Mr. Jericho pounded a fist into the palm of his other hand in the supposed fashion of one in deep thought. He was consulting with his Exalted Ancestors, rifling their stored personas for ancient insights.
“Blessed Lady! I know! Child of Grace, the time machine! The mark two Alimantando time winder. Holy God, the final weapon.”
Bootsteps crunched on the dirt outside. Shhing and hushing, the curfew breakers extinguished their candles and crept away through the web of tunnels and caves to their fearful beds.
On the twelfth day of the occupation Arnie Tenebrae set about her preparations for battle. Loudspeaker vans liberated from the Company announced that all citizens above the age of three were conscripted into the universal labour force and gave times and places of muster. Under the field-inducers of the 14th and 22nd Engineering Corps, the people were set to digging revetments into the cliffs, laying a circular minefield all around Desolation Road at the inner edge of the Crystal Lands, and constructing a maze of trenches, bunkers, dugouts and foxholes from which defenders could command fields of fire along Desolation Road’s eccentric street plan. The sun rose to siesta height, but the universal labour force worked on, for the liberation had freed the day from the tyrannical siesta. There were faintings, there were collapsings, there were sluggish dragging and dropping of tools. A fat sweaty hotel owner called Marshall Cree set down his shovel and refused to work anymore. Two guards from the Corps of Engineers came and led him away. Half an hour later his severed hands were displayed on a sharpened tree branch and taken around the workings for all to see. If he would not use his hands for the Army of Liberation, he would not use them at all. At 13 minutes of 13, when even in winter the sun tipped its crucible of molten heat over Desolation Road, the two guards from the Corps of Engineers came for Genevieve Tenebrae.
“Oh no no no no, not me, please!” she screamed, flailing and kicking so hard it seemed her ancient cardboard bones must snap. The guards took her not to the amputation block, but to her own house, where her daughter awaited her.
“Hello, Mother,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “Are you well? Good. Just called to say hello.” Genevieve had always been slightly afraid of her stolen daughter. Whenever she heard her daughter’s name on the radio in connection with some new atrocity, she had told herself that Arnie was a Mandella, yes, not her flesh and blood at all, because of the fear. Now the sight of her battle-armoured and demon-painted daughter terrified her.
“I really wanted to give my regards to my mother and father, but they’re dead, and so is my brother, and so is my nephew. And no one thought to tell me.”
“What do you want?” asked Genevieve Tenebrae.
Arnie let her gaze roam judgmentally over the sordid room, untidy with neglected bric-a-brac and the little forgetfulnesses of an old crazy woman. Her eyes came to rest upon the blue bubble on the filthy mantelpiece. It was suspended above something that looked like a sewing machine tangled up in spider silk. Inside the iso-informational field her adoptive father still turned blue somersaults. He no longer spoke. After twelve years of solitary confinement there was nothing for him to say. Arnie Tenebrae’s lips brushed the blue bubble.
“Hello, Daddy. I’ve come to set you free, like you set me free.” The controls of the time winder were similar to the wrist sets of the field-inducers; not surprisingly, for the Whole Earth Army weapons had been modelled on Dr. Alimantando’s designs. She smiled as she set the verniers to zero.
“Good-bye, Daddy.”
The blue bubble popped, an implosion of air. Her father’s ghost was gone.
She gave the time winder to Major Dhavram Mantones of the elite 55th Strategic Engineering Group.
“Make it work for me, Dhav,” she said, then went to watch the progress of the construction. She liked to walk along the trenches and revetments and play heroes and demons in her head.
Dhavram Mantones was back first thing next morning.
“It can’t be done,” he declared, “The best I can achieve is a localized temporal stability field.”
“If Dr. Alimantando can do it, you can do it, Dhav,” said Arnie Tenebrae, glancing out of the window of her Steeltown headquarters as if to emphasize the fleetingness of time. “If you need help, get Mr. Jericho, Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli. They worked on the original time winder. We should be able to persuade them.”
The instrument of persuasion was a device called Charley Horse. It was nothing more than a triangular billet of metal, apex upward, suspended a metre and a half above the floor. It was equally simple in operation. The person to be persuaded was stripped, hands bound to a beam above the head to encourage secure seating, and placed astride the metal billet. A few hours of Charley Horse was enough to persuade the most recalcitrant of riders. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das did not even require a minute’s persuasion.
“We don’t know anything more than you do.”
“What about Ed Gallacelli?”
“He’s dead.”
“Might he have told his dear wife?”
“Might have, but she’s left. Flown away.”
“Then who might know?”
“Limaal Mandella.”
“Don’t be clever. He’s dead too.”
“Maybe Rael, then. Limaal passed a lot of Dr. Alimantando’s secrets to Rael Jr.”
“We know. We didn’t find anything in the notebooks. Or in the house.”
“Maybe you should ask him personally. Limaal might have told him something not in the books.”
“Indeed he might.”
To Rael Mandella Jr., virtual recluse since the murder of his father and the disappearance of his aunt and his Pyrrhic victory over the Company, came the surprise invitation for a ride on Charley Horse. He was not appreciative of the treat; after only four hours he was removed in a near comatose state by which time Arnie Tenebrae was convinced anyway that he knew nothing of the inner arcana of Dr. Alimantando’s chronokinetic arts. She did obtain one piece of information from him that earned him his reprieve: that all Dr. Alimantando’s secrets, including the mystic Temporal Inversion that made chromodynamism possible, were somewhere on the walls of his house. Dhavram Mantones was dispatched to take a closer look at the frescoes on pain of a permanent visit to Charley Horse. Rael Mandella Jr. was cut down and taken back to his family home. A pity Arnie Tenebrae would quite have enjoyed leaving him there to see if he could beat the current thirty-hour record for horseback riding.
Rael Mandella Jr. was taken delirious into his grandmother’s kitchen, where she and his own mother tended him and put him to bed. There he hallucinated that he had once had a father made from maple and a mother made from flowers and bean cans. He lay thus for three days and a neighbour’s daughter, a shy girl called Kwai Chen Pak who had assisted Santa Ekatrina in the soup kitchen days, brought him flowers and pretty stones and from the scanty rations made him candy kangaroos and raisin-bread men. At the end of this time he awoke to learn two important things. The first was that he desperately loved Kwai Chen Pak. The second was that in the night the host of the Parliamentarians had settled around Desolation Road in readiness for the last battle.
61
“Must be well on eight thousand of them,” said Mr. Jericho, straining his disciplined eyesight to make sense of the shifting heatshimmer out among the crystalloids. Sevriano Gallacelli shifted his shovel and pretended to be working while the guard was watching.
“So, what are those things then?” He nodded toward the enormous threelegged machines that had been stalking arrogantly around the crystal landscape vaporizing chunks of ferrotrope with vicious blue-white beams.