Nexus Point

19

Kelly stared at the glowing console panels, watching system after system coming on line, a look of amazement and pleasure on his face.

“It worked!” he exclaimed. “Heisenberg was right.”

“Heisenberg? What’s going on?” said Maeve. “Are you telling me that—“

“It changed.” The surprise in Kelly’s voice was edged with a hint of delight. “The program source code changed somewhere. The Golems are spotting variations, and the system called home, just like it was supposed to.”

Maeve was not happy. She had been battling the notion of unaccountable change for weeks, and this was the last thing she needed. “Maybe someone’s tampered with it,” she suggested. “Hackers are always pulling stuff like that.”

“He’d have to be a genius,” said Kelly, “with an open account on an Arion system, and a lot of time. I encrypted the source code with a 512 megabyte key. Yes, I know it’s illegal, but who’s telling. Now, it would take an Arion system about two years to power through that, let alone the fact that I set the key to mutate on a precisely planned route—I call it my guided key evolution. It would take a hundred years to break that—if it could be done at all.”

Maeve was just staring at him trying to absorb what he was saying. He was standing square in the middle of the room, his baseball cap tilted slightly to one side, hands on hips, and eyes scanning the consoles one by one as they came to life. She realized that he was using one part of his head to monitor the boot sequence while another part was explaining his code technique. He reached down to peck a keystroke on one of the systems, as if nudging something that seemed slightly out of place.

“Ah,” he said. “Someone turned this monitor off.” He poked the flat panel display power toggle with a look of satisfaction. All was in order. “So,” he continued. “Let’s just say that this key is unbreakable—for all practical purposes.”

“Unbreakable? Then—“

“At least not breakable with the systems available today. You either know the key or you don’t access the code. That rules out hackers—period. So when my Golem calls home, something is afoot. Something has changed. Let’s see if I can isolate the Heisenberg wave. I set this whole thing up to give us location. You’ll see.”

Kelly was all business now. He had his briefcase open and he was pulling out file folders and a small hand calculator. He marched over to a terminal and settled in, eyes scanning the screen while he waited for the boot sequence to stabilize. He was getting green readings on one board after another, ticking them off mentally in his head as the systems checked in. His little army of number crunching computers was alive and well, and he stretched his arms with a grin, cracking his knuckles.

“This is going to be interesting,” he said.

Maeve felt the flutter of anxiety ratchet up a level in her chest. Kelly had a knack for understatement. “OK,” she breathed. “Let me see if I have this straight. You’re telling me that your program spotted a change—but that it couldn’t possibly be tampering.”

“Correct.”

“And this means someone’s playing with time?”

“That’s my best guess. When I send out the program, it’s pristine. They install it, run it, and the code follows a precisely defined pathway, and constantly checks itself to be sure that nothing is amiss. Well something’s wrong. The only way that could possibly happen is if an element from the source code has been altered. Oh, its likely to be a little thing, like a change in a variable signifier, or something like that. Any serious change would crash the program entirely, and…” He keyed something on the system, squinting at the screen to read the result. “Just as I thought: no crash alerts. So the code changed. Looks like a very small mutation, but anything counts for this test.”

“Well what if someone’s hard drive died and the code was damaged or something?”

“I’d have checksum flags on that, and the basic integrity of the program is still good. See?” He pointed at a monitor, but Maeve could make no sense of the data he was indicating.

“Now I’m going to find out where the problem is, and possibly how it happened. It could be that our friends from the future are running a mission!”

Maeve didn’t like that idea. The notion that unborn people in a distant age were altering this very moment with the technology of the Arch was deeply disturbing, and a bit confounding. It meant that, in spite of all her arguments, the project would not be shut down. The technology would survive and proliferate, and spawn a thousand nightmares that would prey upon her from this day forward.

“And this Heisenberg wave?”

“Ah, yes.” Kelly reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out one of his favorite candies. “Necco Wafer?” He offered, but Maeve simply folded her arms, waiting. “The Heisenberg wave.” Kelly began to explain his theory again. “Ever throw a stone in a pool of water? Well of course you have. So you know what those little ripples look like after it goes ker-plunk. Well, I got this idea: if someone opened the continuum, the effects would ripple out from the breaching point, just like those little waves. It’s just quantum stuff. Paul and I were talking about it. In fact, he encouraged me to run up this program.”

“Ah,” Maeve seized on that. “A conspiracy!”

“Just a collaboration. I ran the theory by him and he said the quantum uncertainty principle had to manifest somehow. So I thought of the ripples in that pond and came up with—“

“A Heisenberg wave. How clever.”

