Dragon Sword (4 page)

Tiberius wanted to tell people what
and how to think. Perhaps with the library gone he will have an
easier time of it.

Here on Saurius Prime, though,
they’re avidly working on translating every manuscript sent back
with me — one on pyramid building was a particular favorite. Each
work is added to the library at K’lion’s school — the Middle
Academy of Applied Science and Cognitive Order, where they’ve given
me my own quarters for study and research. All they ask is that I
allow classes to come in occasionally and observe me.

The Saurians fancy themselves as
very logical and professionally curious.

“
Well, dear chick,
kk-kk-kh!
I’ve been sent here to inform you that the players
sk-tkt!
are nervous, and they want your help for one more rehearsal. They
want
t-t-kh!
everything to be perfect for you.”

They’re very generous, these
Saurians. I keep telling them things don’t have to be perfect. Just
lively.

They’re performing a play that was
in the stack of scrolls K’lion saved. It’s an old one, composed a
few hundred years before I was born, by the Greek writer
Aristophanes. Called
The Ditch Diggers
, it’s a comedy about
men who dig the ditches to bury all the dead left behind in war.
Then
the diggers get the idea to start burying the men — the
generals and leaders — who are causing the war. Then the ditch
diggers become leaders themselves and start their own
war.

It’s quite funny.

They won’t be performing it in its
original Greek, but in Saurian instead. I’ll be listening with the
help of another of these lingo-spots: Like the scrolls, it is made
with technology they call “plasmechanical,” which is half biology
and half machinery.

The lingo-spot rests behind the ear
and manages to insinuate itself into one’s skin, one’s
consciousness, allowing the wearer to “hear” a new language in his
or her own words. I’m still not completely sure how it works, and
though I use it, I find it a somewhat uncanny invention.

But the reason they’re performing
The Ditch Diggers
in the school auditorium is quite
touching: It’s all part of a farewell celebration held in my honor
tonight.

I’m scheduled to leave at dawn, in
a new kind of time-vessel they’ve built. Somewhat at my insistence,
I am being sent back to the Earth I come from. I want to make
contact with Eli. But more important for the Saurians, I’m supposed
to find out what happened to K’lion.

Chapter Four

Clyne: Lab Visit

2019 C.E. November

My friend Eli the boy is already
gone. And now there’s fighting in his nest-house.

I am on the roof, and know I
shouldn’t be here. I am doing what they call “spying”— watching and
listening to somebody, or a lot of somebodies, without them knowing
it. It’s a skill I have picked up here on Earth Orange, during the
time I’ve spent as an “outlaw.”

Before becoming an outlaw, I was,
of course, merely a middle school student en route to study one of
the more familiar, parallel, Saurian Earths, as required by science
class. But I was knocked from the charted time paths by Eli, and
later Thea, and I now seem no closer to completing my course work
than Saurius Prime is to its moon. On our planet, it was the
renegade herbivore philosopher Melonokus who said, “Only an
eggshell is predictable, but everything inside and out is subject
to scrambling.”

I’m beginning to feel
scrambled.

Yes, I know I wasn’t supposed to
read Melonokus’s work until I was older.

In my current situation, I am
simply trying to record as much as I can of my experiences, and I
hope that a detailed record of my time here will make up for much
of my missed class work. I have even taken to using their Earth
calendar to date my entries, as events tend to happen fast here,
and I am attempting to calibrate chronology in the native way to
keep track of them all.

Regardless of the dating system
used, however, I’ve had a lot of free time as an outlaw, since my
main occupations have been hiding and looking for food. I found
myself doing what many of the jobless and neglected sentient
mammals do in this culture: I “Dumpster-dive,” which is to say, I
have learned how to forage for food and supplies in what is often
considered waste.

With some of my newfound time, I’ve
been able to tinker with the lingo-spot to record events, or at
least my telling of them, which can be done with the barest whisper
from me.

