Raintra Four crossed his arms over his chest and drummed his fingers absently while the voice in his head continued to drone in High Speak. Silla Ceeka, occupying the cot next to him, was asleep; no matter. The voice would serve its purpose asleep or awake. The tape was approaching its end, and as the voice summarized its four-hour-long lecture on the language and customs of mid-twenty-first century France, K4 was squirted into the boys’ chestports and the chemical did its work, plunging both of them into a high-REM and carefully timed sleep. The organic portions of their brains did the rest. The monitor noted that Silla was low on one of the precursors to dopamine, and it arranged for a synthetic to be given on the boy’s next visit.
Minutes passed, and the K4 reverser routine was started. A minute or two after that, Raintra, not lacking precursor, woke up, his arms still crossed over his chest. He stretched, raised up on one elbow to look over at his friend. Silla was still asleep. Raintra reached between his legs and retrieved a small pillow that was there. The pillow was about four inches square and covered with red silk. Raintra threw the pillow at his friend’s head. It missed, striking the side of the bed and falling to the floor. Silla’s eyes opened unseeingly.
“Se réveiller, stupide,” Raintra said.
Silla took a deep breath, blinking a few times as his system processed the last of the K4 reverser. “Don’t call me stupid,” he said in French. “I don’t think I got enough K4 reverse.”
Raintra looked at a panel near the foot of Silla’s cot. “No, plenty there.” He wrapped a long piece of shiny red cloth around his naked form in a complicated way and slipped his feet into red-colored slippers. “How long will we have?”
Silla had managed to swing his legs over the side of his cot. “Twenty hours,” he said.
A square darkened on the blank white wall, and then an image appeared in the darkened area. It was the head and shoulders of an older man, white hair framing an unlined but stern face. “Four! Ceeka!” the man said.
“Sirrah,” the boys said reflexively and nearly in unison.
“Je vous veux les garçons pour obtenir quelque repos sur le prochain couple de jours. A de l’amusement et se prépare pour votre voyage, votre accord?” the man said. “Translate!”
Silla responded. “Sirrah said you want us two to get some rest over the next couple of days. Sirrah said we should have some fun, and get ready for our trip.”
“Four?” the frowning face said.
“Yes, sirrah?”
“Same you?”
“Yes, sirrah. Same me.”
“Good,” the face relaxed into a more neutral position. “Now, boys, this is important. As you know, you will be collecting formation about the big sick. La Maladie Jaune de Ciel, the Yellow Sky Disease. And why was it called that?”
Raintra glanced over at Silla quickly and took a step toward the screen. “Sirrah, it’s because the sickness coincided with a series of earthquake-related volcanic eruptions that caused a yellowing of the daytime sky. Ash with high sulfur content was distributed across Europe that summer.”
“Yahyah,” the man said. “Ceela, what was Yellow Sky Disease?”
“Sirrah: airborne respiratory viral disease of birds mutated to go human to human. High communicability plus a long, high latency during incubation made quarantine ineffective, and then was pandemic in about ten weeks,” he continued. “No effective treatment was developed, and about 99 percent of population died.”
“Good.” the face said. The image faded to black, and then the darkened square within which the image had appeared was gone.
“Tra-da,” Silla said, using the diminutive familiar. “From this how are we protected?”
“Mixon 14,” Raintra said confidently. “We both got full squirts today, and we’ll get another squirt in transit.”
“Oh, yah,” Silla said as he wrapped his own long piece of cloth, powder blue, around himself in the complicated way, and slipped into his own powder-blue slippers. Except for the color, his attire matched Raintra’s exactly. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said, and the two boys strode toward what appeared to be a blank section of white wall. As they approached, a tall rectangle darkened, and then shimmered, revealing a doorway-like opening, and the boys stepped through it. It darkened, and then disappeared.
At the appointed hour on the scheduled day, the Raintra and Silla found themselves on the hoverwalk outside of Building R, not far from the city’s western edge. They stood there waiting for the tick, their tick, and when it came, a rectangular section of wall darkened, shimmered, and evaporated.
“Let’s go,” Silla said. The two boys, Raintra in red and Silla in powder-blue, walked through the opening, and it shimmered behind them, bricks reforming and solidifying.
They walked along a long, darkened hallway; a bright light shined from the distant end of the hallway; by virtue of the voice, both boys had the same thought: a train in a tunnel. They walked silently until Raintra stopped suddenly; Silla had taken another step before he realized that his friend was not beside him, and he turned.
“’Tra-da?” he asked. Raintra stood silently for a moment with his head turned away from the light slightly. Silla took a step towards him.
Raintra straightened his head and looked at Silla, nodding. “Josic comes now to complete the triad.”
“Josic?” Silla asked, turning and looking at the light. At that moment, the hinged panel on which the light was mounted opened outward, like the old-fashioned doors that Raintra and Silla had seen in museums. The light moved with the panel; as the panel completed its outward movement, the beam of light shone directly onto the left side of the hallway. A figure appeared in the opening; it was the same face that had appeared on the viewscreen in the talk-talk room, the same face that had advised them to have some fun and get some rest.
