Desolation Road

63

The first that Mr. Jericho and the refugees in the Bar/Hotel knew of the end of reality was when they found themselves bobbing against the ceiling. Though separated at the time of the air strike, they had all come together by means of the tunnels and caves that honeycombed the rocks beneath Desolation Road: no sooner had worried greetings been exchanged than they found tables, cups, carpets, bottles and chairs floating around their ears. Kaan Mandella chased after the beer-crate radio transmitter in a kind of unsteady breast-stroke beneath the roof beams. Rajandra Das anchored himself to the pelmet and peered upside down out of the window. Attackers, defenders, life-careless camera teams, llamas, pigs and pie dogs were floating around the eaves of the houses. Halfway down the street, gravity seemed to have reversed completely, houses, trees, animals, soldiers, earth and rocks were falling into the sky. In the other direction three empty hotels and the Excelsior Curry House were submerged in a huge red sand dune. A dark shadow fell across the free-fall street; something big as a barn, blocky and dirty orange, was flying over Desolation Road.

“What is going on?”

Mr. Jericho’s Exalted Ancestors had been arguing deep in his hypothalamus as he bobbed against the candle brackets. Their final conclusion was appalling.

“They must have got the time winder to work.”

“It wasn’t like this when Dr. A used it.”

Half the room could not understand what Rajandra Das and Mr. Jericho were talking about.

“Alimantando kept his Temporal Inversion Formula a secret: Tenebrae’s engineers must have guessed wrong. Instead of creating fluidity through time, they’ve created a zone of temporal fluidity here, now, and reality is breaking down. The laws of space-time are bending, and I think pieces of alternative universes are being superimposed onto this one.”

“What does that mean?” asked Santa Ekatrina Mandella, who had been married to the laws of space-time for eleven years.

“It means the end of consensus causal reality.” The first earth tremors shook the Bar/Hotel. Freed from gravity, the very rocks beneath the street were shifting and stirring. “Unless.”

“Unless?” asked Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli simultaneously. The Exalted Ancestors had already answered this question, too, and their answer was no less appalling than their first one.

“Unless we can shut down the power supply to the time winder.”

“You mean close down the Steeltown tokamak?”

“I do. And I need you with me, Rajandra Das. I need your charm over machines.”

“You’ll never, do it, old man,” said Kaan Mandella. “Let me.”

Mr. Jericho already had the door open. A glowing wind filled with ghostly faces swept along the street, driving all unanchored free-fallers out into the desert.

“I’m afraid only I can do it. Can you keep a secret? Ever heard of the Damantine Disciplines?”

“Only the Exalted Families…” started Kaan Mandella, but Mr. Jericho said “precisely” and dived out into the street. Rajandra Das plunged after him after a moment’s hesitation. “Try Persis on the radio again,” he called in parting. “We may need her to run interference for us.” He did not add, “if she’s still alive.”

At the junction of Bread Alley gravity was restored but a downpour of boiling rain drove Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das into shelter. Under a window-ledge they found a parboiled guerrilla. Mr. Jericho stripped him of his battle armour and dressed Rajandra Das in helmet, power pack and weapons pack.

“You might need it,” Mr. Jericho said. It did not take Damantine-disciplined hearing to make out the booms of small-arms fire close by. The two men dashed through the tailing drops of scalding rain into Mosman’s Court, where the hands of the municipal dock were spinning around at a rate that compressed hours into seconds. Aging visibly as they ran, refugees from the accelerated timezone fled up the street into a jungle of green lianas and vines which had snagged around the smoking skeletons of two fighting machines. Mr. Jericho detoured around the relativistic zone, passed through a region of inexplicable night into Alimantando Street. The shocking concussion of a close-by field-inducer charge knocked him and Rajandra Das off their feet. Rajandra Das followed Mr. Jericho to cover as a volley of shots from the roof of the mayoral office shattered the facades of the houses on Alimantando Street. One second later a time quake ripped away the mayoral office into anywhen and replaced it with a quarter hectare of green pasture, white picket fence, and three and a half black and white cows.

“Child of Grace!” whispered Rajandra Das. Mr. Jericho found a dead Parliamentarian boy-soldier in the doorway of a burned-out house and looted him of his clean white combat gear. Purple lightning flickered fitfully at one end of the street.

The two men scrambled through a world fallen into insanity. Here gravity had shifted ninety degrees to change streets into cliff faces, there bubbles of weightlessness bounced down the lanes waiting to trap the foolhardy who ventured out from their cellars; here half a house ran backward, there garden plants grew to shady trees in seconds. Green figures like long, thin men were seen capering on rooftops and drew the fire of those soldiers capable of fighting. Phantoms of children yet unborn danced hand in hand under trees that were yet seeds.

“How far do you think it reaches?” asked Rajandra Das. A powerful wind had sprung up, driving them inward toward Steeltown, where the heart of the madness was spinning faster faster faster, reaching into the Panplasmic Omniverse.

“Local as yet,” replied Mr. Jericho. The steel wind whipped at him. “But the longer the time winder runs, the greater the zone of interference.”

“Suppose I shouldn’t say this, but my feet don’t want to go on. I’m terrified.”

Mr. Jericho looked on the spinning curtain of lightning-streaked smoke that shrouded Steeltown.

“So am I,” he said. As Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das raced for the time wall, reality shuddered and shook. A whale swam into Desolation Road station. An Archangelsk urinated in a cabbage patch. A ghostly figure, tall as a tree, stood astride the community solar plant and ripped searing solos from his red guitar. Lightning flew from his fingertips and gathered into tiny balls which blew like tumbleweeds around the two men’s feet. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das plunged into the whirlwind of smoke.

