City of Ruins (14 page)

It only takes two or three more solar cycles,
as we head down a road coded with both binary and a letter: The
I-10. We are going now straight to Grandfather’s.

The weather grows hotter, and dryer, and I am
happy to get out of this “tuxedo” Rocket put me in some time ago,
as we aren’t doing any more shows, and return to my chrono-suit.
Even though it has become a little tattered since I’ve been on
Earth Orange, the material is much better designed to respond
properly to the weather.

And then, after more travel down the binary
highway, we are there.

What is unusual is that, out of all the
humans on Earth Orange, Rocket’s grandfather is someone I already
know.

His name is Rolf Royd; he used to work for a
group calling itself the Third Reich. Eli’s nickname for him was
the Dragon Jerk kid, though I don’t believe Rolf ever met a dragon
firsthand. How the name for these poor Earth-bound Saurians gets
dragged through the mud!

“You again,” Rolf says to me, not in Eli’s
English, but in the Reich’s tongue, when the Odd-Lots Carnival
pulls up at last, the trucks sputtering to a stop a few yards away
from his dwelling, as they use up the last of their fuel.

His hair is still white, but thinner now, and
his mammalian epidermis shows signs of having aged since we last
encountered each other in the Fifth Dimension, after leaving Arthur
the king and Merlin the wizard behind us.

Eli, Thea, and I wound up back in the time of
Lewis and Clark, as did my time-vessel. Rolf landed someplace where
he continued to age. Someplace like right here.

“It’s good to see you, Grandfather,” Rocket
says hopefully.

“Yes, I expect it is,” Rolf says, now
speaking in the English tongue. “Took you long enough to get here.
When did I send you on your way? Sometime last September?”

What Rolf means by the word
here
is
his small dwelling — I believe humans call them trailers — in the
middle of a stand of trees behind a large building with signs that
proclaim journeyers have found the “Cabazon Casino!”

We are outside a place called Indio,
according to the road markers.

“Date?” Rolf says, tossing a piece of fruit
in Rocket’s direction. It bounces off his chest and lands on the
ground, where the Weeping Bat sweeps it up with her mouth.

“It’s getting harder and harder out there
now, Grandfather. It’s getting harder to find vegetable fuels for
our engines, and with all the quarantines and permits you need now
just to move and gather —”

Rolf waves his hand at his grandson, with a
skut
-like gesture of contempt. “I’m not interested in how
you failed.” He walks over to my cage and stares more closely at
me. “So, my alien friend. Come back to claim that
sklaan
of
yours, eh? Oh yes, we kept your objects. Along with files on you.
And all your friends.”

“We? Who?” I ask.

I get a
skut
-like ignoring, as
well.

Rolf turns back to his eggling, Rocket. “Yet
the very fact you could bring me someone like this lizard makes me
hold you in slightly less contempt, Augustus.”

“It’s Rocket, Grandfather.”

“But only slightly less. Did you get any of
the things I actually asked for?”

“Yes.”

“Used the keys and the pass I supplied to get
into the Sandses’ lab?”

“Yes.”

“And the abandoned equipment was there?”

“Yes.”

“‘Yes.’ Always ‘yes.’” Rolf spits on the
ground. “You’d say anything to please me. Come inside and let me
see for myself. As for all your orphans,” — and now he’s waving his
hand at us, but again, it seems to be the opposite of a greeting —
“they can stay outside.”

“Some creatures,” I say to Silver Eye, “never
get their
laan-tandan
, their life force, unstuck. It seems
to wither in them. Of all creatures I know of in different time
folds, on different worlds, human mammals seem particularly
susceptible. That human creature,” I nod toward the trailer where
Rolf and Rocket have disappeared, “that grandsire, in particular. I
have met him before. When he was barely older than a hatchling. And
by then, something called the Reich had already withered his
laan-tandan
completely.”

Yes, there is a deep coldness, a bottomless
hard place, inside Grandfather Rolf. In Rocket, though, there is
mostly sadness. No one in that family was able to form a healthy
pack.

“What transpired?”

