Nothing was written; nothing forbidden, and everything was permitted. That was the chaos that now sat hunched in the center of her mind like an old, unwelcome hobgoblin to plague her thinking. She wanted it out, wanted it gone, wanted things wrapped in nice neat boxes again, and stacked up just so. But the world would never be that way for her again. All of her careful habits, all the meticulous checks and balances that governed her life, were futile efforts at imposing order on chaos. It was very unsettling, to say the least.
She remembered that awful moment in the lab when she had first realized the full implication of all of this. She had suddenly hit on the idea that, if the mission was successful, and the history was actually changed, then the book Lawrence wrote about his exploits in the desert would also have to change.
She had been reading through it the last week or so, wondering what it must have been like for Robert and Paul to actually be there. With each episode she found herself wondering if this was the real story of the event, or something that had been altered again and again by the shifting eddies of time. Lawrence had written three versions of the book before it settled down. Now, even though he was dead and gone, the text was still being re-written!
The Seven Pillars, a metaphor for solidity and truth, suddenly seemed to be built upon very shaky ground. Perhaps there was something in the human heart that reached for a truth that was unalterable. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, wrote Keats, or what’s a heaven for? Knowing, or believing that there was something out there that was fixed and permanent, had long been a comfort to the human soul. Now the Arch had proved that anything was possible, and any semblance of truth, as she once knew it, was gone from her life. She had firm ground under her feet when she walked into the Lab that night, but now all was quicksand. Nothing was certain, not even the comfort of finished, printed text in the books that she so loved all her life.
She remembered how they had started that night with an argument about Shakespeare. They were worried that Nordhausen’s wayward curiosity might contaminate the time line. The man wanted to go rifling through Shakespeare’s office and she resolved, then and there, that he would not set one foot out of her sight if the Arch actually worked. It wasn’t merely Nordhausen’s eccentric temperament that she was determined to set a watch on—it was Shakespeare! The thought that the professor might do something to alter a single word of that man’s verse was the most compelling argument anyone could make against the time project that night. If Paul’s theory was correct, then a carelessly spoken word to a stranger in the past, a heedless stumble in the dark, a mislaid object, could wreak havoc on future time. It would be as if Shakespeare ‘never writ.’ The most maddening thing was that they might not even know what they had done to alter the record of time. Things would simply change—just like Lawrence’s narrative in The Seven Pillars. She would reach for The Tempest on her library shelf one night and find it missing, gone, annihilated. Worse yet, she might never know the damage was done.
The thought that every book in her library was now subject to sudden revision had become a seed of a deep discomfort, and it was growing in her with each day that passed. She could lose any one of them: Bronte, Whitman, Keats, all blown away with the slightest breath of time. That volume of poetry she had been reading last night—would it be the same tonight? It was more than unnerving to her now, it was frightening. It wasn’t merely words and books that could change on a whim, it was everything. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle had finally come home to roost.
She remembered how she had confronted her greatest fear at the end of the mission. Robert and Paul were still flushed and dizzy with the elation of their return. The Arch was a scintillating montage of light and the generators were whining as they strained to provide the power required for the retraction jump. She recalled the excitement she had first felt with Robert’s return. Then Paul came through and everyone was safe at last. She had the barest moment of relief before that odd rumble shuddered through the Arch, like a ghostly train passing in the night. A howling sound droned in its wake, and she felt the fear gather strength within her.
Things were different.
She knew it even before she dared to look at the pages of The Seven Pillars. Something had changed and she could feel it like a shift in the weather, a faint, yet palpable variation in the certainty of her life. Something had changed.
That was the moment she knew Kelly was gone. Before they ever took the elevator ride up to the main lab she knew, in her heart of hearts, that he would not be there. The twisted ripple of Paradox was at work. Heisenberg was running wild. Everything was different now.
When Paul found the farewell note Kelly had scrawled, she could barely bring herself to look at it. The errant strokes of his pen were strokes upon her heart. She knew this moment was waiting for them all if the mission was a success. It was simple logic: if the Palma Event never happened, then there would be no reason for Mr. Graves to come back and seek their help. It was Graves who made everything possible: first by preventing Kelly’s untimely death, and then by tucking that little clue away in his raincoat. If Graves never came, then…
Kelly was gone.
Time railed in a confounding loop of Paradox, and lashed out at anything that did not belong on the changed Meridian. Paul tried to explain it to them once. He said that the notion of Paradox was so insulting to time that she would find a way to punish the offenders for their mischief. Paradox was not a mind-puzzle, but a real effect. It was a cleansing and healing force of time that promised nothing less than annihilation for all those who would dare to meddle, and it wanted to charge Kelly with his life. Kelly did not belong. His presence could no longer be accounted for, and the quantum foam of uncertainty wanted to simply engulf his life and suck it away to oblivion. At least that is what they believed at first. His miraculous reappearance at the memorial service had shaken them all—Maeve more than any other.
Nothing was written—not even death, it seemed. Kelly was saved and snatched away to some distant Nexus Point in the future. She did not yet understand how they did it, but apparently they knew something more about the continuum than she could divine at this point, and so she lived with the mystery, as she lived again with Kelly.
The months that passed brought them much closer. The love she felt taken away from her before its time finally began to bloom, and she took great joy in her relationship with him. Oh, he had his quirks and his silliness, as all men did—particularly when he was around Paul. But there was something in the intensity of his moods, the expression of his poetry, and his simple intelligent reflection on almost any subject that she dearly loved. She did not appreciate the notion that all of this was the artifact of some careless incident from the past—that it was all as temporal as the phases of the moon. Somehow, she wanted to find that same permanence and sureness in her love that she so labored for in the world she built around her. She did not want her love to become a fool of time, but rather, as Shakespeare had so artfully expressed it, ‘an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
The life she had now with Kelly was always at risk in her mind, as much as her heart wanted that permanence. She knew that it had been stolen from time like a chip slipped under the table when the dealer was looking the other way. As much as she tried to put the fear aside, it persisted in her now, and each day was an effort to master that feeling in the safe little rituals of her everyday life.