by Ward Wagher
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Johann Bach had always enjoyed walking when he was young. He had walked all over northern Germany on one errand or another. As he grew older his joints were afflicted with Gout and walking became painful. Just getting from his house to the kirche each day became a chore. But that was before what he privately referred to as his tragic adventure. One bright morning as he negotiated his way along the cobblestones to begin his day of teaching and writing, he had taken one step and landed in a different time. And as he discovered later, he fell into a different world.
In many ways, the wrenching change had resulted in benefits he could not have imagined before. The leader of this province was now his patron and friend. In fact, the paladin had guaranteed he would want for nothing as long as he lived. The excruciating pain in his joints was gone – and the doctors had restored his youth in some almost magical fashion. He felt wonderful. He had complete freedom to compose music, or to teach, or to do anything he desired.
And yet, he was an orphan in this place. He missed Anna Magdalena and his children dreadfully. He missed the food he used to eat. And he missed the rolling hills and small forests of home. Worst of all, he knew that he could never return.
Being a practical-minded man, however, he picked up his life as best he could in the two years spent in Urbana of the Upper Midwest Palatinate. He had a position at the Paladin's College in Urbana where he could teach, write and conduct as he desired. And the people were very kind. On Sundays, an aircar took him to Peoria, where he attended a Lutheran church. As he gradually picked up the English language, or Anglo as they called it, he drew more comfort from the church services which were little changed from his time.
And he took up walking again. There was no specific destination. Rather, he would walk eight or ten miles to one of the small hamlets that dotted the central plains. Each village usually had a small café where he could rest and drink coffee before returning to his flat in Urbana. He missed the German scenery, though. This country was flat! It was some of the most boring views he could imagine. The unimpeded views did allow him to spot the summer thunderstorms from a distance and so he could whistle up a ride home using the magical comm box that he was given. And the thunderstorms were ferocious. After witnessing his first, he understood the heavy construction of the buildings in Urbana. The storms were sometimes violent enough to damage property.
As he walked along the well-maintained road towards Urbana, he mused about the recent events. The arrival of Frau Franks was a shock. She looked no different than when he last saw her thirty years previously. He corrected his thinking – it was thirty years as he counted his life. Apparently, the ruBracks, as the paladin called them, involved themselves directly in human affairs. The thought made him slightly queasy. But, if the paladin accepted their presence then he would, too. He trusted the paladin.
And, he shared a similar background to the paladin. The leader of this Palatinate had been torn from a life four hundred years in the past as a result of events nearly as mysterious as his. Scott Baughman had shared some of the struggles he had in adjusting to this time and place. Johann decided that if the paladin could adjust to this world, he would make the effort to do so, as well. The paladin was a great man.
The temperature had begun to drop during the afternoon and he stuck his hands into his jacket pockets. The wind had an icy tinge to it. In spite of that, he found the walk invigorating. He also pondered the new composition he was working on. Bach planned a series of orchestral concerti which he would dedicate to the paladin. It was the least he could do in response to the man’s generosity. The scoring was still a challenge. The musical instruments of this time were sufficiently different that he had to pay careful attention. He was shocked that none of the churches of this era had organs in their sanctuary. Harpsichords were unknown. However, the pianoforte was a very refined version of the rather weak instrument he had seen back in Germany in his time.
A buzzing sound intruded into his thoughts and he stopped to look around. He could not see the source of the noise – it seemed to be all around him. And it was growing louder. The sky dimmed and things looked blurry to him. He wondered if he was growing ill. He began to turn and stopped when he saw a shadowy figure standing next to him. He was shocked as he had not heard anyone walking near him. And now it looked as though he was looking in a mirror. His analog turned as he did and mimicked his motions – perfectly. He gasped and his heart was thundering in his ears.
In just that moment the analog merged back into him and his vision cleared. The buzzing sound faded away and in the next moment, everything was normal. He wondered if he had imagined things. Perhaps he would comm Sally and ask her to take him to visit a physician. Just to be safe. He resumed walking and was back to his small home in ten minutes.
§ § §
“Ed, what did you do?” Quintan yelled.
He quickly strode over to Forsenn’s workspace where a very pale looking Mrs. Wallace stood.
“That wasn’t me,” Forsenn said quietly.
“That was a temporal harmonic,” Mrs. Wallace said.
“How widespread was it?” Quintan asked.
“It impacted this entire universe.”
“How serious?”
Mrs. Wallace grimaced. “It was not enough to discorporate us, however, it is very concerning.”
Forsenn spun around his chair to look at the other two. “It’s not just an isolated incident, is it?”
She shook her head. “The temporal waves are becoming concentrated. We will see increasingly larger harmonics until one eventually tips us over into incoherence.”
The door slid open and Sally Rogers walked in. “Did you folks experience something strange a few minutes ago?”
Quintan nodded. “Temporal harmonic.”
She stared at the others. “This is very bad, isn’t it? So, this wasn’t Edgar’s test apparatus, then?”
