Touchstone (Meridian Series) Read online

  Touchstone

  A Novel In Time

  Being Volume III in the Meridian Series

  By

  John Schettler

  with

  Mark A. Prost

  Copyright Notice

  All material in this file is protected under U.S. Copyright Law.

  Touchstone, Copyright©2008, John Schettler

  Being Book III in the Meridian Series Novels by John Schettler

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this file may be duplicated, distributed, stored in any medium, or sold without expressed, written permission by the author.

  ISBN: 0-9713170-6-2

  John Schettler – [email protected]

  A publication of:

  The Writing Shop Press

  www.writingshop.ws

  Rev: 05/09

  About Touchstone

  When Nordhausen follows a hunch and launches a secret time jump mission on his own, he discovers something is terribly wrong with the Rosetta Stone. The fate of all Western History as we know it is somehow linked to this ancient Egyptian artifact, once famous the world over, and now a forgotten slab of stone. The result is a harrowing mission to Egypt during the time of Napoleon’s 1799 invasion, to find out how the artifact was changed…and why.

  Novels By John Schettler:

  Meridian – A Novel In Time

  ForeWord Magazine’s Silver Medal Winner

  For Science Fiction Book Of The Year – 2002

  Nexus Point – Book II in the Meridian Series

  Science Fiction- 2004

  Touchstone - Book III in the Meridian Series

  Science Fiction- 2008

  Wild Zone – Book I in the Dharman Series

  Science Fiction – With Richard Gylgayton - 2002

  Mother Heart – Book II in the Dharman Series

  Taklamakan – The Land Of No Return

  A Novel of the Silk Road

  Historical Fiction – 2001

  Steamboat Slough

  A Novel – 2004

  For availability and orders please visit:

  www.writingshop.ws – or - www.dharma6.com

  Part I

  Arrival

  “The Chief malady of man is a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.”

  — Pascal: Pensées

  1

  It was scarcely less cold on the street than passing through the Arch. Nordhausen shivered in his heavy overcoat. It occurred to him that his clothes seemed to be completely frozen, much colder than the air, perhaps an effect of the time travel. He rubbed himself vigorously, trying to put some body heat back into the linen, wool and fur that a prosperous gentleman wore against the damp chill. The air was sour, acid, with heavy drops of floating moisture. He had never thought about how a pea soup fog would smell. Welcome to the industrial revolution, he thought.

  There was no doubt, this was not the Cretaceous. Kelly couldn’t have botched the numbers this time, because he didn’t even know about this trip! Yes, Nordhausen had promised never to do anything of this sort again, but really... What harm could come of a little visit to Old London—just a sightseeing tour; a brief weekend? He would hardly be gone from Berkeley half an hour and they wouldn’t even miss him. That was the plan and, without any nonsense from Kelly and Maeve, everything would be just fine. This time he was spot on target, obviously in London, on a sidewalk, along a short street surrounded by generous four story buildings faced with stone, marble and plaster. Gas streetlamps shone feebly through the fog in the late afternoon, hazing over the view ahead. Dusk came early in this northern latitude, he reminded himself.

  The city was noisy! A racket of wheeled traffic jostled on some nearby invisible block, and he was conscious of the susurrus of human activity that the vast city generated. There were no cars, but he realized what a lot of noise people made underneath the roar of city traffic.

  In spite of his excitement, Maeve sat on his shoulder like a bothersome crow. He knew exactly what she would say if she ever found out about this mission. “What on earth were you thinking?… You did what?…”

  Nonetheless, the die was cast, he was here for forty-eight hours, so he had better do what he could to avoid causing any problems, like forestalling the First World War or some other calamitous event. He didn’t see how he could change the Meridian if he simply laid low and went about his business as quietly as possible. He knew Maeve wouldn’t buy any of these rationalizations, and that was making him very careful.

  Yes, he knew he had joined his hand with those of the other three team members to give his solemn oath. He could hear Maeve’s words, still whispering in his mind even now: “…I’ll say this: if we don’t shut this thing down, and I don’t see how we can with this war business, then we weigh in on the side of Mother Time…We know how things are now. It’s the world we believe to be our own—at least I do. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need something to hold onto each day; something I can use to make sense of the world. There’s enough uncertainty out there as it is. If we get involved, it must be to preserve the past as we know it now—to put a stop to this time war by foiling their efforts, if we can…only we do it with more sense and direction. We keep watch, and we plan, and we get it all right. Understand?”

  Maeve’s point was well taken, but there was a thrill to time travel that she didn’t seem to embrace. Perhaps the brief experience she had while running Kelly’s first “Spook Job” to find Paul had not been enough to get her hooked. She hadn’t really time traveled—at least not to a place where she could open her eyes and breath in the air of a new world. She hadn’t camped under Jurassic skies or shared a meal with men who had died before she was born. And he was willing to bet she hadn’t opened her eyes during that first brief jump either.

  Still, there was something to be said for her logic about the situation now. Time war! The thought still sent shivers along Nordhausen’s spine, and the London fog was quick to reinforce them. He drew his overcoat about him tighter, still thinking about something Maeve had said.

