City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  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.”

  “We decided it’d be all right for him to give you a Christmas present,” Thirty says glumly.

  “Is it Christmas?” I ask.

  “Eventually,” she says. She doesn’t seem happy at all.

  “Eli,” my dad continues, “in all this disruption, this was the first chance I had to go down the hallway by myself. I wasn’t sure where they were keeping you. But I didn’t want anything to go wrong while you were here.”

  “So you were a prisoner, too?”

  “That’s enough, Sandusky.” Thirty is rubbing her forehead, like she has the world’s most terrible headache. “After all, we let you see him, from time to time.”

  “They let me watch you,” my dad says. “Through the monitors. It looked like you were getting better!” he adds, trying to brighten up the whole weird, painful situation.

  “How could you still work for them, after all they’ve done to our family?” I ask him. “You? Of all people.”

  He’s not trying to make the best of anything now. His eyes are wet. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a soggy, crumpled piece of paper. It’s a crayon-and-marker drawing I made, back when I was little. Barnstormer Robot Man. It seems to be covered in…plasmechanical goo.

  My dad lowers his voice. “I took this from storage. They retrieved it with the wreckage of your friend’s ship. I kept it in my shirt. Here.” He taps his chest. By his heart.

  That’s so corny.

  So how come my eyes are wet, too?

  “I found it when they let me use —”

  “That’s classified, Sands!” Thirty shouts, coming over to us. She grabs the paper out of my dad’s hands. “So is that.”

  “I was using the alien technology,” my dad says to me.

  “That’s enough!”

  “Saurian technology?” I ask, starting to figure out why this secret base feels even more secret, even more like a prison, than it did before.

  “To perfect it.”

  “Stop, Sands. Right now.”

  “Perfect what?”

  “Time travel, Eli. I didn’t know you were coming back! I didn’t know if I would see you again! I came here because I thought it was my only chance to —”

  Beep. Beep.

  “Chance to what?”

  Mr. Howe, meanwhile, has been looking through A.J.’s Bible, going carefully through the pages that were the most bent and wrinkled. Then he stops, and his face goes white.

  Beep.

  Thirty takes a small Comphone out of her pocket. She forgets to put it on “shield” because the face of the man she’s talking to pops out and hovers in front of her.

  Sszzzt.

  The time sphere is still crackling, and she turns away from it.

  “Yes, sir?” she asks.

  There’s yelling from the little holographic man, but it’s the kind of yelling people do when they’re scared, and I hear things like “emergency,” “shut down,” “direct orders,” “panic,” “control,” and even the word fear, and when it’s over Thirty just looks more tired than anything else.

  “That was headquarters,” she says, after a moment. “History, as we know it, seems to be falling apart. To a degree we may not be able to control. Apparently, something has even happened to the Bible.”

  She looks toward Mr. Howe, who is still holding the book, and not moving, except when he manages to get the word look out of his mouth.

  He’s not even sure who to pass the book to.

  I take it before Thirty can. It has old-fashioned color plates in it, the kind that don’t move, to illustrate all the Bible stories. One page is titled “Jeremiah and the Rebuilder, Standing in the Ruins.”

  There’s a picture of this Jeremiah, who I know was one of those old Bible guys, though I’m not exactly sure which one. I remember that Noah had the ark, and David had the slingshot. But which one was Jeremiah?

  Next to him, in the picture, is the one called “The Rebuilder.”

  In the illustration, it looks like A.J. A.J. as someone imagined him dressed in old-time clothes. Real old-time clothes — like way before Thea’s time.

  My dad takes the book from me, and then eventually Thirty looks at it, but it’s Mr. Howe who actually starts reading out loud the text that goes with the picture.

  “The Rebuilder came when

  everything was broken.

  ‘I am a small man,’ he said

  ‘but who will start setting stones

  with me

  one upon the other?”

  “That’s not in the Bible,” he says to himself. He looks up at the rest of us. “That’s not supposed to be in here.” He seems to be shaking a little bit.

  Thirty thumbs through the book now. “Second Jeremiah?” she says. “There is no book of Second Jeremiah. Only one. And Jeremiah disappears at the end of it.” She shakes her head. “Nobody will believe anything,” she adds, “if this keeps up.”

  “Nobody will believe us anymore anyway,” Mr. Howe says, “af
ter they find out everything we’ve done in secret.”

  “You believed us,” she says to him.