I don’t know much. Rolf came here after a
great war between the humans. Humans have these concepts called
“winning” and “losing.” Rolf’s side lost that war, and yet in the
land here, the formation that humans call “America,” they still
used Rolf’s knowledge for “secret” programs of their own. To
maximize their power. More strange human concepts.

“Secret programs? Of study?”

Of ways to make weapons that would allow one
to hold on to power for eternity. Yet no power lasts that long, and
as for secrets, everything, everyplace is known somewhere, somehow,
by something. And every being who tastes flesh at the height of
their own power eventually falls and turns to dust themselves.

“Tell me again how humans became the dominant
mammals on Earth Orange, instead of wolves.”

I am not sure. Perhaps wolves were happy
with themselves they way they were. That alone makes you unfit to
grasp for additional power. I believe Rocket is the direct victim
of such grasping. His parents were lost in one of the experiments
Rolf carried out for their government. The ideas behind these
experiments seem quite strange — the humans attempting to move,
control and change the structure of time and space, and of the
smallest pieces of matter in the universe, the very bits that make
up their own flesh.

“So where we are now, this trailer—this is
one of their seats of government? Another lab for
experimentation?”

No. This is where Grandfather Rolf lives
now. He is a gardener for the human tribe that lives here. They
call themselves Morongo, and to survive, they provide gambling and
games of chance for the light-skins. Rolf takes care of these trees
here. They yield a type of fruit called dates.

“Have you heard of a place called
Peenemünde?”

What’s that?

“A terrible place, created by a group called
the Third Reich. Rolf worked for them before he was brought here.
Human mammals enslaved others of their species, forcing them to
build machines to kill even more of their kind. I would hope that
they are not allowing Rolf to make more Peenemündes here in Eli’s —
”

KA-BOOM!

One side of the small trailer has just blown
out, sending shreds of dirty clothing, decomposing food scraps, and
numerous metal containers with the word
BEER
on the side flying through the air, over the date
trees.

“I knew it! I knew it!” the Bearded Boy
screams. He had been hiding under my cage the whole time, and now
he tries to climb in with me. The Weeping Bat flies overhead,
crying, and Rocket comes running out of the burning trailer.

“No, Grandfather! No, I won’t let you do
it!”

“I only have one WOMPER left!” Rolf screams
back at him. “Give me that shielding!”

“No!”

“You took it from the lab for me!”

“Not for this!”

Rolf, for all the
snggg-tlln
his anger
gives him, cannot catch up with Rocket. They are running through
the trees, and in his frustration, Rolf even tries throwing dates
at Rocket, but they MERELY bounce off him.

Strong Bess staggers up, waving her arms in
front of her. “Smoke…” she says.

She keeps the hair on her head short, groomed
into small spikes, but it is spikier now since she’s been singed in
whatever conflagration took place in Rolf’s trailer. Her face has
been badly burned.

“Trying to protect…Rocket…Stood in the back,
to listen…” she pants. “The world…trying to blow up the world…Can’t
see…very well…”

Yes
…In all the commotion, Silver Eye
is able to sort through — to “hear” — many of the panicked thoughts
in the air.
Rocket is afraid his grandfather will somehow blow
up the world with a WOMPER
…

What the humans call a Wide Orbital Mass-less
Particle Reverser. A highly unstable particle. The very particle
trapped in the crystals used by Hypatia and Sacagawea. And
Sandusky, Eli’s nest-sire, used them in his original time
experiments. Rolf must be experimenting here, too, but his trailer
hardly seems like it could house the necessary lab equipment.

…
afraid an unstoppable time reaction will
swallow the whole world.

“I have heard legends about such things,” I
explain to Silver Eye and Bess. “We have a story about a Saurian
world called Aniok, once considered the most advanced of the
Saurian planets, that vanished when they tried experiments to slow
down the effects of time’s passage on their entire world —”

The humans have a similar story about an
island called Atlantis —

“Not the whole world!” Rocket yells. He’s run
back toward our cages, with Rolf chasing behind him. “I didn’t
agree to that!”

“You agree to whatever I say you’ll agree
to!” Rolf shouts. He runs back into his trailer, and emerges a few
moments later with one of the favorite implements of human mammals:
a gun. “I will use this if I have to.”

