Journey Through the Mirrors by T. R. Williams

walked over and examined the back of it. “I wonder if Cassandra might have hidden something behind the matting.”
    “Mr. Perrot, I like the way you think.” Jasper went to take hold of one end of the mosaic as Mr. Perrot grabbed the other, and together they lifted it from the easel and attempted to set it facedown on a nearby table. As they did so, the frame slipped from Mr. Perrot’s hand,and his end of the mosaic hit the table. He cringed at his clumsiness. Jasper set his end down more cautiously.
    Mr. Perrot ran his hand over the matting. He grabbed a pair of scissors off the table and pierced the black cardboard. He proceeded to cut the backing along all four sides.
    With great anticipation, Jasper removed the black cardboard. The two of them inspected the mosaic for anything that looked like recording chips. Mr. Perrot set the scissors down in disappointment. “I thought we had it.”
    “So did I,” Jasper said.
    After replacing the backing, Jasper helped Mr. Perrot move the mosaic back to the easel. When they returned to the table to clean up the scraps of cardboard that had been cut away, Mr. Perrot was alarmed to see that two tiles had been dislodged when he’d dropped the mosaic. “I’ll get some glue,” Jasper said, and walked over to the supply shelf.
    Mr. Perrot carefully picked up the two small tiles. One was green and rounded at the corners, the other square-shaped and painted gold. He walked back over to the mosaic and easily found where they needed to be glued.
    “Don’t worry, sir,” Jasper said. “We’ll get them reset in no time.” Jasper placed a dab of glue on the green tile and put it back into position. He held it in place for a moment. He was ready for the second tile, but Mr. Perrot was still examining the back of it. “What are you looking at?” Jasper asked.
    Mr. Perrot scratched the tile with his fingernail, and tiny flakes of gold paint floated off of it. “It seems I may be vindicated for my blunder.” After scratching the rest of the paint off, he held up the title. “Now, doesn’t that look exactly like one of Cassandra’s recording chips?”
    Jasper looked at the mosaic and counted about twenty similar gold tiles in it. “I think you may have found Cassandra’s missing memories.”

9
Do you really believe that it takes a lifetime to know what a master knows?
Everyone who has reached the pinnacle of his enlightenment will say to you, it took a lifetime to realize that it didn’t need to take a lifetime.
    —THE CHRONICLES OF SATRAYA
    OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN, 7:40 P.M. LOCAL TIME, MARCH 20, 2070
    Madu Shata looked out the airplane window at the Pacific Ocean far below him. The sun was setting, and the brightest of the stars were beginning to appear in the dusky sky. The cabin lights had been dimmed, and his attention was drawn to his reflection in the window. He thought about the puzzle whose solution had eluded him since the day he’d found an original set of The Chronicles of Satraya . Even though so much time had passed, he was still obsessed with learning the secret of the pyramids. He had hoped that the emergence of Logan Ford and his old friend Robert Tilbo would shed some light or offer a fruitful new direction for his search. Destiny, he thought, had forsaken him; it seemed to be the principle that ruled his existence. He leaned back in his seat and thought about that pivotal day, forty years ago, that had determined the course of his life and about the events leading up to it.
    The Great Disruption ravaged northern Egypt. Earthquakes turned the famously picturesque Mediterranean Sea into a raging cauldron ofwater that flooded the coast as far south as Banha. People fortunate enough to survive the flooding, the earthquakes, their aftershocks, and tsunamis migrated south to Cairo, their last bastion of hope. While the city might have been spared the flooding, it was not spared the earthquakes or the climate changes that came with the earth’s shifting four