"No." I kissed her forehead. "You are the Queen of the Pontius, the land of incense ladders, my beloved consort. I never made Chephren. I have nothing to do with Chephren."
Shaman boiled. "Chephren came to me in a dream. He told me to dig you out, you ridiculous ingrate. Are you disowning Chephren?"
"It was your own epoche that changed things, Shaman," I said.
Down below, Izzy was trumpeting it for everyone’s ears: "See, it says so right here, folks:
‘Visitors to the Valley of Kings may be interested to note that, contrary to previously held theories, there is no relation between the Sphinx and Chephren. Frank Domingo, a senior forensic officer of the New York City Police Department, has concluded, after rigorous examination and analysis, that there is no actual similarity between the face of the Giza Sphinx and the face on the statue of Chephren previously supposed to be its model.’
(Or vice versa.) There it is, boys and girls. Your Fearless Leader lied to you."
"I warned you, Shaman," Nora was saying. "You can’t control the epoche. You’re nothing now. The Sphinx never sired our race. We came up out of the mud all on our own. The Sphinx is just hitching through. You’re just another human, like me."
The Space People were pelting the glass doors with rocks. With his mind, Shaman commanded them to stop?to no effect.
The ice pick with which Shaman attacked me was no less lethal for being non-physical. He hacked at Izzy’s bung. Thoughts hissed from me like leaking steam, but the patch held. "You!" he screamed at me. "You laid your own mother. You want to kill yourself, don’t you?"
"You forget I’m only half human," I said. "We Magellanics mummafug all the time, didn’t you say so?"
The glass cracked and collapsed, littering jagged fragments behind Shaman. Space People chinned up and climbed through. Izzy was there, on what would have been Johnny Abilene’s shoulders, were he wearing his Earther skin. The Space People grabbed Shaman’s arms; Johnny grabbed his mind.
I stood by Nora, watching it all.
I stood below, on the desert, behind Lila Kodzi and Sarvaduhka, bursting out of the sunglasses and synthetic suit as the peripheralysis wore off and I was once more a gigantic monolith from the stars.
Johnny Abilene knelt beside Gypsy, his brother Sandulean. "Bodies aren’t important," Gypsy gasped. Then he saw Izzy. "Your Majesty!"
The Space People were tying Shaman to the condiment stand. Izzy stroked Gypsy’s wan anterior bulge. "You been bad-mouthing me, Gypsy. I can tell. Izzovision."
"Why didn’t you trust me, Your Majesty? You sent me here to do a job. Then you came yourself and never let me know."
"I didn’t think things would go so fast, Gyp. I had to epoche on down in a hurry when the Space People killed Shaman."
"Killed Shaman? Shaman’s not dead."
"We got past and future mixed around here, old Giblet. Anyways, I’ll confer with you before the whole thing ever happened?retroactively?once I get a minute."
"I hate your guts, Izzy," Gypsy said, and he kissed him, the way Magellanics do, thwucking their nodes against each other, then expired in Izzy’s arms.
Johnny shook his dendrites. "Well, my Lord, there goes the best dang Sandulean operative you ever want to see."
Izzy heaved a sigh. "When we get back to the Mags, I’ll name a couple weeks after him."
"I thought you didn’t want me to leave Earth. I thought you worked at Gibson’s in Lockport," I said.
"Yeah, that’s just part-time," Izzy said. "I’m also the Emperor of the Magellanic Clouds."
"That still don’t let me out of having to be back at Gibson’s 8:30 a.m. Monday morning though," Izzy said, "unless I want to be docked for the time, which I don’t."
"Dualism!" cried Lila Kodzi. With Sarvaduhka, she had found a way up from the base of the rest stop cafe rocket ship desert concession. Sarvaduhka had become too frightened to remain in my shadow below. "Dualism! You are not both here and there, liar! If you are an Emperor, you are not a lathe setup man as you claimed to me in our conjugal bed at the Cairo Khan Suites Hotel. Izzy Molson, I abjure all past relationship with such as you."
"That suits me okay," said Izzy. "I’m working on a little something in Tonawanda, anyways, name of Fay."
"Creep!" She abruptly turned away, grabbed Sarvaduhka’s jaw and kissed him passionately and long. He squealed. He stopped squealing. He kissed her back.
I stared at Nora, and the world dissolved. Let the Space People devour Shaman. Let Izzy install Johnny Abilene on the throne of the SMC and himself take up the Imperial Scepter of the combined galaxies, while punching in and out at his Lockport factory. Let Sarvaduhka have his female action, and Lila her one divine nature of Christ. Gypsy was dead, but bodies aren’t important. Nasser was dead too.
"Nora…" I said.
"It’s impossible, Mel," she said.
"Why? We’ll go to Sanduleak together and live there forever, Abu al-Hawl and the Queen of Punt, Mel and Nora Bellow."
"You know it’s impossible, even by epoche. You have to go back to Sandy, to release Abu, to return, to become one again on the neutron star. You’re half-Magellanic. I’m just an Earther. And I’m pregnant."
"I love you, Nora."
"I’ll raise our child, my grandchild, your sibling."
"I won’t poke my eyes out, Nora."
"I’m not asking you to. Keep them open. Keep them wide open."
"I will… Hey!" The cafe was shaking and whipping like a flame in the wind. Izzy was beeping again. "Izzy, who’s doing an epoche?"
"I am, Melba," Izzy said. "There’s a number of things wrong here. I don’t like monarchies in North America, or Vietnamese troops either, not yet; also, this rest stop belongs in Texas, and Abu?which means you?better haul ass back to the Magellanics right now, if I’m gonna have time to patch you permanent and still make coffee and Danish before the morning shift. Keep a tight ass now, Melly, but don’t bother to buckle up. Ten… nine… eight…"
"Take this, son!" Johnny threw me his guitar.
The relic background radiation spiked to three point eight, then dipped to three again, and we were gone.
Epilogue
Izzy’s epoche left Nora standing between the zucchinis and the cherry tomatoes behind the house Johnny Abilene had built her in upstate New York. Somehow, a year had passed, and her mouth was full of clothespins. She found herself hanging diapers to a yellow nylon line while she stared southwest at dusk’s rosy fingers. She was in the wrong hemisphere to see the Magellanic Clouds. But I could see her?and Junior too, inside, in the wicker basket next to Nora’s bed: