Chapter 13 – Himmelkreuz

"Limited conditions?" Chrono scratched his head. "Why does everyone in this place have to remind me of Lucca, and not in a good way? Could you please try to explain yourself?"
"Gladly," said Paem. "But I cannot do that here. I would be more satisfied if I could show you instead, and I believe you would be more satisfied, as well."

"Does this mean, Paem" said Coppelia, "that you will make a small prediction and then verify it in order to demonstrate that you can indeed predict the future under some controlled conditions? I do not believe such a demonstration would answer our query. We would like to know why, not if."

Paem smiled. "That is what I will show you. To understand why predictions do not always work, you need to know where they come from. And they don't come from here."

"They don't come from your Dreamstone?" Chrono asked.

"They do not. They only go through it. Such is the path of the flow of knowledge in this land. It flows from Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, down to us through the Himmelkreuz. From there, it disperses itself to those who know how to attain it. Dreamstone can absorb this knowledge and transmit it to skilled individuals. That is because Dreamstone is ultimately, I believe, a piece of Sophia. This is far from certain, and no one knows for sure, but it is what I believe, at least for now. But that does not really answer your question. Please, follow me if you desire better understanding."

Paem pulled a large staff out from under her desk before getting up to lead Chrono and Coppelia out the door. The staff was made of a rich scarlet colored wood in the center, with an ebony snake coiled around it. The snake's head jutted out from the tip, menacingly baring its fangs at wherever Paem pointed it. Chrono thought the aesthetics of it looked a little too similar to something Magus would have liked, but he did not point this out to anyone.

Paem led Chrono and Coppelia back to the center of town, past the statue, and from there she took them down the path to the river. As they went, the buildings lining the road thinned out, leaving nothing but the barren black earth for scenery. More Nus crossed their path from time to time, and like before, not a one of them paid any attention to the travelers or their guide. They appeared to be the only thing alive beyond the outskirts of the town, at least nearby.

Chrono could see the river ahead of them once no more buildings blocks his line of sight. It was too far away for him to discern just how wide or how rough it was, but he could tell it was more than a trivial stream. He could all tell that it widened into a full-blown lake at one point. Their current path seemed to be leading them toward that lake more than toward the river proper.

The river showed more signs of civilization around it than the stretch between there and the town. Off to the left, there was a small cluster of buildings next to a ferry dock. To the right, on top of the lake, the road they were presently walking turned into a bridge, and as it went onward, it eventually met an island in the middle of the lake. On that island stood a tall, black tower. The tower just barely stood out against the dark sky, but the air around it glowed a deep red.

Paem pointed at the tower. "That is our destination. Once we arrive there, I can show you some of the wonders of this land, and I might even have a better answer for your question about your friend Orchid."

"What is inside that tower?" Coppelia asked.
"It's really much easier to see than to hear," Paem replied. "As I told you before, you'll have to wait and see."

The bridge was longer and wider than it appeared at a distance. Fortunately, Chrono thought, it was sturdier than most. He much preferred carved stone to the flimsy woodwork of Zenan Bridge. The bridge, the island, and the tower were all made of the same black stone. Up close, the air looked even more red, and it became clear that the colored light came from some of the tower's windows.

"What's this place called?" Chrono asked.

Paem answered, "Around here, we usually just call it The Tower. Technically, it has many different names, including the North Tower and the Black Tower and Kuei's Tower. Some even just call it Himmelkruez, but that is really what's inside it more than the building itself."

"What is Himmelkruez?" Coppelia asked.

"It's what we're here to see." Paem approached the huge double doors at the base of the tower and raised her staff to a small silver box hanging just below eye level in the middle of the right door. The mouth of the snake on the staff sparkled red for a second, and then with a loud metallic crash, the doors swung inward.

"You just opened a lock, did you not, Miss Paem?" said Coppelia. "You must be an important person to be allowed to enter such a facility."

"I am not," said Paem. "I hold no position of power or governance. I merely have access to this place because of my line of work."

"Because you're a fortune teller," said Chrono. "And this tower is somehow connected to fortunes."

"That is correct," said Paem. "My job is very technical and requires me to keep my equipment fresh. I come here fairly often."

"Quite the commute," Chrono laughed. "I hope it isn't too often."

Paem blushed. "I became accustomed to the walk long ago. It no longer bothers me. In any case, let's save further talk for once we get to Himmelkreuz."

