Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  “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.”

  “Explain, riddlesome creature.”

  The greenperson dropped from the ceiling, turned cat-agile in midair and squatted on the floor like a green toad. As toad it seemed more man than in its lizard guise but so close Dr. Alimantando shivered at its alienness.

  “Desolation Road was never meant to be. We failed once when you were stranded here and founded the settlement, but no matter, we thought, the comet was on its way, destiny was assured. But we failed a second time, a catastrophic time when the comet came. It should have smithereened you into a diaspora to the nethermost parts of the globe; instead, you toyed with his tory and saved your town at the price-ticket of consensus reality: taking for granted, that is, that both those words are numinous and illusory.”

  The greenperson drew little moist-finger railroad tracks on the floor tiles and shunted finger-trains across complex sets of points.

  “Reality, railroads and weaving. Eva is close with her tapestry but she does not have enough yarn to weave the other histories of Desolation Road. I am one of those unwoven husk-histories: I would have no existence save for the great timestorm that parted momentarily the veils between our realities and permitted me to enter from my unreality, my alternative weaving, and travel at will.”

  “How could you.. .”

  Five green-bean digits raised in a sign of peace and hush.

  “Our time-science is greater than yours. Bear me out, my tale will last only a little while. In another time you crossed the Great Desert and on attaining the farther green edge, settled in the small community of Frenchman, a town not unlike that you fled in Deuteronomy, save that its people did not brand you a demon, wizard, or eater of children.”

  “That’s refreshing to know.”

  The wind was rising outside the window; ghosts and dust were blowing through the alleys around the Mandella home.

  “Our shepherding of you-that was not me, incidentally-sparked a fascination with the odd shades of our pelts. ‘Green people,’ you thought, ‘how might that be?’ You delved, you experimented, you probed; in short, and I must be short, for I tend to run to verbosity, y
ou developed a strain of symbiotic vegeplasms which, in conjunction with the human bloodstream, rendered it capable of photosynthesising food from water, sunlight and trace minerals in the fashion of our sessile rooted cousins.” The greenperson upturned its apple-green backside for Dr. Alimantando’s inspection. “Observe: no asshole. One of the modifications we made to your original design, together with hermaphroditism-though I doubt you noticed thatpsychological polymorphism, which is how you see me as many different things, and Intimate Consciousness, by means of which we perceive, in common with our sessile cousins, the plants, the Universe directly rather than through the analogies and analogues of human perception, and thus we are able to directly manipulate space and time.”

  Perhaps by a trick of the silvery moonring, perhaps by a dint of temporal probability and paradox, the greenperson’s features were growing more recognizably human, less greenly alien.

  “But none of this came to pass,” complained Dr. Alimantando. “I never crossed the Great Desert, so you never came to be.”

  “Let us rather say that the probabilities were radically altered. The one who guided you across the Great Desert, his probability was significantly decreased, while mine was significantly increased. Time lines converge, remember? You see, the comet was on its way, hooray, hooray, for a year and a year and a year and a day. The history after you abandoned Desolation Road would be slightly different: places, times, characters, but worldlines converge.” Finger-expresses collided head on on the spittle-drawn mainline. “The greenpeople would again spring Aphrodite-shelled from your brow, Dr. A, and leap off through time in search of an age and civilization friendly to them. They were persecuted, you know. Brown, yellow, red, black, even dirty white skin-that the world can accept, but green? Green?”

  “But you yourself gave me the secret of the Temporal Inversion that was the key to chronodynamism; through it I saved Desolation Road from the comet… and destroyed you.”

  “Well reasoned, my good doctor, but not quite correct. You did not annihilate me, you gave me life. I am the product of the stream of events you set in motion.”

  “Your riddling grows wearisome.”

  “Patience, patience, my good doctor. You see, I am not the greenperson who guided you across the Great Desert. You uncreated him, poor child, though I think that maybe he will come to be again, and maybe again guide you across the desert of grit and the desert of stone and the desert of sand. Time lines converge. No, I am another greenperson entirely. Maybe you have seen me before?” Dr. Alimantando studied the viridian features and they seemed to him somehow familiar, a memory, an unplaced recognition cast in jade.

  “Now, the totally unacceptable part of the evening,” announced the greenperson. “Though I should not exist, I do. There must therefore be an extra-scientific reason for me; a miraculous cause.” The greenperson balanced on one leg. “One leg, ten legs, a thousand legs, a million legs: all the legs of science will never stand balanced unless the one leg of the miraculous supports them.” It set its leg down, bent, stretched. “The science which doesn’t include that which it can’t explain is no science at all.”

  “Superstitious nonsense.”

  “Those tree-dwelling arboreals you visited, they have a science, too, the study of the unstudiable. The things we call mystical and magical, the sciences of the higher orders of organization which distills like sweet nectar down the coils of Helix of Consciousness: this is their study. They study the unstudiable to know the unknowable: what is so great about knowing only what can be known?”

  “You riddle and rhyme as readily as ever,” said Dr. Alimantando, temper prickling.

  “Alliteration! I love alliteration! You want a riddle? Here’s a riddle: what is my name?”

  Dr. Alimantando harrumphed in annoyance and folded his arms.

  “My name, good doctor. Know my name and you know everything. A clue: it’s a proper name, not a jumble of letters or numbers, and it’s a man’s name.”

