by Dale Peck
Charles didn’t understand the point of Iacob’s story, and he said so. Iacob carefully stepped around the symbols on the rug and came to sit beside Charles.
“The sailors from Ropia told us that their vessel was nothing compared with the ships being built by other countries. I think the people they singled out were the Spanitch? They spoke of marvels created in Italia and Francia—churches bigger than our village, and small sticks that eject a lump of iron so quickly it can pierce a man’s heart. I think even you would be amazed by such marvels. But it seemed to me that these miracles did not work for their inventors as much as their inventors worked for them. In the same way years of my village’s stored furs were traded for a few measly tools that gave them food but not warmth, these people had to roam the world in search of treasures they could take back to Ropia to trade for different kinds of treasures. All in all, it did not seem to me that they lived a life any better than the Qaanaaq. Only a life with more things in it, and more dangers, and more work.”
Before Charles could come up with a response, Iacob exclaimed, “Charles—look!”
Charles peered in the direction of Iacob’s downward-pointing finger.
“Is that a…a building?” The Greenland boy’s voice was filled with awe.
Maybe it was the funny angle, but Charles didn’t recognize it at first. They were above it, after all, and all the pictures Charles had seen naturally showed it from the ground, even the ones in the mirror book. But finally he realized what the enormous edifice below them was.
“It—it’s the Tower of Babel!”
The sentence was both the most plain and the most strange thing Charles had ever heard himself say. The Tower of Babel! The most famous building in history—in religion, even. And it was there, before his eyes!
The most famous building in the world. But not, apparently, to Iacob.
“I don’t understand. You know this building? Are we in your time?”
“N-no,” Charles said, daunted at the very thought. “It’s, like, way before that. It was built in biblical times.”
“Then are we in the Bible?”
For an illiterate kid, Iacob could sure ask tough questions. Charles, who had not been raised religiously, found that even thinking about Iacob’s idea made him nervous.
The two boys stared at the building for a long time. From this angle, you could see the terraces at the top of each level, as well as the wide flat top and the small temple erected there. An incredibly steep staircase ran up one side. There were more steps than Charles could count, but then a number flashed in his mind: 999.
He glanced at the book in his hand. He knew it had put the number in his head. But then his eyes were caught by the lines on the amulet. Seven of them. He looked back to the building and counted the terraces, and wasn’t surprised when the number was also seven. He realized that the rune was the tower, only turned upside down.
Charles looked up at Iacob. “The Tower of Babel was built by people who wanted to reach heaven.”
Iacob stared down at the awe-inspiring building, which seemed more like a shape that had been carved out of a mountain than a structure erected on a flat plain. Even though they were above it, the tower still seemed taller than one could imagine. Living in New York City, Charles knew he’d seen much taller buildings, but this structure had a massive base as well. At the bottom, it appeared to be even wider than it was high. And, as well, there was nothing around to diminish the perspective. All the other buildings were just one or two stories tall, barely visible in the shadow of the enormous ziggurat.
Charles blinked. He suddenly realized he was looking at a city of the ancient world. The Tower of Babel. So this must be … Babel, right? Babylon? The sight made Charles so nervous that he resorted to an old habit: he pushed his glasses up his nose. But when he did so he felt the bent nosepiece for the first time in a couple of days. He took them off and cleaned them, remembering his ingenuity in building the fire in the forest. He knew he was going to need that ingenuity now, and a little bit of luck too, and maybe some magical assistance. He, Charles Oakenfeld, was looking at the fabled city of Babylon.
Suddenly Charles remembered the vision of the tower the mirror book had shown on that far-off day in the tree above Drift House, and he understood what was going on. He wasn’t just looking at the tower. He was going to go inside it. He was going to go under it, and close the jetty.
“Charles?” Iacob said in a quiet voice, as if afraid to interrupt his thoughts. “We’re about to land.”
It was true. After an eternity that had lasted only a few minutes (or a year, or more accurately, two thousand), the time jetty appeared to fade away into nothingness just above the uppermost level of the tower. As the carpet spiraled gently out of the jetty, Charles tapped on both sets of arrows at the same time, bringing them to a stop a few feet above the terra-cotta tiles that lined the floor of the terrace. Half-built walls made of large, squat, somewhat crumbly looking bricks rose up on all four sides, shielding them from the view of anyone who might be looking up—assuming they could even see that high.
“They are making it still higher?” Iacob said. “I wonder, when will it be tall enough?”
“According to the Bible,” Charles said, “the tower was never finished. The Babylonians kept building it higher and higher, until finally God destroyed it.”
“We’d better hurry then.”
It took Charles a moment to realize Iacob was joking, and when he did he laughed—nervously, but he laughed. What else was there to do?
Now, tentatively, the two boys stepped off the carpet, as if their feet might go right through the floor. But the tiles were firm and smooth beneath the moccasins the Wendat had given Charles, and he padded across them to one of the half-built walls. The crumbly bricks were basically large rectangles of dried mud, and a good-sized stack of broken ones suggested they weren’t the most durable things in the world. It was hard to imagine that such an enormous structure was basically just dirt, cut out of the ground and stacked up on top of itself.
