City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  Now Bassett and the rest of the team are kind of like ghosts — filling up the room in Comnet 3-D, projected from the locus, which tells about their history. I wonder if they knew that was going to happen — that they’d turn into phantoms coming out of a machine.

  I don’t want that to happen to my friends—to Thea or Clyne or me. I don’t want us to just be ghosts in a time-travel machine. I’d like to get our lives back, to be kids again, or in Clyne’s case, a dinosaur again.

  Thirty, and the rest of the DARPA people, probably think they’re letting me be a kid, with the baseball jersey they left in here: House of David, number 33. Green Bassett. It’s a cool replica, but it’s also creepy.

  Creepy because it’s supposed to be my reward for getting all my atoms mapped, as if I really had a choice in any of it. And creepy because it means they’ve been monitoring everything I’ve been doing in my room. Everything I watch on the Comnet. Everything I think, for all I know.

  It’s also kind of mysterious: There are two letters sewn inside the bottom, squiggly lines that look like this: גג

  I think they might be Hebrew letters. Why are they in a baseball jersey? It some kind of DARPA code? They certainly had the jersey ready to go when I walked in here.

  “For helping us,” Thirty said, “we’d like to give you a little gift. Something we thought you’d like.”

  You want to reward me? Let me know who my parents were before time travel became their main interest. But ACCESS DENIED was what I got when I tried to look up stuff about them.

  Who were they before they became parents? Who else did they love, besides each other? What kind of trouble did they get into when they were teenagers? Could I find out anything that would help me rescue my mom from back in the time of Joe DiMaggio, or wherever she was?

  Time travel. The thing that everybody dreams of doing: getting second chances, maybe even trying to fix up history so it’s a little less scary and bloody and dark. But time travel’s the thing that caused the Sands family to fall apart.

  Even kids from divorced families get to live with one parent. Right now, I don’t have any.

  Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk!

  I jerk my neck and pull off one of the wires.

  They’re testing the bug alarm, again.

  Wheenk! Wheenk!

  At least, I’m pretty sure it’s a test. The detectors are meant to pick up stray slow pox viruses. Usually a recorded voice comes on to let you know it was just practice.

  But if this was a real emergency, where would I go? I’d have to pull off the rest of these wires and figure out a way to crawl out of this humming metal box I’m in, then figure out a way to pick the electronic locks on the door.

  And even if I did all that, I’d still just find myself in a clean, bright cell in a tunnel somewhere underneath San Francisco: my “guest quarters.” That’s what Thirty calls them.

  The Comnet ghosts from the House of David team play their hundredth baseball game all around me. They aren’t worried about slow pox at all. I don’t think they’ve even heard of it. They had other diseases to worry about.

  The founder of the House of David community in Michigan, Benjamin Purnell, eventually died of tuberculosis, after an exhausting legal trial having to do with fraud and misconduct. The team had to be reorganized after the power struggle resulting from his death.

  I wonder if I’m going to be “reorganized.” There’s kind of a power struggle here. Thirty works with a man named Mr. Howe. Or did, until he accidentally went back in time with us. Now she seems to be in charge of DARPA. Or maybe in charge of something bigger that’s in charge of DARPA.

  It’s one of those grownup secrets they haven’t let me in on yet.

  Wheenk!

  They won’t let me see my friends.

  Wheenk!

  They won’t let me see my father.

  Wheenk!

  They won’t tell me if they know anything about my mother.

  Wheenk!

  And I’m stuck here getting my atoms mapped.

  Wheenk!

  Alone in here, separate from everything, from all of history. Alone except for all the 3-D ghosts from the House of David baseball team, with their long hair and their hopes that everyone could live in heaven forever.

  Like them, I’m waiting for some kind of cataclysm, to shake things loose. To get me out of here.

  Wheenk!

  There’s still no voice, telling everyone that this is just practice. Just a test.

  Wheenk!

  And I have no way to know what to expect if this is a real bug alarm. If the disease has really gotten in, after all. Even way down here. In jail.

  With all the ghosts.

  Chapter Two

  Thea: Mothers

  February 2020 C.E.

  “Talk to us the way you talked to your mother about time travel. The way she would talk to you.”

  “You don’t look like the mothering type.” I say it in Greek, just to throw the translator off. He’s been expecting more Latin.

  Of course, he doesn’t realize I can understand everything he says, whether it’s in Latin or Greek or the English he uses when he’s talking to the woman next to him. They don’t know about the lingo-spot I’m wearing. And I’m not planning to tell either of them.

  The woman who calls herself Thirty waits for the translator to convert my Greek sentence into English. When he does, she’s not happy. “Real mothers have real names,” I add. “Not numbers.” The translator doesn’t bother with that. He just shrugs.

  We’ve been at this for a long time. If they had sundials in this artificial light, we’d be deep into the shadow zone now. I’m starting to understand what it was like for K’lion when they had him in that zoo, that prison he was in, before I was able to rescue him in the Saurian ship.

  The very ship we lost in the Fifth Dimension, which crash-landed later somewhere else in America’s history. As did we. Where we met Jefferson President and Sally Hemings, and my friend Eli traveled with the soldiers Lewis and Clark.

