By penning those words, she invited into her home guests most unwelcome. The musings of the widow called down upon her house a terror from out of time.
The search program was named for Visvamitra, a Hindi demigod born of the thoughts of the god Brahma.
Visvamitra was a seer, a prophet of future events, so exacting in his predictions that his words of truth were feared by kings and commoner alike. The program attempted to live up to the mythology of its namesake for preciseness and exhaustiveness. It was powered by a vast global network of servers belonging to various embodiments of Sir Neal Harnesh’s numberless holdings.
Its only task, and the purpose for which it was created, was to monitor Harnesh’s enormous personal library of handwritten texts. It was not a security system. It was something far more complex than that. Visvamitra actually watched the physical copies of the texts in the library. Each and every page was scanned on a regular rotation to alert Sir Neal to any changes made to the pages themselves.
The nature of anomalies in time was not a constant as theoreticians would have us believe. The Butterfly Effect was, so to speak, not in effect in the main. So many alterations in the timeline were localized in nature. Though untold millions of copies of Les Misérables, to choose an example, were in print in hundreds of languages, none of these copies would be altered in the slightest if, by chance, M. Hugo was caused to spill ink upon a page of his manuscript while at the task of writing his novel and be forced to rewrite a few passages using slightly different wording than he intended. Those changes, those rewrites, would not be reflected in any modern print version of his classic. Only by reading the actual written page would one observe that change.
And so, by theft and purchase and other means, Sir Neal collected the world’s most extensive collection of manuscripts that had only one thing in common; they were the very first iterations of their forms written in the hand of their creators, and they were all non-fiction in nature. Histories, essays, biographies, treatises, and papers written by some of the most famous, and, in the majority, the most obscure, authors from the dawn of written language until the beginning of the twentieth century. There were journals and diaries penned by everyone from the most famous personalities in history to the least known and common. From the personal memoir of a certain Egyptian queen to the daily journal of a certain Mme. Villeneuve of Paris.
Many of these volumes, like the former mentioned, were thought to be lost or never to have existed. But Sir Neal’s fortune, combined with his unique mechanism to break the rules of time’s inexorable forward passage, allowed him to send agents into the past to pluck literary treasures from libraries, schools, and privates homes with impunity.
To the horror of any connoisseur of such things, each bound volume was unbound and its pages secured permanently within UV protected Lexan sheets to allow them to be seen from both sides. Ancient papyrus and vellum scrolls were unrolled and sealed within the clear plastic substance. These were carefully cataloged and stored in a zero-humidity environment kept just above freezing temperature and shielded from any direct light. Though they were stolen from history and the eyes of academia, they were preserved for the ages with great care. Uniform sheets containing the handwritten works were in safekeeping within a protected subterranean warehouse carved from limestone rock.
These sheets were fed from great ordered stacks into a mechanized system that carried them along to banks of scanners where Visvamitra “read” each page of the millions of volumes once every twenty-four-hour period. The sheets would flash by at dizzying speed under the low-light lenses of the search program whose only purpose was to find differences, even the slightest alteration, from the previous scan.
If changes to the written words were found, the volume would be separated from the rest and an alert sent to Gallant Informational Solutions Ltd in London where copies of the original text and the new altered text would be brought to Sir Neal Harnesh personally. These would be examined by him, and any actions taken based on his appraisal of their significance would be ordered by the man himself.
It is thus that an unknown widow writing of her relief at her son’s survival and her gratitude for the comfort brought to her by a visiting Canadian was brought to the attention of man nearly two centuries later and deemed significant enough to require swift and bloody action.
40
Stone Soup
Jimbo kept the stretcher team at a steady walk-trot changeup, walk six paces and trot six. The terrain allowed for it, they were moving through the wooded hills to the west of the Roman road following the low ground. They were taking care not to skyline themselves against the falling sun. When one team would tire, another would take up the burden of Boats.
Bruce, the Dead Sea surfer dude, assumed leadership of the bearers. After the first few rotations, he took over calling the changes. But he never gave up his own place at the head of one of the poles. The compact guy was tireless, and kept up a constant string of encouragement and directions to the other bearers that Jimbo assumed was rife with profanity.
The Ranger knew a hardass drill instructor when he heard one. Bruce was Army all the way.
It was a mile-consuming pace, but they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. At some point, they’d slow and then need a rest stop. Experience told the Pima that once it got dark, a few