Charles climbed atop the unfinished wall. The city below was small and dark. In the distance, he could see lights twinkling on a low wall that seemed to ring the city. No lights twinkled from windows though. Only the occasional flicker here or there defined a public space, or perhaps a person carrying a torch or lantern. Did they have lanterns this long ago? Charles didn’t think so, but the lights were too faint and far away for him to see.
When Charles turned back to Iacob, he saw that the Greenland boy hadn’t moved from the center of the terrace. There was a small, frightened look on his face.
“We do not belong here,” he said in an awed voice. “It is not right.”
Something about Iacob’s words made Charles look at the mirror books, which were still on the carpet. A thin, golden light glowed from the amulets on their covers. The light was simultaneously ominous and reassuring, though Charles couldn’t have said why it produced either sensation.
He turned back to Iacob. “We might not belong here,” he said, “but I don’t think we ended up here by accident either.”
Iacob turned, looked at the glowing mirror books for a long moment, then turned back and pointed across the terrace to Charles’s left. Four stone pillars stood there, supporting a flat, thatched roof. Beneath this shelter a square hole had been cut into the floor, and Charles could just glimpse the top of a staircase descending into darkness.
Pitch darkness.
“You said we had to open the books at the end of the temporal jetty.” Iacob pointed at the opening. “Is that the end?”
Charles knew that the answer to Iacob’s question was yes, and he knew that Iacob knew it too. You didn’t have to open the mirror books, didn’t even have to hold them in your hands, to feel what they wanted now. Their desire for the dark hole was as palpable as smoke. And so, shrugging silently, he crossed the terrace and climbed back on the carpet, and after a moment Iacob joined him. The two boys placed the mirror books at the f
ront of the carpet, standing them up like headlights so that the pair of glowing amulets could illuminate their path. When Charles touched his book, he felt a new sensation. It was more than the little tingling charge he’d felt when he’d first handled the mirror book. It seemed to be in him, as if the mirror book’s hunger were being reproduced in his own body. He felt its yearning for a dark place far below the tower—dark not simply because it was buried under hundreds of thousands of thick mud bricks, but because it was … dark. Cold. Inhuman.
Charles glanced up at Iacob. It was clear the Greenland boy was feeling the same sorts of things from his book. Iacob looked up at the faint, tattered spiral of the jetty above them. When he looked back at Charles, his eyes were filled with grim determination, and Charles knew he was thinking of his father, and how opening the jetty had killed him.
“We will close it, yes?”
Charles nodded. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” And, crossing his arms, Iacob sat down on the carpet and stared fixedly ahead.
Charles studied Iacob’s profile. His mouth was set in a frown of grim determination, and Charles was glad the Greenland boy was working with him, not against him—he looked capable of anything.
Charles turned forward now. The two thin beams of light shot out from the mirror books at the front of the carpet, and now Charles thought they looked less like headlights than like a pair of tow ropes, as if the books were pulling the carpet to its destination.
Charles tapped the star. Slowly, silently, the two boys eased into the darkness.
TWENTY-ONE
Food for Thought
Susan.
The word came from everywhere and nowhere. Through her ears, but through her mouth too, and her nostrils, and her eyelids. Through her skin. The experience was so disorienting that she didn’t even think to ask herself how skin could hear.
“Susan, wake up.”
Susan emerged from… sleep. It wasn’t quite the right word, but her head ached too much for her to think of a better one. She opened her eyes. A beak as big as the entrance to a cave opened and closed. Words came from the beak.
“Are you awake?”
Susan blinked. Now a bird’s head came into focus. It was the size of a bowling ball—red like a stoplight, red like a ripe apple—and it filled up the entirety of her vision. She blinked again. Slower this time, letting her eyes stay closed for a long time. When she opened them again the bird’s head had shrunk until it was smaller than her fist, the beak as tiny as an uncooked pasta shell.
“M-Marie-Antoinette?”
Now Marie-Antoinette blinked and fluffed herself slightly.
“Thank goodness. I didn’t know if you’d be able to wake up once we left the temporal universe.”
Susan used the fingers of her right hand to check for the fingers of her left. She found her feet then, her limbs, her stomach, finally pressing—tenderly, tenderly—on the sore place at the back of her head. This last, more than anything else, brought her fully back to herself, and she took stock of her surroundings. She was in a clean, bare, wooden room about ten feet wide and fifteen feet long, whose high ceiling stretched to a cathedral point at least thirty or forty feet overhead. A large window stretched the length of one of the long walls, but it had been covered with some kind of delicate lattice and filtered the clean white light to a soft dun. The shape of this room was familiar, as though it were a church she’d been in before, but she couldn’t quite place it. She turned back to the parrot.
“Are we on the Sea of Time?”
“Over it, actually.”
