Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Read online

  “Probably a concert letting out over at Sidney Hall,” said Nordhausen. “I think they were presenting a Verdi set tonight.”

  “Not exactly the type of crowd you’d expect to be rushing about like that. Especially in the rain. Maybe there was a fire or something.”

  “Good!” said Nordhausen. “They should never have built that hall, if you ask me. The acoustics are terrible in the place. In fact, there isn’t a decent concert hall on this side of the bay. You have to go into the city if you really want to hear anything.” The professor taught at U.C. Berkeley, and he kept a private study on the northwest fringe of the city as it reached towards the East Bay community of Orinda. It was a small apartment that was more of an office, completely furnished as a library and work area. The professor maintained living quarters elsewhere and was generous enough to donate the study as the primary meeting place for key project team leaders. It was convenient for his work, but he hated having to cross the Bay Bridge any time he wanted to pursue his love of classical music. He had chosen this place for his study because of the proximity of the newly built Sidney Hall, but was soon disappointed in the acoustics there. He frowned at the near empty coffee pot, tilting it to try and dribble the last of the coffee into his mug.

  Maeve saw what he was doing and came away from the window. She went straight over to the study table and plopped a heavy volume of the Norton Anthology down with a thud. “Paul,” she said with a stern glance. “Where’s that Peets you said you brought?”

  “What?” Dorland was preoccupied with his notebook. “It’s over by the sink.”

  “Good,” said Maeve, her hazel eyes flashing as she reached out and snatched away Paul’s pen to interrupt his scribbling. “Go make some.”

  Paul started to protest, but one look at Maeve quashed that idea. She had signed on two years ago with the history team to chart potential outcomes and consequences for the experiment. A slim woman in her middle thirties, she had a no-nonsense manner about her, a penchant for cleanliness, schedules and an almost maniacal insistence for structure in the way she ordered her work. She had been a key research leader for the Outcomes Committee, and the considerable force she was able to exert on the group mechanics had soon demonstrated that she was not a person to be trifled with. She smoothed back a lock of her reddish blond hair and fixed Paul with the same patented stare that had cowed the wayward elements of the Outcomes Committee. “Now.” The single word added just enough emphasis to set Paul in motion.

  “Alright,” he offered a meek defense. “I’ll make another pot. Just give me a second here.” He reached for his Styrofoam cup as he retreated to the coffee station.

  “Better hurry,” jibed Nordhausen, “the visitors could show up any moment. If they get here and find the hospitality lacking they might just pack up and leave.” The sarcasm in his voice was laced with just enough humor to soften its sting.

  “Very funny,” said Maeve. “No doubt the mess in this place would be reason enough to send them on their way.” Nordhausen shuffled off to the bookcase as though he wanted to see just how bad it was before he dared to say anything. He thought his argument with Dorland offered better prospects, however, and returned to the coffee station while Paul ground a bowl of fresh coffee beans he had poured from a dark brown bag. The noise of the grinder imposed a moment of silence on the conversation, but Paul started right in when he was done.

  “Your problem is that you are just too wedded to your own subject, Robert.” He tilted the coffee grinder on its side and tapped the contents of the bowl into the protective lid.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Nordhausen was quick to defend himself, and Maeve smiled to herself as the two men warmed up the argument again.

  “I mean you love your history so much that you simply can’t bear the thought that anyone could go back and ‘muck it up’ as you are fond of saying.” He was rinsing out a coffee press and wiping it down with a paper towel. The aroma of fresh ground coffee was already thick on the air as he worked.

  “Well someone ought to be concerned enough about it to put in a good word or two for history’s sake—don’t you think? Can you imagine the potential nightmares we could have if this thing actually works? What if someone botched up the continuum and we end up losing Shakespeare, or Milton or Da Vinci?”

  “We’re the only ones who would know about it,” said Dorland falling back on his inscrutable theory again. “Once the continuum changes, all trace of the altered past is gone forever. If Shakespeare ended up dead before he ever started writing, then no one would ever know about it—unless they were in the Nexus Point where the Meridian was altered.”

