Izzy and the Father of Terror

Two

Izzy did not make it back that night. He was being detained, I learned, in an Egyptian hoosegow. Sarvaduhka ran the message over to me. He had to pay one of his Cairo prostitutes one hell of a baksheesh, he said, to guide him, on the back of a camel, through Nazlet El-Semman over to the western funerary complex, and on to the enclosure, my enclosure. Mastaba by mastaba they crept. It gave Sarvaduhka the willies.

Sarvaduhka’s guide was a Coptic Christian, Lila Kodzi, who discoursed on the mysteries of Monophysitism at the most inappropriate moments. Sarvaduhka complained about it. He seemed to think I was God. He told me everything. At the moment of orgasm (Sarvaduhka’s orgasm?she didn’t have them) she would curse the Council of Chalcedon, some fifteen hundred years past, and she would vociferously affirm, in excellent English, the one divine nature of Christ, as Sarvaduhka twitched and spasmed, emitting expletives in three Sanskrit-derived languages.

Sarvaduhka and his shakti huddled at my hindquarters as lights flashed brilliantly on the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and on my own disintegrating limestone hulk. It was just at the end of the late Friday night sound and light show, the German language one. The show must have been impressive for souls with human bodies and eyes, but all the information was false. As I said, it was I who made Chephren, and not the other way round.

26. What We Can Learn from Linguini

There’s nothing like a few thousand years in the sand to give you a certain sense of perspective. Something deep inside me had loosened up in the millennia since my New Mexico adventure, which, I now understood, preceded the Fourth Dynasty just as much as it followed it. Don’t let the dates fool you.

The people who wrote down the Bible understood this kind of thing. Look and see: Genesis, XIX:3, for example. Lot bakes matzohs?Passover bread?in his house in Sodom. But this was before Moses, before the exodus from Egypt, before Passover started, with the unleavened bread the Children of Israel baked in the sun while the current Pharaoh was saddling horses. Israel (i.e., Jacob) hadn’t even been born yet. So what was Lot doing baking matzohs back in Sodom?

If Izzy has taught me anything at all, it’s that clock time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes five p.m. comes a week or two before six, and sometimes they’re simultaneous. The so-called excluded middle is positively a jungle, teeming with unenumerated possibilities. And causality, so far from being the one-dimensional line that Kant and even Hume talked about, is as wild as linguini on a rolling boil.

Where I now live, for example, on Sanduleak, the surface temperature is three or four hundred times what it is on Earth or Mars. Since Sandy went supernova and contracted to a neutron star, it’s a thousand degrees Kelvin?in the shade! That makes things go pretty fast. By Earth scale, a decent life span for a citizen on Sandy is maybe a quadrillionth of a second. It feels like a long time here. You’d think a bridge like that could never be gapped, that Earthers and Sanduleans could never communicate, and you’d be right except that, in this man’s universe, there is no absolute standard. We have a sliding scale. And I mean sliding!

The Earther Protagoras had it right:

Man is the measure of all things.

Well, not Man, but Mind really, not to be anthropocentric. All those scales and numbers and laws of science are just hypostatizations of something that actually belongs to the realm of Mind. Mind made them. Mind measures them. Mind compares, adjusts, interprets, changes. That’s what the epoche is all about, for example. That’s why Shaman was such an imminent threat even from a couple hundred million miles away, even if it had been light-years away?c is not the top speed in this man’s universe, not when you can do an epoche. Nature is a lot less rigid than that, believe me.

Look at linguini.

"Mel, is that you, Mel? Abu al-Hawl?" Sarvaduhka was whispering into my hindquarters, the pyramid of Chephren at his back, and in between, Lila Kodzi and two camels tethered to a rock. "I can’t believe I drove you in my VW Squareback on Route 40. Is this you? Izzy says you are the Father of Terrors from before the pharaohs and that you have shepherded the dynonucleic acid ancestors out of the primal soup down to modern Homo sapiens such as I myself, Sarvaduhka, that you are the progenitor of all life on Earth. Izzovision. Is this the truth? You did not appear this way to me in New Mexico or Texas. I hope I did not offend you, Great One, by anything I may have said or done at that time, Om Shantih."

Lila said, "Sir, you’re talking to a big stone."