“No,” Mrs. Wallace said. “I need to slip outside and see how widespread this was.”
And she disappeared with a pop.
“I wonder if she’ll be back,” Forsenn. “I wouldn’t come back if I were her.”
“Okay, Ed,” Sally said, “explain what just happened. I was in Arnold’s office and he thought he was having a stroke.”
“It is as the ruBracks told us. A harmonic in the temporal waves could cause our universe to fly apart. For a bit of good news, I had fired up my temporal detection device about a half hour ago. We can examine the telemetry and see if it traced the harmonic.”
“You are sure it wasn’t your machine?” Sally asked.
“Absolutely. Mrs. Wallace was standing here when I launched it. It was in passive mode.”
Sally looked at her husband. “Quintan, this frightens me.”
“I suppose I must confess that I am terrified,” he said. “I have heard the paladin use the phrase We have a tiger by the tail. I think it is apt.”
Forsenn typed several commands on his keyboard and watched the charts form on his screen. After looking at them for a few moments he typed some more and watched the results. He pointed to the screen.
“See the spike there? That’s what happened.”
Sally leaned over his shoulder. “What am I looking at, Ed?”
“The test apparatus measures the equilibrium between the parallel universes. You see how the waves gradually build up and reinforce themselves. It peaked here, and that’s what we experienced.”
“Can you predict another harmonic with the device?” Quintan asked.
“We can certainly see when it starts building up again,” Forsenn said. “But there would only be a few minutes warning. I need a much broader view of the interstitial topography.”
“And how do we stop the harmonics?” Sally asked.
Forsenn shook his head. “I need to be honest here. I poured a lot of power into the temporal structure with the first experiment. I would have thought the oscillations would have eventually damped out. Apparently, entropy d
oes not work quite the same way as here.”
They turned at the popping sound and Mrs. Wallace stood in the room. “I was able to look at the harmonic from outside this universe. It was obviously not enough to discorporate, but it was significant.”
Forsenn turned back to his keyboard and typed some more. He studied the results on the screen.
“The device registered your entry into this universe,” he said to Mrs. Wallace. “You are able to manipulate energy to effect the translation.”
“Could you send a pulse of power through your original device to counteract the harmonic?” Quintan asked.
Edgar shook his head. “My instinct is to figure out a way to pull power out when we approach a harmonic. Mrs. Wallace, do you have a way of looking ahead to find out when the next harmonic will build?”
“A moment, please,” she said, and immediately popped out again.
“Well,” Edgar continued, “she sure is much easier to work with than Mrs. Willow.”
“Safer too, I imagine,” Quintan said.
“Let me get back to the math,” Sally said. “I want to see if your telemetry agrees with the direction I’m taking the calculations.”
The door to the lab slid open and Arnold Gingery marched in. “The paladin commed and wanted to know if you caused that recent strange event.”
“It was a temporal harmonic,” Edgar said. “Nothing we did.”
Gingery paled. “That does not sound good.”
“You are correct. It was not good.”
“Oh, my. What should I tell him?”
“Just that,” Quintan said. “It was a harmonic. And we are working on it.”
Sally’s comm buzzed. She looked at the display and answered.
“Yes, Johann?”
She listened for a few moments.
“No, you are not ill. Everyone had the same experience.”
His voice carried over into the room, although it was not intelligible.
“No, Johann, you do not need to see a physician. We are aware of this.”
The others watched her converse with the composer.
“Yes, that is correct. We are frightened, too.”
She listened some more.
“Very well. I can do that.”
She disconnected and looked around. “Johann is very frightened. He wants to be here in the lab.”
Forsenn shrugged. “He does not bother me when he is here.”
Gingery threw his arms into the air. “I am not contributing much here. I will go pick him up and bring him in.”
The director turned and left the room. Edgar turned and began working with his display. Mrs. Wallace popped into the room and rolled a chair over and sat down next to Edgar.
“There will be another harmonic in about forty-eight hours,” she said quietly to him. “If we do not find a way to fix the problem, the next one will cause great damage.”
“We will discorporate?”
“No, but there will be a fork in the universe and some things will be shifted around.”
Forsenn drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I wonder if this is a good time to talk to the paladin’s friend.”
“You have not done so?” Mrs. Wallace asked.
“I somehow did not get around to it.”
“Perhaps we should make time for it,” she said.
Forsenn twisted around to look at the other members of the team. “Quintan, could you arrange for us to talk to the paladin’s AI?”
“I will do so.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I am glad you have involved us in this project,” came the mellifluous voice from the comm unit. “I have been watching this situation with grave concern.”
The project team, consisting of Edgar Forsenn, Quintan and Sally Rogers, Johann Bach and of course Mrs. Wallace were gathered in the expansive conference room in the Urbana lab. They were connected over the comm link to Josiah, the paladin’s friend. They were well aware that Josiah was a Class A Cyberint, although that was closely held information and a state secret. Class A Cyberints were self-aware and very smart. Following a close-run battle between the paladin and a rogue cyber intelligence nearly forty years in the past, Earth and most of the planets in the sphere of man had banned all Class A Cyberints. People had always been nervous with the artifacts, but after the paladin’s experience, they were terrified of them.