“Sirrah!” Both boys started walking quickly down the hallway toward the man. As they got closer, they saw a smaller figure behind the man.
The boys got to within arm’s reach of the man and stopped. The smaller figure, a long yellow cloth wrapped around him, stepped around the man.
“This is Josic,” the man said. “Josic is your Watcher. Your listener.”
“Espion,” Raintra said.
“Oui, il est notre espion,” Silla said.
“Yes! Good!” the man said. “He is your spy! Yours! Ours! You see it, yahyah. Josic will watch, listen, report!” the man said, smiling, his hand on the small boy’s head. “He has been fully talk-talked on the period, the language, on everything!” the man continued. “We’re very proud of him, yahyah,” the man finished, beaming. He knelt down to bring his eyes to the level of Josic’s eyes. “Little Sic-da, you listen, look, and remember. The Old Ones have granted you sanctuary. You, Sic-da. No worries for you this ride.”
“Sanctuary?” Silla said with surprise. “Sanctuary for a look-see-tell boy?”
The man rose, his face changed to its more customary sternness. “Yes, sanctuary! Protection from mistakes! Your mistakes! It’s necessary for this trip, Ceeka. It is the Old Ones. Question not!” He waved Josic into the chamber. “It is time. Boys, come well in now, and we’ll get you there, you jobbers. Job your job and return with Josic.”
“Sirrah.” Silla said with a nod. Raintra also nodded, but said nothing. They moved into the chamber behind the open panel. Inside the dim room were three comfortable-looking recliner-style chairs: one red, one powder blue, and a smaller yellow one. Each of the chairs had a matching-color single-drawer cabinet beside it. Raintra slid open the red cabinet drawer, pulling it to its full extension, to reveal a pair of jeans shorts, two ankle-length white socks, and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. Raintra unwound the long red cloth from his body and began putting on the clothes from the drawer. Soon he, Silla, and Josic were all dressed in period clothing, and the boys each settled down in their color-coded chairs.
“Illa-da?” Raintra said.
“Yah?” Silla replied from his chair, adjusting his ball cap, trying to find a comfortable spot for it as the chair’s drug crawler found his chestport and started the flow of chemicals that would prepare him for the trip back to twenty-first-century France.
“With Josic in sanctuary, we too will be hearing and seeing?”
“Yah,” Silla responded, smiling. “Hearing. Seeing too,” he repeated.
“It is good,” he said as the chemicals being fed into own chestport started taking effect. With his last bit of consciousness, he turned his head in the other direction to see Josic in his chair.
And in the next moment, the boys were seated on the pavement, breathing deeply and letting the world of the twenty-first century settle in around them. The street was crowded; some wore lightweight masks; all glanced from time to time at the pale yellow sky. Raintra raised his head first, looking up at the pale yellow sky; he could see the upper third of the Eiffel Tower reaching up behind the façade of the brownstone storefronts.
“Yes, it is Paris,” Raintra said in French to Silla as Silla was also looking at the curious yellow sky.
“You still sound like a southerner,” Silla replied in French, pulling at the ball cap he wore.
Josic had stood up and was walking directly toward a group of boys playing and the end of the street Several of them were on bicycles; the sort of bicycles that were used in this age by children to perform—or at least attempt—acrobatic stunts such as jumping from ramps and standing the machine up on its rear tire. “I look. I see,” he said absently in French as he headed toward them. Raintra and Silla looked at each other, and then scrambled up to follow. By the time they had caught up with Josic, he was already to the other boys.
“Hey, I can ride a bike!” Josic said to them in the French of eight-year-old boys.
“Who are you?” one of the boys asked.
“Maurice,” Josic responded. “Can I try it?” he asked the boy closest to him who straddled a bike.
“Okay,” the boy said as he got off the bike and and held it out to Josic. “What can you do?”
“I can jump up over the curb!” Josic said, swinging a leg over.
“Illa-da,” Raintra said soto voce, “What is that thing?”
“Une bicyclette, stupide,” Silla responded, his eyes on Josic as he pedaled it around in a tight circle. He launched it off the curb, pulling the front end up so that when the back tire rolled off the curb, as it did almost immediately, the front wheel was still in the air.
“Don’t call me stupid,” Raintra said. Josic was now riding the bicycle with the front tire balanced in the air, steering it around in the street; the other boys shouted and cheered. Some with their own bicycles pedaled around, attempting their own stunts. Josic was guiding the bike around until it was pointed to where Raintra and Silla stood watching; he let the front tire fall with a thud and pedaled over to where they were standing.
“These are the boys,” Josic said in Low Speak. “That one with the red shirt, he’s the one. He will be sick with the Yellow Sky disease for a month, but he will recover. He will tell me how!”
“Shh!” Raintra said. “They’ll hear you!”
“I don’t care,” Josic shouted in French as he pedaled the bike vigorously, “I’ve got sanctuary. Sanctuary! Ha-ha! Now is the revolution of the Old Ones!” The other boys were running around them now, watching Josic, shouting, blissfully unaware for now of the disease in their lungs and marrows that grew and developed and waited to strike.