Sarvaduhka ignored her. "Izzy couldn’t make it, oh Terrible One. He is being held by the authorities here. They think maybe he is a terrorist, but Izzy says not to worry. He asked me to give you this message, Ineffable Ancient Great One.

"Number One, he apologizes that his gambit did not work exactly as planned…"

"Number One, Number Two!" Lila Kodzi slapped Sarvaduhka on the shoulder. "He’s been rehearsing this all the way from Cairo. Number One, Number Two! Bah! There is only Number One! Is this not so, Ancient Greatness? All is the divine holy Christ Nature, and the divine holy Christ Nature is one." Now she whispered into the clefts of my badly mortared posterior.

The sound and light show had reached the reign of Cheops. People here seemed to consider that fairly ancient. They should have seen the first lungfish. They should have seen the nucleotides I netted from the asteroid belt, how I landed them and nursed them, turned them inside-out, left-to-right, and said to Myself, "Let us make Man." That, they could more justly have called "ancient."

"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka said. Lila grumbled. Sarvaduhka went on. "Number One, Izzy wanted the Sanduleans to save you from Shaman, but not to take you so far away from Earth. So, that didn’t work out so well, and he is sorry, Greatness."

"He’s right here," Lila said. "What?far away? Obviously, you are a dualist."

"I am not a dualist. I am your employer. You don’t know what you are talking about, Lila. The Mel Bellow person is in outer space somewhere."

"I thought you said he was the Sphinx now."

"Yes and no."

"Dualism."

"Quiet, whore!" Sarvaduhka honeyed his voice. "Number Two, Izzy requests that you employ your vast powers to bring Johnny Abilene to El Giza. This appears to be the only way that you can be saved from eternal slavehood to Shaman, who is also Tuthmosis IV."

"Dualism."

"Lord Abu al-Hawl, Great Beneficent One, please make the whore shut up."

I bolted upright, like a stricken dreamer. "Who am I?" Gypsy sat across the table from me, a half-peeled banana, the dendritic bulb sprouting from his crumpled human thorax like fungus from the crotch of a dead oak. He wasn’t moving. Nora sat beside him, still and silent. Her mouth was slightly open; she stared dumbly past me. Nora was naked?still human?and her long hair was splayed all over her face, shoulders, breasts. I touched her arm. It was cold.

From the kitchen: the whooshing and humming of the dishwashing machine, and sometimes a knock, as from badly vented plumbing; then the whole cafe shook. Each sound was accompanied by a change of scenery out the window. The streaks of starlight shifted angles, they grew dense or sparse, or danced in circles, or split into planes like layers of grenadine and liquor. We passed through glittering banks of sperm-like particles, auras of colored light, moments of darkness so profound they seemed to darkle the cafe pitch black, nullifying our fluorescents.

Tools clanked. Shaman grunted.

"Nora?" I said.

The noise in the kitchen abruptly stopped. Shaman appeared at the door. His white pants were stained with grease. He held a box-end wrench in one hand. He looked tired. "I’m you, you little shit."

I slumped back into the chair.

He took a few steps in my direction, then barked, "You’re not here." I was gone. It was night on the Sahara. On the fringe of my mind, fast fading, was the image of Shaman coming closer, jabbing at Izzy’s bung with something like an ice pick, doing it without much spirit, as if he’d tried it a dozen times before to no effect and didn’t really expect it to work now. He slapped Gypsy and Nora to see if they would respond?they didn’t. Then he returned to the kitchen, to the dishwasher, in the same disgruntled, hopeless frame of mind.

"I’ll have to do my own epoche," he muttered, "if this doesn’t work. God help us all then."

Then nothing. Then sand, sound and light, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi shouting up my stone ass.

" ‘Who am I?’ Did you hear that, Lila Kodzi? The Sphinx spoke." Sarvaduhka shivered.

"It was one of the camels. Hamad snorted. He snorts, that’s all."

Sarvaduhka persisted. "Oh Great One, I will convey your question to Izzy: ‘Who am I?’ I myself am but a poor, small person in the hospitality trade. I have two, three motels jointly with my cousins, although they hardly do anything but watch TV and drink alcoholic items. I will ask Izzy, who knows many things like that. But can you get Johnny Abilene, Wondrous One? Izzy wants to know, will you do it A.S.A. of P.? He would do this himself, but he is indisposed."

"Maybe Abu can give us a sign." Lila nudged Sarvaduhka.

