City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  “Yes, which we don’t have a lot of.” Mr. Howe continues climbing down to the bottom, but he also keeps talking. “I’d always thought I was on the side of the good guys. Until I realized that maybe the good guys have lost their way. Watch your step. There still might be electricity coming through some of these old BART tracks.”

  “Isn’t that too dangerous?” I ask.

  “We are living in a time, son,” A.J. says, “when everything is dangerous. But let’s keep the odds in our favor by being as careful as we can.”

  Mr. Howe pulls out a small flashlight and appears to be looking for something along the wall, something besides the old pipes and the dripping water. “Here.” It’s a door. He hands the light to A.J., and pushes against a handle that doesn’t budge.

  “It’s supposed to open right up! These were emergency exits from the old BART tunnels, in case of quakes. We need to use it for a short cut.”

  “A shortcut where? Why are you rescuing us like this?”

  “We’re not rescuing you, son,” A.J. tells me in a friendly way. “Good as it is to see you again. We have come here to solve the time problem.”

  Wait a minute. “Isn’t that the name of something you wrote a long time ago? A book? He told me about it!” I point to Mr. Howe, who looks a little embarrassed.

  “There seemed to be a lot of firsthand knowledge about the effects of time travel in there,” he says to A.J. “We all wondered how you came across the information.”

  “I told you. I was a government employee for a very long time,” A.J. says.

  “We never could find your records,” Mr. Howe says.

  “No, I expect not.” And then A.J. turns to me. “As near as I can tell about this future, nobody reads books anymore, Son.”

  “I think Mr. Howe was all upset about it.”

  There’s another bang! against the door, and Mr. Howe starts rubbing his arm. “This thing won’t budge.” I can see his face, lined by the shadows from his tiny light.

  “Mr. Howe has had an epiphany, son. That’s why he’s here. He wants to make amends.”

  “What’s an epiphany?”

  “Ee-pih-phany!” Clyne says, sounding it out. “Nice mammal sounds. Reminds me of words like mustard. And taco.”

  “An epiphany,” A.J. tells me, “is when you suddenly realize many things, profound things, even, all at once.”

  “We can’t just stay here.” Mr. Howe hits the door again; it still doesn’t move. “Damn. Farther down the tunnel then. Hurry.”

  “Wait. If you seek to open portals,” Clyne says, “perhaps I can be snkkt useful.” Mr. Howe and A.J. look at each other in the dark.

  “Hold on,” I ask both of them at once, “Even if Clyne gets it open, and we find Thea, where can we go after that? There’s slow pox everywhere. That’s what the alarm is, right? All the wheenk-wheenk-wheenk. The whole place is locked down. How can we really escape?”

  “You mean that tink-tink-tink noise?” Mr. Howe says.

  “Whit-whit-whit!” Clyne chirps. “Sound waves tympanically resonating separately for everyone! Brain-wave security so sound is always unique and cannot be faked by others!”

  “It’s a biohazard alarm, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what they told you?” Mr. Howe asks.

  I nod. “They moved me to a more secure area.”

  “Not because of slow pox,” Mr. Howe says. “That’s not what that alarm is for.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Clyne, meanwhile, starts to hum. It sounds like…music. Sort of. Screechy music. I’ve never heard Clyne hum or whistle before, or anything.

  The humming gets louder. His eyes roll back in his head. Then a large SCREECH rips from his throat, like the hunting cry of a fierce giant bird, and all of us—Mr. Howe, A.J., and me— involuntarily cover our heads and duck.

  Clyne leaps through the air, right at the door, and I notice, for maybe the first time since I’ve known him, how thick and sharp the claws on his feet are.

  “TKAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”

  The door pops off its hinges like a tiddlywink flipping through the air, and Clyne lands inside the dark tunnel beyond it.

  After rising back to his feet, Mr. Howe turns to me. His face is doing that sweating thing again. “No wonder he’s always been so hard to catch.” Then he leans in closer to me. “They didn’t move you because of slow pox. They moved you because of intruders. They moved you because this base is no longer secure. Let’s go.”