  We know how things are now… Was that so? The thought that unseen adversaries from the future were creeping along the deep Meridians of time was more than unnerving—it was terrifying. What might they be about? If Paul’s experience after his haphazard stumble into that cavern in the Jordanian Desert was any guide, they were up to a great deal. That nest of Assassins had been festering away in the year 1187 and planning to meddle with the history of the Crusades! Might there be other nests; other key Nexus Points on the Meridian where the Assassins were setting up new operations?

  Time war…

  Maeve was quite correct. In order to fight that kind of battle one had to have some clear hold on the world before they set to meddling and changing things. Kelly’s RAM bank, and the nifty Golem program he devised to constantly monitor the Web, was a step in the right direction. To tamper with history you needed something, anything, as a sure reference point to measure your success or failure. The first mission, when they struggled to reverse the Palma disaster, they had to rely on their own living memory of Lawrence’s narrative in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Now, with Kelly’s RAM bank functioning as a kind of constant memory, they had some hold on the moment, some tether on the way things were supposed to be. Surely the Assassins would have faced this problem as well. What were they using? What was their reference point?

  That thought brought Robert back to the intent of his mission. Yes, he had always wanted to see old London, but there was more to his weekend plans than a simple jaunt through the foggy streets of Dickens’ era. No, Paul said something tha
t got him thinking, and he was following up his hunch before he brought all this to the others. “…we’ve got our Arch, and Kelly’s Golems, and the RAM bank idea gives us a good touchstone on the history. Now we stand the watch.” Robert remembered how they all nodded agreement, but he was soon thinking about Paul’s last statement.

  A touchstone, he mused. While he waited out those anxious hours in the Jordanian desert he had encountered a man named Rasil, the Messenger, as he called himself. Apparently, this fellow had intended to take a little jump through the cavern they had stumbled upon in Wadi Rumm. What an ingenious idea! The technology of the Arch required enormous energy and computing power to work its magic but, somehow, the Assassins had figured a low tech way to achieve the same result. They used the quirky nature of a strange bacterium with an appetite for Uranium ions. Paul called it an Oklo reaction.

  It took a month or more, but the subterranean pools of radioactive water were enough to generate the power required for a jump—a precisely calculated jump—from one particular point to another. How they figured it all out and secreted the equipment in the desert was still a mystery, but the cavern in Wadi Rumm was a one way jump to the time of the Crusades—right smack into the midst of Castle Massiaf, the key base for Sinan’s Assassins in that region. Unwittingly, Paul had taken the ride in Rasil’s place, and it was only the incredible ingenuity of Kelly and Maeve that brought him home.

  Robert remembered how he wrangled with his captor, Rasil, and that brief moment when he had managed a glimpse into the other man’s haversack. In addition to the satellite phone he had used to alert Kelly and Maeve to their dilemma, he had found an odd scroll, inscribed with strange writing that he immediately recognized. He was still ruminating over the hieroglyphics he had seen there, and an idea began to bubble up. The scroll was obviously a message of sorts. Maeve’s voice was back, her words echoing in his mind as he replayed the conversation from their last meeting.

  “What did you find?” she asked.

  “It’s what I didn’t find,” Nordhausen replied. “They’ve got every last line of discovered hieroglyphic text on file now, and I know enough about the script to replicate what I saw in that scroll. Using characters dating from the Old Kingdom, I was able to draw out most of what I remembered. I scanned the images and ran comparison queries in the database, but there were no hits on those phrases.”

  “It could mean that this Rasil fellow had something from another milieu.” Maeve raced on in her thinking, and it had jogged something loose in Nordhausen’s mind.

  “Then you suppose they might be using the hieroglyphics as a kind of code?” he remembered saying. “That would explain why the passages don’t exist in any discovered writings. But I had the distinct impression that the characters I saw were a rubbing—as if they had been pressed onto the scroll from an original stone carving. It was very odd.”

  It certainly was, and Robert intended to follow up on his hunch and get to the bottom of this business, here and now. He went through his reasoning again, like a man shuffling through his pockets to be sure he had everything he needed for a trip. There were lots of discoveries from antiquity that failed to survive to his present day. Many artifacts had become lost, damaged or destroyed. Libraries had been looted in ancient times, as at Alexandria, and even in recent years, when the collection of the Baghdad Museum had been plundered at the outset of the war in Iraq. Unless they were utterly destroyed, these things still had to be in the world somewhere. Perhaps he could use the Arch to have a look around in a few promising places. In the process he hoped to find out more about Rasil’s mysterious scroll. If it was indeed a rubbing, as he suspected, it seemed to him that some of the history was written in stone. The more he thought about it the better it sounded in his head, though he did not want to bring his idea up in committee just yet. He had an inkling of where he might find a good cache of old stone carvings from Egypt that had been lost to his day. They were here, right here in London, in the British Museum.

