“Right!” said Paul. “You really do know this Egyptian business, don’t you.” He smiled. “So what do we have here, my friend. Sound out this name phonetically. Ra-Mer. You have to pronounce that first syllable with a long a, but does it sound familiar?”
Nordhausen frowned. “You aren’t serious.”
“Of course I am! Look at it. Two characters in a cartouche indicating a name, and they spell out Ra-Mer. That’s Kelly’s last name, Kelly Ramer!”
Nordhausen rolled his eyes. “Your whole theory is based on this? You’re telling me you think Kelly is alive just because this cartouche appears to sound out his last name? That’s pretty damn farfetched, Paul.”
“But there’s more!” Paul rotated the laptop and called up another file. “Can you read these?”
Nordhausen saw that there were many more hieroglyphics now, and he noted that they began and ended with the Ra-Mer cartouche. He spent some time looking the symbols over. “Ra-Mer comes… at the moment of the rising sun… make that dawn. It says Ra-Mer greets the dawn… forever and ever… make that eternally… at the appointed place.”
Paul gave him a satisfied look.
“It’s pretty damn thin, Paul,” Nordhausen protested again.
“Think for a minute,” said Paul. “If you were Kelly, lost in Egypt over ten thousand years ago, what would you do to try and signal your friends in the future? You would have only one reliable means of communication—the hieroglyphics! You would find a way to give your friends the one vital bit of information they would need in order to pull you out—your physical location at a specific point in time. We need both the temporal and spatial coordinates, to program a retraction scheme!”
Nordhausen was shaking his head. “Look, assuming he is alive somehow, do you think he’s just free to do whatever he pleases? He must have been discovered and captured before he could act. You think his captors are going to let him chip merrily away at stone walls, writing things they can easily read, and signal you his location? You’re daft!”
“No, just optimistic. You assume these messages were carved just at the time of his capture. They could have been written days, weeks, months or years after, when Kelly’s relationship with his captors may have mellowed considerably. My guess is that they would treat Kelly with the same respect and dignity he deserves as one of the Founders, a Prime Mover and First Cause Initiator. Their whole effort at changing the continuum through Time intervention depends, for a large part, on Kelly. And what was it your captor said—that they would not kill another Time traveler as a matter of policy?”
“To use his own words, he said it is not seemly for a Walker to strike down another. No doubt there are major consequences when you mess with Free Radicals—all Time travelers become Free Radicals on a mission, correct?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Paul agreed. “And in our case we’re more than Free Radicals. We’re Prime Movers and First Cause Initiators. It would have been a simple matter for them to assassinate us all once they discovered we were operating against them. But they can’t. The Outcomes and Consequences are too severe. So my bet is that they treat Kelly with the utmost respect, and that he finds a way to communicate through these hieroglyphic messages.”
Nordhausen thought deeply, then decided to accept Paul’s reasoning. After all, if there was anything they could do to save Kelly and reverse this horrible catastrophe again, then it was incumbent upon them to act, decisively, and with all courage and speed. Though it still seemed flimsy evidence to work with, he decided to let Paul have a run at his idea.
“So where did you get this image,” he pointed at laptop screen.
“A recent discovery,” said Paul. “I used Kelly’s Golem program to have the little buggers search for anything I could feed them that would identify Kelly.”
The Golems were a name Kelly had given to a program he disseminated over the Internet that could, at his command, use the power of every computer they were installed on to conduct data searches. It was a super Google, as it were, collecting Internet data from every search engine and web source it could find and comparing it with a live RAM Bank that was constantly infused with real time energy to preserve a record of the history. The Golems would then note any anomaly or variation. In effect, the RAM Bank was their touchstone, their hold on the Meridian as a baseline of reliable data. It was a permanent record of the way history was written before Palma. The team could then use the Golems to do real time searches of the Internet and report any variance from the data they had stored in the RAM Bank. Any point of conflict in the data would indicate a possible meddling point by the adversaries at war with one another on the Meridians of Time.
The variations would be reported to the project team members via special cell phone alert, allowing them to spin up the Arch and actually create an artificial Nexus Point through engineering, where they could safely analyze what was happening and plot an intervention mission if one should become necessary. The team had made a pledge to defend the Time line they knew as history before the Palma event occurred. As any intervention affecting Palma would have to occur in that history, they could act to prevent tampering, by either side.
“Never mind how I found it,” said Paul gesturing to the image on the screen. “The Golems put me on to it and I followed up with a raft of discrete search algorithms. Suffice it to say that this Ra-Mer figure has no representation in the original RAM Bank. He’s an anomaly, and a very, very ancient one at that. These carvings were found behind a false door in the Tomb of Mehu. No one paid them much heed, and scholars were not able to discover who he was—at least that’s what the Golems find now.”
“The Tomb of Mehu?” The Name was familiar to Nordhausen. “That’s nowhere near old enough to hold an artifact from the milieu where we sent Kelly.”
“Yes, that threw me off at first as well,” said Paul. “Then I discovered that this tomb site once belonged to someone else. It seems Mehu was a bit of a hermit crab. He was remodeling the tomb of Pepi the first king of the 6th dynasty.”
“Still not anywhere close to our target time for Kelly.”
“Right and good,” said Paul. “But Mehu had come upon an old, old carving, and he thought it especially sacred, the writing of Amun-Ra himself, or so the research goes now. It was so precious to him that he built a new door in the tomb with an inscription dedicating the chamber beyond to his son, but there was no chamber beyond—just six feet of solid granite. So the door was false, and no one gave it another thought for centuries. Millennia in fact.”
“This was all in the Golem report?” Nordhausen was amazed.
“This and more,” said Paul. “Mehu cleverly used this false door to hide a very ancient artifact away from curious eyes. There was no chamber dedicated to his son there, but there was a small enclosure, at a lower level of the tomb, and it held something quite unusual—a very ancient carving of old hieroglyphics. More than a hermit crab, Mehu was a bit of a plagiarist as well. Because he copied some of the figures and characters he had seen on the artifact onto his own tomb carvings. Oh, it made no impression outside academic circles, very small circles at that, but the Golems turned it up when I told them to search for any permutation of Kelly’s name. Bingo! The entire sequence from Mehu’s tomb was later found to be attributed to the original carvings of this Ra-Mer figure!”