Great Red Dragon, having seven heads and ten horns—seven provinces and ten mighty rulers. The Prophet himself can trace his blood line through the sire of the sons of Umayyah. It was truly a great Caliphate, one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, and it might have been so much greater were it not for a misstep by the Emir Abdul Rahman.”

“You’re talking about the Umayyads? You mean when Abdul Rahman ran afoul of Charles Martel? Yes, I’d call that a misstep. Charles made short work of him at Tours.”

“Ah, you are willful again!” Hamza smiled. “We do not see the history quite that way,” he explained. “It is described as a great victory for the forces of Christendom by your scribes. In accounts of my people, however, the matter was not so threaded with gold. The legend of your Frankish lord is overblown. As it is written in our time, the faithful pierced the mountains, trampled over rough and level ground, plundered far and wide in the country of the Franks, smiting all with the sword, insomuch that when Odo came to battle with them at the River Garonne, he fled before the wrath of Islam. So it begins.”

“Yes, but it didn’t end that way,” Kelly challenged, and Hamza held up a hand, nodding his head in a slight concession.

“The great Emir Abdul Rahman was careless, to be sure,” he said, “and his men too worrisome over the fruits of their plunder. I have had many deliveries in recent days, and must complete this work in due course. And I will inscribe it diligently and faithfully, so that this misstep may be corrected. Come. Will you join me? Undoubtedly you will have much to say about the period.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Kelly.

He lingered a moment as he watched Hamza walk back toward the stairway, half way expecting to feel that lightness of being and the frosty chill that made the cool morning air seem balmy by comparison. But nothing happened. He had been many long months here now. The last time he felt that intense cold of infinity was the moment just after he met the scribe and walked out with him to face the place where Mecca would rise up in ages hence. He remembered how Hamza thought to prepare him for the fate that awaited him.

“Your friends will try to call you home soon, though you may not feel the place to be a home in your heart when you return. They will make an error, a very small one of course, but then little things have great consequences—”

It was obviously more than a small error, thought Kelly. He felt the retraction shift beginning, that heady lightness, tinged with a wave of nausea. For the briefest moment he thought he was back in his dream again, the same dream he awoke with this very morning, at the Harney Science Center Arion complex. Then he could feel his blood thicken and solidity returning to his body. He fell on the cold wet stone, unaware until he awakened. Was it hours later? Minutes? Seconds? He could not recall it now. They tried to pull me out and failed, he thought. Or perhaps it was that Time had no place for me in the world where my friends live now, and it tried to hijack the retraction shift and send me back to the beginning, back to a moment where I could walk gently forward to the death that was rightfully mine.

That thought darkened his mind every time he considered it. He had tried to ask Hamza what he knew of the events of his day, but the man was reluctant to divulge too much about it.

“The days yet to come are not my concern,” he would say. “I will contemplate them when the time comes to inscribe them here in the wall. You should not trouble yourself with idle speculation, my friend. Time has left you safely in our care. It is the will of Allah that you remain here with us, and share in the counting of days.”

So the moment when Time could best decide his fate was this moment, thought Kelly. Hamza was right. Time left me here, abandoned, a lost orphan. It took the easy way out. Hamza had told him just enough to know that the world had changed yet again, and was restored to the true Prime Meridian.

They had worked a mighty transformation, or so he explained it. A stumble and a kick had foiled them for a brief interval, but they worked it, with all determination, and found another way to restore the Time line to what it had been that Memorial Day when Palma exploded and wreaked its havoc on the world. How could Time account for my presence in that altered Meridian if I had shifted forward to the project lab again? He was well aware of the dilemma, and the grave danger of Paradox.

Time would have to balance her books, he thought, and my presence would force her to the difficult choice of either annihilating me, a Prime Mover and Agent of First Cause, or somehow finding a way to alter everything else to serve the need of my life. So she made the quick and easy choice, he thought, and just left me where I was, with a nice fat buffer, ten millennia wide, between me and any potential problem my life might cause.

Still, he had hope that one day he might return home to the world he knew. He wasn’t sure what had actually happened, given his failure to flood and destroy the shrine and record of days here. That uncertainty made friends with hope, and together they gave birth to a determination on his part to try and find his way home, whether that choice was wise or not. There was little he could do here on his own. His only chance would be to somehow alert his companions to the fact that he was alive and well, and prompt them to act. He soon realized he had the perfect means of communicating with Paul and the others right here!

