City of Ruins (11 page)

Given that rapid change always brings
uncertainty, she may have even been understating the case on behalf
of her fellow mammals. I detected this uncertainty manifesting
itself shortly after I escaped the tunnels where my friends were
being held.

Appearing under the great golden bridge
connecting the settlement of San Francisco to points north, I
realized I should leave its vicinity before being detected
again.

But to go where?

And then it occurred to me that I should
journey back toward the lab sanctuary used by Sandusky, to see if I
could find Eli’s sire, or anything that might help my friends
escape detention or set the timestream for Earth Orange right
again.

I swam to the far shore where the bridge
connected to the mainland, and stuck to main thoroughfares from
there, but only during nighttime, sleeping and hiding in
daylight.

Things appeared to be changing rapidly in
Eli’s world. The last time I moved by darkness like this — during
my previous outlaw time — I noticed more activity in the streets
and towns.

There was much more motorized transportation
on the boulevards and causeways then. More lights turned on, more
busy-ness at the markets and gathering places and entertainment
arenas.

Now, everything in the human settlements was
quieter. And darker.

It was easier to move without being detected,
because everyone seemed to live behind locked doors now.

The people appeared to be afraid already,
quite separate from any possible Saurian sightings they might
have.

By the time I had reached the familiar roads
and trails near the Valley of the Moon, I had even started moving
around in daylight.

Sloppy science, perhaps, since it is a well
known principle that the observer always effects what is observed,
even more so when he is observed himself.

And I was finally observed, that morning near
the Moonglow: first by a family — not Eli’s — that was motoring
away from the lab. The face of a boy about Eli’s age, with curlier,
dark hair — was pressed to the glass. He stared at me as his
vehicle receded in the distance.

But I was also observed by a soldier who was
parked near the lab.

One soldier.

The level of security had certainly decreased
in the time since I had last been here. How had Sandusky sire’s lab
fallen into such disrepair?

I had little time for such questions as the
soldier fired his sidearm into the air and commanded me to
stop.

I increased speed and headed for the woods,
and once again, found myself waiting for nightfall.

It was dark when Rocket Royd’s truck first
pulled up. He showed something to the soldier — who had been
falling asleep — and was waved in.

No security alarms sounded. Perhaps the
perimeter field set up by Mr. Howe was no longer working. Or had
been turned off. This was my chance to enter the lab, as well.

I left my hiding place and followed the
truck, under cover of darkness.

As it rolled up to the Moonglow’s front door,
I discovered the alarm was distressingly operative. Apparently
whoever this was in the truck knew how to turn the security
apparatus off
and
on.

The tip of my tail caught in the monitoring
field originally installed by Mr. Howe and set off several loud
alarms.

The soldier was no longer asleep behind me
and the new arrivals hadn’t stepped out of their trucks yet. I ran
into the Moonglow, unwilling to be discovered in such an
ignominious way after such an arduous journey.

I had never been inside before. I had been on
the roof once but never in the very nest where Eli’s sire raised
him, after his egg ma’am, Margarite, disappeared into the time
stream itself.

But there was no time to stop, to appreciate,
to smell the scents, since I was already being pursued.

Inside, I passed what must have been the
preparation area for edibles and potables, and farther on, what
must have been Sandusky’s lab, though it appeared to have been
gra-bakked
by a series of explosions, or perhaps,
uncontrolled multidimensional interactions.

My hopes of finding another time portal here
were severely reduced.

Moving further into the structure, hearing
the inevitable yelling of mammals behind me, I turned to see some
inviting tunnels, cavelike, but artificially made, filled with
round containers, “barrels,” in which I could plausibly hide.

Yes,
something told me. Almost as if a
creature was whispering to me from the barrels themselves.

But before I could investigate, I heard the
much more concrete sound of shattering glass, not from my pursuers,
not in the barrel cave — but ahead of me.

