“Halleluiah!” Kelly mimicked a typical television preacher, a bit of a Southern twang in his tone of voice. The chronology made its way slowly forward as the CPUs in the research systems ran comparison checks on the two data banks at the speed of light. The progress still seemed agonizingly slow to Maeve. After about five minutes she had worked her way through the first century AD, her mind ticking off events by recollection. “The Romans look solid,” she said. “Nero, Titus, Hadrian… all looking good.”
The time line continued forward, solid green, to Maeve’s great satisfaction. “Here come the Goths,” she said as the line swept through the second century into the third. “They’ll sack Athens and Sparta any second now.”
“Don’t forget the Persians,” Kelly put in.
“Oh, I won’t. Right now Rome has its hands full with the Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Picts, Scots, Germans and the Huns will show up soon enough. You say all is well as long as I get green here, right?” She pointed at the timeline. “You don’t have any surprises for me, do you, like shades of emerald to lime and so on?”
“Nope. Any variation will go to yellow at once. See that meter in the upper left hand of the screen? It will tick off calendar years, and you can toggle it down to months if you need to take a closer look at something. Any discrepancy will be flagged and put into this box here. Think of it like a penalty box denoting the bad years. You’ll be able to go right to that specific year and initiate a deep pattern search to vector in on the data.”
“God, I just love this Kelly! How did you dream this up?” Maeve was beaming as Alaric the Goth and Attila began to devour the fringes of the Roman Empire. Italy was invaded while she was warming up her coffee and barbarians clotted the Appian Way as she stirred in the cream. Rome fell while she struggled to get the cellophane off a bag of Fig Newtons. By the time she had returned to her seat the Western Roman Empire had come to an end, the Vandals moved in, and the value of real estate dropped considerably in Italy and Sicily. Her line looked perfectly normal, green and solid as the Byzantine Empire began to spar with Persia in the Sixth Century. The Persians soon moved into Syria and overran Egypt as the line moved into the Seventh Century.
“Looks like Muhammad has started things rolling in his neck of the woods,” she said. “The Arabs will be militarizing by now and pushing north into Palestine and the butt of Asia Minor.”
“No problems yet?” Kelly came to look over her shoulder.
“Not if this thing works as advertised,” said Maeve. “Look. While Europe languishes the Islamic Caliphs are spreading their credo like wildfire. The call of the muezzin will be sounding in India to the East and echoing from the cobblestones of Lisbon in the West soon.”
Kelly squinted at the line as it traced through the eighth century. “Looks like Charles Martel stopped them at Tours and Portiers, “he said. “No variations at all, and those were some pretty significant years.” The line was still solid green as it reached 900 on the chronology.
“Expecting trouble?” Maeve gave him a quick glance, wondering what was on his mind.
“Well,” he explained, “given the fact that we set back the greatest blow ever conceived and executed against the West by the Muslim world, I was wondering about other crisis points in that conflict.”
“You mean Palma?”
“Sure,” said Kelly. “Just consider what the world would have been like in the future if we hadn’t stopped those wave sets from smashing the Eastern Seaboard.”
Maeve gave him a nod of agreement. “It’s conceivable that the United States would have been finally eclipsed on the world stage—assuming Europe got off with relatively little damage.”
“Europe would have survived, but with the US literally swept out of its position as the world’s imperial watchdog, the Islamic states may have consolidated in opposition to the European Union.”
“They would have lost their biggest customer,” Maeve put in.
“Hell, California and the entire West Coast would not have been affected by Palma. But they’d have their hands full rebuilding the East for decades to come. I suppose Graves could have told us all about it.”
“Did he?” Maeve raised an eyebrow, realizing that she had violated her own credo in asking Kelly about his brief sojourn with Mr. Graves in the future.
“Nope. He was very tight lipped about the history. In fact, I think they were totally amazed with what happened after the Palma mission. I mean, they were desperate, right? So we have to assume the world was spinning down into something really bad by then. Who knows what was going on. Maybe there was a nuclear war, or some bio-terror plague once these radicals got the bit between their teeth.”
“History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes, said Voltaire.” Maeve raised a finger, gratified that all the ill deeds and foul play were still in order on her screen.
“I like Henry Ford better,” Kelly offered. “History is bunk. He gets right to the point, and I suppose they must have had quite a shock when we ran our little mission. Imagine what it must have been like for them when everything suddenly changed! They would have had an entire new world to walk into, and hundreds of years of history to re-learn.”
“Were they that far ahead in time?” Maeve took one more step out onto the ice, and then promised herself she would stick with the past.
“They wouldn’t tell me,” Kelly finished. “I suppose you would be the first to understand why, Miss Outcomes and Consequences.”
As they talked the time line rolled on, passing one centennial Meridian after another. History receded in its wake, quietly unchanged and safe under the gloaming dust of memory. Maeve began to feel much better as she watched the screen.
“Can I assume that if the history database is unaltered, then most other key areas will have good integrity? I mean, do I have to run literature queries to check in on folks like Chaucer and all, or should I assume the Canterbury Tales are safely inscribed in Middle English somewhere as long as I get a good green line through the thirteen hundreds?”
“I would say so,” said Kelly, “but I’m sure you’ll want to run checks in the literature database as well when we finish this. The system can do your inventory on Shakespeare for you in about thirty seconds—line by line.”
“Love you, Mister!” Maeve’s eyes gleamed. It was as if a great burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Now she didn’t have to worry that the whole of the world was kept safe in her head, with endless hours ahead of her as she struggled to remember each poem, each novel, every page of the history she knew so well. Now they could check anything, at any time, from the safe sanctuary of the Nexus while the Arch spun out its quantum mystery below them. She felt wonderfully light, instilled with great energy and vigor as she watched the years tick by. So far there was not a single discrepancy between the two history data sets, and she was very relieved.
“Here comes the Twelfth Century,” she chimed. “At this rate one last cup of coffee should get me to the turn of the second millennium.”