  And for the same reason that people, however reluctant, are unable to resist a game of I Spy With My Little Eye, Dr. Alimantando began to guess names. He guessed and guessed and guessed into the dark and the cold of the night, but the greenperson, squatting amid sticky train tracks and growing more unplacebly familiar with the passing hours, just shook its green head and said no no no no no. Dr. Alimantando guessed until his voice was hoarse and the first glow of dawn began to light the edge of the world but the greenperson still said no no no no no.

  “Give me another clue,” croaked Dr. Alimantando.

  “A clue, a clue,” sang the greenperson. “A clue then. It’s a common name from your old home country, friend. I am a man of green Deuteronomy.” So Dr. Alimantando listed every family name he could remember from his youthful days in Deuteronomy.

  “…Arumangansendo, Amaganda, Jinganseng, Sanusangendo, Ichiganseng…” and still the greenperson shook his head (growing increasingly familiar with every syllable of the tongue-rolling Deuteronomy names) and said no no no no no. As the world tipped its rim beneath the edge of the sun, Dr. Alimantando’s imagination was empty and he said, “I give up.”

  “Done them all?”

  “All of them.”

  “Not quite true, good doctor. You’ve left one name out.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Tell me that name.”

  “Alimantando.” And the greenperson reached out his hand and touched his finger to Dr. Alimantando’s and the hand was his own hand and he penetrated in a sparkle of green light to the heart of the mystery. The Ring of Time, the great Annulus within which all things circled, must heal itself of the wounds his toying with history had opened. Beyond the outer edge of the ring and at its hub flowed the miraculous which had broken into time to ensure that the greenpeople would come to be by making him his own creation. From eons hence one of the sons of the future would lead him by his bootstraps across the Great Desert: that greenperson was not the greenperson who now confronted him, for that greenperson was his future self. He now knew from whence the red chalk scrawl on his ceiling had come. He had given himself his own greatest desire and in doing so had embarked himself upon the green chronodynamic merry-go-round, which had at first taken him away from his destiny to be father of the greenpeople, but had in time brought him to this miraculous moment of genesis. The Great Annulus was healed and whole. The future was assured, the past immutable.

  “Let it be,” said Dr. Alimantando.

  Miraculous greenness flowed from the greenperson’s fingers into Dr. Alimantando. His hand turned green, his wrist, his arm. Dr. Alimantando cried out in alarm.

  “There will be some pain,” said the greenperson. “There always is at birth.”

  Dr. Alimantando tore at his clothing with ripe green fingers and it came away to reveal the green tide sweeping across his body. He fell to the ground with a wail, for even as the last trace of brown was washed from his outer form, the inner man was beginning to transform. Green blood surged through his veins, displacing the crude meat-red fluid. Hormonal glands squeezed and swelled into new shapes, organs twisted or shrivelled to the dictates of the alien functions of the green lycanthropy. Juices trickled, glands stirred, empty spaces collapsed inside him. Dr. Alimantando rolled and writhed on the floor tiles for time out of mind and then it was complete. The dawn light streamed through the window and by its sustaining light Dr. Alimantando explored his new body.

  “You to me, me to you, we to we,” sang the greenperson. “Behold thy future self.” Greenperson stood before greenperson, twin statues of jade. “The future must preserve itself, the greenpeople must come to be, therefore the miraculous broke through and made you me. Now, are you coming with me? There’s an awful lot to do.”

  “An awful lot,” agreed the greenperson.

  “Indeed,” said the greenperson, and there was a sudden aroma of newmown hay and ancient redwood forest and fresh-turned soil after rain and wild garlic in the hedgerows of Deuteronomy, and in a single step the green men walked a m
illion million years into the dreamtime.

  At six minutes of six heavily pregnant Kwai Chen Pak Mandella (wife in name and not law, for there was no longer any law in Desolation Road capable of recognizing marriages) came knock knock knocking on the guestroom door with a tray of breakfast. Knock knock knock no answer knock knock knock no answer so she said to herself, he must still be asleep, and entered quietly to heave the tray by the bedside. The room was empty, the window open. Dust had blown onto the bed, which did not seem to have been slept in. On the floor the stranger’s clothes lay strewn and ripped, and among them the curious Kwai Chen Pak found a curious thing; a paper-thin silvery skin in the shape of a man, dry and scaly, flaking in her fingers, as if some strange desert snake had shed its skin and departed in the cold of the night.

  69

  It was raining the day they broke into the sealed house, the man and the two women; a weighty, penetrating rain, falling heavily from heaven, punishing the earth. Prior to that Tuesday it had not rained for three years. There was a dreadful smell in the sealed house, the smell of something that had begun to die years before but was not yet done dying. Thus Rael Mandella Jr. was prepared when he found the body in the chair by the fire though the shrivelled skin and bared teeth and staring, mummified eyes drove a little cry of fear from him. Hearing the small cry, Santa Ekatrina at once took Kwai Chen Pak back to the house, for if a corpse were to pass a pregnant woman, the child would assuredly be stillborn. So Rael Mandella Jr. carried the paperlight corpse from the sealed house on his own and all alone he dug a shallow grave in the puddingy soil of the town cemetery. The rain ran down his face and his neck and his bare arms and filled up the grave, and because there was no mayor and no priest to say the proper words he bent his head and said the consignatory sentences himself, in the pouring, drenching rain. When the grave was covered with puddingy soil, he hammered in a wooden headboard and painted on it the words “Genevieve Tenebrae: founder citizen of Desolation Road,” and because he did not know dates or places, he wrote the simple epitaph: “Dead by a broken heart.” Then he splashed back through the red mud to his hearth and wife and his soul was heavy because now there were only the Mandellas left.