The hieroglyphics, he thought. They’ll survive for thousands of years intact, and Nordhausen can read them! All he had to do was get chummy enough with Hamza and the others here to avoid arousing suspicion. So he joined Hamza where he worked at the wall each day, engaging him in lively conversation and discussion on the history, an advocate for his own Western perspective on the course of events, though Hamza might define him as a devil’s advocate with such opinions.

He would also join the others at prayer each time they would answer the call of the Muezzin, and he would sit with Hamza each evening and hear reading of the holy suras of the Koran as well. In time they came to see him as a new initiate to the faith, and eagerly engaged him with the teachings of the Prophet. And he found the discourse very uplifting and enlightening, however narrow the mindset behind it was at times. On occasion he would tussle with Hamza intellectually, trying to elucidate a viewpoint that could embrace the freedoms of the West, but it was largely a fruitless endeavor. If it was written in the Koran, then Hamza would give ear. But things like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the personal freedoms they gave rise too were often at odds with mainstream Islamic teaching.

“Tomorrow will be a special day,” said Hamza. “I will carve the rendering of new meaning for the concept of Jihad, as the Prophet related it in his ministry at Mecca and Medina. More than a simple admonishment to actively recount the words of the Koran and initiate the unfaithful, jihad now comes to be understood as a more active resistance to the ways of the Infidel.”

“Ah, yes,” said Kelly. The concept of holy war is not unknown to the West. I suppose the Crusaders proved that in no uncertain terms. Yet a time must come where men of different views and faiths can be at ease with one another, and find peace together. Is that not to be wished for?”

“Such contentment can arise only when the world acknowledges the true teachings of the Prophet,” said Hamza. “For there is no God but God, and Allah is his name, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

“Peace be upon him,” Kelly finished with a sigh.

“Yes, I will come to the wall again today, Hamza, and you may teach me more. Perhaps you will even let me help you, as I did once before, and ease your burden.”

Hamza had showed him his craft, explaining how the tools were to be used, and dyes applied to the hieroglyphics to preserve them through the long ages. Each day when he would come to the wall he could now see many others at work there, under Hamza’s watchful eye. They were carving the record of days, year by year, on the long, smooth stone walls of the chamber at the heart of the Sphinx. As big as it was, Kelly thought that they must eventually run out of space here. He could see that they were already nearing the end of this wall, and asked Hamza what he would do when every space was covered.

“What we cannot fit here will be carved in new slabs of stone and stored for safekeeping.”

They were carving these even now, and small groups of men were apparently assigned to different periods of the history, while Hamza inscribed the main narrative on the wall. “This character here,” he pointed, “will instruct the reader that what follows is to be found in detail on a stela, and indicate its location.”

“Here? But given the progress of the work so far, you’ll need more room than you have in this chamber, no matter how many more stones you bring in. There’s only so much room here.”

“Do not trouble yourself. The stones can be stored in any location. This one, for example, will be moved to the ancient temple site at Zau. See here how we inscribe its name?” He pointed to the base of the stela and Kelly saw how it matched the symbol Hamza had carved into his narrative on the wall.

“A nifty little card catalog system,” he said. “Etched in stone. Then you can move these anywhere you wish? We thought this had to remain a central library for the whole record of days.”

“That would be foolish,” said Hamza. “Your presence here has taught us that much. So we will take care to see that certain records of important times are duplicated and dispersed to other locations.”

Kelly thought for a moment about Paul and Robert, and how they secured his place in the Meridian by essentially doing the same thing with that memorial DVD and publishing duplicate copies in a thousand other locations.

He could see that people were arriving, and leaving, with armfuls of parchment. They used these to make rubbings from the engraved stone characters, carefully rolling them up and placing them into sturdy round tubes for easy transport. So the record of days was being duplicated and carried away from this place—to who knows where, he thought. Were there other locations where they were carving?

