City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  Since this is my dream, I just want everyone to laugh. At least once.

  So far, no one does.

  Chapter Eight

  Clyne: Odd Lots

  March 2020 C.E.

  EPIDEMIC?

  OR EPIC DECEPTION?

  Now the Weekly Truth wants to know!

  It was in the paper journal, one of the few remaining non-electronic oracles the human mammals use to transmit information to each other. The one they call the National Weekly Truth.

  A man was standing near my cage, reading it, and I squizz-lensed just enough with my eyes to make out the words. He kept glancing over, giving me looks of suspicion. That same paper had been kind enough to run pictures of me the first time I became an outlaw here on Earth Orange.

  Perhaps I had also become what the human mammals call a “celebrity,” a class of beings well-known to their nest-mates and the community at large, to the point where other humans lose track of their own existence in order to copy behaviors of the ones being celebrated.

  If I am a celebrity now, will I drive others to emulate the outlaw life? I hope not, since it always seems to involve winding up in one type of cage or another.

  I have been in this particular cage since Rocket Royd captured me in Eli’s home in the Valley of the Moon. This may have inadvertently transformed me into a different type of celebrity, a performer in what he calls Rocket Royd’s Traveling Circus and Odd-Lots Carnival. Specifically, if my study of human language is correct, I have become a mummer or jongleur. Like the slaversaur. Someone who puts on a show.

  We have been traveling down the numbered roads that were once used as main transportation corridors in Eli’s time, though few vehicles seem to be on them now. They were once called highways or freeways. We left the particular road named in tribute to binary code — the 101 — and are now on a somewhat dryer, hotter corridor named twice, for emphasis, Highway 99.

  We’re in a town called Visalia.

  For days Rocket has been telling all of us here — me, Silver Eye, Strong Bess, the Weeping Bat, and the Bearded Boy — that we’re in a hurry to get to his “grandfather.” The word describes an honorific title for a nest-sire, one who is once or twice removed at what we would call egg intervals on Saurius Prime, but are known as generations here.

  Evidently, Rocket’s presence in Eli’s Moonglow home was no accident. He had been sent there by this grandfather to retrieve a scientific artifact, and having found it — and, as it turned out, me, as well — was in a hurry to return it and, he hopes, to win praise.

  “I think Grandfather will be happy. I’ll bring you to him, as well,” he said to me. “He’s talked about creatures like you. He’ll be surprised to really see one.”

  But Grandfather apparently lives some distance away, and it will take us a few days to get there. The vehicles that transport us all — trucks, as they are known — are of an older variety that once ran on a somewhat deadly, polluting fuel known as gas. From what I’ve read about gas, and its source element, oil, these fuels were the cause of wars, atmospheric assaults from which Earth Orange has yet to recover, and various severe economic upheavals. But Rocket and Strong Bess converted these vehicles to run on different fuels, like vegetable oil, with the flip of a switch.

  When we perform, then, whatever currency is earned goes into paying for something combustible, so the Carnival can keep moving along. Since Rocket perpetually finds his “odd lots,” as he calls us, running out of money, food, and fuel, we find ourselves stopping, for two or three days at a time, in villages, towns, decaying cities, and settlements along the way.

  “I don’t know what happened to Rocket’s parents,” the Bearded Boy said to Silver Eye and me one night, when he was feeding us. He had warmed up to me somewhat when I said his unique physical trait — a profusion of hair bursting out all over his body — could actually be considered “a remarkable evolutionary step on certain well-regarded planets.”

  “So Rocket was raised by his grandpa,” the Bearded Boy went on. “I was raised by him, too. They said my parents disappeared somewhere in Oklahoma, during a cross-country trip. The police said they got lost in a snowstorm, even though it was the middle of summer. They found me at a highway rest stop, shivering on a July night.”