  He heads through the mangled doorway that Clyne opened for us.

  “But why? What’s happening?”

  “We’re the intruders,” Mr. Howe says. “We broke in.”

  “But you work for them.”

  “Not anymore. Like I told you, I have begun to see.”

  “He’s had that epiphany, son.”

  “But what epiphany?”

  Mr. Howe turns and shines the light on his own face, so that it looks like kids sharing a flashlight telling ghost stories during a sleepover. “What if I told you there was no such thing as a slow pox epidemic?”

  For a moment, there’s only quiet in the tunnel. We can’t even hear the distant alarms.

  “No such thing?” I ask, wondering what he means. “But ever since you started this whole Danger Boy business, you’ve told me —”

  “We told you what you needed to hear. But it wasn’t the real truth about slow pox. We’ve kept the truth from everyone. And A.J. helped me realize how tired I was of lying all the time for a job. A.J. — and all that accidental time travel.”

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth now?” Sometimes, you just can’t tell with grownups.

  “I realized…when I fell back in time, and saw my…relative, Mr. Howard, that I didn’t want to wind up like that. I didn’t want to history to judge me that way, to be part of any lies that could keep messing thing up…for years and years after I’m gone.”

  “And that, son,” A.J. tells me, watching my face, “is an epiphany.”

  “Friends…new information,” Clyne says slowly.

  The tunnel isn’t quiet anymore. Coming from the other direction, where we’ve just been, we see lights — lots of them — just before we hear the shouting.

  DARPA troops. Coming for us.

  They’ve found Mr. Howe’s shortcut.

  “And the fact we’ve been discovered” Mr. Howe adds, “just might be another.”

  “Did I mention,” A.J. adds, “that not every epiphany is a welcome one?”

  Chapter Six

  Clyne: Wolves at Wolf House

  February 2020 C.E.

  And this was where you made the sacrifice for your friends?

  “Yes.” My outlaw status is undergoing another metamorphosis here on Earth Orange. Which is to say, I have once again been “on the lam,” as they say in their filmed entertainments, and yet I have been taken prisoner again as well. But this time, not by DARPA or any of its minions.

  I am trying to explain the circumstances of my arrival to a fellow detainee.

  “We were still in the tunnels, when the whit! whit! whit! of the alarms was still sounding. Mr. Howe —”

  The official from the human government?

  “Yes, originally. Though he appears to have gone in and out of what we call a ‘re-egging,’ on my home planet, meaning a profound change, like a new or second birth, later in life. So Mr. Howe found himself agreeing with A.J —”

  The spiritualist, you mentioned, who you suspect of re-perceiving time, as you do?

  “Yes! He’d had an epiphany — a moment where Earth mammals suddenly veer in a different, and hopefully better — or at least, less gerk-skizzy — direction.”

  Re-eggings?

  “Of a type, yes. But my friend Eli —”

  The human cub, the fledgling, whom you care for?

  “Correct! Eli was focused on his own revelations, shunt-crkked at realizing there was no slow pox.”

  Shunt-crkked?

  “It’s a Saurian
term for the sort of shock you experience when everything you have known or thought you knew changes all at once. Sometimes, it is applied to sudden reversals at the end of long Cacklaw matches. Meanwhile, the others were trying to quiet him, as numerous guardians were headed our way, and we wished to remain undetected for as long as possible.

  “But Eli wouldn’t be calmed, and kept yelling that slow pox had ‘ruined his life’, and was even the excuse used to turn him into Danger Boy.”

  Danger Boy?

  “One of the humans’ many secret government projects, as it happens. Apparently, from my study of Earth Orange history, mammals are unable to govern themselves without using fear, secrecy, and deception.”

  Some mammals.

  “I remain open to new data. A.J. is an optimistic mammal, like you are. He told Eli not to use the word ruined when he thought of his life, because in becoming Danger Boy, he’d taken amazing voyages through the universe that other humans could only imagine. He wanted my friend to consider there might be unseen cosmic reasons for his abilities.”

