City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  “Your friend’s small reminder prompted me to search out sknggg! my own pockets, where, in another moment of merrikus, I discovered I had plasmechanical material, too, residue from the explosions and hot weapon beams blasting knnng! my way while in mammalian custody! Enough here to open a dimensional rift that we might time-journey through!”

  “How would we do that?” I wanted to get all the details before I started to feel at all hopeful.

  Clyne reached into his fairly worn-out Saurian jump suit, and pulled out a handful — clawful — of…goo.

  Plasmechanical goo.

  “Secret sauce,” A.J. said.

  The goo almost seemed to be humming.

  “This was from my time-ship. A beam weapon superheated a section of it in your pnnng! tunnel jail and created a small tnnng! reaction, which allowed me to escape from the room. Perhaps if we superheated pkkt! this, we could create a similar boom-like moment of rift-shifting.”

  I was like the people Huldah was talking about — afraid to get too hopeful, because I knew how easily things could go wrong. But then again, weren’t she and A.J. and Jeremiah saying you still had to have some hope, no matter what? Just to go on?

  “Well, Clyne, we have a problem: we don’t have any way to superheat it. We still have to wait around a couple of thousand years for beam weapons to be invented. We can’t just throw fastballs. Even Satchel Paige fastballs. Sparks aren’t enough.”

  “Fire?” The word was spoken behind me, in English. Thea.

  She’d come back with Naftali and James. They were all scrubbed up, and she’d even managed to get James’ hair wet and comb it back, so that he looked kind of like a kid who was wearing a Bigfoot costume for Halloween, except he’d also been invited to a girl’s tea party, so he had to try and look neat.

  There was even a fresh bandage on Naftali’s head.

  “Fire,” Thea repeated, gesturing to the small fires that were all around us. After even just one day of building, the place seemed more like a camp, a settlement of some sort, instead of just a ruin.

  There were walls, pieces of structures, for people to huddle behind. There were several groups around the different campfires, and each seemed to be sharing what it had — from bits of food to scraps of blanket. Some people had huddled together to doze off.

  I didn’t know if that was enough to make a city, or a community, but at least it wasn’t a war.

  Clyne shook his head. “Fire remains not heatful enough,” he told Thea. “But, if we are trapped here muchly”—and then he broke into one of his overly-toothy smiles—“perhaps I can work on a way to plkkkt! harness solar rays,” — he pointed to the moon — “in some kind of focused energy bttt! burst.”

  “You mean sunshine?” A.J. asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When the sun’s up there, instead of the moon?”

  “Snkkkt! Yes.”

  “Reflected off somethin’ like a mirror?”

  “Kngaa!”

  We all waited for Clyne to finish his sentence.

  “That is the Saurian word for yes.”

  A.J. nodded and looked at me. “Well, boy? How ’bout it? I mighta had the Reach in my pocket, but the goat-demon has the sauce! I got one more thing, too. But this one’s meant for you.” And A.J. reached into his shirt and took out the small wrapped mirror I’d seen earlier.

  You are reflected in your friends, family, and times!

  One man’s family. Mine. And some of those who had become my family were there with me: Thea and Clyne. Maybe even A.J., as a kind of crazy grandpa who doesn’t always appear to make much sense, except when you listen real close.

  “Well, how long would it take using this?” I asked, unwrapping the mirror. Some of the campfires glinted in its reflection.

  “Tomorrow we begin our field observations to find out! Stnnkt!”

  “What if it doesn’t work, K’lion?” Thea asked.

  “Then we have plenty of time to consider the next znnnng! field experiment.”

  I don’t know if it Clyne was attempting a joke for our benefit or stating what he considered a scientific fact. Thea just nodded without saying anything, then turned her attention to finding some food for the boys.

  Later that night, we made a fire of our own near the wall by the path that led to A.J.’s altar. It kept some of the wind away, and we all huddled together, and even got a little sleep.

