Touchstone (Meridian Series)

by John Schettler

  LeGrand had come to his side, his eyes begging an audience, with a look that was almost reverent. “Mister Kelly,” he whispered. “May I have a word with you on the mission?”

  Kelly caught Maeve out of the corner of his eye. She had come back with his costuming, a simple Arabic robe, and she was trying to stay busy in the anteroom, fussing through her accessories, a headpiece, braided sash and sandals, but he could feel her intermittent gaze on him, and knew that she was keenly aware of LeGrand, and very uneasy.

  “When you arrive,” LeGrand began, “you will be able to clearly sight the location of the sphinx by looking for the moon. Understand? Just turn toward the light. You’ll be arriving at night, for your own security, and you should be able to see the monument easily enough. There will be a watercourse that flows to the cleft between the lion’s front paws. Make your way to that depression, and approach the monument by following the stream.” He smiled, the weight of his cheeks seeming to strain with the effort, but his grey eyes held real warmth. “Do you swim?”

  “Swim? Yes. I do a workout at the YMCA every other month.”

  “Splendid. You may have to do a bit of that as you approach the sphinx. The stream will enter the monument—we aren’t sure exactly how, but you’ll figure it out. I have every confidence!”

  Kelly digested that a moment, then asked: “And this lock on the waterway you mentioned—it’s meant to regulate the flow of the watercourse?”

  “We believe so. The water flows toward the monument, but when the river is at high flood stage, the lock prevents the interior chambers from being flooded. If you can see that it fails to do that, some time before the dawn, then we believe the mission might have a good chance for success.”

  “Before dawn?” Kelly gave him a searching look. “Let me understand this: you say the lock regulates the river at high flood stage. Then the flood comes with the dawn?”

  LeGrand hesitated briefly, his face soon set with resolve. “I’m afraid so.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “We have a way of taking a quick peek at things—don’t ask me to explain it, but Research tells me this is what will happen.”

  “And you expect the flood to damage the monument?”

  “We hope as much. Our research has determined that the ground beneath the eastern sphinx is somewhat compromised. The river is actually intruding and infiltrating below the monument in deep aquifers. There is a zone of instability there. If the flood waters are allowed to penetrate to the hidden inner chambers of the sphinx, we believe that the pressure may just be enough to… to cause a collapse.” His eyes held Kelly’s now, waiting.

  “I see…” Kelly looked down, his finger tapping aimlessly at the side of a keyboard. “And where will I be when this happens?”

  “A difficult question,” said LeGrand. “We went round and round with it ourselves. Mr. Graves was a real advocate for you, of course. Many others as well. The problem is this, however: we just don’t know what you might do once you arrive, or what may happen to you. You know how things go. You reach to tie a loose strap on your sandal and lose your footing—that sort of thing. There’s an infinity of variation between the setting of the moon and the rising sun. How could we hope to account for it all?”

  “Of course,” said Kelly, the numbers man acceding to the impossibility inherent in the math. There was no way they could write a retraction algorithm that would be able to predict his exact location at the key moment. “Then you’re timing the retraction to the particle decay?”

  “It’s the only chance we have,” LeGrand agreed quickly. “I’ve had a word with Mister Dorland, and he seems confident that he can get just the right infusion in the particle chamber.”

  “Right,” said Kelly, but his tone was hollow. He knew that Paul would do his best, but the quantum fuel situation was grave now. Even if there was enough left to pull him out, the situation could be chaotic. He’d be underground, with a flood tide careening through the chambers of the sphinx. How would he escape?

  LeGrand seemed to sense his thoughts and spoke softly, his voice laden with emotion. “We know we may be asking a great deal of you, Mister Kelly…”

  “Yes.” A voice spoke from behind them and they turned to see Maeve. “You put it lightly, but that’s about the size of it, isn’t it? You people couldn’t leave things be. You had to have them your way, and now you’re going to ask a great deal indeed. You’re dumping the whole thing on us—on Kelly.”

