“And what did it all achieve?” Rajandra Das would finally ask. By timehonoured tradition Mr. Jericho refrained from reply though he perhaps knew better then anyone else left in Desolation Road. “Nothing,” Rajandra Das would self-answer. “I tell you, all that praying and marching and striking, all that fighting and bloodshed and days and nights of fear, what did it get them? Nothing. Nothing at all. Waste of time, energy, lives.”
Mr. Jericho did not speak of words like “principles” or “absolutes” when Rajandra Das vilified Concordat’s failure to win a true victory over Bethlehem Ares Steel, for he was no longer sure he believed in absolutes or principles. To him the collapse of the company and thus of Desolation Road was of little consequence so long as the sun kept shining, the crops kept growing, and the occasional rains kept falling from heaven. His belief in Desolation Road was more selfish than Rajandra Das’s. He liked to think it was also more realistic. He remembered the first day it had ever rained. Fifteen years had gone past since then. Time passed by so soon. There was an irrational fear wandering around inside him that Desolation Road might vanish entirely from existence and he would not notice the difference. The people had gone, the shops had closed, the banks transferred their credit back to the big cities of the Grand Valley, the lawyers, hairdressers, mechanics, counsellors, doctors, had left the same day the railroad was repaired; all that remained were the farms and the solar panels and the creaking wind-pumps and the empty empty streets. These days the trains called only once a week, if even that. Everything was as it had been at the beginning. History had stopped for Desolation Road and Desolation Road was thankful for it.
One day as the two men sat in their leather chairs watching the desert dust whip along the street, Rajandra Das said, “You know, I suppose I mustn’t have been the marriageable type.”
Mr. Jericho did not know what he meant.
“I always thought one of those Pentecost sisters would lay ahold of me, but they never did. Funny thing. I always reckoned they would. Well, now they’re away God knows where, and here I am, without a wife, without a farm, with only a token half-share in the porch I’m sitting on. Haven’t even got my charm over machines, that got took back; what I am is a bum again. Maybe that’s what I always was, that’s why they never married me.”
“You thinking of leaving?” asked Mr. Jericho. He had known Rajandra Das long enough to read his heart like a railroad timetable.
“There’s nothing holding me here, least of all this place. You see, I always wanted to see Wisdom, those sparklin’ towers beside the Syrtic Sea.”
“Should have asked Miss Quinsana to take you back with her.”
Rajandra Das spat at the moonring.
“She wouldn’t give me a wipe of her ass now and she ain’t worth one of mine. No, if I go, I want to go on my own. I’ve got time enough to learn to be a bum again and I’m old enough to enjoy that time. No future to worry about.”
Mr. Jericho looked into the heavens. The stars seemed close enough to touch that night.
“Maybe I should go with you,” he mused. “I always said I was just passing through.” But he stayed and Rajandra Das found himself running up on the blindside of a slow early-morning ore train. As he swung onto the wagon-plate and scrambled up the ladder onto the top of the car, he felt the years fall away. This was what he had meant to do all his life. He was the Bum Eternal, the archetype of the Travelling Man. He had just taken a long wait between trains.
For a year and a day he roamed the world’s interesting places, sending back picture postcards of himself standing by the Chasm of Lyx or in the floating flower market of Llangonedd or squatting outside the legendary Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar on Belladonna’s Sorrowful Street. Kaan Mandella pinned the postcards up around the back-bar mirror for all citizens to see and wonder upon. Then one Thursday Rajandra Das succumbed to the urge that he had successfully resisted for the year and the day and went to Wisdom, the most beautiful city in the world. He had resisted the temptation for so long because he feared he might be disappointed, but as he walked the shining boulevards and gazed on mighty bridges and towers and took his siesta (agreeable habits dying hard) in a cafe beneath the shade of the bo trees lining Nevsky Prospect and dined in the waterside seafood restaurants and rode a tram to the top of each of the nineteen hills, it was all as he had imagined, glorious in every detail. He wrote card after card of glowing praise to Mr. Jericho.
“This is the most wonderful place in the world,” he wrote in his final card from Wisdom, “but I can’t stay here forever. There’s other places to see and there’s always Wisdom to come back to. It’s not going anywhere. If I’m passing through, I’ll pay you a call.”
It was Rajandra Das’s final card from anywhere. Riding back to Llangonedd and wondering where he might go that would satisfy him after the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition, a tickle of dust prickled his nose. A sudden fit of sneezing seized him and he sneezed out his last little drop of power over machinery. He lost his grip on the bogie, fell with a small cry under the wheels of the Wisdom-Llangonedd Syrtis Express, and died.
On the day that Mr. Jericho received his final postcard, a train arrived in Desolation Road. Since the town died, this was a sufficiently unusual event for the entire citizenry to turn out and welcome it. Most trains thundered through at 400 km/hr., leaving dust and flying pebbles as souvenirs. Even more unusual than the train’s stopping; two passengers stepped off. Apart from traveling salesmen and gullible tourists whom Kaan Mandella lured to the Bar/Hotel with the promise of trips to the geological curiosities of the Crystal Land, the rule was that people always got on trains at Desolation Road. These passengers did not look like salesmen or tourists. They wore kneelength silk jackets of the kind that had recently become fashionable in the Big Cities. They wore high-heeled hand-tooled leather gaucho boots and upon their heads were wide-brimmed round cardinal hats. They looked like killers.
One side-of-eye glimpse was enough to convince Mr. Jericho. He slipped away from the gawking crowd and went to his bedroom. In the bottom drawer of his tallboy was the manbonehandled needle-pistol wrapped in the red paisley scarf. Mr. Jericho knew who the visitors were. They were assassins of the Exalted Families, come to kill him.
At last.
Their names were AlphaJohn and BetaJohn. Since being decanted from Paternoster Damien’s Genesis-bottle, they had spent their lives searching the world for Paternoster Jericho. For the first five years of their lives (passed in the two-in-one mutuality unique to twin clones) they had searched the cities and the towns. They had found nothing. Then for a year and a half they went back over the territory that had been covered by their predecessors before they had been in-vitroed. Killer clones bred for their gift of pair-empathy, they knew themselves infallible and scorned the skill of those predecessors. But that search, too, found nothing. Then for another year and a half they studied old records and data nets for some thread they might follow; some scent, some spoor, some fingerprint that might lead them to Paternoster Jericho. They were dogged, they were determined, they were zealous. They could not be other. But the scent was cold, the spoor rained away, the fingerprints smudged. So they called up an Exalted Families’ computer, and with its help compiled a list of places where Paternoster Jericho was not or had not been and by a process of elimination reduced the planet’s teeming millions in all its towns, cities and metropolises down to fifteen locations. Last on that list was Desolation Road. It was the last place in the world they thought of looking for him.