City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  How did their cameras record that image? Why is that paper here, so many years later?

  I’m feeling a little fuzzy, and I’m not sure how much more I can…retain. Mother — Hypatia — always said a fresh mind was important for a new venture. So she believed in naps.

  “I think with the world end, we should nap.” I say it in English. Thirty’s mouth drops open. I’ve never spoken English to her before.

  Alexandria on a warm afternoon was a good place for a nap. “I miss it.”

  “English!? What other secrets are you keeping from us, Thea? What else do you know? Who else do you know?” She taps the picture. Tunk! Tunk! Tunk! Tunk! “You see this bridge? There’s a kind of cult that lives out there at the foot of the Golden Gate, in the ruins of Fort Point. A colony for people who have slow pox. That’s the official story, anyway. It keeps most people away. Except for some preacher who’s been camped out there, talking to everyone, yelling at them, preaching about the end of time itself. How there is no more before, no more after. Everything is just a great big now, and people should act accordingly. It’s all here in the article.

  “The curious thing about this preacher” — Tunk! Tunk! her finger taps in such a frantic way, that I wonder if maybe she doesn’t have as much control over herself as she wants everyone to think — “this Andrew Jackson Williams, is that I keep coming across his name in the archives, too. Just like yours.”

  Tunk! Tunk!

  “We were able to round almost all of you up when you came back to us,” she adds — Tunk! Tunk! — and the corners of her lips go up in a slightly frightening way. “Almost. Eli, that gray alien lizard man, and you.”

  “Our own Mr. Howe is the only one who managed to elude us, initially, but now” — and she flips the paper open, pointing to another fuzzy picture, with a big red circle around a couple of the faces — “here he is, showing up in the company of this Williams character.” Then she slides the paper over to the translator. “Read it to her. Or maybe not.” Tunk! “Maybe if we keep her in here long enough, we can jog her memory.” Tunk! Tunk! Tunk! Tunk!

  Then, the fingers slow down. And she breathes in deeply for a moment.

  “I don’t want to see anybody get hurt, Thea. I think your mother would agree.”

  What? Who’s going to be hurt?

  TUNK! TUNK!

  The translator leaps to his feet, knocking the Truth paper down on the floor, along with a few writing styluses and stray papyrus sheets — and sending Mother’s astrolabe flying off the table.

  I jump and catch it before it hits the ground.

  TUNK! TUNK!

  That sound isn’t coming from Thirty’s fingers.

  This TUNK! TUNK! TUNK! is a loud, clanging thumping noise that fills the air— like bells, like horns, it fills the room, fills my head, louder, much louder than the finger-tapping, piercing the steam around my head and ears and it makes Thirty’s eyes go wide. Without saying anything else, she turns and runs out. TUNK! TUNK! TUNK!

  The translator looks at me. “What do we do now?” he asks. In Greek.

  “Don’t know,” I tell him. In English.

  Yes, Mermaid, you do.

  Who said that? Mother?

  I wonder if this means the lingo-spot voices are back. I don’t care. I have the astrolabe that Mother designed. The only part of her that’s left to me. I will hold it close while I take my nap and try to dream of Alexandria.

  Chapter Three

  Eli: Days of Future Passed

  February 2020 C.E.

  I’ve been in this room before.

  It’s not often I get to say that. Most people seem to spend a lot of their lives in familiar rooms. Not me, not anymore. I’m lucky if I can even stay in a century I recognize for more than a little while.

  But now I’m back in room number 532, from the Fairmont Hotel. Mom’s old room, when she lived in San Francisco, back in World War II. But the room isn’t in the Fairmont anymore. And neither am I. I’m still in the old BART tunnels that the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency has been using as a kind of headquarters.

  And a kind of jail.

  This is supposed to be the “secure” area — that’s what they said, after they ended my DNA mapping early and unhooked me. “We’re taking you to the secure area.”

