Desolation Road Read online

  “You mean you're going to use that thing on yourself?” said Rajandra Das.

  “Could I really ask anyone else? Of course, and as soon as possible. After lunch, I think.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Mr. Jericho. “Are you going to do what I think you're going to do, that is…”

  “Go into the past and change history? Of course.” Dr. Alimantando fiddled with some knobs and fine settings and the time winder rewarded him with a potent hum. “It's only history, and when I change it, everything gets changed with it, so no one'll ever know. Certainly nobody in Desolation Road.”

  “My God.” It was Ed Gallacelli who said that.

  “That's sort of the effect I'm looking for,” said Dr. Alimantando.

  He had managed to surround the time winder in a glowing blue bubble. “Of course, there are some temporal paradoxes that have to be resolved, but I think I have that all taken care of. The main paradox is that if I succeed, then the purpose for my time travelling becomes nullified; you can see what I mean, the whole thing begins to loop around, but I think I should disappear from Desolation Road and stay disappeared; some other excuse for my disappearance will crop up, something to do with time travelling, as like as not. These things converge. Also, there'll be a lot of cross-temporal leakage; don't let it worry you, at the time of break there'll be a lot of time-echoes resonating around nodes of significance and you may find little bits of alternative histories, those old parallel universes, get superimposed on this one, so be prepared for the odd little miracle to happen. It tends to create a lot of fall-out, tinkering with history.”

  While he had been speaking, his deft fingers had discovered the setting on the time transfer controls he desired. He stood back from the time winder; it gave a sigh, a shudder, and vanished in a series of blurred afterimages.

  “Where did it go?” asked Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli.

  “Three hours into the future,” said Dr. Alimantando. “I'll pick it up about lunchtime. Gentlemen, you have seen with your own eyes that time travel is a practical possibility, if you join me at thirteen twenty, you can help participate in the first manned trip in history.”

  Over his lunch of leeks and cheese Dr. Alimantando planned how he might change history. He thought he might start with the orph who had willed him the oasis. From there, well, all time and space was his to wander. He might spend a lifetime in one evening saving his town. It would be a lifetime well spent. He went to a special cupboard in his kitchen and opened it. Inside was piled his amateur time traveller's outfit. He had spent five years and a lot of his credit lodged in the Bank of Deuteronomy amassing it. At first it had been an idle fancy, the kind of hobby that men take up as proof of the ultimate fulfilment of their impossible dreams, then as the items began to arrive from the Meridian Mail Order companies, the fancy had dragged the dream after it until now here he was, preparing to travel to times and places in a way no one had ever travelled before.

  Dr. Alimantando smiled over each item as he laid them out:

  A folding one-man survival tent, military issue, with double-seal gaskets and integral groundsheet.

  One sleeping bag, mummy-style: military issue.

  One transparent plastic insulation suit, complete with bubble helmet and oxygen rebreather mask.

  Two sets of clean underwear, one long for cold weather. Socks.

  One complete change of clothes.

  One military-issue camp kitchen, collapsible, adapted to run off his portable power supply. Compressed rations for desperation only.

  Five hundred dollars in cash.

  Sun hat and two tubes of sun-block cream.

  Soap bag, sponge and towel.

  Toothbrush and paste (spearmint).

  First-aid kit, including antihistamines, morphine, and general antibiotics.

  For use with above, one pewter hip flask Belladonna brandy.

  One pair sunglasses, one pair sand goggles.

  A pure silk scarf: blue paisley.

  One pocket shortwave transceiver.

  Compass, sextant, and inertial direction finder, together with Geological Survey maps to enable him to find his position on the planet's surface on emerging from the flux fields.

  One small tool kit, glue, and vinyl patches for the pressure suit and tent.

  One packet water-sterilizing tablets.

  A camera, three lenses, and twelve rolls of assorted self-developing film.

  Five leather-bound notebooks and one guaranteed everlasting ball-point pen.

  One wrist ionization dosimeter.

  Six bars of emergency chocolate.