  The world had been blissfully ignorant of Egypt and its fabulous history until Napoleon followed his ambitions and invaded that ancient country in 1799. A thousand scholars had accompanied him there, bent on bringing the benefits of Western enlightenment to backward people, yet the inverse had been true. Instead, the troops of savants had uncovered the majesty of the pyramids, of Karnak and Luxor and Thebes. They had sketched it all out in notebooks and carted off hundreds of artifacts and stone carvings to Europe when Napoleon finally fled. Some of the very first finds of the old hieroglyphics had been uncovered during that three year expedition—and many of them were here, in the British Museum. They were all nested away in the showrooms and cellars, long before the greed and neglect of the world saw them scattered or lost. He had them all on hand for his inspection, and he was going to have a very close look before the weekend was through. This was going to be great fun, he thought. Great fun indeed!

  He looked about, trying to get oriented. He hadn’t gone far in time. He imagined he should be pretty close to the target date, and pulled out a map of the City while walking to the nearest gas light. The trees were dripping, and his eyes were starting to burn. How on earth could people live like this, he wondered? It was worse than Los Angeles in the summers of his youth. More evidence of human progress, he thought, with a sense of pity. These people suffered from asthma, tuberculosis, chronic alcoholism, tobacco related illnesses…what did they not suffer from? There were hideous chemical toxins in the air, especially heavy metal compounds of lead, arsenic, mercury—not to mention parasites and pathogens. And this was the greatest city in the world at this moment in time. He would be lucky not to come back with cholera! He made a note to drink only brewed, distilled or fermented beverages. Beer, wine or gin were likely to be his tipples this weekend.

  He peered at the map while standing below a street sign posted on the side of a wall at the intersection. Paddington Street. Tracing his finger, he found it. Yes, he was smack in the middle of London, close to Covent Garden and the British Museum, just off Baker Street… Baker Street!

  The thrill of time travel was on him again. Around every corner would be a new historical landmark. He could not begin to take it all in. He wondered who might have been beheaded on this very spot, 900 years ago. If only it weren’t so murky. At that moment, bells began to peal in the far distance. What time was it? They were immediately picked up by a closer set and, one by one, half a dozen, seven, eight, peals overlaid one another. The gentle tolling hung in the air, almost vibrating the fog molecules, making the entire city hum.

  “Oranges and lemons, sing the bells of St. Clemens,

  “When will you pay me, sing the bells of Old Bailey,

  “When I am rich, sing the bells of Fleetditch,

  “When will that be, ring the bells of Stepney,

  “When I am old, ring the Great Bells at Paul’s”

  The nursery rhyme came to him, unbidden, from forty years in his past. And indeed, nearby St. Paul’s tolled long and deep, and hung in the air rolling longer than any of the others. He turned toward its sound, but could see nothing in the fog. He counted out four long tolls.

  What time was it, indeed? What year was it? This was not the undifferentiated Olden Days, this was a specific moment of time. The Arch had sifted and juggled every quantum particle of the universe to produce this moment—just for him. Now he was in a Deep Nexus, and Time waited, holding her final judgment in abeyance as she watched his every move, like Maeve on his shoulder, her constant whisper in his ear. He would have to be very careful. He couldn’t do anything to inadvertently change things. He would just have a brief look around, steal over to the museum, and then get home. He had studied the maps and social history books (all at home, never at the labs!) But he needed to get oriented. This was quite different from the desert adventure. Here there was a real possibility that he would have to interact with the locals, have conversations, and pass in society. He and the Bedouin might have been space aliens to each other as far as the
ir social intercourse. Here, he must pass; he must fit in and flow along the streets like the genteel soul he made himself to be in his carefully chosen clothing.

  Oh, Maeve, perhaps you were right…

  2

  He decided to head out to Baker Street, which was a thoroughfare, and sounded as if it had more traffic on it. It was six o’clock, and very dark in these northern latitudes by this hour, but the night was still young.

  He stood, for a while, at the corner, watching the passersby. This appeared to be a substantial middleclass neighborhood. The street was lined with shop fronts, supporting three brick stories of apartments above them. There were street lights on the corners and, in the middle of each block, a line of fading glows in either direction. The fog was lighter here. People strolled along the street, alone or in couples, mostly in silence, but he caught occasional lines of conversation.

  “Evening, Miss Hynes.”

  “Evening, Mr. Simms.” The gracious nod as one passed another in the street, and occasionally a casual, courteous remark or two. “You’re looking well tonight. Lovely rose in your cheeks, m’lady. Must be that fine fare you set on table. Such a roast! Enough to feed a brace of yard workers, I’ll warrant.”

  “You’re too kind, Mr. Simms.”

  Nordhausen smiled, wondering whether Mr. Simms was angling for the lady’s affections or a good meal. Still, the simple humanity of these people was immediately impressed upon him. They were not ‘historical figures,’ subjects for his intellectual digestion and study. They were real flesh and blood now, with quirks and foibles and all too familiar gestures as they spoke to one another in that brief passing. He rubbed his palms together, experiencing a moment of excitement. He was here at last, and this was going to be far more interesting that he could possibly imagine.