Music was coming from every direction, the same kind of tinny techno I was used to hearing from fair rides, but louder—and including sounds I’d never heard on the radio. In music class, we’d had a unit on uncommon instruments. I heard some of those: a didgeridoo, a theremin, a zither. It sounded like all of the world’s instruments were playing in one frantic orchestra.
And then there were the colors. The fair was always a whirlwind, but these were tones I’d never seen before, something flickering between fuchsia and aquamarine, a brown that looked gold every other time I blinked. Maybe I’m embellishing it in my memory. I just remember, in the first few minutes out in that world, feeling like confetti in a kaleidoscope.
But the real kicker was, as you’ve probably guessed, the people. Or . . . well, I guess you would call them people. You just wouldn’t call them human.
What I find remarkable now is how quickly I recognized them as aliens. We’re collectively sophisticated enough, now, to think that real aliens probably aren’t the tentacled creatures of our mid-twentieth-century imagination. We think we can’t possibly know what sentience from another world might look like. As a child, I had internalized that gooey 1950s imagery. But I was a smart child, so I knew on some level that if I did ever encounter an alien, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.
And yet when I saw that all the people were green, some bearing an extra arm and all with bizarrely shaped ears—my immediate reaction was to tighten my hold on Dave’s hand and whisper, “They’re aliens!”
“Well, at least part alien,” he said, distantly. I now suspect he was focused on keeping us safe. We were getting quite a few stares as we walked through the crowd. Looking around, I started to realize that Dave was right: The people were human enough that there had to have been some crossbreeding. But there really wasn’t anyone like us. Not everyone was quite the same shade of green, and some people had only two arms, but no one looked normal. No one seemed quite human.
“Dave, what are we gonna do?” I asked him.
“We are . . .” he started, and then stopped walking and nodded decisively. “It only makes sense that if we spun one way on the carousel to get here, we have to spin the other way to get back. We’re not having any luck finding the answer out here. I had hoped for an information booth or some such, but alas. I don’t want to worry your parents. So we’re going to return to the carousel.”
We turned around. The noise and the lights and the strange green people were all around us, pressing in on us, getting louder and brighter and weirder.
It was then I remembered that Dave was terrible with directions.
“Screwed” was one of those words my parents used casually and often at the dinner table, but I was not yet permitted to say. Whenever I protested, they said my teachers would get angry if I said the word at school. I didn’t want my teachers to be mad at me, so I kept it out of my daily vocabulary. But I knew what it meant. And now seemed like a perfect time to practice.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” I said.
“Goddamn fucking horseshit,” he muttered.
I waited and looked around while he cursed for a few minutes.
Eventually, he decided we were going to ask for directions. This proved to be difficult at first. The fair was swarming with alien-people, greenish and excited, snaking in long lines out from the fried-food stands and Ferris wheels. We walked slowly, trying not to get too much farther off course.
Finally, I glimpsed a grumpy-looking guy standing near a booth that had no line in front of it. He was yelling occasionally, but no one was taking the bait. The booth’s side advertised ARCHIE’S ENORMOUS ANCIENT “COW.” ONLY FOUR LEGS. HEALTHY DESPITE DEFORMITY. SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT. Before the words were some numbers and a bizarre symbol that I assume meant money. We approached him.
“Y’all wanna see the cow?” he growled as we came up. Listening to him speak up close, it finally struck me what was weird about everyone’s voices. They sounded the same, but wetter, like a damp lisp.
“We were hoping for directions to the Village of Yesteryear,” Dave said. The guy—Archie, I assume—looked at us skeptically for a moment, then picked his nose.
“Gotta pay to see the cow first.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
The guy shrugged. “Not gonna give free directions to some prejudiced asshole.”
Dave furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
“Won’t sleep with our kind. Keeping your line pure and all that bullshit. It’s the twenty-sixth century, time to wake the fuck up.”
“Oh!” Dave said. “No. Listen, I recognize this sounds foolish, but we’re actually from the past.”
Archie picked his nose again.
Dave gave up and reached into his pocket. “Fine. We’ll see the cow if you give us directions. Is five dollars enough?”
The guy’s eyes went wide. In fact, I think his eyelids contracted fully into his skull to reveal more eye, which was something I could not do, but I guess that’s what evolution will get you. He snatched the five-dollar bill from Dave’s hands.
“What the fuck, man, where did you get this?”
“From my pocket,” Dave said slowly.
“This is . . . shit, I’ve never seen one of these except in a museum.” The guy paused, looked down at the bill again, and reverently folded it before placing it in his pocket. “You say you came from the past? Where’s the time machine?”
“We think it’s the carousel in the Village of Yesteryear,” I piped up. “That’s why we want directions.”
“Got it.” His ear flaps rotated slowly. “Tell you what, you paid to see the cow, you see the cow. You go on in and wait. I’m gonna get the Engineer.”
“What about the directions?” Dave demanded.
“The Engineer is gonna be able to help you. I, uh, I don’t know the area that well.”
“Can you give us a map or something?” I asked, trying to be helpful.
