City of Ruins (10 page)

“You made it different!” Eli yells at
them.

“No, Eli.
You
are different. The way
your body’s made. The
atoms
in it. Something in you that
allows you to time-travel and come back in one piece. Your body is
its own time machine. We’ve never seen that before.”

“What is it that you
have
seen
before?”

The number lady doesn’t answer. Maybe she
wants Eli to do the guessing game!

“I throw up all the time,” he adds.

“What she’s trying to tell you,” Mr. Howe
goes on, “is that not just anybody can be a Danger Boy, or a Danger
Girl.” And he looks at me and causes me to laugh again, except the
laughter turns into a fit of coughing, and I can’t hear anything
else for a moment, and when I can hear, Eli is back to yelling
again.

“You blew apart my family, and all you’ve
done is mess up the whole entire world! And the lives of everyone
in it!”

“And that’s why we needed slow pox, Eli,” Mr.
Howe tells him. “In a strange way, when people think slow pox is
the biggest problem they have, people are reassured.”

“Pretend, pretend! I knew it!” I try to clap
my hands, and wind up slipping out of Eli’s arms, back on to the
floor.

It hurts.

This party isn’t so fun anymore.

“Mother is here now?” I ask.

“No.” The number lady looks somewhere else
when she speaks.

“When did her English get this good?” Mr.
Howe wonders.

You know.

“She learns fast,” Eli says. He’s pulling me
up from the floor, but I am perspiring a lot and I keep slipping
out of his hands.

We are all trying to keep from slipping from
each other’s hands.

“It’s all slipping out of our hands,” Mr.
Howe says to the number lady.

“Hah!” I say. It’s a party once more.

You know,
the voice repeats to me.

“Can someone please help me get her on the
bed?” Eli really wants me to take another nap, but then I’d miss
everything.

“Why is she laughing so much?” Mr. Howe asks,
because he doesn’t understand this is a festival.

“It’s her fever,” the number lady says.

“From slow pox,” Eli insists.

“No, from Chronological Displacement
Syndrome. Which you and your friends are helping us discover,” the
number lady says. “Another reason we can’t let you go, Eli. The
time-traveling we’ve already done — you and your friends have
already done — has unleashed unpredictable results throughout
history. We thought history was fixed, finished…”

“But it turns out to be in quantum flux,” Mr.
Howe finishes.

“And who have
you
been listening to?”
the number lady asks him

“That’s why I had to come back,” Mr. Howe
says. “To try and fix this…this mess we all helped make.”

“You never complained before,” the number
lady says.

“You’re saying time travel is making her
sick?” Eli asks. “It’s not. This isn’t Chrono-whatever. It’s slow
pox! She has it!”

“Oh, this is silly,” the number lady says.
“Look, I’ll show you.”

Very fast, moving like one of the warriors
from the Eastern lands, the number lady picks up a needle and
shoves it into my arm.

“Owww!”

“Hey!” Eli yells.

“Bad party!” I shout.

“Sheila!” Mr. Howe shouts back, but not at
me.

“Okay,” the number lady says, quite calm
about jabbing me. She holds up the needle, which has drained a
little of the blood from my arm.

“We know how to keep slow pox controlled, how
to detect it. If she’s positive, if she had it, which she doesn’t,
this strip would turn green. If she’s negative, which she is, this
strip will turn yellow.”

She drops my blood on the paper—paper like a
tiny scroll, though I can’t recall if there were ever such small
scrolls in the library at Alexandria, and whether we ever saved
any.

After my blood hits the paper, it turns
purple. Scarlet purple! One of my favorite colors!

“What does
that
mean?” Eli says.

“Oh hell,” the number lady says.

“What does it mean!” Eli says to Mr.
Howe.

“She’s caught a strain of slow pox that
wasn’t engineered by us,” Mr. Howe replies. “
Real
slow pox.
Wild
slow pox.”

“But I thought you said —”

“It’s exactly what I was afraid of. We wanted
slow pox as a form of control. We made a strain that was even
easier to use. But we’ve lost control of it.” Mr. Howe looks at
Eli, looks like he might start crying, and everything about this
party seems to be falling apart all at once. So if this is all just
a dream, I should plan on waking up soon.

