Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

“Outside the bar,” said Mr. Jericho. “Whole town free-fire zone.” Their telegraphic mode of speaking was infectious. “No civilians, no hostages, no poisons, formal rules. Needle-pistols only. Take it you boys have them? Good. Be there…high noon.” No, that was siesta time. Siesta time was traditionally inviolable. Nothing must be permitted to disturb the dying town's rest in the heat heat heat of the noontime. “Sorry, old custom, have to be fifteen o'clock.” When the second advent of the Pantochrist was heralded by the hosts of the Five Heavens, even that would have to wait until after siesta time in Desolation Road.

  Mr. Jericho stood in the fifteen o'clock dust beneath the timestormed bar dock and remembered kneeling. Kneeling in the Hall of Ten Thousand Candles (no misnomer, he had been set to count them once as punishment for a boyhood misdemeanour: 10,027) trying to ascribe meaning to Paternoster Augustine's riddlesome koans. Unvastened as he was then, bereft of the souls of his ancestors, Paternoster Augustine's quandaries had seemed pointless; now he treasured their little wisdoms.

  “Use your senses,” Paternoster Augustine had told him and told him again. “Use all your senses. Consider the rabbit.” Ah, but he had been down his burrow for five years now and he was old, and though he had of late taken up the Damantine Disciplines to ward off tightening sinews and grating bones, he was not the man he had once been. Ah, but then he would have drubbed these two vain striplings in a trice. Then. Now it was his trained senses against identity-telepathy. Witch-magic. He spat into the wind three times and crossed fingers and toes.

  No one was more surprised than he when the little automaton gentleman dressed in Deuteronomy green who had sounded the time for Desolation Road defied his time-frozen mechanics to waltz out and strike the bronze bell with his little mallet. On the last note of the fifteen the little man seized arthritically forever and two pairs of high-heeled hand-tooled leather gaucho boots kicked up the dust and turned toes toward Mr. Jericho's battered brogues.

  “Formal rules?”

  “Formal rules.”

  “No poisons?”

  “No poisons.”

  “Might as well begin then.” And two steel needles kicked puffs of dried whitewash out of the wall at the end of the street.

  —My but they're quick! Mr. Jericho crawled out of the far side of the veranda under which he had rolled and looked for cover. A needle grazed his left earlobe and buried itself in the warped wooden planking of the veranda.—Fast, very fast, too fast for an old man? Mr. Jericho jumped behind a low wall and squeezed his first needle off at the snake-quick figure in black silk that had fire on him.—Run run run! the Exalted Ancestors shouted, and he ran ran ran just as a string of needles pitted and cracked the white plasterwork where he had been crouching.—Always remember there are two of them, the limbosouls told him.

  —I'm not about to forget it, he told them, and rolled and fired all in one cat-graceful action. The needle howled wide of the black-hatted figure diving down from the roof.

  —One in the street, one in the alley. They've got you running. You get them running. You built this town with your own hands, you know it. Use that knowledge. The Ancestors were dogmatic. Mr. Jericho zigzagged down Alimantando Street toward the timelost patch of jungle vinery and drew a stitching of needles closer and closer to his twinkling heels. He leaped for the veranda of the Pentecost sisters’ General Merchandise Store and the last needle embedded itself in his footprint.

  —They are good. A perfect team. What one sees, the other sees, what one knows the other knows. He consciously brought his breathing under discipline in the Harmonic Mode and let his Ancestors kick him into the sensory state of the Damantine Praxis. Mr. Jericho closed his eyes and heard dust motes fall in the street. He took a deep breath through his nostrils, tagged a stench of hot tense sweat, popped up at a window, and pumped off two needles.

  —Knowledge. An unbidden memory, demanding as unbidden memories always are, bubbled to the front of his head: Paternoster Augustine's garden; a pergola amid trees and singing birds, velvet-smooth grass beneath feet, the scent of thyme and jasmine in the air, above his head the mottled opal of Motherworld.

  “Learn all you can,” said Paternoster Augustine seated in a lepidoptiary of rare fritilliaries. “Knowledge is power. This is no riddle, but a true saying and much to to be trusted. Knowledge is power.”

