City of Ruins (3 page)

“Look here, Mermaid. This shows the rotation
of our own Earth through the skies, and how the heavenly bodies
move in relation to us.” She turns the rule on the front, and the
wheels-within-wheels move. “Here are the days and nights through
which we live our lives, one coming after the other — the usual way
we move through time.”

“I want to know if it’s time for more sweet
cakes, Mommy.”

“Soon. But look again, Mermaid — what if we
could do this?” And she takes a sharp pin and shows me a hole she’s
bored into the two faces of the astrolabe, and she runs the pin
through, from side to side. “What if we could move
in
between
the stars while they march through time? What if we
could —”

“Take a shorter passage?” I finish her
sentence.

“Yes, a new artery, a new boulevard, to let
us come out somewhere else along time’s path. Ahead of where we
were expected to be. Or behind.”

“In time?”

“Yes.”

“Like a jinni?”

Mother laughs. “Yes, like a jinni. Let’s go
look for your sweet cakes now.”

But now I’m in a place with no sweet cakes at
all. “You took that from Mother’s lab. How?”

“No. We didn’t reach that far back in time.
This was kept locked in our own national archives. It was built by
Thomas Jefferson, based on ideas and designs from a certain Hypatia
of Alexandria.”

She looks at me like she expects an answer,
even though it wasn’t a question.

“Who?” I ask. It feels as if there’s steam
swirling around my head.

“That’s not funny.” Thirty frowns.
“Especially since he became interested in these ideas and designs
after meeting a runaway slave girl named Brassy. His description of
her sounds an awful lot like you.”

I let the translator finish with Thirty’s
words, because it gives me more time to consider a reply, and to
wipe the sweat off my forehead, since it’s getting so hot in
here.

I wish I could be eight again, and eating
sweet cakes, and looking for jinn.

Mother used to tell me stories about jinn.
Once you let one out of the bottle, you couldn’t put it back in, no
matter how many wishes you had left. The world you knew was changed
forever, and you had to live with it.

“You will have to live with your jinn,” I
tell Thirty.

“What?” Thirty turns to the translator.

“Your jinn. Can I lie down now?” I touch my
face. I’m really sweating.

“I don’t know about jinn, or genies, Thea,
and I’ll thank you not to be cute with me. We have a growing
situation in this country with terrible rumors spreading from mouth
to mouth — sightings of spirits and phantoms; people reported
missing in one place, then showing up miles away, claiming to have
been gone for years, even though it’s only been days or weeks;
numerous sightings of large land mammals thought to have been
extinct for thousands of years; travelers showing up burnt and
bleeding, insisting they’ve been burned by volcanoes or trapped by
earthquakes in places where these things haven’t happened in
millions of years.

“Add that to all the shortages, the wars, and
the bomb alerts — which
are
real — and the only thing
slowing down a panic over these
new
events are the slow pox
outbreaks and all the quarantines. People are scared enough about
that, about this disease — but they can’t run away, they can’t
flee. The laws force them to stay put.

“But as soon as they’re allowed to go out
again, the crazy rumors start back up—that reality itself can’t
even be trusted. And everyone gets afraid all over again. So we
need to look at everything, anything, that can help us. To help
them
. And if your mother had some ideas about space and time
that we should know about, to help explain what’s going on, well,
that might help us offer people something else besides fear and
sickness. A way to make things — some things, anyway — right again.
People deserve something better than monsters and phantoms. Don’t
you agree? Wouldn’t your mother?”

It’s true that Mother didn’t believe in
keeping secrets. “We must spread light,” she would always say. “To
remind people of things that deep down, they already know.”

But Thirty’s questions aren’t about spreading
light, or keeping people safer, or making them less afraid. They’re
about finding things out, to make the powerful more powerful. Their
consuls and officers. If they could control time voyaging for their
own ends…what would they do?

And if Mother were here, in this hot room,
what would she…

Mother…

My mother…?

Hypatia.

For a moment, it was as though I’d almost
forgotten her name. Even after hearing it from Thirty, a moment
ago. How is that even possible?

