“Undoubtedly,” said Kelly.
He lingered a moment as he watched Hamza walk back toward the stairway, half way expecting to feel that lightness of being and the frosty chill that made the cool morning air seem balmy by comparison. But nothing happened. He had been many long months here now. The last time he felt that intense cold of infinity was the moment just after he met the scribe and walked out with him to face the place where Mecca would rise up in ages hence. He remembered how Hamza thought to prepare him for the fate that awaited him.
“Your friends will try to call you home soon, though you may not feel the place to be a home in your heart when you return. They will make an error, a very small one of course, but then little things have great consequences—”
It was obviously more than a small error, thought Kelly. He felt the retraction shift beginning, that heady lightness, tinged with a wave of nausea. For the briefest moment he thought he was back in his dream again, the same dream he awoke with this very morning, at the Harney Science Center Arion complex. Then he could feel his blood thicken and solidity returning to his body. He fell on the cold wet stone, unaware until he awakened. Was it hours later? Minutes? Seconds? He could not recall it now. They tried to pull me out and failed, he thought. Or perhaps it was that Time had no place for me in the world where my friends live now, and it tried to hijack the retraction shift and send me back to the beginning, back to a moment where I could walk gently forward to the death that was rightfully mine.
That thought darkened his mind every time he considered it. He had tried to ask Hamza what he knew of the events of his day, but the man was reluctant to divulge too much about it.
“The days yet to come are not my concern,” he would say. “I will contemplate them when the time comes to inscribe them here in the wall. You should not trouble yourself with idle speculation, my friend. Time has left you safely in our care. It is the will of Allah that you remain here with us, and share in the counting of days.”
So the moment when Time could best decide his fate was this moment, thought Kelly. Hamza was right. Time left me here, abandoned, a lost orphan. It took the easy way out. Hamza had told him just enough to know that the world had changed yet again, and was restored to the true Prime Meridian.
They had worked a mighty transformation, or so he explained it. A stumble and a kick had foiled them for a brief interval, but they worked it, with all determination, and found another way to restore the Time line to what it had been that Memorial Day when Palma exploded and wreaked its havoc on the world. How could Time account for my presence in that altered Meridian if I had shifted forward to the project lab again? He was well aware of the dilemma, and the grave danger of Paradox.
Time would have to balance her books, he thought, and my presence would force her to the difficult choice of either annihilating me, a Prime Mover and Agent of First Cause, or somehow finding a way to alter everything else to serve the need of my life. So she made the quick and easy choice, he thought, and just left me where I was, with a nice fat buffer, ten millennia wide, between me and any potential problem my life might cause.
Still, he had hope that one day he might return home to the world he knew. He wasn’t sure what had actually happened, given his failure to flood and destroy the shrine and record of days here. That uncertainty made friends with hope, and together they gave birth to a determination on his part to try and find his way home, whether that choice was wise or not. There was little he could do here on his own. His only chance would be to somehow alert his companions to the fact that he was alive and well, and prompt them to act. He soon realized he had the perfect means of communicating with Paul and the others right here!
The hieroglyphics, he thought. They’ll survive for thousands of years intact, and Nordhausen can read them! All he had to do was get chummy enough with Hamza and the others here to avoid arousing suspicion. So he joined Hamza where he worked at the wall each day, engaging him in lively conversation and discussion on the history, an advocate for his own Western perspective on the course of events, though Hamza might define him as a devil’s advocate with such opinions.
He would also join the others at prayer each time they would answer the call of the Muezzin, and he would sit with Hamza each evening and hear reading of the holy suras of the Koran as well. In time they came to see him as a new initiate to the faith, and eagerly engaged him with the teachings of the Prophet. And he found the discourse very uplifting and enlightening, however narrow the mindset behind it was at times. On occasion he would tussle with Hamza intellectually, trying to elucidate a viewpoint that could embrace the freedoms of the West, but it was largely a fruitless endeavor. If it was written in the Koran, then Hamza would give ear. But things like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the personal freedoms they gave rise too were often at odds with mainstream Islamic teaching.
“Tomorrow will be a special day,” said Hamza. “I will carve the rendering of new meaning for the concept of Jihad, as the Prophet related it in his ministry at Mecca and Medina. More than a simple admonishment to actively recount the words of the Koran and initiate the unfaithful, jihad now comes to be understood as a more active resistance to the ways of the Infidel.”
“Ah, yes,” said Kelly. The concept of holy war is not unknown to the West. I suppose the Crusaders proved that in no uncertain terms. Yet a time must come where men of different views and faiths can be at ease with one another, and find peace together. Is that not to be wished for?”
“Such contentment can arise only when the world acknowledges the true teachings of the Prophet,” said Hamza. “For there is no God but God, and Allah is his name, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”
“Peace be upon him,” Kelly finished with a sigh.
“Yes, I will come to the wall again today, Hamza, and you may teach me more. Perhaps you will even let me help you, as I did once before, and ease your burden.”
Hamza had showed him his craft, explaining how the tools were to be used, and dyes applied to the hieroglyphics to preserve them through the long ages. Each day when he would come to the wall he could now see many others at work there, under Hamza’s watchful eye. They were carving the record of days, year by year, on the long, smooth stone walls of the chamber at the heart of the Sphinx. As big as it was, Kelly thought that they must eventually run out of space here. He could see that they were already nearing the end of this wall, and asked Hamza what he would do when every space was covered.
“What we cannot fit here will be carved in new slabs of stone and stored for safekeeping.”
They were carving these even now, and small groups of men were apparently assigned to different periods of the history, while Hamza inscribed the main narrative on the wall. “This character here,” he pointed, “will instruct the reader that what follows is to be found in detail on a stela, and indicate its location.”
“Here? But given the progress of the work so far, you’ll need more room than you have in this chamber, no matter how many more stones you bring in. There’s only so much room here.”
“Do not trouble yourself. The stones can be stored in any location. This one, for example, will be moved to the ancient temple site at Zau. See here how we inscribe its name?” He pointed to the base of the stela and Kelly saw how it matched the symbol Hamza had carved into his narrative on the wall.
“A nifty little card catalog system,” he said. “Etched in stone. Then you can move these anywhere you wish? We thought this had to remain a central library for the whole record of days.”