Not so much as a scrap of flesh or cloth remained of the defenders. The generator hall was empty of everything save the song of the tokamak.
“Spooky things,” said Rajandra Das, laying rude hands on the controls.
“I thought you knew about these things.”
“Locomotive tokamaks. This is different.”
“Now you tell me.”
“Well, Mr. Damantine-disciplines, you shut it down.”
“Wouldn’t have the first idea.”
Distant explosions rent the air. Metal creaked and groaned and the iron tread of a fighting machine shook the generator hall. Rajandra Das’s fingers moved over the control lamps, then hesitated.
“What happens when the power goes off?”
“I’m not certain.”
“Not certain? Not certain?” Rajandra Das’s exclamation rang from the steel walls.
“Theoretically, reality should snap back to concensus reality.”
“Theoretically.”
“Theoretically.”
“Hell of a time for theoretically.” Rajandra Das’s fingers danced over the controls. Nothing happened. Again the fingers played. Nothing happened. A third time Rajandra Das played the control board like a chapel harmonium and a third time nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t do it! It’s been too long. I’ve lost the touch.”
“Let me see.”
Rajandra Das waved Mr. Jericho away from the control lights with the muzzle of his field-inducer. He whispered some consignatory mumbles and emptied a full power burst into the control board. The two men staggered back from the explosion, blinded by sparks and flying circuitry. The fusion tokamak’s usual serene hum rose to a shriek, a howl, a roar of outrage. Rajandra Das fell on his knees for divine forgiveness for a wastrel’s life when the all-destroying fusion scream was silenced. And in the same instant the men felt themselves, the power hall, Steeltown, the whole world turn inside out and inside out again. With a thunderclap of inrushing reality the time winder imploded and drew Arnie Tenebrae’s five-level-deep time-control centre and all its staff into neverwhenness.
The timewall exploded outward. Free-fallers dropped-out of the air; whales, archangels and guitar players vanished, and the boiling rain blew away on the glowing wind. Every clock stopped in the time-burst and stayed stopped forever, despite the attempts of subsequent generations many kilometres removed from the day of the time storm to restart them.
64
In the aftermath of the timestorm Mr. Jericho emerged from the hall of the dead tokamak to find that theoretically, he had only been partly correct, theoretically. A full quarter of Steeltown had been sheared away as if by a knife of marvellous sharpness and in place of the pipes and girders red rock stretched to the horizon. The encirclement of Crystal Ferrotropes was broken by incongruous expanses of virgin dunes, green oases of banana trees, and a pockmarking of fused glass craters. As Rajandra Das joined his friend and the two men returned to Desolation Road, they passed through a fantastical landscape of the bizarre and curious. Streets ended in empty desert or were buried in huge self dunes; locomotives stood in the middle of market gardens, houses in lakes. One track of the railroad line ended abruptly in a small but luxuriant patch of jungle, and the whole of the new development beyond the railroad was returned to bare High Plain.
Faces began to fill the streets. Dumbfounded by the alchemy that had engulfed Desolation Road, they searched for time-lost houses and families. They did not know, nor could they, that when the reality-warping power of the time winder was shut off, all those phantom geographies of Desolation Roads that might have been were fixed, fused, and made permanent the moment Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das closed the door to the Panplasmic Omniverse.
The break was sealed; the battle was over. The survivors assessed degrees of victory. A full third of Marya Quinsana’s Parliamentary Legion had been decreated when the timestorm struck, returned to whatever tasks, occupations, or lives they might have led had not the beat of the recruiter’s drum seduced them. Those who had not been swept into otherwhenness had sustained only light casualties. The defending Whole Earth Army had been largely annihilated. Seventy percent casualties, her entire command structure beheaded in whatever had taken place within the heavily guarded redoubt under Steeltown: Shannon Ysangani surrendered her remnant army to General Emiliano Murphy and cried tears of joyous laughter as her comrades were taken to the desert-edge detention camps.
“We lost!” she laughed, tears streaming down her face. “We lost! We lost!”
The Whole Earth Army was no more.
Two hours before nightfall the Yamaguchi and Jones twin-prop stunter GF666Z came in for landing beyond the railroad tracks. The last survivor of Tatterdemalion’s Flying Circus was carried shoulder-high through the streets by the friends who loved her most, and Angel Red was brought in triumph and humility to the Bar/Hotel, where all hearts and hands saluted her.
That same evening Marya Quinsana made a torchlight triumph through Desolation Road. The Steeltown Ring was lined with fighting machines for her, the citizens cheered for her but she was unsatisfied. She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials. She did not like to think about where all her decreated boy-soldiers had gone.
After the service of thanksgiving in the Basilica of the Grey Lady she demanded that Arnie Tenebrae be brought to her. She wanted very much to vent her dissatisfaction in mutilation and torment, but the subsequent search of Desolation Road and Steeltown did not turn up so much as her corpse. So after five days of triumph and victory before the cameras of the nine continents, Marya Quinsana returned to the hills of Wisdom to take the First Ministerial ring of office from the finger of the Honourable Vangelis Karolaitis only to find that that fine old gentleman was neither fine, gentlemanly, nor ultimately honourable, for he had enough accounts of his security minister’s atrocities and outrages in quashing the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group to be very very sure that she would never take the ring from him while he lived. As for Little Arnie Tenebrae, Deathbird, Vastator, she was never heard of again, though there was no shortage of explanations, rumours and idle gossip which in time became the fabric of folk story, which in time became legend, which in time became myth, and so Little Arnie Tenebrae’s name came to be written in the sky which was only what she always ever wanted.
65
Inspiration Cadillac awoke in a steel shriek from an iron dream. Memory and awareness defied him-what were these bright lights, this high roof, these green-robed servants bowing awestruck from his presence? He sat up to require an explanation and was answered with cries of alarm and religious dread.
“Master, master, oh, it’s true, it’s true! Oh, master, bless me.”
A young postulant with a half-metal face fell to the floor in blatant adoration. Inspiration Cadillac stepped from the bed (an operating table?), caught sight of himself reflected in the white wall tiles, and remembered everything.