Ancient Fire (9 page)

“Well,” the girl said, “I suppose it doesn’t
matter who you are. Or what. Thank you for your help. You’re in my
city, Alexandria, now. And I’m afraid you’ve come at a very
dangerous time.

“This is the library. We have all the
knowledge in the known world here. My mother, Hypatia, is the head
librarian, lecturer, and the city’s principal mathematician. I am
Thea. I have recently discovered a new star and am also finishing a
rebuttal to Pythagoras. He claimed each number has a male or female
personality, but he made too many of them masculine.”

There was a pause after that, then she grew
terribly sad. “I suppose none of that matters now. I saw them take
her away.” Then she did something strange: It involved water coming
out of her eyes, which she eventually wiped off. After she regained
her breath, she looked right at me—a look of amazing intelligence.
“Whatever you are, you’re in danger, too. No, Tiberius won’t stop
until everything he can’t control, or doesn’t understand, is
destroyed. And he wouldn’t even try to understand you.”

“No,” I said. It was my first word in her
tongue. She looked surprised. But I still don’t know if I meant
“No, he won’t understand,” or just “No,” as if I could personally
stop what had already been set in motion.

It turned out none of us could. Not even Eli
the Boy, when he returned to us through time mere minutes
later.

Chapter Eleven

Eli: DARPA — The First
Tunnel

August 2, 2019 C.E.

I keep looking at the picture of my mom. I
don’t think my dad knows what to say, either. He just looks sad,
drained, and even weirdly amused, all at once. “She always wanted
more time for her music,” he says.

More time for her
music?
I get really impatient when grownups make bizarre
jokes that only they understand. Especially in a situation where it
makes more sense to be scared. “Well, is she all right?” I ask.
“Does she still know who she is? Or where she really belongs?”

Dad adds a small shrug to his mixed-up
expression. “No one knows, Eli. I wish I did. I’m sorry. I don’t
think anybody’s ever been in a situation like this.”

Mr. Howe comes over. “The world has never
been in a situation like this, and we have to try to fix it.” He
turns to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives. “We have to fix this before
it gets out of hand!” The Referees don’t respond.

“Dad? Before what gets out of hand?” Mr. Howe
answers me before Dad can. “Time! If time, in fact, really doesn’t
move in just one direction…if history can be rearranged behind our
backs at a moment’s notice…then everything we know could be
changed” — he snaps his fingers—“like that. I mean, what if George
Washington suddenly loses the Revolutionary War, and there’s no
America? Or for you, personally, one of your grandparents winds up
married to somebody else, and you wink out of existence? Or worse,
what if that happened to someone important? What then?”

“Who’s deciding who’s important, Howe? You?
DARPA?” My dad is standing up now. “I mean, what if hydrogen bombs
were never built? What about that?”

“What are you talking about now!?” Mr. Howe
is sweaty and nervous, and turns back to the Referees. “What is he
talking about now?”

Thirty looks at my dad. “What are you talking
about?”

“It’s just that there are some things about
history we might be
better off
changing.”

“We’re not here to play God, gentlemen,”
Thirty says to both of them.

“Why not?” Mr. Howe snaps. Everyone stares at
him. “I mean,” he adds, “if the mission requires it.”

Dad glares at him, getting more and more
annoyed. “I think we need to remember the reason this is happening
is that Mr. Howe kept pushing me to do the experiments before we
knew where they would lead.”

Howe stares at my dad. “You told me once,
Sandusky, that the part you loved best about your work was when
something totally unexpected happened. You liked the surprise.
Well, I’d say you got it.”

“Dad,” I say, loud enough so Mr. Howe can
hear, “do you think you could both stop arguing? So we could figure
out how to get Mom back?”

That actually shuts them up for a minute.
Then Dad takes me by the shoulders. “In a way, that is what we’re
trying to figure out. They brought me down last night, Eli, to
brief me on the situation, and to ask my permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“They want to send you back to
Alexandria.”

Now it’s my turn to shut up for a minute. I
hear water dripping somewhere in the BART tunnel.

