Читать книгу The Ruby - Leland Nichols - Страница 3

I have been taken prisoner, securely bound to a wooden structure and put on display, among all the mockery, to die in public shame. As they paraded me through the streets, some glared at me in scornful silence, others humiliated me with contemptuous laughter, still others pelted me with the myriad of objects they threw. I was surrounded by a magnitude of humans, yet was all alone in my humanity.

I awoke with a jolt, as one who thinks his last moment has come, yet with no time to prepare. A burning thirst consumes me, agony wracks my whole body. I try to stretch the muscles of my back and arms, but lack the strength to pull myself up a bit, as before. I draw a deep breath, trying to feel conscious of my existence. Growing feebler in body, and dimmer in my senses, I must keep my mind active, my thoughts flowing, for I fear a sudden, complete collapse is near. It seems that now, I remain at longer intervals in a state of unconsciousness, an unsatisfying sleep. I face the realization that I will soon drift ever more often into those brief slices of death.

The morning could not have passed so quickly, yet it is growing dark. Clouds do not block out the sun, but somehow, in my half-stupefied condition, a twilight gloom has scattered all over the earth. Had I emerged from a long uneasy sleep, while the whole day passed before me?

In my insufferable pain, I curse those responsible for this unjust fate. I am a convicted thief in a foreign country. My trial was a mockery of justice, made all the more difficult because I speak little of the local language and could not defend my actions during the proceedings.

Dying slowly, I’ve had ample time to reflect on the journey, and now feel the whole ordeal was just a little short of madness. It should have been something beautiful, a wonderful experience, but, in the end, what I found was worry and despair. Recently, it had begun to gnaw at me that there would be a terrible price to pay.

I have lost track of time—I speak not of hours, or even days—I do not even know exactly what century it is. My physical misery is now so great, it prevents me from doing anything but dwell on what went wrong and how it all began. Oh, how did it all begin? I suppose it was back at the Quantum Institute, with its time travel project.

I traveled to this land in a remarkable manner. I had within my power the freedom to move through the moments of time, forward or backward, at the expense of displacement in space, to another location on the earth; it could be millennia into the future, along with a quantum leap to another continent. A journey beyond ordinary comprehension, yet it could be measured in both years and miles. Until I came to this time and place, I had control of my movement in time. Now, my time is running out.

I had become bold and careless of danger, roaming freely among strangers and putting my trust in them. How could I allow this to happen when my instructions were so simple? “Don’t interact with anyone, anymore than is absolutely necessary, or draw attention to yourself.” That was the Principal Mandate I violated. Things went wrong though, and I couldn’t help myself. Difficulties forced me to reduce myself to the lowest standards of moral conduct in a shameless effort to steal a ruby.

I have full memory of the trial, of being condemned to death by torture and agony; punishment for being a thief. This awful dishonor arose from an unexpected turn in the adventure.

A death sentence is hardly a suitable punishment for theft. I was a mere visitor to their country, a traveler, and my intentions were good. Unfortunately, my captors had no knowledge of that. How could I explain to them my circumstance of being a wanderer in a strange land, masked, as it was, by a mysterious arrival?

My only moments of relief come from vague, impossible plans of escape. But escape is really out of the question. Guards watch my every move, and with little clothing and no shoes, I feel somewhat like a small bird trapped in a thicket of clinging brambles and thorns.

These primitive people have no idea of who I am or where I came from. They have no knowledge of the space-time continuum, or that with the proper equipment and knowledge, one can move through both time and space at an accelerated rate. It is difficult, even now, for me to entertain that such a thing is possible, but here I am, and I have done it. I have put into reverse the drift of the time dimension, and my travel was fleeting and dreamlike.

I recall feeling suspended in a limitless concourse as I traveled the infinite halls of time, across the boundless chambers of eternity, where I saw a century pass in the wink of an eye. Brief as it was, only a strange weightless feeling can describe moving through time and space simultaneously. There, I chased a glimmering light of wonder through fading shadows and danced briefly with immortality. I felt I was floating on effortless wings. Time and distance pass like the glistening of rainbows, unfolding in a kaleidoscope of colors, like an excursion to a realm where reality breaks down, like witnessing the creation of the universe, while traveling through a multidimensional abyss. Never again, though, will I waltz time-space as I desire.

Time is the moving image of eternity. A river of passing events, which has no existence, except for the moment. For me, the river became a raging torrent, and with it echoed the price one pays for wisdom. I can still vividly remember those times and the strange tale it is, or had I only imagined it?

Behind closed eyes, Dorian Alexander’s mind roams unrestrained through a maze of memories of his journey. He had come to the stark realization that at the age of twenty-six, he must now, he supposes, consider his life’s work finished. He feels tired, dispirited, drained of energy.

