Nexus Point (Meridian Series) (30 page)

King of Diamonds

“There is a friend that
sticketh closer than a brother.

He that is thy friend
indeed,

He will help thee in thy
need.”

Proverbs 18:24

Address to a Nightingale
-
Richard Barnfield

25

Kelly watched
the progress bar on the monitor, a pleased
expression on his face. “Looks like my children have all come home for a
visit,” he said. “The Golems have been filling the RAM bank for the last hour
now. We’ll have a good read on things in a moment. In fact, you may want to
start setting up some queries on the research system. I’m sending a good mirror
of the primary data over to that terminal now.”

       “What’s that?”

       “The GUI will display a chronological time
line for you over there.” He pointed at Research Terminal 3. “I’ve been
comparing data blocks as they come in from the Golems—checking all key dates
and events. If the information on this fetch seems consistent with the data I
stored earlier, then I’ll have the system color that segment of the chronology
green. When there’s variance, discrepancy or outright conflict in the data, the
system will shade the bars in different colors: yellow for minor stuff through
orange to red. If you see black, then we either have a data void on that
period, or a major conflict. This way we can actually look at the time line and
see where things start to go fuzzy on us. I’m going to keep my Golems very
busy, so we’ll be getting a constant stream of new information from the net as
it exists in real time—to use a phrase.”

       Maeve was delighted. “Kelly, you’re a
genius! Is it only history and political events, or can I query things like
religion, literature, art, music and the sciences?”

       “It’s the whole damn Internet—or at least
the essence of what’s out there as we speak. Ask anything you like.”

       “Sounds like this colorized chronology is a
good place to start.” Maeve settled into the swivel chair, adjusting the
armrests and stretching before she stared at the keyboard. “But how does it
work?”

       “Just hit the F1 for a general display and
enter your dates. Use the TAB key to start a specific query on any given year
or year grouping. A menu will come up and you can search for key events in any
of the disciplines you mentioned a moment ago.”

       “History first,” she rubbed her palms
together, her mind beginning to feel its way through the situation, assessing
what she needed to do. “I’ll have a look at the last two thousand years or so.
Do I enter negative numbers for dates before the Birth of Christ?” A nod from
Kelly confirmed that and she thought for a moment. “Let’s see… we had better
check in on the Prime Movers first. I’ll go from –1 BC to the present. That
will cover Christ, Muhammad, Luther’s Boys and most of the key history that
would effect us here.”

       “You’ll miss the Buddha,” Kelly noted.

       “I’ll get back to him later. For now I want
to see if anyone’s fooling around with Western Civ. I’d hate to see the look on
old Professor Porter’s face if he has to re-write all his course notes at the
University. Those dates will give me a good chunk of Rome, the Byzantines,
Barbarian invasions, the rise of the Islamic Caliphates, the Medieval period
and everything after.” She had the numbers in and was pleased to see the screen
display as it began to trace out a green color bar starting with the first year
BC and working forward. She sighed with immediate relief. “Looks like Christ
was born in Bethlehem, right on schedule.”

       “Halleluiah!” Kelly mimicked a typical
television preacher, a bit of a Southern twang in his tone of voice.    The chronology
made its way slowly forward as the CPUs in the research systems ran comparison
checks on the two data banks at the speed of light. The progress still seemed
agonizingly slow to Maeve. After about five minutes she had worked her way
through the first century AD, her mind ticking off events by recollection. “The
Romans look solid,” she said. “Nero, Titus, Hadrian…all looking good.”

       The time line continued forward, solid
green, to Maeve’s great satisfaction. “Here come the Goths,” she said as the line
swept through the second century into the third. “They’ll sack Athens and
Sparta any second now.”

       “Don’t forget the Persians,” Kelly put in.

       “Oh, I won’t. Right now Rome has its hands
full with the Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Picts, Scots, Germans and the Huns will
show up soon enough. You say all is well as long as I get green here, right?”
She pointed at the timeline. “You don’t have any surprises for me, do you, like
shades of emerald to lime and so on?”

       “Nope. Any variation will go to yellow at once.
See that meter in the upper left hand of the screen? It will tick off calendar
years, and you can toggle it down to months if you need to take a closer look
at something. Any discrepancy will be flagged and put into this box here. 
Think of it like a penalty box denoting the bad years. You’ll be able to go
right to that specific year and initiate a deep pattern search to vector in on
the data.”

       “God, I just
love
this Kelly! How did
you dream this up?” Maeve was beaming as Alaric the Goth and Attila began to
devour the fringes of the Roman Empire. Italy was invaded while she was warming
up her coffee and barbarians clotted the Appian Way as she stirred in the
cream. Rome fell while she struggled to get the cellophane off a bag of Fig
Newtons. By the time she had returned to her seat the Western Roman Empire had
come to an end, the Vandals moved in, and the value of real estate dropped
considerably in Italy and Sicily. Her line looked perfectly normal, green and
solid as the Byzantine Empire began to spar with Persia in the Sixth Century.
The Persians soon moved into Syria and overran Egypt as the line moved into the
Seventh Century.

       “Looks like Muhammad has started things
rolling in his neck of the woods,” she said. “The Arabs will be militarizing by
now and pushing north into Palestine and the butt of Asia Minor.”

          “No problems yet?”
Kelly came to look over her shoulder.