“I’m sorry, Eli,” he adds.

“I want everybody in this room to —”

But before the number lady can finish, the
WUMP! WUMP! WUMP!
comes again, only louder, much louder.
Maybe the musicians from the court are here for the party, the
birthday party, the week-long festival, except they’re playing
badly out of tune.

The door —the one on the wall — opens up, and
Eli’s father runs through it, just in time for our party.

“
Dad!?
”

Eli’s father looks at his son. “Eli! My God.
I didn’t realize —” He grabs Eli and squeezes him close, the way
Mother would do to me. It’s the number lady who pulls them apart.
Eli’s father looks at her. “There’s been another breech.”

“I know that!” She holds up the purple paper.
“Look at
this
!”

“No. I mean in the time-sphere room. Somebody
broke in. And went through.”

“A.J.?” Mr. Howe asks, though he says it in
the way people ask questions when they already know—

You know.

“Dad! What are you
doing
here?” Eli
asks his father, who is also invited to my party. “Have you been
here the whole time?”

“Eli, I —”

“The whole time they’ve kept me locked
up?”

“Hide-and-peek!” I say again.

Since this is my dream, I just want everyone
to laugh. At least once.

So far, no one does.

Chapter Eight


Clyne: Odd Lots

March 2020 C.E.

EPIDEMIC?

OR EPIC DECEPTION?

Now the
Weekly Truth
wants
to know!

It was in the paper journal, one of the few
remaining non-electronic oracles the human mammals use to transmit
information to each other. The one they call the
National Weekly
Truth
.

A man was standing near my cage, reading it,
and I
squizz
-lensed just enough with my eyes to make out the
words. He kept glancing over, giving me looks of suspicion. That
same paper had been kind enough to run pictures of me the first
time I became an outlaw here on Earth Orange.

Perhaps I had also become what the human
mammals call a “celebrity,” a class of beings well-known to their
nest-mates and the community at large, to the point where other
humans lose track of their own existence in order to copy behaviors
of the ones being celebrated.

If I am a celebrity now, will I drive others
to emulate the outlaw life? I hope not, since it always seems to
involve winding up in one type of cage or another.

I have been in this particular cage since
Rocket Royd captured me in Eli’s home in the Valley of the Moon.
This may have inadvertently transformed me into a different type of
celebrity, a performer in what he calls Rocket Royd’s Traveling
Circus and Odd-Lots Carnival. Specifically, if my study of human
language is correct, I have become a mummer or jongleur. Like the
slaversaur. Someone who puts on a show.

We have been traveling down the numbered
roads that were once used as main transportation corridors in Eli’s
time, though few vehicles seem to be on them now. They were once
called highways or freeways. We left the particular road named in
tribute to binary code — the 101 — and are now on a somewhat dryer,
hotter corridor named twice, for emphasis, Highway 99.

We’re in a town called Visalia.

For days Rocket has been telling all of us
here — me, Silver Eye, Strong Bess, the Weeping Bat, and the
Bearded Boy — that we’re in a hurry to get to his “grandfather.”
The word describes an honorific title for a nest-sire, one who is
once or twice removed at what we would call egg intervals on
Saurius Prime, but are known as generations here.

Evidently, Rocket’s presence in Eli’s
Moonglow home was no accident. He had been sent there by this
grandfather to retrieve a scientific artifact, and having found it
— and, as it turned out, me, as well — was in a hurry to return it
and, he hopes, to win praise.

“I think Grandfather will be happy. I’ll
bring you to him, as well,” he said to me. “He’s talked about
creatures like you. He’ll be surprised to really see one.”

But Grandfather apparently lives some
distance away, and it will take us a few days to get there. The
vehicles that transport us all — trucks, as they are known — are of
an older variety that once ran on a somewhat deadly, polluting fuel
known as gas. From what I’ve read about gas, and its source
element, oil, these fuels were the cause of wars, atmospheric
assaults from which Earth Orange has yet to recover, and various
severe economic upheavals. But Rocket and Strong Bess converted
these vehicles to run on different fuels, like vegetable oil, with
the flip of a switch.

