City of Ruins (18 page)

It’s K’lion. Yerushalayim
has
been
invaded again, but not by soldiers. By time travelers.

Chapter
Fifteen

Clyne: Nerve
Tissue

583 B.C.E.

Uncontrolled time reactions always lead to
uncontrolled results, a spacetime flow as
gerk-skizzy
as the
faultiest ship’s drive. Couple such unstructured time-roaming with
the innate unpredictability and hot-bloodedness of mammals
themselves, and you have a grid of random probabilities to
challenge the wiliest mathematician.

You may try to calculate, but in fact, you
never know where you’ll wind up or who you’ll be with. As a result
of Eli’s earlier extemporaneous time leap, he became a passenger in
my ship, and cause and effect being the quantum, often unknowable
things they are, I have, ever since, found myself stranded here on
Earth Orange.

Not that I regret the experience. The mere
idea that mammals are capable of advanced evolution is worth
several Saurian life cycles of study. And never mind what one
learns being an outlaw.

However, Rolf’s uncontrolled time reaction,
undertaken in his trailer with a WOMPER he had secreted from the
government agencies on Eli’s planet, did not turn out so
happily.

Several of us who should’ve made the trip are
missing: The Weeping Bat, Strong Bess — and Silver Eye. I have
arrived here in the company of Rocket Royd, who appears to be
passed out, along with the Bearded Boy, who doesn’t…and Rolf, who
is wide awake and trying to make his own kind of sense about what
just happened.

But happily, wherever we are, and whatever
has
just happened, I believe I see Eli by one of the
campfires.

“A good time to meet?” I venture.

The only answer I get is a projectile thrown
past my ear, and the words “Goat-demon!” shouted in my direction.
Goat?

“The demon gods are here!”

“You did this, Jeremiah! You brought this on
us, with all your doom and gloom!”

Most of the people are running away. A couple
run toward us.

“Eli! Watch out!” Thea’s voice. She’s here,
too! The ruined rock buildings make me think we are in her time.
Good. She can explain, perhaps, that I am not a demon god. Or a
goat. If we get the chance.

“A good time to meet? Or not?” I say in
Thea’s tongue.

“Clyne!” Eli’s voice. He is definitely here.
But he’s in a small group being surrounded, near the fire.

“This isn’t Jeremiah’s doin’.” It’s the
distinct mammalian dialect of the one named A.J. We’re all here. At
this place. At this time.

Perhaps one result of all these time
reactions and chronological leaps is becoming predictable — at
least enough for me to refine a hypothesis: time travel disrupts
the flow of “history” enough that a new prime nexus is created
wherever a time voyager lands. If Eli or A.J. were here first,
their very presence would be enough to draw, to attract, other
chronological explorers, like waves circling a whirlpool. At least,
here on Earth Orange, the interconnections created by the
plasmechanical material that’s been loosed upon this planet only
exacerbates the effects.

“No, no, no!” A mammal boy, younger than Eli,
begins kicking me.

“No more, no more, no more! Go back!” It
doesn’t even occur to me to try a slaversaur roar with one so
young. “No more! There’s no one left to take! There’s no one left
to hurt! Go back, go back! We don’t want you Babylonians!”

“But I am a Saurian,” I tell the
hatchling.

“Then go back to Saronia!” the boy yells.

“It would be Saurius Prime, and I believe for
now I am str —” But the boy is too upset, and instead picks up a
projectile, some bit of discarded mineral material, and throws it
at me.

I move my head and the object misses, but it
grazes Rocket, who is just waking up and now yells “Ow!” very
loudly, and starts rubbing his head. Then he starts to look around,
and then his mouth starts to move, but it’s awhile before anything
audible comes out. And when it does, they syllables sound a small
and squeaky
klnny
, and all he manages is, “Uh-oh.” He’s
never time-voyaged before. “What has Grandfather done now?
Grandfather!” He is wobbly getting to his feet. “What have you
done!?”

But Rolf doesn’t answer. True to character,
he has used all the mammalian skirmishing to slip away.