  The Bearded Boy throws some more meat in my cage. I try not to eat too much, having arranged with the Weeping Bat to share some of her fruit when no one is looking. If I ever return to Saurius Prime, a strong appetite for flesh could make me a social outcast among the herbivores.

  But I’m too hungry to wait for the Bat. “Do you have some fruit?” I ask.

  “Why would a dragon man eat fruit?” he asks.

  “I am not a dragon. I am a slaversaur,” I reply. We’ve been having some disagreement about what my celebrity-mummer-jongleur-performing name should be. Rocket keeps insisting on various versions of “Dragon,” depending what town we’re in: “The Laughing Dragon,” “The Startling Dragon Man,” even “The Space Dragon.”

  These names remind me of North Wind Comes and Crow’s Eye, since they were more musical than most Earth Orange names. Thinking of them, it occurs to me that if I ever get out of this cage, I might like to retreat to whatever unbuilt and unsullied landscapes are left here, to simply watch buffalo move across snowy fields, once all this business with a gra-bakked, grk-skizzy timestream gets sorted out.

  “But mainly,” I say, in reply to the fruit question, “because of the treaty we signed after the Bloody Tendon Wars.”

  “You mean, there’s another war somewhere? How can anyone keep track anymore? Anyway,” the Bearded Boy said, leaving the piece of meat in my cage, “I guess they couldn’t put me up for regular adoptions, since I’ve had this hair problem since I was born. Rocket and his grandpa always said I should feel lucky they kept me.”

  What’s so unusual about a human growing fur on his face? Silver Eye asks.

  “He’s still a hatchling,” I reply.

  “Who’s a hatchling?” the Bearded Boy replies sharply. He looks around, then back at me. “As you can see,” he says, touching his face, “I have whiskers that look like stripes, since my hair is red, blonde, black, and brown. And there’s more than just the face part. It grows all over my body. When I was little, the doctors told me it was some kind of genetic defect or something and I would have to learn to live with it. But anyway, who can afford to keep seeing doctors? See you in the morning.”

  And then he went off to sleep in his straw bed in back of the big truck that Rocket drives.

  “He’s not kept in a cage, but Rocket treats him like he’s an outlaw, too.”

  I don’t believe Rocket has much experience in treating living beings with kindness.

  Now that I’ve seen Silver Eye’s face, her voice resonates with a tympanic difference — even though there is no vibrational sound displacement at all, but just thoughts coming into my head. Every uttered thought from her evokes the deep well of her vision orbs — not necessarily silver — and sadness and wisdom reverberate with her words.

  “But he lets him sleep in the back of his truck.”

  That’s because we’re such a small circus.

  We are four cages and two trucks, the other driven by Strong Bess, who, with her lifting of pieces of furniture and small vehicles, and whatever else people will pay to have lifted, seems to have the right stamina for the job.

  Rocket has said he values portability and speed, just in case.

  “‘Just in case’ what?” I ask.

  These are uncertain times, she replies.

  Given that rapid change always brings uncertainty, she may have even been understating the case on behalf of her fellow mammals. I detected this uncertainty manifesting itself shortly after I escaped the tunnels where my friends were being held.

  Appearing under the great golden bridge connecting the settlement of San Francisco to points north, I realized I should leave its vicinity before being detected again.

  But to go where?

 
; And then it occurred to me that I should journey back toward the lab sanctuary used by Sandusky, to see if I could find Eli’s sire, or anything that might help my friends escape detention or set the timestream for Earth Orange right again.

  I swam to the far shore where the bridge connected to the mainland, and stuck to main thoroughfares from there, but only during nighttime, sleeping and hiding in daylight.

  Things appeared to be changing rapidly in Eli’s world. The last time I moved by darkness like this — during my previous outlaw time — I noticed more activity in the streets and towns.

  There was much more motorized transportation on the boulevards and causeways then. More lights turned on, more busy-ness at the markets and gathering places and entertainment arenas.

  Now, everything in the human settlements was quieter. And darker.