  —Knowledge is power, repeated the massed choir of all souls. What do you know about your enemies that will give you power over them? They are identical clones. They have been reared in identical environments so that they have developed the same responses to the same stimuli and thus can be considered to be one person in two bodies.

  That was the sum total of his knowledge of AlphaJohn and BetaJohn. And now Mr. Jericho knew how to beat them.

  A shadow squeezed off a needle from behind a pump gantry. Mr. Jericho shifted his head the moment he sensed the metal latticework cool in the man's shadow. He slipped from the General Merchandise Store veranda, crept tigerman through the jungle vines, and made a low fast run through the maize fields for his destination. The solar power plant. Mr. Jericho crawled soily-bellied through the geometrical domain of reflections and held his antique needle-pistol pressed close to his chest. He smiled a thin smile. Let the smart boys come hunting him here. He waited as an old, dry black spider waits for flies. And they came, cautiously advancing through the field of angled mirrors, starting at reflections and flibbertigibbets of the light. Mr. Jericho closed his eyes and let his ears and nose guide. He could hear the heliotropic motors shifting the lozenges to track the sun; he could hear water gurgling through black plastic pipes; he could hear the sounds and smell the smells of confusion as the clones in the mirror-maze found themselves cloned. Mr. Jericho heard AlphaJohn wheel and fire at the looming shape rearing up behind him. He heard the glass crack into a spiderweb of fissures, the reflection shot through the heart. There was quiet for a while and he knew that the Johns were conferring, ascertaining each other's position so they would not fire on each other. Telepathic conference done, the hunt resumed. Mr. Jericho rose to the crouch and listened.

  He heard footfalls on soft red dust, footfalls approaching. He could tell that the target's back was momentarily turned by the sound his heels made on the earth. Mr. Jericho smelled human sweat. A clone was entering the row of mirrors. Mr. Jericho squeezed his eyes tight shut, stood up, and fired two-handed.

  The needle took AlphaJohn (or maybe BetaJohn, the distinction was trivial) clean between the eyes. A tiny red caste-mark appeared on his brow. The clone emitted a curious squawk and slipped to the ground. An echoing, answering wail came up from the depths of the mirror-maze and Mr. Jericho felt a glow of satisfaction as he loped through the rows of reflectors toward the cry. The twin had shared his clone-brother's death. He had felt the needle slip into his forebrain and rive away light life love, for they were one person in two bodies. As Mr. Jericho and his Exalted Ancestors had surmised, Mr. Jericho found the brother gasping on the ground, eyes gazing at the high arch of heaven. A little stigmata of expressed blood sat on his forehead.

  “Shouldn't have given me the chance,” said Mr. Jericho, and he shot him through the left eye. “Punks.”

  Then he returned to the Bar/Hotel, where the man in Deuteronomy green had frozen in commemoration of the last gunfight. He went up to the bar and told Kaan Mandella to drop whatever he was doing, pack all his wordly possessions, and come with him that very hour to the important places of the world, where together they would regain all the power and prestige and transplanetary might that had been Paternoster Jericho's.

  “If that was their best, they are no match for this old man, none of them. They have gone soft over the years, while the desert has made me old and hard, like a tree root.”

  “Why me?” asked Kaan Mandella, head swirling whirling with the unexpectedness of it all.

  “Because you are your father's son,” said Mr. Jericho. “You are marked with the family curse of rationalism as Limaal was before you, I can see it, smell it, do
wn there beneath the dollars-and-centavos business nose, deep down there you want order and power and an answer to every question and in the place where we are going that is going to be a very useful skill. So, are you coming with me?”

  “Sure. Why not?” said Kaan Mandella with a grin, and that very afternoon the two of them, armed only with an antique manbone-handled needle-pistol, successfully held up and hijacked the 14:14 Ares Express and rode it into Belladonna's Bram Tchaikovsky Station and a destiny as glorious as it was terrible.