  And then we found our way…back here, to Eli’s time, the year 2020 C.E. I am not sure how long we’ve been back. It is hard to tell when you’re a prisoner. Each day looks much like the last.

  Though I am pretty sure I’ve had what Eli calls “a birthday,” and am now fourteen summers old.

  At that age, in Alexandria, they would start looking for a husband for me. Often someone around the same number of years. Like Eli.

  Luckily, Mother did not believe in such things.

  “Why are your cheeks turning red?”

  I hope this ends, soon. It’s getting really warm in here. And these questions are starting to make me shiver.

  “We know at the time of her death, your mother was working on primitive time-travel experiments. We even know about this.”

  Thirty gestures to the translator, who carefully puts on a pair of gloves as he finishes turning Thirty’s words into Latin. Then he reaches down into a little metal box he’s kept on the floor, unlatches it, and pulls out a sack that looks like its sewn from rough flax or linen.

  And then he takes out the thing in the sack — and I see that somehow, they have managed to steal from Mother’s lab.

  “An astrolabe, Thea. You recognize the design, I assume?” Thirty looks at me, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, I giggle.

  And when I giggle, I am suddenly just seven or eight summers old, not fourteen, and I am watching Mother put the gears and wheels of her astrolabe together, her circular, mechanical chart of the stars. She’s showing me how the circles in it turn to let you know where celestial bodies are in the sky, and when you might expect the moon to rise, in case you were interested in observing it that night or getting ready for a festival.

  “Look here, Mermaid. This shows the rotation of our own Earth through the skies, and how the heavenly bodies move in relation to us.” She turns the rule on the front, and the wheels-within-wheels move. “Here are the days and nights through whi
ch we live our lives, one coming after the other — the usual way we move through time.”

  “I want to know if it’s time for more sweet cakes, Mommy.”

  “Soon. But look again, Mermaid — what if we could do this?” And she takes a sharp pin and shows me a hole she’s bored into the two faces of the astrolabe, and she runs the pin through, from side to side. “What if we could move in between the stars while they march through time? What if we could —”

  “Take a shorter passage?” I finish her sentence.

  “Yes, a new artery, a new boulevard, to let us come out somewhere else along time’s path. Ahead of where we were expected to be. Or behind.”

  “In time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like a jinni?”

  Mother laughs. “Yes, like a jinni. Let’s go look for your sweet cakes now.”

  But now I’m in a place with no sweet cakes at all. “You took that from Mother’s lab. How?”

  “No. We didn’t reach that far back in time. This was kept locked in our own national archives. It was built by Thomas Jefferson, based on ideas and designs from a certain Hypatia of Alexandria.”

  She looks at me like she expects an answer, even though it wasn’t a question.

  “Who?” I ask. It feels as if there’s steam swirling around my head.

  “That’s not funny.” Thirty frowns. “Especially since he became interested in these ideas and designs after meeting a runaway slave girl named Brassy. His description of her sounds an awful lot like you.”

  I let the translator finish with Thirty’s words, because it gives me more time to consider a reply, and to wipe the sweat off my forehead, since it’s getting so hot in here.

  I wish I could be eight again, and eating sweet cakes, and looking for jinn.

  Mother used to tell me stories about jinn. Once you let one out of the bottle, you couldn’t put it back in, no matter how many wishes you had left. The world you knew was changed forever, and you had to live with it.

  “You will have to live with your jinn,” I tell Thirty.

  “What?” Thirty turns to the translator.

  “Your jinn. Can I lie down now?” I touch my face. I’m really sweating.

  “I don’t know about jinn, or genies, Thea, and I’ll thank you not to be cute with me. We have a growing situation in this country with terrible rumors spreading from mouth to mouth — sightings of spirits and phantoms; people reported missing in one place, then showing up miles away, claiming to have been gone for years, even though it’s only been days or weeks; numerous sightings of large land mammals thought to have been extinct for thousands of years; travelers showing up burnt and bleeding, insisting they’ve been burned by volcanoes or trapped by earthquakes in places where these things haven’t happened in millions of years.

  “Add that to all the shortages, the wars, and the bomb alerts — which are real — and the only thing slowing down a panic over these new events are the slow pox outbreaks and all the quarantines. People are scared enough about that, about this disease — but they can’t run away, they can’t flee. The laws force them to stay put.

  “But as soon as they’re allowed to go out again, the crazy rumors start back up—that reality itself can’t even be trusted. And everyone gets afraid all over again. So we need to look at everything, anything, that can help us. To help them. And if your mother had some ideas about space and time that we should know about, to help explain what’s going on, well, that might help us offer people something else besides fear and sickness. A way to make things — some things, anyway — right again. People deserve something better than monsters and phantoms. Don’t you agree? Wouldn’t your mother?”

  It’s true that Mother didn’t believe in keeping secrets. “We must spread light,” she would always say. “To remind people of things that deep down, they already know.”

  But Thirty’s questions aren’t about spreading light, or keeping people safer, or making them less afraid. They’re about finding things out, to make the powerful more powerful. Their consuls and officers. If they could control time voyaging for their own ends…what would they do?