“This is the cool part,” Kelly hurried on. “I have a good data map on the location of all the boxes running my Golem. All I have to do now is send out this query and have each box on-line report its code status. Then I’ll know exactly which boxes have a mutant running, and exactly where they are with the GPS sync that’s been built into all CPUs for the last five years.”

The Global Positioning System was another nifty little feature that had enjoyed wide proliferation. Ever since the US Air Force started turning dumb iron bombs into precisely targeted killers, GPS technology began to pop up in a wide array of appliances. It was a standard feature on all cars since the 2006 models, and now even computers could use the internet to tell the world exactly where they were. They sold the idea as a way of enabling new zip code like domain structures and IP addresses for the burgeoning Internet. It was a nifty anti-hacking scheme spawned by the Department of Homeland Defense. They wanted to know where every cell phone, vehicle, boat, plane and computer was, and once the technology was in place, their wish was made a reality.

“I just made the GPS feature a system requirement for my Golem.” Kelly was pulling up data as he spoke, eyes bright with the glow from the monitors. “Now I can plot where the corrupted systems are, and map the damage graphically… Like this!” He poked his finger on a key and leaned back, fingers locked at the back of his head and elbows splayed out like twin antennae. The screen began to display a map of the world, and tiny colored dots were winking on, slowly coloring the map with the data plots.

“The green dots are normal systems… the red dots are corrupted. I’ll have a possible breaching location soon.”

“You mean they’re coming here—to our time?”

“Well, not necessarily,“ Kelly equivocated. “When we ran the mission to 1917, things changed here as well. The change migrates through time but, like Einstein said, its really space-time. The temporal coordinates determine when the Heisenberg wave starts, and the spatial coordinates determine where it starts. The change ripples out from the location of the Nexus—like a wave, only it moves through the fourth dimension as well as the other three.”

“A Heisenberg wave…” Maeve grasped the simile and held on to it. She imagined some critical change in the Meridian. From that single point, a place Paul called a Nexus Point, a ripple of quantum uncertainty would expand out in all directions, altering everything in its path.

“Effects from alterations in the Meridian have a brief local life before they migrate out,” said Kelly. “It happens slowly at first, relatively speaking of course. This is the work of the first few nanoseconds.” He pointed at his data plots. “After that the wave accelerates rapidly until it reaches an infinite speed and changes everything; everywhere. But look here!” He rotated the flat panel monitor to give Maeve a better view. “Here’s the footprint of the devil, Maeve. It started somewhere in this location…”

Kelly pressed a finger to his LED screen and noted the swirl of interference caused there by the pressure. “Wouldn’t you know it,” he said. “Right smack dab in the Middle East. Looks like Syria… Somewhere north of Damascus near the Lebanese border. That’s where the system seems to indicate a Nexus forming, and there’s a shadow of something else further south—a bit east of Akaba. Very odd. It’s almost as if the two points arose simultaneously.” He keyed some GPS coordinates and told the system to display the name of the nearest town for the point in Syria. “There,” he said with finality. “How do you pronounce this… Mas-yaf?”

Maeve leaned in. “No,” she corrected him. “Sound the letter Y like a long I, and make it three syllables instead: Ma-sigh-af. It’s a famous castle ruin north of Tripoli.”

“Well, that appears to be our Nexus Point. And look—the change is proliferating throughout my whole Golem network. I’ll bet they’re spotting variations.”

“You mean to say the whole time line has just been altered again?”

“Altered? Who can say. But it certainly appears to be vulnerable, and we may be the only two people alive that know it—at least in this Milieu. I thought about that. The only thing that irked me about the prospect of using the Arch was this: how would we know what’s gone wrong? It was easy to monitor changes to my program like this, but getting back to your issue with Shakespeare—it looks like you would have to read all the plays again tonight to see if something changed. Not to mention everything else we’d have to check, history, politics, scientific discoveries. It’s maddening! We would need some kind of master library to serve as a reference point—a kind of touchstone to measure the whole world against. So I got to thinking…”

Maeve slumped into a chair at his side, leaning heavily on the armrest with her elbow, chin in hand. She was resisting the impulse to get up and run to the emergency equipment locker for an axe. She had a forlorn look on her face. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “I wish we had never done this—any of it.”

Kelly gave her a sympathetic look. To him this was an exciting adventure into cyberspace and the arcane realms of mathematics he so enjoyed. He could see that Maeve was truly distressed, however, and he offered one small consolation.

“Dust in the wind, Maeve. We want permanence, we reach for it, hope for it. Lord, isn’t that what heaven’s all about? But it doesn’t work that way—at least not in this realm. Nothing stays put for long. It’s all process; all change. We’re just surfing the wave now, that’s all. I don’t see what else could be done. I know how you must feel. It’s going to be lonely here—in the heart of it all. We’re sitting at infinity’s bedside now, and she’s quietly dreaming. At least we’ve got each other, if that’s any consolation. And I’ve got another little surprise up my sleeve as well.”