  “Oh they’d know,” Nordhausen countered. “They’d know in their gut. There would be an immense hole in the entire progression of Western thought and expression that would leave us all the more impoverished. And if this be error upon me proved—” he began to quote one of the sonnets, and Maeve quipped in the finishing line for him.

  “Then I never writ, and no man ever loved.” She was secretly delighted with the discussion, for it was just the sort of temporal conundrum that she so enjoyed sorting through. While her primary academic interest had been in Byzantine History, she was very well read and could hold her own in a discussion on almost any subject involving history, literature, and the other liberal arts. But the real reason she had been selected from among the thousands of applicants for the project was the incredible analytical ability she seemed to have. Her scores on the outcome variable testing were right at the top of the list, and she could back up each and every answer she gave with a hundred references and logical arguments. “That’s why I’m here, Robert,” she continued. “Don’t worry. It’s my job to be certain no one does drown Shakespeare before his time, and I can assure you that Hamlet and Othello have nothing to fear.”

  Nordhausen smiled at her, convinced that she meant exactly what she said. Maeve Lindford would set a guard on the hallowed halls of history like no one else. It was precisely her research on potential Outcomes and Consequences that would stand that watch, and a sudden thought occurred to him.

  “There you go, Paul,” he angled over to Dorland where he was impatiently waiting on a simmering water kettle. “Why not put Outcomes in charge of the operational phase of the project? Good Maeve here would be a formidable defender for us both, don’t you think? You theoreticians set up the equipment and parameters, and the historians will find you that needle in the haystack of time you’ll be wanting to get at. But we need someone like Maeve to knock our heads together when we can’t agree on what we should do. Outcomes and Consequences—Isn’t that what it’s really all about in the first place? Let Maeve’s committee exercise final authority on the operation and keep Shakespeare and Milton sleeping comfortably in their graves.”

  “Here, here!” Maeve smiled at the thought of knocking a few heads together, and she knew exactly where she might begin.

  The whine of the water kettle interposed itself and Paul quickly rescued it from the electric burner, pouring the hot steamy water into the coffee press. The aroma of the coffee redoubled. He was already looking for his Styrofoam cup to pour in his favorite creamer, a blend of powdered Carnation milk with a hint of hazelnut.

  Maeve shot him a disapproving glance as he heaped the powder into his cup. “I can smell that way over here,” she said with an edge of complaint in her voice.

  “What?” said Dorland as he stirred the coffee in the press with a long-handled spoon. “You mean my precious powders?”

  “Whatever,” said Maeve with a half smile. “Are you sure you really like coffee? Why don’t you just mix up a batch of hot water with that stuff and enjoy your hazelnut.”

  Nordhausen was quick to take her side. “I’ve always said that most of Paul’s problems can be attributed to an excess of hazelnut in his coffee.” They laughed together, the mood lightening a bit as Paul began pressing the coffee.

  “Seriously,” said Dorland, trying to tack back to the heart of the discussi
on. “This gets at the crux of the matter, doesn’t it?” He filled his Styrofoam cup and Nordhausen watched the creamer billow up as he poured. “Now, the way I see it, the Old Bard would have to be a Prime Mover all on his own. He simply influenced too many lives with his writing to be so easily erased from the time continuum. I mean, anyone who has ever read the man seriously could not help but be changed by his poetry and plays in some way. Shakespeare is a perfect example of my theory on Primes. He’s just too damn important to be shunted aside, and history will do everything possible to see that it could never happen. A little help from Maeve in the bargain would be all the assurance you need, my dear Professor. See what I mean? Prime Movers cast a kind of protective shadow on the time line. They aren’t easy to derail.”

  “Here we go. He’s going to give us that penumbra nonsense again,” Nordhausen complained.