Once everyone stepped inside the tower and cleared the swinging radius of the front gates, the gates shut themselves, and the room grew dark. Pitch dark.

"I can't see," said Chrono. "Where did the light go?"

"Mister Chrono, do you not still have Disenchantment's light?" Coppelia's voice asked. "Perhaps it can guide us, though I suspect our current guide has a solution for our darkness problem. If not, I can provide one."

"That's right!" said Chrono. "I think I put it away after we escaped the cave. Maybe I can dig it out of my pocket. Ah… got it!"

Chrono held up the orb of light that had served him so well in Jinling Caverns, and immediately he found himself able to see most of the ground floor of the tower, or what there was to see. The walls and floor and ceiling were all the same black rock as everything else, and there was no decoration anywhere in the room. If not for the passagesways leading out, the whole chamber would have been indistinguishable from a cave.

The view did not last long. As soon as the orb left Chrono's hands, it took off under its own power, floating to the back of the room toward a stairwell, where it flew up and disappeared, leaving him in the dark again.

"That is an interesting device," Paem noted. "Where did you get it?"

"I got it from someone named Disenchantment," said Chrono. "She gave it to me when we got separated back in the caverns. It helped me get out of there in one piece. Actually, it rescued both of us. Coppelia was lost, too, and she was the one who figured out how the thing worked."

Paem shrugged. "I should have liked to see more of it, but it's gone now. We don't need it, though. I know this place better than anyone alive or anyone dead. Each of you, grab one of my hands, and I shall lead you directly. It's… probably better if you don't see everything we're passing by, anyway."

"Wonderfully designed building," Chrono muttered. "You'd think someone would have thought to put in a window or two."

"We could see windows on the outside," observed Coppelia, "but we cannot from in here. That is a curious fact."

"This place just keeps getting better," said Chrono. "Fine, Paem, lead us."

Paem took their hands and pulled them along to the stairs at the back. They ascended three flights, and then they left the stairwell for a side room, which was still pitch dark.

Chrono laughed. "Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Paem told us we'd be better off seeing rather than hearing before bringing us here?"

"Do not scoff," said Paem. "Your eyes require light, and you shall have light." She let go of their hands. "Behold!"

Paem struck the floor with her staff, and the walls lit up. They only lit up with a dreary red color similar to the air around the outside of the castle, but after so much darkness, even it was enough to make Chrono shield his eyes. Coppelia somehow managed to stare unblinkingly at the walls.

"Red lines?" she said. "Did you bring us all this way to show us some shining red lines on the walls of a dark room, or is this a trap?"

"This is not a trap at all," said Paem. "Not in the least. This is a viewing room for the mysteries of Himmelkreuz. This is font of the Wisdom of Sophia."

"You're making no sense," said Chrono. "Weren't you going to show us what all these fancy words mean?"

"Watch," said Paem. "I shall ask Sophia a question, and she will give me an answer."
Paem said a short chant and finished by tapping her staff against the floor again. When she did, the light around the edge of the room began to flicker, and an unbearably loud groaning noise, like the grinding of a gigantic set of gears, spewed out from the walls. The room shook, and Chrono found himself on the floor covering his ears to keep from going deaf.

The commotion lasted about ten seconds, after which everything quieted back down to dim red light and a faint humming noise. Paem then turned her staff around and looked straight into its mouth. The same red light from the walls shone out of the staff and into Paem's face, and she closed her eyes.

"The answers to my question are 2299 and… 982. This is unusual. I didn't expect that. Are you sure you've been traveling together? I asked the machine for your birth years."

"Machine?" said Chrono.

"We are from different times," said Coppelia. "We only met after we arrived here. I hope this satisfies your curiosity."

"It still strikes me as strange," said Paem. "In any case, that's how this works. It's sort of like…."

"It greatly resembles an advanced supercomputer," said Coppelia. "Himmelkreuz is a machine for transmitting knowledge from the entity you call Sophia, which is likely also supercomputer. The tower itself is a storage medium, and at the top is a transmitter for beaming the information to the Dreamstone in your office. You aren't divining the future; you are looking it up on a computer."