She looked at him with a smile. “I think I hear my poet in there somewhere,” she said, feeling just a little safer to see Kelly at the keyboard, a little warmer knowing he was here—at least for now. “I guess that’s what it all really boils down to,” she said. “This moment and the guy with the funny baseball cap sitting next to you.”

“Hey!” Kelly offered a mock protest. “Bonds signed this cap the year he retired. It’s going to be an heirloom.”

“Heirloom? You making any plans I don’t know about?”

“Don’t worry,” he grinned. “I’ll run everything by Outcomes and Consequences before I buy the ring.”

Maeve fought off the urge to snatch away his baseball cap, Barry Bonds and all, and muss up his hair. “I think your chances for approval may be fairly good!” She gave him a conspiratorial grin. “That is if I still have any pull with the committee.”

The rising vibration of the generator feeding power to the Arch pulled Kelly back to the urgency of the moment. “Now for my other surprise,” he said. “I think you may like this one.”

He scooted his chair two terminals to the left and toggled some switches. “Time for a pattern signature,” his eyes gleamed with excitement.

“Pattern signature? On who? If you think we’re going down to that Arch—”

“Not us,” Kelly reassured her. ”But everything else will do.”

Maeve was back to the fishing trip routine with him, trying to figure out what he was up to. “OK, maestro, what is it this time?”

“Just one more thing I put into the Golem. Let me send out the query sequence first and I’ll explain.”

He was keying commands, very quickly, and Maeve found herself recalling the exponential keystroke error he had made on the first mission. “Take your time,” she breathed. “We apparently have plenty to spare if we’re under the influence of the Arch Nexus like you suggest.”

“Don’t worry,” Kelly breathed. “There. It’ll take about an hour, even with that bank of fifty high speed DSL modems I installed last month.”

“So that was why our hardware budget was high. I thought it was the RAM you ordered for the history module.”

“That too,” said Kelly. “I installed a whole new system here, just for you.”

“For me?”

“Look, Maeve,” he began with that placating tone in his voice that always prompted her to raise an eyebrow of suspicion. “This thing isn’t going to be shut down. I think you know that as well as I do. Don’t get me wrong. Everything you’ve argued up until now makes perfect sense, but the fact that I’m still alive means that the technology survives. It gets used. Oh, I suppose we could shut everything down for our lifetimes but, after we’re gone, then what? The way I figure it, we just have to ride the wave. At least that gives us a chance to keep an eye on things—it gives you a chance, Maeve. Outcomes and Consequences: that’s really what its all about now, right? We need you more than ever. Shakespeare needs you.”

Maeve had a defeated look on her face, but it resolved to a quiet resignation. Her stubborn strength and the energy of her considerable will power would just have to be directed elsewhere now. Kelly was right. “Looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of reading,” she said.

“Well I was thinking about that,” Kelly beamed, safely over the speed bump and accelerating again. “Like I said, this little module is for you.”

“What is it?” Curiosity was beginning to restore her.

“A gift from the Golem,” Kelly grinned. “I just sent a command to all hundred thousand plus screensavers out there on the net. It’ll take a while to migrate through the network, but then, watch out. We’ll have one hell of a data stream pointed our way in about an hour. I hope fifty modems can handle it.

“Do I get to know why this data stream is going to bombard us in an hour, or are you going to make me pull that out of you after coffee?” Maeve was angling toward the French press.

“Ok, I took a pattern signature on the Internet last month and I have some good data stored here on a runtime system with as much RAM as I could possibly get my hands on.”

“Ah ha! You’re as bad as Nordhausen, Kelly. The two of you were nodding yes to the vote for shutdown in committee, and then you were both off pursuing your own private little projects! What do you mean you took a pattern signature on the Internet?”

“Hear me out, I think you’ll approve of this. You thought my Golem alert was a good idea, right? Well this is even better. I just told all my little Golems to use the search feature and visit key portals and data bases on the Internet. They’ll sample the data there—just like a search engine index, and send it all here.” He pointed at the new module he had installed and then indicated a crawlway access on the floor. “That leads to a bay for air conditioning equipment. Heat management has not been much of a problem, so I used the bay for a RAM bank. It’s six feet wide and goes down ten feet—all the memory I could buy. You can never have too much RAM, right?”

“And you’re saying you’ve got all this data from the Internet running down there?”

“Yup—a runtime data bank—always on, and protected in the Arch Nexus. I have an Arion mini crunching error scans, just like the loop I coded into my Golem. Now this bank over here—“ He pointed at another crawl access a few feet to the right.

“There’s more?”