“Just chill with the cow and I’ll be back real soon,” the guy said and ushered us inside. He zipped the tent flap behind us.
“Well that was fucking useless,” Dave muttered. Although I couldn’t disagree, I said nothing. I was too busy adjusting my mind to the fact of the cow in front of us, which in fact was not a cow but a horse. It looked like a perfectly normal horse. It had four legs and a snout and a tail, which it flicked at us in a vaguely irate manner. I went forward to pet it, stepping over the thin rope barrier separating it from the walkway. I would hate it here too, cooped up in this strange little tent.
I petted the side of its face, like my friend had taught me at her pony-riding birthday party. “It’s all right,” I said softly. “You’re not a cow.” It blinked one enormous eye at me and pushed its head into my hand.
Dave began to pace back and forth across the thin strip of dirt.
“This is not a good situation,” he said. I continued petting the horse. In my head, I named her Lyra after the protagonist of my favorite book. “We’re leaving. We can find a map somewhere else.”
“But the weird guy told us to stay,” I said.
“Yes, well, you have to trust me more than him,” Dave said shortly. He strode to the end of the tent and reached down to pull up the zipper.
It didn’t budge.
Dave cursed and tried the entry flap. That zipper didn’t move either.
“Sometimes mine gets stuck in a piece of fabric from my coat,” I said.
“It’s not that,” Dave said. He crouched on the ground, attempting pull up the zipper with all his might. “It’s more intentional. I’m guessing a magnetization system of some kind. Regardless, it’s working. We’re trapped.”
I leaned against the horse. I was starting to feel a bit sick. I wanted my mom and dad, and said so.
“Well, I’d like to see them again too, but I can’t promise anything,” Dave said. Tears sprang to my eyes. He took another look at me and, for the first time, appeared to realize that I was a child. Dave had a son, and
it always mystified me to consider what kind of father he would have been. He always treated me like a grown-up. Now, though, it seemed like he understood that I might be having more trouble than the average adult. He sighed.
“We might as well talk about something else until they come back,” he said. “Have you started Latin yet?”
“No,” I said.
“But you know the basics,” he clarified.
“No,” I said.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Well, you’ve heard of the Metamorphoses, at least.”
“Yes,” I said, giving up. I had actually heard of the Metamorphoses in a book somewhere. I didn’t know what they were or how they related to Latin, but that didn’t matter. Dave was going to tell me.
So I petted Lyra’s snout, and she looked at me with one big lovely eye, and Dave talked about the Metamorphoses for a long time. He used all kinds of words I didn’t know and referred to people I had never heard of, Roman emperors and conquerors and poets. He talked about his own struggles with translations and the intricacies of the stories.
I smiled and said “uh huh” in what appeared to be the right places, because he nodded at me and continued every time. Something I both loved and hated about Dave is that he always assumed I was right there with him, on the same intellectual level. It was difficult because I usually didn’t understand his speeches. But it was nice to have the benefit of the doubt.
Dave was right in the middle of a soliloquy on the poet-emperor relationship when I heard an odd click and the sound of a zipper. I jumped, startling Lyra, and turned toward the entrance. Dave stopped talking abruptly and followed suit.
The tent parted at the zipper and through stepped our friend from before. It was hard to tell on his alien face, but he seemed nervous. He held the flap open for a second person.
She was much more familiar. Much more human, I should say, because although I had never seen her before, she immediately made me feel as if I was back in a world I knew. She was young and dark-haired with only a slight green tinge to her skin. She had only two arms and the flaps on her ears were delicate, almost unnoticeable. She smiled at us widely as she stepped in.
“We need to leave now,” Dave said. “We’ll find our own way. Let us out.”
“I am so sorry for the inconvenience,” the young woman said. She had the same wet voice as Archie (who was now hanging back in front of the entrance, picking at a scab on his chin). Her voice wasn’t clammy and gross, though—it was smooth and sugary, like the thin line of honey right before you stop pouring. She reached out a hand to Dave. “I’m the Engineer,” she said. “It’s an honor to meet travelers from so long ago.” Dave kept his hands on his hips and said nothing. The woman lowered her palm.
“We’re going now,” Dave said.
“I was hoping you could help me,” the woman said.
“We can’t,” Dave said, his voice rising.
It was as if she hadn’t even heard him. “You see,” she continued, “I discovered the carousel and built the Village of Yesteryear, and I’m very curious to hear more about life in your time. It would help me expand the village and make it much more realistic. After all, we have some photographs and the articles online, but the Internet was slow in 2002, and after the asteroid, well . . .” she shrugged. “It destroyed a lot of primary sources. Regardless, there’s no comparison for firsthand witnesses. And I’m sure you must be curious about how the carousel works.” She looked at me for the first time and smiled, a warm, sweet smile that reminded me of my favorite teachers.
“I am,” I said. Dave shot me a furious glance and I immediately realized I’d made a mistake. But I was curious. I read all sorts of fantasy and time-travel books and I always wondered how the whole apparatuses worked. The authors never fully explained things.
