City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  “Because we can’t,” Mr. Howe added in a sharp voice. “Not anymore.”

  “Then you’re helping your friend,” Thirty finished. Then she and Mr. Howe stared at each other for a moment. “And the rest of us, too.

  Beep. Beep. Her Comphone kept going off, but she’d stopped answering it and kept talking to me.

  “Come back to us, Eli. Help us get all this straightened out. If people lose faith that things work out, that life makes sense, or that it’s even safe to be alive…” Thirty shook her head. “We thought with slow pox, that by creating a great and terrible challenge people could see us triumph over, prevail…that we could still control…” She looked at Thea, then back at Mr. Howe. “But yes, we can’t even control that anymore.”

  “I’m not sure we ever could, Sheila,” Mr. Howe added.

  “But people need faith in…something,” she said.

  My dad’s eyes were still wet, like they’d been since he first saw me. “Just so you know, if I thought they were forcing you to go, I wouldn’t let it happen. But this time, I know you’re choosing it.”

  I nodded. “They said Thea has a different kind of strain…that they thought was extinct. They can’t cure it in a lab. This is for her. She’d do it for me.”

  “Is Mother back yet?” Thea asked. “She used to call me ‘Mermaid.’”

  I pulled her close, put on the cap, and everything winked out. She and I were pulled across the Fifth Dimension, past every color you could imagine — and some that you can’t — stretching out, surrounding you, slowing you down, speeding you up…

  …and then, there we were, at night, in the snow. In Jerusalem.

  Dad wasn’t sure we’d follow the same “trail” back through time that A.J. did, because were using my hat, instead of jumping through a floating time sphere. But I remembered what Clyne said about certain times and places acting like beacons, because they were so disruptive. Kind of like a giant boulder or log in a stream, drawing everything toward it.

  Dad said he would use the chrono-compass he was working on to keep the portal open as long as he could.

  “But we’re not jumping through there, Dad,” I told him. “We’re using my cap. I have to hold on to Thea. She’s in no shape to jump anywhere. Especially a distance of two or three thousand years.”

  “I know. But think of it like keeping both ends of a slide open.”

  “I was thinking of streams.”

  “Or a moving stream. You don’t have to step into it off the same dock.” He smiled at me. “Let’s sit down and talk about time travel when you get back.”

  “Let’s sit down and just talk,” I said.

  “I’d like that,” he answered.

  So the stream, the slide, whatever you want to call it, worked, and so did the Seals cap, and we all seem to have landed in the same place. And, it seems, the same time, since they’re taking us to the Rebuilder now.

  I hope. I heard that name mentioned when they kept talking about “strangers.”

  Torches are used to guide us now, instead of making us easier targets, though Thea is having a harder and harder time of it, stumbling over rocks, seeing things that aren’t here. And there are a lot of rocks — boulders, rubble, ruined walls, the remains of smashed or burned buildings — to stumble over.

  The bones of an entire city.

  “Was there an earthquake?” I ask, hoping that was the explanation. Hoping this wasn’t done on purpose, but being pretty sure it was.

  Everybody looks at each other, then back at me. Right. The lingo-spot. I can understand them. But they can’t understand me.

  Then Thea speaks to them. In their own tongue. Hebrew. I think they all spoke Hebrew, at least until Jesus came along and then they spoke Christian or English or whatever.

  I know Thea speaks a bunch of languages — when she’s well. But is she able to make any sense now, in the condition she’s in? Because it sounds like she was asking about —

  “We weren’t aware this was your birthday celebration, young woman.”

  Okay, so she’s not making sense. But all the people holding torches stop and look at us, and one of the men speaks to her.

  “We don’t expect anyone to be celebrating anything in Jerusalem again for years to come,” the man goes on. “Maybe not even in our lifetimes. Though Jeremiah has promised that celebrations will come again. A jubilee year. Though probably not for us. For years, he warned us that our country would fall because we were ignoring the things God wanted us to do.”