"Exactly, but please be quiet, Lila. I am doing this… Great One, can you give us a sign?"

My selfhood was significantly in disarray. I was being addressed by creatures whose formation I had initiated some seven hundred million years before in an attempt to disembark from the Milky Way, where I found myself stranded. On the other hand, I was being held in a Texas highway rest stop cafe a good ways out in space toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Besides which, I was some sort of tourist attraction.

Shaman wanted to eat me. I wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t find my center. To me was lost that Archimedean fulcrum from which the soul can act.

"A sign, oh Great One! Please, a sign!"

It was like trying to sit up when your back is out?Where are those muscles? My desperation drove me deeper and deeper away from my senses, deeper and deeper away from thoughts and feelings too. Sinking in, even the desperation dwindled above me like bubbles rising away from a skin diver.

Through murk and roil, I squinted as an artist squints, bracketing the details to understand the whole. Fish and weed of mind tumbled by, denuded of names and relations, continually devouring one another, blurring boundaries. This wasn’t the swill of Shaman’s hole, for now I was the diver and the pearls I found would be mine.

But then the word "I" grew goosefeet. It emptied. "I" was just a mark, a convenience of thought, vacuous outside the quote marks.

The voices of Shaman?I’m you!?of Sarvaduhka, Lila Kodzi, the sound and light show?upbeat, mendacious?all merged in a current without source or destination. The moan of the wind, an atom bomb, nostalgia, the planet Mars, the number three, oneself, the South of France, all lines all gone!

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.

Place went. Sequence went. Time was ungetatable. No thought to think and not a thing to think it. "I" kept diving. "I" allowed "myself" to be swallowed further until, dissolving, "I" melted into a dark, pliable mass one could only call the bottom. Sea creatures here, murky, inchoate, that altered as one’s gaze changed, inseparable from one’s gaze.

A stirring here, continually! Not the blank void of the mystics! Call it an urge, call it Der Wille Zur Macht, call it Tao or Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, impelling the contractile world back out of its own navel:

says Lao Tze of this foetal state.

"I" had unwittingly performed an epoche, and this was its crux. "I" had found the fulcrum. "I" was utterly free. "I" could do anything.

I broke wind.

All at once, the goosefeet fell away. Iwas there, little me and big me, as before: Mel and Abu al-Hawl, the one space-bound in a helpless stupor, the other grounded in a strange galaxy, both on account of Shaman. Yes, Shaman existed and Gypsy and Nora in the Magellanic Stream, Izzy in his lockup, Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi holding their noses, the camels huffing and turning away, the tourists… oblivious.

I had glimpsed my fulcrum. Used it even. I had witnessed the birth of a world ex nihilo, with me in the middle. Epoche. Incomprehensible! I would bide my time and wait to see what it meant.

Some things were a bit different. I was aware somehow, as information, as something casually read or heard, that Gamal Abdel Nasser was dead. (He had been alive before the epoche.) Also, the Vietnam War was still going on, with American soldiers heavily invested.

And Eugene McCarthy wasn’t president. My epoche had shifted a sweaty upper lip into the Oval Office. There it had been, for a hundredth of a second, hovering above a swivel chair, just the lip, a little damp skin above it, and the barest hint of nostril. Then, due to a principle the Magellanics call "Causal Recovery," in order to preserve the causal chain locally, a human being congealed around it, complete with his past, present and future, grade school teachers, mortician, the lot: a guy name of Richard Nixon. Some other things changed as well. The American flag was now red white and blue (and now, it always had been!).

Nobody but me would know the difference, for my new universe came complete with history?retroactively?and memories in synch. Nobody, I suspected, but Izzy.

There was one other change I was immediately aware of. A guy in cowboy boots with spurs, wearing a ten-gallon hat and carrying a guitar case under his arm, was striding into the Sphinx enclosure where Sarvaduhka and Lila Kodzi grimaced: "Feh! Feh! Feh!"

"Mel?" he was saying. "Is that you, son? Is it really, truly you?"

"Gone Joe! Dad!" I said?somehow.

Somehow, he heard me. Effluvium despite, he galloped to my rock butt and embraced the cooling, rough stone, pressing into me with all his might, kissing me and weeping for joy.

"Are you the authentic Johnny Abilene?" Lila Kodzi said. "I have all your records. I love your music."