"Brava," said Paem. "I guess you have similar things in your time. That doesn't mean you're completely right, though. Computers are…."
"Computer don't even exist in my time," said Chrono. "Let's try to keep things simple, okay? Lucca talks about this sort of thing way too much already, and it gives me a headache because she never explains the basics first. I can't follow all the details without covering the basics, can I?"

"Mister Chrono," said Coppelia, "a computer is a device for performing calculations. It will take in a number written in some form, and it will perform operations on the number to turn it into a different number. If you use the right numbers, you can put them in an order to let them describe a picture or a song. Pictures work by coming up with numbers for squares on a grid and colors for those squares, and sounds work by break the song down mathematically into easier numbers. Sound is a wave, but there is an easy way to describe the wave in terms of an infinite series of trigonometric functions that can be truncated…."

"You're losing me again," said Chrono. "I think Lucca only gets it because she spent all that time in the future when all this stuff had already been invented."

"I apologize, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "I sometimes become too excited when I speak on these matters. Suffice it to say that a computer is a device that can take in information, store it, and then return the information either to a user, to a screen, to an audio device, or to some other format. It can also store the information. This tower stores vast quantities of information, which Miss Paem calls the Wisdom of Sophia. I do not yet know how the Sophia supercomputer obtains its information, but I suspect the predictions the computer here makes are the result of educated guesses given what information it has. It can then transmit likely future outcomes to Miss Paem."

"I'm impressed," said Paem. "You are a smart one, but there is much that neither of us knows about Himmelkreuz and Sophia. I cannot presume to be able to fill you in on every detail, but I can tell you that I don't know what Sophia is. We in this land have always worshipped her as a goddess, and we greatly value the wisdom she provides. Without it, we would have perished long ago. I can also tell you that your computer analogy, while close, does not quite account for some of the peculiarities or our system. Most computers run on copper and silicon, correct?"

Coppelia nodded. Chrono shrugged.

"There are some variants in times ahead of your time, but that is the basic idea. One constructs electrical circuits and other instruments for processing and storing data. Himmelkreuz, however, was not constructed. It draws from the Wisdom of Sophia and stores it in the walls. We had to find a way to extract it, but we didn't design the mechanism for putting it there. Ultimately, we don't know where that came from. Also interesting is that we don't have to design devices for interpreting the Wisdom of Sophia. Can you guess why?"

"I cannot," Coppelia admitted with a shamed expression on her face.

"Anything made of the right material can do so," said Paem. "Anything made out of…."

"Dreamstone," said Chrono. "It's the Dreamstone, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Paem. "No one knows why, except that we think Dreamstone is a piece of Sophia herself."

"Is this the same Dreamstone as we have on Earth, then?" Chrono asked. "Because on Earth, we believe it has a different origin."

"Miss Orchid told me of this," said Coppelia. "It is believed that Dreamstone comes from the entity known as Lavos, is it not?"

"How old is Sophia?" Chrono asked.

"Older than time," said Paem. "Older than everything beyond time. Older than everything, including Lavos. Hmm, Lavos. It has been many years since I've heard that word."

"It was sort of a big deal back on Earth," said Chrono.

"Even records here are disorganized," said Paem. "I mentioned that we do not put the wisdom into the machine, but I haven't yet told you that we have to mine it from the ground."

"You mine it?" said Coppelia.
"Yes, we dig up Dreamstone from the ground and bring it to the tower. From there, we can more easily scan it and read it. If we find empty Dreamstone, we bring it back here anyway so Himmelkreuz can write new knowledge into it if it predicts something important."

Coppelia let out a yelp and hopped up off her feet. She seemed slightly embarrassed as she recomposed herself. "Do you think that information about Miss Orchid may be buried in the ground somewhere? Will you eventually know where she went?"

"I might," said Paem. "But I might not know for a long time. I might not ever know. The system is quite useful when it works, but it often only works when we need it most."

"When is that?" said Chrono.

"It tells us when someone is attacking," said Paem. "That's my real job, you know. Forget what I said earlier. You don't think I'd be allowed in here if I were just a fortune teller, do you, Hero of Time?"

"Well, no, but… what did you call me?"

"Yes, Mister Chrono, what did she call you?"

"N-nothing," said Chrono. "I think she's all confused again. I did some time traveling, but I'm no hero."

Paem shook her head. "I thought for sure you must have been in order to know of Lavos, but I can't very well keep tabs on all the billions and billions of people through the ages, can I?"