“What the…” A battle of statues was being fought here: slugs and snails engaging each other with tachyon beams slow as drunkards’ punches.

“Time distortion,” explained Mr. Jericho. “Let’s go.”

“You mean through?”

“They can’t see us. Watch.” Mr. Jericho danced across the battle ground, ducking under sluggardly tachyon beams, dodging sessile field-inducer bursts. “Come on.” Rajandra Das crept through the Einsteinian battlefield. He tried to imagine how his passage seemed to the time-frozen combatants: was he a whirlwind, a flash of light, a blur of multiple images, like Captain Quick in the old comics his mother had used to buy him? He followed Mr. Jericho down a corridor between two steel converters into an unexpected freefall zone. Rajandra Das’s momentum took him straight up in an elegant reverse dive.

Mr. Jericho was shouting something, something about his fieldinducers? He hadn’t even thought about the device he was wearing. Defence canopy up? He didn’t know how to do it. He fiddled with his wrist-control and was rewarded with a prickle of static electricity across his face in the same instant as a sudden smashing blow sent him spinning through space. As he ricocheted off the side of Number 16 smokestack, he caught a glimpse of Mr. Jericho being bounced from wall to wall like a ball in a pachinko parlour. The central fusion tokamak was clearly well defended.

A second field-inducer blast sent Mr. Jericho zigzagging from steel furnace to ground to conveyor to converter. Only his looted defence canopy saved him from pulverizing death.

—Too old for this, he told his Exalted Ancestors; They reminded him of duty and honour, and courage. Well they might, free as they were from the tyranny of time-bound flesh.-They can bounce us around like rubber balls all day if they want to. He saw Rajandra Das loom up before him; the two men smashed together and rebounded. As Mr. Jericho cartwheeled through the Anarchic Zone, his Exalted Ancestors reminded him that every second the world was oscillating farther from consensus reality.

In mid-bounce Rajandra Das realized that he had passed from the stage of being too terrified to be scared into the sublime state of hysteric comedy. What could be more ridiculous than being bounced around a steel works in the middle of a time storm by a gang of terrorists defending a fusion tokamak powering an out-of-control time machine? He knew that if he laughed at the joke, he would not be able to stop.

A crackle came over his ear-thimble.

“Hello, boys. Having fun?”

Mr. Jericho heard the voice on his earphone and answered.

“Persis! Darling! Jim Jericho. Request you launch an immediate attack on the forces entrenched around the Steeltown fusion plant.”

“Check.”

“Persis, I suggest you beware of severe reality displacements.”

“You don’t need to tell me.”

“And Persis . .

“Yes?”

“If all else fails, and only if all else fails, if we can’t get through, destroy the tokamak.”

“There’ll be . .

“A fusion explosion. Yes.”

“Check. Here… we… g……

A rally of shots from the tokamak positions volleyed Jim Jericho like a handball as the Yamaguchi and Jones stunter howled in over the smokestacks. Wing-mounted tachyon blasters kicked out, there was an explosion that made Mr. Jericho fear that maybe she had destroyed the tokamak, then Persis Tatterdemalion was climbing into the sky away from winged figures pursuing her with scimitars. Mr. Jericho dropped his canopy and caught hold of a stanchion. Rajandra Das did likewise, and as he drifted past, Mr. Jericho caught hold of his collar.

Not so much as a scrap of flesh or cloth remained of the defenders. The generator hall was empty of everything save the song of the tokamak.

“Spooky things,” said Rajandra Das, laying rude hands on the controls.

“I thought you knew about these things.”

“Locomotive tokamaks. This is different.”

“Now you tell me.”

“Well, Mr. Damantine-disciplines, you shut it down.”

“Wouldn’t have the first idea.”

Distant explosions rent the air. Metal creaked and groaned and the iron tread of a fighting machine shook the generator hall. Rajandra Das’s fingers moved over the control lamps, then hesitated.

“What happens when the power goes off?”

“I’m not certain.”

“Not certain? Not certain?” Rajandra Das’s exclamation rang from the steel walls.

“Theoretically, reality should snap back to concensus reality.”

“Theoretically.”

“Theoretically.”

“Hell of a time for theoretically.” Rajandra Das’s fingers danced over the controls. Nothing happened. Again the fingers played. Nothing happened. A third time Rajandra Das played the control board like a chapel harmonium and a third time nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do it! It’s been too long. I’ve lost the touch.”

“Let me see.”

Rajandra Das waved Mr. Jericho away from the control lights with the muzzle of his field-inducer. He whispered some consignatory mumbles and emptied a full power burst into the control board. The two men staggered back from the explosion, blinded by sparks and flying circuitry. The fusion tokamak’s usual serene hum rose to a shriek, a howl, a roar of outrage. Rajandra Das fell on his knees for divine forgiveness for a wastrel’s life when the all-destroying fusion scream was silenced. And in the same instant the men felt themselves, the power hall, Steeltown, the whole world turn inside out and inside out again. With a thunderclap of inrushing reality the time winder imploded and drew Arnie Tenebrae’s five-level-deep time-control centre and all its staff into neverwhenness.

The timewall exploded outward. Free-fallers dropped-out of the air; whales, archangels and guitar players vanished, and the boiling rain blew away on the glowing wind. Every clock stopped in the time-burst and stayed stopped forever, despite the attempts of subsequent generations many kilometres removed from the day of the time storm to restart them.