Sarvaduhka was trembling, hysterically trying to piece together how Johnny Abilene had appeared on the scene. Sarvaduhka’s Causal Recovery, apparently, had been incomplete. He pulled Lila violently away. "Take me back to Cairo. This is all Izzy said to do. The sound and light show is almost over, and I don’t want to be caught back here when they start cleaning up… It still stinks?what was that?"

She pushed him back. "And what about Number Three?"

Sarvaduhka slapped his head. "I forgot! The photograph. The passport photograph. Give me the Kodak."

"It’s a Polaroid."

"Give me the Kodak."

It was a Polaroid. The epoche. Sarvaduhka blinked. He took the camera. "Wait." He sneaked around to the front of me, in among the tourists, and snapped a photo of my face and shoulders, pleated headdress and all. Then, shaking wildly, he managed to return to Lila and the horses?they were horses now, and not camels. Epoche.

He tore Lila away from Johnny Abilene, who was oblivious to her advances as he hugged me and whispered and whispered. Sarvaduhka and Lila were still arguing as they mounted their horses and trotted away between the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren.

Johnny Abilene whispered: "Oh son, we finally made it! Guldang if you ain’t one with Abu al-Hawl! I knew we could do it! I knew it! You forgive me for leaving you and your poor little mama, don’t you, Mel? You must know by now that I’m no Earther. That makes you a half of what I am, son, you and Abu, half-Magellanic. I’m gonna take you back to the Clouds, where you belong. You’ll come now, won’t you?

"I’m sorry we can’t take your mama there, boy, but she’s an Earther; believe me, Mel, Nora just wouldn’t understand."

In the Magellanic Stream and in the Sahara, my mind brittled like frozen tofu. "Did you say ‘Nora’?"

I had thought she looked familiar.

Johnny Abilene was astounded to discover that Nora was also a Sandulean agent. More accurately, she was an Earther recruited by Sanduleans for the purpose of returning Abu al-Hawl to the Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Emperor, the same entity who, with his United Diet of the Small and Large Clouds, maneuvered the Magellanics into orbit around the Milky Way, the same who caused Sanduleak to go supernova in order to convey Johnny Abilene to Earth, this same Emperor also found Nora, via epoche, and installed her as a backup and secret watchdog over Abilene.

"In this business, you can’t trust nobody," the Emperor told me much later. Only Izzy was in a position to know all the details at that time, but now, on Sandy, it’s immortalized in the song, "Marriage is Just Two Alien Agents Hiding from Each Other, Anyway," Number 423 on the list, last I heard, about a billionth of a second ago.

By inseminating the Earther, effecting the commingling of the Magellanic and Milky Way branches of Abu’s great family, the Emperor and my father (and, unknown to him, Nora) had planned to produce the Sphinx’s Messiah. "Yeah, every time we tried to get through to Abu, it was ‘ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN,’ the Emperor told me once, over neutron latte. "It’s enough to make a guy agnostic. So we figured we’d try a little psychology."

But then they didn’t know how to use me to get through to Abu. Undercover as "Johnny Abilene," world-traveling musical goodwill ambassador, my father left Nora and me to look for a clue. Everywhere Johnny gigged, he buttonholed Egyptologists, astrophysicists, and Edgar Cayce fans.

Neither the Emperor, Nora, nor Johnny actually understood how to get to Abu via Mel until Shaman inadvertently showed them the way. Then it was a race to avert disaster; the Earther Shaman, after his own selfish ends, threatened to thwart the entire proceeding. The Magellanic Emperor sent Gypsy in the cafe ship, to help out Nora. The Emperor had, of course, first prepared the way by lining the North American throughway system with rest stop cafes that resembled the Magellanic craft, so Gypsy’s cafe could land undetected.

And if you think that any of this is less reliable information than the Battle of Hastings or the invention of the cotton gin?which may change any moment due to epoche or political revisionism?then, Earther, you don’t understand history.

Johnny Abilene was astounded. Just imagine how I felt. And now she was pregnant again?my mother, with my child. Whatever in hell "my" had come to mean!