So it came to pass that he often joined Hamza in the main chamber, and assisted with the work. A quick study, Kelly easily learned many of the hieroglyphic symbols, and was one day surprised to learn his own name could be spelled out by using two simple characters, Ra for the sun, and Mer for pyramid. At times he practiced carving, as Hamza had shown him, and here and there he affixed his signature to things in a characteristic cartouche. One day he had been working a relatively small stone from the quarry when two men came looking for something to complete a stela they had been carving. They had miscalculated the length, and need another foot or two extend their narrative.

“Take this,” he gestured at the stone he had been carving, turning it over to show them the smooth, uncarved back side would meet their needs. “I was just writing of my morning prayer.” And take it they did. The message he had been writing was that ‘Ra-Mer greets the dawn, eternally, at the appointed place.’

Slowly, over days and weeks, he carved his name in many other places, but it was that one single stone that would survive intact, its characters perfectly preserved where it was mounted on a temple wall with the reverse side carved by Hamza’s men facing outward to endure the weathering and erosion of years, and his own script neatly preserved intact against the inner wall.

He remembered watching the two men carry the stone away, whispering to himself and making a promise that he must pray, each and every morning, there on the apex of the Pyramid of the Sun, without fail.

“Find it, Paul,” he whispered as the men left. And through the long ages his friend was engaged in exactly that endeavor.

Chapter 2

“What’s done is done, Paul. He’s gone and we’ll just have to accept it.” Nordhausen leaned forward on the dining table, his heart as heavy as his body felt at that moment. Paul had just finished his meal, but was still picking aimlessly at a few leftovers with his chopsticks.

The city was humming with energy tonight, especially here on Stockton Street, San Francisco, which was the real heart of Chinatown where all the locals did their grocery shopping daily at the open air markets and food stands while the tourists browsed the Asian nick-knack gift stores a block away on Grant. There were not many tourists tonight, but the trucks still came in from the many central valley growers, making late deliveries for a throng of customers who were haggling at the curb side produce stands, mostly Chinese.

The women would press their way into the crowded stores, squeezing and sorting and sometimes tasting fruits and vegetables. They would stoop over crates of lychee fruit, dragon’s eyes, jujubes, sorting and sifting to find the very best. They would dig into cartons of fresh shelled peanuts with gnarled hands, scooping them up into plastic bags, an old favorite. They would poke and prod tomatoes, inspect fresh cabbage, hold up bundles of bok choy squinting at the pale green leafage. Here and there, the windows of small cookeries were strung with freshly smoked hanging ducks, plump roasted chickens, and barbecued ribs.

The old Amahs, gray haired grandmothers with bowed backs would brave the crowds, dragging small rolling tote carts for their bags and leaning heavily on canes as they threaded their way through the crowds. Store clerks chanted up fresh produce, and some harangued customers who seemed overanxious to sample the merchandise. Meanwhile, men stood outside on the street, laden with red plastic bags full of produce. Some smoked, some talked, others simply stood there waiting to be handed yet another burden.

Paul had shopped here many times himself, immersing himself in the culture and finding the Chinese a simple, friendly, and industrious people. Now there was an added edge to their movements, he noted. The haggling was more intense. The handfuls of string beans and dried nuts seemed more grasping and urgent as they filled the bags. Storekeepers seemed nervous and short tempered, waving and yammering at people trying to taste the ripening fruit, and the prices crept ever higher.

Normally it was almost impossible to find parking on Stockton, but arriving late they happened by just as a shop owner was leaving for the day, and grabbed his parking spot as he left. Hungry, tired, weary with the news and an equal measure of remorse, they found Sun Sun Restaurant was still open and slipped in for a meal.

Nordhausen knew there was nothing more they could do. Kelly was gone, lost, annihilated in Time. They had tried to pull him back from that last mission, but failed. He could not explain the theory, but the God shaped hole in his soul was enough to make it plain. They sent him off… to who knows where, a hidden base in the Egyptian desert, lost in the convoluted labyrinth of Time. What chance did he really have anyway? They were not even sure the location and temporal coordinates had been accurate. For all he knew Kelly could have just ended up in the middle of the Sahara, ten thousand years away from home.

“LeGrand’s numbers…” The professor tapped his plate with a chopstick, stirring through the arguments again like old fried rice. “There had to be something wrong with the numbers, right? And why no pre-programmed retraction scheme?”

Urged on by LeGrand, an agent from the future group they had come to call ‘the Order,’ they made that last, grasping attempt to end the Time War, as each opposing side sought out moments of seeming insignificance in the long continuum of events, hoping to lever the chain of causality to some clear advantage.

Kelly was the only team member available for the mission. Yet he failed. They would never know why or how. The one stubborn fact that remained after they struggled to recover him was Palma. It had happened! The volcano blew its top again, helped by a nuclear device buried deep in the unstable western flank. It was as if their first mission aimed at preventing the calamity had never even occurred.

“How did they do it, Paul? How could they restore Palma to the time line if we prevented Husan Al Din from being born?”

“I have no idea, but it happened.” Paul was listless, distracted and beset by the heavy burden of loss. A sudden memory returned to him. He was sitting in the parlor of a hair cutting studio, just two doors down here on Stockton, and staring at the full wall mirror that was placed to the left of, and perpendicular to, the open front door. It created an odd effect. People walking down the street were reflected in the mirror as they approached and could be seen from the front as they reached the salon. Then they would suddenly appear in the open doorway, and he would get a side view of them as they passed. As the eye followed, expecting to see them continue on into the mirrored area, they just vanished as they passed the open door! It was an optical illusion, because the mirror was so clean and reflective that it appeared to be reality. You thought they would just walk happily into the reflection and that you would catch a rear view of them as they continued down the street, but the alternate reality presented by the mirror was just playing a clever trick on him. He sat for twenty minutes, just watching people walk by and vanish. His mind knew what was happening but his eye remained stubbornly ignorant, surprised each time. At one point he was compelled to get up and go to the door to look outside, relieved to see that the real world was all still there and the person he had seen in the reflection was ambling quietly down the street.

Life played equally cruel tricks, it seemed. People would come into your life, bask in the reflection of your heart and soul, then walk on and sometimes disappear.

“We lost him,” Nordhausen said with resignation heavy in his voice. “Win, lose or draw, we lose Kelly in this mess. I’ll be damned if I know what happened this time. But we’re going to have to face it and let it go.”

“No, we’re not, going to simply let it go.” There was a hard edge of determination in Paul’s voice. He had been thinking deeply about the event for the last three days. The chaos sweeping the nation after Palma sent them all into near survival mode, but he had managed to keep his head focused on the problem and things were slowly falling into place in his mind.

The great destructive waves could not harm them here on the Pacific coast, but the tsunami caused by Palma sent ripples of panic clear across the country. It was a heavy blow. Boston was destroyed. New York City was still under ten feet of water in most low lying areas. The waves swept right over Manhattan, thirty to forty feet high in places, and only those well above the flood tides in the high buildings survived—too few, as the catastrophe struck early in the morning, at 4:11 Eastern Standard time. Most of New Jersey was inundated. The ocean surged up the Delaware Bay and delivered a death blow to Philadelphia and Newark. The Delaware Isthmus shielded Washington D.C. for a time, but the great tide surged up the Chesapeake Bay as well, eventually flooding the nation’s capital, with great loss of life. Every bridge on the Potomac was down and the capital was isolated, though news feeds from overflying helicopters showed that neither the White House nor anything else on Pennsylvania Avenue survived intact.

In Virginia, the navy base and city of Norfolk were utterly destroyed, and the waters reached as far inland as Richmond. In the Carolinas, Raleigh was spared, but Charleston destroyed, and every city in Florida was virtually wiped off the map when the awesome power of the ocean swept completely over the peninsula in places! The average elevation of Miami was just six feet, and no more than a ground level of 26 feet at its highest location. The initial wave approached a hundred feet in height there. Some of the sturdier concrete buildings remained in the larger cities, but millions died in that state alone.

It was just too much for the nation to take. Panic spread across the continent as people in the heartland and Midwest instinctively went into survival mode and began stripping the shelves bare in markets and stores. The entire national transportation system ground to a halt. Food and fuel were no longer being delivered through most of the central states. Communications were spotty, though Atlanta based CNN was still on the air chronicling the disaster.

The ocean surge even swept into the Gulf of Mexico, swamping hundreds of production platforms and flooding major portions of Houston and New Orleans. Pipelines were wrecked, and no oil was reaching the southern states at all. Within 48 hours people had drained every last drop at service stations and, though the waves of destruction did far less damage there, the entire Gulf coast was evacuating inland.