  “Maeve…” Kelly raised a hand in a placating gesture, but she shook her head, the anger flaring in her eyes, and then melting away as tears spilled out, streaking her cheeks.

  “Maeve…” Kelly was up, his arms around her now, pulling her close.

  LeGrand swallowed hard, but saw that this was a battle he could not fight and discreetly withdrew without another word.

  “You know what this means, Kelly.” Maeve wept as she spoke. “You know…”

  “You were listening. You heard what LeGrand said. Yes, I know. But you mustn’t worry, Maeve. I’ll figure something out once I’m there. If I can get in and out before the flood at dawn, then I should be well away from the place before anything happens.”

  “Kelly…” She pulled back from him, her eyes meeting his. “You know I’m not talking about that. It’s—“

  He put his hand over her lips to silence her. “I know,” he said. “You don’t have to go through it all now, love.”

  They looked at one another and Kelly could see that she understood him. He knew that his chance of escaping the sphinx alive was the least of his worries. It was what happened after that mattered. Whether he succeeded or failed, there was still Paradox to answer, and Paradox was jealous. It had been cheated once before, and now it would have its chance to even the score. Yet Kelly was undaunted. All he could think of at the moment was how he might bring some small comfort to Maeve. “Don’t you see?” he began. “I’ve been there before. I’ve faced down the void and danced on my own grave. Something will happen, Maeve. And if it doesn’t…well… what are we, anyway? What are we?”

  She looked at him through the pain, wanting to understand him, yet unwilling to let him go.

  “I’ll tell you what we are,” she whispered. “We’re promises, and hope. We’re a whisper in the night; a yearning. We’re everything we ever dreamed of being, and more. We’re the whole of it on one single breath; a lifetime in one kiss, a hundred years…” She smiled wanly, her heart breaking open as she spoke.

  “A hundred years,” he whispered back,” and not a moment now to spare.”

  He held her close. The silence in the room was palpable. Paul was hunched over the particle infusion chamber, unable to look at them. LeGrand had retreated to the history module where Robert was sandbagging himself in behind a wall of research files and books. He was tormented, trying to master his emotion with his work, his attention pulled to the scene and then yanked back again to the pages of a thick, leather bound volume. He was searching for something, driven.

  Paul was the first to break the silence. He composed himself and turned to face Kelly with as much of a smile as he could muster.

  “Time,” he said, and Kelly looked up at him. “Time we got the system up, mister.”

  “Right,” said Kelly, easing away from Maeve.

  “I’ll see to the consoles,” Paul put in. “You had better get dressed for the part, amigo.” It would give them another few moments together in the anteroom, he knew, and Maeve gave him an appreciative smile as she led the way.

  They were not long. The minutes passed quickly and Kelly emerged, his arms extended in a graceful sweep as he displayed his Arabic getup. Everyone smiled as he pranced about the room, a regular Lawrence of Arabia in his own right.

  “There were Arabs in Egypt before the Pharaohs came?” Paul laughed as he asked the question.

  “Well,” said LeGrand, “there shouldn’t be, but there are—the other side has men in the sphinx. I thought this might give our man here a
bit of an advantage, and suggested the garb to Maeve.” He laughed with them, but his gaze was ever pulled to the clock on the wall by the door. Paul saw the worry on his face, and he swallowed hard, shoring up his will for the moments ahead.

  “Best get down to the Arch,” he said. “You go too, Maeve. You can see him off at the yellow line.”

  There was a long silence. Kelly stood up straight and looked from one to the other. He was thinking of what he might say to them now. He was leaving them all, he knew, and he would never see any one of them again.

  “No goodbyes,” said Paul, his voice breaking.

  Kelly smiled as his heart flooded with a warming sense of compassion. “Don’t mourn because it’s over,” he said softly. “Rejoice that it happened.” Then he turned suddenly, his robes wafting up on the still airs of the room, and he strode quickly away to the yawning oval door that would take him down to the Arch.

