Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1)
Page 11
Chapter Ten
Clyne: The Rhino and the Time-Vessel
Final Class Project: 10,271 S.E.
3. How was this culture different from your own? Describe.
Since I’ve already described this planet as being dominated by evolved mammals, I have, in a way, already answered the question. What could be more unusual than that? But you still may not believe me, and may even be thinking that when I get home, the school nurse should immediately prescribe a volcano cure for me to let me sweat out these bad visions. But our motto, as Saurians, has always been “Science is deep truth,” and science is on my side here.
Even though the truth is that everything is different, and what we thought we knew about evolution has been turned into mush-fern stew.
For example, there are nearly as many types of mammal species as there are Saurians! Not just the two-legged, mostly sentient kind like Eli the Boy, or Thea, the daughter of the scholar Hypatia (and a scholar in her own right), but many other strange creatures with equally strange names: rhinos, monkeys, tigers. They have “birds,” too. These birds even resemble our own winged Saurians.
I met many of these firsthand, when they tried to overrun my vessel in the middle of something called a “zoo.” The human mammals evidently keep other mammals imprisoned, like the Ring of No Escape in Cacklaw. And, like Cacklaw, it’s for entertainment. But not for a few mere sun-cycles as in our own sporting events, with the gates open after the game. No, these zoos are permanent. Does this mean, for mammals, that their games don’t end? It seems more serious for the ones behind bars. I will continue to investigate.
My introduction to the culture, of course, was when Eli the Boy wound up in my ship as a result of a poorly plotted experiment on time dynamics. Their mature beings, called “grownups” or “adults,” possess roughly the scientific knowledge of a Saurian in secondary studies. As a result of this rough science, my settings were thrown completely off.
We know from our own studies that certain beings can potentially act as “lightning poles,” magnets if you will, for time energy—with the slightest disturbance in spacetime focused on and channeled through them. As the saying goes, “Some hatch differently.” The boy is like that. Apparently, his unique reactions are triggered by the wearing of headgear, or a “cap”.
As a living time particle himself, Eli the Boy was drawn to another time experiment in Alexandria, a place that was “ancient” for him, since it reached the height of its glory some sixteen hundred years before he was born. Thea’s female parent, Hypatia, had retreated to a lighthouse after solving several equations about the composition of light and time, and how each measures and affects the other. She was trying to demonstrate the results for the whole city, perhaps because she thought some citizens might appreciate what would be a great forward stomp in mammalian knowledge.
Hypatia’s experiment acted as a kind of homing beacon for us. Since I found myself back in a fairly normal, compressed atmosphere, I stuck my head out of the ship’s portal to get a better view of our surroundings, and to bring the standard time-traveler’s greeting to the crowd below: “A good time to meet!”
But I never got that far. They began throwing projectiles and chanting at us. Apparently, they were not fond of Hypatia or her experiments.
As the ship was still wobbly, Eli the Boy and I looked for a place to put down. When we found open space in this “zoo,” we were attacked first by the rhino, and then by other creatures, who presumably thought, as had the humans, that their territory was being invaded.
After getting out of the ship, I just stood there transfixed, watching these amazing creatures come at us. The rhino might’ve speared me dead center in my abdo-bilious if Eli the Boy hadn’t shoved me away. A rude gesture for a kind purpose.
In their own way, these Earth Orange animals are wondrous. Like creatures you might find in a hatchling’s tale. But they also have appetites — and tempers.
“I think we made him mad,” Eli the Boy said as the rhino turned around to face us again.
Now it was my turn to help. Holding the boy, I jumped to safety, hearing behind me the distressing thud of the rhino colliding with my ship. My leaping seemed to amaze the other humans scrambling for safety around us. Apparently, human legs are slow and spindly.
I leaped across the great grounds of these Royal Quarters, over fountains, pillars, and arches, trying to keep ahead of the strange riot that was brewing between the interplay of mammals—the animals who were loose, and the various humans running from them in panic. Even in this confusion, I had time to notice that Alexandria, in all its pink, sandy tones, is very much like a Saurian city!
But our first task was getting to safety. So I cleared the walls, still holding on to Eli the Boy, thinking we’d be safe once we were away from all the stampedes.
Instead of tigers and lions, we found more humans. The angry mob had chased the girl up from the lighthouse and into the public market, where they had her surrounded. Then I saw Eli the Boy do an amazing thing.
After my appearance caught them off guard once more, Eli declined to continue our escape and instead released himself from my arms.
“Get her away from here,” he instructed me. Here I’d just arrived on their planet, and they were already getting me involved in their fights. This certainly wasn’t a typical school assignment!
But I trusted Eli, and had a sense that the girl —for I didn’t know her as Thea yet — could use a helping claw. I took her, and, as we jumped away, caught sight of something extraordinary:
Eli voluntarily put himself in danger, drawing the wrath of the mob, giving Thea and me a better chance to escape. Then he put his cap on and disappeared back into the Fifth Dimension.
Meanwhile, I took the girl and returned over the wall into the Royal Quarters, since the four-legged mammals suddenly seemed less dangerous than the two-legged ones.
I heard another distant thump as the rhino kept charging at my poor ship. The girl spoke to me, but in a tongue different from the boy. Apparently Earth Orange is so early in its development that it is still multilingual! I could see I would need the lingo-spot again to learn how to converse with her.
I had some of the plasmechanical substance in the emergency kit in my uniform, and I quickly applied some. She was pointing frantically toward some buildings on the edge of the great lawn, and I jumped in that direction.
After we landed, she turned to me. “Are you a lizard god? Or just a lizard man?”
I responded, but she couldn’t understand me. I reached out to give her a lingo-spot, but she stepped back. I could understand her caution, but it would take me at least a few minutes to pick up some words in her language.
“Well,” the girl said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter who you are. Or what. Thank you for your help. You’re in my city, Alexandria, now. And I’m afraid you’ve come at a very dangerous time.
“This is the library. We have all the knowledge in the known world here. My mother, Hypatia, is the head librarian, lecturer, and the city’s principal mathematician. I am Thea. I have recently discovered a new star and am also finishing a rebuttal to Pythagoras. He claimed each number has a male or female personality, but he made too many of them masculine.”
There was a pause after that, then she grew terribly sad. “I suppose none of that matters now. I saw them take her away.” Then she did something strange: It involved water coming out of her eyes, which she eventually wiped off. After she regained her breath, she looked right at me—a look of amazing intelligence. “Whatever you are, you’re in danger, too. No, Tiberius won’t stop until everything he can’t control, or doesn’t understand, is destroyed. And he wouldn’t even try to understand you.”
“No,” I said. It was my first word in her tongue. She looked surprised. But I still don’t know if I meant “No, he won’t understand,” or just “No,” as if I could personally stop what had already been set in motion.
It turned out none of us could. Not even Eli the Boy, when
he returned to us through time mere minutes later.