“I told you—all the RAM I could buy. I went to seven different vendors last month. Good prices, too! In any case, my Golems are out there sampling the entire body of published knowledge on the Internet. That’s the real reason I wrote the program. They can’t get everything, of course, but they’ll get enough for us to get a good pattern signature. It’s a bit like political polling, if that makes any sense.”

Maeve was flabbergasted. “You did this… for me?”

“That’s right, babe. That’s the way the world was before this little alert.” He pointed at the first RAM bank. “And my Golems will go out and fetch the whole thing again and put it right there.” He pointed at the second RAM bank now, grinning ear to ear. “All we have to do is compare the two and see what’s changed.”

Maeve’s eyes brightened with the realization of what he was saying. “Bless you, Kelly…” Now they had some reference point, some slim hold on the reality they brought with them to the complex that night. “But how will we compare them?”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of help here.” Kelly gestured at a row of five computer terminals. “I routed everything into the research modules. And besides,” he winked at her. “I’ve got you.”

“Damn right you have!” She ran up to him and threw her arms about him. The fervor of the embrace sent his baseball cap flying off his head.

“Easy does it,” he said, his eyes still glued to the monitors. “We know that something’s is going on in Syria—now we need to find out when it happened. Since the change always ripples forward in time from the breaching point, all we have to do is figure out when things started changing in the history data.” He smiled broadly and added one more thing: “Pour the coffee. This is going to be interesting.”

20

Nordhausen was stunned. A time traveler. He was sitting in the middle of a cave in Wadi Rumm with a goddamned time traveler! Who was he? What was he doing here? The professor replayed the man’s remarks in his mind. He said something about being a messenger. He had some business here, and we’ve stumbled right into the middle of his operation. He was talking about a reaction—something Paul set off unintentionally.

The Oklo reactor!

Now the professor strained to recall what Paul had told him about the odd green water in the depths of the cave—the water that was glowing softly, quietly radiating as the bacteria concentrated the isotopes and started a low level chain reaction. It suddenly occurred to him that these people could have set up equipment here for an Arch! They could use the energy produced by the Oklo reaction for a natural nuclear power source. Its low radiation level would prevent it from being detected, and it would last for thousands of years!

“You mean to say… Are you telling me you have an Arch here? That my friend went through?”

“And may Allah go with him,” said Rasil. “He jumped too early, or he fell too soon, if that was the case. The timing will not be accurate. He will probably land before the event, and his coming may prove to be quite a stone in the still waters there.”

By God, thought Nordhausen, by holy God! What have I done? I insisted Paul come with me on this little adventure and then…

“Where?” He leaned forward eagerly, eyes searching his Arab companion’s face, eager for the answer. “Where did he go?”

“I cannot reveal that.”

Nordhausen sat up, flustered. “Why not? You just said that we were both safe here in a Nexus Point, right?”

“Yes, we are safe—but the whole world is now at risk again, my friend.” He gestured expansively at the terrain about them. The tall weathered walls of Wadi Rumm towered silently over them, brooding down with just a hint of distain and reproach. The earth sat, with infinite patience, and endured the constant insult of man.

“What does that have to do with it? We are completely alone. You said your guards don’t understand a word we’re saying. Come now. Where has he gone? You must tell me.”

Rasil’s eyes narrowed, and he stroked the dark stubble of his beard. “Do you realize the trouble you have caused here already? I was to jump at the setting of the moon!” He pointed to the heart of the cave, a flash of anger returning to his eyes. “Then you come fluttering out of the sky with the Jordanian Air Force at your heels. I thought you were a tourist at first, until I saw your cargo sled. You tell me, what is it you were carrying? Equipment? Must I have my men dig it up?”

“Dig it up? Damn it man, I told you what it was. It’s a fossil. An Ammonite. If you don’t believe me then go dig it up yourself. You talk about trouble? We were minding our own business until you came along. Now where is my friend?”

The Arab set his jaw, as if stifling a rising anger. “We cannot quarrel here,” he said. “You think we are without means, without resources after Palma failed. But, as you have seen, we are more capable than you may realize.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The war was going badly for you. In fact, we believed that the issue was nearly settled at Palma. But it can never be so, yes? It can never really be written while we struggle with one another. One side or the other must prevail. You and I are warriors, meeting here in the stream of life. Yet, now a chasm has opened and your friend has fallen through. It is not for us to quarrel like spoiled children. He is the master of fate now, and we must simply wait.”

The professor was trying to sort through the man’s words, and slowly, by degrees, the meaning was dawning on him. Rasil was clearly angry about what had happened here, yet he was forcing some truce on his emotion. A moment ago he wanted to kill me; now he accepts parley. It was as if he saw himself as my opponent in some way. Yes. He said it himself.