  One Defence Forces knife, with a blade for every day of the year, and a tin of dry matches.

  Emergency flares.

  One copy The Collected Works of Watchman Ree.

  One portable trans-stable muon power unit with multicharge syphon for re-energizing from any power source: home-made.

  Running off the above, one home-made portable tachyon blaster, about the size and shape of a folding umbrella, with enough clout to vaporize a small skyscraper.

  One large frame backpack, military issue, to hold everything.

  Dr. Alimantando began to store his equipment. It all folded down remarkably small. Then he glanced at his watch. It was almost thirteen o'clock. He went to the kitchen table and counted the seconds off on the wall clock.

  “Now.” He pointed at the table. In a cascade of multiple imaging, the time winder arrived out of the past. He picked it up and added it to the time traveller's kit. Then he went and changed into his old much worn, much loved desert clothes and as he struggled into his long grey desert coat he invented eight hundred and six reasons why he should not go.

  Eight hundred and six cons, and one pro. It was simply that he had to. He strapped on his bulky pack and fastened the control verniers around his wrist. Mr. Jericho, Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli entered, prompt as only Mr. Jericho could be prompt.

  “Ready?” asked Mr. Jericho.

  “How ready can you be for something like this? Listen, if I succeed, you'll never know, understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Because of the nature of chronodynamics, I'll have changed all history and you'll never know you were in danger because that danger will never have been. From an objective point of view, my point of view, because I'll be time-free, the universe, rather, this subjective world-line, will shift onto a new world-line. I'll try to leave a note of what I've done, if I can, somewhere in the past.”

  “You talk too much, Doc,” said Rajandra Das. “Just get on with it. You don't want to be late.”

  Dr. Alimantando smiled. He said good-bye to each man in turn and gave them a bar of his emergency chocolate. He cautioned them to eat it soon, before some transtemporal anomaly uncreated this moment. Then he flicked some switches on his wrist controls. The time winder began to hum.

  “One final thing. If I succeed, I won't be back. There's too much out there that I want to see. But I may call in from time to time, so look out for me and keep a chair empty for me.”

  Then to Mr. Jericho, he said, “I've known who you were all along. Made no odds to me, the past never has, though I'm obsessed with it. Funny. Just look after my people for me. Right. Time to be off.” He pressed the red stud on his wrist control.

  There was a shriek of tortured continuum and a fading trail of Alimantando-shaped afterimages and he was gone.

  On the night before Comet Tuesday everyone dreamed the same dream. They dreamed that an earthquake shook the town so hard that a second town was shaken out of the walls and the floors, like the double image you sometimes see when your eyes won't focus first thing in the morning. The ghost town, complete with its company of ghost inhabitants (who so closely resembled the true citizens that they could not be told apart) separated from Desolation Road like curds from whey and drifted away, though not in any direction anyone could have pointed to.

  “Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” For
ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories? Then there was a shock which shook every sleeper momentarily from his rapid eye movements. They could not know that they had died in that moment and been reborn into new lives. But when they regained the sanctuary of their common dreaming, they found a subtle revolution had taken place. They were the ghosts, real, solid, flesh-and-blood ghosts and the town drifting away in the incomprehensible direction was the Desolation Road they had built and loved.

  Out of the dream woke Dominic Frontera, shaken by the alarm call of his communicator. He rubbed sleep and Ruthie Blue Mountain out of his eyes.

  “Frontera.”

  “Asro Omelianchik.” His chief officer. One hard bitch of a woman. “All hell's breaking loose; the orbital boys have picked up an enormous surge of probabilistic energy focusing five years, fifteen years and eighteen years into the past with chron-echoes resonating all the way up and down the time-line.”

  “Damn it, man, someone's playing around with time! The orbital boys have given it a ninety percent plus probability of our universe being thrown into a different time-line: whatever it is, it's going to change history, the whole damn history of the world!”

  “I didn't get that…what's this to do with me?”