“Over it?” Susan suddenly noticed the room was shaking ever so slightly. Bouncing really, like a boat on the water—or an airplane in the sky. She eased herself to her feet and walked to the window. There was no glass, she saw, just the lattice, and she hooked her fingers through the diamond-shaped openings and peered out.
What she saw took her breath away: an enormous icy blue vortex, as big around as…as… Susan couldn’t even begin to say how big around it was, and Susan had been in the Great Drain of the Sea of Time. She could see that the vortex was spinning ferociously, and yet she and Marie-Antoinette seemed to ride it in their floating room as smoothly as the aforementioned boat or airplane.
“Are we, I mean, in the—”
Marie-Antoinette shook her head. “The drain? No. I am not sure what this is, but it is not the Great Drain.”
Susan nodded and turned from the lattice, rubbing more liberally at the sore spot on the back of her head. (Well, spots, really, since there were two distinct bumps. Knocked out twice in one day, she told herself. Way to go!) She looked down at the parrot.
“What happened to the radio?”
Marie-Antoinette did one of those uncanny things Susan had occasionally seen on the parrots of Drift House: she appeared to smile.
“Susan,” she said in a light tone. “We’re in the radio.”
Susan gasped. She realized immediately that this was true. The room’s shape was exactly that of the tombstone radio. “But…it’s grown.”
“Correction. It is growing.”
And Susan realized this was true too: the room did seem palpably larger than it had when she’d first opened her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you have any idea how this happened?” “None at all,” the parrot said. “I’m afraid chronology doesn’t hold that much interest for me.”
“I think you mean temperology.”
The parrot shrugged. “Temperology, chronology. It’s all Greek to me.”
Susan frowned. Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, and since Marie-Antoinette was finally feeling talkative, she figured it was time to get her story. “So how did you end up with the Time Pirates anyway?”
The parrot stared up at her with a cocked head. “Can’t you guess?”
Susan could only return the bird’s stare in confusion, and then all at once understanding filled her slightly sore cranium. “Are you? I mean, were you destined for the Island of the Past?”
“Ara tricolor,” Marie-Antoinette said in a flat voice. “The Cuban macaw. The last of my kind disappeared just as President Wilson”—Marie-Antoinette snickered a little, but not unkindly—“was being born.”
“So they rescued you too!”
“Rescued? Kidnapped is more like it.”
“You mean you didn’t want to go to the Island of the Past?”
Marie-Antoinette shuddered. “I can imagine very few creatures who would. A solitary species, like the North American ground sloth or one of those moles that disappeared without anyone noticing, because no one had ever really seen them in the first place. But macaws are very social beings. An eternity spent on a vast treeless plain? Living in a cave? With nothing except dull-witted dinosaurs and dodos and that dreary old sailor to talk to? No thank you.”
Her point made, Marie-Antoinette suddenly flew to the grille and began climbing up it, using her beak along with her claws to make her way up. She must have felt Susan staring at her, because she turned and glanced quizzically at her human companion.
“Yes?”
Susan wasn’t sure how to say what she wanted to say. “I can see how being the last of your kind might be a bit, um, lonely. But, I mean, what do you do about…?”
Marie-Antoinette sighed impatiently, then stuck her head through a gap in the lattice. Her voice came faintly from the other side. “About?”
“About… you. About all the other extinct species. Do you just forget them?”
The macaw pulled her head back in and looked at Susan severely. “It is one of the peculiarities of your species that it feels it must pass judgment on everything, regardless of the relevance to their own existence. But there is a natural order to things that transcends human concerns. No matter how highly you value yourself, humanity is not the goal of creation, nor its guardian.”
Marie-Antoinette’s words were certainly food for thought, and Susan was contemplating how to re
spond when the macaw put her head back through the lattice, and then the hinges of her wings, and then, as suddenly as a popping balloon, the bird slipped through the hole and disappeared.
“Marie-Antoinette!” Susan ran to the lattice. “Get back in here this instant!”
In answer, the macaw only said, “We’ve come out over the Island of the Past.”
“What? How?”
“Well, that’s another question entirely, isn’t it? One you should probably ask your precious Pierre Marin.”
“Of course! I’ll find him when we land. I mean, if we land. I mean, um, how do you think we land this thing?”
Susan wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard the macaw chuckle. “I don’t think you have to worry about that part. You might want to brace yourself though.”
“Brace my—aieeee!”
For suddenly the radio had started to fall. The descent was so rapid that Susan’s feet left the floor, and she found herself twisting about in the cavernous empty space.
“Marie-Antoinette! Help me! Help me!”
“Just relax, Susan,” the macaw called, her voice half consoling, half impatient. “Just relax. I’ll meet you on the ground.”
“Marie-Antoinette, no! Don’t go! Help me!”
But it was too late: the blur of red on the other side of the lattice had disappeared. Susan was all alone, and falling.
She hung in the empty space, racking her brain for an idea of what to do next. But there was nothing. She was helpless. She thought of her family. She tried to send her thoughts out like a beacon of love, but it was hard to concentrate on any one image—even her mother and father—with her legs twisting over her head. She was plummeting at an incredible rate.
