“Correct is a relative term, but yes—that book gives a generally accurate depiction of the timeline before Saul started mucking about. We were very lucky to be able to preserve these books. If I hadn’t found Connor when I did, the entire library would have been corrupted. And while you’ll find no mention of the Cyrists in any of these volumes, Connor and I can give you a precise date for the actual founding of Cyrist International: May 2nd of last year.”
“Ah,” I said, comprehension dawning. “That’s when…”
“Exactly. That was the date of the first temporal distortion you felt, when you were still in Iowa.”
“That’s so hard to imagine, though. I mean, I can remember seeing Cyrist temples since I was a kid. They’re what, maybe ten percent of the population?”
“You’d have been close a week ago,” Connor said. “As of this morning, however, the CIA Factbook says 20.2 percent—they gained quite a few adherents in the last time shift. Oh, and you mentioned Vice President Patterson?” He typed a few characters into the search window on his computer and clicked a link near the top.
The White House website opened to display a photographic slide show of Washington scenes, most including Patterson’s trim figure at a podium or photo op. Connor tapped the screen lightly with the tip of his finger, partially obscuring Patterson’s face and her perfectly styled auburn hair. “As you can see, she’s had a promotion.”
My jaw quite literally dropped at that. Paula Patterson wouldn’t have been my choice for first female president by a long shot, but it was kind of cool to know that the highest glass ceiling had finally been shattered. “But how? Was the president killed, or…?”
Connor shrugged. “Nothing so dramatic. Patterson just won the primary instead. She was very well funded.”
I shook my head slowly. “That’s… unbelievable. You’re saying that nothing I remember, nothing I’ve learned in school, is real?”
“It’s not that your memories aren’t real,” Katherine said. “You just experienced a different timeline than we did after the temporal disturbances you felt. To be precise, you aren’t the same Kate that I would have encountered if I’d started this project eighteen months ago, as I had planned.”
I took a few moments to digest all of this. It was hard to imagine a different version of myself, with different memories. And the Cyrist Temple was on the periphery of my life. How different would the timeline be for people who grew up with that religion or whose entire families had been of that religion for generations?
“Okay,” I began. “Let’s set aside how recently the Cyrists were created. Why do you think they’re involved in your murder? I don’t know a lot about the Cyrists, but I know they don’t advocate killing people. I’m pretty sure they have specific rules against that.”
“Of course they do,” said Connor with a derisive snort. “All major religions have rules against murder. If they didn’t, there would be few converts. Well, at least few converts that you’d want to be in the same room with. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of people willing to kill in the name of their faith—that’s true of most religions.”
“So why build a religion? You mentioned power—it would seem to me that there are much more direct routes to power than building a religion.”
“Perhaps,” said Katherine. “But a minister from the 1870s—not Saul, but someone he studied—once preached to his congregations that ‘Money is power and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it.’ The Cyrists have capitalized on his advice. Above all other rules of the church, members are required to tithe. They are promised that their ‘spiritual investment’ will be returned to them many times over.”
Katherine leaned forward, a sly smile on her face. “And it is returned many times over, if those members also follow the suggestions their leaders make for the rest of their investments. You can be quite sure that there are plenty of Cyrists who knew when to invest in Microsoft and when to dump their Exxon stock. They’ve managed to manipulate their portfolios wisely through every recession. Of course, the poorer members who can spare only the ten percent tithe are pretty much out of luck, but the others? They have, in their eyes, firsthand evidence that God will bring riches to those who believe.
“Cyrist International is a very wealthy organization, Kate. Much of the money might, admittedly, be under the control of other religious groups if the Cyrists hadn’t… emerged. But either way, it has resulted in billions of dollars in the hands of someone with the ability to manipulate that wealth even further, by interfering in the historical markets.”