  “It's damn well coming from your area! Someone within five klicks of you is pissing around with an unlicensed chronokinetic shunter! We've traced the probability net back to you!”

  “Child of grace!” exclaimed Dominic Frontera, suddenly awake and aware. “I know who it is!”

  And then he was asleep again, dreaming of Ruthie Blue Mountain as he had dreamed of her every night since…when? Why? Why did he love her?

  The universe was changed. Ruthie Blue Mountain had never opened the blossom of her beauty upon Dominic Frontera, who indeed had no reason to be in Desolation Road now that the past was changed, yet he slept in his room in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel and dreamed of Ruthie Blue Mountain because universes may come and go but love remains; such is the teaching of the Panarch from whom all love proceeds, and also Dr. Alimantando had promised the odd little miraculous interdimensional leakage on the night he changed the world.

  And in the morning it was Comet Tuesday and everyone woke and rubbed the strange dreams of the night from their eyes and looked at the town charter, proud on their walls, the charter Dr. Alimantando had signed with ROTECH all those years ago to build a town here, the charter that meant that the approaching comet would be vaporized in the upper atmosphere instead of crashing into the ground with enormous destructive force as had been ROTECH's previous practice. Everyone gave heartfelt thanks to Dr. Alimantando (whenever he might be) for having made everything fair and square.

  At fourteen minutes of fourteen everyone without exception was up at the high place on the bluffs called Desolation Point with warm rugs and flasks of hot Belladonna brandy-laced tea and readied themselves for what Dominic Frontera had assured them was going to be the spectacle of the decade.

  According to Ed Gallacelli's watch, Comet Tuesday was two minutes late but Mr. Jericho's half-hunter made it forty-eight seconds early. Irrespective of terrestrial timepieces, the comet came when it came and it came with a dull thundering that shook the rock beneath the spectators’ feet while above their heads, high in the ionosphere, auroral discharges wavered insubstantially, meteors showered like rocket bursts, and sheets of purple ionic lightning back-lit the entire desert for split-seconds of phantom illumination.

  The sky was suddenly streaked with blue beams that converged upon the still-invisible comet like spokes upon a hub. Gasps of collective amazement greeted this scene.

  “Particle beams,” shouted Dominic Frontera, struggling to make himself heard over the noises in the sky. “Watch this!” As if he had spoken an abracadabra, a sudden blossom of light filled the sky.

  “Coo!” said everyone, blinking away the blobs before their eyes. A great golden glow filled the horizon and slowly faded. The ionic lightning crackled fitfully and passed, the occasional meteors burned away to nothing. The show was over. Everyone applauded. Forty kilometres up, Comet 8462M had been shattered by ROTECH's particle beams into chunks of ice the size and shape of frozen peas and then flashed to vapor by the streams of agonized particles. A gentle rain of ice dropped through the ionosphere, troposphere, tropopause and stratosphere over days and weeks to build a layer of cloud. But that was not part of Comet Tuesday.

  When the last shooting star had flared over the horizon, Rajandra Das pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “Now, that weren't bad. Weren't bad at all. I could live with that if I had to.”

  And that is the story of Comet Tuesday.

  And this is the story of Comet Tuesday.

  In a place as far removed from Desolation Road and yet as intimate to it as the print on either side of a page, two hundred and fifty megatons of dirty water ice, like an unhygienic sorbet, tunnelled out of the sky at five kilometres per second and threw itself into the Great Desert. Now, the application of Newton's formula for kinetic energy gives us a figure for the energy released by this act of 3.126x1016J, enough to run a valve wireless until the end of the universe, or the equivalent calorific value of a pile of rumpsteak the size of the planet Poseidon; certainly enough for Comet 8462M to be instantly vaporized, for that vapour and resulting dust to be thrown tens of kilometers into the atmosphere, and for the shock wave, traveling at four times the speed of sound through the rocks beneath the desert, to heave a great tidal wave of sand into the air and bury Desolation Road with all its cargo of dreams and laughter under fifteen metres of sand. Certainly the accompanying mushroom cloud could be seen by the ghosts of Desolation Road in their exile in the cities of Meridian and O; certainly they felt the red rust rains that fell sporadically for a year and a day after Comet Tuesday. But this was long away and far ago and of as little consequence as a dream.