  Now that the final summer had come, Eva Mandella liked to work outdoors under the shade of an umbrella tree by the front door of her rambling home. She liked to smile and talk to strangers, but she was now so incredibly ancient that she no longer dwelled in the Desolation Road of the 14th Decade but rather in a Desolation Road peopled with and largely constructed from the memories of every decade since the world was invented. Many of the strangers she smiled and talked to were therefore memories, as were the pilgrims and tourists for whom she still laid out every morning her hand-woven hangings worked with the traditional (traditional in that she had invented it and it was curious to her times and place) designs of condors, llamas and little men and women holding hands. Sometimes, rarely, there would be the clunk of dollars and centavos in her money-box, and Eva Mandella would look up from her tapestry loom and remember the day, month, year and decade. Out of gratitude for having drawn her back to the 14th Decade, or possibly out of denial of it, she would always refund the money to the curiosity-seeking tourists who bought her weavings. Then she would resume her conversation with the unseen guests. One afternoon in early August a stranger came and asked her, “This is the Mandella house, is it not?”

  “It is,” said Eva Mandella, at work upon her tapestry history of Desolation Road. She could not tell if this stranger was memory or reality. He was a tall leather-brown man in a long grey desert coat. On his back was a large pack of great complexity sprouting coils of cable and antennae. He was too much a memory to be real but too rank with dust and sweat to be wholly memory. Eva Mandella could not remember his name.

  “Is Rael in?” asked the stranger.

  “My husband is dead,” said Eva Mandella. The tragedy was so old and cold and stale, it was no longer tragic.

  “Is Limaal in?”

  “Limaal is dead too.” But often the memories of both son and husband whiled away long afternoons in remembrance of other days. “My grandson, Rael Jr. is in the fields at the moment, if you want to talk to him.”

  “Rael Jr. is a name I don't know,” said the stranger. “So I will talk with you, Eva. Could you tell me what year it is?”

  “One thirty-nine,” said Eva Mandella, drawn back from the desert of ghosts to the dying summer, and in doing so passing through the place of recognition and so knowing name and face of the stranger.

  “That early,” said Dr. Alimantando. He took a pipe from his coat pocket, filled it, and lit up. “Or rather, that late? I was trying for either eighteen months from now, or about three years back, to try to find out what happened, or rather is going to happen to the town. Accuracy's a bit tricky with the really long jumps: ten minutes ago I was eight million years away.”

  What was wonderful to Eva Mandella was not how far or how fast Dr. Alimantando had come, but that he had come at all; for even she who had known him personally in the early days of the settlement had almost come to believe those who said Dr. Alimantando was as legendary as the greenperson he had gone to hunt.

  “So you didn't find the greenperson then?” she asked, setting up a new pick of desert-coat grey thread.

  “I didn't find the greenpeople,” agreed Dr. Alimantando, drawing long and leisurely on his pipe. “But I did save the town, which was my chief concern. That much I have achieved and I'm quite content though I'll never get a word of thanks or praise for it because no one'll ever know. Even I forget sometimes: I think living across two time-lines is blurring my memories of what is history and what isn't.”

  “What are you talking about, silly man?” scolded Eva Mandella.

  “Time and paradox, reality-shaping, history-shaping. Do you know how long it's been since I stepped into time that night?” He held up one long digit. “That long. One year. For me. For you…Eva, I hardly knew you! Everything's changed so much. In that one year I travelled up and down the time lines, up and down, forward and back.” Dr. Alimantando watched Eva Mandella's fingers weaving threads together, twisting, twining, warping, wefting. “Time travelling is like your weaving,” he said. “There is no single thread running from past to future, there are many many threads, and like your warps and wefts, they cross and mingle to form the fabric of time. And I've seen the fabric, and guessed at its width, and I have seen so many things, strange and wonderful things, that I should be here until nightfall if I were to tell you them all.”