“Specifically,
Mr.
Howe
wants to send you back.” It’s Thirty, speaking as the
Twenty-Fives nod repeatedly. “It’s our job, as Referees, to decide
if he has a case.”

“And then what?” I ask.

“We give the agency our approval to go
ahead.”

“You can’t make him go against his will.” My
dad says it out loud, just as I’m thinking it.

“It’s not just about trying to fix time and
space anymore or even how to get Dr. Margarite Sands back to her
family.” Before any of us can ask Thirty what it is about, the wall
shimmers back to life with more images from Vinita.

Mr. Howe jumps as though he hasn’t seen these
pictures before, either. Maybe DARPA is even keeping secrets from
him.

The wall screen shows Andrew Jackson Williams
and a bunch of other people being taken away by men in Thickskins —
material that sticks to your real skin and protects it if you’re in
an area where there’s something dangerous in the air. It covers
your nose, too, and your eyes, but you can breathe and see through
it. It makes people look like big, shiny bugs.

Only the government’s supposed to have it.
But I touched some once—when Dad brought some of the material
home.

“There’ve been outbreaks in Vinita and a few
other places. As we did with the airplane incident, we’ve kept them
out of the news. But not much longer.”

“Outbreaks of what?” I’m like Clyne with my
questions.

“Slow pox. A disease that causes a slow
withering of the nervous system. Usually irreversible. Toward the
end, people are prone to violent outbursts. The last outbreak we
know about was before the Middle Ages. Before the Black Plague,
actually. In Alexandria, around the year four hundred.” Thirty
looks straight at me. “But we thought slow pox had been eradicated
—or died out on its own—a couple of centuries back.

“Then early this morning…this.” On the
screen, there’s a section of a tile mosaic, a kind of landscape, or
cityscape. The colors are still amazingly vivid, and I recognize
the buildings, and the pink-blue light on the water. “This is an
artist’s rendition of people fleeing a great fire in the library at
Alexandria — done in tile about a hundred years or so after the
actual event. It’s usually on display in the British Museum, in
London. But not today. This was first discovered — rather
excitedly, I might add — by a child visiting the museum on a field
trip.”

The lower-right corner of the image has been
enlarged. You can make out the robes and sandals on the people
running from the blaze. There’s a rhino stampeding by.

And then, coming out of the library behind
them is…Clyne. I don’t know how else to explain it. But it looks
like Clyne. Running on his two legs, looking over what’s basically
his shoulder at the flames behind him.

Thirty doesn’t know about Clyne. She has a
different explanation.

“The two legs, the gray lizard-like skin, the
big eyes. This might be a gray alien.”

“What?”

“A gray alien. Look at the large head. Oh,
don’t be surprised, Eli. We’re not alone in the universe. Mr. Howe
can show you the reports sometime. By the way, Howe, does he know
he’s sworn to secrecy about all this?”

“Yes.”

Well, I do now.

“Do you mean,” Mr. Howe says slowly, “that an
alien race is trying to invade us…by invading our history first?”
He’s worked himself up into a sweat.

“It’s possible.” Thirty stays calm. “The
WOMPERs may have created a breach in spacetime around our whole
planet. Everything we thought we knew about our history could be
changed, or changing, with unimaginable consequences. Like ancient
diseases reappearing as new plagues. And it’s possible that other
races, other beings, who already know how to travel in
spacetime…are taking advantage of our predicament to
make
these things happen. A gray alien suddenly
appears in a museum picture, when he wasn’t there before, because
he decides to surprise us by getting here about sixteen hundred
years early.”

Thirty sure seems satisfied with herself,
getting all that figured out. I want to tell her it wasn’t an
alien, just a two-legged dinosaur. From a parallel Earth. And he’s
not invading. Or making anyone get sick. He’s just trying to do his
homework.

“And what do you think my son can do about
any of this?” Dad is sweating, too.

“Alexandria seems to be one of the keys. He
needs to go back there.”

“And do what?” I ask.

“Find out what you can about treating slow
pox. See if you find any aliens.” That’s Thirty’s advice.

“Fix what’s wrong.” Mr. Howe is less
helpful.

