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

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.