  “And what did your god desire?”

  Thea’s question throws them off. The man points into the darkness, almost dropping his torch. In the light, I can’t see anything but more burnt timbers and broken walls. “At one time, we thought God desired this. This was our temple. The one God asked King Solomon to build. They say his father, King David, could have built it, but he had too much blood on his hands.”

  “It is hard to face your god when you are covered in someone else’s blood.”

  The man holds the torch closer to Thea’s face. “Who are you, another stranger, to say such things?”

  Thea doesn’t seem worried. I guess one thing about slow pox is you’re not so concerned about being polite.

  “I am not trying to make your wounds more grievous,” she tells him. “It is just that birthday parties and whole cities turn very angry when people pit their gods against each other.”

  “You talk in riddles,” the man says. “Perhaps you imagine you are a prophet, too? Jerusalem has no need for more of those.” There’s more anger in his voice. “People came here for Passover offerings in the spring, and for the New Year festival in the fall. What we wanted was God’s favor, some way to make it go easier for those of us who had so little. But most of us were left to watch and smell the meat when the rich would bring their best animals for slaughter on the altar here.

  “What did our god desire?” the man repeats, getting even madder. “Jeremiah told us that it wasn’t the animals’ burning flesh or the flasks of fine olive oil left with the priests — it was the way we behaved toward our fellows. We had stopped considering our ‘fellows’ at all, and grew concerned only about ourselves.

  “But if we no longer cared enough about each other, how could we truly care about anything else? How could we protect our temple? So when the Babylonians came, the city was that much easier to destroy. And so was the temple.” He waves the torch over the ruins, and the moving shadows over all the broken, jagged edges make it seem like there’s still an army of ghosts on the loose. “They took everything out of it — all the gold and jewels they could carry. They took the treasures, and they took the rest of the people—rounded them up as slaves. Everyone and everything but us. To the Babylonian soldiers, we seemed worthless.”

  “Why?” Thea asks. She looks around when she talks, and I wonder if she thinks this is just one big fever dream. The man has resumed walking; I have to pull her along to keep up with him and the group of torches.

  “We are the poorest of the poor,” he says to her, speaking into the flickering dark. “Slaves, beggars, cripples, the very young, the very old. In their eyes, we were of no value.”

  “Then those soldiers need new eyes.” Thea reaches out and brushes her fingers over the man’s face. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the slow pox is making her say crazy things, or words that actually make a lot of sense, if you could stop and think about them. But nobody seems to have that much time.

  The man brushes Thea’s hand away. Then he wipes his face, like maybe some snow got on it.

  “Here.” He steps away from Thea and points. We seem to have come to the mouth of a kind of staircase or tunnel. I hear water go past us. “The Gihon Tunnel. The Healer’s down there.”

  “The Healer? But what about the Rebuilder?” And why does everyone here have a title?

  Nobody answers, of course. My English just seems like some bizarre tongue to them.

  The torch man hands me the light. “Move carefully. The rock
s are wet. But the path will take you to her.”

  “Can’t you come with us?” I really don’t want to hold Thea and the torch at the same time. By myself. On wet stairs. In a destroyed city. At night.

  “I do not understand your words, stranger. But all who are down there are Gehenna-marked in some way. You can choose to be with them, like she is, if you wish.”

  Thea seems to feel the warm flames near her face. “Too hot,” she says. “No sun.”

  “No sun,” I repeat to her, softly, moving the fire away from her.

  I hold Thea with one arm and a torch with the other, and head into the dark tunnel, hoping to find a healer I don’t even know, who may not be able to help me at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  Clyne: Re-enter the Dragon

  March 2020 C.E.

  And so it went, skirmishes and confrontations, through towns and over roads and even in the large metropolis that humans have named for celestial beings called angels. I expected, in a “City of Angels”, to perhaps find enlightenment, or, at least, according to what I know of Earth Orange’s angel stories, a more cosmological perspective on events.