  I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who dreamt of home.

  And so, here we’ve been for three days. Clyne has worked with A.J. to keep positioning the mirror so the plasmechanical material would directly receive the beam.

  “Your body vibrates in sknng! time-moving resonance,” Clyne explained. “Once the plasmechanics reach a certain heatitude, they will explode small but distinctly, like that starchy snack food consumed during visual entertainments.”

  “Popcorn?”

  “Yes! Klllkt! Like popcorn. Creating a small but exploitable rift in space-tnngg!-time. A big version of the ball-base stkkt! sparks you saw.”

  “But then how do we use it, Clyne?” I asked him. “There’s no ship. No atomic-altering cap to put on.”

  “I believe you should stick your hand through the vnnng! vortex when the rift occurs.”

  “What about the rest of me?”

  “In theory, you will be pulled along, since the reverse particle charge particular to you should then course through your whole body.”

  “And what about everybody else?” I asked. “I brought Thea here. I can’t leave her. And then all those people that came with you…”

  “In theory, we will be pulled along if we hold on to you, while hoping sknntng! for the best, though it is true that the rift may close again swiftly before everyone could get through.”

  The definitions of “we” and “everyone” eventually shifted. It was just Clyne, Thea, A.J. and me who were trying the time-jump. By yesterday, Rocket had decided to stay.

  He’d gone off after Rolf disappeared, thinking he could find his grandfather somewhere in the desert, and maybe hold him accountable for the things he’d done.

  He couldn’t. Rolf was gone.

  So he’d taken up with the rebuilding idea started by A.J., and helped stacking rocks, moving old burnt timbers, and digging. He’d also go with Naftali and James to take water out to the ground where Jeremiah had planted his seeds.

  “It will be good to stay in one place long enough to see something grow from the ground up,” he said. “And I like a world where everything is right in front of you.” I guess he was tired of living with all of Rolf’s secrets, and he thought this would be a simpler time.

  I still wasn’t sure it’d be a good idea for him to stay behind with James, but by Clyne’s calculations, only three or four of us, at most, could get back.

  So Rocket volunteered to stay, and he’ll get his chance to find some kind of happiness a few thousand years before he is born. And maybe some kind of better history will come out of it after all. I guess you can’t really put genies back in bottles once they’re out, and the time-travel genie has been loose for a while.

  “Besides, this might be a good place for a show,” Rocket said. “We could cheer people up. We could make a real difference. And anyway,” he said, lowering his voice, even though no one but us spoke English, “it might help make up for some of the things my grandfather did.”

  “Was Rolf really your grandfather?” I asked.

  “He adopted me as a baby when my parents disappeared after volunteering for one of his experiments. They’d both been with the military. But then Rolf disappeared too, and I grew up in a government facility where they kept…well, I’m not allowed to talk about it. But I didn’t see him again for many years.”

  It was the middle of a clear desert day. It was bright and blue in the distance, and it seemed like we were standing in the middle of the world, with every direction stretching out to infinity around us. “There’s no one here who can hurt you,” I told him.

 
Sometimes people just need to hear that.

  He looked around to be sure, then continued. “Well, I grew up there, and then worked there as an adult — because I had noplace else to go. I was always pretty alone. There were creatures in that place…that couldn’t be explained. The results of genetic experiments, I think, like James. Or maybe visitors…like your lizard friend.

  “But mostly you had no idea who else was in there with you. Until one day, somebody came in a flying saucer and busted somebody out. I heard the noise outside, and in the commotion, I helped some of the people and creatures in there escape. With me.

  “We formed a circus. My circus. We kept a low profile, in small-out-of-the-way places, makin’ our own way through the world, until suddenly, out of the blue, Rolf was back—like he’d just popped back out of the sky, or something.

  “He was able to have me tracked down. And blackmailed me. Said he’d send everyone in my circus — even me — back to that zoo-prison we were in, at least if I didn’t cooperate.”