  “Because of the alarms?” I asked. It was one of the Twenty-Fives, one of Thirty’s assistants, who was taking me. “Does this mean it’s not a drill? That the slow pox has really gotten in?”

  “No time for questions.”

  The pox appears to have spread a lot while I’ve been gone. After we all escaped from New Orleans in the 1800s, by time-porting through the Fifth Dimension with my Seals cap, we wound up…almost home.

  Almost back at my dad’s lab, in the Valley of the Moon, north of here. But not quite.

  We “landed,” or appeared, under the Golden Gate Bridge, near Fort Point. The same place I last saw my mom, who had been working on a secret time-travel project during World War II—or at least pretending to work on it while trying to keep it from being turned into some kind of weapon.

  The world already has way more than enough weapons, anyway. Letting governments invent more —especially time-travel weapons — might tip things over the edge, especially since we were discovering that time travel was changing history in ways we couldn’t always see. For instance, the first real breakthrough in time travel was supposed to come in 2019, in my parents’ lab. But after a few time trips, the flow of history had changed enough that it was suddenly being researched in secret, during the second world war, just like the atomic bomb.

  And just like the atomic bomb, its effects were widespread, and unpredictable.

  I wasn’t thinking of any of this when we landed back on that tiny beach, a few…what? Days ago? Or has it been weeks, already?

  But there we all were—cold, scared, hungry, tired—huddled on the beach with the wind from the Pacific howling under the bridge, and me throwing up.

  Time travel seems to be agreeing with me less and less.

  “Behold! The end of history begins!”

  Somebody was shouting, but my head felt too heavy to turn around and see who it was. And by the time I could lift it —

  “Eli,” Thea said.

  — we were already surrounded by men with guns. And uniforms. DARPA. Army. The same people who’d surrounded my dad’s lab at the Moonglow winery, up in Sonoma.

  And Mr. Howe, who helped run things for DARPA — or at least did, until he became accidentally unstuck in time, too — was yelling at his old troops. Yelling at them, and not at me. For a change.

  “No! No! You don’t understand! You do not understand!” After his experience meeting one of his own relatives in the era of Thomas Jefferson, and ping-ponging back through the Fifth Dimension, it was hard to tell if he was still “in his right mind,” as the grownups like to say.

  Not that his “right mind” was all that right before.

  Some of the guns were aimed at him —

  “Behold! Their swords are still not beaten into plowshares!”

  That voice again. I knew it. But how could it be —?

  A.J. Andrew Jackson Williams, the Army preacher from World War II, and motel owner from that cross-country drive I took with my dad. And a guy who seems to be getting knocked around history almost as much as I am.

  How could he be here? They told me he died in 1969.

  Then the screaming started. Farther down the beach, there were people who were standing in the tide, their clothes soaking wet. They were pointing at us. And at Clyne, with his glistening-but-bumpy green-blue lizard skin, his torn time-suit with his tail sticking out, and his long mouth with all its very sharp teeth, all of which became visible to them when a couple of the soldiers shifted position. And when Clyne started to speak.

  “Friend Eli, we seem to have time-skipped from one mammal rumble to another.” There wasn’t even time to agree with him when shots were fired in the air.

  Ironical
ly enough — and considering how long it’s been since I’ve been in a classroom and had a spelling test or done any kind of English or vocabulary studies, it’s pretty good I know how to use a word like ironically — it was Mr. Howe who managed to escape.

  He ran into the crowd that was surging toward us, stripping off his jacket and the damp, torn up tie he had on, as he tried to blend in with the people on the beach. “Let him go!” one of the soldiers’ leader yelled at the others.

  They weren’t quite prepared to fire into a crowd of people, but they didn’t want to let their guard down with Clyne there, either. “We’ll get him later!”

  Thea and I were quickly surrounded, and my Seals cap — the one that lets me time-travel — was snatched away by one of the soldiers, who handled it with gloved hands. Thea and I were stuck again. More shots were fired into the air, to keep the sopping wet people back where they were, and then the two of us were put into one of the vans that were parked on some broken pavement just above the beach area.