  We did manage to perform part of a show on a roadway named for a long vanished forest — Hollywood Boulevard — where we were not the only costumed or performing creatures plying our wares. Silver Eye read minds; Strong Bess bent various metals, tore thick books, and lifted spectators up by the palm of her hand; the Bearded Boy let other children tug on his long tendrils of body hair, in exchange for small pieces of currency; and the Weeping Bat flew, just like the winged Saurians back home, using her radar — for a price — to find items that customers had recently lost, or to bring back things they secretly desired, but never told anyone about.

  Sometimes, depending on the object, this would cause great embarrassment among the patrons.

  An older woman, a “grandmother” in earth terms, was given a toy, a “doll,” that she’d apparently desired her whole life. She burst into tears, and nobody was sure where the bat had found the doll. Occasionally, the guardians and constabulary ask uneasy questions about such things.

  “Why is the bat always sad, then, if she helps people recover lost items?” I asked Silver Eye one evening. “Things they desire?”

  Because if you ask her, she will tell you that much more has been lost than people know.

  When the municipal armed guardians came around and started asking the performers for their identity cards and official papers, Rocket cut the show short — our first real performance in days — and had us moving along before we could finish collecting revenues.

  I did not even get to do my new act, which involves the wearing of a suit called a “tuxedo,” human clothes which are supposed to denote “class” or “elegance,” according to Rocket. He says he’s trying out a new act called “The Debonair Dragon,” because “that might be less frightening, and people seem plenty scared already.”

  I am supposed to sit at a table — my leg is always discreetly in chains, though, to prevent my running away (though this will not be truly possible until full recovery is made from my reinjured jabberstick wound) — wearing this “tuxedo” and conversing with anyone willing to pay to have a conversation.

  Few people have been willing.

  “You never used to have to follow so many rules,” Rocket complains, as we pack up the Odd-Lots Carnival and prepare to drive away. “Like hanging out yellow flags to prove you are pox-free, and having to wait for an inspection in each new town you go to.” He shakes his head. “I can’t wait until we get to Grandfather’s. He says he was a way to make us rich.”

  “‘Us?’” the Bearded Boy asked hopefully.

  “Me and him,” Rocket corrected. “The rest of you will be on your own, Whiskers.”

  “I have a name.”

  “All right then: Bearded Boy.”

  “A real name: It’s James. James Rodney.”

  This is surprising, the Bearded Boy standing up for himself like this.

  “When I found you, Whiskers, you had no name. At least, no one around to call you anything but Whiskers.”

  “Well, I’m James, and I’m eleven years old. I think.”

  “You think? Then how can you even be sure who you are? If you really want to find out, I can always send you back to the streets.”

  The exchange sends the Weeping Bat into what looks like a skyyttl dance, searching for lost things, and for the rest of the trip, the Bearded Boy is quiet, even when bringing dinner in for Silver Eye and me.

  It only takes two or three more solar cycles, as we head down a road coded with both binary and a letter: The I-10. We are going now straight to Grandfather’s.

  The weather grows hotter, and dryer, and I am happy to get out of this “tuxedo” Rocket put me in some time ago, as we aren’t doing any more shows, and return to my chrono-suit. Even though it has become a little tattered since I’ve been on Earth Orange, the material is much better designed to respond properly to the weather.

  And then, after more travel down the binary highway, we are there.

  What is unusual is that, out of all the humans on Earth Orange, Rocket’s grandfather is someone I already know.

  His name is Rolf Royd; he used to work for a group calling itself the Third Reich. Eli’s nickname for him was the Dragon Jerk kid, though I don’t believe Rolf ever met a dragon firsthand. How the name for these poor Earth-bound Saurians gets dragged through the mud!

  “You again,” Rolf says to me, not in Eli’s English, but in the Reich’s tongue, when the Odd-Lots Carnival pulls up at last, the trucks sputtering to a stop a few yards away from his dwelling, as they use up the last of their fuel.