  And if Mother were here, in this hot room, what would she…

  Mother…

  My mother…?

  Hypatia.

  For a moment, it was as though I’d almost forgotten her name. Even after hearing it from Thirty, a moment ago. How is that even possible?

  I feel another shiver run through my body. I don’t know what’s happening to me. At least the lingo-spot whisperings that began when I was at Jefferson President’s, appear to have quieted down.

  For now.

  I reach for Mother’s astrolabe. I want to touch something of hers. After her murder in Alexandria, this is as close as I’ll ever come to touching her again.

  I reach for it, but Thirty pulls it away. “It’s very old and fragile, Thea. We wouldn’t want it to be harmed in any way.” Then she reaches into the same box and pulls out an old book, which she slams on the table in front of me. Pages flutter by my eyes.

  It’s the book from Thomas Jefferson President’s house. The one with the picture of my mother in it.

  There are notes in the margins, in Jefferson President’s own hand. And next to those, a drawing he made of me. Of my face. With the names Brassy and Thea? written underneath.

  What can I tell them that they’d want to hear? Yes, I have found other boulevards, other paths through time, with my friends Eli and K’lion. But so far the experience cannot be controlled. And the results of such reckless movement through the cosmos are completely unpredictable.

  I say nothing, and keep my eyes focused on Jefferson’s book — and try not to giggle (but what am I finding so funny?). I can also see the published etching of K’lion, printed in his book, the picture that troubled Jefferson, of K’lion running from the fires that burned my town. Fires set by people who thought they knew what was best for everyone else, too. Their laws, their rules, their gods.

  “These notes on the side were written by President Jefferson himself, in a mix of languages, apparently. A little French, a little Latin, a little English. Do I need to read them to you? Or do you remember them firsthand?”

  Thirty doesn’t wait for an answer, but instead slides the book over to the translator, who looks around, clears his throat, and starts reading out loud.

  “ ‘In all the years of combing through this book,’ ” the translator reads Jefferson’s words, “ ‘why have I never previously seen this section before, with the rendering of the incognitum?’ ” He clears his throat again, then continues. “‘It seems as if there must be a connection to these mysterious pages, and to the slow pox outbreak in New Orleans, shortly after our visitors vanished in the spring of 1805. But the connection continues to elude me. And I have never relished a conundrum that resists all solution.’

  “Jefferson sure had a way with language!” the translator says, brightening. But his mood is quickly dissipated by the look Thirty gives him.

  She turns her attention back to me.

  “This book of Jefferson’s has been stored in top-secret archives that until recently, were restricted even to me—‘Black Box’ files that I had never heard of before. And I was supposed to have heard of all of them. This apparatus, built by Jefferson during his retirement, as he apparently continued to research your mother’s experiments, was stored in there, too. Evidently” — and she takes a long thin metal strand, or “wire,” I believe it’s called, and runs it through the two sides of the astrolabe, like my own mother, Hypatia, did, so long ago — “the idea of time travel is a very old one, even at the government’s highest, most secret levels.”

  I reach again for the device, and again, she pulls it away.

  “Or so it would seem. But I’m starting to wonder, Thea,” — and now she leans close to me, so close I can smell her breath, and she certainly hasn’t been eating sweet cakes — “if perhaps these ‘Black Box’ files even existed until recently. These notes from Th
omas Jefferson, and this contraption he built, appear to be over two hundred years old. Including the drawing of you, here. ‘Brassy.’ And yet, I’m also wondering if any of it is perhaps really no older than a week or two. If maybe it only popped into being then, because the history around it, behind it, had been changed. By someone. Or a few someones. Like you. And your friends.

  “I really hate being left to wonder, Thea. You need to tell me who you’re working with. And why you did it. Did you have orders from some other government? Some other secret department? Did somebody instruct you not to tell me anything?

  “If there is a plan to invade, to overthrow, and take over by changing history, I will have the truth. Just like your mother wanted. The truth. ‘Thea.’ ”

  I’m too tired for all these questions.

  “Hypatia was my mother’s name,” I say to her.

  “What?” she says, looking at the translator, then at me.

  “The jinni won’t go back in the bottle now,” I add. The room keeps growing hotter. I wish she would let me lie down. “You should always remember your mother’s name.”

  Now Thirty is looking confused.

  “Even if you won’t be seeing her again.”

  Now Thirty is looking mad.

  “We will find out who you really are, Thea. What you really are. Whether you’re actually some ancient Egyptian girl related to Hypatia of Alexandria…or someone else. Why you and your…alien lizard friend have taken over the Danger Boy project. And what you’ve done to Eli—who, by the way, doesn’t seem very cooperative either. Though we’re trying other methods with him.”

  She has a small, satisfied look on her face as she waits for the translator to speak to me in Greek.

  “Let me show you something else.” She holds up one of their printed news heralds, something still written on papyrus stock, or paper, called the National Weekly Truth: END OF THE WORLD!? it says in large letters over a large picture. It’s K’lion’s time ship, flying over the bridge here in the city of San Francisco, when we came to rescue Eli.