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 and 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 dustchoked 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 sapped 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.
But the bright illusion of travelling onward, upward, forward hung before him like a glowing Paschal candle. As the meal progressed he felt the death gathering around the table, the death and the ghosts of the dead and the bone-deep tiredness of Desolation Road, and he knew that his town no longer held any future for him. Ruins, a patchwork mishmash of impossibilities, dust decay, sleep. Desolation Road was dying. His eccentric notion of a place where all would be welcome had seen its day. The world had grown too cynical for such innocence.
Light-years beyond the window of the bedroom Kwai Chen Pak had given Dr. Alimantando the stars shone. He remembered a time when they had seemed close and warm, caught on the branches of the cottonwood trees the night of the first party in the world. He remembered innocence, and naivety, and suddenly the burden of his dream seemed too weighty to bear.
Time was vast. There was a whole eternity for the greenpersons to hide their shining cities. While he still searched he could never be disillusioned. The desert wind smelled green tonight and the lights of the moonring tinkled like wind-chimes. He turned away from the window to sleep on his disillusionment and the greenperson was there, clinging upside down to the ceiling like a green house-gecko.
“Greetings of the decreated,” it said. “We, the impossible, salute you, the all-too-probable.”
Dr. Alimantando sat down on the bed with a start.
“Oh,” he said.
“Is that all you can say?” The greenperson pitterpattered around the ceiling on little feet.
“In that case, how is it, then, that I’ve searched from world’s beginning to world’s end for you and have been unable to find you?”
“Because I have come out of nonexistence to greet you.”
“So you are a figment of my imagination after all.” Kwai Chen Pak had placed dried herbs under the pillow to aid beneficial dreams; their green fragrance suddenly filled the room.
“No more than you are of mine.” The greenperson fixed Dr. Alimantando with its green green eyes. “Remember we talked of destiny? Only it was density, not destiny. You see, this was not your destiny, and because it was not your destiny to which I was leading you disguised as a sprig of broccoli, we have been uncreated.”