“What war do you speak of, Iraq? Iran? You mean the fighting in Syria last year?”

“Do not be coy,” Rasil berated him. “The American occupation of the Holy Lands in this timeframe will be short lived, I assure you. The Romans tried, and failed, just as the Byzantine Empire failed after them. All of Europe failed with their pathetic Crusaders. The French thought to carve out a kingdom there once. They held it for nearly ninety years, but Salah ad Din took it back. We saw to that by letting a mongrel wolf live out his fate, when we could have killed him at our whim. No matter! Now, in this age, the West comes to our land once more. First the British, then the Americans. It will not last. You will see. We had the solution in hand once, at Palma. We will find another, soon enough.”

The man’s words seemed to brand Nordhausen with sudden realization. He was speaking like they were mortal enemies. It was as if there was an ongoing struggle between two factions for the long-term control of the world. What was it he accused me of earlier? He said I was a member of some order. Now he was talking about Palma. Could he be one of the original conspirators? Could it be that they’ve got their hands on the Arch technology somehow?

“Palma? You mean you were in on that?”

“It was our master stroke!” Rasil’s eyes gleamed. “Yes! I have told you I am from the ninth age. I was a part of the world that Palma made possible. I tasted the fruit of that victory—the grandeur of Islam that spanned the whole of the globe. Oh, you tried to reverse our achievement for many decades, but always failed. The alerts would come in and we would rush to the safety of our Nexus Chambers to wait and stand the watch, looking for transformation. It never came. I tell you that we were beginning to think we had bested you at last. The Shadow was so impenetrable around the island of Palma that it frustrated your every attempt to reach a criticality on the Meridian. You could not get through—nobody could, and nothing that happened after mattered. The key event was at Palma.”

The look of satisfaction on his face suddenly withered and he returned to the posture of guarded watchfulness, eying Nordhausen with suspicion. “At least that is what we believed. Then the alarms came in again—just another feeble blow, we thought, the last death rattle of the Order. Imagine our surprise when we emerged from the shelter of our chambers and found the whole world was lost to us once more. Everything shattered, vanished, gone forever…”

Nordhausen gaped at the man and, to his great surprise, he saw how Rasil’s eyes clouded over with tears. The consequences of the mission to reverse the Palma event had been annihilating. This man knew them—he had been protected in a Nexus Point when it happened. Now everything he had been saying connected in the professor’s mind, and he nearly gasped with the awareness of it all. Time war! This man was talking about a struggle between some nefarious Arab faction and a group he called ‘the Order.’ They were at war, running missions into the past to alter the course of history one way or another. One side prevailed for a time, and Islam spread throughout the globe, the West destroyed by the awful catastrophe of the tsunami sequence generated by the Palma event.

Like a massive rock hurtled into the ocean, the ripples of change surged forth from that all consuming moment and made an end of Western history. Graves said it himself—they were desperate. They couldn’t get through the Shadow. Paul talked about that, and now it finally made sense to the professor. Palma was so decisive, so final in its effect, that the remnant of Western civilization struggling to be reborn risked all on one last operation. And they came to us, he mused, to me. I was a part of their plan all along; with Paul and Kelly and Maeve. We still don’t even know what we did, but it turned this man’s world on end—it changed everything.

He looked at Rasil, saw the tears, the pride as he struggled to control his emotion, the dignity of the man. He knew. He saw it all happen, and saw it all lost. It was as if all Western history had been re-written in a night.

“Do you have any idea what we lost?” Rasil’s voice was a whisper now, and he stilled himself, head lowered with the shame of his tears.

Nordhausen reached out and placed his hand on the man’s knee. “Forgive me,” he said softly. “This is a hard business.”

Rasil nodded, recovering his composure. He placed his hand on Nordhausen’s for a moment, and the two shared a brief understanding. “A hard business,” he repeated. “And it needs hard men. My tears were unseemly. But you see why I cannot reveal the breaching point to you here—you understand now, one hard man to another.” He withdrew his hand and the professor folded his arms. They sat there for a moment in the mouth of the cave, feeling very cold and alone.

“So, what do we do now?” said Nordhausen.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“Until the resolution, and it will not be long, I fear.”

“And my friend?”

“You may have seen the last of him.” Rasil looked him full in the face now. “A hard business.”

“What? You mean to say that you can’t pull him out—you have no retraction scheme?”

“He was not prepared,” Rasil explained. “You know this as well as I do. I’m afraid he is on his own now. It is not within my power to reach him from here. This is a one way journey, and his time will be short. A man who jumps into the Well of Souls does not return—at least not here.”

Nordhausen was flabbergasted. “One way? But how can that be? Paul told me time would hold the door open for him. He doesn’t belong there!” The professor pointed to the depths of the cave.