  “And then, Sheila, I woke up.”

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  The Comphone again.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Whoever her boss is, he’s yelling at her some more. She sighs, then finally hangs up without saying goodbye.

  “He just received a report from an archaeological dig in Israel. In Jerusalem. They found a piece of mirror, with the word FAMILY written on it. In English. That wasn’t the only thing: a crumpled page of Bible text, also in English. A scrap of paper, like a piece from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Except this was from a book.”

  “Is he sure?” my dad asks. “It’s probably recent. Tourists still go there, even after the war.”

  “It was found hundreds of feet down. Meaning the mirror and the book are each nearly three thousand years old. From a time when there was no English, when there weren’t any mirrors, when they weren’t printing any books. Let alone a Bible they were still busy living out.”

  “It could be a hoax.”

  “The page even has a number. 278.”

  Mr. Howe flips through the pages in A.J.’s Bible. “Page 278,” he announces, almost like he’s won a contest or something, “is missing from this book!”

  Dad lets out a big sigh. “We were trying to control the time sphere, the parameters, how far back the fold in spacetime went,” he says slowly. “Running simple experiments with what your friend Clyne calls a ‘chrono-compass,’ to see if we could control, or pinpoint —”

  “I mean it, Dr. Sands.”

  “Mean what, Sheila?” my dad asks. “I’m talking to my son. That’s the only thing that means anything right now.”

  Thirty doesn’t say anything, but sits down instead. Except there isn’t a chair, and she plops down on the floor.

  “As far as we could tell,” Dad tells me, “the dimensional rift we were working with stretched back about twenty-five hundred years — back to the time of the Bible.”

  “You mean, A.J. just jumped through? And landed there?” I ask.

  Thirty doesn’t seem to mind being on the ground. She puts her hand on her knees, and rests her chin. Like a kid. Before this moment, I could never imagine her doing anything “like a kid.”

  The two Twenty-Fives run over to her.

  “No, no, no,” she says, waving them away. “Just leave me where I am. And bring me something.”

  “What do you need?” one of them asks.

  She nods toward me. “His hat. Bring the young man his hat. Suddenly, we have another job for him.”

  Chapter Ten

  Eli: Gehenna-spawn

  583 B.C.E.

  “This feels a little like Alexandria,” Thea tells me.

  And if she means a place with stone buildings, rock-lined streets, and no lights, she’s right. I can’t see where we are. But it’s cold here. A lot colder than Alexandria.

  Though my face suddenly feels warm…

  Quickly, I’m on the ground, upchucking. Even the fancy cleaning and repair that the DARPA folks gave to my cap, and the new automatic Thickskin apparatus which allows me to keep wearing it on my head without direct skin-to-wool contact, can’t change any of that.

  Time travel still makes me nauseous.

  But I don’t have time to think about that. When I double over, I’m surprised that my hands land in snow. Not a lot of it, not like what you’d get at Fort Mandan or someplace. But still, it’s snow.

  I never heard of snow in any of these hot, dry Bible places. Maybe all this prime-nexus business didn’t work out like they thought, and I’m somewhere cold, like, I don’t know, ancient Norway or Sweden.

  I guess we’ll know if the Vikings show up.

  “Is this Yerushalayim?” Thea asks. She says it differently, even through the lingo-spot.

  I get back to my feet in time to steady her. “I hope so.”

  And now the Vikings — or somebody — are showing up. A bunch of somebodies, moving in the dark. They’re groups of shadows and light, holding the only shiny things — besides the moon and the stars — glinting in the night dark right now: spear tips, catching the reflection of torches.

  Torches held by people who are heading right at us.

  Whoever they are, Thea’s right — this part really is like Alexandria.

  They’re yelling at us, though they’re still too far for me understand what they’re saying. Calling us names, maybe. Strange names, like “Philadelphians.” What’s wrong with Philadelphia? The A’s came from there, and even the Phillies have had a couple of good years.

  Wait, no. The word is Philistines.

  And…Hitters? No — Hittites. And Babylonians.

  Bible names. I’ve heard A.J. use them. Groups of people who lived a long time ago, and then died out, which is exactly what I hope Thea and I are not about to do.

  The spear-holders and the torch-carriers close in on us, and in the firelight, I’m seeing that maybe this isn’t like Alexandria, after all.

