Touchstone (Meridian Series) (7 page)

       “Well, I was just here ten minutes ago,” said Paul. “The
consoles were humming at full tilt and Kelly’s Golems were running wild. But
you were nowhere to be found.”

       “I went down to check on the Arch, I tell you… and to the
bathroom, if you don’t mind. If you had waited for me here, you would have seen
that I came right back.”

       “Mmmmhmmmm,” Dorland replied. He made no effort to hide his
skepticism. “Anyway, here’s what I’ve managed to find out. The alert call went
out at
three past
four
, and we’ve
got a preliminary spatial locus somewhere in the
Middle East
. Nothing hard yet. The Golems are doing a data comparison with
the RAM bank now, but, as you can see, there hasn’t been much to report,” he
flipped through some pages on a clip board he held. “It’s a bit early, but we
should be getting something soon. I’m surprised you didn’t have this ready. It
was your shift.” He looked up, suddenly perplexed by his friend’s demeanor.

       “Robert, what is it?” He had caught a look of misery on
Nordhausen’s face, so at odds with the man’s normal easy going nature, that he
was struck by it.

       “Oh, Paul,” Nordhausen moaned.

       “What?” Dorland was now alarmed.

       “Oh, Paul, something has happened…”

       “Robert, what? Are you all right?”

       “I don’t know… something is very wrong…”

       “What are you talking about? What happened? You mean to say
you
did
get a report before I arrived?” He rushed to Nordhausen’s side,
eyes scanning the desk top as though he expected to see a variance report.

       Nordhausen sat with his face in his hands. He couldn’t look
at Dorland. “It was my fault, Paul. I… used the Arch…” he muttered, in a low
voice, almost inaudibly.

       “You what?”

       “I used the Arch!” He lifted his head from his hands, and
the look of despair was deep and clear. “I used the Arch and something
changed.”

       Paul stiffened. He held his clipboard to his chest, and
said, slowly: “Robert, what did you do?”

       “Nothing! I didn’t do anything! At least not anything I can
clue on. But I must have done something, because things are clearly wrong.”
Nordhausen gave him a pleading look. Suddenly the whole story came spilling out
in a gush of disjointed narrative, clothed in rationalizations and
justifications, causing Dorland to slowly sink into the other office chair
while Nordhausen went on.

       “So, you see, I didn’t do
anything
!
I was
just there, and—”

       “Didn’t do anything?” Paul gave him an incredulous look.
“You say you went out to the opera?”

       “But I just watched the show… then went across the street
to a club after and...”

       “And what?”

       Nordhausen hesitated, for the bit about his encounter with
Wilde and Gilbert was a source of great anxiety to him. He started to tell his
story and saw how Paul just put his hands over his ears with a flabbergasted
look on his face.

       “You didn’t do anything?” Paul just stared at him. “Robert,
you shouldn’t have been there in the first place!”

       “Yes, I know, I know…” Nordhausen covered his face in his
palms again, wanting to hide from his own foolishness. “But I just don’t see
the connection,” he muttered.

       “What connection?”

       “Between Wilde and the stone. How could an innocent session
in a bar cause damage to the Rosetta Stone? I can’t see it.”

       “What are you talking about?”

       ‘That’s the problem, Paul. It’s the stone. It’s broken, but
I can’t figure how. I went there to look at the carvings, and  I saw it… but it
was wrong!
The Rosetta Stone.
Our whole understanding of the
hieroglyphics was based upon that one object—but now it’s changed. What does it
mean? How could it have happened?”

       The recital had left Nordhausen drained, and he sat slumped
in his desk chair, waiting now for Dorland to say something.

       “I don’t know what to make of this, Robert. I have never
even heard of this thing—what did you call it? The Rosetta Stone? And what’s
all this about understanding the hieroglyphics? No one has ever translated ancient
Egyptian writing. Yes, there are pyramid freaks, and conspiracy theorists and
other cranks who claim to be able to read them, but they’ve remained a mystery
for thousands of years.”

       “No, no, no,” Nordhausen protested, waving his hand.
“That’s just what I mean! Someone
did
translate the hieroglyphics. I was
looking up the references only a moment ago. Champollion, a French scholar,
identified the phonetic connection in the glyphs centuries ago, but none of
that work is published now. Oh, God, what have I done?”

       Paul put his clip board down and folded his arms. “This is
too much for me to swallow at this point,” he said. “I’m still not sure what
you’re driving at. You just told me that this guy’s work was never published.
Do you realized how crazy that sounds? How could you know about something that
was never— “ Paul caught himself, and a squall of concern swept over his
features.

       Nordhausen’s empty emotions were suddenly filled with a
backlash of anger. “Well I am not insane, if that’s what you’re thinking. I
planned this very carefully.  I told you I was going to check on the writing.
It was a legitimate mission, though I know I should have cleared it with the
rest of the team. In any case, what’s done is done. Yes, I had my toast with
Wilde and Gilbert in the bar, and I went to the museum the very next day. It
was well thought out. How long have you known me, Paul? Since high school!
Maybe I shouldn’t have gone back, but that’s not the issue here. Something
bigger is going on now. We’ve got to find out what happened to the Rosetta
Stone!”

6

“Rosetta Stone!”
Dorland shot back. “There you go again. What are you talking
about? Look, I’m trying to be sympathetic here, but you’re not making any
sense. What’s this stone you keep rambling on about?”

       Nordhausen sighed heavily. “It was discovered in 1799,
during Napoleon’s invasion of
Egypt
.
They were trying to improve an old fort near the town of
Rosetta
and uncovered a huge slab of
black basalt with inscriptions in three languages.”

