City of Ruins (6 page)

Usually, they would grow frustrated and send
me back to one of their holding rooms, each with various guardians
who came and went on their shifts, each assigned to watch me, to
make sure I didn’t escape again.

Such an escape would certainly be the outlaw
thing to do, of course. But I wouldn’t have Thea’s help. She’d been
taken captive, too.

We were all taken captive when we time-ported
back to Eli’s present, landing under the very bridge where Thea and
I once tried to rescue our friend: “The Golden Gate.”

And it’s orange!

And while the locals probably imagine “Golden
Gate” refers to the inlet from the ocean to their bay, I wonder if
it’s not a signal — for those who know such signs — that the “gate”
may be a place where such a nexus occurs.

There must be some reason we keep being drawn
back to it. And from my brief studies of Earth history, it would
seem certain structures — the pyramids, a place called “Stonehenge”
near where King Arthur and Merlin lived, to use but two examples —
were built with the idea of some kind of nexus in mind, a place to
channel and control the convergence of past and future and the
fissures between dimensions.

I couldn’t tell, after we’d arrived, whether
the soaking, chanting humans on the shore near us considered
themselves in the presence of such a nexus, and were celebrating —
mammal dancing, at last. They were certainly performing some kind
of ritual, one that reminded me of the fervor that comes in a
Cacklaw Culmination — the end ceremonies after one of the game’s
long rounds concludes — where Saurians, usually circumspect in
their spiritual leanings, all pray to the Great Makers for bounty,
blessing, and of course, better score tabulations to come.

When these human celebrants saw us appear, or
more specifically, when they saw me, a great cry and moan went
up.

“There it is!” yelled a man with rumpled
clothing and bushy eye hair. “Proof that heaven is torn apart and
time is running in all directions at once! And it is now in our own
hands to send time and history in a new direction!”

There were more screams, and people started
running — away from me, toward me. Some of them had signs, which
they dropped in the sand:

NOT END TIME — OUR TIME!

And:

STOP STEALING OUR TOMORROWS!

More evidence that these sand celebrants must
have been thinking about nexuses and the general elasticity of
time.

And, perhaps, so was Mr. Howe, who surprised
us all by shouting “
Yes
!” and running toward the yelling
man, whose eyes glittered with an almost Saurian-like focus under
his bushy brows.

One of us might have retrieved Mr. Howe,
except that armed military personnel were already there, as if
prepared for our very return.

Their weapons were leveled at us.

“Perhaps one of the not-so-good times to
meet,” I ventured, looking at the guns.

“You. Don’t. Move,” one of the squadron
members said to me, as he and his two companions waved their
weapons for extra emphasis.

He seemed extremely nervous. I could have
skttle-tngd
right out of there, but as I watched Eli and
Thea being snatched and taken immediately into rough custody, it
occurred to me that my
skttle-tnging
back to outlaw mode —
in spite of the plethora of food scraps, high-end garbage, and old
copies of the
National Weekly Truth
that could sustain me —
might make it harder on my friends. The consortium of police and
military agencies that always seems to pursue time voyagers on this
planet might be further panicked by my absence, and take out their
fears on my friends. I didn’t want them to come to any additional
harm on my account.

So I decided, for the moment, to allow my
capture, and hoped we would all be taken to the same facility. From
there, we could decide where the three of us could go next.

Or, perhaps,
when
the three of us
could go next.

“Later, a better now!” I yelled to my
friends, using a Saurian phrase I hadn’t thought of in many time
cycles. But I am dubious they heard me before their vehicle door
slammed shut.

I have since remained in captivity here at
the DARPA facility, without seeing my companions, or knowing how
they are faring. Left to myself, however, some insights have come
to me. Perhaps not as grand as those that occurred to the Saurian
philosopher Melonokus, briefly arrested in the early reign of King
Temm, where he wrote “Meat and Silence — Jail Notes Of a Bad
Lizard.” It was a treatise that would eventually change how
everyone felt about our own Bloody Tendon wars, then raging between
carnivores and herbivores. But still, insights nonetheless. The
fear of Saurians, so prevalent in mammals here on Earth Orange, at
least the walking talking ones like Eli and Thea’s species, is a
common staple of their popular entertainments.