To some degree, it justifies
talking to myself, which is good, since I’ve been alone here. Now,
though, if I don’t speak up, I may be drowned out by the shouting
below, which is giving me cranial reverberations. Eli the boy’s
nest-sire, Sandusky, is arguing with Mr. Howe, who always seems to
misunderstand the nature of things.

And yet, despite this ability — or
is it an anti-ability? — Mr. Howe appears to work for the central
authorities, whose security forces are looking for me.

Mr. Howe is monitoring the progress
that Sandusky the nest-“dad” (
dad
is peculiar mammalian
shorthand for “sire,” but it pops off the tongue nicely) is making
with his own time-vessel.

Dad.
I just like saying it.
Certain Earth Orange words are like fizzy bubbles on your flavor
nodes.
Jazz.
That’s another one.
Howdy.
They have
much interesting language here.

As for this vessel, that might be
too ambitious a description. It’s not an object that moves or goes
anywhere on its own, but simply a “time sphere.” The idea behind it
is similar to Melonokus’s saying about the stages we pass through
while young: “Your shell cracks, and the universe changes.” This
sphere seems to be more of a crack, or a tear, in the fabric of
time, one that Sandusky created in his laboratory. I believe it was
an accident — at least the severity and extent of the rip suggest
so.

Eli was exposed to some of the
energy released by the accident, and the atomic structure of his
body seems to have changed, making him able to traverse the Fifth
Dimension
by himself
, without an actual vessel. My skin gets
all tar-pitty just thinking about it. Imagine the oral reports he
could deliver at school!

Below me, they’re still arguing
about the power residing in the body of this young mammal. In some
ways, I may be one of the causes of the current
situation.

“
It wasn’t an accident, Sands! You
let him go on purpose. You sent him. You don’t have any authority
to send him on missions. I mean, my God, World War Two!”

“
I’m his father. I know that
doesn’t count for much in your book, but do you think I would
knowingly let him go back there?”

I’m crouched next to a roof window
— like a small piece of hothouse glass that lets light in during
daytime — and can hear their voices coming up from below. This is a
bad place for me to hide, but at least it’s dark now. My
understanding of the rituals of some of Earth Orange’s most famous
outlaws, however, is that they would often return to the scenes of
their crimes, perhaps in order to be caught.

But even though I have no desire to
be famous, like a group elder or a top-stomper in Cacklaw, I would
return to the lab when I was supposed to be hiding, and leave
things for my friends.

I was careful. I left items in
places where I knew only Eli or “Dad” (My taste nodes again! Have I
mentioned the word
taco
yet?) would find them. Mostly, I
took bits and pieces of things I found in those Dumpsters, and I
was able to fabricate a crude version of the time compasses we use
in our vessels. If the mammals on Earth Orange were going to start
shredding the fabric of time, it seemed best to give them the means
of controlling themselves, too. Or at least point them in the right
direction.

You’d be amazed what gets thrown
away here. I’ve found computing machines, silicon chips,
fluorescent tubing, simple electric engines, medical supplies,
pieces of dwellings, various transportation devices, chemicals,
paints and sprays, clothes, toys, and plenty of food.

For the compass, though, all I
needed was the copper wiring from one of the engines and a
collection of highly polished sea stones.

To those I added a battery, then
ran the wire around the rocks, setting up a series of “stops” and
“starts” for the electric impulse, to mimic crudely what is
supposed to happen to light in the simplest of chrono-compasses.
The stops and starts are like the basic
ones
and
zeroes
in simple computing devices, and I knew that
Sandusky-sire’s knowledge would lead him in the right direction to
fashion a prototype.

Just to make sure they knew it was
from me, I’d leave a sign. I find oranges, one of the sweetest
gifts of their planet, and would place one next to my
offering.

The last time I visited the lab,
there was an orange waiting for me, stuffed into the crevice of a
nearby tree. There was a query written on it, in their language:
Thanks, but how do I turn it off?