I feel another shiver run through my body. I
don’t know what’s happening to me. At least the lingo-spot
whisperings that began when I was at Jefferson President’s, appear
to have quieted down.

For now.

I reach for Mother’s astrolabe. I want to
touch something of hers. After her murder in Alexandria, this is as
close as I’ll ever come to touching her again.

I reach for it, but Thirty pulls it away.
“It’s very old and fragile, Thea. We wouldn’t want it to be harmed
in any way.” Then she reaches into the same box and pulls out an
old book, which she slams on the table in front of me. Pages
flutter by my eyes.

It’s the book from Thomas Jefferson
President’s house. The one with the picture of my mother in it.

There are notes in the margins, in Jefferson
President’s own hand. And next to those, a drawing he made of me.
Of my face. With the names
Brassy
and
Thea?
written
underneath.

What can I tell them that they’d want to
hear? Yes, I have found other boulevards, other paths through time,
with my friends Eli and K’lion. But so far the experience cannot be
controlled. And the results of such reckless movement through the
cosmos are completely unpredictable.

I say nothing, and keep my eyes focused on
Jefferson’s book — and try not to giggle (but what am I finding so
funny?). I can also see the published etching of K’lion, printed in
his book, the picture that troubled Jefferson, of K’lion running
from the fires that burned my town. Fires set by people who thought
they knew what was best for everyone else, too. Their laws, their
rules, their gods.

“These notes on the side were written by
President Jefferson himself, in a mix of languages, apparently. A
little French, a little Latin, a little English. Do I need to read
them to you? Or do you remember them firsthand?”

Thirty doesn’t wait for an answer, but
instead slides the book over to the translator, who looks around,
clears his throat, and starts reading out loud.

“ ‘In all the years of combing through this
book,’ ” the translator reads Jefferson’s words, “ ‘why have I
never previously seen this section before, with the rendering of
the
incognitum
?’ ” He clears his throat again, then
continues. “‘It seems as if there must be a connection to these
mysterious pages, and to the slow pox outbreak in New Orleans,
shortly after our visitors vanished in the spring of 1805. But the
connection continues to elude me. And I have never relished a
conundrum that resists all solution.’

“Jefferson sure had a way with language!” the
translator says, brightening. But his mood is quickly dissipated by
the look Thirty gives him.

She turns her attention back to me.

“This book of Jefferson’s has been stored in
top-secret archives that until recently, were restricted even to
me—‘Black Box’ files that I had never heard of before. And I was
supposed to have heard of all of them. This apparatus, built by
Jefferson during his retirement, as he apparently continued to
research your mother’s experiments, was stored in there, too.
Evidently” — and she takes a long thin metal strand, or “wire,” I
believe it’s called, and runs it through the two sides of the
astrolabe, like my own mother, Hypatia, did, so long ago — “the
idea of time travel is a very old one, even at the government’s
highest, most secret levels.”

I reach again for the device, and again, she
pulls it away.

“Or so it would seem. But I’m starting to
wonder, Thea,” — and now she leans close to me, so close I can
smell her breath, and she certainly hasn’t been eating sweet cakes
— “if perhaps these ‘Black Box’ files even
existed
until
recently. These notes from Thomas Jefferson, and this contraption
he built, appear to be over two hundred years old. Including the
drawing of you, here. ‘Brassy.’ And yet, I’m also wondering if any
of it is perhaps really no older than a week or two. If maybe it
only popped into being then, because the history around it,
behind
it, had been changed. By someone. Or a few someones.
Like you. And your friends.

“I really hate being left to wonder, Thea.
You need to tell me who you’re working with. And why you did it.
Did you have orders from some other government? Some other secret
department? Did somebody instruct you not to tell me anything?

“If there is a plan to invade, to overthrow,
and take over by changing history, I will have the truth. Just like
your mother wanted. The truth. ‘Thea.’ ”

I’m too tired for all these questions.

“Hypatia was my mother’s name,” I say to
her.