”Surely not. It was my place to jump, but that was foiled.”

“Then let me go after him, if you will do nothing to save him.”

“Don’t be foolish. Did you not hear? The Well is dissipated. It takes a full month for the reaction to build. It will not open again until the next full moon—in fact, it must never open again.”

“What are you saying?” Nordhausen was desperate for some way out of the dilemma.

“If the well remains—if we remain—after the transformation, then I will order my men to destroy this place. It must not be allowed to come to the attention of the Order, you understand. I could kill you instead, but that is against our code of honor. A walker must not be harmed. The repercussions are too difficult to fathom. So the well will be destroyed, and that will be the end of it.”

Nordhausen slumped with resignation, a deflated look of pain on his face. “Then I’ve doomed him,” he whispered. “I’ve killed my friend.”

“No,” Rasil corrected him. “It is very likely that he will survive the jump. We have caretakers at the other end. They will do what they can for him, if he survives the fall. Then time will decide his fate at the other end. It is our doom you have sealed, not that of your friend.”

“Our doom?”

“None of this was written,” said Rasil. “It was not supposed to happen, this chance meeting in the desert. We did not expect you, so that is why I believe you when you say your coming here was unplanned. Yet you yourself have said it: your friend does not belong there. He is a Free Radical now. Remember—time is jealous; time is vengeful. It may be that the dogs will have our bones before the dawn.”

21

Thankfully, Jabr’s sanctuary was not far. They moved through the thickness of the night, first winding their way down a twisted gorge, and then climbing again, by a narrow rock-sewn pathway that eventually withered away to nothing. Paul thought it odd that along the route he had not seen any other sign of life—not a road, a house or even so much as a telephone pole. While it made sense that this group would hide away in these remote mountains, the rugged, unfinished nature of the ground seemed strange to him.

“What is this place?” he asked when they finally halted for the night. It was the dark hour before dawn, and the chill lay heavily upon them, in spite of the thick, coarse robes they had donned.

“This is Wadi el Jan. That would be the Valley of Demons in your language. Let us hope the jinn have ceased their restless walking in the night and returned to their haunts, for the new day will be upon us soon. I am sorry to have pressed you to such discomfort this night. You must be very tired. Come, there is a deep cave hidden in the face of yon cliff. It is known to very few—perhaps not even the Sami. We will be safe here for a time, Allah willing.”

They found the entrance, well hidden behind the twisted remains of an old cedar tree, its trunk cloven by lightning and scored by fire, the long limbs barren and charred to black and ashen gray. One of the two guards continued on, leading the horses away as if he were just a weary traveler in the mountains.

“The horses would be too easy to spot from yonder ridge,” Jabr explained. “Poor Hamza still has long hours ahead of him before he takes his rest. Yet, he will be rewarded. Aziz will remain and guard the entrance to our sanctuary. Come, we will prepare a meal. I’m afraid it will not be so sumptuous. We cannot light a fire here just yet, so cold biscuits will have to do. Perhaps it will be safe to brew kahwa when the sun is up.”

Another cave, thought Paul as they slid into a narrow crack in the face of the sheer cliff. He soon found that, once through a constricted tunnel, the interior of the cave opened up to a wide chamber. Jabr disappeared into the shadows for a moment and Paul caught the scrape of flint on stone. A spark flared in the distance and the soft light of an oil lamp suffused the chamber. To his great surprise, he saw that the walls had been shaped and smoothed by artisans, and squared to the semblance of a typical room. There were crude wooden tables, chairs, and recessed shelves hewn into the rocky walls, stacked high with many bound leather volumes and rolled scrolls. He saw doorways leading to other rooms deeper in the heart of the cliff, and caught a glimpse of an ornate arabesque, hung with richly colored tapestries. There were thick carpets in one quarter of the room, dressed out with pillowed bolsters. A few wooden tables were scattered with archaic instruments, quill pens, a pair of calipers and something that appeared to be an astrolabe. Paul saw several sketched documents, which he took to be maps of the stars. They were illustrated by elegant drawings of the heavens, dominated by a large sickle moon.

“A library, of a kind,” said Jabr, seeing how he was drawn to the tables.

Paul was amazed. “These books must be very old,” he said, his finger tracing a path in the ash white dust covering a leather bound book.

“Some,” said Jabr. “Others are very recent, the handiwork of the Kadi’s scribes and mapmakers. This is a secret archive he has set aside from the world. The days are careless, and wisdom is too easily lost in the heat of our quarrels. Such a sanctuary is a place of peace, where Allah may watch kindly over all that is set here for safekeeping.”

Paul could not resist taking up one of the drawings, a great circle with darkened areas painted in the interior to form stark, regular shapes labeled by Arabic writing.

