“That would be foolish,” said Hamza. “Your presence here has taught us that much. So we will take care to see that certain records of important times are duplicated and dispersed to other locations.”
Kelly thought for a moment about Paul and Robert, and how they secured his place in the Meridian by essentially doing the same thing with that memorial DVD and publishing duplicate copies in a thousand other locations.
He could see that people were arriving, and leaving, with armfuls of parchment. They used these to make rubbings from the engraved stone characters, carefully rolling them up and placing them into sturdy round tubes for easy transport. So the record of days was being duplicated and carried away from this place—to who knows where, he thought. Were there other locations where they were carving?
So it came to pass that he often joined Hamza in the main chamber, and assisted with the work. A quick study, Kelly easily learned many of the hieroglyphic symbols, and was one day surprised to learn his own name could be spelled out by using two simple characters, Ra for the sun, and Mer for pyramid. At times he practiced carving, as Hamza had shown him, and here and there he affixed his signature to things in a characteristic cartouche. One day he had been working a relatively small stone from the quarry when two men came looking for something to complete a stela they had been carving. They had miscalculated the length, and need another foot or two extend their narrative.
“Take this,” he gestured at the stone he had been carving, turning it over to show them the smooth, uncarved back side would meet their needs. “I was just writing of my morning prayer.” And take it they did. The message he had been writing was that ‘Ra-Mer greets the dawn, eternally, at the appointed place.’
Slowly, over days and weeks, he carved his name in many other places, but it was that one single stone that would survive intact, its characters perfectly preserved where it was mounted on a temple wall with the reverse side carved by Hamza’s men facing outward to endure the weathering and erosion of years, and his own script neatly preserved intact against the inner wall.
He remembered watching the two men carry the stone away, whispering to himself and making a promise that he must pray, each and every morning, there on the apex of the Pyramid of the Sun, without fail.
“Find it, Paul,” he whispered as the men left. And through the long ages his friend was engaged in exactly that endeavor.
Chapter 2
“What’s done is done, Paul. He’s gone and we’ll just have to accept it.” Nordhausen leaned forward on the dining table, his heart as heavy as his body felt at that moment. Paul had just finished his meal, but was still picking aimlessly at a few leftovers with his chopsticks.
The city was humming with energy tonight, especially here on Stockton Street, San Francisco, which was the real heart of Chinatown where all the locals did their grocery shopping daily at the open air markets and food stands while the tourists browsed the Asian nick-knack gift stores a block away on Grant. There were not many tourists tonight, but the trucks still came in from the many central valley growers, making late deliveries for a throng of customers who were haggling at the curb side produce stands, mostly Chinese.
The women would press their way into the crowded stores, squeezing and sorting and sometimes tasting fruits and vegetables. They would stoop over crates of lychee fruit, dragon’s eyes, jujubes, sorting and sifting to find the very best. They would dig into cartons of fresh shelled peanuts with gnarled hands, scooping them up into plastic bags, an old favorite. They would poke and prod tomatoes, inspect fresh cabbage, hold up bundles of bok choy squinting at the pale green leafage. Here and there, the windows of small cookeries were strung with freshly smoked hanging ducks, plump roasted chickens, and barbecued ribs.
The old Amahs, gray haired grandmothers with bowed backs would brave the crowds, dragging small rolling tote carts for their bags and leaning heavily on canes as they threaded their way through the crowds. Store clerks chanted up fresh produce, and some harangued customers who seemed overanxious to sample the merchandise. Meanwhile, men stood outside on the street, laden with red plastic bags full of produce. Some smoked, some talked, others simply stood there waiting to be handed yet another burden.
Paul had shopped here many times himself, immersing himself in the culture and finding the Chinese a simple, friendly, and industrious people. Now there was an added edge to their movements, he noted. The haggling was more intense. The handfuls of string beans and dried nuts seemed more grasping and urgent as they filled the bags. Storekeepers seemed nervous and short tempered, waving and yammering at people trying to taste the ripening fruit, and the prices crept ever higher.
Normally it was almost impossible to find parking on Stockton, but arriving late they happened by just as a shop owner was leaving for the day, and grabbed his parking spot as he left. Hungry, tired, weary with the news and an equal measure of remorse, they found Sun Sun Restaurant was still open and slipped in for a meal.
Nordhausen knew there was nothing more they could do. Kelly was gone, lost, annihilated in Time. They had tried to pull him back from that last mission, but failed. He could not explain the theory, but the God shaped hole in his soul was enough to make it plain. They sent him off… to who knows where, a hidden base in the Egyptian desert, lost in the convoluted labyrinth of Time. What chance did he really have anyway? They were not even sure the location and temporal coordinates had been accurate. For all he knew Kelly could have just ended up in the middle of the Sahara, ten thousand years away from home.
“LeGrand’s numbers…” The professor tapped his plate with a chopstick, stirring through the arguments again like old fried rice. “There had to be something wrong with the numbers, right? And why no pre-programmed retraction scheme?”
Urged on by LeGrand, an agent from the future group they had come to call ‘the Order,’ they made that last, grasping attempt to end the Time War, as each opposing side sought out moments of seeming insignificance in the long continuum of events, hoping to lever the chain of causality to some clear advantage.
Kelly was the only team member available for the mission. Yet he failed. They would never know why or how. The one stubborn fact that remained after they struggled to recover him was Palma. It had happened! The volcano blew its top again, helped by a nuclear device buried deep in the unstable western flank. It was as if their first mission aimed at preventing the calamity had never even occurred.
“How did they do it, Paul? How could they restore Palma to the time line if we prevented Husan Al Din from being born?”
“I have no idea, but it happened.” Paul was listless, distracted and beset by the heavy burden of loss. A sudden memory returned to him. He was sitting in the parlor of a hair cutting studio, just two doors down here on Stockton, and staring at the full wall mirror that was placed to the left of, and perpendicular to, the open front door. It created an odd effect. People walking down the street were reflected in the mirror as they approached and could be seen from the front as they reached the salon. Then they would suddenly appear in the open doorway, and he would get a side view of them as they passed. As the eye followed, expecting to see them continue on into the mirrored area, they just vanished as they passed the open door! It was an optical illusion, because the mirror was so clean and reflective that it appeared to be reality. You thought they would just walk happily into the reflection and that you would catch a rear view of them as they continued down the street, but the alternate reality presented by the mirror was just playing a clever trick on him. He sat for twenty minutes, just watching people walk by and vanish. His mind knew what was happening but his eye remained stubbornly ignorant, surprised each time. At one point he was compelled to get up and go to the door to look outside, relieved to see that the real world was all still there and the person he had seen in the reflection was ambling quietly down the street.