  Maeve went after him, her thoughts a torrent of confusion, and yet with some hope. He’s out for us all, she thought, for LeGrand, and Paul, and Robert, and all the rest. He’s on his way for everything we have ever loved, and yet for everything we have railed against as well. He on to it now, all of it—Shakespeare and Stalin both, and he won’t come back. She was certain of that now. He would not come back.

  A surge of emotion seized her as they went, hand in hand, down to the Arch. She cursed them all, Einstein, and Heisenberg, and every other name she could bring to mind. She wanted back every moment she had given to the project, the long hours of research, the endless calculations, the mind numbing struggle with outcomes and consequences that she could never really be certain of. There was no certainty. It was all a show, and she cursed it silently beneath her breath before she let her anger go at last and took hold of her love again.

  Kelly would go for the West and do what he could to set things right. He was willing to give up his life—but for what? What was it? The poetry; the music he so loved? Strangely, it was the voice of a poet that came to her now, with the only comfort she could fathom in this moment of parting. This was the second time she had faced this certainty… this terrible sense of loss. The first was the moment she reached for the volume of the Seven Pillars, afraid to look and see that the history once written there would be changed. She knew, of course, that its altered course would make an end of Kelly, who’s life depended on the calamity of Palma—on the catastrophe that began the great fall into the gray world that even now loomed around them, just beyond the gossamer thin barrier of the Nexus.

  She lost him once, and now she must lose him again. A line of poetry came to her, stubbornly, reflexively, as if to say that saving at least this much would mean something in the end… ‘My life closed twice before its close…’

  Yes, she thought, how appropriate. I will endure this again, and then live with what remains. And when death finds me, somewhere ahead, it will seem a small and inconsequential thing to me then, after this. She held the poem close in her mind, and finished it as they reached the bottom of the elevator. It was Emily Dickinson, that shy wisp of a woman with the whole of life in the turning of one simple rhyme:

  My life closed twice before its close;

  It yet remains to see

  If Immortality unveil

  A third event to me,

  So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

  As these that twice befell.

  Parting is all we know of heaven,

  And all we need of hell.

  Part X

  Resolution

  “Things are where things are,

  and as Fate has willed,

  so shall they be fulfilled.”

  —Aeschylus: Agamemnon 67

  (Translated by Browning)

  28

  He arrived on the dark of night, the chill of the Arch quickly giving way to a sensation of growing warmth. The sound of flowing water came to him next and, as the mist of the time shift dissipated, he gathered himself and scanned the low horizon for the moon. It was a thin sickle, hanging in a of jade black sky just above the darker shape ahead, which he immediately recognized as that of a great beast, silent in its repose as it waited for the dawn.

  He stared at it, realizing that this was not the real sphinx, the stony lion that sat at the feet of the Great Pyramids, but it bore an uncanny resemblance. The Great Pyramids did not yet exist, and would not be built for another eighty centuries or more! Yet here this ancient artifice sat, guarding the eastern meridian where the faint glow of fading stars were now setting, low on the horizon. He immediately recognized the constellation as that of Orion—that the Egyptians might call ‘Osirus.’ As the moon crowned the head of the beast, he could make out the telltale shape of a crudely carved face, draped in shadow. Moments later, the silhouette was plain to see and he froze, as if the creature might spy him out where he stood on the gentle downward slope of a low hill.

  For a moment he thought he perceived a glint of light emanating from the eye of that great carved face. But then he was possessed with a feeling of immense emotional weight, as if the burden of ten thousand years had suddenly come down upon his shoulders, the leaden legacy of all the centuries that stretched out between this moment and the time of his own life. The gleam in the eye of the beast was one of recognition, he thought. It was oblivious to all else around it—fleeting life that came and went in the barest wink of a moment compared to the vast span of its existence. But when Kelly appeared it took notice, one ancient thing regarding another in the silence of the desert. He felt old now, hobbled by time and the dire urgency of his mission.