  “Well think about it, will you?” Dorland took a sip from his cup and extended the pot to Nordhausen as he spoke, filling the other man’s mug with the rich, black coffee. “You’re the man who is so adamant about protecting our cherished past. Perhaps the time continuum has a way of protecting its own, if you will. A man like Shakespeare or Milton is simply too important to the progression of Western culture to be lightly tampered with. Isn’t that why we picked Shakespeare for our first target? So, the continuum surrounds such a man with a protective aura of some kind. Such men stand so tall in the course of history that they cast a deep shadow about them once they first give birth to a work of art or science or whatever it is they do to become so important to the future. The shadow deepens as their influence on other lives grows and changes the progression of the time line. It soon reaches a point where their influence is so great, where they have altered so many individual lives, that it cannot be undone. The shadow they cast on history is so deep that it simply cannot be penetrated—That’s the penumbra surrounding the Prime Mover and insuring the Imperative such a person or event must give rise to. Shakespeare must write Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and all the rest. ”

  “Yes, but there’s a problem with that,” said Nordhausen. “What’s the Imperative, the man or the message? Is it Shakespeare that is important to the time line, or Hamlet?”

  “To be or not to be? That is the question,” quipped Maeve.

  “Well, we darn well better answer it, my friends,” said Nordhausen. “They still aren’t sure if Shakespeare even wrote half of the stuff that has been attributed to him.”

  “Oh, now don’t drag in that silly theory about Sir Francis Bacon again,” Maeve protested, a warning in her eyes as she sidled over to the coffee station, mug in hand.

  “Suppose it’s true,” said Nordhausen. “Then Shakespeare, the man, would be irrelevant. It’s Hamlet that matters, no matter who wrote the damn thing. I mean, suppose it was written by a squire somewhere and Shakespeare simply bought up the manuscript and published it for the local playhouses—grist for the mill.”

  “So now it’s a simple country squire who’s doing the writing for you. Does he happen to work for Sir Francis Bacon?” Maeve jabbed him in the ribs with a firm fingertip.

  Nordhausen laughed at this, letting the humor cover his retreat as he made his way to his seat at the study table again.

  “The point is, it was published,” said Dorland. “Whether it was written by Shakespeare, or Bacon or his squire doesn’t matter.”

  “And what are you getting at?” Nordhausen had reached his chair and was settling in again with a glance at his pocket watch. He snapped it closed and slipped it into his sweater. “Nine-ten.” He muttered.

  Paul continued. “It’s the whole milieu of the time that surrounded Shakespeare’s life that gave rise to Hamlet, by one means or another. You can’t separate the man from his environment, and all of the history that gave rise to it. The two arise mutually—hand in glove. If Shakespeare were alive today he couldn’t write Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet or anything even remotely like the plays and sonnets that made him famous. He was a man for his time, and the time produced the man. Don’t you see? It was an era where all the social and cultural elements that allowed a play like Hamlet to be written just came into the proper focus. Someone simply had to write Hamlet, no matter who it turns out to be.”

  “Someone did write Hamlet,” said Maeve with an air of finality. “It was Shakespeare.”

  Dorland filled her coffee mug with a smile. “Sure you won’t try my hazelnut creamer?”

  “Don’t press your luck,” said Maeve, and she went over to the study table to retrieve the copy of the Norton Anthology of Literature she had dragged out of Nordhausen’s bookcase.

  Dorland was momentarily distracted by a honking horn outside. He glanced through the study window and noted the traffic only seemed to be getting worse out near Sidney Hall. He saw a group of people running, and thought it a bit unusual for a classical music concert to be so unruly at this hour of the night. His attention to the time produced that brief surge of anxiety in his chest again. “Now where is Kelly?” He was getting more and more exasperated as they waited, as if the commotion outside the room was slowly invading the quiet atmosphere of Nordhausen’s study and stirring up all his old fears about the project again. Here he was, on the most important night of his life, perhaps the most important night of history since the Nativity, and Kelly was late again.

  “He’s probably trying to get through that crowd out there by now.” Maeve took a sip of her coffee, and frowned. “You didn’t wait long enough before you pressed this,” she said. “It’s too weak. I thought you were going to bring Major Dickason’s blend?”

  “Sorry,” Dorland apologized. “The professor here had me all caught up in this Shakespeare business and I wasn’t watching the time.”