“I don’t know how. I’m just a kid.” Nobody
seems to be listening to me. “And anyway, what if I just want to go
back and find my mom?”

Dad gets his sad look back. “The truth is,
Eli, we’re not a hundred percent sure
where
you’ll wind up. Or if you’ll go anywhere at all.
I’ve been running calculations, and I think since the WOMPER
accident, your whole body is like a supercharged particle traveling
backward in time.”

“But I’m here now. I’m staying here. I’m not
moving.” I look around at all the grownup faces. “Right?”

A cart with a metal box on top is wheeled
over to me. Mr. Howe puts on some Thickskin gloves, opens the box,
and takes out my Seals cap.

How did that get here?

“It’s the baseball cap, Eli,” Dad says. “For
some reason, that’s what carries the particular WOMPER charge that
sets you off. Completes it. Turns you into a kind of giant
positron.”

“Just me? Can’t someone else do it?”

Dad glares at Mr. Howe. “Apparently, Mr. Howe
had the same question. He found three different soldiers to
volunteer to put it on.”

“What happened?”

“Their bodies flickered like Christmas lights
before they were thrown across the room by a burst of energy.”

“Are they all right?”

“Two of them, Eli, are in a psychiatric
ward.”

“And the third?”

From the look my dad gives Mr. Howe, he
obviously thinks it’s Howe’s turn to answer. But he doesn’t.

“You don’t have to go,” Dad says softly. “You
don’t have to do any of this.” Then, in a louder voice, he speaks
to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives.

“You can’t make him do any of this! And I
won’t. This has to stop somewhere. And it stops now! With my
son.”

Thirty flips on the newspaper image of Mom,
stuck in 1937. I think that’s a mean thing to do to my dad.

“Dr. Sands. It is our job to decide if Mr.
Howe can go ahead with his operation. But our decision was made
before we got here. We’re in a dangerous situation. And as far as
we know, your son is the best chance we have to keep it from
getting worse. Eli, if something happened to Earth history back in
Alexandria, to change things, to make them different for us now,
you need to find a way to change it back.”

“How do I know I’d go back to
Alexandria?”

“There’s a chance…” My dad lets that trail
off.

“What?” I ask him.

He doesn’t really want to say. “There’s a
chance
, it seems, that whatever attracted
you there in the first place will pull you back. You may have
created a kind of particle trail connecting our time to Alexandria.
Or at least connecting you.”

“You think we’re so heartless, Sands. Look.”
Mr. Howe holds up a Thickskin that looks about my size. “We’ve got
protection for him when he gets there.”

“He’s not going!” It looks like Dad is about
to lunge for the suit, but a couple of DARPA men block his
path.

“Dad? What if I don’t go?”

I look up at the wall, see Mom’s face staring
out from the old newspaper photograph, see it change to the
pictures of the confused and scared-looking airplane passengers,
then see it change again to Andrew Jackson Williams being led away
by the DARPA team. Thirty can play that screen like a violin.

“What happens to the world, Dad?”

“I don’t care what happens to the world
anymore. I care what happens to you, Eli.”

But if people are getting sick, or planes are
disappearing and reappearing in the sky, or ghosts are wandering
the streets, and history is spinning more and more out of control,
it’s not going to be much of a world for me or him, anyway. And I
don’t want my mom trying to survive things that happened before she
was even born. I didn’t ask to get all tangled up in time like
this, but now, I guess, that tangling is part of me.

I reach for the hat in the metal case.

“Put on the Thickskin,” Mr. Howe says.

He holds it up, and as I take a corner in my
hand, Dad yells, “Eli, no!” He breaks free of the guards and runs
toward the cart holding the Seals cap.

He smashes into it, fighting with the DARPA
men, with Mr. Howe, even one of the Twenty-Fives. But no one
notices the cap has been knocked loose and landed by my feet.

I can already feel the tingling in my toes.
For the second time in my life, I reach for it.

Then everything winks out, I cross the Fifth
Dimension like a dream, and when I come to, the fire in Alexandria
has already begun.

Chapter Twelve

Eli: Tunnel of the
Dead