Ancient Fire (6 page)

The boy looked scared when I reached out to
him. “Don’t be afraid. I’m just out on a field trip.”

“I can understand you,” he said, staring at
me in disbelief. “But you’re a dinosaur! Where is this? What’s
happening?”

A
dinosaur
. That’s
what we’d be called on Earth Orange. “You’re in my vessel!” I told
him. “I’m supposed to be doing schoolwork. We’re in the Fifth
Dimension, moving through time.”

“Time . . .” He looked a little nauseous,
then stared at a piece of blue cloth in his hands. I would later
learn to call it a “cap.” For now, he was transfixed by it. “Oh,
no,” he went on. “The Wompers.” I still have not found out who the
Wompers are.

Meanwhile, as we found out later, Hypatia,
perhaps the senior female in her city of great learning, was
creating a time beacon that was pulling us toward her, and toward
the light- house — just like a water-ship heading for a beacon.

“Where are we going?” the boy asked.

I looked at my chrono-compass, which was
spinning around wildly. Perhaps things hadn’t stopped going wrong
on this field trip after all. “I have no idea. You’ve upset all the
controls.”

“How come I understand you?”

I tapped the side of my head to indicate the
lingo-spot. “School supplies.”

2. Were the Saurians on
the other Earth helpful? Why or why not?

There are no living Saurians on Earth Orange!
Scanners do show traces of one or two “dinosaurs” — evolutionary
cousins of ours — in a lake called Ness in a region called
Scotland, and a couple of other places. But that’s it.

There are no living Saurian
species
. By and large, they all became… extinct!

I expect I will lose points for this answer,
as if I stayed home and made all this up, rather than going on my
trip and doing actual research, but it’s true. I shudder at the
thought of a planet without Saurian culture, too. But I am
attaching several history texts — translated from the rough
languages of their planet — to show what they believe to be the
truth: That one time, long ago, a comet collided with their Earth,
causing a disaster that stopped Saurian evolution completely, like
a dragonfly hitting a tar pit.

It’s horrible to think about, and maybe it’s
just a crazy local myth. But could this event correspond to the
same comet sighting in our own prehistory — and the prehistories of
several other parallel Saurian Earths? — the nest-tale of the Great
Sky Hammer? It was said to be a near miss with some kind of
asteroid.

You will have a harder time believing what
happened after this presumed extinction, though

I have digitized much visual and aural
evidence and attached it to this homework. I hope to prove my
thesis that on Earth Orange, in the absence of Saurians,
mammals
evolved.

Yes, mammals! Those little ratlike creatures
who scamper around the feet of the more advanced Saurian species
have grown here into all sorts of exotic creatures who roar, growl,
beat their chests, walk around on two legs, and use all kinds of
tools. Their records show that, like mammals everywhere, they also
engage in the high-risk “live birth” of their young, as opposed to
hatching from the vastly safer egg-and-nest method.

Eli the Boy was one such mammal. His species
call themselves
Homo sapiens
, because they
all presume they can think. They
do
have
many languages. But they are always making trouble for each other
and lighting many fires.

That said, I must add the most surprising
thing of all: This Eli the Boy, this young mammal, has become my
friend. As has Thea the Girl — born of Hypatia, the time scholar
from Alexandria — whom the boy and I would soon meet.

They were helpful because they trusted me and
wound up defending me, despite our having just met. Like two
leaf-eaters assisting a stranger in a roomful of carnivores —
before knowing which I was.

I realize such closeness breaks all the basic
rules about field-trip safety.

One thing about Earth Orange: It never runs
out of ways to surprise you.

Chapter Seven

Eli: The Lighthouse

415 C.E.

I’d become unstuck, unglued in time. Tangled
in it.

Thanks to my dad’s experiments, and Mr.
Howe’s WOMPERs, I wasn’t going to move straight through from the
beginning of my life to the end of it, like everybody else. I was
going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in
a great big cosmic blender.