  And that is the other story of Comet Tuesday.

  Who can say which is true and which is false?

  In his days of deepest darkest duplicity Mikal Margolis often took himself on long walks into the Great Desert so that the wind might blow the women out of his head. And the wind blew as it had for a hundred and fifty thousand years and would for another hundred and fifty thousand years but that would still not be long enough to blow away the guilt Mikal Margolis felt in his heart. He had three women: a lover, a mistress and a mother, and just as the learned astronomers of the Universuum of Lyx maintain that the dynamics of a system of three stars can never be stable, so Mikal Margolis wandered, a rogue planet, through the fields of attraction of his three women. Sometimes he ached for the enduring love of Persis Tatterdemalion, sometimes he longed for the piquancy of his lascivious relationship with Marya Quinsana, sometimes when the guilt gnawed at the base of his stomach he sought his mother's forgiveness, and sometimes he wished he could escape their whirling gravitations entirely and wander free through space.

  His desert walks were his escape. He did not have the courage to escape completely from the forces that were destroying him; a few hours alone among the red dunes were the farthest he could go from the stellar women of his life, yet in those hours he was alone in delightful solitude and he could play out his fantasies in the cinema of the imagination: desert raiders; grim, unspeaking gunmen; bold adventurers seeking lost cities; tall riders; lonely prospectors close to the motherlode. He trudged for hours up slopes and down, being all the things the women would not let him be and tried to feel the wind blow and the sun sweat the guilt out of him.

  On this day no wind blew and no sun shone. After a hundred and fifty thousand years of light and air unceasing, the sun and wind had failed. A dense bank of cloud lay over the Great Desert, wide as the sky, black and curdled as devil's milk. It was the legacy of Comet 8462M, a layer of condensing water vapour that covered most of the North West Quartersphere and which had turned to rain and fallen on Belladonna and Meridian and Transpolaris and New Merionedd and everyw
here except Desolation Road, where it had somehow forgotten to rain. Mikal Margolis, walker of dunes, knew little of this and cared less: he was an earth-scientist not a sky-scientist and anyway he was preoccupied because he was about to make a serendipitous discovery.

  Sand. Contemptible sand. Red grit. Worthless, but Mikal Margolis, with the light of revelation in his eyes, bent down to pick up a handful and let it run through his fingers. He closed his fist on the remaining dribble, stood up, and shouted his delight to the ends of the Great Desert.

  “Of course! Of course! Of course!” He stuffed his lunch satchel full of sand and danced all the way back to Desolation Road.

  Limaal and Taasmin Mandella, Johnny Stalin, and little Arnie Tenebrae, six days past her second birthday, were up at Desolation Point building paper gliders and launching them over the bluffs when The Hand came. They did not know it was The Hand then, not at first. Taasmin Mandella, whose eyesight was keenest, thought it was just a trick of the heat, like the hazy thermals that spiralled the paper gliders up into the heavy grey clouds. Then everyone noticed the thing and were amazed.

  “It's a man,” said Limaal Mandella, who could barely distinguish its shape.

  “It's a man of light,” said Taasmin Mandella, noticing the way the figure shone brighter than the cloud-hidden sun.

  “It's an angel,” Johnny Stalin, seeing the pair of red wings folded on its back.

  “It's something much much better!” squeaked Arnie Tenebrae. Then all the children looked and saw not what they wanted to see but what was there wanting to be seen, which was a tall thin man in a high-collared white suit upon which moving pictures of birds, animals, plants, and curious geometric patterns were projected, and the wings upon his back were not wings at all but a great red guitar slung across his shoulders.

  The children ran down to meet the stranger.

  “Hello, I'm Limaal and this is my sister, Taasmin,” said Limaal Mandella. “And this is our friend, Johnny Stalin.”