Sindri gestured expansively. "I don't say it-history says it. Think of all the reports from every culture since the dawn of time about lights in the sky, flying phenomena Small radiant, spherelike objects were observed during pivotal points in many civilizations, from the ancient Egyptians to the so-called foo fighters reported by Allied pilots during World War H."

Shizuka regarded him with inscrutable eyes, but the tone of her voice was doubtful. "You expect us to believe those remote scanners have been dispatched throughout history from here?"

As an answer, Sindri's nimble fingers clattered over the b.u.t.tons on the console, as if he were a pianist warming up to play a sonata. All the monitor screens flashed with a flowing panorama of images, appearing and disappearing so quickly they were little more than glimpses of people, places and things. Semblances of savages and protohumans, of pyramids and castles, of Renaissance artists and steam-engine operators flickered by in dizzying rapidity.

Kane watched as history unfolded on the screens, but he wasn't moved to awe. The concept of such power at Sindri's command rooted him to the spot in terror.

Chapter 18.

Sindri leaned against the railing of the catwalk, resting his chin on his forearms. He smiled down at the two-forked pylon as if it were his child. He nodded fondly to it. "And there it is-the absolute pinnacle of quantum mechanics. The temporal dilator."

He turned to face the people arrayed on the walkway around him. His brow furrowed as if he were troubled. "Which, of course, you caused to be damaged during your last visit." His tone was less accusatory than genuinely puzzled. "To this day I have no idea how you managed it."

"We didn't," Brigid replied stolidly. "It was a feedback pulse from a secondary energy source. The electromagnetic discharge of the two signatures meeting and merging caused the damage."

Sindri's brow furrowed. "Really? From where did the secondary energy pattern originate?"

Brigid opened her mouth to speak, then she caught Kane's eye. He shook his head and she stated, "It doesn't really matter."

Sindri's eyes slitted with suspicion. "I have afeeling it definitely does matter, particularly if the interception was deliberate."

No one responded to his conversational lead-in. Even though Lakesh had explained the event to her, Brigid wasn't certain of what happened on that day. According to Lakesh, Sam-the self-proclaimed im-perator-could manipulate the energies of what he called the Heart of the World, an encapsulated packet of the quantum field.

Buried beneath the Xian pyramid in China, the Heart was described as containing the energies released in the first picoseconds following the Big Bang, channeling the matrix of protoparticles that swirled through the universe before physical, rela-tivistic laws fully stabilized. It existed slightly out of phase with the third dimension, with the human concept of s.p.a.ce-time. From this central core extended a web of electromagnetic and geophysical energy that covered the entire planet. Sam himself claimed he had transported from Thunder Isle to Xian by opening a localized wormhole in the energy web.

When Sindri realized a response to his query was not forthcoming, he shook his head in exasperation and returned his attention to the pylon. "As distressed as I was initially, the damage was mainly superficial, even though some of the secondary systems had to be replaced. Most of the failures were software, not hardware."

"That makes me feel a lot better," Grant muttered.

Sindri ignored the remark. "The actual structure itself remained completely intact."

Kane eyed it critically. "What's it made out of?"

"A blend of conductive alloys and ceramics, which make it virtually indestructible. Believe it or not, the dilator is essentially a giant electromagnet. It creates two magnetic fields, one at right angles to the other.

Both of the fields represent one plane of s.p.a.ce. But since there are three planes of s.p.a.ce, a thud field is produced through the principle of resonance."

Sounding slightly surprised, Brigid asked, "Sound?"

"Exactly."

Kane eyed the pylon again, realizing that even if Brigid seemed startled, she shouldn't have been. He thought back to the infrasound wands wielded by the hybrids at Dulce, to the instrument played by Aifa in Ireland, and a similar device Sindri claimed had been found on Mars, a relic of the Tuatha de Danaan.

They all seemed related, devices operating on the same principle of manipulating sound. The infrasound wands converted electricity to ultrahigh sound frequencies by a miniature maser.

He recalled how Sindri had described the Danaan harp as producing energy ;forms with balanced gaps between the upper and lower energy frequencies. He explained if the radiation within particular frequencies fell on an energized atom-like living matter- it stimulated it in the same way a gong vibrated when its note was struck on a piano. Harmony and disharmony.

