Unburning Alexandria (25 page)

"We better keep to our schedule," Sierra said. "We don't have that much time."

"Ok," Max nodded. "I'm still not trusting the android completely – I'm not trusting anyone completely except you. But so far so good as far as no Heron."

"Yeah," Sierra said.

"Though maybe that's worrisome in itself." Max continued. "Is he giving us a free pass now because our getting to New York with the scrolls is somehow in his plan?"

"Impossible to know one way or the other," Sierra replied. "But I'd still rather be here without him and his legionaries waiting around the corner in whatever they're wearing."

The two arrived at their terminal. They checked their phones again just to make sure their passports were still in order. Then they noticed the big glowing letters that said their flight was postponed two hours.

"I'm exhausted," Sierra said. She looked at the health and beauty pavilion just beyond the terminal. "How about we go over there and relax – I could use a massage."

Max smiled. "You relax and I'll watch, just to make sure Heron or one of his minions hasn't become a masseur."

[Carthage, 413 AD]

The Nubian yet again ushered Heron into Augustine's room and left.

"We've recovered the scrolls carried by Jonah and his wife, and Synesius and that unholy concubine," Heron said, as Augustine gestured him to a cushioned seat.

"Don't try to curry my favor by calling her unholy," Augustine said, testily. "It matters not to you that she was not created by God. You believe no more in God than she does."

Heron nodded his acknowledgment of the point.

"And it matters not to me, either," Augustine continued. "You say she was created by man, but man is an instrument of God, so she can rightly be considered God's work, too."

"You've become quite ecumenical in your theology," Heron replied.

"This is not about theology," Augustine said. "It is about not disrupting the future of humanity by giving it knowledge it was not meant to have. Is not that what you told me?"

Heron nodded again. "The only scroll that is crucial at this point is my
Chronica
, as I told you. A few more texts by Aristotle won't change the future in any major way."

"Yes, your
Chronica
. Perhaps Socrates was right that writing was more of a hindrance than a help to the human project after all," Augustine observed sarcastically.

"You do not believe that," Heron said, and waved to a wall with scrolls authored by Augustine.

"No, of course not," Augustine replied. "But that does not mean that care should not be taken with what is written."

"I reproach myself every day about writing the
Chronica
," Heron said and sighed. "I doubt that Hypatia would have trusted the concubine enough to let her carry that scroll. It is either in Hypatia or her lover Max's possession."

Augustine nodded.

"And I have what I hope is enough in place in the future to retrieve my
Chronica
before anyone else sees it."

[New York City, 2061 AD]

Two small groups of New York's finest awaited Sierra and Max at New York's Kennedy Airport – two groups, in case Sierra and Max chose to leave separately as a safety precaution from the two different exits of the airport, which they did. And not really New York's finest, but Heron's men, known in other ages as his legionaries, dressed now to look exactly like New York City police, and knowing just what to say and how to say it if they encountered any real members of the NYPD. There were legionaries similarly dressed in appropriate 2061 police attire in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, and New Chicago, because all were an easy distance from New York City and the Millennium Club and its room up the winding stairs with the chairs, and Heron thought Sierra and Max might take a flight from Greece to one of those cities as an extra precaution, which they did not.

The two went though separate customs lines in New York without incident. Sierra almost laughed when asked if she had acquired anything not allowed on the import list. Yeah, she was pretty sure scrolls from 150 AD and earlier were not permitted to be brought into the country without sufficient declaration, which of course Sierra did not make.

Sierra patted the precious scrolls in the deep inner pockets of her jacket and walked right past her group of phony cops, who looked her over, but only in appreciation of what they imagined to be underneath her clothes. She sighed in relief.

Max wasn't quite so lucky.