  What the humans call “religion”?

  “Yes. As our own Melonokus says, ‘The universe is always trying to heal itself,’ something that remains an enigmatic comment for our scientists. Does the universe, as a whole, know itself to be alive?

  “Meanwhile, I chirped in that I thought slow pox did, in fact, exist, saying I had found it was infecting plasmechanical material, from my home planet of Saurius Prime. It was causing Saurian material to grow extra nervous-system connections, changing the Saurian material into something different here on Earth Orange. Something new and unpredictable. Like mammals themselves.”

  You mean the material from your home world — which you said was a kind of blend between something built and something living — managed to show the human mammals that they are bound together in the way of all living things? Feeling themselves parts of a single unity? Perhaps connecting them to each other in the way of bees, with unseen signals?

  “Plants, too!”

  But are there creatures who do not already know this? When I ran free, and took down an elk, I understood I was part of the elk’s life, and he, mine.

  “What kind of Earth mammal are you? I can’t see you with your cage behind mine.”

  I am of a type that humans have hunted and feared for ages.

  “Why is that?”

  They imagine we possess the very traits that frighten them about themselves. You, Saurian, remain a mystery to me as well, even though I can glimpse your tail, flicking through the bars. Continue with your telling.

  “So the guardians kept shining light beams on us from their end of the tunnel. And Mr. Howe wondered who had told them about his shortcut. A.J. was still talking about re-eggings.”

  Epiphanies.

  “Yes. After epiphany, he said transformation follows. And with transformation, with profound change, comes action. Meanwhile, as we ran into the dark, away from our pursuers, Mr. Howe panted out additional explications to my friend Eli, about the human contagion slow pox. He noted that while the disease was indeed real, the outbreaks were something controlled by human security forces.”

  Governments?

  “Whoever wields true power among them. Apparently, their grand experiment was to make everyone believe there was a disease outbreak, in order to practice a kind of herding, or crowd control.

  The humans’ leaders deliberately controlled one of their own sicknesses? Toward what end?

  “Eli queried similarly, feeling not only shunt-crkked, but angry too. Mr. Howe had dissembled, shll-pkkt, lied to him, Eli was saying, when sending him away from his nest. Mr. Howe tried to reason that Eli’s family was already broken apart — his nest-ma’am, his mother, having disappeared before he ever became a time voyager. And then my friend did something very un-Eli-like: he jumped at Mr. Howe and tried to choke him.

  “This had the effect of knocking the light stick out of Mr. Howe’s hand, causing it to skitter away, leaving my friends in the dark.

  “‘No!’ I chirped loudly. I believe it was the first time I had ever reprimanded my friend, a privilege normally reserved for elders, teachers, and nest-parents back on Saurius Prime. But we were being pursued. And this was hardly the time for him to wage a private Bloody Tendon war of his own.

  “Mr. Howe was insisting that everyone, including him, had been shll-pkkt, lied to, by somebody else, usually someone above them in the human chain of command. Lying fascinates me — it’s so rare on Saurius Prime that shll-pkkt is considered an archaic, seldom-used word. Yet here it seems a common mammal propensity to make things up that aren’t true, deliberately altering facts for one’s own benefit or gain.”

  Some mammals…

  “I repeat that I am open to all new data, once I am free to make additional studies. Though my experiences in the field indicate you may be right. But on Saurius Prime, facts are kd-fmn, solid as the ground. You don’t change them for your own good. You can’t. Despite the ultimate unknowability, the opaque srz-bnt of things — that single great mystery where facts and science often lead — you just cannot. Because there is a common place, a common knowledge, between us, that cannot be unilaterally altered for individual gain.

  “Meanwhile, I hop-trekked down the tunnel, where Mr. Howe had dropped his portable beam after my mammal companions had raised their limbs, after hearing the words Don’t move!

  “Though our pursuers had many small lights of their own, I knew they could not see well in the dark. Not as well as a Saurian.”

  Or other types of animal folk.