A window lay ahead, and past that, above the
tunnels, a slope of grasses and plants that led toward the wooded
area beyond.

I could just glimpse the curly-headed boy
from the car, running into the trees.

And near me, was a rock. With a paper tied to
it. A letter.

The letter said
ELI
on the front. Who else was trying to convey messages to my friend?
And why was he similarly trying to avoid the security
apparatus?

I bent down to pick it up. That turned out to
be my error in judgment. I smelled the smoke first — later I would
learn this came from the “cigars” that Rocket puffed on — and
before I could move, a small jabberstick hit me in the leg (the
same leg!) where I was wounded twice before.

This jabberstick made me realize immediately
just how weary I was, and I felt myself slipping to the floor,
barely getting the letter into my suit before dreams overtook
me.

The last thing I saw was Rocket’s shiny,
baggy face peering at me, and heard him say, “Grandfather told me I
might see somebody like you.”

And then, after that, I dreamt I was home on
Saurius Prime.

And when I woke up, I found I had joined the
Odd-Lots Carnival, where I met Silver Eye, and where I now find
myself in the settlement of Visalia, with a man reading a paper and
staring at me, and Rocket’s mysterious grandsire still several
days’ journey away.

Meanwhile, the man with the
Truth
paper keeps staring at me. He’s here early, just as the town’s
market is getting set up. Fewer people use or trust the currency
anymore, and in most settlements, they trade food and goods and
services directly with each other. This sometimes makes it harder
to obtain fuel. But the market areas are usually the best places
for shows. Unless there’s a slow pox quarantine in effect. Then we
stay on the main highway until we reach the next town.

We are still some time segments away from
actually performing. The man with the paper rolls it into a small
cylinder.

“I think that’s why they finally outlawed
Barnstormers in public. Kids were making up all sorts of video
projections to scare regular, decent people with.” As he speaks, he
starts poking me through the bars with the cylinder. “Though you
seem real enough.”

Another poke. “Maybe it’s a mask.” And he
grabs my skin and gives it a hard
zrrrk
and suddenly his
eyes widen a little. “What are you really?”

“Slaversaur!” I snarl, knowing that human
mammals seek a good scare in order to entertain themselves.

The man screams and gets his extremities
caught in the bars while trying to pull his hand out of my cage. I
can see some blood on his pink hide. “He bit me!” the man screams,
throwing his paper at me through the bars. “He bit me!” The man
starts running around, holding up his finger, pointing with his
other hand to the trickle of blood. “The monster bit me!”

And even though it is early in the day for
Visalia’s market square, there are enough people around to stop and
notice the hurt man, and soon there is more pointing, and
screaming, and someone yelling loud worries that maybe slow pox is
spread by blood drops. By the time Strong Bess and Rocket show up,
it is too late: things are being thrown at me, and eventually at
the Bearded Boy, and at Silver Eye in her cage. Strong Bess is
hurriedly starting the trucks, and we’ll be driving out of Visalia
before we even get to show them we are not monsters or apparitions
after all, but jongleurs, performers, with only pretend scares to
offer, so that everyone might forget their real ones for a little
while.

We will be hungry for a while longer
now,
Silver Eye tells me, as we drive along the twice-named 99
into the darkness.
I’ve always found humans strange, but they
seem so much more strange — and frightened — lately.

And it occurs to me if I am too frightening
to entertain human mammals, perhaps Rocket will have to “fire” me,
as they say in the vernacular, and then I can give up performing
for something more comfortable, like outlawry.

Chapter Nine

Eli: Parable of the
Healer

February 2020 C.E.

“I see you’re wearing the jersey I had them
send to you,” my dad says to me, when his arms let go, and we can
get a good look at each other’s faces.

I look down at my House of David shirt, my
number 33 Green Bassett replica. I forgot I even had it on. “This
was from you?”

“They told me you were…reading up on your
baseball history.”

