Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella (11 page)

*   *   *

Even the Doctor isn’t quite mad enough to do what I’ve done. He’s a lunatic, yes indeed. He’s also a survivor. Better than most, he understands that one screws with the infinite at one’s own peril. I’m sure the meticulously recorded results of those Victorian experiments with peasantry cooled his jets.

I
, on the other hand, am a desperate sort.

Those nights the good Doctor and his toady spent drunk off their asses, I took the T&S Machine for joyrides. The calibrations weren’t difficult—I simply plugged in the various sequences from Doctor Kob’s logs. The wild part is, the machine goes forward and back and to any physical location in the universe, provided one has the coordinates. The places I’ve gone, weirder and more frightening than those Technicolor nightmares.

After Doctor Kob and Pelt murder me in that squalid alley, I give them a moment to wonder at my dying words. But it’s only a possible me, a shadow. Travelers exist in duplicate during collocation. It’s complicated; suffice to say, each of us unique snowflakes, aren’t. We exist as a plurality. That old saw about meeting yourself…it’s only kinda true. The universe didn’t unravel when I skipped ahead and met one of my future selves, an inveterate alcoholic and aimless wanderer, one bound to run afoul of Dr. Kob’s plots of revenge. If she’s anything like me (haha!), she won’t mind making the sacrifice to even the score.

Pelt knows something’s wrong, but even as he turns I tap him with the prod and he’s gone in a belch of gas and flame. The Doctor takes it in stride. He’s a hobbled shell of a man, yet arrogant as ever. He commands me to drop the weapon and submit to my well-deserved punishment. I slug him and he falls unconscious. That feels so good, I’ve revisited the moment a dozen times.

This is how it ends for Daddy dearest: I strap him into the machine and send him to the land of my ancestors, and once he’s evaporated into the abyss of Time I take an axe to the machine. I’ve gotten my kicks. That conscience I’ve been incubating stings like hell. Who knows what havoc I might wreak on material existence were I to keep dicking around with the timestream.

I sent the Doctor with a mint copy of
Frankenstein
, a dozen bottles of wine, and the prod with a full charge. It’s the least I could do. The very least.

*   *   *

I track the Banning Circus to a show in Wenatchee. The owner, the great, great grandson of Ezra Banning, is skeptical when I apply for the strongman job. He’s got a strongman, he says, and I say I know. I also know his guy is getting long in the tooth and suffers from asthma, or emphysema, or whatever. Banning tells me to hit the bricks, he’s a busy man, blah, blah. I walk over to the lion cage and tear the door off its hinges—naturally, I try to make it look casual, but the effort does me in for the day. The owner picks up his jaw. He sends one of his flunkies to break the news to poor Cleo. He doesn’t even mind that it takes Armand the better part of two days and the assistance of local animal control to corral their lion and get him into his cage.

I knock on Lila’s trailer door. A monster storm cloud is massing in the north and that could be good or bad. It certainly sets the scene. My hair is standing on end. Lila screams and throws her arms around me. She’s crying a little and there’s snot in her beard.

“Hey, this is for you,” I say and give her a small wooden coffer I bought off a guy at a garage sale where I also scored some dumbbells to get in shape for my strongman—
strongperson
—audition.

“What is it?” She lifts the lid and gasps. An eerie golden light plays over her face.

“Stardust.”

“Stardust?”

“I hope it’s not radioactive. Maybe we should get a Geiger counter.”

“You’re yanking my chain.”

I smile. “Never happen.”

“Well…my God. Look at this. Where…?”

I take the folded, spindled, and mutilated piece of paper with the Dreyer entry for galaxy N1168 from my pocket and give it to her. Lightning parts the red sky like a cleaver. It reflects twin novas in her eyes. I grasp her free hand and press it against my heart.

Three, two, one. Boom.