  “ ‘Cooperate?’ ”

  “I’d go find things he wanted or needed while he pretended to be a retired old man working as a gardener. I guess being scared like that, looking over my shoulder all the time, made me pretty mean.” He sighed, like he was trying to let a few years worth of bad air out of his body. “I think by staying here, I won’t have to look over my shoulder so much. That’s one of the reasons I went into the desert. I was looking for my grandfather, in a way. I wanted to make sure he was really gone this time.”

  I didn’t tell him that with my cap in Rolf’s possession, no one can really be sure where Rolf might pop up next or what he might try to do.

  “Hey, when you get back,” Rocket continued, “will you try and round up Strong Bess and the bat and Silver Eye? I’m not sure if they’d know what to do out there on their own.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, not really knowing if I ever would get back, or, if I did, whether there was anything at all I could do about finding the missing half of his carnival. It’s the way grownups talk to kids half the time, saying “I will” when you can’t be sure of anything, pretending the world makes sense when it really doesn’t at all.

  And as of today, James, the Bearded Boy, said he wanted to stay, too. He and Naftali have found a common bond, like brothers. Orphan brothers, with only each other to rely on.

  “It’ll be hard for you, James, when Thea goes,” I told him. “You won’t have her to translate for you.”

  “But I’ll have someone who knows what it’s like to be me,” he said, talking about Naftali. “And anyway, I’m not even a James.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I used to look up profiles of kids on the Comnet, in libraries, sometimes. James Rodney was this guy out in Illinois someplace — about five feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes, played a lot of sports like soccer, golf, even water polo. He had lots of friends. I read about him on the Comsite his family made when they were having some kind of family reunion. I thought: I could be like him. Or maybe, I wanted to be like him. To have that same kind of life he had. So I started to call myself James.”

  Thinking of what Rocket and James had told me, I realized that some of the things A.J. said about Jerusalem were still true. People were still coming here looking for something, hoping, maybe, they could leave something else behind and walk away feeling better, or luckier, or just less worried.

  That’s what all of us wanted, too, even those of us who came here pretty much by accident.

  Early this morning, the woman who grabbed at Thea and called her “Gehanna-marked” gave the Bearded Boy a haircut, though all she had to use was a broken piece of sword, scavenged from the temple ruins. Now he just looks like he’s going to the tea party, never mind Halloween.

  Except, in this case, it’s a rock-throwing party with Naftali. It’s late afternoon, and they’re throwing strikes at the outline of the soldier on the temple wall.

  Occasionally, they yell, “Barnstormer!” when they’re throwing. I’ve been able to teach them a couple things about baseball and about having a little fun, no matter what.

  “I think things are about to get a little gerk-skzzy!” Clyne announces, watching the plasmechanic goo start to…percolate, on the flat white rock where it’s been these last three days.

  “Hold this, please,” A.J. says to Huldah, handing her the mirror. She’s come to watch us leave.

  “Just to be clear,” she says, “the power to perform miracles belongs only to God.”

  “Well, it’ll be a miracle if this really works,” I say, thinking that even if we land anywhere — or anytime— near home, we’ll still have to figure where Rolf went and how to get him back and whether we’ll need to come back for the other refugees from the Odd-Lots Carnival that we’re leaving here in Jerusalem’s ruins.

  “May God grant you safe passage, wherever you’re going now,” Huldah says.

  “Thank you, Huldah,” Thea tells her.

  “You’re welcome. And perhaps you will find a way to pass along any blessings you may have received here. And take some of this.” Huldah hands Thea what looks like a wineskin.

  “It’s healing water, from the wadi. You never know when you might need some.”

  As the sun begins to set again, a lot of people are standing around their campfire. There are even more fires now; every morning, before setting up the mirror with Clyne, to reflect light on the plasmechanical goo, A.J.’d set up a new cooking fire, to make sure the sparks never went out.

