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 twohanded.
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, down 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 needlepistol, 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.
68
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.”