FEMA was overwhelmed and no aid was reaching survivors virtually anywhere in the damage zones. And after the food and fuel ran down, Paul knew that it would not be long before the power would go off. Rolling blackouts were already sweeping the nation, even in places far removed from the destruction, like Chicago. Husan Al Din, who’s name meant “The Sword of the Faith,” had struck a fearsome and near fatal blow—if indeed he was the man responsible for the catastrophe. His only assumption had been that the Assassin cult had found some way to restore the man to the continuum, and assure his birth. That failing they had managed to find another terrorist to do the job.

On the Pacific coast the infrastructure remained intact and the abundant natural resources allowed for a brief interval of near normalcy. There was a measure of panic buying, but the national guard had imposed a modicum of order, particularly in California. Some places fared worse than others. There was a day of shocked numbness as people watched their television screens, dumbstruck by the scale of the devastation back east. It seemed that almost every family had lost a relative or friend in the disaster. Maeve, god bless her, had lost her mother that morning, and she was now reeling from the double blow in loosing Kelly as well, not to mention the impending collapse of social governmental infrastructure throughout the nation.

Then, as stories of evacuation, shortages of essential supplies, and growing civil disorder crossed the airwaves, people came out of their homes to scavenge the stores for things they thought they would need. Food was at the top of most people’s list, and panic buying started to gain momentum a day ago. The situation in Los Angeles was deteriorating, with crime and looting slowly getting out of control, particularly in the poorer neighborhoods. The constitution was suspended there, and martial law declared by order of the new acting president, the Speaker of the House, who had been safe on vacation in Hawaii.

Here in San Francisco there was still civil order, and civil liberties, though people went about their business with an edge of fear. The roads were drivable, though busier and more jammed than ever, even with gasoline approaching twenty dollars a gallon and nearly impossible to find. Hotels remained open, drawing on emergency supplies stockpiled in the event of a major earthquake. People were weeping in the lobbies, and thousands of tourists from the east coast lamented the loss of relatives and real estate. The banks were still operating, trying to manage a mad rush by thousands trying to get cash when the credit and debit card processing systems collapsed. Most schools and businesses closed their doors in shock, but retail outlets were open, making a hefty profit in sales. The restaurants and markets were open as well, selling off the last of their food before it spoiled, with prices quickly doubling, then tripling overnight. The meal Paul and Robert were sharing tonight had cost them over a hundred dollars for a plate of fried rice, a noodle dish with vegetables, and two beers.

Nordhausen gave Paul a confused look. “What are you saying? Palma happened, Paul. The whole eastern seaboard is a flooded wreck—all the way from Miami to Portland Maine. Kelly couldn’t stop them and they must have figured out some way to run another intervention that would save their damnable terrorist. Husan Al Din was born, and the bloody radicals got their revenge for that Navy Seal Mission in Pakistan when they bagged Bin Ladin. Then this Paradox thing wipes the slate clean, Kelly and all.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Paul. “Because if Kelly failed in his intervention then there was no reason for him to be exposed to Paradox.”

“Well it damn well took him before,” said Nordhausen. “If they reversed our intervention and restored the Palma event to the Meridian, then Kelly was fated to die, right? Graves never has a reason to come back and save him, for God’s sake. You explained all this to me a hundred times.”

“Yes, I know I did, and that logic was good in accounting for Kelly’s jeopardy at this moment on the continuum. But think, Robert. He wasn’t on this side of Palma when all this happened. He was over ten thousand years in the past! In that instance Paradox may not judge him harshly, right? Yes, Kelly could not be explained alive here in our time after Palma, but Paradox doesn’t have to account for his presence in that segment of the continuum.”

Nordhausen gave him a blank stare. “Are you trying to tell me that you think—”

“Kelly’s alive,” said Paul. “He’s alive, damnit, and by God, I have an idea.”

Chapter 3

Nordhausen had an incredulous look on his face. “An idea? Don’t tell me you’re planning another time jump. How in the world are we going to get the Arch operating without Kelly? Look at it out there, listen to the city! There’s a quiet panic underway, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re lucky things haven’t completely fallen apart by now, but I assure you, they will fall apart. Look at the bill for this meal. It’s going to get very uncomfortable when people start going hungry.”

“Staying fed is the least of my worries now,” said Paul.