Sindri went on to describe scientific precedents cloaked by myth and legend such as the Ark of the Covenant bringing down the walls of Jericho when the Israelites gave a great shout. He claimed the walls were bombarded and weakened by amplified sound waves of the right frequency transmitted from theArk. Sindri also cited Merlin, who was reputed to be of half-Danaan blood, and had "danced" the megaliths of Stonehenge into place by his music.

"From what you said earlier, I'm guessing you haven't been here but for a few months?" Shizuka said.

Sindri nodded. "That's right."

Two vertical lines of consternation appeared between her nose. "Then you couldn't have been responsible for the phenomenon that we of New Edo witnessed almost from the day of our arrival on the main island."

"How long ago was that?" Sindri asked.

"Over eight years now," she replied.

New Edo had been settled by the House of Mash-ashige, fleeing political unrest in j.a.pan. The daimyo of the House of Mashashige, Lord Takaun, made one last attempt to not only reclaim his clan's power, but also to restore some semblance of order and dignity to his country. He failed, and had no choice but to flee, to go into exile. Taking with him as many family members, retainers, advisers and samurai as a small fleet of ships could hold, they set sail into the Cific. Their destination was the island chain once known as the Hawaiians.

But the heavens broke open with the unchained fury of the tai-fun, the typhoon. The storm drove the little fleet far off course. The ships had no choice but to make landfall on the first halfway habitable piece of dry ground they came across.

This turned out to be a richly forested isle, the tip of a larger landma.s.s that had been submerged during the nukecaust. Evidently, it had slowly risen from the waters over the past two centuries and supported a wide variety of animal and vegetable life. Lord Takaun decreed it would support theirs, as well. The exiles from Nippon claimed it as their own, and named it New Edo, after the imperial city of feudal j.a.pan.

Of course there were many problems to overcome during the first few years of colonization. Demons and monsters haunted the craggy coves and inland forests. They had a malevolent intelligence and would creep into the camp at night to urinate in the well water or defecate in the gardens. More than one samurai was slain during that time, their heads taken. The depredations were the acts of creatures who had made their way from Thunder Isle to New Edo.

When Brigid, Grant and Kane made landfall on the isle, they found evidence of radiation poisoning that extended out from the Chronos facility in a parabolic shape. Brigid theorized the affected area was regularly subjected to short bursts of high-power microwave radiation.

Sindri lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "The chronon wave guides seemed to activate random intervals, either reconst.i.tuting trawled subjects from the matrix or s.n.a.t.c.hing new ones from all epochs in history.

When I arrived, I installed a governor to keep that from happening."

"Except," Shizuka snapped, "when it suited you."

"Yes," the little man said agreeably. "Except when it suited me.""What about Megaera and her Furies?" Brigid demanded. "Were they trapped in the matrix, or did you intentionally trawl them from somewhere?"

Sindri pursed his lips. "I honestly know no more about the where the Furies came from than you do.

During my investigation of all Operation Chronos connected installations, I found a special encoded program that was linked, but separate from Chronos. It was code-named Parallax Points. The subhead was Alternative Three."

The dwarfish man looked expectantly into their faces. "Does that mean anything to you?"

"Should it?" Brigid asked.

"Perhaps not. Alternative Three was a conspiratorial premise that begins with a virtual epidemic of mysterious abductions of ordinary people. The theory postulated that they were lifted off to build secret bases on the Moon and even Mars. Does that strike a familiar chord?"

"As a point of fact," Kane answered, "it does. You claimed your ancestors were forcibly abducted to Mars to serve as slave labor. What does the Parallax Points program have to do with it?"

Sounding a little ashamed of himself, Sindri replied, "I haven't been able to overcome the encryption."

Defensively, he added, "But only because I've been too busy repairing the damage to the dilator."

Shizuka stepped to the rail and gazed down at the pylon. "You mentioned earlier something about Ar-chons and root races. What did you call them?"

"The Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan," he promptly responded.

"What did they have to do with this?"

"In a way," Sindri declared smoothly, "just about everything. I know very little about the Annunaki, but I'm familiar with the Danaan, since evidence of their culture still exists on Mars."

"The Danaan are long gone," Grant rumbled.

"Yes," Sindri agreed. "But much of their science remained, particularly that which was interpreted as magic. One thing that had been realized by the Danaan at the very dawn of their scientific maturity, was the indivisibility of s.p.a.ce and time. The mystery of s.p.a.ce had seemed easily solvable at first-there was matter and there was energy, but the problem of determining which was which became more and more complex.

