City of Ruins (2 page)

Can the future of the Earth really be
changed? Can any one person really affect it? Maybe. Because I
already know that if you’re not careful, you can really mess up the
past. Which means you’re changing
somebody’s
future, even if
it doesn’t seem like your own.

I guess the question is, can anybody — even a
whole team of people who think God has a personal interest in every
inning they play - really control what happens next, or are we all
just along for the ride?

Green Bassett is running out from the Comnet
screen into the middle of the room to catch a fly ball, and I can’t
turn to watch, not without ripping all these wires off, and messing
everything up, forcing them to start my “scan” over again.

Even the stuff I’m allowed to watch in here,
I can’t really watch.

The House of David baseball team grew out of the
Israelite House of David, a religious community established in
Michigan in 1903. The Colony hoped to gather what it considered
“the 12 Lost Tribes of Israel” in one spot, to await the
Millennium, which they also thought would bring the Messiah. The
founder of the community, Benjamin Purnell, thought that playing
baseball would be a good thing to do while they were waiting. A
House of David team was formed in 1913, and a few years later, they
were barnstorming across the country.

I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve just turned
thirteen — just had a birthday that no one noticed except for Thea.
And
she
can’t figure out if she’s just turned fourteen years
old, or maybe sixteen hundred years old, depending on whether you
calculate how her life feels to her, or where it started — back in
Egypt, in the Library at Alexandria, right after the turn of
the…what? Fifth century, I guess.

But even locked up here in the DARPA tunnels
I can still figure
some
things out.

For starters, as you grow up, you look at the
world around you and think
This is how it’s always been,
and
maybe even,
This is how it’s
supposed
to be
— these
parents, this house (if you even have a house, or if you even have
both parents) and you think everything that came before was
designed, pretty much, to create the world just for you.

Even the bad stuff: The endless wars, the
chunks of cities blown up with suitcase bombs, the gas riots, the
last of the great forests vanishing ’cause the weather keeps
changing…

However much better it was before, even the
bad things had to happen, because somehow, it all led up to our
birth, and well, the world was made just for us. Wasn’t it?

I mean that’s what kids are supposed to
think, to grow up happy. Aren’t they? That everything was meant to
happen just for them?

But I know different.

Sure, I’m “special;” I’m what DARPA calls a
“chronological asset.” I can move through time, become a time
traveler, when I put on the San Francisco Seals cap that popped
through a dimensional rift created in my parents’ lab one day. My
wearing that cap creates an impossible moment: the cap didn’t exist
when I was born, but when I put it on the particles in my atoms
suddenly race backwards, which causes me to go backward — backward
in time, traveling through the Fifth Dimension, to who knows where,
or when.

Anyway, that’s what a “chronological asset”
is. I saw that phrase in the latest report in my “Danger Boy” file
when they were debriefing me.

I’m learning a lot of grownup words, lately:
debrief
is kind of code for “getting everyone’s story
straight,” which is what DARPA had to do after Thea, Clyne, and I
came back from our time with Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Jefferson,
and his friend Sally Hemings. His “friend” who was also his
slave.

And in an era when African Americans weren’t allowed
to play major-league baseball, the House of David team — made up of
white, believing Christians, along with many major-leaguers who
were between jobs, or finishing out a career — could be found
barnstorming with Negro League teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords,
Homestead Grays, and Kansas City Monarchs. The House of David was
perhaps operating on a belief that “on Judgment Day, everyone will
be equal.” For many decades, major-league baseball made it clear
that in their estimation, Judgment Day was very far away,
indeed.

And now there’s Satchel Paige, the great
Negro League pitcher, throwing to Joe DiMaggio in an exhibition
game. The ball goes straight across the room, past my face, but I
can’t move to follow it. From the very corner of my eyes, I can
just see a piece of DiMaggio striking out. He looks young. When I
met him, in San Francisco during World War II, he looked older. But
I guess when there’s a war on, everyone looks older.