But it wasn’t Rolf that brought us here. Not
really. True, he initiated the reaction. But I believe what brought
us here, as the evidence supporting my hypothesis grows stronger,
was the sentient plasmechanical material from Saurius Prime, which
is steadily mutating here in this mammalian dimension. I believe it
has been fusing with the properties of the slow pox DNA to make a
neural network, a kind of nerve tissue not just connecting separate
human beings — but separate times, as well.

“Ow, hatchling!” The young mammal has given
up throwing objects and returned to the more reliable
closed-quarter fighting method of kicking.

“Stop! Stop it!” It’s the Bearded Boy, James,
who comes over and puts himself between the hatchling and me. “He’s
not going to hurt you.” But I’m not sure which one of us he’s
talking to, since this angry young mammal can’t understand James’s
words. Though his hand gestures should be eminently readable.

“No,” James says to the other boy. James’s
resiliency surprises me. In what little light there is — besides
the nearby fires, the sun is just now breaking over the horizon — I
believe he sees the surprise in my face.

“When I was on the street,” he says to me, “I
would be kicked or hit for how I looked. I don’t know where we are
now or how we got here, but that kind of hurting has got to
stop.

“No,” the Bearded Boy tells the angry
hatchling again. But then, even in the dim light of the nearby
fires and the early sunrise, he must see something familiar in the
young mammal’s face or in his eyes, because then he adds,
“Please.”

“Naftali!” Eli shouts at the hatchling. “He
won’t hurt you.” Like the Bearded Boy, Eli is speaking the English
of his people. And despite the way plasmechanical material is using
all of us to spread itself around, I don’t believe this young boy
is wearing a lingo-spot. I hope he is as adept at reading
expressions as I believe him to be.

“Excuse me,” I tell the hatchling. Then I
pick him up — I hope he’s never seen
Slaversaur!
— and set
him down closer to James. “You two should be open-palmed trust
colleagues,” I tell him, using Thea’s tongue. I hope it is close
enough. I haven’t been here long enough to fully understand the
local idiom. “You could protect each other.” I repeat it in both
their languages. “We are in a period of uncontrolled time
reactions, and young ones are especially vulnerable.”

With that, I hop over to see if I can help
Eli. Somebody’s always after that boy, and he doesn’t even look
like a dinosaur.

Chapter
Sixteen

Eli: Wrestling With
Angels

583 B.C.E.

We’re all under some kind of house arrest. On
top of that, A.J.’s bleeding from a head wound, Thea seems better
but is still weak, and Rolf Royd, the Dragon Jerk Kid — who didn’t
look so much like a kid anymore when he arrived in a time explosion
early this morning — is running around loose somewhere in Biblical
Jerusalem, causing who-knows-what kind of damage to history itself.
But all of us, especially Clyne and Jeremiah, are guarded now,
surrounded, not allowed to take more than one or two steps.

Apparently, from what I can pick up from
Thea, Jeremiah himself, and the snatches of conversation translated
by the lingo-spot, the people here are deciding whether to stone
Jeremiah to death, since they blame him for many of their
misfortunes.

The arrival of Clyne — and the remnants of
the carnival that he’d been with — was the last straw. The
survivors here are sick and tired and at the ends of their ropes,
with nothing left to lose. There was all that talk about rebuilding
and sacrifice. But I guess too many people think that will take too
long and that it would be faster and easier to kill us — and it
might be worth finding out if that makes God happier. The woman who
keeps talking about Gehenna brought it up. “Your words,” she said
to Jeremiah, “your words said all this would happen. They
made
it happen.”

“If only my words had such power,” Jeremiah
sighed. That’s when they took their spears and knives and rocks and
put us here, in the middle of what used to be their temple, right
next to the altar A.J. and I were building.

“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, when
I talked about makin’ offers to God,” A.J. whispered to me at one
point. “I didn’t mean us.” This was after he’d already been hurt —
one of the flying rocks hit him in the head during the growing
hysteria about the new arrivals.

Jeremiah holds his hands over the ashes
remaining from the fire, then puts them together when he realizes
there’s no heat left. “The summer is past,” he says, “the harvest
is come, and we are not saved.”

