Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“It is,” said Eva Mandella, at work upon her tapestry history of Desolation Road. She could not tell if this stranger was memory or reality. He was a tall leather-brown man in a long grey desert coat. On his back was a large pack of great complexity sprouting coils of cable and antennae. He was too much a memory to be real but too rank with dust and sweat to be wholly memory. Eva Mandella could not remember his name.

“Is Rael in?” asked the stranger.

“My husband is dead,” said Eva Mandella. The tragedy was so old and cold and stale, it was no longer tragic.

“Is Limaal in?”

“Limaal is dead too.” But often the memories of both son and husband whiled away long afternoons in remembrance of other days. “My grandson, Rael Jr. is in the fields at the moment, if you want to talk to him.”

“Rael Jr. is a name I don’t know,” said the stranger. “So I will talk with you, Eva. Could you tell me what year it is?”

“One thirty-nine,” said Eva Mandella, drawn back from the desert of ghosts to the dying summer, and in doing so passing through the place of recognition and so knowing name and face of the stranger.

“That early,” said Dr. Alimantando. He took a pipe from his coat pocket, filled it, and lit up. “Or rather, that late? I was trying for either eighteen months from now, or about three years back, to try to find out what happened, or rather is going to happen to the town. Accuracy’s a bit tricky with the really long jumps: ten minutes ago I was eight million years away.”

What was wonderful to Eva Mandella was not how far or how fast Dr. Alimantando had come, but that he had come at all; for even she who had known him personally in the early days of the settlement had almost come to believe those who said Dr. Alimantando was as legendary as the greenperson he had gone to hunt.

“So you didn’t find the greenperson then?” she asked, setting up a new pick of desert-coat grey thread.

“I didn’t find the greenpeople,” agreed Dr. Alimantando, drawing long and leisurely on his pipe. “But I did save the town, which was my chief concern. That much I have achieved and I’m quite content though I’ll never get a word of thanks or praise for it because no one’ll ever know. Even I forget sometimes: I think living across two time-lines is blurring my memories of what is history and what isn’t.”

“What are you talking about, silly man?” scolded Eva Mandella.

“Time and paradox, reality-shaping, history-shaping. Do you know how long it’s been since I stepped into time that night?” He held up one long digit. “That long. One year. For me. For you… Eva, I hardly knew you! Everything’s changed so much. In that one year I travelled up and down the time lines, up and down, forward and back.” Dr. Alimantando watched Eva Mandella’s fingers weaving threads together, twisting, twining, warping, wefting. “Time travelling is like your weaving,” he said. “There is no single thread running from past to future, there are many many threads, and like your warps and wefts, they cross and mingle to form the fabric of time. And I’ve seen the fabric, and guessed at its width, and I have seen so many things, strange and wonderful things, that I should be here until nightfall if I were to tell you them all.”

But he did, and he was. By the time he had finished chronicling his adventures in plastic forests billennia dead, sketching down in his notebooks the bizarre polymer flora and fauna, and his sightseeing trips around the future achievements of mankind, colossal feats of science, and learning that rendered the jewel in this age’s crown, the manforming of the world, trivial and petty by comparison; by the time he had related his travels in the planetary jungle of flower-ripe trees in search of men no longer human, so transformed were they by their own hands that they wore the form of pulpy red melanges of organs, bulbous arboreal creatures with hard shells and gripping tentacles casting their reality-shaping intelligences into the chasms of the Multiverse so to commune with the lofty interdimensional wills that presided there, by the time he had told all this and how he had seen the sun glaze over with ice and walked on the lava-warm rock of the newborn earth with the lightnings of Genesis forking all around him; and how he had seen St. Catherine plant the Tree of World’s Beginning in the bare red rocks of Chryse and also stood upon the summit of Olympica, loftiest of mountains, to see the sky lase violet with glowing partac beams as ROTECH battled the otherworldly invaders known as the Celestials on the very first day of the 222nd Decade, and how that very morning, this very morning, he had sipped his breakfast mint tea upon the planetary ice cap as the horizon filled with the bloated, moribund sun while around his tent under the surface of the ice crawled the peculiar geometrical patterns that he reasoned must be the remnants of the humanity of that time of ending: by the time he had told all this the shadows were growing long beneath the umbrella tree and the air held an edge of evening crispness and the moonring was beginning to sparkle overhead and Eva Mandella had woven Dr. Alimantando and all his tales of wonder and horror into her tapestry in a colourful knot of jungle greens and battle violets and morbid reds and ice blues through which ran the grey thread of the time traveller.

“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.