       “Not if this thing works as advertised,”
said Maeve. “Look. While Europe languishes the Islamic Caliphs are spreading
their credo like wildfire. The call of the
muezzin
will be sounding in
India to the East and echoing from the cobblestones of Lisbon in the West
soon.”

       Kelly squinted at the line as it traced
through the eighth century. “Looks like Charles Martel stopped them at Tours and
Portiers, “he said. “No variations at all, and those were some pretty
significant years.” The line was still solid green as it reached 900 on the
chronology.

-1BC_ _ _ 100 _ _ _200 _ _ _ 300 _ _ _ 400 _ _ _
500 _ _ _ 600 _ _ _ 700       _ _ _ 800 _ _ _ 900

       “Expecting trouble?” Maeve gave him a quick
glance, wondering what was on his mind.

       “Well,” he explained, “given the fact that
we set back the greatest blow ever conceived and executed against the West by
the Muslim world, I was wondering about other crisis points in that conflict.”

       “You mean Palma?”

       “Sure,” said Kelly. “Just consider what the
world would have been like in the future if we hadn’t stopped those wave sets
from smashing the Eastern Seaboard.”

       Maeve gave him a nod of agreement. “It’s conceivable
that the United States would have been finally eclipsed on the world
stage—assuming Europe got off with relatively little damage.”

       “Europe would have survived, but with the US
literally swept out of its position as the world’s imperial  watchdog, the
Islamic states may have consolidated in opposition to the European Union.”

       “They would have lost their biggest
customer,” Maeve put in.

       “Hell, California and the entire West Coast
would not have been affected by Palma. But they’d have their hands  full
rebuilding the East for decades to come. I suppose Graves could have told us
all about it.”

       “Did he?” Maeve raised an eyebrow, realizing
that she had violated her own credo in asking Kelly about his brief sojourn
with Mr. Graves in the future.

       “Nope. He was very tight lipped about the
history. In fact, I think they were totally amazed with what happened after the
Palma mission. I mean, they were desperate, right? So we have to assume the
world was spinning down into something really bad by then. Who knows what was
going on. Maybe there was a nuclear war, or some bio-terror plague once these
radicals got the bit between their teeth.”

       “History is little else than a picture of
human crimes and misfortunes, said Voltaire.” Maeve raised a finger, gratified
that all the ill deeds and foul play were still in order on her screen.

       “I like Henry Ford better,” Kelly offered.
“History is bunk. He gets right to the point, and I suppose they must have had
quite a shock when we ran our little mission. Imagine what it must have been
like for them when everything suddenly changed! They would have had an entire
new world to walk into, and hundreds of years of history to re-learn.”

       “Were they that far ahead in time?” Maeve
took one more step out onto the ice, and then promised herself she would stick
with the past.

       “They wouldn’t tell me,” Kelly finished. “I
suppose you would be the first to understand why, Miss Outcomes and
Consequences.”

       As they talked the time line rolled on,
passing one centennial Meridian after another. History receded in its wake,
quietly unchanged and safe under the gloaming dust of memory. Maeve began to
feel much better as she watched the screen.

       “Can I assume that if the history database
is unaltered, then most other key areas will have good integrity? I mean, do I
have to run literature queries to check in on folks like Chaucer  and all, or
should I assume the Canterbury Tales are safely inscribed in Middle English
somewhere as long as I get a good green line through the thirteen hundreds?”

       “I would say so,” said Kelly, “but I’m sure
you’ll want to run checks in the literature database as well when we finish
this. The system can do your inventory on Shakespeare for you in about thirty
seconds—line by line.”

       “Love you, Mister!” Maeve’s eyes gleamed. It
was as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Now she didn’t
have to worry that the whole of the world was kept safe in her head, with
endless hours ahead of her as she struggled to remember each poem, each novel,
every page of the history she knew so well. Now they could check anything, at
any time, from the safe sanctuary of the Nexus while the Arch spun out its
quantum mystery below them. She felt wonderfully light, instilled with great
energy and vigor as she watched the years tick by. So far there was not a
single discrepancy between the two history data sets, and she was very
relieved.

       “Here comes the Twelfth Century,” she
chimed. “At this rate one last cup of
coffee
should get me to the turn of the second millennium.”

       “What fun that was,” said Kelly. “Y2K was a
big no show, but the fireworks were great, and the stock market was even
better.” He snatched up Maeve’s mug and went off to the kitchenette to see what
was left in the coffee pot. When he returned he was surprised to see her
leaning in to the screen and biting tentatively at the nail of her right index
finger. He looked at the screen. “Something come up?”

       “Not sure…” Maeve was quietly watching the
Meridian, and she squinted up at the lights. “The fluorescents are a pain on
these monitors. Is that yellow, or just a screen glitch?”

       Kelly felt a pulse of adrenaline. He knew at
once that they had probably encountered their first variation. Sure enough, by
the time he reached Maeve’s side and set down the coffee mug, the penalty box
was filling up with numbers. He leaned in to spy the first crucial year.
“Eleven eighty-seven,” he breathed. “Hang on a second. I’m going to shift some
system resources your way and focus CPU power on that spot. Everything was
green up until that year, right? Keep an eye on the line and we can switch to
monthly data checks. What was going on back then?” He threw Maeve a question,
preferring to have her musing on the history instead of worrying over the spots
of yellow that were popping into the time line with increasing regularity.