  His hair is still white, but thinner now, and his mammalian epidermis shows signs of having aged since we last encountered each other in the Fifth Dimension, after leaving Arthur the king and Merlin the wizard behind us.

  Eli, Thea, and I wound up back in the time of Lewis and Clark, as did my time-vessel. Rolf landed someplace where he continued to age. Someplace like right here.

  “It’s good to see you, Grandfather,” Rocket says hopefully.

  “Yes, I expect it is,” Rolf says, now speaking in the English tongue. “Took you long enough to get here. When did I send you on your way? Sometime last September?”

  What Rolf means by the word here is his small dwelling — I believe humans call them trailers — in the middle of a stand of trees behind a large building with signs that proclaim journeyers have found the “Cabazon Casino!”

  We are outside a place called Indio, according to the road markers.

  “Date?” Rolf says, tossing a piece of fruit in Rocket’s direction. It bounces off his chest and lands on the ground, where the Weeping Bat sweeps it up with her mouth.

  “It’s getting harder and harder out there now, Grandfather. It’s getting harder to find vegetable fuels for our engines, and with all the quarantines and permits you need now just to move and gather —”

  Rolf waves his hand at his grandson, with a skut-like gesture of contempt. “I’m not interested in how you failed.” He walks over to my cage and stares more closely at me. “So, my alien friend. Come back to claim that sklaan of yours, eh? Oh yes, we kept your objects. Along with files on you. And all your friends.”

  “We? Who?” I ask.

  I get a skut-like ignoring, as well.

  Rolf turns back to his eggling, Rocket. “Yet the very fact you could bring me someone like this lizard makes me hold you in slightly less contempt, Augustus.”

  “It’s Rocket, Grandfather.”

  “But only slightly less. Did you get any of the things I actually asked for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Used the keys and the pass I supplied to get into the Sandses’ lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the abandoned equipment was there?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Yes.’ Always ‘yes.’” Rolf spits on the ground. “You’d say anything to please me. Come inside
and let me see for myself. As for all your orphans,” — and now he’s waving his hand at us, but again, it seems to be the opposite of a greeting — “they can stay outside.”

  “Some creatures,” I say to Silver Eye, “never get their laan-tandan, their life force, unstuck. It seems to wither in them. Of all creatures I know of in different time folds, on different worlds, human mammals seem particularly susceptible. That human creature,” I nod toward the trailer where Rolf and Rocket have disappeared, “that grandsire, in particular. I have met him before. When he was barely older than a hatchling. And by then, something called the Reich had already withered his laan-tandan completely.”

  Yes, there is a deep coldness, a bottomless hard place, inside Grandfather Rolf. In Rocket, though, there is mostly sadness. No one in that family was able to form a healthy pack.

  “What transpired?”

  I don’t know much. Rolf came here after a great war between the humans. Humans have these concepts called “winning” and “losing.” Rolf’s side lost that war, and yet in the land here, the formation that humans call “America,” they still used Rolf’s knowledge for “secret” programs of their own. To maximize their power. More strange human concepts.

  “Secret programs? Of study?”

  Of ways to make weapons that would allow one to hold on to power for eternity. Yet no power lasts that long, and as for secrets, everything, everyplace is known somewhere, somehow, by something. And every being who tastes flesh at the height of their own power eventually falls and turns to dust themselves.

  “Tell me again how humans became the dominant mammals on Earth Orange, instead of wolves.”

  I am not sure. Perhaps wolves were happy with themselves they way they were. That alone makes you unfit to grasp for additional power. I believe Rocket is the direct victim of such grasping. His parents were lost in one of the experiments Rolf carried out for their government. The ideas behind these experiments seem quite strange — the humans attempting to move, control and change the structure of time and space, and of the smallest pieces of matter in the universe, the very bits that make up their own flesh.