In the confusion following Nasser’s death, Izzy was sprung, and all tours of the Giza funerary complex were put on hold. Lila Kodzi led Izzy on horseback, with Sarvaduhka, Johnny Abilene and one of the Haymakers, just arrived from the other Memphis via Lufthansa. Nobody stopped them. I saw them from above and from below. I felt hooves echo against the roofs of underground chambers; I saw them, tiny, remote, from millions of miles above the sky. And from inside their skins, I felt them also, not chaotically as when Shaman had pierced me, but clearly, from a standpoint: Abu al-Hawl’s.

Izzy waved a little navy-blue book. "I got it! I got it, Melly baby. I got you a passport. We’re gonna haul ass out of the Sahara." They cantered into the enclosure. "His Polaroid did it; the sun spoiled my Fuji’s. Sarvaduhka’s a hero. And you, you’re great too, boy. You got Johnny Abilene here, and he’s our main man." Izzy dismounted and held the passport photo up for the Sphinx to see.

Lila jumped down beside him and twined herself around his arm. "You lovely one-brow, you are a crazy man everywhere, just like in bed. How will you get the Great Sphinx through customs?"

My father clapped a husky arm around Sarvaduhka. Sarvaduhka was cadaverous and grim on the outside. Inside, he was set to explode. "He gets everything,"?I could hear him thinking? "female action included, and my squareback thrown in, free mileage, everything. And what do I get? Saddle sore."

"It so happens," Izzy crowed, "that if we can take him through during the hour just after sunset, the customs official lets it right by. He just thinks maybe something’s kind of funny, but he can’t put his finger on it, see what I mean?"

"Why do you have to move him at all," said Sarvaduhka, and he thought, "… you stupid, back-stabbing fornicator?"

"I’ll ignore the last part, Marmaduke, but the fact is, I gotta take him into the shop. I can’t finish fixing him against Shaman out here in the Sahara. My skin’s too pale, okay?"

"I will not bother to ask how you expect to move a sixty-five-foot-high limestone statue across the desert, through customs, and up the gangplank onto an airplane, and convince everyone that he is simply a mid-level executive at Coca-Cola. Two hundred forty feet long, Izzy!"

"Good work," said Izzy, "you’ve been listening to the Son et Lumiere. I get his peanuts and that on the airplane, don’t forget. I called it at the Cairo Khan Suites."

They were gathering under my chin, where my plaited stone beard used to hang, the Pharaonic sign that shaded Tuthmosis when he dug me out of the sand. My father, Johnny Abilene, passed around his canteen; it was a scrotal second-hander from Death Valley. "I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, Your Majesty," he said to Izzy.

"Don’t call me that," Izzy hissed, "not in front of him."

"Okay, Johnny A.," said Izzy. "I think you know what to do."

The Haymaker produced a ukulele and started strumming backup, while Johnny tightened his bowels as if he were about to defecate. Johnny pursed his lips and squinted. The sky blinked black and then shone so brilliantly that they all had to squint and shade their eyes. There was a faint rumble from deep below.

Johnny was peripherizing. "I’m gonna impossibilize that gigantus right down to a midgy," he grunted. "He can walk among us like a regular man, as long as we don’t look too hard, and I’m gonna fix it so’s we can’t, and so nobody can, till he gets to Izzy’s shop."

Sarvaduhka was unimpressed. "What about the plane? It won’t hold him."

"Anything that touches old Abu, once I’ve peripherized him, is gonna fall down into the same squint and follow along."

"Do it, cowboy," Izzy said, sweating under his pith helmet as the sun crossed over the zenith.

Johnny gave one last push, "Ee-hah!" Nothing had changed, but suddenly, everyone was looking at me differently, that is, without craning their necks! It was no longer possible to focus directly on the Sphinx; I was quarantined to the corner of everyone’s eye, where a lot can pass, believe me, that would terrify down center. I was as if man-sized. Johnny patted me on my stone shoulders, gave me a kiss, they all remounted, and we headed out.

came across the desert like a swarm of locusts. They were swinging "spirit catchers" over their heads, dowel-and-rubber-band doohickeys furiously buzzing.

We had left the Sphinx enclosure. Dad had given me sunglasses and a white polyester suit to wear. Izzy stuck a briefcase in my paw and hoped that the headdress would pass for a touristy gewgaw. For reasons unknown, the headdress, unlike my gigantic size, earthen complexion, missing appendages, and leonine corpus, could not be easily camouflaged. I walked in the middle, flanked by Johnny and the Haymaker, a baritone in a bolo tie, with Izzy and Lila Kodzi in front and Sarvaduhka bringing up the rear.