Fear seems to get them
zbblly
inside,
all wound up, perhaps even
shunt-crkked
, but in a way they
enjoy, which oddly, makes them feel better, too.

I was able to watch such entertainments
through the spaces in the containment bars which held me, while the
guardians, on their shifts, would sit outside my cage and often
watch these “shows” on their Comnet screens. There were various
pantomimes and entertainments, everything from attempts at humor to
startling displays of mating behavior, to long visual stories,
which, I gather, used to be called “films” or “movies.”

One such guard always watched films about
Saurians:
Valley of the Gwangi
,
One Million Years
B.C.
,
Jurassic Park
, — a few of them seemed to have this
title —something called
Godzilla
which featured an
outlandishly large Saurian, and another, a “Comnet original” titled
Slaversaur!

In none of these do Saurians come off as
particularly insightful, well-meaning, or even approachable.

As for the slaversaur, he — or perhaps she (I
couldn’t tell, since the subject of egg-laying never came up) — was
like a Saurian who never knew the Bloody Tendon Wars came to an
end.

He ate a lot. Of mammals. Then he drooled.
And slavered.

Each time the guardian watched one of these,
he’d move his chair farther and farther away from me, get his
weapon and start cleaning it, and practice his aiming.

Sometimes in my direction.

“So who’s evolving
now
, T. Rex?” he
said, after one of his Saurian entertainments, pointing his gun at
me.

“I didn’t realize on your planet evolution
was voluntary!” I said, hoping to strike up friendlier
relations.

It didn’t work.

“If everything was voluntary, you think I’d
be stuck down here guarding you? And stop talking to me, it’s not
right.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“I said stop it!”

He waved his gun, and seemed to be getting a
bit
gerk-skizzy
—that shakey condition that derives from
Saurian slang for a
gerk
-drive gone bad.

So I stopped talking to him.

It was on that particular night, after one of
his numerous repeat viewings of
Slaversaur!
that the
building’s emergency alarm system went off — a loud, persistent
WHIT! WHIT! WHIT!
sound, as if an unoiled flywheel was
grinding its gears and couldn’t be stopped.

“I
knew
it!” the guard screamed.
“Alarm bells! It’s a dinosaur attack!” And then he fled, one last
glance to make sure the bars would still hold me, leaving me alone
with just a flickering Comnet screen on the other side of the
bars.

If he’s hearing bells and I am hearing a
whit
-like noise, perhaps the sound waves of the alarm are
perceived differently by each listener. Indeed, perhaps they are
using neurotransmitters to feed directly into the brain, bypassing
soundwaves entirely. Could this be another experiment? A security
precaution? Meanwhile, on the screen, there was at last something
new:

Slaversaur II: The Feasting.

But I never got to find out if the slaversaur
redeemed his own outlaw status, left unresolved after his first
adventure. For after only a few moments into the electric
pantomime, the scene where two fledgling humans tell their
nest-sire, “Pa, there’s something terrible growling in the shed,”
my chilly acquaintance Thirty arrived, a contingent of guardians at
her side.

As usual, she made little small talk.

“There’s been a security breach. We’re moving
you.”

And then they proceeded in the ritual of
turning off the energy field surrounding my cell, opening the bars
while leveling their beam-powered weapons at me, then clamping my
arms and legs in restraints before leading me down the hallway.

“Something’s gotten in, and we don’t know
what it is. Perhaps one of your fellow gray aliens, Mr. Klein,
checking to see if you’ve turned our compound into one of your
prime nexuses.”

“Friend Thirty, you cannot
make
a
prime nexus. You can only strive to
understand
them. As I,
like the slaversaur, seek to understand and come in from the
shed.”