“What is this?” He held the document closer to the lantern, noting the earthy tones in its coloring, ochre, violet and umber.

“Ah, that is a map.” Jabr brought another oil lamp to the table and they spread the document out. “It is the world as we know it now, drawn from accounts of many travelers we have dealings with.”

“A map?” Paul squinted at the document, cocking his head to one side, somewhat perplexed. It was like nothing he had ever seen, and had not the slightest resemblance to the maps he often doted over back home. “I can’t make any sense of it,” he said. “Which way is north?”

“At the bottom, of course,” said Jabr. “Here is the land of the Arabs, and here is Egypt.” He pointed with a slim, brown finger, indicating abstract areas of the map offset by dark shading.

Paul rotated the scroll, turning it 180 degrees about, his eyes widening as Jabr continued his narration, and he labeled the areas mentally, slowly beginning to see familiar shapes in the diagram.

“But now you have it turned the wrong way,” said Jabr. “Mecca, the jewel of the south, is always placed at the top.”

Paul stared at him, as if he was playing out some mischievous prank. “One of your men drew this? Well he certainly could use a geography lesson or two. Where are we?” He slipped the question in nonchalantly, hoping Jabr would not draw that veil of guarded secrecy about their exchange.

“See the sickle there,” he pointed to the Northeast quadrant, the shape Paul took to be Syria. “That is the realm of the Sheikh, where we now hold forth.”

“Is he your leader?”

“That and more!” Jabr’s eyes gleamed in the lamplight. “He is sâhib al-kawn the Master of Creation; Master of Time. He is the Witness, the Watcher, the Dispenser Of Mercy at the beginning and the end.”

Quite the humble soul, thought Paul. Not even Osama bin Ladin was that fond of himself. He was suddenly possessed with a driving urgency to know who these people were, and what they were about here in their mountain hideaways.

“Jabr,” be said firmly, “I am far from home, quite lost, in fact. I have no idea who you are, really, or what you intend to do with me. I suppose I should be grateful to you for all you have done for me, but the truth is, I feel a captive here, a hostage taken against my will. Is that so?”

“Hostage? Oh no, Do-Rahlan. You are an honored guest! You came to us through the Well of Souls, and you have the Kadi’s favor and protection until such time as the Sheikh may decide otherwise, peace be upon him.”

“Ah, then you are waiting for instructions from this other? What then?” He searched Jabr’s face for some sign of a truth kept hidden from him, but he saw only sincerity and empathy in the man’s brown eyes.

“I am not told these things,” said Jabr. “The Kadi received a letter from the Sheikh at the setting of the moon last night. It warned him that the Sami was misguided, and fallen into error. It specified that you were to be taken from the castle, and that the woman assigned to your care was to be closely watched. Allah be praised, I was just in time to prevent her foul deed. It was said that she meant to poison you!”

“Samirah? I think she was innocent,” said Paul. “She came to my side as always, bearing that wonderful drink you have been offering me each evening. Yet I could see that something was disturbing her. She seemed upset; afraid.”

“She knew the darkness of her own heart,” Jabr pointed to his chest for emphasis.

“No, I rather think she was simply terrified of something. She poured the cup, but then, as I was about to drink, she struck it from my hand and embraced me. A moment later you burst into the room.”

Jabr gave him a thoughtful look. “I see,” he said, stroking the thin curled wisp of his beard. “It may be that she heard my approach and sought to secure her innocence at the last minute. Then again, it could be as you suggest: that she was forced to this deed by threat of pain, or worse. In any case, such is not for us to decide. The matter of discernment is for the Kadi—or the Sheikh when he should come.”

Paul gave him a perplexed look. “About this Sheikh,” he began. “You say a letter came with all this written?”

“Yes,” Jabr nodded enthusiastically. “In the hand of the Sheikh himself! He sees many things—even before they happen! Apparently he left Alamut, riding fast horses five days ago—why, the very day of your arrival here. He draws nigh, and may arrive any time now.”

“Riding fast horses? You can’t be serious. I realize you folks may have adopted a low-tech lifestyle to prevent your discovery, but horses?” Images of US special forces operatives riding horses in the highlands of Afghanistan returned to him, lending just the hint of credibility to what Jabr was saying.

“Alamut is far. It would take many weeks for a man on foot. But the fleet riders of our brothers can devour the land and soar like the wind itself.”

“Where is this place you speak of—Alamut?” Paul’s eyes scanned the makeshift map again.

“I am not permitted to say,” said Jabr. “It is a hidden fastness, far to the east.”

“I understand,” said Paul. “But I am very confused. I have told you I was in Wadi Rumm, a place you seemed to know well enough.”

“Yes, yes. It is far to the south, where the finger of the sea points the way to Akaba.”