I wonder if I do? Look older, I mean? There
aren’t any mirrors here. Are there usually mirrors in jails?

I know this isn’t called a jail, but I also
know that adults change the meaning of words around any way they
want to—words like
love
and, for sure, words like
time
and
history
.

Like me being a “chronological asset.” Which
is just a fancy way of saying “a time traveler who we’re trying to
put to good use.”

That’s why I’m basically in jail right now.
They don’t want me disappearing again.

Like Green Bassett.

Green Bassett disappeared after an experimental
“night game” in Vinita, Oklahoma. In his last outing with the
squad, he faced Satchel Paige, and like the great Joe DiMaggio,
could only manage to go 1-for-5 against the legendary pitcher.

Later, after Bassett had been missing for several
days, his teammates didn’t recall much that was unusual, except
that when they said, “See you tomorrow,” he replied, “Really? And
you can still be sure when tomorrow is?”

Now Bassett and the rest of the team are kind
of like ghosts — filling up the room in Comnet 3-D, projected from
the locus, which tells about their history. I wonder if they knew
that
was going to happen — that they’d turn into phantoms
coming out of a machine.

I don’t want that to happen to my friends—to
Thea or Clyne or me. I don’t want us to just be ghosts in a
time-travel machine. I’d like to get our lives back, to be kids
again, or in Clyne’s case, a dinosaur again.

Thirty, and the rest of the DARPA people,
probably think they’re letting me be a kid, with the baseball
jersey they left in here: House of David, number 33. Green Bassett.
It’s a cool replica, but it’s also creepy.

Creepy because it’s supposed to be my reward
for getting all my atoms mapped, as if I really had a choice in any
of it. And creepy because it means they’ve been monitoring
everything I’ve been doing in my room. Everything I watch on the
Comnet. Everything I think, for all I know.

It’s also kind of mysterious: There are two
letters sewn inside the bottom, squiggly lines that look like this:
גג

I think they might be Hebrew letters. Why are
they in a baseball jersey? It some kind of DARPA code? They
certainly had the jersey ready to go when I walked in here.

“For helping us,” Thirty said, “we’d like to
give you a little gift. Something we thought you’d like.”

You want to reward me? Let me know who my
parents were before time travel became their main interest. But
ACCESS DENIED
was what I got when I tried
to look up stuff about them.

Who were they before they became parents? Who
else did they love, besides each other? What kind of trouble did
they get into when they were teenagers? Could I find out anything
that would help me rescue my mom from back in the time of Joe
DiMaggio, or wherever she was?

Time travel. The thing that everybody dreams
of doing: getting second chances, maybe even trying to fix up
history so it’s a little less scary and bloody and dark. But time
travel’s the thing that caused the Sands family to fall apart.

Even kids from divorced families get to live
with one parent. Right now, I don’t have any.

Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk!

I jerk my neck and pull off one of the
wires.

They’re testing the bug alarm, again.

Wheenk! Wheenk!

At least, I’m pretty sure it’s a test. The
detectors are meant to pick up stray slow pox viruses. Usually a
recorded voice comes on to let you know it was just practice.

But if this was a real emergency, where would
I go? I’d have to pull off the rest of these wires and figure out a
way to crawl out of this humming metal box I’m in, then figure out
a way to pick the electronic locks on the door.

And even if I did all that, I’d still just
find myself in a clean, bright cell in a tunnel somewhere
underneath San Francisco: my “guest quarters.” That’s what Thirty
calls them.

The Comnet ghosts from the House of David
team play their hundredth baseball game all around me. They aren’t
worried about slow pox at all. I don’t think they’ve even heard of
it. They had other diseases to worry about.

The founder of the House of David community in
Michigan, Benjamin Purnell, eventually died of tuberculosis, after
an exhausting legal trial having to do with fraud and misconduct.
The team had to be reorganized after the power struggle resulting
from his death.