Four cops surrounded him as soon as they caught sight of his face. Max's familiarity with the NYPD was from two decades earlier, but he knew as soon as they closed in around him that these were not cops. Something about their surety, something about their lack of cop scripted tone as they barked orders at him made it crystal clear to Max that they were Heron's men. There was no way Max could have carried any kind of weapon from Athens to New York. "Ok, ok, take it easy," he said as they shoved him against the wall and slashed open his jacket. They removed all of his scrolls. The legionary with the knife waved it front of Max's face. "Where's your girlfriend?" he demanded in an odd, unidentifiable urban American accent. Max started to lie, but the legionary suddenly pocketed his knife, punched Max in the stomach, and ran with the three others. Max looked at them and then in the opposite direction, to see what they were running from – a real New York City cop, who ran up to him, gun drawn.

"Are you all right?" the cop asked.

Max nodded, his breath not completely back.

"Are you hurt? Did they rob you? Take anything valuable?"

Max thought for a second and took a couple of deep breaths. "No. Just an old book I picked up in Athens."

The cop nodded and called it in. "I'm sorry," he said to Max. "These lowlifes are impossible to eliminate – that's what happens when funding and security are reduced. The dress like us, but as soon as one of us approaches, they take off. Can I call a cab for you?"

"No, thanks, I'm ok." Max smiled weakly.

Sierra came running up from the same direction as the cop. "Are you ok?" she shouted desperately at Max.

"He just had the wind knocked out him," the cop answered. "He'll be fine."

Max nodded and accepted Sierra's arm. The two thanked the cop and walked with increasing speed to the taxi stand.

"We were supposed to go on separately to the hotel if either of us wasn't at the cab stand," Max said.

"Right, like you would have just left me here to fend for myself, if I hadn't shown up."

Max took the point and pointed to the line of people at the taxi stand. "Shouldn't be too long," he said about the likely wait. "And you got through customs ok, and Heron's men didn't grab you?" he asked, though the answer was obvious and he smiled in gratitude about it.

"I passed a group of cops who looked a little off, but all they did was undress me with their eyes," Sierra replied.

"Must be your renewed good looks," Max said, appreciatively, "though I was beginning to enjoy sleeping with Hypatia."

Sierra gave him a slightly acid smile. "You had a brilliant idea back there in the health shop – I'd forgotten that fast-growing facials have been around at least five years already." She tentatively touched her cheek. "It feels good to have my face back." She'd almost forgotten to replace her passport with Hypatia's picture and put her original passport in her phone – she never would have been able to board with a wrong picture – but Max had been on top of that, too. She was able to easily download her original passport from the cloud.

"Yeah, I was betting that Heron, as thorough as he is, wouldn't have thought about alerting his men to look for someone who really looked like the original you – he's been too intensely telling himself that the woman who looked like Hypatia was really you."

Their cab pulled up. Its door opened.

"No way Heron can control these robot cabs, is there?" Max asked.

"Probably not," Sierra replied. "But if he could control the cabs then he could do the same for the subway and the busses – they're all part of the same robotic system. And the hotels in the city are too far to walk to."

Max nodded. "And staying in an airport is probably more dangerous." He helped Sierra into the cab. "The New Barclay Hotel," he said to the cab, "Madison and 52nd Street."

"Very good, sir," the robot answered with a British accent.

"They were doing 19th-century Southern drawls the last time I was here," Sierra said and laughed a little.

"They took all of my scrolls," Max said, much more somberly.

"Good thing you also urged me again to carry the
Chronica
after my face-restoration," Sierra said and patted her jacket. "I've got that and the Aristotles right here." She felt a twinge about not having the Antisthenes scroll, which she had left with Jonah, and that gave her a deeper stab of concern about Jonah's fate.

"I'm just full of good ideas today." Max leaned over and kissed her. "Now we've got to figure out the best way to get them into Appleton's 19th-century hands, so they're off-line and beyond any hacking from Heron."