"They eventually discovered that matter and energy could be interchangeable-one turned into the other and vice versa, according to the application. The deeper the Danaan probed into the minutiae of matter-the building blocks of material objects-the more they found energy and complexities of energy at the bottom of everything."

When the little man paused to take a breath, Kane interjected, "That's the entire template for Project Cerberus."

Sindri nodded, saying waspishly, "Of course it is. Please be a little more like Miss Brigid and don't state the obvious. Burr and the other Operation Chronos scientists proceeded from the same principle as thequantum interphase inducers, the gateways. Both Cerberus and Chronos were seeking a form of rapid transit along hyperdimensional paths. But the temporal dilator caused an overlapping of the third and fourth dimensions-& mingling of spatial and temporal distance."

"There was a bit more to it than that," Brigid said dryly. "Balancing out the energy-exchange ratios, for one thing."

Sindri bobbed his head impatiently. "That was one hurdle, but leaping over preconceived notions was another. There were those who insisted that ultimately everything resolved into electromagnetic charges, and since electromagnetic charges were apparently without physical substance, it could be claimed that everything that existed was nothing, simply a matter of subjective perspective."

The little man began pacing nervously back and forth across the catwalk, first to one end and then the other. "Pursuing this train of thought, if the universe and all of its manifestations were nothing, then the universe was all in the imagination. Whether the imagination in question was supposed to be that of a being prior to and superior to the whole of existence, or was supposed to be that of each individual, was still under debate. The essential point here was that if all existence was in some way imaginary, then it need not necessarily adhere to any definite laws.

"Unfortunately for this view, the universe did seem to follow discoverable and even predictable patterns.

It obeyed specific laws, and an action did indeed beget a reaction. Therefore, the problem remained unresolved."

Sindri drummed his fingers on the handrail as he paced, a staccato accompaniment to his speech.

"Then there was the factor of the pa.s.sage of time. Nothing remained at a standstill. What did exist- all that was known to the Danaan and humanity- was in a state of motion, of vibrational change. Perhaps the answer to the riddle lay in electromagnetic energy in the process of change and movement. Possibly the meaning of time was a universal motion, a glue that maintained the universe in apparent existence.

"The Danaan had grappled with s.p.a.ce, but time was not so easily mastered. How could a fly lift itself from flypaper? How can those who are fixed in the motion of time extricate themselves from a stream that surrounds them on all conceivable sides?"

Sindri stopped his pacing and speaking. After a long moment of silence, as if he were pondering a truly weighty problem, he announced somberly, "The answer, said the Danaan and their descendants, the so-called Archons, lay in the mystery of entropy. That was the method used in crossing time, and of the principles that were rediscovered here."

Grant ma.s.saged his temples. With his eyes closed, he intoned, "Sindri, if you don't get to the G.o.dd.a.m.n point, you'll be rediscovering a principle of my own creation. How a size-14 foot can fit into a size-2 r.e.c.t.u.m."

Sindri smiled without mirth. "Very humorous, Mr. Grant. Droll and vulgar at the same tune. But I doubt Oakshott would allow you to put it into practice. The least you can do is not to interrupt. If you don't have the intelligence to follow my reasoning... very well then, that is not your fault. But will you please refrain from making impotent threats and allow me to continue? Thank you."

Anger stirred in Grant's eyes, and he clenched his fists. Shizuka noticed and laid a hand on his arm, saying quickly, "Let's not argue the point. Let's hear him out."Sindri looked at her blankly and said, "Entropy describes a process by which the universe is slowly running down, so slowly that it can only be measured in terms of aeons. Every particle of matter is losing energy, and this energy in the form of heat and light gradually acc.u.mulates throughout the universe. The rate at which bodies lose their energy is the entropic gradient. It appears that this process is also part of the process that we call the pa.s.sage of time, or our perception of its pa.s.sage. The entropic gradient is steady, incessant and inexorable."

Kane thought about asking for a clarification about the difference between a perception of time pa.s.sage and the pa.s.sage itself, but decided to let the little man continue. This was Sindri's show, and he liked nothing better than to strut in the spotlight. Such dedication to being the center of attention would eventually make him careless.

Sindri went on, "The physical const.i.tuents of the universe-oh, let us say in the year from which Oak-shott was trawled, 1899-were quite different than those const.i.tuents at any other time. That's a fundamental bit of physics, both quantum and relativ-istic."

