Trail of Bones (20 page)

I am sure of it, and would love to pursue my
thesis further.

The great turning point of history that may
have drawn my ship here wasn’t the journey of Eli’s friends Clark
and Lewis, or the death of Birdjumper, or anything else that
transpired while we’ve been here, each of which, in its own away,
will affect all history that flows afterward.

It wasn’t even Steek’s Theorem, which I was
beginning to strongly suspect might explain everything: the
loop-the-loop theory, from my home world, which postulates that by
his or her very arrival, the time-traveler causes the upheaval in
history — the disturbed time-wave — that draws that traveler or
vessel to the prime nexus in the first place.

It’s a good hypothesis, and Steek is a
venerated scientist, but the prime nexus here has been found in
bones and a medallion.

“A trail of American bones, each one
yielding surprises.” Jefferson, the clan, or nest, leader, whom
Thea and Eli both already know, said that a few moments ago. He’d
arrived in a wooden, wheeled conveyance — a carriage, I believe it
is called — pulled by those four-legged mammals called horses.

Following Jefferson out of the conveyance
was another man, dressed like a snake or serpent. Apparently, he
had been attending festivities earlier in the evening, called Mardi
Gras. I have yet to ascertain the reason for this festival. Perhaps
the costumes indicate a human willingness to celebrate sharing
their planet with other life forms.

The snake man took off his masquerade head,
revealing a quite human head, with facial hair, underneath. He
quickly let it be known he was a kind of nest leader, too — a
“governor.” Governor Claiborne.

An additional handful of men— either actual
military soldiers, or dressed as soldiers for purposes of costumed
fun— emerged from the conveyance as well. This was, evidently, the
governor’s retinue.

King Temm actually tried to ban the custom
of “retinues” — bands of followers who travel with the powerful or
famous — on Saurius Prime. But there are still those at home who
follow the powerful in hopes it will rub off on them. Certainly the
same is bound to be true in a species as volatile as human mammals,
on a planet as unpredictable as Earth Orange.

Governor Claiborne grabbed my face.

“Ouch!” I said. “No derma-tugs, please! It’s
uncalled for!”

“What kind of accent is that, boy? You think
you’re clever keeping that costume on? We’ll get it off. We’ll
figure out who you belong to.”

Costume? Did he mean my chrono-suit, which
was indeed looking a bit tattered? And what is this strange notion
humans have of one life form
belonging
to another?

“Here is our problem, Mr. President,”
Governor Claiborne said, pointing to the fused mass that used to be
my time-vessel. “Some kind of voodoo shrine bringing the runaway
slaves out here. Here’s that ‘doorway’ they’ve been using.”

I thought this perhaps would be my chance to
explain to everyone that what we were witnessing were side effects
of plasmechanical technology becoming infected with local slow pox.
Indeed, I wanted to warn everyone to be careful, since I hadn’t
established whether the biomechanical material was capable of
spreading the disease to its local surroundings. Somehow, the
combination of slow pox’s cellular reproduction mechanism, crossed
with the molecular replication aspects of the vessel itself, have
caused this new, highly-advanced Saurian ship to fuse with the
landscape. Its time-displacement features had somehow ruptured,
creating local time vectors of uncertain calibration. In other
words, it had created a large-scale time-sphere. Through which
people were evidently disappearing.

Too many people time-traveling all at once,
from the same historical moment, could have very wide-ranging and
unpredictable consequences.

And I don’t believe anyone on Earth Orange
is prepared to deal with such consequences. After all, on their
planet, time-voyaging was only recently discovered by Eli’s parents
and Thea’s mother, at their respective junctures in history. It’s
still so new for them.

Concurrent with these field hypotheses, I
noticed a dog mammal digging furiously in the vicinity of my ship,
and I was worried it might slip into the vessel’s sphere of
influence and disappear into the time stream, too.

The dog was barking excitedly about
something it was uncovering.

I tried to talk to it in wolfish, but the
effect was to startle the dog, all the other dogs nearby, and most
of the humans.