When we perform, then, whatever currency is
earned goes into paying for something combustible, so the Carnival
can keep moving along. Since Rocket perpetually finds his “odd
lots,” as he calls us, running out of money, food, and fuel, we
find ourselves stopping, for two or three days at a time, in
villages, towns, decaying cities, and settlements along the
way.

“I don’t know what happened to Rocket’s
parents,” the Bearded Boy said to Silver Eye and me one night, when
he was feeding us. He had warmed up to me somewhat when I said his
unique physical trait — a profusion of hair bursting out all over
his body — could actually be considered “a remarkable evolutionary
step on certain well-regarded planets.”

“So Rocket was raised by his grandpa,” the
Bearded Boy went on. “I was raised by him, too. They said my
parents disappeared somewhere in Oklahoma, during a cross-country
trip. The police said they got lost in a snowstorm, even though it
was the middle of summer. They found me at a highway rest stop,
shivering on a July night.”

The Bearded Boy throws some more meat in my
cage. I try not to eat too much, having arranged with the Weeping
Bat to share some of her fruit when no one is looking. If I ever
return to Saurius Prime, a strong appetite for flesh could make me
a social outcast among the herbivores.

But I’m too hungry to wait for the Bat. “Do
you have some fruit?” I ask.

“Why would a dragon man eat fruit?” he
asks.

“I am not a dragon. I am a slaversaur,” I
reply. We’ve been having some disagreement about what my
celebrity-mummer-jongleur-performing name should be. Rocket keeps
insisting on various versions of “Dragon,” depending what town
we’re in: “The Laughing Dragon,” “The Startling Dragon Man,” even
“The Space Dragon.”

These names remind me of North Wind Comes and
Crow’s Eye, since they were more musical than most Earth Orange
names. Thinking of them, it occurs to me that if I ever get out of
this cage, I might like to retreat to whatever unbuilt and
unsullied landscapes are left here, to simply watch buffalo move
across snowy fields, once all this business with a
gra-bakked
,
grk-skizzy
timestream gets sorted
out.

“But mainly,” I say, in reply to the fruit
question, “because of the treaty we signed after the Bloody Tendon
Wars.”

“You mean, there’s another war somewhere? How
can anyone keep track anymore? Anyway,” the Bearded Boy said,
leaving the piece of meat in my cage, “I guess they couldn’t put me
up for regular adoptions, since I’ve had this hair problem since I
was born. Rocket and his grandpa always said I should feel lucky
they kept me.”

What’s so unusual about a human growing
fur on his face?
Silver Eye asks.

“He’s still a hatchling,” I reply.

“Who’s a hatchling?” the Bearded Boy replies
sharply. He looks around, then back at me. “As you can see,” he
says, touching his face, “I have whiskers that look like stripes,
since my hair is red, blonde, black, and brown. And there’s more
than just the face part. It grows all over my body. When I was
little, the doctors told me it was some kind of genetic defect or
something and I would have to learn to live with it. But anyway,
who can afford to keep seeing doctors? See you in the morning.”

And then he went off to sleep in his straw
bed in back of the big truck that Rocket drives.

“He’s not kept in a cage, but Rocket treats
him like he’s an outlaw, too.”

I don’t believe Rocket has much experience
in treating living beings with kindness.

Now that I’ve seen Silver Eye’s face, her
voice resonates with a tympanic difference — even though there is
no vibrational sound displacement at all, but just thoughts coming
into my head. Every uttered thought from her evokes the deep well
of her vision orbs — not necessarily silver — and sadness and
wisdom reverberate with her words.

“But he lets him sleep in the back of his
truck.”

That’s because we’re such a small
circus.

We are four cages and two trucks, the other
driven by Strong Bess, who, with her lifting of pieces of furniture
and small vehicles, and whatever else people will pay to have
lifted, seems to have the right stamina for the job.

Rocket has said he values portability and
speed, just in case.

“‘Just in case’ what?” I ask.

These are uncertain times,
she
replies.