  “Always got to give something back,” he told me, blowing on some embers.

  Over the last couple of days, people have grown to accept us, even if they’re not overly fond of us.

  And just as it looks like we might have to spend one more night here, Clyne jumps up. “Heating to critical snggg! mass!” he says. “We must get in proximate contact with the brewing dimensional flnnng! rift!”

  The plasmechanical goo has been on top of another small pile of rocks — another altar, really — made by A.J., though this one is a short walk from the temple ruins. The mirror has been propped in another small pile of stones a few feet away, with each of us moving it during the day.

  Now as the sun fades, A.J. takes the mirror and hands it to James, who is part of the crowd that’s gathered around us again — though this time they’re here to watch, not to throw rocks.

  “Keep this thing aimed right there at all that sauce on those stones,” A.J. says, and then he runs over to hold hands with me and Clyne. Well, hold claws with Clyne. A little bit of the goo is so hot, it pops off the rock, like oil from a skillet, and burns my skin a little. But I don’t move.

  My other arm is around Thea’s waist. She’s warm and my fingers fit kinda neatly where her body curves in—which is sort of corny, but I want to keep her close. I can’t keep losing everyone.

  “Here’s hoping we get home,” I say.

  But where is that exactly, for each of us? Or even for me?

  “Speaking of snkkkt! homes,” Clyne says, his eyes widening. “ I almost forgot! This is for you. I found it in your home. The one near Wolf House.”

  He takes a crumpled envelope out of one of the chrono-suit pockets on his back leg, and hands it to me. It has my name on it: ELI. It’s an old-fashioned letter, like when they used to write Comnet messages on paper. But I don’t have time to open it.

  I stuff it into one of my pockets, and put my arm back around Thea as quickly as I can.

  There is a loud hum, then a roar and a rush of color and motion like a hard wind has sucked me in. But I know the name of this storm.

  We’re in the Fifth Dimension.

  And then, just as suddenly, we’re not.

  Chapter Twenty

  Eli: Moonglow

  2020 C.E.

  Dear Eli—

  Weird, huh? This is how our grandparents would get in touch with their friends, writing on a piece of paper like this, and waiting forever for the message to get through. I never thought I
’d have to do it with you. But all my Comnet messages to you keep bouncing back.

  What have you been doing since you moved away?...

  How do you explain time travel to somebody who hasn’t done it? Or wouldn’t believe it. Even an old friend who was practically like your brother.

  Andy and I grew up together in New Jersey. Discovered Barnstormers together. And I haven’t seen him since I moved west with my dad.

  His family was on a trip to California when he left this message here. In spite of all the quarantines, they were able to get passes to move around. Probably because his mom is a doctor.

  I wrote to your new street address, because I knew we were coming to California, and I thought it’d be cool to see you…

  But by the time he got here, I was gone — probably several centuries away. My dad wasn’t here either. The Moonglow was abandoned.

  It’s not abandoned anymore.

  Thea and I have been living here since we returned, along with Dad. The government had to shut down the labs in the BART tunnels, after all the accidents there, especially the ones caused by Mr. Howe and A.J. So Dad has been able to come back to the Moonglow to do his experiments, in his own way, on his own terms.

  It’s a little bit hard getting used to being around him again, after being on my own, kinda, for, well, for thousands of years, in a way.

  But he tries to really listen to me now, and I’m getting used to listening to him again. DARPA has to listen to Dad now, too, because things are still going wrong all over.

  One of those things is that Clyne and A.J. are lost. The brief dimensional rift Clyne talked about separated us in the Fifth Dimension.

  Maybe Clyne’s Saurian body reacts differently to direct time travel; he might really need his ship to keep from landing weeks and miles from where he intended to be. Or maybe he had some leftover plasmechanical goo in his pocket, that affected his calculations. And who knows? Maybe A.J. still had part of his lucky Reach baseball in his clothes, too. In any case, neither of them was with Thea and me when we landed.