Desolation Road (16 page)

"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 timefree, the universe, rather, this subjective worldline, will shift onto a new worldline. 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 untreated 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 backlit the entire desert for splitseconds 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 3.126x10^16J, 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 0; 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?

n 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 everywhere 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.

imaal 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.