Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

***

  “Ready for a little demonstration?” Jeremy said, stripping the tablecloth off his invention.

  She clapped the unveiling, her face sour because she couldn’t help herself. But this was also her little brother, who she’d been supporting in his mad adventures since before he could walk. It seemed to be her calling in life, to be that hard shell around his soft underbelly. A creature far too tender for this world, she doubted he would have survived childhood without her.

  ***

  Camellia recalled fighting the cat off Jeremy, stabbing it with a pen when it jealously tried to rip his face off, herself just three years old. He, still a toddler, couldn’t help from crawling steadfastly into its swiping paw, as intent to stuff the cat in his mouth as the cat was intent to stuff the toddler in his.

  She reminisced over that time when, at the age of five, he’d decided to best the premier high-wire daredevil in the whole world, James Hardy, who’d walked across Niagara Falls in 1896, and instantly became his hero. He’d decided to ride his bike across the clothes line connecting their tenement with the one across the street. She found him hanging helplessly and screaming at the midway point, his bicycle fallen onto a Gestapo vehicle below. The commandant, less than enthused, was taking potshots at him with his Luger to teach him a lesson. She had dashed across the wire, displaying a sense for balance she didn’t know she had, yanked her brother up, thrown him over her shoulder, and bolted back into the house, dodging bullets and mad laughter from the officer below the entire time.

  The mad scientist years really didn’t kick in until he was seven, and stuck with him from there on out. She found him pedaling a contraption off their balcony that powered a fan blade meant to help him fly clear to the roof across the courtyard. He, of course, landed in the same colonel’s convertible two-seater as he had years before.

  (The colonel still carrying on with the woman downstairs in an illicit affair. She was Jewish, and he’d eventually march her off to a death camp and denounce her for betraying him once he was done with her, but that was another story.)

  She rescued her brother by sneaking up behind the colonel and pulling his gun out of his holster and then holding it fast on him. He teasingly dangled the seven-year-old in his hands, making him a moving target.

  “Go ahead, shoot!” the colonel jeered.

  “Let’s think this through, shall we?” Camellia retorted. “A nice car like this requires a lot of upkeep. Such an expense in these hard times when money is scarce. Would be nice to have a couple of street urchins like us to slave over it for you, to attend to every detail with a loving devotion that money just can’t buy.”

  “Keep talking, kid. So long as you’re more entertaining than thoughts of snapping his mangy little neck, he lives.”

  “You can’t keep carrying on an affair with a Jewish woman in full daylight and hope it’s not going to get back to your Nazi friends. A couple of lookouts watching every time you come visit can be worth their weight in gold. They can be washing your car at the same time, moreover. Doing double duty, as it were.”

  “I do like how you think, child. You should consider a career in sales. Still, it’s hard to beat wringing a little weasel’s neck for a sense of satisfaction.”

  “Maybe you’d like to add to your collection of vintage cars. War-ravaged Europe… I imagine a lot of them turn up, their owners long dead or flown the coop for greener pastures. Someone to scout for the cars, someone to attend the growing collection. You might have to keep them just as hidden as you keep your concubine. Can’t hire just anyone to take care of the cars you obtain illegally, can you?”

  “Such a smart little girl. I can see you matured early having to mind your brother. I suppose you owe him that.” He sighed. “I wish I could have met you in a calmer state of mind. I must confess, I’m entirely swayed by your rhetoric. But I can’t seem to dial down the urge, the blood running hot like it is, to do in your brother. Maybe the next time we talk, we can come to a better understanding.” He tightened his hands around Jeremy’s neck.

  She fired into the colonel’s precious car to make her point. He quickly let go of Jeremy, and she and her kid brother fled with the Luger she had kept to this day.

  Their actual parents dead, among the first casualties of war following the incident with the colonel, they fled their adoptive parents, who’d have ratted them out in an instant, and had been on their own ever since.

