“Shampoo.”
“Shampoo.”
The traveller smiled. His face crinkled like a well-used old leather wallet.
“See that rock?”
“I see it.”
“I used to live there. That’s my home.”
“Those are your numbers, going all the way up?”
“You’ve been in?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Well, this time you come as guest, not trespasser.” The odd man bowed her through the door, indicated that she should follow the spiral of temporal mathematics all the way to its conclusion. From the ruined weather-room the sun was a cracked red yolk dripping light-juice over the horizon, the shards of twisted glazing bars desperate fingers trying to hold back the sol-stuff.
“Stay there. Don’t move.” The strange little man clicked his pack shut around him. He twiddled dials on his coat sleeve.
“Where would I go?” Sweetness began to ask, then a wind out of nowhere flayed her sunburn and whipped her hair in her eyes. “Hey!” Faces rushed in from the world’s four quarters, voices, images, and were gone. As was the man.
“Hey…” sweetness started to say again but while the word was still on her tongue, hot wind blew in her face, dust buffeted her, faces loomed at her, yawned as if to swallow her, then vanished to their haunts beyond the edge of the world. The man was back. With him, total transformation. The high room was a web of triangular glass panes linked into a geodesic bubble. Some of the lights were stained with Ekaterinist angels. The setting sun kindled them to divinity.
Then Sweetness saw the thing in the middle of the mosaic floor.
“Oh,” she said. “Oooh. Ooh.”
The bath was long and iron and elegantly curved, with lion’s paw feet, a gold faucet, and full to within ten centimetres of the brim with gently aromatic steaming water.
“And shampoo.” The man lifted up a silver ewer, poured a semeny gobbet into the bathwater. “And afterward…” A hammered brass Llangonedd table was set with covered thalis. Chapattis were stacked in a soft dinner-cloth. A folded napkin and bowl of rose-water invited finger-feeding. The man lifted a bottle out of a cooler and studied the label. “This is good. I never knew I had such taste.”
“What the, how the?”
“Pick one, choose one, engineer one. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” the man said, with a wizardly twirl of the mustachios. He surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. “It was never this good when I had it. Wonder what happened to that other Alimantando?”
“That your name?” Sweetness asked.
“It’s been one.”
“The writing’s still on the wall,” she said.
“So it is,” the traveller said. He walked to within squinting-distance of the equals sign, then began to follow the equations outward. Sweetness thought that the writing looked fresher, bluer, cleaner. But the water was deep and hot, and she could smell her hair again…
“Er.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” the man said, led out of the high room by numbers. As she wriggled out of her sweat-stiff gear, Sweetness glanced over her shoulder for spectators: reflex born of a life lived in close proximity to others. Beyond the stained glass there was no town, no walls, no ruination. A red rock stood on a bluff, and a steel rail ran by it. That was all. Trying not to screw her head round with the paradoxes of time-travel, Sweetness slid into the hot water, grimacing as it grazed her sun-sting. It was good and enfolding and long and she sang old burlesque songs as she scrubbed the shampoo into her curls. No drier, but she shook her hair out like a dog, then studied herself in the floor-standing mirror to check if she was still as cute as she remembered. She poked gingerly at the scabby burn on her cheek, turned profiles to see if her little breasts had lost anything she could not afford to desert privations. Still fabulous, she concluded, wrapped herself in a silk robe worked with more mathematical symbols. The night was high, the moonring a twinkling arch over the glass dome. Sweetness sat herself in a wicker chair by the glass and watched the hasty moon twins race each other up the sky.
Here’s a man can make anything by re-engineering history, she thought, so what else can he do for me?
The man himself looked through the stair door. He was dressed in velveteen knee-britches and frogged jacket. His mustachios were perkily waxed to lethal weapons.
“You’re, ah?”
“Done? Yah.”
“Good. Then let’s consume.”
He bowed in the Deuteronomian manner to guide Sweetness to her place, pulled out her chair, unfolded her napkin with a flourish.
“Thank you,” she said, charmed. Only proper man I’ve met in…oh my gods! Years!
“You’re exceedingly welcome,” the traveller said. “I have few enough chances to entertain, these days.”
Whatever they are, Sweetness thought. She said, “I got one question. What happened to the town?”
“It never happened, not in this time-line. I seem to have been something of a bon-viveur, though.” The man indicated his attire, the table furnishings. He offered a platter of wind-dried meats. Sweetness heaped her plate. “It’ll give you the shits, too much of that on an empty stomach.”
“I been eating stories,” Sweetness said.
“Really? How extraordinary. Poor fare, I don’t doubt. Little sustenance in most stories. A lot of people think their lives are stories, but they delude themselves. No structure, no narrative tack, no sense of dramaturgy. Just chains of events.”
“Not me,” Sweetness said. “I met this guy once told me I was a story, well, for a time.”
“That’s the most story any of us are, for a time.”
“He was weird. I think he was green.”
The dapper traveller choked as if poisoned.
“I beg your pardon?”
“He had this tiny wee yurt thing by the side of the track, ’cept of course when you looked back it wasn’t there, but he said, ‘Sees all hears all knows all.’”
“‘Past present future,’” the traveller cut in. “‘Uncurtain the windows of time…’ Have you any idea, young woman, any idea at all how long I’ve been searching for this…trackside mountebank, this scryer of fortunes and futures?”
Sweetness saw a light in the traveller’s eyes, a prickling of his whiskers, an edge in the voice that warned her, Nice manners or not, you’re here with this man, and there’s no one else around and you don’t even know for sure what universe you’re in.
But the traveller was in flow and vent now. “This…soothsayer, this story-maker,” he sprayed, “This green man of whom you speak so lightly; he guided me to this place, teased and taunted and tantalised me across that desert, to this high red rock, where he abandoned me; he, if anyone, is the founder of the town that sometimes exists out there, sometimes not; he is the reason for every single one of those symbols on the wall, he is the reason I continue to travel across time, up and down and side to side; him. Read your beads? Say your seeds? Tell your bones? Of course! Of course he can tell the future, he is the future! Time is a part of him, as much as the air you breathe, the food you eat is part of you! This green man, you met him! Ah! I’ve been a billion years forward and a billion years back, I’ve seen the sun swollen like the burning belly of a pregnant martyr, this world of ours a ball of bubbling slag; I’ve seen the very first spring, a billion years ago in the youth of the world—there were things living then, girl, that you would not even reckon alive. I’ve travelled across the frozen years, I’ve seen them erect the diamond pillars of Grand Valley. And I’ve travelled from side to side: I’ve visited strange great civilisations, bizarre and inhuman; I’ve watched the fleets of Motherworld and this world set the heavens on fire with their weapons; I’ve seen this world in all its colours, red, green, blue, white, yellow; I’ve stood beneath titanic pyramids and mountains carved into alien faces. And all across these billions of years, landscapes of time, I see the footprints of this green man, mentor and tormentor, and always I am a moment too late, a day too early, a street or two wide: and you, traingirl, you tell me you meet him at some…some…trackside bawdy-burg! I tell you this, girl; yours must be a mighty story indeed for him to step out of time to say your sooths. I think I need to know much about you, Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th. Tell me what brought you from there to here. Omit nothing.”