Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (23 page)

       “Follow quickly,” said Jabr. “Keep to the
shadows. The way may be open for a time, yet we must be very careful. I do not
think that the Sami could to spy us out in this light, even from the Eyrie of
Sinan, but he will certainly have watchers on the outer towers. This way is
seldom used, and not easily seen from above. We must reach the chamber of
hiding before the Sami realizes you are gone.”

       So much for drifting to this place on the
underground river, thought Paul. He was on a high range of coastal mountains,
and the terrain about them looked nothing like Wadi Rumm. How could he have
reached this promontory height from an underground cavern? Think now, he told
himself, you must have been driven here while unconscious. He was very
confused, but pressed by the immediacy of the danger.

       There was now little doubt in his mind that
the Sami had argued for his death in the council that morning. He probably
meant to stab him or cut his throat, but something stopped the man when he
approached. Perhaps he could not risk such an obvious act of defiance in the
presence of the Kadi. Paul thought of Samirah and the decoy that would take his
place in the room where he had been quartered. He wondered what would happen to
the girl if Jabr’s suspicions about her complicity in the plot proved true. The
subtle clues began to mount up in his mind, and he understood why she seemed so
upset. The porcelain cup had been filled with a lethal agent. She had been
ordered to poison him! Yet, though her fear compelled her to obey, and pour the
dark liqueur for him as before, something else happened there. She dashed the
cup away, protecting him on an impulse. He must tell Jabr that Samirah should
not be harmed.

       The way led them down into a steep ravine,
overgrown with scrub and thorn. The thick outer garments were coarse and itchy,
but they made good sense to Paul now. He was grateful for the protection they
afforded as the small party slipped through the gorge, descending all the way.
They walked for nearly half an hour before they came upon two horses tied to a
withered tree stump. One was a gray-flecked mare, and the other a sturdy
caramel plow horse with heavy fetlocks and muddied hooves. Jabr approached them
silently, and Paul saw that he had produced a small handful of brown sugar,
which he used to quiet the horses while the two guards took up their reins and
prepared to mount.

       “We will ride two men to each horse,” said
Jabr. “I will go forward with Hamza, and you will follow with Aziz. They are
good men both. Have no fear.” He watched while Paul cast a sidelong glance at
the plow horse. “Do you ride well?”

       “To be honest,” Paul confessed, “I’ve never
been on a horse in my life.”

       This brought a moment of real surprise to
Jabr’s eyes. He stared at Paul, as if trying to see through him, see into him
to some understanding of who he was and why he had come. “You are no Templar,”
he concluded. “That much is certain. And I doubt if you are a sergeant or even
a squire if you have never set your cheeks upon the back of a horse. The Sami
was wrong. Come now, Aziz will assist you.”

       Yes, thought Paul. I’m no Templar—but who in
blazes are you? Where in God’s name am I—or must I call upon Allah now to find
that out? He knew that much of the world still lived in backward, almost
medieval  conditions, but this was too much. How could a band of Arab radicals
be occupying the ruins of an old castle with complete impunity? All those sites
were considered antiquities now and carefully managed by local governments. Yet
these men ran about with turbans and swords as if they were acting out some
private little fantasy here. It was all too strange. Nothing made sense!            Paul
needed the help of both guards to get up on the back of the plow horse. Once he
was safely mounted, the guard, Aziz, leapt deftly aboard, seating himself
behind Paul and urging the beast on.

       Paul squinted through the hood of his robe
at the landscape around him. He was struck by the barren emptiness of it all.
The hills were sparsely vegetated, falling off to a tumbled lowland below. He
could see no sign of the village Jabr had mentioned. It was very odd. There
were no lights, no glow of cities in the distant darkness of the night.
Wherever this castle was, it must surely be remote. He looked over his shoulder
at the stark outline of the castle in the distance and suddenly knew what was
wrong.

Part VII

Heisenberg’s Wave

“I stand as one upon a
rock,

Environ’d with a wilderness
of sea,

Who marks the waxing tide
grow

Wave by wave.”

Titus, in Titus Andronicus
, act 3, sc. 1, l. 93-7.

William Shakespeare

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.