  ***

  Jeremy’s recital jogged her back into the moment. “It’s meant to look superficially like a conventional rifle,” he said, “one that won’t fire, so if confiscated, it’ll quickly find its way into the junk pile.”

  He loosened the joints and wrapped the metal parts around his waist like a belt only slightly wider than her own. He pressed the button, and an energy field materialized around him. “Go ahead, fire at me.”

  She took the Luger and fired at the edge of the field, not willing to risk actually hitting him. When the shield easily deflected the bullet, she got braver with the gun.

  As fate would have it, the field collapsed, short-circuiting, with the firing of the final shot. The bullet caught Jeremy in the heart. She had become caught up in his zeal, happy to prove to him how brilliant he truly was. Now she had to find some other way to communicate how much she loved him as the life bled out of his eyes.

  “If only that energy field could trap your soul in your body for me,” she said.

  “If only you could protect me from myself, sister. You’ve been at it long enough. Time to rest. Time for both of us to rest,” he said. The last of his life essence flowed out of him like water into sand.

  Her eyes flooding with tears, she looked up at the sound of squeaking floorboards to see an intruder standing gun in hand, aimed straight for her. One of the jackals from the street must have stolen up the second her guard was down. But his image was too blurred to make out, thanks to the tears in her eyes. Sensing that, he aimed the gun instead at Jeremy’s invention, shot it to hell, then lowered the weapon, and exited quickly down the stairs. She picked up the Luger and fired, realizing only then that it was empty.

  ***

  Mort came back into the moment, reoriented himself to the trailer, saw the Luger in his hand, and realized only then that the man who had come to kill her brother that day was the chocolatier. And that chocolatier was T-Rex, who’d gone by Cicero in those days. He was an assassin then as he was now.

  This time T-Rex wouldn’t get away from him.

  He should have taken the Luger, walked across to the Airstream, and gunned him down then and there. But there was the curious fact that this guy was still alive, hadn’t aged a day, and had somehow crossed paths with Mort yet again. There had to be more than unfinished business between them. Could he be here, too, to undo the wrongs he did then? Or was it something else?

  Mort would bide his time, play it cool, and this time he wouldn’t drop his guard. He reminded himself, none of his loved ones could be his intended target, in any case; it had to be their ward, the man building the time machine. This assassin had a real thing for scientists who didn’t respect the timeline. After revising his original theory as to why T-Rex was here, he felt even more justified in holding off. There were mysteries within mysteries that needed chance to breathe. He’d just now uncorked the bottle. He couldn’t rush the drink.

  Not the least of those mysteries was why Mort appeared in yet another timeline set during WWII. He couldn’t be a male soldier on an aircraft carrier and a female femme fatale at the same time, could he?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “You’ve been looking out that window for the last few hours.” Santini wondered if Mort was staring into the present, the past, or the future. “You turned to a pillar of salt at this Sodom and Gomorrah scene, or some other?”

  Out the window, the two scientists were going at it over their workbench; Sister Gretchen was handing out finger sandwiches. Santini’s cereal was going down his gullet like a mouthful of gravel. “And what’s with the
Luger?”

  “Poetic justice comes in many forms, some of them more pissy than poetic.” He regarded the interior of their new digs. “Do me a favor, check out T-Rex’s memory palace and tell me if you find any more striking parallels between the past and the present.”

  Santini ran his eyes over the place. “No, I’m good.” He slid the bowl of cereal out of the way, and the plate with the bacon and eggs toward himself. He reached for the vintage salt and pepper set. It was a miniature 1940's television cabinet-console. When he turned the ON button, the salt and pepper stood out from the set so that he could use them. Made of plastic, the set measured roughly 3" x 3 1/2" x 1 1/4". He laughed, not realizing he was much on tchotchkes until now.

  But manhandling the collectible, he got more than he bargained for. Salt and pepper weren’t the only things he shook out of it. A bit of his past slipped through as well.