  It was easier to move without being detected, because everyone seemed to live behind locked doors now.

  The people appeared to be afraid already, quite separate from any possible Saurian sightings they might have.

  By the time I had reached the familiar roads and trails near the Valley of the Moon, I had even started moving around in daylight.

  Sloppy science, perhaps, since it is a well known principle that the observer always effects what is observed, even more so when he is observed himself.

  And I was finally observed, that morning near the Moonglow: first by a family — not Eli’s — that was motoring away from the lab. The face of a boy about Eli’s age, with curlier, dark hair — was pressed to the glass. He stared at me as his vehicle receded in the distance.

  But I was also observed by a soldier who was parked near the lab.

  One soldier.

  The level of security had certainly decreased in the time since I had last been here. How had Sandusky sire’s lab fallen into such disrepair?

  I had little time for such questions as the soldier fired his sidearm into the air and commanded me to stop.

  I increased speed and headed for the woods, and once again, found myself waiting for nightfall.

  It was dark when Rocket Royd’s truck first pulled up. He showed something to the soldier — who had been falling asleep — and was waved in.

  No security alarms sounded. Perhaps the perimeter field set up by Mr. Howe was no longer working. Or had been turned off. This was my chance to enter the lab, as well.

  I left my hiding place and followed the truck, under cover of darkness.

  As it rolled up to the Moonglow’s front door, I discovered the alarm was distressingly operative. Apparently whoever this was in the truck knew how to turn the security apparatus off and on.

  The tip of my tail caught in the monitoring field originally installed by Mr. Howe and set off several loud alarms.

  The soldier was no longer asleep behind me and the new arrivals hadn’t stepped out of their trucks yet. I ran into the Moonglow, unwilling to be discovered in such an ignominious way after such an arduous journey.

  I had never been inside before. I had been on the roof once but never in the very nest where Eli’s sire raised him, after his egg ma’am, Margarite, disappeared into the time stream itself.

  But there was no time to stop, to appreciate, to smell the scents, since I was already being pursued.

  Inside, I passed what must have been the preparation area for edibles and potables, and farther on, what must have been Sandusky’s lab, though it appeared to have been gra-bakked by a series of explosions, or perhaps, uncontrolled multidimensional interactions.

  My hopes of finding another time portal here were severely reduced.

  Moving further into the structure, hearing the inevitable yelling of mammals behind me, I turned to see some inviting tunnels, cavelike, but artificially made, filled with round containers, “barrels,” in which I could plausibly hide.

  Yes, something told me. Almost as if a creature was whispering to me from the barrels themselves.

  But before I could investigate, I heard the much more concrete sound of shattering glass, not from my pursuers, not in the barrel cave — but ahead of me.

  A window lay ahead, and past that, above the tunnels, a slope of grasses and plants that led toward the wooded area beyond.

  I could just glimpse the curly-headed boy from the car, running into the trees.

  And near me, was a rock. With a paper tied to it. A letter.

  The letter said ELI on the front. Who else was trying to convey messages to my friend? And why was he similarly trying to avoid the security apparatus?

  I bent down to pick it up. That turned out to be my error in judgment. I smelled the smoke first — later I would learn this came from the “cigars” that Rocket puffed on — and before I could move, a small jabberstick hit me in the leg (the same leg!) where I was wounded twice before.

  This jabberstick made me realize immediately just how weary I was, and I felt myself slipping to the floor, barely getting the letter into my suit before dreams overtook me.

  The last thing I saw was Rocket’s shiny, baggy face peering at me, and heard him say, “Grandfather told me I might see somebody like you.”

  And then, after that, I dreamt I was home on Saurius Prime.

  And when I woke up, I found I had joined the Odd-Lots Carnival, where I met Silver Eye, and where I now find myself in the settlement of Visalia, with a man reading a paper and staring at me, and Rocket’s mysterious grandsire still several days’ journey away.