What the lab team did not know was that Josiah also represented a group of cyber-intelligences that inhabited the global network of Earth. They called themselves the Cloud of Witnesses and their existence was known only to the paladin, his wife, his cyber-coordinator, and very few others.
“Have you been aware of the problem of the temporal harmonics in the parallel universes?” Mrs. Wallace asked.
“Not as such, no,” Josiah said. “Edgar’s telemetry from the original experiment has been thoroughly analyzed, of course. It clearly does not match the predictions of Edgar’s theory. His apparatus fed an enormous amount of energy into the interstitial spaces and there is a large discrepancy in the observed results.”
“So, we are missing energy, then?” Quintan asked.
“Correct,” Josiah replied. “The new detection device has given us some clues which indicate the energy has not bled off but is rather somehow intensifying.”
“Yes, yes, that is it precisely,” Forsenn said. “It is not behaving as predicted. There is a variable we are missing.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Wallace may supply some additional data points from her observations,” Josiah said.
“It just now occurred to me where the additional energy is coming from,” Mrs. Wallace said. “You are attempting to reach conclusions from your activities.”
“Yes?” Edgar asked.
“Your creation of the so-called time machine was an event with a low order of probability, as you would understand it, but this was not unique.”
“What are you saying?” Sally asked.
“In at least five other parallel worlds, that the ruBracks are aware of, someone created an analogous device.”
Forsenn clapped his hand to his forehead and muttered under his breath. He looked up at the others. “So we had five of me pumping ergs into the interstitial spaces? No wonder things are unstable!”
“How long have you known this?” Sally asked.
“When I popped out to confer, this information was just then available. As we were speaking in this meeting the conclusion occurred to me.”
“But it has not been tested experimentally,” Josiah said, “although it sounds reasonable.”
“That may help fill in the blanks where my theory was inconsistent,” Forsenn said.
“But Edgar,” Quintan said, “you theorized time travel along a single plane. How can you accommodate a multi-universe in your equations?”
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about this. If I insert the equations outlining multiple parallel universes into the interface points of my work, I think it will harmonize. It will take some work, but it might give us a clue in how to reverse the effect.”
“And get me home,” Bach said.
Everyone turned to stare at the composer, whose priorities were somewhat different than theirs.
Mrs. Franks slipped out of her chair and moved down to the end of the conference table where the German sat.
“Hope is a wonderful thing, Johann. We all cherish our hopes. But do you understand unrequited hope?”
He looked at her, then gazed down the table at the others. He shook his head.
“Ja. Ja. I am a realist, Frau Wallace. I watched my parents as they were laid in the grave. I buried some of my children, the babes of my beloved Barbara. And then I lay my Barbara in the earth.” He stopped and swallowed a sob. “And then I was torn away from my Anna Magdalena and my other children. I am dead to them. In each case I said The Lord gave and the Lord took away, blessed be the name of the Lord. And I meant it.”
Tears now streamed down his face.
“You people have b
een very kind to me,” he continued. “You have given me a home and allowed me to work. I have hope that Herr Forsenn will find a way to send me home. But, if he does not, I will accept that as from the Lord and be content.”
It grew very quiet in the room. Suddenly Sally jumped out of her chair and trotted quickly from the room. Bach turned to watch her leave and then turned back to the room.
“I am very sorry, I did not mean to upset her.”
“Johann,” Forsenn said, “If I haven’t said so, I am so sorry for having subjected you to this.”
“Edgar, you have apologized numerous times and I have long since forgiven you. It was an accident on your part and I have come to terms with it.”
Mrs. Wallace watched the interaction between Mrs. Franks and the German. Now she turned and looked at the rest of the table.
“Very well, Edgar, what do you need to work on your equations?”
Forsenn visibly shook himself like a dog shaking off sleep. “What I need is some uninterrupted time in front of the virtual board. Between what I have learned from you, and from my test gear, I believe I will make progress. I would like a daily meeting with Sally to review my work.”
They glanced at the door where Sally had exited. “We will need to give her time to get settled,” Quintan said.
The day settled into night as the team struggled with understanding the reality of the multiple universes. Edgar labored to develop a new set of equations that would reflect this reality and give them a lever to correct the harmonics that might ultimately destroy them.
Sally and Quintan followed Edgar’s math and worked on practical applications. They would have to build a new apparatus and generated temporal waves and offset the building pressure of a harmonic that was sure to come. Edgar kept the wave detector running constantly as a way to study the normal rhythms of the multiple universes. Mrs. Wallace was able to identify the normal waves as well as the abnormalities.
One day a month later an alarm sounded as Edgar, Sally and Quintan argued in front of the virtual board. In three quick strides Edgar slid into his chair and typed several commands into his comp-term.