"In other words," Brigid commented, "you can't step into the same river twice."

Sindri clapped his hands together. "Exactly! The implications of that old bromide are clear enough- it means there's a difference in entropic measurements in regard to capacity for energy. And the differences between the universal const.i.tuents in 1899 and 2199 add up to a substantial amount. Now we reach the truly fun part-what entropy means to me."

"Whatever it means," Grant grunted, "it can't mean anything good-at least not anything good for the rest of us."

His lips stretched in a grin, displaying his perfect teeth, Sindri said, "You could be so wrong, Mr. Grant, that you would cease to be even pathetic. If the entropic gradient of any piece of matter can be reversed, either organic or inorganic, if it can be restored to the status of matter of say, three hundred years ago, we don't just have a temporal dilator."

He wheeled toward Brigid, stabbing a finger at her. "Quickly, Miss Brigid-what would we have?"

She frowned and unconsciously nibbled at her un- derlip. Kane watched her face and was surprised by the expression that suddenly crossed it. It wasn't only comprehension; it was horror. Her lips moved, and it took her two attempts before she was able to husk out, "Immortality. You would have, for all intents and purposes, a machine to make anything- or anyone-immortal."

Sindri nodded in smug triumph. "Precisely, Miss Brigid. A G.o.d machine."

Chapter 19.

Sindri's p.r.o.nouncement brought all conversation to a complete halt. A number of things popped into Kane's mind to say, but he knew Sindri wouldn't appreciate any of them.

Shizuka broke the silence by demanding, "Why should we believe anything you say, particularly aninsane boast like that? You're not only a madman- you're a liar."

Anger made a mask of the face of the dwarf. He turned as if to summon Oakshott. Ever so slightly, Kane shifted position, readying himself to kick the little man full in the face before he could verbalize an order.

With a visible effort, Sindri regained control of his temper. "Immortality is the one dream that always haunted man yet eluded him. He has hungered after immortality in the same way he hungered after great power." He waved toward the forked pylon. "That is the source of both."

"I won't dispute you on one score," Brigid said. "But how do you know entropic reversal works on organic matter? The physical body is a chemical ma- chine. It wears out. Corrosion eats away .at cell structures, at the nervous system, at the marrow of the bones. Going back in time a thousand years, and then returning to this time period won't insure you'll live for a millennium. There's no way you can prove your theory."

"Actually," Sindri said with a sly smile, "I have empirical evidence...but I need more. That's where you three enter the equation. I'd hoped you'd bring your little pet albino with you, since she has already been exposed to the chronon radiation, but I can make do with the material I have here."

Kane, Grant and Brigid gaped at him as Sindri pointed a finger at them, one by one. "You I'll send to the Tria.s.sic Age, you to the Bronze. And you-" he chuckled, a sinister rattlesnake laugh that stood the short hairs on everyone's neck at attention "-you, Miss Brigid, I owe a bloodletting and therefore a lesson in humility. Perhaps I'll send you to Caligula's Rome or inject you into the fall of Troy. If you survive, you'll have some interesting tales to bring back."

With a whir and a click, Kane's Sin Eater sprang into his hand. Coldly, he stated, "Perhaps I'll send you to h.e.l.l, Sindri. And you won't have any interesting tales to bring back."

Grant flexed his wrist tendons and his own auto-blaster slapped into his waiting palm. Sindri regarded both weapons with inscrutable eyes. Sar- donically, he murmured, "I suppose now would be the best time to play my ace."

"You'd better do something," Grant said grimly. "I know I've run out of reasons to keep you alive."

Oakshott lumbered forward, aiming his wooden pistol at Grant. "Bang, bang. Behave yourself, sirrah.

Bang, bang."

Grant grimaced in annoyance, lifted the Sin Eater and squeezed off a single shot. The cracking report was painfully loud. The round centerpunched Oakshott in his exceptionally broad chest and slammed him backward. He dropped his toy gun, and his huge arms windmilled hi a clumsy attempt to keep his balance. He fell heavily onto his back. His huge hands balled over his sternum, scarlet squirting between the fingers.

Training the pistol on Sindri, Grant growled, "What was that about an ace?"

Seemingly not the slightest bit perturbed by the shooting of Oakshott, or the gun inches from his forehead, Sindri held up two gloved fingers. "Two aces actually. The first is the tried and true tactic of holding a hostage.""And who might that be?" Kane asked.

"Everyone in New Edo."