I wonder if I’m going to be “reorganized.”
There’s kind of a power struggle here. Thirty works with a man
named Mr. Howe. Or did, until he accidentally went back in time
with us. Now she seems to be in charge of DARPA. Or maybe in charge
of something bigger that’s in charge of DARPA.

It’s one of those grownup secrets they
haven’t let me in on yet.

Wheenk!

They won’t let me see my friends.

Wheenk!

They won’t let me see my father.

Wheenk!

They won’t tell me if they know anything
about my mother.

Wheenk!

And I’m stuck here getting my atoms
mapped.

Wheenk!

Alone in here, separate from everything, from
all of history. Alone except for all the 3-D ghosts from the House
of David baseball team, with their long hair and their hopes that
everyone could live in heaven forever.

Like them, I’m waiting for some kind of
cataclysm, to shake things loose. To get me out of here.

Wheenk!

There’s still no voice, telling everyone that
this is just practice. Just a test.

Wheenk!

And I have no way to know what to expect if
this
is
a real bug alarm. If the disease has really gotten
in, after all. Even way down here. In jail.

With all the ghosts.

Chapter Two

Thea: Mothers

February 2020 C.E.

“Talk to us the way you talked to your mother
about time travel. The way she would talk to
you
.”

“You don’t look like the mothering type.” I
say it in Greek, just to throw the translator off. He’s been
expecting more Latin.

Of course, he doesn’t realize I can
understand everything he says, whether it’s in Latin or Greek or
the English he uses when he’s talking to the woman next to him.
They don’t know about the lingo-spot I’m wearing. And I’m not
planning to tell either of them.

The woman who calls herself Thirty waits for
the translator to convert my Greek sentence into English. When he
does, she’s not happy. “Real mothers have real names,” I add. “Not
numbers.” The translator doesn’t bother with that. He just
shrugs.

We’ve been at this for a long time. If they
had sundials in this artificial light, we’d be deep into the shadow
zone now. I’m starting to understand what it was like for K’lion
when they had him in that zoo, that prison he was in, before I was
able to rescue him in the Saurian ship.

The very ship we lost in the Fifth Dimension,
which crash-landed later somewhere else in America’s history. As
did we. Where we met Jefferson President and Sally Hemings, and my
friend Eli traveled with the soldiers Lewis and Clark.

And then we found our way…back here, to Eli’s
time, the year 2020 C.E. I am not sure how long we’ve been back. It
is hard to tell when you’re a prisoner. Each day looks much like
the last.

Though I am pretty sure I’ve had what Eli
calls “a birthday,” and am now fourteen summers old.

At that age, in Alexandria, they would start
looking for a husband for me. Often someone around the same number
of years. Like Eli.

Luckily, Mother did not believe in such
things.

“Why are your cheeks turning red?”

I hope this ends, soon. It’s getting really
warm in here. And these questions are starting to make me
shiver.

“We know at the time of her death, your
mother was working on primitive time-travel experiments. We even
know about
this
.”

Thirty gestures to the translator, who
carefully puts on a pair of gloves as he finishes turning Thirty’s
words into Latin. Then he reaches down into a little metal box he’s
kept on the floor, unlatches it, and pulls out a sack that looks
like its sewn from rough flax or linen.

And then he takes out the thing in the sack —
and I see that somehow, they have managed to steal from Mother’s
lab.

“An astrolabe, Thea. You recognize the
design, I assume?” Thirty looks at me, and for reasons I don’t
fully understand, I giggle.

And when I giggle, I am suddenly just seven
or eight summers old, not fourteen, and I am watching Mother put
the gears and wheels of her astrolabe together, her circular,
mechanical chart of the stars. She’s showing me how the circles in
it turn to let you know where celestial bodies are in the sky, and
when you might expect the moon to rise, in case you were interested
in observing it that night or getting ready for a festival.