  But he did, and he was. By the time he had finished chronicling his adventures in plastic forests billennia dead, sketching down in his notebooks the bizarre polymer flora and fauna, and his sightseeing trips around the future achievements of mankind, colossal feats of science, and learning that rendered the jewel in this age's crown, the manforming of the world, trivial and petty by comparison; by the time he had related his travels in the planetary jungle of flower-ripe trees in search of men no longer human, so transformed were they by their own hands that they wore the form of pulpy red melanges of organs, bulbous arboreal creatures with hard shells and gripping tentacles casting their reality-shaping intelligences into the chasms of the Multiverse so to commune with the lofty interdimensional wills that presided there, by the time he had told all this and how he had seen the sun glaze over with ice and walked on the lava-warm rock of the newborn earth with the lightnings of Genesis forking all around him; and how he had seen St. Catherine plant the Tree of World's Beginning in the bare red rocks of Chryse and also stood upon the summit of Olympica, loftiest of mountains, to see the sky lase violet with glowing partac beams as ROTECH battled the otherworldly invaders known as the Celestials on the very first day of the 222nd Decade, and how that very morning, this very morning, he had sipped his breakfast mint tea upon the planetary ice cap as the horizon filled with the bloated, moribund sun while around his tent under the surface of the ice crawled the peculiar geometrical patterns that he reasoned must be the remnants of the humanity of that time of ending: by the time he had told all this the shadows were growing long beneath the umbrella tree and the air held an edge of evening crispness and the moonring was beginning to sparkle overhead and Eva Mandella had woven Dr. Alimantando and all his tales of wonder and horror into her tapestry in a colourful knot of jungle greens and battle violets and morbid reds and ice blues through which ran the grey thread of the time traveller.

  “But,” said Dr. Alimantando, “nowhere in all my ramblings across the ages of the world did I find the age of the greenpersons. Yet all history is patterned with their footprints.” He gazed at the silver bracelet moonring.

  “Even this place. This place more than most, I think. It was a greenperson who led me here to found Desolation Road.”

  “Silly man,” said Eva Mandella. “Everybody knows that Desolation Road was founded by charter from ROTECH.”

  “There are histories and histories,” said Dr. Alimantando. “Since going timefree I've caught glimpses of so many other histories running parallel to this one that I'm no longer certain which is true and real. Desolation Road had other beginnings, and other endings.”

  For the first time Dr. Alimantando saw what it was that Eva Mandella was working upon.

  “What's this?” he exclaimed with greater surprise than any tapestry should elicit.

  Eva Mandella, who had been slowly, gently, sinking down toward the desert of ghosts again, was startled into the present by her guest's outburst.

  “That's my history,” she said. “The history of Desolation Road. Everything that happens is woven onto the frame. Even you. See? History is like weaving; every character a thread that moves in an
d out of the weft of events. See?”

  Dr. Alimantando unbuttoned his long duster coat and withdrew a roll of fabric. He spread it out before Eva Mandella. She peered in the moonring silvery twilight.

  “This is my tapestry. How did you get my tapestry?”

  “From farther up in time. This is not my first visit to Desolation Road.” He did not tell her where he had found it, fixed to its frame in the dust-choked ruins of the very house before which he sat in a future Desolation Road, dead, deserted, swallowed by dust. He did not want to frighten her. Eva Mandella tapped the cloth with a forefinger.

  “See? Those threads I have not woven yet. Look, a green thread, and a dust brown one and…” She grew unexpectedly frightened and angry. “Take it away, I don't want to see it! I don't want to read what the future will be, because my death is woven in there somewhere, my death and the end of Desolation Road.”

  Then Rael Jr. came from the maize fields to take his grandmother in for her dinner, because she often wandered so far into the desert of memories that she would forget to come inside when the chill night fell. He feared for her frailty though she was stronger than he would have guessed; he feared her turning to ice in the night.

  In these latter days of history many of the old traditions of the first days were re-established in their honoured places. Among them was the tradition of open-door hospitality to strangers. Dr. Alimantando was set in the honoured place at the table and between forkfuls of Kwai Chen Pak's lamb pilaf learned the reasons for the empty seats around the planed desert oak board. In the course of this old tragedy much that had appeared strange to him when he stepped out of time was explained and his year of travelling through such history had lent him a certain detachment from events, even events among the friends in a town he had invented himself. Though the folk history raised more questions than it answered, the timestorm clarified a puzzlement in Dr. Alimantando's mind. He now understood why he had been unable to reach the central period of events that had led to the ultimate destruction of Desolation Road: the rogue time winder (plus rather than minus, he surmised) had generated a zone of chronokinetic repulsion about itself that increased in strength the closer he approached the three-year distant heart of the mystery. He contemplated travelling back before the battle of Desolation Road, perhaps living through it incognito. The idea sorely tempted him, but he knew that to do so would rewrite all the history he had just learned.