“The carousel is linked to a very specific time: October 23, 2002, six o‘clock through six-oh-three p.m. The idea is that as people ride the carousel here and now, the circular motion creates just enough of a link for them to see what the world was like in 2002, but not enough to actually interact with it, and not enough for the past world to see them. But it wasn’t working.
“Or so we thought. Now I discover that it was working, but in a different way than we expected.” She stepped over the rope and petted the other side of Lyra’s snout. Lyra shuffled and turned toward me. “My question is, if you’re here, where are all the other carousel riders? All my data indicates that the ride would have been quite full at that time.”
“We were the only ones,” I told her honestly.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” she said softly, leaning a little closer. “You can trust me.”
“She is,” Dave said, exasperated. “She spun that little booth so fast that it only took us.”
The woman frowned and leaned back. “Possible,” she muttered to herself, “but . . . no, it’s so unlikely. Tell me where the others are.”
“It’s really just us,” I said. I was starting to get afraid.
The Engineer looked down at me, opened her mouth, and then shut it again and smiled. “You’re standing by that?” she said. I nodded.
She turned to Archie and jerked her head slightly to the right. That was the only warning. The next thing I knew, the green man had pulled out something like a gun from a flap on his side and shot Dave.
“No!” I screamed, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought: He was only bound. Two thin metal bands wrapped around him at the chest and shins. He fell to the ground struggling.
“Magnetic ropes,” the guy said. “Good luck getting out of those. I’ve seen your movies. Knives ain’t gonna do nothin’. Now, me, I could let you out right now—” He clicked the side of a metal disc on his belt, and the ropes loosened for a moment. Dave was starting to stretch out his arms when the guy clicked the disc and the ropes tightened again. “But I won’t.”
Dave started cursing at them in a long, steady stream. Terrified though I was, I had to admire the sheer variety of words he was throwing at our captors.
The Engineer turned to Dave and spoke over him, her voice loud and dripping. “I’ve done a lot of research to make this Village as accurate as possible. But until now, I couldn’t know everything. I want all the details, and I need a variety of primary sources to get a full picture. Plus, there are the scientific possibilities. There are no full humans left, no matter what those purist groups claim. We could learn so much from you.”
She crouched down to just below my height. She was truly beautiful, like an elf from the movies. Her ear flaps fluttered like feathers.
“We won’t hurt him if you tell us where they are,” she said to me. She reached out to my cheek as if I were the horse. I shied away.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Get away from her!” Dave yelled from his place on the floor.
She leaned in close and whispered in my ear, her breath damp and cool like a winter swamp. “We will hurt him if you don’t.”
My mind went wild. “The Wisconsin Cheese Stand,” I blurted. The woman’s brow furrowed. “I mean, where the Wisconsin Cheese Stand was in 2002, I guess. I don’t know what’s there now. But that’s where they were headed. We got separated from the group.”
She stood up and turned away from me, moving toward Archie. She nodded her head pointedly and they stepped outside. I heard a small click after they fully zipped up the flap. Outside, their voices were audible but muffled. The Engineer was tense and excited, her sidekick less so.
“Sarah,” Dave hissed, jerking me over with his head.
“We need to get out of here,” I said to him.
“I fucking know,” he whispered urgently. “Keep your voice down. Now listen. I would tell you to run for it on your own, but I’m not sure you would make it. I think that bitch is going to leave us in here while she looks up her goddamn antique maps to find out where the cheese stand used to be. We’ll be alone with the idiot. I’m going to distract him so you can steal that disc from his belt.”
&n
bsp; “I can’t do that,” I said. I was starting to panic.
“Yes you can. Here—help me up—” He had managed to sit and was struggling to get upright. I pushed and shoved until he was steady on his feet. “Listen very carefully. This is our chance. While I’m talking, try to get closer to the asshole, and when I say Catullus, that’s when you take it. Click the top button and the button on the side. If I’m right, the top should unlock the tent and the side should unlock me.
“Once I’m free, I’m going to attack. We won’t have a lot of time before the Engineer gets back and finds us gone. So after I disable him, we’re getting on the horse and leaving.”
“But we don’t have any idea where to go,” I said.
“Yes.” Dave exhaled. “That’s still an issue. But it’s the least of our problems. And we can cover a lot more ground on a horse than we could on foot.”
“So we’re just going to ride around until we find the carousel again?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to ride a horse?”
“I know how to ride a motorcycle. It can’t be that different.”
“Dave.”
“Sarah.” He looked severely into my eyes. “You can do this. You need to do this. Believe me when I say I would not ask you unless it was absolutely necessary. He won’t be looking at you; you just have to make a run for it, quietly.”
“But what if I—”
Dave shushed me. “Go back to the horse,” he said under his breath, and I hurried back to Lyra. She sniffed around my pockets, which still smelled like pretzels. Her hot breath was oddly comforting.
“You’re gonna save us from the weird aliens. A cow couldn’t do that,” I whispered to her as the carnie and the Engineer walked back in. This time, she started directly toward me.
“Sweet girl,” she said, “I just wanna make sure. You aren’t lying to me, are you?”
I shook my head. I think if I had spoken, I would have started crying.
Onward, Drake! Page 19