“That’s an understatement,” said Nordhausen. “I’ll be glad if we make it over the Bay Bridge and get back to Berkley in one piece. It was a crazy to come over here to the City. Damn expensive as well. How much fuel is left in the tank? We’ve barely got enough to get us out of the Bay Area. Let’s get out of here, Paul. Go somewhere safe while we still have some mobility and the roads are open.”

“Somewhere safe?”

“How about your place down in Carmel? It’s a perfect refuge, tucked away on a peninsula with only a few roads leading in or out, all easily blocked and defended. There’s a lot of agriculture close by and lots of local growers in the area.”

“Forget it, Robert. You think we can just retire with the old folks in Pacific Grove and just ride this thing out? Hell, we have to do something. We’ve still got the Arch complex intact at Lawrence Labs in Berkeley. And I didn’t come into the City here for a hundred dollar meal in Chinatown, we’re heading over to the University of San Francisco. They’ve got an Arion system at the Harney Science Center there, and I still have 5 hours booked. I doubt anyone’s using it now.”

“Five hours? The University is closed, Paul.” What are you going to do, break into the building?”

“I have a key,” Paul said firmly. “We’ll just let ourselves in.”

“Oh yes, excuse us sir, we’re time travelers and we need as few hours on your machine here…” Nordhausen was trying to be sarcastic but Paul just fixed him with a determined stare and he relented. “You mean to say you have a mission planned? Is that why you’ve been carrying Kelly’s laptop around the last three days? You’ve got research? You think you can send us off to some desert again and reverse all this—prevent the Palma event from happening? In this mess?“ He jabbed a thumb at the open door where the City noise seemed louder, more cacophonous, with a tinge of uncertain anxiety in the normal backwash of cars and people. There were more horns, people shouting, car alarms going off, emergency service sirens, all adding a sense of urgency to the moment.

“I have an idea about that too,” Paul said again, “but we’ll need Kelly, so getting him back is the first order of business. He’s the only one who can handle the programming for a new mission.”

Nordhausen blinked. He started to say something then stopped and took a last swig of his now warm Tsing Tao beer, setting the bottle down on the table with a hard thud.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You think Kelly’s alive, god only knows why, but you do. And I know you’re stubborn enough to hold to that, his obvious absence aside. But it’s just denial, Paul. You’ll have to admit it eventually. You’re just making it harder on yourself with this.”

Paul said nothing, folding his arms defensively and pursing his lips. The professor gave in and gestured to him with an open hand. “OK, OK, I’ll go along with this for the moment. But what makes you think he’s alive? At least tell me that.”

“Why should he be dead?” Paul started. “It’s not denial, Robert, just positive thinking. Why should I assume he’s dead just because we couldn’t hold the quantum fuel together for a safe retraction? My bet is that he is still safe at his mission location.”

“What, having tea with the Assassins, like you were in Masyaf when you fell through the Well of Souls? That’s a stretch, Paul, not to mention that his mission location is over ten thousand years in the past. You explained it all to me yourself—he’s likely to have wandered off his initial manifestation point, and he could be anywhere in the area now. He could be kidnapped and hustled away to some stronghold like you were. Hell, these people are smart. They managed to stop Kelly, foil our intervention and reverse Palma all in one throw of the dice. They obviously know who Kelly is, and how important he is to the success of our endeavor here. Don’t you think they’d make damn sure he was well away from his manifestation point so we’d be unable to pull him out? Better yet, they could end the whole affair by simply cutting off his head!”

“They didn’t cut off my head,” said Paul.

“Well they should have.”

“When you were captured by Rasid and his men at Wadi Rumm they didn’t cut off your head.”

“Well they should have,” Nordhausen remained adamant.

Paul smiled, reaching for Kelly’s laptop where it sat on the unused chair at one corner of the table. “I need to show you something,” he said quietly. “I’ve been doing some digging around in the history.”

Nordhausen tapped his fingernail on the table top impatiently. He watched as Paul opened the laptop and poked at the touchpad to call up a file.

“OK,” said Paul. “You did your thing with the Rosetta stone and you claim you can read hieroglyphics, right?” The professor gave him a suspicious look. “Then read this…” Paul swiveled the laptop around so Nordhausen could get a look at the screen. The professor leaned in, squinting at the image there, suddenly curious. There were two symbols in a characteristic oval cartouche. One was a circle with a dot or another smaller circle in the center. The second looked a bit like a styled letter A, three strokes, with the left vertical side extended and curved below the horizontal stroke.

