Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (24 page)

       “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.”