  ***

  Santini studied his plate of potatoes and sauerkraut. He could no longer remember what any other food tasted like. World War II Germany was hell on the gourmand. Not that he ever displayed such affectations, but right now a celery stick would without doubt have triggered an orgasm.

  He gazed at the German high command the table over, laughing gaily over their wiener schnitzel; the lean tender veal cutlets, pounded flat, then breaded and fried in oil. Also in evidence, spatzel, the German dumplings shaped like long thick noodles, served with gravy and mixed with green beans. And of course—what had always been a German staple in less lean times—bratwurst, the pork sausage making Santini’s mouth water. Just the odors were enough to make him light headed.

  Refusing to feel sorry for himself, Santini contented himself with his potatoes and sauerkraut, took advantage of the odors wafting from the table over to imagine he was biting down on different food entirely. He chuckled at the salt and pepper shaker, a miniature TV, as he lent some much needed variety to his dish’s flavoring.

  He looked up from his plate as an SS captain walked up to the German high command, gestured and called, “Heil Hitler!” As everyone around the table returned the gesture, he took his other hand, tucked behind his back, holding the Luger, and gunned down the officers.

  Then he swept up the table’s centerpiece in his hands, grabbed the TV tchotchke as an afterthought, and laughed. He twisted the two halves of the centerpiece—and disappeared—as shots flew.

  Santini looked out the window and saw him materialize in the street. He smashed the item he had stolen, then escaped using the cover of night.

  Santini ran the tape over in his head to see how he’d missed the clues as to the importance of the gadget the Germans held between them, now that he thought about it. The contraption was, moreover, probably the reason for their celebration. The only one sitting at the table not in uniform was undoubtedly the scientist who’d invented the device.

  He was part of the Polish underground, and it would do no good to be blind to the kind of pointers that could keep him alive. A compatriot from his clandestine network of coconspirators, posing as a bus boy, slipped him a sliver of paper. There were several of them working here. It was a watering hole, a place to gather and exchange information, right under the Germans’ noses, for an added sense of satisfaction. The furtive looks bouncing around the room in the wake of what had just happened, for those with eyes to see, would have given several of them away.

  He unfolded the paper. It read: “That was him. Did you get a good look at his face?” Yes, he had. T-Rex, a name Santini knew not then, but only from the future, the other him still present in the lucid dream, like a fly on the wall. He gazed up to see unfriendly eyes on him, perhaps picking up on what was going on in the room. He needed to quickly throw up a smokescreen to divert suspicion.

  He could speak perfect German, and affect a convincing enough accent from any district in Germany, as needed, which had helped him pass here tonight, as it had allowed him to live a life out in the open like a chameleon. But his shape-shifting abilities couldn’t cover for abject stupidity in other areas. He ordered the waitress to bring over the plates of unfinished food to his table. The woman’s eyes, which lingered on him, returned to her dinner, probably thinking, with regard to the note that had been passed him, that they were surely lovers intending to rendezvous later, pursuing an illicit affair between races, frowned upon, but not uncommon for the times. Even his lack of reaction to the officers getting blown away could be explained easily enough, considering the amount of terrorist activity in the sector that had left many numbed.

  Now that all the other officers had fled the eatery, chasing after the teleporting man, that left the arthritic Wolfgang, his assumed German name, the man to fear, no one knowing for certain if he was perhaps related to someone who mattered. The waitress did as requested, then skulked away. The way the others gave him deferential treatment now that he had suddenly moved to the top of the pecking order, seemed to further quell the woman’s fears regarding his genuinely German status. She left a short while later, her plate of food wiped clean. She may have been leaving with the intent of ratting him out; one never knew. Not wanting to push his luck, “Wolfgang” pressed his napkin to his lips, then to the table, and hammered the heels of his feet against the floor en route to the exit.

  ***

  “I see our T-Rex gets around,” Santini said.