“That’s Ra,” the professor said at once as he pointed to the circular character. “It’s the symbol for the sun.”

“Right,” said Paul. “And the other one?”

Nordhausen thought for a moment. “That would be the symbol used to indicate a pyramid, a burial chamber, as they were all basically tombs.”

“What could it mean?” Paul urged him on. “What do those two symbols in tandem spell out? Sunset? The sun dying and going to its tomb in the underworld?”

“No, no, no,” Nordhausen pointed at the circular cartouche surrounding the two symbols, and noted that they were stacked one above another. “The cartouche was used to isolate characters and indicate a name. It’s someone’s name, probably an important figure that the rest of the glyphs are talking about. Where did you find this? I’ll need to see it in context to tell you what it means.”

“Exactly!” Paul clasped his palms together as he spoke. “Now… You said that first symbol was Ra, Atum-Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun. What’s the second symbol called, the one describing a pyramid?”

“Well the ancient Egyptian name for pyramid is Mer in some translations. It means tomb: pa mer. Others think the Greeks got involved in the etymology, by describing the pointed tops of ancient wheat cakes with the word ‘pyramis.’ But remember, the Greeks weren’t even around when the Egyptians started with all of this. So the prevailing wisdom is that the word has other origins. It’s all related to the sun cult one way or another—to Ra. Some even interpret the word to mean ‘fire in the middle’ and claim the notion of a pyramid arose from ancient volcanoes, the fire in the middle being obvious in that image.”

“Right!” said Paul. “You really do know this Egyptian business, don’t you.” He smiled. “So what do we have here, my friend. Sound out this name phonetically. Ra-Mer. You have to pronounce that first syllable with a long a, but does it sound familiar?”

Nordhausen frowned. “You aren’t serious.”

“Of course I am! Look at it. Two characters in a cartouche indicating a name, and they spell out Ra-Mer. That’s Kelly’s last name, Kelly Ramer!”

Nordhausen rolled his eyes. “Your whole theory is based on this? You’re telling me you think Kelly is alive just because this cartouche appears to sound out his last name? That’s pretty damn farfetched, Paul.”

“But there’s more!” Paul rotated the laptop and called up another file. “Can you read these?”

Nordhausen saw that there were many more hieroglyphics now, and he noted that they began and ended with the Ra-Mer cartouche. He spent some time looking the symbols over. “Ra-Mer comes… at the moment of the rising sun… make that dawn. It says Ra-Mer greets the dawn… forever and ever… make that eternally… at the appointed place.”

Paul gave him a satisfied look.

“It’s pretty damn thin, Paul,” Nordhausen protested again.

“Think for a minute,” said Paul. “If you were Kelly, lost in Egypt over ten thousand years ago, what would you do to try and signal your friends in the future? You would have only one reliable means of communication—the hieroglyphics! You would find a way to give your friends the one vital bit of information they would need in order to pull you out—your physical location at a specific point in time. We need both the temporal and spatial coordinates, to program a retraction scheme!”

Nordhausen was shaking his head. “Look, assuming he is alive somehow, do you think he’s just free to do whatever he pleases? He must have been discovered and captured before he could act. You think his captors are going to let him chip merrily away at stone walls, writing things they can easily read, and signal you his location? You’re daft!”

“No, just optimistic. You assume these messages were carved just at the time of his capture. They could have been written days, weeks, months or years after, when Kelly’s relationship with his captors may have mellowed considerably. My guess is that they would treat Kelly with the same respect and dignity he deserves as one of the Founders, a Prime Mover and First Cause Initiator. Their whole effort at changing the continuum through Time intervention depends, for a large part, on Kelly. And what was it your captor said—that they would not kill another Time traveler as a matter of policy?”

“To use his own words, he said it is not seemly for a Walker to strike down another. No doubt there are major consequences when you mess with Free Radicals—all Time travelers become Free Radicals on a mission, correct?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Paul agreed. “And in our case we’re more than Free Radicals. We’re Prime Movers and First Cause Initiators. It would have been a simple matter for them to assassinate us all once they discovered we were operating against them. But they can’t. The Outcomes and Consequences are too severe. So my bet is that they treat Kelly with the utmost respect, and that he finds a way to communicate through these hieroglyphic messages.”