"She has a point, though, Mister Chrono," said Coppelia. "How do you know of Lavos?"
"I'm a time traveler," said Chrono. "I've seen lots of things. Computers, jet bikes, the Guru of Time, crazy robots…."

Coppelia frowned. "Mister Chrono, you continue to amaze me."

"All I want now is to see Nadia. I've seen lots of amazing and wonderous things throughout the history of our little planet, but Nadia is still the most amazing of them all. If only you could meet her!"

"You see, Miss Paem," said Coppelia, "he is intensely devoted. We both will not give up until we find those for whom we are searching, though our motivations differ. You can see why we wish to know if this supercomputer can tell us anything."

Before Paem could answer, the lights in the room brightened and the grinding noise from the walls restarted. This time, the a loud siren accompanied the other noises, and the rock walls themselves flashed red on and off in a steady rhythm. Paem's face turned fierce.

"Come with me," she said. "If you are any good at all in a fight, come with me."

"What is going on?" asked Chrono.

"Himmelkreuz is telling me that we have invaders."

XXX

A.D. 2305

"Sam," said Jinling Lan between a bit of a juicy pear she was having as a side dish with her pork cutlet and a swig of raspberry-cranberry juice, "I think you'd have twice as many papers if you didn't spend so much time with your computers. You're a mathematician, you know."

"Theoretical computer science is mathematics," said Samsara, nibbling at her salad. "I like both fields, and I have a knack for both. Temporal mathematics and computer mathematics."

"It's because of your mother, isn't it?" said Jinling. "It must be fun having a famous circuit named after you. As far as I know, there isn't anything important named after the Lan family, at least not computer related."

"Knowing your habits, you'll probably get your name attached to a video game network or something."

Jinling stuffed a crab puff into her mouth, chewed it quickly, and swallowed it, all within ten seconds. "Work hard, play hard. That's how it goes. You only seem to have half of that figured out."

"I prefer to work hard and then relax when the work is done."

"And when is that? I don't think I've ever seen you sitting around and talking about how your work is done. The day after you finished college you went right back to work on one of your little side projects."

Samsara rinsed her salad down with a sip from her glass of water. Finding herself without an adequate reply, she quickly stabbed another lettuce leaf with her fork, shoveled it into her mouth, and began chewing loudly.

"Well?" said Jinling.

"Hmmph hmmph hmmp!" Samsara mumbled.

"Fine, I get it," said Jinling. "You're quite the character, Sam. I'm sure I've told you that before."

Samsara swallowed and took another sip of water. "You've got dreams of surpassing Balthasar, so I would think you would know what it feels like. Right?"

"That's your dream too, Sam."

"But the Ashtear Circuit is just the beginning for advanced artificial intelligence. It was the major breakthrough, and Mother was a genius and all, but I know I can do even better. At the very least I owe it to her to build something with her invention."

Jinling laughed at this and nearly spit a crab puff out onto her plate. "Why not do something useful and build a better Wondershot ray gun? I'd buy one."

"That was a one-shot invention," said Samsara, "and it relied a little bit too much on a one-of-a-kind power source. Anyone could have come up with it these days."

"Only an Ashtear could have an entire branch of science named after her and still not be satisfied. Oh well. Just relax once in a while and save your strength for our physics work, okay?"

"Computers are a different kind of interesting, though," said Samsara. "With physics, it's all about looking for the underlying rules that govern everything. We can describe the way planets move with simple equations. Computers are a completely different intellectual meal. You know how you're eating both pork and fruit? Well, I need both my physics math and my computer math. With the computers, I build up complicated systems that can't be described so simply, and it do it using simple algorithms implemented iteratively. It's just like looking at a cell. Everything a cell does follows local rules, but you can't tell what a human body is just by looking at a cell and thinking really hard. You have to look at a whole body and see how the cells work together. Even something completely mindless and undirected can give birth to something seemingly complex. It's amazing, and it's so different from just about everything else. It's a new kind of challenge. In a way, it lets my brain rest when I'm tired from working on my temporal mathematics."

Jinling leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. "You certainly love what you do. Just don't go abandoning our collaborative work."

"I have no intention of that. I am every bit as passionate about Balthasar's work as I am about my mother's."

"Good. Then will you join me in a game of racquetball after dinner?"

"I can't," said Samsara. "I was going to go play with my computer."