Desolation Road (56 page)

One side-of-eye glimpse was enough to convince Mr. Jericho. He slipped away from the gawking crowd and went to his bedroom. In the bottom drawer of his tallboy was the manbonehandled needlepistol wrapped in the red paisley scarf. Mr. Jericho knew who the visitors were. They were assassins of the Exalted Families, come to kill him.

At last.

Their names were AlphaJohn and BetaJohn. Since being decanted from Paternoster Damien's Genesis-bottle, they had spent their lives searching the world for Paternoster Jericho. For the first five years of their lives (passed in the two-in-one mutuality unique to twin clones) they had searched the cities and the towns. They had found nothing. Then for a year and a half they went back over the territory that had been covered by their predecessors before they had been in-vitroed. Killer clones bred for their gift of pair-empathy, they knew themselves infallible and scorned the skill of those predecessors. But that search, too, found nothing. Then for another year and a half they studied old records and data nets for some thread they might follow; some scent, some spoor, some fingerprint that might lead them to Paternoster Jericho. They were dogged, they were determined, they were zealous. They could not be other. But the scent was cold, the spoor rained away, the fingerprints smudged. So they called up an Exalted Families' computer, and with its help compiled a list of places where Paternoster Jericho was not or had not been and by a process of elimination reduced the planet's teeming millions in all its towns, cities and metropolises down to fifteen locations. Last on that list was Desolation Road. It was the last place in the world they thought of looking for him.

Therefore AlphaJohn and BetaJohn were confident when they asked Rael Mandella Jr. if there was a man named Jericho in town and when in all innocence he answered yes and told them where they might find him, they felt something close to joy that the investment made in creating them had paid its due dividend. AlphaJohn and BetaJohn counted twelve canals down and five canals in and found Mr. Jericho pollinating a stand of hybrid maize with a feather.

-Should have kept on passing through, he said to himself, and went forward to greet his assassins. Polite bows, names, pleasantries about the weather were exchanged.

"From Damien?" asked Mr. Jericho after a time. Cartwheel-brimmed hats tipped simultaneously.

"World searched," said AlphaJohn.

"Last place," said BetaJohn. They rested their hands above the pockets Mr. Jericho knew must hold their needlepistols.

"Took your time," said Mr. Jericho, rifling his Exalted Ancestors for something that might save him from the indignity of dying in a maize field. "Tell me, you boys good?" The Johns nodded. "The best?" Again the slow tilt of the wide-brimmed hats. "How do you know?" Hats halted in mid-tilt. Little black currant eyes looked out from the shade. "All you've ever done is hunt people. If you're good, you've got to prove it. To me. Against me." He let them cogitate on that for a few seconds, then whipped them again. "I reckon this old man could take you both. What do you say?" By their reactions to his words Mr. Jericho reckoned they must be clones, perhaps even pseudosimultaneous clones, for their eyes sparkled pseudosimultaneously at the challenge.

"Accepted," said AlphaJohn.

"Designate," said BetaJohn.

Mr. Jericho suppressed a little grin of triumph. He had them, and knowing that, he knew he could beat them. A true professional would have stitched him crotch to forehead immediately after wishing him "good morning." These clone twins were vain and if they possessed the fault of vanity there would be other faults to exploit.

"Outside the bar," said Mr. Jericho. "Whole town free-fire zone." Their telegraphic mode of speaking was infectious. "No civilians, no hostages, no poisons, formal rules. Needlepistols only. Take it you boys have them? Good. Be there ... high noon." No, that was siesta time. Siesta time was traditionally inviolable. Nothing must be permitted to disturb the dying town's rest in the heat heat heat of the noontime. "Sorry, old custom, have to be fifteen o'clock." When the second advent of the Pantochrist was heralded by the hosts of the Five Heavens, even that would have to wait until after siesta time in Desolation Road.

r. Jericho stood in the fifteen o'clock dust beneath the timestormed bar dock and remembered kneeling. Kneeling in the Hall of Ten Thousand Candles (no misnomer, he had been set to count them once as punishment for a boyhood misdemeanour: 10,027) trying to ascribe meaning to Paternoster Augustine's riddlesome koans. Unvastened as he was then, bereft of the souls of his ancestors, Paternoster Augustine's quandaries had seemed pointless; now he treasured their little wisdoms.