Strange things happen when you zigzag through
time like that. First, you go into the Fifth Dimension, where it’s
much harder to tell the difference between time and space, or when
and where. Or even who and what — you’re not quite sure, when
you’re there, where
you
end and the rest
of everything else begins. In the Fifth Dimension, things kind of
flow
….

Time gets stretched out. And somehow, in some
part of your brain, when you land in a ship next to a talking
dinosaur, who turns out to be about your age in dinosaur years,
you’re not that surprised.

And when the time-ship journey seems to be
taking a while, like a cross-country drive with your father, you
get to know the dinosaur boy. After all, you’re not going anywhere
else. Yet.

His name is Clyne, and he was doing some kind
of science project for his school. Apparently, by landing in his
ship, I’d messed up all his careful calculations, and now his trip
was ruined, because he didn’t know where he was headed.

As it turned out, he was headed for ancient
Alexandria, in the year 415. And so was I.

Judging from the sun, we arrived around
noon.

We first appeared hovering over a giant
lighthouse in the harbor. Now, arriving in a round, metallic ship
in full daylight isn’t exactly the way to slip in somewhere without
being noticed. On top of that, there was a beam of rainbow-colored
light pouring out of the tower, directly hitting Clyne’s ship.

Making us even more obvious than we already
were.

There was a big crowd of people around the
lighthouse already, but whatever they were there for, they stopped
doing it to stare at us.

Clyne looked through the glass at the people
below. I was squinting because the rainbow beam was so bright.

“Mammal dance!
Tchkkk-tchkk-kk
!” Clyne said excitedly. He’d already
taken off his lingo- spot in the ship, because after we’d been
talking awhile, he said human speech seemed pretty simple, and if
he learned it on his own, he could maybe fulfill some language
requirement at his school.

I decided to keep my lingo-spot on. There was
little chance I was going to learn to speak Lizard anytime soon.
With or without the tongue-clicking.

As for what Clyne described as a “dance” — he
was still figuring out which words go with which situations — to me
it just looked like people standing still with their jaws open.

They were dressed in robes or tunics and wore
sandals with lots of lacing. Their faces looked pretty sunburned,
like maybe they spent a lot of time outdoors. This particular group
all seemed to be holding rocks or clubs, and I thought I saw a
drawn sword or two.

It didn’t look like they’d come to dance.
Clyne checked some controls. “Cabin air good. Outside breathable.”
He tapped some gauges, then tapped them again. “Chrono-compass
still unworking.”

He stared, and tapped one more time. Then he
turned to look at me with those big, round lizard eyes and
shrugged. “Stuck in this present until fix-up. But where-when are
we?” He looked through the glass. “Mammals below, on two legs,
somewhat advanced, have streets, buildings, boats, and wagons.” He
turned back to me, still fairly cheerful. “Probably your planet!
Kkzht!
Let’s look.”

The speckled glass of Clyne’s time-vessel
slithered open along each side — I didn’t even know there were
windows in it.

Clyne stuck his head out.

They weren’t silent anymore; you could hear
them shouting. The lingo-spot let me understand them. “Devil!”
someone screamed. “Demon!”

I heard a couple
thunks
against the side of the ship. Someone from down
below was hitting us with rocks. They must’ve had a pretty good
arm. Too bad for them baseball hadn’t been invented yet.

Then my eye caught something else. We were
hovering near the top of the lighthouse, and as the rainbow-colored
beam moved away from us, I could see a girl, about my age, also
wearing a robe, with dark hair around her shoulders. She was
leaning out of one of the archways in the top of the tower, staring
at our ship.

And now she was staring at me.

I didn’t know what else to do. Through the
open window, I waved.

Instead of waving in reply, she looked
startled and stepped back. I guess I couldn’t blame her.

Then she was joined at the railing by an
older woman, who looked a little bit like her. Thick brown hair
just kind of flowed around her face. Her mother?

The woman was shouting at us. At me.
Sometimes, when the lingo-spot was working hard, there’d be a
tingle, and the slightest delay, like listening to an announcer in
a ballpark.