  These aren’t professional soldiers. These aren’t Vikings, either. This doesn’t even seem like the kind of mob Tiberius had following him when he came after Thea and her mother.

  In fact, the spears aren’t really all even spears. In the torchlight, I can see people’s ragged clothes, and how their weapons look like they were put together with rocks and splintered wood and strips of leather, like something out of an old caveman cartoon or something, except those shows were funny, and this isn’t.

  These people are scared. Not cartoon-pretend-getting-up-again-after-being-knocked-down scared, but the real thing.

  Whoever these people are, they’re as afraid of us as we are of them.

  “She’s Gehenna-marked,” someone whispers. They’re looking at Thea.

  The place where they dug up A.J.’s missing Bible page was originally for “The Gehenna-marked,” according to the words scratched into nearby stones. A translation of the symptoms described the “slowly-unfolding fever that consumes the afflicted in the permanent fire of their visions.”

  Symptoms that made it sound a lot like slow pox.

  That’s what Thirty told me, right before I left: “ ‘Behold, I will bring healing and cure, and I will cure them.’ ”

  It was one of the lines from Jeremiah, circled on A.J.’s missing, three-thousand-year-old page, which was found near the scratching in the stones. Was he talking about slow pox?

  “Get her,” another voice hisses now. “No more Gehenna-spawn. No more strangers. We’ve suffered enough.”

  With their torches and their homemade spears and their underfed faces, the crowd starts to move toward us. They’re still scared of us, but the fear has shifted, and now we’re just something they want to stamp out, to destroy, the way grownups do when they think destroying something will make them feel better.

  And behind them are even more people, faces I can’t make out in the flames.

  This could be bad. And frankly, things have already been hard enough.

  But I guess sometimes you don’t get a choice. Maybe that’s what my dad was trying to tell me.

  “No,” a voice says. “No.”

  There’s a figure moving on the hill behind the crowd. A shadow.

  Some of the heads turn.

  “Not her,” the voice says again.

  The fear doesn’t go out of the crowd, but their words are mixed with a kind of excitement when they recognize the speaker: “It’s Jeremiah! Jeremiah’s here! He came back!”

  Jeremiah was the one in the picture with A.J. The prophet. He steps even closer to the torchlight, and now I can see his face. He doesn’t look like the painting in the Bible. In those pictures, they make it look like everyone has time to see a barber and keep their clothes washed.

  Instead, Jeremiah’s hair looks stringy, like he’s been camping out for, I don’t know, two years or so, and from what I can see of his eyes in this light, they look like someone keeps waking him out o
f a good’s night sleep, over and over.

  He’s wrapped up in a really big shawl or cape or something. Robes maybe, that have also been out camping for two years. And because it’s cold, everyone has their clothes pulled around them tight.

  “Take this one to the Rebuilder.”

  The Rebuilder! A.J.! Great. Unbelievable! We can see A.J., find out what he’s been doing here, and whether he’s learned anything about curing slow pox. Then we can bring him back with us. The easiest time-travel job ever.

  Before we left to come here, I’d already told them I wasn’t going to go to ancient Jerusalem without Thea. Because trying to help her slow pox is the only reason I’d still have for going anywhere.

  Well, that and trying to find my mom.

  Other guys who have both mom and girlfriend problems at least have everybody living in the same century.

  But of course Thea’s not my girlfriend. But it’s kinda my fault she’s unstuck in time, so I’m responsible for her. That’s what I told my dad, right before I left again. I also told him he could come with us, too.

  “I can’t, Eli,” he said to me. “My job is to try and fix things from this end.” While he was speaking, Thea kept almost slipping out of my arms, like she was asleep, or about to pass out. I kept pulling her closer, so I wouldn’t drop her. “Why are you so red?” my dad asked. “Are you hot or something?”

  “It’s nothing. Look, how come whenever you or Mom have a chance to just fix our family, to reunite everybody, you always say no?”

  “I need to perfect time travel now, Eli. So we can undo all of its effects, undo everything that’s happening.”

  “That’s what Mom said, too.”

  “And when we do that — me here, and she, wherever she is — when we do that, then it will be that much easier to find your mother and bring her back. And then she can stay put. And so can you.”

  “What you’re doing,” Thirty added, “is you’re buying us more…time.” She said it like she was trying, for once, to sound a little bit glad about something, but you could tell it didn’t come naturally. “And if you can find a cure for this strain of slow pox —”