Ancient Fire (2 page)

Serapis was supposed to be a god of healing,
but I didn’t see too much healing back in Alexandria. The city felt
like it was about to explode.

Now the doctor guy is shining a light in my
eye. “Hey!”

Mr. Howe waves him away. “Later.”

“Where’s my dad?”

“He actually
is
out
for a walk. Said he needed to think things over.”

“How come
he
gets to
go?” I ask for the zillionth time that week.

“Because he’s not under medical observation.
Because he didn’t just become the first person who we know can
time-travel.”

Now Mr. Howe sits down on the bed only a
couple feet away and turns to look at me. He’s supposed to be all
sincere, but his expression gives me the creeps.

“Eli, you do know how special you are, right?
Nobody wants to hurt you, but you have a chance to help a lot of
people. To be a part of history yourself.”

“Starting with slow pox, huh?”

“Starting with slow pox, and helping us find
a cure. We need to know if you’d be willing to go back again. This
time, on purpose.”

“I want to find my dad first.” I get up and
head for the door and hear the doctor guy behind me. “Sir. He’s not
supposed to go outside yet. Not by himself.”

“He’ll be all right,” Howe says. Which means
they’re going to have me followed. “Eli, please stay close by.”

As soon as I get outside, I see another DARPA
guy, this one in a blue uniform. He looks at me kind of unhappily,
but I keep walking toward the thicket of oaks nearby and hope I can
disappear before he starts to follow.

When I make it into the stand of trees, I
begin to run down the path. I don’t know if my dad came this way or
not. I’m trying to get to a place called Wolf House, a couple miles
from here.

Way back last century, some guy who wrote
adventure books owned it — a big old stone house in the middle of
the woods that looked like it was raised up out of the earth.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to look,
but it all burned down the night before the adventure-book guy and
his wife were supposed to move in. It’s a big ruin now, and they
made a kind of park around it, so you could have a nice picnic
where someone else’s dreams were all broken up.

I like to sneak into the park without paying
and go there to think.

Maybe my dad’s going there, too. If I can
find him, it’ll be the first time we’ve been alone together…since
Mr. Howe showed up. Maybe we can talk.

But I don’t want any of these DARPA guys
hanging around. I’m running pretty hard now, but so’s the guy in
the blue uniform, and when I look back, he’s yelling something into
his headset, so I guess my days — or minutes — of outside walks are
gonna be numbered.

This could be my only chance to get away for
a while. But if I stay on the path, it’s gonna be too obvious to
the DARPA guys where I’m headed.

“Dad! Dad!”

No answer. He could be anywhere.

The blue uniform is catching up. I come
around a bend, then cut in fast through the brush, down toward the
creek. If I can get deep enough in the bushes, he won’t be able to
see me….

Aw, nuts. But they have equipment that can
amplify my heartbeat. They can hear me, even if they can’t see
me.

This sucks. Can’t I just be by myself for a
little bit?

As I move through the trees, some low
branches scratch my face. One of them drags behind my ear, over my
neck.

There’s a strange tingling, almost like a
sudden, intense sunburn. I reach back to feel my skin, and my
fingertips tingle, too, when they touch a small rough spot the size
of a quarter.

I look at my fingertips. I can feel the
substance. Because it blends in so well with my skin — it looks
like a slight bruise — the doctors have missed it. And since
everyone here speaks English, I forgot I had it on.

My lingo-spot.

A lingo-spot is a plasmechanical device for
translating languages.
Plasmechanical
means something that’s half biology and half technology.

How do I know all that? A dinosaur told
me.

But I don’t want to explain any of this to
Mr. Howe or DARPA, so I start wiping off my lingo-spot on the bark
of another tree. It looks like it’s a redwood.

Then I wonder if the lingo-spot will suddenly
help the tree understand human beings. Let it hear our secrets.

But that would mean, what? Translating words
into sap? Into the rustle of leaves? How do you make a language out
of that?

