Ancient Fire: Danger Boy Episode 1 by Mark London Williams

Author:Mark London Williams [Williams, Mark London]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0763630926
Published: 2011-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Clyne: The Rhino and the Time-Vessel

Final Class Project: 10,271 S.E.

3. How was this culture different from your own? Describe.

Since I’ve already described this planet as being dominated by evolved mammals, I have, in a way, already answered the question. What could be more unusual than that? But you still may not believe me, and may even be thinking that when I get home, the school nurse should immediately prescribe a volcano cure for me to let me sweat out these bad visions. But our motto, as Saurians, has always been “Science is deep truth,” and science is on my side here.

Even though the truth is that everything is different, and what we thought we knew about evolution has been turned into mush-fern stew.

For example, there are nearly as many types of mammal species as there are Saurians! Not just the two-legged, mostly sentient kind like Eli the Boy, or Thea, the daughter of the scholar Hypatia (and a scholar in her own right), but many other strange creatures with equally strange names: rhinos, monkeys, tigers. They have “birds,” too. These birds even resemble our own winged Saurians.

I met many of these firsthand, when they tried to overrun my vessel in the middle of something called a “zoo.” The human mammals evidently keep other mammals imprisoned, like the Ring of No Escape in Cacklaw. And, like Cacklaw, it’s for entertainment. But not for a few mere sun-cycles as in our own sporting events, with the gates open after the game. No, these zoos are permanent. Does this mean, for mammals, that their games don’t end? It seems more serious for the ones behind bars. I will continue to investigate.

My introduction to the culture, of course, was when Eli the Boy wound up in my ship as a result of a poorly plotted experiment on time dynamics. Their mature beings, called “grownups” or “adults,” possess roughly the scientific knowledge of a Saurian in secondary studies. As a result of this rough science, my settings were thrown completely off.

We know from our own studies that certain beings can potentially act as “lightning poles,” magnets if you will, for time energy—with the slightest disturbance in spacetime focused on and channeled through them. As the saying goes, “Some hatch differently.” The boy is like that. Apparently, his unique reactions are triggered by the wearing of headgear, or a “cap.”

As a living time particle himself, Eli the Boy was drawn to another time experiment in Alexandria, a place that was “ancient” for him, since it reached the height of its glory some sixteen hundred years before he was born. Thea’s female parent, Hypatia, had retreated to a lighthouse after solving several equations about the composition of light and time, and how each measures and affects the other. She was trying to demonstrate the results for the whole city, perhaps because she thought some citizens might appreciate what would be a great forward stomp in mammalian knowledge.

Hypatia’s experiment acted as a kind of homing beacon for us.

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