He had been a brilliant young scientist, and, until recently, quite handsome and unusually charming. The suns of different ages had given his complexion an attractive glow. Yet now, his face was bleeding and distended with bruises. Even more painfully, he is aware of his sore shoulders and back, drawing his attention away from the pain of his lacerated, beaten face. He is filthy and appears mangy, with a shabby beard and sun-bronzed face coated with a shiny layer of sweat, radiating an expression of unspeakable sadness. Dehydration had gradually sapped his will, so that he ignores the constant buzzing of innumerable flies. The discomfort causes him to twist and squirm, resulting in a loss of footing, placing even more tension on his arms, already dulled and near-numb from the unrelenting traction.

He looks down toward his feet, seeing that they have slipped far below the footrest. His chin hits his chest, and he lifts his head up again, arching his neck. He turns to look upward at an outstretched hand and tries to make a fist. His squinting, darkened eyes look from side to side at his hands secured to the wooden framework. He bats his eyes to clear his vision. Slowly, the thick salty sweat is blinked free, and his eyes come into focus, only to find his fingernails embedded in his palms. His face tightens into a grimace, as he tries to flex his outstretched arms toward his body, in an effort to relieve the muscle cramps and body aches. Crystallized salts, from his dried sweat, glisten off his forehead through the grime and dust.

The passage of time further drains what little strength remains, while his clouded mind tries to fabricate some means of escape. Contracted, in his growing agony, is the pain of labored breathing, though he can still feel air whispering in and out of his lungs. He can feel his heart beat too, in a slow steady rhythm.

Nearby, lounging in a small circle on the ground, half a dozen soldiers entertain themselves, gambling for the prisoners’ clothing and personal effects. The men are the guards, soldiers that have been distracted as they pass articles of clothing and other items among themselves. There was not a large crowd around the dying men, and since no disorder or rioting was anticipated, negligence of the soldiers could be expected.

Dorian looks toward the ground at the guards rummaging through his things. One of the men picks up a gold colored pendant-like object on a chain, and at its center an enormous ruby—now damaged—that glimmers with an ugly milky pink in the twilight. A flash from the gold catches his eye. Dorian frowns hard and closes his eyes. His medallion is handled as mere trinket, so close, and yet so far away. Right there in front of him is the device that could give him back his life and freedom. The medallion-like object with the ruby—the failed component of a time-portation device—that had gotten him here in the first place.

The device that had begun his journey, starting several thousand years in the future, had come about as the result of many years of painstaking investigation and planning. The research facility known as Quantum Institute had taken on the daunting task of developing a systematic method to travel through time. But now, for Dorian all that has changed; the mission had been a failure. Dorian has had ample time to reflect upon the unlikely chain of events that led to this anguish.

I thought that when I went back into the past, nothing could do me harm; I had the knowledge of hundreds of generations of progress, and thus assumed I possessed the insight to handle any situation. If I were a wise man, with the additional wisdom and understanding I hoped to acquire on this journey, I wouldn’t be in this predicament. In my search for wisdom, however, I found the unexpected: romance and true love. It was another time and another place, a new horizon that opened up a joyous experience and exposed a youthful loss of innocence.

Every time I shift my weight, I hear the grinding and creaking of the timber I have been tied to, and that has brought to mind a nearly lost memory of an evening on the porch of a country home in the Ozarks. I recall the squeaking floor as she walked barefoot across the planks on that first evening I met her. Today is Friday, I think, and it was on a Friday evening that I first met her, too. That memory, from that enchanting time, is only one of many precious moments and dreams I have left behind. That age, though, was not without its difficulties; in many ways, it was primitive, cruel. Also, as I was to discover, it was one of the worst possible times and places in history to be looking for a ruby.

I can now present a coherent narrative, as if I saw it only from a dream. Sometimes I don’t know what was real and what may have been imagined. To understand all this, I must go back, from my frame of reference, several months, or so—or, shall I say, forward—because it is actually into the future, to that simpler time.

Although I vaguely remember how this extraordinary journey all started—at the Quantum Institute, more than four thousand years in the future—my memory of that far-off time has faded. In my mind now, the odyssey began near the banks of a small river in the rural foothills of Missouri. Let me return to that stage of my experience, the first time the ruby failed and left me stranded in a world so unlike the one to which I was accustomed.

A half smile emerged, lifting the corners of Dorian’s mouth, causing dried blood to crack from the stretching skin. It was the first time he had smiled since the torture began. To put his discomfort out of his mind, he closed his eyes to shut out his physical surroundings, and concentrated on the memories of what had brought him to this point. These thoughts served to distract him from his grim reality, and he settled, for a time, into a calm serenity.