“I am not laughing, Mr. Klein. There is more
at stake than you realize.”

Not laughing? Well, no. But then, this was
not a laugh-round of school students seeking to make fun of
teachers during class break, either. What odd responses these
humans have!

Eventually, after a long walk down several
descending tunnels, into areas that grew increasingly dark and
increasingly damp, my security escorts deposited me in what was not
so much a room but a sunken arena, surrounded by metal walls and an
outer perimeter of electrified wire, patrolled by security
personnel with even more convincing weapons than the ones who
escorted me here.

In the middle of it all was much dirt and
foliage, and to my surprise, the remains of the Saurian
time-vessel, which I’d last seen some two hundred Earth Orange
years previously, outside the settlement at New Orleans.

They had apparently taken my observations
about prime nexuses pretty seriously after all; they had
transported the entire area where my time vessel had crashed, and
where the anonymous slave Brassy had died, to this facility. The
very Brassy who may have changed the history of Earth, or at least
that section of it that calls itself America, had she been allowed
to live.

But where had this prime nexus existed in the
two hundred earth “years” since we went through it? Had it lain
undiscovered all this time? Or had it always been a secret
possession of the governing class, preserved so they could study
its mysteries, they way they attempt to study me, in all the time
since?

Did these reconstituted ruins come with a
trail of bones behind them, too?

It was actually a fascinating idea: If a
prime nexus is a combination of time-and-place that acts like a
beacon, attracting time voyagers — the way Alexandria attracted me
and Eli — what happens if you move the beacon?

It wasn’t just the crystals of the lighthouse
tower that brought us to Alexandria, it was the
ideas
that
Thea’s mother, Hypatia, had. Just as it was the essence of the
mysterious Brassy — combined with the choices made by her
contemporaneous mammal, and, admittedly, the crash landing of my
Saurian vessel — that made that particular spot a nexus of its
own.

Would these remains, these plants, this soil
— and Brassy’s bones — still act like a nexus if they were taken
from their place and time? I would have to note that question for
extra credit someday.

Though what if I found points docked from my
research because the stranded Saurian technology was now
interfering with the normal flow of Earth Orange history?

And mammals are so hot-blooded, that things
flow only in the most
gerk-skizzy
way here, anyway. I hope I
have not made their problems worse.

“This is the most secure area of the entire
complex,” Thirty said to me, bringing me back from my contemplated
studies. “Several levels below where you were being kept. Until we
find out what’s happening, you’ll stay here.” She looked at the
guardians surrounding me. “With the restraints on.”

No top-stomping for me. Shackled like this, I
could barely move, like a hatchling still wet with egg shine.

And here I’ve remained, in all the stretched
moments since— the
whit! whit! whit!
of their alarm system
still sounding in the background—and I believe my earlier
observation stands: these mammals are really only happy when they
can go from one crisis to the next.

It seems to give them purpose. It is, I
suppose, another kind of dance. But not the happiest one.

Meanwhile, I have had a chance to study what
remains of the Saurian vessel.

I use the term “study” advisedly, of course.
The entire planet is one vast uncontrolled experiment. And there
isn’t a single decent Saurian syllabus here. But as I suspected
previously, the plasmechanical material of the ship has somehow
interacted with its Earth Orange environment and been transformed
by it.

Saurian technology is being mutated, changed,
on this planet. The plasmechanical material appears to have
absorbed the slow pox virus, as I discovered when doing my field
research in the time of Clark, Lewis, and North Wind Comes, and may
be experiencing a kind of cellular mutation. This mutation seems to
be causing a kind of nervous system to form inside the material’s
organic components, resulting in a type of biologically-based
electric grid, or what the humans call a “computer,” one that is
developing its own intelligence.

This could be something new, and never before
seen. Something that could, perhaps, link previously unconnected
types of Saurian artifacts — like time-vessels and lingo-spots—into
a neural network of their own.