A.J. groans and rubs his head.

“Getting rid of me will not free them of
their burdens.” Jeremiah turns to A.J. “When you came here, I was
prepared to vanish from Jerusalem, where I was no longer wanted and
where the sight of me reminded everyone — man, woman, and child —
of their unending sorrows. When I was ready to vanish, it was you
who told me to stay. Told me that things could yet be made whole,
made right. You wanted to start rebuilding, even then, holding on
to a simple faith that even I was in danger of losing.”

While that sounds good, I’m remembering what
Thirty and Mr. Howe were saying before I left, about all the sudden
changes in Biblical history, and maybe Jeremiah isn’t supposed to
stay — maybe that’s one of the “breaks” in history we have to try
to fix.

But now that Thea’s here, and seems to be
cured, part of me wants to just put on my cap and go with her and
Clyne and maybe A.J. But I already know I can’t leave Rolf here,
and on top of that, if something happens to Jeremiah that wasn’t
supposed to…well, we have to keep history from getting even more
messed up than it already is.

Besides Thea feeling better, the only other
bright spot right now is that Naftali seems to have become friends
with the kid that Clyne brought with him — James, the Bearded Boy.
He looks a little bit like a small Bigfoot, I guess, with fur all
over his body.

He’s sort of cute. Thea seems to think so,
too. She’s been translating for Naftali and James, so they can
understand each other. They’ve both discovered that neither of them
has any parents around.

“Friend Eli,” Clyne whispers to me now.

“Yes?”

“What is the custom here with this kind of
snnkt!
legal proceeding? When do we find out whether they
will stone us?”

“I’m not sure. I never read the Bible much.
And even though these people are in the stories” — I point to
Jeremiah and the people surrounding us — “you and I and everybody
else with us sure aren’t. So we’re in the middle of a brand new
story that hasn’t ended yet.”

“Can’t that be said about all
fnnntk!
lives? And stories? And what is this Bible?”

“It’s a very powerful collection of stories
for humans who are Jewish or Christian. Belief systems, about the
way the world was created. About how to act toward other humans,
about what God wants us to do.”

“‘God’…is the mammalian name for
skkt!
the
Endu-kaaan
?”

“I don’t know, Clyne. What is the
Endu-kaan
?”

“Melonokus called the
Endu-kaan
, ‘the
great source of all
thmmb-skizzles
.’”

“I’m not sure that helps.” I look out at the
crowd. They’re talking to one another, pointing back at us. I pick
up stray words that don’t comfort me, like
rid
, and
stone
. I keep watch out of the corner of my eye, then turn
back to Clyne, stepping in front of him so it’s a little harder for
the people around us to see him.

“A
thmmb-skizzle
is what feeds…your
spirit, what sparks your life. Melonokus wrote, during the Bloody
Tendon Wars, that there was no
snnnt!
reason for us to keep
eating each other. ‘Nothing compares to the nourishment of the
Endu-kaan
, so wipe that blood off your face,’ he said.
According to the legends.”

“Maybe it’s something like that. But I never
really went to church or synagogue much. Except sometimes for
Christmas or maybe a friend’s bar mitzvah.”

“Were you of these Jewish or Christian
thmmb-skizzle
groups?” Clyne asks.

“Both, really. I had grandparents that were
both. Parents that were at least a little of both.”

“But there are many such
thmmb-skizzle
groups on Earth Orange?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “They’re all called
religions. Not just Jewish or Christian, either. Muslims, and
people who believe in Buddha, and the ones in India…”

“
Tkkknt!
Hindus?” Clyne says.

“Yes! How did you know?”

“I recall a travel-entertainment shown on
your Comnet, between dinosaur movies. This India was
mentioned.”

I’ve known Clyne for centuries, in a way. But
I realize I don’t have nearly as good a memory as he does.

“And each
thmmb-skizzle
group claims
to believe in God?” he asks.

“Each group has a different name for God, but
in the end, it’s still God. And sometimes, there are more than
one.”

“Each often willing to
zkkkt!
kill the
other groups over what they insist is the essential goodness of
their
gods?”