“God!” it cried. “Here again!” Then, noticing Sweetness staring over the rim of the well, it pulled a device like a collapsible umbrella from a holster at its waist and brandished it at her. “What in the name of all sanity are you?”
“I am Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th,” Sweetness ventured, then, finding the umbrella-thing aimed at her absolutely the last straw in a line of kidnappings, hoodwinkings, maroonings, meanderings and burnings, she declared, fiercely, “And just who the hell are you?”
The figure goggled owlishly at her. But if he were any bird, it was a desert hawk, something keen and pinched and fidgeting; a bit leathery. The feather in his battered hat lent to the avian image, and the dark little eyes that gave no hint of where they were looking. The long, elegantly curving mustachios suggested another kind of beast, some watchful, quizzical desert gopher, a chewer of taproots and cactus, burrowing and twitch-whiskered. Altogether he was a strange bestiary of a creature, Sweetness decided. Still fixing her with his eye, the man said, “I am a traveller.”
“Me too,” Sweetness said. “Where from?”
“Here,” the man answered.
“You haven’t exactly gone far,” Sweetness said. The man tilted his head from side to side, as if attempting to triangulate her soul.
“I’ve just got back,” the man said after a good pause. “I was away a long time.”
Sweetness realised that noun-play in a dead town with mysterious travellers who crossed the great desert in dust-devils of faces stood a good chance of killing her, and that all she had eaten for the past three days was paperback romantic fiction.
“Have you anything to eat?” she asked. The traveller heard the plaint in her voice. He shrugged off his heavy pack, which Sweetness now saw was much more complex and arcane than at first impression. There were whip aerials and coils of cable and arrays of flashing lights and copper dials and bellows that went in and out and the definite taint—to the train-born—of fusion power. The traveller rummaged through his pockets. His coat was generously endowed with them. He hooked out a clutch of claw-shaped green fruit too large for the pocket that had produced it, but Sweetness was inured to the dimensionally transcendental.
“These are good.”
Sweetness frowned at them.
“They’re going to be big, a few million years from here.”
She took the bunch, peeled one of the hooked things. Cautious sniff: coffee and vanilla and a sweet/ sour tang, like guavas, but a little to the left. She took a bite. It was so good to a belly fed with mass market paperback that she devoured the whole bunch in six mouthfuls. She wiped her sticky fingers on her backsac. Since entering the big desert she seemed to have eaten nothing but fruit and paper. She remembered her promise of a fish on the mud-terraces at Therme.
“Million years?” she asked.
“I get around,” the traveller said. He spread his coat tails and sat beside her on the well wall. “Up to the end, and back again.” He held out his forefingers, crossed his hands. “Both ways.”
“I got an uncle like that,” Sweetness said.
“Have you now?” said the stranger. He explored deep in a pocket, hauled out a greaseproof-paper package. “These were fresh yesterday.” Inside were pale flaky rolls, forefinger sized.
“Thanks.” They were stuffed with a sweet, beany paste. “Only he’s more like beyond the end, if you know what I mean.” This, through a spray of pastry flakes.
“Your uncle?”
“More like elsewhere.”
“Ah yes. I am familiar with that. Most when is elsewhere, when you come down to it. It’s all probabilities; at first I thought you went forward and back, what I now realise is that you go sideways as well. Every movement forward, or back, is into an alternative created by your own apparent motion. I go diagonally through time.”
“The sky’s red there,” Sweetness said. “There’s frost on the ground, and a lot of stones. No one around, no clouds, no plants neither. Any more of those roll things?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said the traveller. His hand went elbow deep into his right pocket. “That’s the problem with diagonal, probabilistic motion. You get something good, you can’t go back to it again. All you can go to is a close alternative. Sometimes it’s better. Usually it’s worse. This do?”
He offered a foil-wrapped savoury. Sweetness’s desert-wise nose picked up a whiff of off but it was sustenance. For the first time the traveller seemed to notice the where and what of his location. While Sweetness licked animal grease off her fingers, he surveyed the dead town.
“When is this?” he asked.
Sweetness gave him the year and month.
“Long way to go yet,” he said. “I suppose I should warn them all, for the good it’ll do.”
“Warn who?”
“The people who live here. Lived here.”
Drawn by the desolation, he picked up his humming pack and went through the desiccated streets, running a finger along the sandy tops of the fallen walls, peering into the slack mouths of the doorways at the choked rooms. Sweetness followed him, half-intrigued, half-hoping for more provender from the deep deep pockets.
“The people who lived here, I could tell you their names, the names of their children,” the man said. “I could tell you the names of their thousand-times children’s children, but the problem is, would it be true? So many alternatives, and you can never trust that you travel back to the one, the true. It might have been someone else entirely, in this history.” He walked through the sterile fields toward the red rock-house. “I wonder what happened? It’s easy to lose the small change down the lining.”
Sweetness glanced at the sky—evening coming on.
“You travel in time, right?” she said to the journeyman.
“Right, child.”
“So you could go back and find out what happened.” Temporal paradox had suggested opportunity to Sweetness. “In fact, you could go back and leave me some food, and some water. That would be nice. Somewhere comfy to sleep, you could do that too, and a bath. I’d really really like it if you could do me a bath, and a lot of shampoo.”