Chapter Fifteen

[New York City, 2061 AD]

Sierra and Max awoke the next morning in the soft, fresh sheets of their bed in the New Barclay Hotel. "So the question still is can we completely trust her," Max said about the android, picking up their conversation from precisely where it had left off when they both had fallen asleep, spent in each other's arms, about 10 hours earlier the night before.

"Probably not, but what choice do we have," Sierra said, and stretched herself further awake.

"She told me you programmed her in the future," Max continued. "And she knows all kinds of things about you, such as exactly when you arrived in the Millennium Club in this year with Socrates. But she also said that Heron has programmed copies of her that look and think like her, and know everything about you that she does, except the copies are working for Heron."

"Well no one else knows what she personally experienced – say, what I said to her just yesterday – unless she deliberately communicated that to Heron or the other androids, right?" Sierra asked.

"Yeah, I suppose so."

"This whole question is related to the paradox of the liar in some way, isn't it?" Sierra said, and kissed Max lightly on the chest.

"How would that be?" Max asked, a little distracted.

"If someone says this very statement is a lie, then you can't know if that's a lie or true. If the statement that 'this statement is a lie' is true, then that means it's truly a lie, which means it's not true, which means it's a lie, but if the statement that 'this statement is a lie' is a lie, then that means it's true, which means. . . ." She said most of this while tracing lines with the tip of her finger on Max's chest and a little below.

"I'm still not completely getting this," Max said.

"Good," Sierra said, thinking this hotel room was the first place she felt really comfortable in bed in she couldn't remember how long, and last night she had been too exhausted to fully enjoy it, but she felt rested to the bone and raring to go now.

* * *

"I get what you were saying before about the android and the paradox of the liar," Max said to Sierra, as they consumed with gusto an old-fashioned American breakfast of grits and shrimp. "She says she's a good android and as evidence of her goodness she tells us there are bad androids that are just like her. So how do we know she's not really a bad android, warning us that there are bad androids, just to put us at ease and get us to think she's good?"

"Right," Sierra said and let the flavor of a perfectly genteched cherry-orange juice work its way around her tongue and the roof of her mouth. "Or she could just be truly good, truly trying to warn us. Her one statement counts equally against her being bad and her being good – or equally in favor of both of them – and without further evidence, we can never know which one is true."

"So far the evidence suggests that she's good," Max said.

Sierra nodded.

"She told me some things about you," he said, slowly. "If she's good, that likely means they're true. If not, then–"

"What did she tell you?" Sierra asked.

"That Alcibiades loved you deeply, but stayed away from you because he was afraid that you and he were Heron's parents," Max said, almost tenderly, in concern about Sierra's feelings and how she would react to this. "I guess he must have had some reason to believe this."

"It didn't happen," Sierra said, "and I just can't believe that it ever could happen, in any timeline however warped."

"You already knew this about Alcibiades?" Max could tell from Sierra's reaction that she already did. "You talked so much about Alcibiades, and why he disappeared on you–"

"The android told me when I first arrived in Athens 2061 AD," Sierra replied. "When you ran off to the hospital. Why did you really do that? It was reckless."

Max ordered two cups of pineapple mint green tea. He finished the last of his cherry-orange juice. "I wanted to tell him, if there was any chance he was still at the hospital, that he didn't have to stay away from you – that his just leaving you like that caused you years of pain."

Sierra felt her eyes burn with the beginning of tears.

"I'm sorry," Max said, softly, "now I've caused you pain. But – I was also being goddamn selfish. I wanted to tell him there was no need to become Thomas, no need to start this whole insane thing we're in. We were pretty happy back then in New York, 19 years ago. Life was fun. And I'm not even sure we made the world a better place with all that we've done. Socrates didn't have any more impact on the world after you saved him. He may have made Thomas – Alcibiades – happy, but–"

"What? What did you say?"

"That all your bringing Socrates to the future did was make Thomas happy for a few months–"

"What does that have to do with Alcibiades?" she demanded. She hadn't quite gotten it the first time Max had said it, but now it was ringing with deafening clarity in her head.