       “Wait a second,” Paul interrupted. “I’ve read that history
many times. Sure, Napoleon invaded
Egypt
,
and was stranded by the British Fleet. He fought a few battles, tried to march
off to
Palestine
, then got tired of the whole
campaign and escaped to leave all his men to fend for themselves. That’s all in
the history, but I’ve never heard of this Rosetta thing.”

       “Well he brought teams of savants with him. Do you remember
that? They carried back all their records and artifacts and published volumes
about them.”

       “Yes, but there was nothing with a clue to translating
hieroglyphics.”

       “Don’t you see?” Nordhausen was getting frustrated now.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you! There
was
an artifact. It was
called the Rosetta Stone—perhaps the most significant find of the whole expedition!
There were three languages: Demotic, Greek and the Hieroglyphics, and they all
said the same thing. That was how Champollion made the connection between them.
It was a touchstone, a key reference point that opened everything up.” He gave
Paul a wild look, then changed his tack, hitting on some new thought. “Paul, I
can read them,” Nordhausen insisted.

       “Read what?”

       “The hieroglyphics! I know what they mean—I’ve known about
them for over thirty years. Hell, I’ve got old notebooks in my study—We’ve got
to get over there!”

       “Notebooks? Hold on now, Robert.” Nordhausen was up off his
seat and looking about him, as though searching for something.

       “Yes, notebooks. Good lord, what if they’re gone too?”

       “Sit down, Robert. You’re getting weird on me now.”

      
“Sit down? Is that all
you have to say about this? I thought you were the time theoretician here.
Think man! I just came through the Arch, only minutes ago in fact. No, I wasn’t
in the bathroom. I lied about that, but you’ve got to believe me on this point.
I was back in Old London, just like I said, and I’ve done something to change
the
Meridian
. But I remember the world I came from, Paul,
and it had the Rosetta Stone, the hieroglyphics and all. I remember how to read
the glyphs, and I can prove it to you. Hell, that’s why I went on the mission
in the first place—to read samples of the hieroglyphics that might have been
lost to our time. I figured they might still be intact in an earlier time, and
what better place to look than the
British
Museum
? So I went
back, damnit. Yes, I screwed up again, and I’m the first to admit that. But I
know I’m right about the stone, the glyphs, and all the rest.”

       Paul gave him a long, searching look. He scratched the back
of his head and started to say something, then caught himself, the change in
his thinking obvious on his face. Robert’s jibe about the time theory had
pricked his attention. If it was true, and the alert had been called because of
his friend’s use of the Arch, then Robert would have been in a Nexus Point, a
protected bubble in the stream of time. He would know things, aspects and
elements of his original
Meridian
, while everyone outside the Nexus would remain oblivious.
“Alright,” he began. “Let’s slow down here and take this one step at a time.
You say you used the Arch.”

       “Yes.”

       “And you went to
London
and had a drink with Oscar Wilde and company—just like you, Robert. What were
you thinking? You don’t get involved with Primes! How many times do we have to
tell you these things?”

       “Well it wasn’t my fault. I was just sitting there, trying
to mind my own business and they latched on to me. The next thing I know I was
judging a poetry contest. I had no intention—”

       “Yes you
did,
my friend. You went to the opera,
right? No fault in that. We were going to watch Shakespeare when this whole
thing started. But, just like Maeve warned, you can’t resist the urge to start
poking around in the history. I’ll bet you loved every minute of that little
encounter in the nightclub. What did you say you were drinking?”

       “Oh, come now. I was in complete control of my faculties at
all times. Yes, I conversed with them, Wilde and Gilbert both. But it was just
happenstance. I never had any intention of tampering with a Prime Mover, and I
tried to extricate myself from the situation as soon as I could.”

       “Happenstance? That’s the point Robert—that’s exactly what
a Pushpoint is—something completely innocuous in the immediate milieu that has
enormous power to catalyze the future.”

       “Do you think that’s where the damage occurred?”

       “Damage?”

       “Yes, man. I’ve been trying to tell you that the Rosetta
Stone was damaged! All the Hieroglyphics were gone. That’s why no one ever made
the connection between the languages, don’t you see? I’ve done something to
change
things—God only knows what—just like we changed things after the Palma Event.
We never did figure out what happened that time, Paul. Neither one of us got
anywhere near
Lawrence
’s explosives, but yet we did
something to alter the event. We stumbled on one of your pushpins and everything
was different.”

       “Push
points
,” Paul corrected, very annoyed.

       “Whatever!”

      
Nordhausen was getting
quite exasperated now. “The point is that we did something to the
Meridian
without
even knowing it. We changed things, yet we all remember what was supposed to
happen that night because we were in the Nexus…” His eyes widened with sudden
realization. “That’s it, Paul! That’s it! I was in a Nexus Point! That’s why I
remember it all—why I can still read the hieroglyphics, because I’m retaining
memories from the time line I came from.” He gave Paul a searching look, almost
pleading. “You’ve got to believe me,” he breathed, slumping back into his
office chair. “Kelly’s Golems will bear me out. There’s no way they could miss
something like this.”

       Paul took a deep breath, his mind resting in his own time
theory now. The professor was quite distressed, but was certainly convinced
that he had done something to change the continuum.

       “Very well,” he said, granting Nordhausen a measure of
respect. “I agree. If you used the Arch, then you were certainly in a Nexus.
Let’s assume that all this is true. All we have to go on now is your word that
things are different—that we’re supposed to understand these hieroglyphics, and
we don’t.”

       “The notebooks, Paul.” Nordhausen held up a finger. “Let’s
get over to my study and see if they’ve changed. Would they change?”  He looked
to Paul for the answer. “Champollion’s work vanished. God, what if my notebooks
are altered as well? What does the time theory say about a situation like this?
Would my personal effects be altered even if I was in a Nexus? Come on, man—You
dreamt all this up!”