Read Online City of Ruins by Mark London Williams - Free Book Online Page B

is to say, I have once
again been “on the lam,” as they say in their filmed
entertainments, and yet I have been taken prisoner again as well.
But this time, not by DARPA or any of its minions.
    I am trying to explain the circumstances of
my arrival to a fellow detainee.
    “We were still in the tunnels, when the whit! whit! whit! of the alarms was still sounding. Mr. Howe
—”
    The official from the human government?
    “Yes, originally. Though he appears to have
gone in and out of what we call a ‘re-egging,’ on my home planet,
meaning a profound change, like a new or second birth, later in
life. So Mr. Howe found himself agreeing with A.J —”
    The spiritualist, you mentioned, who you
suspect of re-perceiving time, as you do?
    “Yes! He’d had an epiphany — a moment where
Earth mammals suddenly veer in a different, and hopefully better —
or at least, less gerk-skizzy — direction.”
    Re-eggings?
    “Of a type, yes. But my friend Eli —”
    The human cub, the fledgling, whom you care
for?
    “Correct! Eli was focused on his own
revelations, shunt-crkked at realizing there was no slow
pox.”
    Shunt-crkked?
    “It’s a Saurian term for the sort of shock
you experience when everything you have known or thought you knew
changes all at once. Sometimes, it is applied to sudden reversals
at the end of long Cacklaw matches. Meanwhile, the others were
trying to quiet him, as numerous guardians were headed our way, and
we wished to remain undetected for as long as possible.
    “But Eli wouldn’t be calmed, and kept yelling
that slow pox had ‘ruined his life’, and was even the excuse used
to turn him into Danger Boy.”
    Danger Boy?
    “One of the humans’ many secret government
projects, as it happens. Apparently, from my study of Earth Orange
history, mammals are unable to govern themselves without using
fear, secrecy, and deception.”
    Some mammals.
    “I remain open to new data. A.J. is an
optimistic mammal, like you are. He told Eli not to use the word ruined when he thought of his life, because in becoming
Danger Boy, he’d taken amazing voyages through the universe that
other humans could only imagine. He wanted my friend to consider
there might be unseen cosmic reasons for his abilities.”
    What the humans call “religion”?
    “Yes. As our own Melonokus says, ‘The
universe is always trying to heal itself,’ something that remains
an enigmatic comment for our scientists. Does the universe, as a
whole, know itself to be alive?
    “Meanwhile, I chirped in that I thought slow
pox did, in fact, exist, saying I had found it was infecting
plasmechanical material, from my home planet of Saurius Prime. It
was causing Saurian material to grow extra nervous-system
connections, changing the Saurian material into something different
here on Earth Orange. Something new and unpredictable. Like mammals
themselves.”
    You mean the material from your home world —
which you said was a kind of blend between something built and
something living — managed to show the human mammals that they are
bound together in the way of all living things? Feeling themselves
parts of a single unity? Perhaps connecting them to each other in
the way of bees, with unseen signals?
    “Plants, too!”
    But are there creatures who do not already
know this? When I ran free, and took down an elk, I understood I
was part of the elk’s life, and he, mine.
    “What kind of Earth mammal are you? I can’t
see you with your cage behind mine.”
    I am of a type that humans have hunted and
feared for ages.
    “Why is that?”
    They imagine we possess the very traits that
frighten them about themselves. You, Saurian, remain a mystery to
me as well, even though I can glimpse your tail, flicking through
the bars. Continue with your telling.
    “So the guardians kept shining light beams on
us from their end of the tunnel. And Mr. Howe wondered who had told
them about his shortcut. A.J. was still talking