“What?” she says, looking at the translator,
then at me.

“The jinni won’t go back in the bottle now,”
I add. The room keeps growing hotter. I wish she would let me lie
down. “You should always remember your mother’s name.”

Now Thirty is looking confused.

“Even if you won’t be seeing her again.”

Now Thirty is looking mad.

“We will find out who you really are, Thea.
What
you really are. Whether you’re actually some ancient
Egyptian girl related to Hypatia of Alexandria…or someone else. Why
you and your…alien lizard friend have taken over the Danger Boy
project. And what you’ve done to Eli—who, by the way, doesn’t seem
very cooperative either. Though we’re trying other methods with
him.”

She has a small, satisfied look on her face
as she waits for the translator to speak to me in Greek.

“Let me show you something else.” She holds
up one of their printed news heralds, something still written on
papyrus stock, or paper, called the
National Weekly Truth
:
END OF THE WORLD!?
it says in large
letters over a large picture. It’s K’lion’s time ship, flying over
the bridge here in the city of San Francisco, when we came to
rescue Eli.

How did their cameras record that image? Why
is that paper here, so many years later?

I’m feeling a little fuzzy, and I’m not sure
how much more I can…retain. Mother — Hypatia — always said a fresh
mind was important for a new venture. So she believed in naps.

“I think with the world end, we should nap.”
I say it in English. Thirty’s mouth drops open. I’ve never spoken
English to her before.

Alexandria on a warm afternoon was a good
place for a nap. “I miss it.”

“English!? What other secrets are you keeping
from us, Thea? What else do you know?
Who
else do you know?”
She taps the picture.
Tunk! Tunk! Tunk! Tunk!
“You see this
bridge? There’s a kind of cult that lives out there at the foot of
the Golden Gate, in the ruins of Fort Point. A colony for people
who have slow pox. That’s the official story, anyway. It keeps most
people away. Except for some preacher who’s been camped out there,
talking to everyone, yelling at them, preaching about the end of
time itself. How there is no more before, no more after. Everything
is just a great big
now
, and people should act accordingly.
It’s all here in the article.

“The curious thing about this preacher” —
Tunk! Tunk!
her finger taps in such a frantic way, that I
wonder if maybe she doesn’t have as much control over herself as
she wants everyone to think — “this Andrew Jackson Williams, is
that I keep coming across his name in the archives, too. Just like
yours.”

Tunk! Tunk!

“We were able to round almost all of you up
when you came back to us,” she adds —
Tunk! Tunk!
— and the
corners of her lips go up in a slightly frightening way. “Almost.
Eli, that gray alien lizard man, and you.”

“Our own Mr. Howe is the only one who managed
to elude us, initially, but now” — and she flips the paper open,
pointing to another fuzzy picture, with a big red circle around a
couple of the faces — “here he is, showing up in the company of
this Williams character.” Then she slides the paper over to the
translator. “Read it to her. Or maybe not.”
Tunk!
“Maybe if
we keep her in here long enough, we can jog her memory.”
Tunk!
Tunk! Tunk! Tunk!

Then, the fingers slow down. And she breathes
in deeply for a moment.

“I don’t want to see anybody get hurt, Thea.
I think your mother would agree.”

What? Who’s going to be hurt?

TUNK! TUNK!

The translator leaps to his feet, knocking
the
Truth
paper down on the floor, along with a few writing
styluses and stray papyrus sheets — and sending Mother’s astrolabe
flying off the table.

I jump and catch it before it hits the
ground.

TUNK! TUNK!

That sound isn’t coming from Thirty’s
fingers.

This
TUNK! TUNK! TUNK!
is a loud,
clanging thumping noise that fills the air— like bells, like horns,
it fills the room, fills my head, louder, much louder than the
finger-tapping, piercing the steam around my head and ears and it
makes Thirty’s eyes go wide. Without saying anything else, she
turns and runs out.
TUNK! TUNK! TUNK!

The translator looks at me. “What do we do
now?” he asks. In Greek.