  I couldn’t see what happened to Clyne, but he wasn’t in the van with us.

  How could all of those soldiers be waiting there like that? How did they know where we’d wind up? Did A.J. know? But then, it seemed like they were after him, or his group, too.

  The van started up, and while I wasn’t exactly sure where they were taking us, I had a pretty good guess: down to the DARPA tunnels, to answer questions. I’d had a van ride like that before — after my dad and I had moved west from New Jersey, to his family’s abandoned winery in the Valley of the Moon, Dad was hoping he would left alone to do his research, to figure out a way to bring my mom back from wherever she was lost in the time stream.

  It seems like such a long time ago—as though I wasn’t just a year younger then, but way younger. Young enough to think everything would always work out for the best and that the good guys always win.

  For that earlier drive, they had the windows completely blacked out, and I couldn’t see where I was going.

  This time, there was a place in the back where the paint over the glass had started to peel away, and you could peek out of it.

  I was still shivering, and Thea found some old blankets in the back, the kind they wrap heavy boxes in. They were smelly, but she put one around me to keep me warm. Then she looked out the peephole.

  “All your citizens,” she said, peering out. “where are they?”

  We’d been driving awhile, and I think we were somewhere downtown—Market Street, maybe, or Geary, ’cause of the hills, heading down toward Union Square, and then down toward the Bay, in the direction of the old Ferry building or the Giants’ ballpark…

  I leaned over, pulled the blanket closer, and looked, too. Thea was right, there was hardly anyone around.

  “Maybe it’s Christmas,” I told her. “It always seems to be Christmas when I’m in San Francisco.”

  “The winter festival?” she asked. Then she peered back out the window. “But shouldn’t there be more people out on the boulevards if there’s a festival?”

  “It’s usually the kind of festival people celebrate in their homes.” Not me, of course, not anymore. Back when I had two parents that lived with me in a single place — in a single time — I even used to have two holidays. Not only Christmas trees, but we lit candles for Chanukah, too. Another kind of winter festival. It was something my mother’s family did when she was growing up, and so did we.

  There used to be a lot of lights in our house, when December rolled around.

  “Well, does that explain the absence of vehicles, too?” Thea was looking at me, her eyes widening a little bit, her curly dark hair still wet and clinging to her face.

  Now that she was fourteen, she was managing to look, I don’t know, not so much like a girl, anymore, but kind of cute, even in situations where there was really no point in looking cute.

  Like in a DARPA van, where even having that thought —about her potential cuteness— felt completely beside the point, too. God, now that I’d turned thirteen, was I gonna have corny ideas in my head like that all the time?

  Then I thought about that quick kiss thing we did in New Orleans.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, leaning in to look at me.

  “I’m sorry I got you into all this, Thea.”

  “Into what?”

  “This…” I waved my hands around the van and pointed to the city outside. “All of this. Taking you away from your home, from your mom, when she needed you. From your own time.”

  “That was not you, Friend Eli.”

  Friend Eli! She was sounding like Clyne, even without Clyne being around. Maybe we were all sounding more like one another now. Maybe that’s ’cause we were the only family any of us had left. Like three kids left in the house alone while our parents ran off to the corner store for a moment.

  Except that the parents never came back, and the house was like all of history — we never knew which room we’d be in next.

  “That was not you.” She reached out and touched my face with her fingers. “Tiberius would have taken my mother from me, regardless. His mob would have burned Alexandria, either way. And if you hadn’t come along, he would have taken me, too. You saved my life.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just felt kind of funny all over. We rode the rest of the way sitting next to each other — not cuddling or anything like that — just being quiet, looking out the tiny patch of window that was all we had to make sense of the world.

  It didn’t seem to be Christmas, or even winter, as far as I could tell. It looked like summer. But of course, weather no longer worked in predictable “seasons,” like it did in the old days, so you could never be sure.

