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

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