Dad and the baritone Haymaker had been singing:

And there they swarmed, Shaman’s Space People, a dozen humans swathed in what looked like twisted bedsheets. They swept straight for us over the sand. Dad and the Haymaker fell silent. Izzy started beeping.

"No!" Izzy pulled out the beeper and examined it. "Three point five and rising. Damn! Shaman’s trying an epoche." The air shimmered with heat waves. The Space People advanced through a mirage of shining sand that looked like the Great Salt Lake. As we continued to advance, it cleared, and behind them, suddenly, nearer than the chotchke market of Nazlet El-Semman, there appeared a large concession complex that had not been there a moment before, although everyone in the world except Izzy, Johnny and I?and Shaman?remembered its being there.

The Texas state flag hung limply from a huge pole beside it. In addition to the entrance at the base, there was another entry on the upper story, a pair of glass doors opening into empty space. It looked exactly like a highway rest stop cafe, with the overhead passenger walkway amputated.

"Lila," Izzy asked her, "how’s the Vietnam War going?"

"The what?"

"The Vietnam War. This is important."

"Well, Iz, last I heard anyway, the VC were still holding onto Manhattan, Washington, and most of the American east coast, but the government in Memphis is making them fight like hell to advance inland. Why?"

"And who’s president? C’mon, Lila, honey, I gotta know the score before Shaman leaves the dishwasher."

"What president?" Sarvaduhka interjected. "The last president was Kennedy, in nineteen hundred and sixty-three. Since then, it’s been a monarchy. Are you completely crazy, besides being a back-stabbing fornicator?"

"Well, boys," Izzy said, "better switch to Plan B. Looks like we’re not gonna make it to customs before midnight?Do we still have midnights…? Hey! Where’s the baritone?" The Haymaker’s horse was snorting nervously. Its saddle was empty. At its hooves was a dead asp with a bolo tie around its eyes.

"Dang!" Johnny said. "There goes the best Earther baritone you ever saw."

"Phooey!" Sarvaduhka spat and tramped forward, biliously abreast of Izzy. "It was stupid to bring a horse to carry that asp in the first place."

The Space People huddled about two hundred yards away. Someone had appeared against the double doors of the cafe. "That’s Gypsy or I’m a mute coyoot," Johnny said. "I ain’t seen that boy since we chain-ganged together on the Magellanic Stream." Gypsy was banging on the glass. Banging, banging. Then sliding down slowly, leaving a trail of ichor. And revealing behind him, as he fell, a tall figure dressed in white. There was a catch in Johnny’s voice: "And that’s gotta be Shaman."

Where’s Nora? I thought?I Mel?eyes closed, swooning at the cafe table. Is she okay?

"Sure she’s okay," Izzy said, down on the desert. "She’s batting a thousand, kid, only we may not be doing so good. I don’t like the way Shaman’s smiling."

Johnny Abilene was unzipping his human skin. My father! The big hat fell down around his dendrites. The spurs and boots slid down his horse’s flanks and slithered, still stuffed with feet, to the sand below. The horse, spooked, took off toward the Pyramid of Cheops, leaving Johnny hovering there for a moment before he fell to the ground, at noticeably less than 32 feet per second squared.

Lila Kodzi petitely threw up.

Sarvaduhka dismounted, ran to Izzy and fell on his knees. "Izzy, we are okay, yes? The Space People will not hurt us, yes? You have Plan B? Izzy, what is Plan B?"

Izzy slapped the Haymaker’s mount on the rump and watched it gallop toward the Space People, followed by Sarvaduhka’s horse. "Let me think a minute," he said.

"Nora?" It came out of my throat like a death rattle. "Mom?" I lifted my head from the table. My cheek was wet?I had been drooling. She was cold. She didn’t move. I saw Shaman standing at the glass doors, Gypsy slumped at his feet. An acrid vapor rose from Gypsy’s flesh. The color was steaming out of it, yellow to grey to black. "Nora?"

"I’m you," Shaman said. He was looking out into the desert, not at me. He drilled without spirit, like a drunken tarrier, never noticing how dull his bit was since my epoche. "I’m you"?a tired song, water on water; I’d seen my fulcrum, I’d glimpsed who I was, though I too was tired.