  Meanwhile, the man with the Truth paper keeps staring at me. He’s here early, just as the town’s market is getting set up. Fewer people use or trust the currency anymore, and in most settlements, they trade food and goods and services directly with each other. This sometimes makes it harder to obtain fuel. But the market areas are usually the best places for shows. Unless there’s a slow pox quarantine in effect. Then we stay on the main highway until we reach the next town.

  We are still some time segments away from actually performing. The man with the paper rolls it into a small cylinder.

  “I think that’s why they finally outlawed Barnstormers in public. Kids were making up all sorts of video projections to scare regular, decent people with.” As he speaks, he starts poking me through the bars with the cylinder. “Though you seem real enough.”

  Another poke. “Maybe it’s a mask.” And he grabs my skin and gives it a hard zrrrk and suddenly his eyes widen a little. “What are you really?”

  “Slaversaur!” I snarl, knowing that human mammals seek a good scare in order to entertain themselves.

  The man screams and gets his extremities caught in the bars while trying to pull his hand out of my cage. I can see some blood on his pink hide. “He bit me!” the man screams, throwing his paper at me through the bars. “He bit me!” The man starts running around, holding up his finger, pointing with his other hand to the trickle of blood. “The monster bit me!”

  And even though it is early in the day for Visalia’s market square, there are enough people around to stop and notice the hurt man, and soon there is more pointing, and screaming, and someone yelling loud worries that maybe slow pox is spread by blood drops. By the time Strong Bess and Rocket show up, it is too late: things are being thrown at me, and eventually at the Bearded Boy, and at Silver Eye in her cage. Strong Bess is hurriedly starting the trucks, and we’ll be driving out of Visalia before we even get to show them we are not monsters or apparitions after all, but jongleurs, performers, with only pretend scares to offer, so that everyone might forget their real ones for a little while.

  We will be hungry for a while longer now, Silver Eye tells me, as we drive along the twice-named 99 into the darkness. I’ve always found humans strange, but they seem so much more strange — and frightened — lately.

  And it occurs to me if I am too frightening to entertain human mammals, perhaps Rocket will have to “fire” me, as they say in the vernacular, and then I can give up performing for something more comfortable, like outlawry.

  Chapter Nine

&
nbsp; Eli: Parable of the Healer

  February 2020 C.E.

  “I see you’re wearing the jersey I had them send to you,” my dad says to me, when his arms let go, and we can get a good look at each other’s faces.

  I look down at my House of David shirt, my number 33 Green Bassett replica. I forgot I even had it on. “This was from you?”

  “They told me you were…reading up on your baseball history.”

  “Did you just get here?” I ask him. He’s probably come to get me and Thea out of here.

  “Well, Eli. No.”

  “What?” I look up at his face — then at Thirty’s face, and even Mr. Howe’s, to see if I can find more clues to what he just said. There aren’t any. “What do you mean? You just found out we were in here, right?”

  “Well, not ‘just,’ but —”

  I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me, but we can’t really finish our talk since Thirty’s guards are rushing us down a hallway. The alarms are getting louder now, and people are holding their ears and shouting at one another as we move along.

  We pass Mom’s rebuilt hotel room.

  “I’ve been looking for clues in there, about what happened to your mother, after the war.”

  “What clues?”

  “I haven’t found any yet. I don’t think anyone knows — not even the people who are supposed to, like your friend Thirty.” He huffs it out between breaths, as we keep running along.

  “I didn’t even know this hallway existed!” Howe shouts toward Thirty. She mouths something about “surprises,” and then ushers us past what look like steel vaults into a room that neither I nor Thea, nor apparently Mr. Howe, have ever been in before.

  But it looks like my dad has.

  It’s like a replica of the lab he had in the Moonglow. Or a replica gone almost supernova. There’s more of everything, especially the tubes — the long tubes for sending particles through the magnet-lined coiled loops where my parents, and later, just my dad, tried to reverse the charges inside protons.