"Use your senses," Paternoster Augustine had told him and told him again. "Use all your senses. Consider the rabbit." Ah, but he had been down his burrow for five years now and he was old, and though he had of late taken up the Damantine Disciplines to ward off tightening sinews and grating bones, he was not the man he had once been. Ah, but then he would have drubbed these two vain striplings in a trice. Then. Now it was his trained senses against identity-telepathy. Witch-magic. He spat into the wind three times and crossed fingers and toes.

No one was more surprised than he when the little automaton gentleman dressed in Deuteronomy green who had sounded the time for Desolation Road defied his time-frozen mechanics to waltz out and strike the bronze bell with his little mallet. On the last note of the fifteen the little man seized arthritically forever and two pairs of high-heeled hand-tooled leather gaucho boots kicked up the dust and turned toes toward Mr. Jericho's battered brogues.

"Formal rules?"

"Formal rules."

"No poisons?"

"No poisons."

"Might as well begin then." And two steel needles kicked puffs of dried whitewash out of the wall at the end of the street.

-My but they're quick! Mr. Jericho crawled out of the far side of the veranda under which he had rolled and looked for cover. A needle grazed his left earlobe and buried itself in the warped wooden planking of the veranda.-Fast, very fast, too fast for an old man? Mr. Jericho jumped behind a low wall and squeezed his first needle off at the snake-quick figure in black silk that had fire on him.-Run run run! the Exalted Ancestors shouted, and he ran ran ran just as a string of needles pitted and cracked the white plasterwork where he had been crouching.-Always remember there are two of them, the limbosouls told him.

-I'm not about to forget it, he told them, and rolled and fired all in one cat-graceful action. The needle howled wide of the black-hatted figure diving down from the roof.

-One in the street, one in the alley. They've got you running. You get them running. You built this town with your own hands, you know it. Use that knowledge. The Ancestors were dogmatic. Mr. Jericho zigzagged down Alimantando Street toward the timelost patch of jungle vinery and drew a stitching of needles closer and closer to his twinkling heels. He leaped for the veranda of the Pentecost sisters' General Merchandise Store and the last needle embedded itself in his footprint.

-They are good. A perfect team. What one sees, the other sees, what one knows the other knows. He consciously brought his breathing under discipline in the Harmonic Mode and let his Ancestors kick him into the sensory state of the Damantine Praxis. Mr. Jericho closed his eyes and heard dust motes fall in the street. He took a deep breath through his nostrils, tagged a stench of hot tense sweat, popped up at a window, and pumped off two needles.

-Knowledge. An unbidden memory, demanding as unbidden memories always are, bubbled to the front of his head: Paternoster Augustine's garden; a pergola amid trees and singing birds, velvet-smooth grass beneath feet, the scent of thyme and jasmine in the air, above his head the mottled opal of Motherworld.

"Learn all you can," said Paternoster Augustine seated in a lepidoptiary of rare fritilliaries. "Knowledge is power. This is no riddle, but a true saying and much to to be trusted. Knowledge is power."

-Knowledge is power, repeated the massed choir of all souls. What do you know about your enemies that will give you power over them? They are identical clones. They have been reared in identical environments so that they have developed the same responses to the same stimuli and thus can be considered to be one person in two bodies.

That was the sum total of his knowledge of AlphaJohn and BetaJohn. And now Mr. Jericho knew how to beat them.

A shadow squeezed off a needle from behind a pump gantry. Mr. Jericho shifted his head the moment he sensed the metal latticework cool in the man's shadow. He slipped from the General Merchandise Store veranda, crept tigerman through the jungle vines, and made a low fast run through the maize fields for his destination. The solar power plant. Mr. Jericho crawled soily-bellied through the geometrical domain of reflections and held his antique needlepistol pressed close to his chest. He smiled a thin smile. Let the smart boys come hunting him here. He waited as an old, dry black spider waits for flies. And they came, cautiously advancing through the field of angled mirrors, starting at reflections and flibbertigibbets of the light. Mr. Jericho closed his eyes and let his ears and nose guide. He could hear the heliotropic motors shifting the lozenges to track the sun; he could hear water gurgling through black plastic pipes; he could hear the sounds and smell the smells of confusion as the clones in the mirrormaze found themselves cloned. Mr. Jericho heard AlphaJohn wheel and fire at the looming shape rearing up behind him. He heard the glass crack into a spiderweb of fissures, the reflection shot through the heart. There was quiet for a while and he knew that the Johns were conferring, ascertaining each other's position so they would not fire on each other. Telepathic conference done, the hunt resumed. Mr. Jericho rose to the crouch and listened.

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 mirrormaze 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 manbonehandled 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.