Shaman angled and bobbed his head, peering past his Space People at Izzy’s band. "Peripherized," he muttered. "The sly dog!"

He turned toward me and lifted his chin; I knew he wanted me to come to him, to stand at his side. My body felt leaden. My pulse echoed in my skin. I had to leave Nora and go to him. He put his arm around my shoulders.

Down below, the Space People leaned toward us like heliotropes to the sun. Sarvaduhka was hugging Izzy’s saddle bags. Lila covered her eyes and drew her head down between her shoulders as if she could withdraw like a turtle into its shell. The force of Shaman’s thought flung Johnny Abilene into the sand; posing there before the glass, Shaman spoke to everyone?inside their own heads.

"This is my property. He’s me. Here is my fountain, my ancient spring. He’s me. His deep waters sired and nurtured me until I ripped out my umbilicus and dammed Abu for my own pleasure. He’s me. Abu will remain on Earth forever. Abu?He’s me?is my eternal life."

"But Shaman," I said, "I’m not you."

Izzy was ransacking his saddle bags, as if Plan B were in there. Lila had climbed down off her horse and was sitting on the ground, her head lolling against Sarvaduhka, who still knelt beside Izzy, begging him to think of something to save them. Johnny, his slimy Magellanic body glimmering on the sand, struggled to lift himself.

"I got a feeling," Izzy said as baggies of moldering Danish, maps, sun tan lotion, airline tickets, ephemerides and sen-sens flew from his saddle bags. "I got this feeling, Ducky!"

I, Abu, had lived through many things. I had seen civilizations come and go. The Space People could scythe Izzy and the others into the dunes, and I need barely notice. But I, Mel, was so new to this world?twenty years of it?that every flutter was still a revelation. Oh, Izzy, come through!

"Ah!" Izzy thrust high a travel brochure he’d picked up at the American Embassy in Cairo. Then he riffled through it till he found the paragraph he’d been looking for, the one that hadn’t been there before Shaman’s epoche, the one he’d sensed via Izzovision. "Look at this, Sarvaduhka."

Sarvaduhka read as Izzy held the page open before him. "So what?"

"The motel business has really dulled your brains, Duke." Izzy ran toward the Space People waving the brochure over his head. "Hey! Look at this. Hey! Did Shameface show you this?"

The Space People were leaning to see Shaman through the glass doors above. Izzy had to swing them around, one by one, bodily, to make them look at his paragraph. When they did, some gasped and seemed immediately stricken, others became angry and denied it, pushing him away, while still others started to argue with Izzy and with one another.

Above, Nora stirred. I ran to her. "Mother!"

"I’m you!" Shaman protested. I ignored him.

"I am but a remote descendent of your creature Chephren," Nora told me. Her face was coloring again, the eyes filling with light.

"No." I kissed her forehead. "You are the Queen of the Pontius, the land of incense ladders, my beloved consort. I never made Chephren. I have nothing to do with Chephren."

Shaman boiled. "Chephren came to me in a dream. He told me to dig you out, you ridiculous ingrate. Are you disowning Chephren?"

"It was your own epoche that changed things, Shaman," I said.

Down below, Izzy was trumpeting it for everyone’s ears: "See, it says so right here, folks:

‘Visitors to the Valley of Kings may be interested to note that, contrary to previously held theories, there is no relation between the Sphinx and Chephren. Frank Domingo, a senior forensic officer of the New York City Police Department, has concluded, after rigorous examination and analysis, that there is no actual similarity between the face of the Giza Sphinx and the face on the statue of Chephren previously supposed to be its model.’

(Or vice versa.) There it is, boys and girls. Your Fearless Leader lied to you."

"I warned you, Shaman," Nora was saying. "You can’t control the epoche. You’re nothing now. The Sphinx never sired our race. We came up out of the mud all on our own. The Sphinx is just hitching through. You’re just another human, like me."

The Space People were pelting the glass doors with rocks. With his mind, Shaman commanded them to stop?to no effect.

The ice pick with which Shaman attacked me was no less lethal for being non-physical. He hacked at Izzy’s bung. Thoughts hissed from me like leaking steam, but the patch held. "You!" he screamed at me. "You laid your own mother. You want to kill yourself, don’t you?"

"You forget I’m only half human," I said. "We Magellanics mummafug all the time, didn’t you say so?"