  People weren’t off the streets because there was a holiday, it turns out. They were all indoors because there’d been a quarantine. For slow pox.

  I found out during one of those debriefings in the DARPA tunnels. There was no Comnet in the bare, bright room they first took me to, and I had to pay attention to Thirty. But this particular “debrief” was better than the others, because they brought Thea with them. I think maybe they thought if they did something like that, Thea and I would lighten up and start chatting away, and we could all be friends

  “You’ve been away for a few months and things have gotten worse here,” Thirty said, thinking maybe she’d try her version of “helpful.” “Problems with the weather, wars still breaking out, someone somewhere always angry about something, bombing someone else. And on top of everything else, there’s this plague. Thank God it’s slow pox. If it spread any faster, I don’t think we could manage.”

  “Managing” consisted of keeping people inside, mostly. So I guess, in that sense, being stuck in the DARPA tunnels made Thea and I a lot like “normal” teenage kids in the year 2020, who weren’t getting out much. Thirty said something about the government letting people out to shop once in a while, but mostly keeping them apart so they wouldn’t keep infecting each other.

  Even though I knew slow pox was bad, I didn’t think it was that easy to catch. Maybe I was wrong.

  “So what do you want from Eli and me?” Thea asked her. A translator repeated the question to Thirty — who was not expecting either of us to start asking her questions at all.

  “Well, that’s it, isn’t it, my little time travelers? What do we do with you when all of history seems to be unraveling at once?”

  “Why do you have to do anything at all?” I asked back. “Why not just let us go home?”

  “And where is ‘home,’ for the little time travelers?” she wondered, with a hard little smile. Now it was Thea’s turn to ask something.

  “And what of our friend K’lion? Will you be bringing him in here, soon, too?”

  I always kind of liked the way she pronounced Clyne’s name.

  “Ah, Mr. Klein. Yes. You have to understand, not everyone is as…used to his presence, as the two of you appear to be.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  She never answered
. She didn’t seem to like how this was going, and said, “We’ll show you to your rooms now.” That was the last time I saw Thea.

  After that, Thirty started taking me to the cafeteria with her, or at least she’d meet me there, in another attempt to be “friendly,” or maybe in a pitiful attempt to make up for Thea’s absence.

  One time the two Twenty-Fives came to bring me to the cafeteria and I overheard them talking about Mr. Howe. They said he’d gone “off the reservation,” and at first, I wondered if they were talking about the Mandan village I’d been to with the Corps of Discovery. But then when they said, “He’s out there saying crazy things,” I figured it meant he was doing some stuff they didn’t officially approve of.

  That’s when they realized I was listening and they shut up and went back to sipping their vending machine coffee, waiting for Thirty to show up for one of her question-and-hardly-any-answer sessions with me.

  That’s what “going out to eat” was in the DARPA tunnels — me picking food from the same vending machines Thirty and the Twenty-Fives used. I’d sip a hot chocolate while she talked. But sometimes, I’d ask her questions first, the way Thea did. Like, when am I gonna get to see my dad? I can’t believe he wouldn’t have tried to get in touch with me by now. Somehow.

  It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. I’ve seen King Arthur, and Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, and all kinds of people since I last spoke to my dad. I know he’s around somewhere. He can’t have disappeared, too.

  I can’t possibly be an orphan. Time travel couldn’t be that unfair. At least not to a thirteen-year-old.

  Could it?

  But whenever I asked about Dad, Thirty would always change the subject. So I don’t even know if he’s okay or not, and of course she doesn’t tell me anything about my mother, and yet I’m supposed to answer all her questions about history and what it feels like to go through time, and then she slips in something like, “Did you ever want to just destroy the whole world because you were so mad at your parents?” questions that always seem weird to me, though I’ve come to the conclusion it’s kind of a psychology thing, because she thinks I’m keeping big secrets from her. Like some plan Thea and Clyne and I have to change history and rule the world.