  “You make me thirst for new research. There is still so much to learn about Earth Orange. However, in the dark, I knew I could use humans’ limited seeing to a quick advantage, and turned Mr. Howe’s light on myself. ‘Slaversaur!’ I trebled, to keep their interest high in chasing me. I turned and ran into the darkness. And ran some more. I could hear my pursuers yelling, using frk words — forbidden language — every time they tripped and stumbled. Which was often, due to their limited night vision.

  “But I was limited too, since I didn’t know where I was. I decided to trust my sense of smell.”

  That’s a good sense to trust.

  “Yes. I went deeper into the tunnels, following the old rail line, toward the smell and sound of water.

  “I eventually came to the tunnel’s end: a mass of debris, and rock, and tangled rail. That’s why these passageways had been abandoned — some earlier calamity left them unused, and thus free to be colonized by the government of Eli’s time, converting them to a locus with a secret purpose.

  “The Guardians who pursued me were yelling at me to ‘Stop! Halt!’ and generally desist in my running. They were tired of the chase and were even firing their weapons at me. I was still able to move fast enough, despite my old jabberstick wound, to avoid exploding into many tiny pieces. Yet why go to all that trouble to catch me, if they only wanted to blow me up?”

  You look for logic where there is fear and passion.

  “There may have been fear and passion, but soon enough, there was water. Much, much water. The explosive projectiles were dislodging the rock barrier behind me, which had been fashioned into a sealed wall, a barrier against the bay outside the DARPA tunnels. The excitable mammals pursuing me suddenly realized the same thing and screamed the command ‘Hold your fire!’ at each other. But it was too late.

  “Soon a trickle, then a torrent, of liquid came through the tunnel, pouring over the tracks, causing sparks and confusion, but eventually allowing me to stop running and start swimming.

  “I squeezed my way through a small opening into a vast body of water.”

  Like the fish tribes.

  “Yes! Like the Saurians on their water planet.

  Are you a fish?

  “I don’t have the sshezz-flmm, the breath capacity, for it. Behind me the DARPA tunnel walls continued to give way. But once again, my good intentions may have caused even more confusion for my friends, and this time, of a l
iquid nature.

  “Being separated from them by the roaring water pouring in, I made my way to the surface, gulping down much sshezz, much air, and finally found myself under the very bridge Thea and I had flown by before, in the Saurian time-vessel. The same bridge we had returned to when we time-ported back from the days of Clark, Lewis, and North Wind Comes.”

  Human names I recognize. From the time of my first grandmother, Silver Throat.

  “Yes! I knew Silver Throat!”

  You are like the Fish Man in her stories.

  “I am the same Fish Man! She was my friend! Who are you?”

  The signs here call me the mind-reading wolf.” In my tribe of wolves, they say this ability was passed down from Silver Throat herself—that after her encounter with the Fish Man, she grew to understand the thoughts and language of many different creatures. But perhaps I am a novelty simply because humans are always startled whenever they are actually listened to.

  And is that what you are called? The Fish Man?

  “Is this the kind of prison where you are assigned new names? I haven’t been in one of those yet.”

  They don’t call it a prison. They call it a carnival. It’s a traveling show, for the amusement of humans.

  “Really? Amusements? Do they show what they call ‘movies’ here? Especially one called Slaversaur!? That apparently amuses humans, too, though the reasons for it elude me. If they run one about Gwangis, however, we can learn new words. Like amigo. And mañana, which refers to the movement of time. You can call me by my name, though.” And I pronounce it for her in my native Saurian.

  And you can call me by mine: Silver Eye.

  “You are named in remembrance of your forebear, Silver Throat.”

  Yes. And because I am said to see things. I see how you came to us here.

  “I have been telling you the story.”

  I also see that you have more to tell. Concerning your friends.

  “Yes. It’s how I came to be captive here, in this — you said, ‘carnival’?”

  Yes. Rocket Royd’s Traveling Circus and Odd-Lots Carnival.

  “Do carnivals always camp in ruins? I understand this place was once called ‘Wolf House.’ Perhaps you knew of it?”