Nordhausen thought deeply, then decided to accept Paul’s reasoning. After all, if there was anything they could do to save Kelly and reverse this horrible catastrophe again, then it was incumbent upon them to act, decisively, and with all courage and speed. Though it still seemed flimsy evidence to work with, he decided to let Paul have a run at his idea.

“So where did you get this image,” he pointed at laptop screen.

“A recent discovery,” said Paul. “I used Kelly’s Golem program to have the little buggers search for anything I could feed them that would identify Kelly.”

The Golems were a name Kelly had given to a program he disseminated over the Internet that could, at his command, use the power of every computer they were installed on to conduct data searches. It was a super Google, as it were, collecting Internet data from every search engine and web source it could find and comparing it with a live RAM Bank that was constantly infused with real time energy to preserve a record of the history. The Golems would then note any anomaly or variation. In effect, the RAM Bank was their touchstone, their hold on the Meridian as a baseline of reliable data. It was a permanent record of the way history was written before Palma. The team could then use the Golems to do real time searches of the Internet and report any variance from the data they had stored in the RAM Bank. Any point of conflict in the data would indicate a possible meddling point by the adversaries at war with one another on the Meridians of Time.

The variations would be reported to the project team members via special cell phone alert, allowing them to spin up the Arch and actually create an artificial Nexus Point through engineering, where they could safely analyze what was happening and plot an intervention mission if one should become necessary. The team had made a pledge to defend the Time line they knew as history before the Palma event occurred. As any intervention affecting Palma would have to occur in that history, they could act to prevent tampering, by either side.

“Never mind how I found it,” said Paul gesturing to the image on the screen. “The Golems put me on to it and I followed up with a raft of discrete search algorithms. Suffice it to say that this Ra-Mer figure has no representation in the original RAM Bank. He’s an anomaly, and a very, very ancient one at that. These carvings were found behind a false door in the Tomb of Mehu. No one paid them much heed, and scholars were not able to discover who he was—at least that’s what the Golems find now.”

“The Tomb of Mehu?” The Name was familiar to Nordhausen. “That’s nowhere near old enough to hold an artifact from the milieu where we sent Kelly.”

“Yes, that threw me off at first as well,” said Paul. “Then I discovered that this tomb site once belonged to someone else. It seems Mehu was a bit of a hermit crab. He was remodeling the tomb of Pepi the first king of the 6th dynasty.”

“Still not anywhere close to our target time for Kelly.”

“Right and good,” said Paul. “But Mehu had come upon an old, old carving, and he thought it especially sacred, the writing of Amun-Ra himself, or so the research goes now. It was so precious to him that he built a new door in the tomb with an inscription dedicating the chamber beyond to his son, but there was no chamber beyond—just six feet of solid granite. So the door was false, and no one gave it another thought for centuries. Millennia in fact.”

“This was all in the Golem report?” Nordhausen was amazed.

“This and more,” said Paul. “Mehu cleverly used this false door to hide a very ancient artifact away from curious eyes. There was no chamber dedicated to his son there, but there was a small enclosure, at a lower level of the tomb, and it held something quite unusual—a very ancient carving of old hieroglyphics. More than a hermit crab, Mehu was a bit of a plagiarist as well. Because he copied some of the figures and characters he had seen on the artifact onto his own tomb carvings. Oh, it made no impression outside academic circles, very small circles at that, but the Golems turned it up when I told them to search for any permutation of Kelly’s name. Bingo! The entire sequence from Mehu’s tomb was later found to be attributed to the original carvings of this Ra-Mer figure!”

“How old,” asked Nordhausen. “This has to be well before the 6th Dynasty to have any relevance.”

“Well, researchers are now saying this artifact appears to be one of the oldest instances of hieroglyphics ever found. They’re saying it is over 6,000 years old, their best guess I suppose, but I think they’re wrong. I say it’s well over ten thousand years old, written by Kelly Ramer himself as a message to us that would survive through the ages and broadcast one thing—his exact physical location at dawn each morning in the milieu where he resides at this very moment, alive and well.”