I jump at what sounds like a burp, but
there’s no one around. It seemed to come from the direction of…

…the tree. Like the lingo-spot made a
noise.

At least, that’s what I hope it was.

I move a little farther away. Even if the
redwood could hear secrets, it wouldn’t matter. Not with mine:
They’re doozies. Like the dinosaur I just talked about. I
originally met him in a place called the Fifth Dimension.

Ah, forget it. The tree wouldn’t believe me,
either.

Chapter Two

Eli: Snowball Fight

June 7, 2019 C.E.

Even before I got tangled up in time, I’d
been to a lot of places.

Like, for example, the Motel Bayou Deluxe,
outside New Orleans. My dad and I had a snowball fight there, and I
hit two grand slams in one inning.

“You know, it never really used to snow in
New Orleans, especially in summer. But the weather seemed to make a
lot more sense when I was a kid.”

My dad was using that phrase a lot back then,
“when I was a kid.” It’s a way grown ups have of talking when the
present moment has them kind of mixed-up or sad.

Dad was actually pretty happy during the
snowball fight, even when I ambushed him by hiding under our parked
truck with an armful of icy ammo and pelting him on his back and
head when he walked by. He actually laughed. He hadn’t done that in
ages.

“You’re getting sneaky, Eli. I don’t know if
that’s a good thing.”

“It’s good for stealing bases. Or if I ever
decide to become a spy.”

Sometimes, you have to be careful what you
joke about.

Dad and I were driving cross-country, moving
out of my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey. He’d inherited the old
winery out in the Valley of the Moon from some uncle or something,
and it sat there for a couple years, empty and abandoned, till my
dad decided he’d had enough of Jersey and was going to try things
out in California.

I’d never lived anywhere else but Princeton.
It’s where I grew up and where my best friend, Anderson Wall,
lived. Andy. “Wall, wall, cracks on the wall.” I think that was the
first thing I’d ever said to Andy. We were in second grade and had
just met on the playground. When you’re little like that, the idea
of moving away never really crosses your mind.

I was born in Princeton because that’s where
the Institute for Advanced Study was. The Institute was run by
Princeton University and was supposed to be a place where
scientists and thinkers could sort of noodle around and goof off
and come up with stuff on their own, without any outside pressure.
Einstein worked there back in the twentieth century. My dad and mom
worked there in the twenty-first.

Dad was good with spacetime. I don’t mean
space
and
time
but
spacetime
. One word for two sides of
the same cosmic thing — ways to try and figure out where you are on
the humongous map of the universe, like north and south. Except
spacetime is
where
and
when
.

Since his grad school days, he’d been
tinkering with spacetime, changing the electrical charges of
particles — the tiniest pieces of the universe, the bits that make
up atoms. Dad figured out how to accelerate them through space and
send them backward — not just through the air, but backward in
time, too.

That’s how he met my mom, Margarite, who was
pretty good with spacetime herself. With her help, Sandusky had
perfected his first “spacetime sphere” — a small area, the size of
a basketball, maybe, surrounded by, well, kind of a force field.
That’s what it’d be called in one of those corny old sci-fi movies,
anyway. Especially since it was pumped out by a constantly humming
generator.

Inside the force field, time moved
differently. You could put a banana in there, and it wouldn’t get
soft and mushy for days. Sometimes weeks. Because time was moving
slower for the banana.

Dad thought the little spheres could have
practical uses — like keeping an organ fresh if you were waiting to
transplant it, or storing blood for a transfusion. You could slow
down disease cells and study them. All kinds of uses like that.

Word about his experiments got out, and one
day Mr. Howe showed up. I was pretty young, maybe around seven. He
would come by the lab, and he would also come by the house. He
tried to act the way some long-lost uncle would — way too friendly
and smiling too much.

