City of Ruins (22 page)

I’ll be spending the rest of my life here.
With Thea. And A.J. And all those people Clyne brought. I won’t
ever see my parents again.

I’ll grow up here. And then what?

Marry Thea?

That’s too weird to even think about.

And I sure won’t ever get to play
‘Barnstormers’ again.

“A good time to meet!” Clyne bounds over,
apparently having hopped across the sands after us.

Jeremiah takes a few steps back, crouching a
little, still not sure what to make of Clyne. He stands straight
after a few moments, but keeps his distance. “And I believe it will
be good if I am no longer seen in the company of a goat-demon.”

“I have been searching you out, friends!”
Clyne says to us. “I believe I may have a way
znnnkt!
to get
us home.”

Chapter
Nineteen

Eli: Slaversaur

583 B.C.E.

Any day now, we should know if this works. So
far, it’s been three.

Clyne’s idea was to open up a dimensional
rift. He said he got the idea when he saw the scrap of the Reach
baseball reflecting the rays of the setting sun “in
multi-
tizzyng
many-vectored ways. As if the shard of cloth
contained some plasmechanical material.”

“Well,” A.J. said, “that’s because I reckon
it does.”

The whole thing began when he’d actually met
Green Bassett, right before he disappeared. It was in Vinita, after
an exhibition game against one of Satchel Paige’s traveling
all-star squads from the Negro Leagues.

“I saw Bassett the mornin’ after the first
game, walkin’ out of town, kinda like he was in disguise, a big
overcoat on him, even on a sticky Oklahoma day, with a hat pulled
low over his eyes, carryin’ somethin’ in the kinda case you might
put a fishin’ pole in, or a shotgun. Though once you figured out
you were lookin’ at a ballplayer, you could guess it was a baseball
bat. I was on a store porch, with an Orange Crush on my lips, when
I saw him. ‘Hey, Green Bassett!’ I yelled.

“He put a finger over his mouth, like I’d
already spilled the beans. ‘Where you goin’?’ I asked, ’cause I
knew he was s’posed to have another game against Satchel Paige that
night.”

“Paige could pitch two days in a row?” I
asked.

“If he had to, son. Had to make hay any way
he could, since they weren’t lettin’ black men into the majors back
then. ‘I need to go away a while,’ he told me, ‘’cause things ain’t
exactly like I thought.’

“‘What things?’ I asked him.

“That’s when he flipped me the Reach ball.
‘Ask Paige how he learned to throw spitters like this one,’ he
said. ‘I never struck out on three straight pitches before. Never.
I’m going to New Orleans, to see for myself.’ And then he left
town, son. He left baseball, too. No one ever saw him after
that.”

“Did you ever find out what he meant?”

“I snuck into the ballpark the next day. Ol’
Satchel wouldn’t tell me, but he showed me after the game. Everyone
else had left the park. A spitter, son, like you’ve never seen
before. Took a little resin bag he had, only there wasn’t no resin
in it. ‘My special sauce,’ Paige said. And he dabbed a little on
the ball, looked around, then threw a pitch that gave off sparks
and zigged and zagged, and almost seemed to stop before it reached
the plate. Like a ball out of a cartoon.

“‘Learned that down in Louisiana,’ Paige told
me. ‘Only use it when I have to. Against batters like Green
Bassett. Still, I may have to give that pitch up. It unnerves even
me.’”

“I knew what he meant. The whole thing seemed
unnatural, even for a pitcher as great as ol’ Satchel. Well, son,
in those days, I was young myself, and thought about
ballplayin’.”

So he
did
have other options besides
the motel.

“That was before preachin’ took a hold of me.
So I headed off to New Orleans, armed with only the vague
descriptions Paige had given me of where he had gone to get that
‘special sauce’ that made the ball fly around so crazy. I wanted to
learn its secret. And I got as far as a tree.”

I knew exactly which tree he meant. The one
in the bayou outside of old New Orleans, the city that used to be
there before all the hurricanes struck. The place I’d visited with
Thea and Clyne. The spot where the Saurian time-ship had crashed in
the early 1800s, outside Lake Ponchartrain. It created a place — I
guess Clyne would call it a nexus — where escaped slaves could
just…“disappear.”

“The special sauce?...” I asked, beginning to
put the pieces together. “From the crash site? It was still
there?”

“Material from the alien ship, piloted by
your goat-demon friend. I know that now.”

“Plasmechanics!” Clyne chirped. “Even a small
amount on a
snkkt!
base-sphere could change its quantum
position in spacetime! Just a
znggt!
fraction! Enough to
make the orb seem
gerk-skizzy!
as if it wasn’t quite solid
when it moved through air!”

In other words, when a pitch usually leaves a
pitcher’s hand, the ball goes forward in space and time, arriving
at the plate or against the bat. But if it had plasmechanical
material on it, like Paige’s, it wouldn’t move straight through
time in the normal way. It’d be off by a micro second here or
there, just enough to make it a lot harder to hit. Maybe
impossible.

“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.