“Did you just get here?” I ask him. He’s
probably come to get me and Thea out of here.

“Well, Eli. No.”

“What?” I look up at his face — then at
Thirty’s face, and even Mr. Howe’s, to see if I can find more clues
to what he just said. There aren’t any. “What do you mean? You just
found out we were in here, right?”

“Well, not ‘just,’ but —”

I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me, but
we can’t really finish our talk since Thirty’s guards are rushing
us down a hallway. The alarms are getting louder now, and people
are holding their ears and shouting at one another as we move
along.

We pass Mom’s rebuilt hotel room.

“I’ve been looking for clues in there, about
what happened to your mother, after the war.”

“What clues?”

“I haven’t found any yet. I don’t think
anyone knows — not even the people who are supposed to, like your
friend Thirty.” He huffs it out between breaths, as we keep running
along.

“I didn’t even know this hallway existed!”
Howe shouts toward Thirty. She mouths something about “surprises,”
and then ushers us past what look like steel vaults into a room
that neither I nor Thea, nor apparently Mr. Howe, have ever been in
before.

But it looks like my dad has.

It’s like a replica of the lab he had in the
Moonglow. Or a replica gone almost supernova. There’s more of
everything, especially the tubes — the long tubes for sending
particles through the magnet-lined coiled loops where my parents,
and later, just my dad, tried to reverse the charges inside
protons.

There are Comnet links and screens
everywhere, and even banks of older, hardwired computers that don’t
have any Comnet access or ports, and are therefore easier to
protect from any “unauthorized intrusions.”

Or from anyone getting a message out.

There’s heavy electrical wire everywhere,
too, to power up the particle chargers. The small time sphere being
generated is pulsing and crackling. There’s metal shielding around
it to try and protect the people working here.

Somebody should tell them they aren’t really
safe. I wasn’t. My mom wasn’t.

Even people who aren’t technically people,
like Clyne. Who knows if he’s safe?

What are they still doing this for?

“What is this?” I ask. Then I turn to my
father and look him right in his eyes.

“Did you design this? Here? For them?”

“Eli, you don’t under—”

“After all that’s happened?”

“It’s not what you think.”

The vault doors have closed, and we can
actually hear each other now, though the crackling seems louder In
fact, the sphere seems much more
alive
than the early
prototypes my parents were working on. Maybe
too
alive.
There’s the funny smell of ozone, and the crackling is nearly as
loud as the alarms in the hallway. And there are wisps of smoke in
the air.

“Stay back!” one of the guards yells. “It’s
already been breached!”

“Breached!?” Thirty yells

“By some guy holding this.” The guard hands a
small, battered book to her. She flips through the pages without
really looking at anything.

“It’s a Bible,” she says.

“A.J.” Mr. Howe adds. “He made it.”

“‘He
made
it’?” Thirty repeats. “What
on earth do you mean?”

“We were trying to secure the room against
floodwaters,” my dad explains, “when he broke in…”

“Breaches everywhere,” she says, “holes in
everything.” I’ve never seen her look sad before, until right now.
“Just from the water damage, they may close this place down. And
now this.”

My dad hands a torn piece of cloth to Thirty.
“He ran past us, soaking wet, yelling about one last chance to get
it all right, and before I could stop him, he jumped through the
sphere. Right over there. I just got a little piece of his
pants.”

“You ran to tell
her
?” I ask again,
pointing to Thirty, glaring at my dad. “You’ve been working here
this whole time, and have known I was locked up, and you go to see
her
?”

“Eli, I —” My dad looks around, a little
scared, a little confused, but I can’t believe my own father would
betray me, would sell me out like this. “Eli…they told me you had
slow pox.”

“They told you
what
?”

“That I couldn’t see you. That you were
contagious.”

“And you
believed
them?”

“They had guards with me the whole time. I
couldn’t get any Comnet messages out. They even checked that
jersey, to make sure I didn’t write anything in it.”