I guess things started to change for my
parents at the Institute, too. They couldn’t do their experiments
just for the sake of finding stuff out. Mr. Howe wanted everything
to have a purpose. He was full of ideas: Like, he wanted to start
putting live animals inside the spheres and running tests on them,
to see if their aging could be slowed down. Dad said he wasn’t
ready to put living creatures inside his time sphere. I remember
one particular argument he had with Mr. Howe.

Both of them were standing in the backyard
after dinner on a really cold October evening, and I could hear
them through the closed window in my room. It was the first time
they had their “weapon” argument.

Sandusky said he wasn’t going to use his
science to hurt people or make war. Mr. Howe just kind of laughed
at that. He said something about how the time sphere wasn’t really
a weapon at all, it’d just be helping his country.

A lot of things started to go wrong in a
hurry after that.

Mom stopped going into the lab with Dad so
much, which meant I got to see more of her in the afternoons when I
came home from school. Those were pretty good times — when I felt
like a regular kid, just getting along in my life.

Andy and I had joined a Gaming Guild to be
part of our favorite Comnet game, Barnstormers. It’s a baseball
game with monsters. See, you pick a squad of “Barnstormers,”
creatures who go around the country on a team bus, playing pickup
ballgames in small towns or challenging minor-league teams to
matches. Like a scarier version of a fantasy baseball league. The
kind of monsters you pick affects how you play: Like, if you have a
lot of vampires, you can only play at night. If you have too many
zombies, they run slow and you don’t have base speed. Werewolves?
They can really keep their eye on the ball — but watch out for full
moons. And if you beat the local team, you’ll probably be chased
out of town. With torches. You can trade players, and even play
league games on the Net. Andy and I just did it for fun.

There was a place on the edge of town called
Herronton Woods. Andy and I rode our bikes together all the way
down Nassau Street and spent afternoons there. There was a spot we
liked in the middle of all the oaks — some kind of plant disease
had swept through there a few years back. In one area, where they
had chopped down the sick trees, it made a kind of creepy clearing,
full of stumps and twisted branches. We liked to go and stay till
late afternoon, when the shadows would get long, because the area
reminded us of a place where some Barnstormers might really play a
game — a little spooky, but still with enough room to hit a ball
around.

Andy and I would play some real ball —
usually a version of over-the-line, with oak stumps to mark the
different kinds of hits you could get — and then we’d take out our
roam boxes.

Roam boxes let you capture extra-rare
characters that weren’t available on your vidpads. The characters
were signals you could only pick up in a certain area, sort of like
the way my dad describes old TV broadcasts or something. In other
words, you could only receive them in a specific place. There were
thousands of Barnstormer characters all over the country. You could
pick them up in shopping malls, parks, schoolyards — anywhere
anyone wanted to make one up or sponsor one. But you had to have a
roam box, and you had to be standing in the right spot.

In Herronton Woods, someone kept making up
Barnstormer characters, like the Jersey Devil — who was actually a
good shortstop — and the Pine Barrens Thing — who was slow, but a
fair catcher. Then they would put them out in the air for someone
to catch in a roam box.

Andy and I never figured out who was behind
it — there was no ad that went with any of the new characters — and
there wasn’t always a new player to catch every time we went out
there, but part of the fun was never knowing what might be lurking
in the woods. It felt cool, like you were actually inside the game
a little bit.

So Andy and I were out there, with our roam
boxes and gloves and bats and balls, pretending to be Barnstormers
ourselves, about four o’clock on a November afternoon, and this is
one of the last great memories I have of my mom, before everything
just got really bad and confused.

I remember it the way grown ups say they
remember things: suddenly, with no warning, triggered by some
movement in the light, or a smell or something, anything that takes
you back to that crystal-clear place in your memory, which isn’t
really what’s happening to you right then, but comes from some
earlier time. Which is sort of like being in a time machine,
too.

When my mom showed up, she was all bundled up
in a coat and actually looked kind of pretty right then, in a way
that wasn’t too corny. Kind of like herself and not just a mom.