  His instinct told him to move, down from the exposed slope of the hill to the covered watercourse below, and he felt his legs labor with sluggish response. Must be the effects of the time shift, he thought. Paul had told him what to expect. Though this was not the first time he had moved in the continuum, the feeling of disorientation was greater now than either of his previous shifts.

  Moving forward was feather light, he remembered. He felt as though he was simply evaporating to mist, and then suddenly appeared in the pristine white chamber of some future world. There he had met, and spoken again, with Mr. Graves, a man bound to the thread of his life by the mystery of Time and Paradox. They had saved him from certain annihilation, snatching him away from the hounds as they sought to fall upon him at the end of that first mission.

  He remembered snatches of conversation, questions and answers he did not fully comprehend at the time. It was necessary to move him forward to the safety of a Nexus, Graves had told him, otherwise his life would be forfeit to Paradox. The mission, undertaken by Paul and Robert, had been a success. Somewhere, back along the desolate track of the thin rail line that led down from Maan to Medina, a moment had been found that would change all future moments. It was something that still remained unseen and hidden in the confounding complexity of Time, hidden by its own insignificance. Neither Paul nor Robert could discern it. They could not determine what they had done to change things, but the Pushpoint was there somewhere, replete with significance, the whole of Time wrapped tightly round one single instance of the ordinary. What was it? Was it something they said to one of the historical figures they encountered? Was it something Paul did while held captive on the train? Was it something Robert worked by changing the life course of the two Arab men he had stumbled upon? They would never know.

  That thought filled him with anxiety as he reached the bottom of the hill and descended into the low, winding thread of the watercourse. He remembered Paul’s anxiety when a silly error had sent his friends millions of years into the past. The farther back you go, the greater the influence of every thing you do.

  There was a distant flash of light in the sky and, seconds later, the low rumble of thunder. Storm coming, he thought, and there was something in the growl of the night sky that filled him with deathly fear. LeGrand had spoken of a floodgate he must find and open. Could they have known that, on this night, of all nights, the sky would open and rains would fall heavily up
on the barren landscape, a tempest that would end this whole affair. He remembered the rains of the Bay Area that first night in May when they were planning the Shakespeare mission. It began with a storm, and it will end with one, he thought.

  Shivering, he looked about him at the flowing stream. What was he supposed to do here? Look toward the moon, follow the water, LeGrand had told him. It would lead him towards the great beast of stone that guarded this place—the only sign of human civilization anywhere to be seen. What would he find there?

  He had no idea whether the numbers provided by LeGrand were even accurate. For all he knew, the time shift could be well off the mark. Even a minor variance could find him decades from any moment where he could actually carry out his mission. Follow the watercourse. It will lead to an opening and become a hidden, underground stream. That is the way.

  He looked at the wine dark waters, agleam with slivers of moonlight, and stooped briefly to let his hand dip into the stream. The water was slightly cool, and he could perceive a gentle tug as the water swept slowly along its way, heading east towards the dark mass of the sphinx. He looked around him, wondering if there were any other people about. Would not this gateway be guarded? LeGrand seemed to think the site would be free and clear, its makers, if they still existed, unwary of any intruder.

  One way to find out, he knew, and he started along the muddied edge of the stream, following its winding course as he crept silently to the base of the immense monument. Up ahead there came the sound of falling water, and he soon came to a place where the stream cascaded down a steep incline in a low fall. The mist from the rising spay was cool and refreshing, awakening his senses as he searched for a path down. In the inky darkness, he could barely make his way, afraid that he might lose his footing at any moment and tumble into the water. Trusting to fate, he lowered himself until he sat at the base of the fall. Amazingly, the water flowed down a slight incline here and rushed into the mouth of an eroded cleft in the ground, vanishing from his sight.