Governor Claiborne gave my face another
derma-tug. “Somebody get this costume off!” he yelled.

The one named Jefferson came up to me,
holding his own torch, and regarded me with intense curiosity.

“What if it’s not a costume?” he said. Then
he gave me his own derma-tug, pulling my cheek skin out, like a
nest full of grandmames, clucking over hatchlings. “What if it’s an
incognitum
?”

Further local meteorological disruptions
flashed and sounded just then.

“Sir! Sir!” The one named Howard was trying
to get Jefferson’s attention. “The only discovery here is that
there’s been a
conspiracy
! Led by your own Sally — along
with that runaway girl, Brassy!” He was pointing at Thea and her
friend.

“How do you explain
this
?” Jefferson
asked, pointing at me.

“Frankly, sir,” Howard went on, “up until a
few moments ago, I wasn’t entirely sure anyone else saw it. It’s
something of a relief that you do.”

“Can’t we just let these wretches go back to
their owners, then be done with it?” Jefferson asked, still looking
at my face. He then asked me, in a tongue different than English —
the Latin, I think, that Thea has been known to use — “What exactly
are you?”

“I am a student who is somewhat overwhelmed
by his research,” I replied.

Jefferson stepped back in surprise upon my
reply. Then he said, “Well that makes two of us.”

“We need to make examples of them, Mr.
President,” Governor Claiborne insist-droned. “We have to let it be
known that your new Louisiana territory will not be soft on
slavery.”

My friends Eli and Thea were bound in the
chains apparently used on the “slave” class. I allowed myself to be
similarly caught and bound when it became apparent that rescue of
my friends would be temporarily impossible, and any kind of
skirmish or disruption might lead to weapons-discharge with a high,
immediate flesh-rendering and deep ouch-factor, and I would not
wish that on my friends.

As I stood, attempting to finish my
conversation with nest leader Jefferson, someone else was brought
into camp and chained, as well. It was the one known as Howe. Upon
catching sight of me, he burst into laughter, raised his chained
fist, and shook it at me. He was holding a
sklaan
.

A
sklaan
!

The last
sklaan
I’d seen was the one
Thea had in the time-vessel, the one she’d given away at the
terrible factory cave. That was another place built upon the
strange idea of human mammals owning one another.

Howe kept up his fevered laugh, all the time
waving the
sklaan
at me. Apparently chronological
displacement had not gone well for him.

Thea was then roughly separated from Eli and
brought over with Sally.

“Hello once more, K’lion,” she said.

“Who is teaching all these foreign languages
to slaves!?” Governor Claiborne screamed. “And why is that man’s
costume still on?”

“These two,” Howard said. “Brassy and Sally.
You have to make examples of them.”

“You have be strong, Tom,” Governor
Claiborne declared. “The strength of the republic’s at stake.”

“I worry for a republic whose strength is
based on keeping slaves,” Jefferson said.

“You keep yours,” Sally pointed out to
him.

“Would you have left me, Sally? Were you
going to run away?”

“I’m too famous, Jefferson. Where would I
run to?”

“Potentially anywhere,” I said, pointing to
the time vector surrounding the ruins of my ship. “Considering the
vast expanse of time in which none of us is known at all.”

“That’s what happens there, when you step
through the doorway?” Sally asked, raising her chained hands toward
the ship.

“It is my best theory. A temporal disruption
caused by an unforeseen biomechanical reaction caused by a local
disease vector. Though I am somewhat bereft of field equipment to
fully test it.”

The dog who had been digging by the
time-vessel started barking again.

Governor Claiborne was talking — barking,
too, really — at Thea.

“My wife’s been missing you for months. How
could you do this to us?“ He held up a torch, close to her face.
“And how come you look different? Will somebody make that dog shut
up?”

He spun around, fluster-bothered.

“I believe it’s trying to tell us
something,” Jefferson said. “Look.”

He leaned down and reached into the hole. He
pulled out a pair of muddy bones. Then he extracted a stained
silver chain, which revealed, after he knocked off the dirt, a
piece of wrought, metal-smithed jewelry affixed to the end.