“Where are you from?” she was asking.

“I’m from New Jersey!” I yelled back. “And
the Valley of the Moon!”

I don’t think they understood me.

It didn’t matter, because my part of the
conversation ended when a rock hit me on the forehead. It knocked
me back into the ship, making me dizzier than even time travel
does.

I touched my head and saw I was bleeding a
little bit. I crouched and peeked out through another part of
Clyne’s ship — it was made from some kind of transparent metal,
which we don’t have on Earth — and saw one guy who’d actually
climbed a few yards up the side of the tower.

He had a beard and long hair and eyes that
seemed to pierce you from a mile away. His robes were brown and
kind of scraggly, and he was shaking his fist at us.

I think the rock came from him.

“Maybe mammals aren’t dancing,” Clyne
decided. He pulled the ship away from the light- house. “Yet both
of us stuck in this ‘now’ until compass is fixed. Need to land —
k’ingg!
— and rethink studies.”

We floated over the city of Alexandria: There
were spires, stone boulevards, pillars, arches, and huge statues of
men and warriors along the roadways. Also, a few statues of
half-men or half-women. The other half would be animal — like a guy
with a bird’s head or something.

I wonder if they thought Clyne was like one
of those statues come to life.

He was still looking for a place to land. Up
ahead, we saw a wide clearing, mostly grass, with some bushes, in
the middle of a huge complex of buildings. Like a palace courtyard
turned into a giant park.

Clyne steered the ship toward it, hovered,
landed. As we came down, we could see a couple people scurrying
away.

The ship hit with a bump, and I stepped out.
I reached down to put the Seals cap on my head…and felt my body
tingling again. The colors of the Fifth Dimension swirled in front
of me and I nearly passed out…

“Boy sick?” It was Clyne, leaning over me,
waving the hat in front of my face like a fan. “Time-stretching
does that.”

I started to wonder what was up with the
cap.

I didn’t wonder long, though. Coming up
toward the ship, we had some new, curious visitors: a tiger, a pair
of sauntering giraffes, and farther away, a rhino, stomping, head
down, taking aim at the ship.

This wasn’t just a courtyard. It was a zoo.
And we’d landed in the middle of it.

Chapter Eight

Thea: Bazaar

415 C.E.

My name is Thea, daughter of Hypatia, last
librarian in the city of Alexandria, keeper of archives and
records, seeker of truth. This is my record, and whoever reads
this, know that I would not lie. A lizard man and a boy wizard
really did come to my city, fly around the lighthouse, and escape
from a rhinoceros.

And that was before we’d been properly
introduced. But
proper
is the wrong word
for this story.

Their ship came at the stroke of noon. I’d
climbed the tower with my mother, who was preparing a demonstration
for her lecture on “The Bending of Light and the Movement of
Time.”

With the sun at its zenith, she revealed a
carefully placed row of crystal prisms she’d set up in front of the
lighthouse mirror. Normally, that mirror is used at night, or
during dense fog, when the flame of Pharos burns and is reflected
and thrown far out to sea.

But now, the lighthouse threw instead a
blazing rainbow, and within moments, the airship appeared.

“What’s happening?” I asked Mother. There had
always been whispered stories about ancient flying ships from
distant lands, but I had never seen one before.

“The lighthouse signal seems to have drawn
another kind of ship here. I wonder where it’s from? Or, perhaps,
when
it’s from? And if it’s friendly.” My
mother looked at the rows of crystals. She’d spent months shaping
them and calculating how to line them up. “I wonder if this was
such a good idea.”

I leaned out over the railing to get a closer
look at the ship, and that’s when I first saw the boy.

He was staring at me, too.

“Where are you from?” I shouted, but I’m not
sure he understood me. He said something that sounded like
“Neujarzii,” but it made no sense.

Still, we might have shouted more questions,
marveling at each other’s strangeness, if “Brother” Tiberius hadn’t
hit him in the head with a rock.