Nicholas stood looking out the window of his office. The trees along the Keizersgracht were bare, the sky gray, the cobblestones wet from the drizzling rain.
His seventieth birthday was coming up. He had long ago adopted 1630 as his birth year, even though he knew he was born seventy-five years earlier than that, and kept his December 3 birth-day, only three days before the Day of Saint Nicholas of Myra, the Catholic saint after whom he was named. Even though he had converted to the Lutheran faith as a young adult, he still considered Nicholas the Wonderworker as his role model.
Over the past twelve years Nicholas had solidified his reputation as an important patron of the sick and the poor, and had been compared more than once with his namesake of fourteen hundred years earlier. He brushed aside those comparisons but steadfastly refused to comment on the many rumors otherwise.
Now, at the end of November of 1700, he was feeling the weight of his years. Physically he was still in surprisingly good shape, with none of the aches and troubles so many of his peers complained about, but mentally, he was tired of cold, wet, and dreary Amsterdam.
His manservant entered the office with hot cocoa and he turned around. Peter had been an orphan who had managed to convince one of the Spanish trading captains to take him back to Amsterdam almost twenty years ago. As Moors, Peter’s family had been killed by Spanish Catholics. Peter had just barely escaped and he knew that with his black skin he would never be safe by himself in his home country.
Nicholas adopted Peter as the son he never had, and Peter was the only person he had ever shared his secret of the Base under the house with. Now he motioned the servant to sit with him in the comfortable chairs.
They nursed their hot drinks while they sat in silence looking at the flames playing in the fireplace.
“Don’t you get sick and tired of this cold wetness?” Nicholas asked eventually. “You didn’t even grow up here. Don’t you want to go back to Spain?”
“But here I’m alive and back home I’d be dead. I’ll take the weather for that.”
Nicholas chuckled. “Yeah, there’s that. But now you’d be under my protection, so it might not be all that bad. I’m seriously thinking of moving to some place warmer.”
“But what about the Base?”
“That’s the thing that has been holding me back. I have no idea how we could move the Base without people finding out about it.”
“Have you asked it about that?”
“I haven’t, but I don’t see how it can do any good.”
“Well, you never know,” Peter insisted. “After all, you don’t really know what that Base can and cannot do, do you?”
Nicholas agreed. “That’s true enough. I can’t imagine how it’s doing what it is doing now, so maybe it can move itself without anybody noticing. Alright, next time I’m down there I will ask.”
“Why wait? Let’s go down right now and ask.”
Nicholas sighed. He was enjoying his cocoa in the comfortable chair in front of a warm fire, but he knew Peter was right. This was on his mind now and he wouldn’t be able to relax until he had talked to the Base.
They went down to the cellar and Nicholas opened the entrance to the Base by just thinking of it. They climbed down the ladder and went into the big room.
“I have a question,” Nicholas said.
“Speak.”
“How can we move this whole Base to another place without anyone knowing?”
“I can transport myself wherever I need to go.”
Nicholas was surprised. “You can?” he asked incredulously. “Just like that?”
“I need to know where I am going. But once I know that, I can teleport myself over.”
Neither Nick nor Peter knew what the word “teleport” meant, but they were used to strange phrases by the Base.
“So I just give you an address of where to go, and you go there?”
“I need to have the exact five-dimensional coordinates of the target location.”
Nicholas looked at Peter, who just shrugged as he didn’t have any idea what that meant either.
“How can I get you those, what do you call them, five-dimensional coordinates?”
“I can create a tool that looks like you, that can travel with you and which can give me the exact coordinates.”
Nicholas thought about that. “You mean someone who looks exactly like me?”
“Yes.”
“That would look very strange. Does he have to look like me?”
“No, it does not have to look like you. It can look like anyone, but I need to have an example.”
“Can you have it look like me?” Peter asked. “People think all Moors look alike anyway.”
“Yes.”
“How long would it take to create such a—tool?” Nicholas asked.
“Three days.”
The old merchant nodded. “We will leave on December 6, then. Saint Nicholas Day. On an expedition to Madrid. Peter, see to it that everything will be ready. And you will be coming along, I will want your knowledge and experience.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter nodded.
⁂
They reached Madrid before the end of January. Nicholas had been describing his two black servants as the brothers Peter and Paul, and while they drew some curious stares, there hadn’t been any problems.
Nicholas was fluent in French and it was not hard to find a local French-speaking guide in Madrid. Hearing that they were looking to buy a mansion fit for a great merchant, the guide had wasted no time introducing them to some of the wealthy local businessmen.
The next day, they were looking at the grand house on number 89 of the Calle de Atocha, one of the major streets in the Spanish capital. Nicholas was especially interested in the cellar, which extended under the whole house. Contrary to the damp cellar in Amsterdam, the cellar of this house was very dry and a full eight feet high.
Nicholas took Paul aside when they were back at the main level.
“Would this work?” he asked. “Can the Base move here and hide itself so that nobody will know it exists?”
“Oh yes,” Paul answered. “No problem at all.”
Within days the arrangements were made and Nicholas was able to move into his new home. Peter helped hire local servants, to whom the cellar would be off limits at all times. The Base somehow magically (at least in Nicholas’ eyes) transported itself underneath the house. It created a much more convenient entrance with a broad stairway that led directly into the strange main room.
Over the next several years, Nicholas and Peter could be found in the Base almost every day, learning about all the other things the remnant of Alton technology was able to do. They thought its abilities were very much like magic, but realized that they were actually nothing more than advanced technology. And they discovered limitations of what the Base could do. Although the Altons had been able to travel through time as well as space, the Base did not have that ability. Neither could it travel anywhere away from the Earth. It could create artificial people and material things, but only if it had sufficiently detailed examples.
Nicholas continued his work to help the poor year after year. He never forgot his adopted country of Holland, coming back every year around his birthday to deliver clothes and toys to the many poor of the country.
Peter grew older and died in 1752. By then, the Base had long been in the habit of creating artificial people as servants to help out in the household, many of them based on Moors that Peter had introduced. They became known as Zwarte Piet on the yearly travels to The Netherlands, just as Nicholas himself became known as Sinterklaas.
To his utter surprise, Nicholas found himself continuing in the same health he had in 1688. Contrary to the people around him, he did not seem to be aging at all anymore. The Base did not have an explanation for that, and over time Nick came to the conclusion that, like his strange transfer to Amsterdam as a kid, it must have been divine intervention, so he could be doing his good works.