Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“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 million 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.

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.