“Even you couldn’t bring yourself to shoot
me, Grandfather.”

Rolf takes a few steps closer, looks at
Rocket. “Don’t be so sure.” Then he swivels and aims his gun at
Silver Eye. “But I could certainly shoot this dog of yours. No more
circus without a mind-reading dog, eh?”

Cages are such a bad idea.
Silver Eye
is pacing, nervous.

“Don’t do it, Grandfather.”

I hear weeping, but it’s the Bearded Boy
crying, not the bat, who’s flying overhead.

“Don’t do it.”

Rolf’s finger starts to slowly squeeze the
trigger.

“Don’t!” And then Rocket takes a parcel out
of his jacket, and I can view it clearly. It looks like part of the
shielding Sandusky would have used to contain decaying particles,
containing their own
gerk-skizzy
-ness for a controlled
reaction, and providing enough positrons in a lab for the WOMPER to
constantly charge, and then reverse, sending them all moving
“backward” in the time stream.

Primitive at best, and certainly too
dangerous to use without rigorous scientific conditions
prevailing.

“Time hopping cannot be done lightly! There
can
be bad times to meet!” I say, but it doesn’t help.

Rocket holds out the package. “Here,” he says
to his grandsire. “No shooting. No more hurting anything, or
anyone, Grandfather. You’re old now. No more hurting.”

“Hurting can be necessary,” Rolf hisses.

And just as Rolf is about to grasp the shield
fragment, Rocket throws it in the air — where the Weeping Bat
snatches it. Rolf and Rocket struggle for the gun, but Rolf seems
to remember some kind of Cacklaw-like battle training from his
past, and kicks his grandson in the midsection, briefly freeing the
gun so he can move it —

“No!” The Bearded Boy bursts from under my
cage where he had been hiding, and tackles Rolf, who had taken aim
at the bat.

But the shot goes off, anyway, and there is a
great
swngll
of wings, as the Weeping Bat is either hit or
startled, and drops the shielding to the ground, where it lands on
a mound of date-tree branches withering near the remaining three
walls of Rolf’s trailer.

Panting badly, Rolf performs a high speed
limp to reach the metal fragment before the Bearded Boy can. Rocket
gets his wind back, and goes after his grandfather too, but Rolf is
able to get to the fragment and sprint-limp, in a
gra-bakky
but effective way, back into the trailer, where through the blasted
wall I can spy a generator and what looks like a crude, unprotected
time-sphere apparatus...

…and it’s hard to know what happens behind
the surviving three walls other than to hear Rocket’s “No! No! No!”
and a long “Owwww!” followed by a high speed humming and a laugh.
And then after that…

…everything whites out, and I find myself
back in the Fifth Dimension, where I really hadn’t expected to be
at all. At least not for a few more time cycles.

Chapter Twelve

Eli: Huldah

583 B.C.E.

It takes a few minutes for the woman to come
over to me. I’ve taken Thea down a long wet stone staircase — you
could barely call them stairs, since going down them was more like
reverse rock-climbing in the dark — that led to a large pool, a
kind of spring, inside a man-made cave. There’s light in here from
torches placed into the rocks, or held by some of the people who
move around in their rough robes and bare feet — it seems a lot of
the people here can’t even afford sandals.

The woman I’m waiting for wears them, though.
But it’s not like she looks rich, or fancy. Her skin, which is
already dark, like Thea’s, is caked with grime, and her thick,
curly black-and-gray hair keeps flopping around as she steps among
the piles of straw or rags that pass for mattresses, where all the
sick people, the slow pox victims, lie.

Some of them shiver — the way Thea does,
shaking against my body. Her shaking has been getting worse. A lot
of the people on the straw beds are sweating, twitching, shouting
into the air, and even my lingo-spot can’t sort out all the
screams, though I hear different versions of “God!,” and the word
please
a few times, too. And some of the — victims?
patients? — just lay quietly, eyes open, but not looking at
anything. At least, not anything in this room, or this world. You’d
almost think they could see into the Fifth Dimension, they seem to
be looking so far away.