He looked at the bones closely, then wiped
his hands, and set them down very carefully, as if he had new
respect for them.

“Perhaps somebody here would like to say a
prayer,” he said. “I believe these are human.”

Governor Claiborne wasn’t looking at the
mammal bones, however. He was transfixed by the small chain. He
held it up to the torch flame.

“Look.” He was holding up the locket. “A
silver crescent. A symbol of New Orleans. There used to be a small
green stone in the middle.”

“How do you know,” Jefferson asked.

“Because,” the nest-governor said, studying
the small, smithed piece of jewelry on both sides, “I recognize it.
My wife gave it to Brassy. As a gift, because she”— he turned to
look at Thea, then back at the hole in the ground— “she had grown
fond of the girl, even though she was a slave. You’re not Brassy,”
he said to Thea.

“No,” Thea said.

“That’s Brassy down there,” the governor
stated, to no one in particular. “She didn’t get very far after
all. Then who
are
you?” he asked Thea.

Human mammals, it appears, struggle often
with the idea of who they might be, and who everyone else might
be.

“I am Thea,” she said in Eli’s tongue.
“Hypatia’s daughter.”

That’s when Jefferson made his comment about
surprises and bone trails.

And that’s when I knew we had found our
link. I hypothesized that if the ship had been here before Brassy’s
escape, then she may have made it into the time stream somewhere.
But something happened to her. She perished, and her perishing
could have been the very thing to alter history, drawing my
time-ship to it when it tumbled out of the Fifth Dimension, and
creating a —

“Prime nexus!” I called out.

“Is that a signal?” Howard asked
suspiciously. “Watch those slaves!”

“Prime nexus! The one named Brassy! That’s
why the ship was drawn here, to this place, to this time!”

“What do you mean, K’lion?”

“Her early sad death changed everything! Had
she not died while trying to escape, had she lived — I do guesswork
here, but there is science to back me up — she would have had some
tremendous role to play here on Earth Orange! A whole different
history would have unfurled!”

“You mean, she would have
changed
history? How, Clyne?” Eli wondered.

“We shall never know. But all the equipment
on the ship, sensitive to great time disruptions, was drawn to this
spot. This grave.”

“Our little Brassy,” Governor Claiborne
exclaimed, “was going to be…important?
Necessary?
What the
hell are you saying, boy? And why won’t that mask come off?”

I was about to make another potentially
agitating observation when Banglees walked into the clearing,
carrying a wrapped bundle.

“Just whose side are you on, anyway?” Eli
asked.

“Whoever pays me,” he responded. “Whoever’s
ahead.”

And so the attention of the human mammals
shifted again. This all happened in the past few moments as I was
still trying to get them to understand that a prime-nexus spot must
be preserved for further research and examination.

But either no one here agrees with me, or
they’re just not focused on their studies.

Chapter
Twenty-three

Eli: Vanishing Tale

February 1805

The last rocket of the night explodes in the
sky, back in the direction of New Orleans, crackling with sparks of
red and blue.

At least, it feels like the last one.
There’s a tremendous silence after the sparks fade from the sky.
There isn’t even any more thunder and lightning.

Maybe this is my chance to tell Thomas
Jefferson the truth about this whole situation. If I did, maybe
he’d help us out. Wasn’t he the president who believed in honesty,
anyway? The one with the cherry tree?

“I think we need to make some arrests,”
Claiborne says.

“He looks like Serapis,” Thea whispers to
me, pointing to his snake costume. “I had no idea the Alexandrian
gods would last so long, considering how determined Tiberius was to
destroy them.”

“Mere arrests? We must
burn
this
voodoo shrine, Mr. President,” Howard says. “We must stamp out all
vestiges of this conspiracy, and then let it be known that your
firm hand was behind it.”

Jefferson gives a big sigh. “Sometimes, I
can scarcely wait to
not
be president, and retire full-time
to Monticello.”

Howard picks up another torch from one of
the soldiers, so he has one in each hand. He starts walking toward
the crash site of Clyne’s ship.