I’m not sure if that message was
from Eli or his father. I didn’t have time to find out; one of the
shell-protectors posted by the central authorities was making his
rounds, and I barely got away.
Somebody
has been getting
glimpses of me, though. In one of the Dumpsters, I found a news
tally, a paper one, printed on tree fiber — such an extravagant use
of a tree! — called the
National Weekly Truth
. The headline
read:
DINO-MAN OF THE WOODS?
There was a
crude rendering next to it that looked vaguely like me.

The snout was much too long,
though, and the eyes too close together and dull.

Still, it would seem that outlaws
are sometimes famous in spite of themselves. As the saying goes,
“All the eggs look the same, but some hatchlings make more noise.”
Not only was I scrambled, I was getting noisier.

This time, instead of a quick stop,
I thought of climbing to the roof. If I could tap on the hothouse
window and get Eli the boy’s attention, I could actually talk to
him. We hadn’t spoken since Howe and his corps of shell-protectors
tried to corner us at Wolf House. That’s when Thea escaped in my
time-vessel and I fled into the woods.

When I arrived at the lab, the
squabble-roars between Howe and Sandusky-sire had already erupted.
I pieced together that I had missed my friend Eli again: He’d gone
back through the Fifth Dimension to find his nest-mother, who
herself had become displaced in time due to an earlier lab
accident.

“
You told me he agreed to let you
keep that hat under lock and key! That you’d talked him out of
using it by himself! I should have seized it! It’s a
national-security asset!” Howe’s face gets damp and purple like a
horned Saurian when he stays angry too long.

“
It’s a boy’s baseball cap,”
Sandusky-sire says. “And you wanted me to keep testing his
reactions to the particle charge. Anyway, I thought he had agreed
to let me keep it locked up.” Eli’s dad isn’t squabble-roaring at
all now. “He’d become obsessed with the note his mother
sent.”

“
WHY WON’T ANYONE SHOW ME THIS
NOTE!?” It was, apparently, a subject that caused Mr. Howe much
agitation, among the many subjects that prompted such a response in
him. A night-faring bird fluttered away, itself agitated by the
noise from Mr. Howe.

“
He took it with him. It was
written on Fairmont Hotel letterhead,” Sandusky-sire adds. “It was
dated 1941. She’s been back there a long time.”

“
That’s the year we entered World
War Two,” Howe says, looking a bit more scared than a moment ago.
“We can’t have your boy back there changing things
around.”

“
Why not? Maybe so many families
won’t be blasted apart this time. The way I’ve lost
mine.”

Howe doesn’t respond to that. Not
directly. “Why did Eli think he could even find her back
there?”

Sandusky-sire doesn’t say anything
about the chrono-compass. I wonder if he perfected it. I wonder if
he discovered the quantum trace-prints of matter yet, as a way of
pinpointing times, beings, and places.

“
I was wrong to have been so lax.”
Howe remains unquiet. “You should have told me about the note
immediately. I shouldn’t have to hear these things from agents. I’m
having you watched twenty-four hours a day now, Sands. We needed
that boy for new missions. World War Two is already fought and done
with.”

“
Is that why you came here tonight?
To send my son on an errand of your own?”

“
No. No.” Howe becomes a little
distracted, like he’d lost something in his pockets. “I came here
because I really
am
having you watched, but not just with
guards. We’ve been planning this for a while anyway — I didn’t
realize how necessary it had become.”

“
More surveillance?” Sandusky-sire
sounds like he doesn’t much care. “You already know I don’t say
anything important into any of my phones or Comnet
devices.”

“
Yes, well, speaking of Comnet,
we’ve launched a couple of new satellites,” Howe says, damp and
minimally purple. “We’ve trained one of them here on Moonglow, your
lab, and the area around it. It monitors large, moving masses.
Nothing can really hide from it. Everyone authorized to be in the
zone will have their own transmitter. Here.” He holds out what
looks to be a kind of lingo-spot to Eli’s father.