“Well that would be about here, yes?” He pointed at the map. “Yet you moved me all the way up here?” His finger traced the distance north along the scroll. “How did you manage that? Horses again? It’s a distance of several hundred kilometers!”

“Move you?” Now it was Jabr who wore a bemused expression. “Yes, we pulled you from the water and carried you from the deep pool of the well up to the chamber of greeting. It was not far.”

Paul shrugged. “Come now,” he breathed. “That can’t be so. Or do you simply want to keep me in the dark about my true whereabouts? Are we really in Syria, as you have said, or still in Jordan? I assure you, I have no intention of giving you away to the authorities. I’m just trying to get home, that’s all.”

“No, my friend, we are far from the River Jordan. Look here.” He paused briefly, angling his frame to orient himself to the map. “That way is south, to the holy city of Mecca. To come there you must first traverse the lands of the Emirs of Damascus—or pass through the County of Tripoli instead. We do not walk that road, for the Templars exact payment from travelers there, and the way is dangerous. East lie the Atabegs of Mosul; to the north is the principality of Antioch, and beyond that, Far Edessa, the source of the two rivers that embrace a land that is dear to us—that we call Al Jazira, the island.”

Paul stared at him, slack jawed, a mixture of disbelief and amazement on his face. “You people really like this little game,” he said. “Very well, have it your way master Sinbad. I’m not playing anymore.” He strode away from the table, clearly annoyed and slumped down on the carpeted quarter of the floor, seeking comfort in the bolster lumped against the wall.

Jabr followed him with his eyes, a pained expression on his face. “Do-Rahlan, how have I offended you? Ah! I have left out the land occupied by the Franks and the Christian Lords—that they call the Kingdom of Jerusalem in Palestine. Please understand that it has not always been their realm and, one day, we hope to see them gone and have all those lands returned to us.”

“Yes, yes,” Paul said disdainfully, “the endless war against Zionists and Crusaders you people seem intent on fighting. I suppose you mean to use me as some pawn in that game, right?”

“Then you favor the Christian Lords? You said you were not a Templar, or in their pay. Yet, you are clearly a Westerner, and come from their lands over the sea. Who are the others you speak of in this war? Zion? What is meant by that? It is a word from the Christian holy scripture, yes?”

“Zionists, Israelis, call them what you like. I suppose you people have had your fill of us ‘Westerners’ infesting your land by now. I’m not angry with you, Jabr. But you can see that this whole situation is really unfortunate. I am not your enemy simply because I come from the West. That’s the whole problem! A man is a man. We have to learn to live together at one time or another, don’t we?”

“Very true, Do-Rahlan.” Jabr set down the map and shuffled over to Paul’s side, intent on mending fences with him. “You are not like the men of the West I have known,” he said. “The crusaders are hard, mailed in steel. They are haughty and filled with pride. Yet, their knights are fearsome and without equal in all the world. Even our best horsemen will quail with fear at their thunderous approach. They build great stone castles, impregnable, on all the borders of their land. That they call Krak de Cheval is not but a long day’s march from this very place. It is awesome, vast and unyielding—a fearsome stronghold, to be sure. We hold forth here in our mountains, the followers of Hassan. In truth, we do not favor either side, and have quarreled with both the Sultan and the Christian Lords at times. Yes, we even quarrel amongst ourselves when the Sheikh is not among us—as our presence here attests. You may be thankful that you came to us, Do-Rahlan, and that you were not first taken by the Saracen riders, or even the iron soldiers of the Krak.”

Now Paul was truly disturbed. He took the words in, a look of disbelief resolving to fear and amazement… Crusaders, Castles, Assassins and Sheikhs… Horses, Knights, Saxons, Franks and nary a cell phone to be found… It sounded, for all the world, as if this man was plucked right from a chapter of Medieval History! He had to be joking, or carrying out this colorful extended metaphor in his manner of dealing with the world. Yet the map, the clothing, the odd incongruities that had cropped up in all their hours of conversation. It sounded as if… but it could not be so, he thought. It sounded as if… but no, that was impossible!

“Jabr,” he said quietly. “Tell me truly now, will you? What year is this?” It was a question he never thought to ask before. Why should he?

“The year? Five-eighty-three, Allah be praised.”

“What?” The look of incredulity on Paul’s face prompted Jabr to touch his knee and offer correction.

“Forgive me, you reckon the years differently. We count from the time of Muhammad, peace be upon him. All the West counts from the time of Jesus the Christ, peace be upon him. It seems every prophet has his followers. We turn our maps one way, you turn them another. Let me see,” his dark eyes rolled to the vaulted ceiling. “That would make this the year eleven-eighty-seven, as the Christians reckon.”

Paul just stared at him, saying nothing at all.