  Mort took his eyes off the window to note the collectible-TV-salt-and-pepper set in Santini’s hands, the way he was holding it, the look on his face, and put two and two together for himself.

  “Sister Gretchen has been acting differently around him, too,” Mort said, returning his eyes to the window. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed.” Santini observed the coquettish way she buzzed around T-Rex.

  “They must have been lovers back then,” Mort said, “and despite loyalties to you, her heart is betraying her, even if it isn’t betraying you.”

  “Maybe it’s time we had this guy over for dinner to see what else we can glean from him.”

  ***

  T-Rex entered to find the room full of people about the table rising on cue. “Hear ye, hear ye, the court is now in session, the honorable Thomas Rex presiding,” he said, being a smart-ass.

  “An immortal, cool.” Fabio shook T-Rex’s hand.

  “Oh, I see,” T-Rex said. “This is more of a celebrity sighting.”

  “A what?” Milton interjected, looking up from the Luger. Preoccupied with his gun cleaning, he was the only one at the table not standing.

  “Sorry, meant to brief you,” Fabio said. “If you read more fantasy, you’d know all about these guys.”

  “Why is it those most dialed into reality are suddenly the least equipped to deal with it?” Milton protested. He stuffed in the loaded clip to test its sliding action. Satisfied, he handed the reassembled gun back to Mort, and returned to the time machine component he had been adjusting.

  “I presume that’s a rhetorical question.” Fabio took a seat, and gestured for T-Rex to do the same. “So spill,” he said. “My surrogate dad here is all I’ve had to keep me sane these last few weeks. The rest of these people are pedestrian in the extreme.”

  “Kids these days,” Mort said. “No respect for people two days older than they are. Of course, that’s all it takes to become a dinosaur around here.”

  “Two days?” T-Rex said. “Took me two hundred years.”

  T-Rex served himself from the food on the table, buying himself time to figure out what he was going to say. Despite the casual setting, this could turn explosive on a dime, and he had thoughtlessly left his gun in the small of his back, not on his thigh like Mort.

  “The me you see before you came into being during the early-industrial era,” T-Rex said. After seeing how that line took, he set the dish with the potatoes down on the table. Their facial muscles were riding the shock wave better than he expected, so he continued. “I grew up spinning wool with my father in our home. Flax and cotton, once too difficult to work, due to all the pre-
processing needed, was already replacing wool as the chief export in Europe.

  “By the eighteen thirties, the cottage industry in textiles was all but over. Steam power drove the mechanization needed to produce a wide variety of linens cheaply. I had to leave home to work in a factory. I guess you could say that’s when my love affair with innovation started.”

  His plate full, T-Rex toyed with his food, his appetite already lost just thinking about his early years. “Many of us routinely passed out from the heat in the factories. We weren’t allowed to open windows because, without the humidity, the strands of fabric would break. Anyone getting sick was told to get back to work and, if they couldn’t, they were fired. We worked sixteen-hour days even as we saw wages drop. There was no humanity in those places, no hope. I had it good; there were kids from the age of five being driven harder than slaves who couldn’t get their minds around the horrors. Their older sisters and brothers had to talk them through it.”7

  ***

  Cicero strolled the aisle of the factory, intent on getting to his station without drawing undue attention to himself, as might be the case if he lollygagged even for a second to talk to one of the many pretty girls. He was one of the few males working the textile mill. He liked how he could put a smile on the young girls’ faces just by sauntering by. He didn’t want to rush too fast, or he wouldn’t get to take in their faces from all angles.

  He passed the pickers first. Picking removed foreign matter—dirt, insects, leaves, seeds—from the fiber. He remembered when pickers beat the fibers by hand to loosen them and remove debris. Now, machines used rotating teeth to do the job, producing a thin "lap" ready for carding. Katie, one of the pickers, just sixteen, smiled at him, her eyes promising what darkness of night alone could deliver. Only then would they be hidden from prying eyes.