  “Don’t blame me, Paul.” Nordhausen was quick to defend himself. “Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business.” He quoted Shakespeare again. “You’re the coffee expert here. You should know better.”

  “Thank you, Prospero,” Maeve was quick to pick up Nordhausen’s reference to Shakespeare. “Well, our coffee expert had better learn how to use a press properly. This is too weak.” She pushed her cup aside and began flipping through the pages of her Norton Anthology.

  “Looking for that quote?” Nordhausen ventured.

  “Looking for trouble?” Maeve shot him a disapproving glance. “The Tempest: Act Five, Scene One.” She knew the play well and didn’t need her anthology to zero in on the reference.

  Nordhausen gave her a contented grin. “Oh? I liked the second scene in that act better,” his voice had a teasing edge.

  “There wasn’t a second scene,” Maeve was not in any mood for nonsense, and Nordhausen thought the better of prodding her further.

  Paul was staring at the coffee press, his feathers ruffled somewhat by Maeve’s last comment. He did fancy himself a bit of a connoisseur when it came to his coffees. After years of swilling down run-of-the-mill Columbian beans off of supermarket shelves, he discovered Peets on the Internet one day and his long habit finally exulted with a brew that was truly addictive. He tried every one of the many blends over the years, finally settling on a few favorites. Major Dickason’s blend was not one of them, but it was a favorite of his good friend Kelly, and Maeve seemed to like it as well. “Sorry, Maeve,” he apologized again. “I just forgot. I had the Guatemalan in my cupboard, so I just grabbed it and ran out to catch BART. If I had known Kelly was going to be this late I could have stopped by and bought something fresh. Can I get you a tea?”

  “No thanks,” Maeve was resigned to content herself with the Norton Anthology for a time. “You two can go right on arguing, if you want. Don’t mind me.”

  Dorland struggled to contain his frustration. He never thought it would be like this. Here he was on the night before the launch and Kelly was late and he was fussing with a coffee press and arguing with Nordhausen again! He had looked forward to this moment for so long that the seeming inconsequentiality of the events that were playi
ng themselves out just didn’t seem to measure up to his expectations. In one sense, it confirmed a major principle of his own time theory: that most of the time line was littered with insignificant moments that simply flowed along, like bubbles in a stream. These were the ‘Thousand nothings of the hour’ as he liked to call them after a line from Matthew Arnold’s Buried Life. Somewhere in the stream, he knew, there was one tiny bubble that would give rise to Shakespeare and Hamlet and The Tempest. Which one?

  He had puzzled over his theory for years before the ideas really seemed to gel in his mind over a cup of coffee one day. It was odd the way it happened. He wasn’t even trying to think about his theory that night. He was simply relaxing in an idle moment with the TV and scrolling through the channels with his remote. After skirting away from a score of commercial messages and the latest political scandal to hit Washington, he settled on a science documentary about genetics.

  The narrator was explaining how only a tiny fraction of human DNA differed from that of a Chimpanzee, or from all the other animals on earth. He remembered the event so clearly now: how the narrator had emphasized that the human genome was littered with thousands of strands of unused, excess genetic material that served no real purpose. It had simply gathered there over the eons of mutation, redundant snips and errant strands of genetic flotsam and jetsam produced by the trillions of subtle errors DNA would make over time. Yet it was exactly these errors, the mutations arising in insignificant bits of protein, that gave rise to all the variety of life. If DNA were perfect in the way it replicated itself, the world would be awash in countless strands of DNA, and nothing else. Now, however, after a trillion, trillion errors, only a tiny fraction of all the DNA in the genome was actually useful, yet it still needed the supporting structure of all the trivial material around it in order to continue to move forward in the stream of evolution.

  Time was like that, he suddenly thought. The idea shot through him like a bolt of lightning and gave him the last critical tenet that had so eluded him in his search for an understanding of time theory. His life was transformed from that moment on. The incident became the founding principle of his theory of time: that all of history’s most crucial events arose from their opposite, from some single moment of utter insignificance that served as the key trigger for the event.