The glass cracked and collapsed, littering jagged fragments behind Shaman. Space People chinned up and climbed through. Izzy was there, on what would have been Johnny Abilene’s shoulders, were he wearing his Earther skin. The Space People grabbed Shaman’s arms; Johnny grabbed his mind.

I stood by Nora, watching it all.

I stood below, on the desert, behind Lila Kodzi and Sarvaduhka, bursting out of the sunglasses and synthetic suit as the peripheralysis wore off and I was once more a gigantic monolith from the stars.

Johnny Abilene knelt beside Gypsy, his brother Sandulean. "Bodies aren’t important," Gypsy gasped. Then he saw Izzy. "Your Majesty!"

The Space People were tying Shaman to the condiment stand. Izzy stroked Gypsy’s wan anterior bulge. "You been bad-mouthing me, Gypsy. I can tell. Izzovision."

"Why didn’t you trust me, Your Majesty? You sent me here to do a job. Then you came yourself and never let me know."

"I didn’t think things would go so fast, Gyp. I had to epoche on down in a hurry when the Space People killed Shaman."

"Killed Shaman? Shaman’s not dead."

"We got past and future mixed around here, old Giblet. Anyways, I’ll confer with you before the whole thing ever happened?retroactively?once I get a minute."

"I hate your guts, Izzy," Gypsy said, and he kissed him, the way Magellanics do, thwucking their nodes against each other, then expired in Izzy’s arms.

Johnny shook his dendrites. "Well, my Lord, there goes the best dang Sandulean operative you ever want to see."

Izzy heaved a sigh. "When we get back to the Mags, I’ll name a couple weeks after him."

"I thought you didn’t want me to leave Earth. I thought you worked at Gibson’s in Lockport," I said.

"Yeah, that’s just part-time," Izzy said. "I’m also the Emperor of the Magellanic Clouds."

"That still don’t let me out of having to be back at Gibson’s 8:30 a.m. Monday morning though," Izzy said, "unless I want to be docked for the time, which I don’t."

"Dualism!" cried Lila Kodzi. With Sarvaduhka, she had found a way up from the base of the rest stop cafe rocket ship desert concession. Sarvaduhka had become too frightened to remain in my shadow below. "Dualism! You are not both here and there, liar! If you are an Emperor, you are not a lathe setup man as you claimed to me in our conjugal bed at the Cairo Khan Suites Hotel. Izzy Molson, I abjure all past relationship with such as you."

"That suits me okay," said Izzy. "I’m working on a little something in Tonawanda, anyways, name of Fay."

"Creep!" She abruptly turned away, grabbed Sarvaduhka’s jaw and kissed him passionately and long. He squealed. He stopped squealing. He kissed her back.

I stared at Nora, and the world dissolved. Let the Space People devour Shaman. Let Izzy install Johnny Abilene on the throne of the SMC and himself take up the Imperial Scepter of the combined galaxies, while punching in and out at his Lockport factory. Let Sarvaduhka have his female action, and Lila her one divine nature of Christ. Gypsy was dead, but bodies aren’t important. Nasser was dead too.

"Nora…" I said.

"It’s impossible, Mel," she said.

"Why? We’ll go to Sanduleak together and live there forever, Abu al-Hawl and the Queen of Punt, Mel and Nora Bellow."

"You know it’s impossible, even by epoche. You have to go back to Sandy, to release Abu, to return, to become one again on the neutron star. You’re half-Magellanic. I’m just an Earther. And I’m pregnant."

"I love you, Nora."

"I’ll raise our child, my grandchild, your sibling."

"I won’t poke my eyes out, Nora."

"I’m not asking you to. Keep them open. Keep them wide open."

"I will… Hey!" The cafe was shaking and whipping like a flame in the wind. Izzy was beeping again. "Izzy, who’s doing an epoche?"

"I am, Melba," Izzy said. "There’s a number of things wrong here. I don’t like monarchies in North America, or Vietnamese troops either, not yet; also, this rest stop belongs in Texas, and Abu?which means you?better haul ass back to the Magellanics right now, if I’m gonna have time to patch you permanent and still make coffee and Danish before the morning shift. Keep a tight ass now, Melly, but don’t bother to buckle up. Ten… nine… eight…"

"Take this, son!" Johnny threw me his guitar.

The relic background radiation spiked to three point eight, then dipped to three again, and we were gone.