[This short story has been especially written for ConFuse 92 by Ian
McDonald and takes place in the vicinity of Desolation Road.]

They wake in the morning to dust. Red dust, drifted in long plumes
behind the upright windboards in the lee of which they lay down to
sleep the night before. Dust in the desert bags. Dust in the ear, dust
in the corner of the eye, in the corners of the mouth. Dust clinging
to the sweat of the night like a red crust. As he prepares breakfast,
she surveys the forward horizon with her scanshades. The sun is well
up, already the heathaze is flowing and running and filling the land
with illusions and uncertainties. She thinks she sees a darkness in
the liquid haze, dark discordant shapes, sharp and thrusting. About a
day's sail, she thinks. Surely they must be getting close, she thinks.

There is dust in the breakfast.

While he checks their position against the signs of the desert that
only he can read, she readies the boards, powering up levitators,
balancing cargo fore and aft, unfurling the sails, inspecting the
bright coloured fabric for tears and nicks. Her skin darkens under the
strengthening sun; child of a pale race, her epidermis has been
infected with a photosensitive melanin-secreting symbiosis. Child of a
dark race, he has no need of protective melanin. But it excites him to
watch her go dark on him.

The long wind swells the sails with a crack and a boom and carries
them onward. A dark mass of angularities and sharp thrustings slowly
emerges from the veils of heathaze. As the edge of the world touches
the sun when they come upon it; a great half-wheel of stone: thin
jagged slabs of rock built into an arch. Spires and spears of jagged
stone burst outward: as they arrive, sand-anchors throwing up long
tails of dust, the sun is contained whole within the hole in the
centre of the sunburst of stone. The artifact dwarfs them, both
windboards could sail abreast fully rigged beneath the arch. By the
dregs of daylight she records it with her scanshades. Only when it is
fully digitised and memorized and digested does she go to press her
hands, her left cheek, her right cheek, her left ear, her right ear,
her lips against it.

He finds the embers of a fire beneath the stone arch. Old, cold, but
with recent memory of burning.

"No more than two days old," he says.

"Close," she says.

She wants him this night. He comes, though he knows it is not him she
wants but the one who stopped here and built the stone arch under
which they make their love. He comes, because sex, to him is
remembering. The desert is hard with memory. Kilometre by kilometre,
day by day it takes everything that is not of it away and grinds it
into red dust; the life he owned before the desert, his memories, his
name.

His name...

He was once Jammer.

She was once Safarside.

As they lie together, he inside her, they remember Two Moons Flat.

Two Moons Flat was founded on the concept of intersection. Where the
Solstice Landing Grand Trunk Road crossed the Bethlehem Ares Railroads
Transpolar freight line at the only crossing in two thousand
kilometres either way, something almost like a town had struggled from
the desert. Struggled, and died. Struggled, and the third time struck
an anchorhold in the scalding soda-flats from which, in honour of its
achievment, it took his name. There is Amjandrees the crossing
attendant's junctionbox, his dome and his few square meters of
irrigated truck garden. There is the Teahouse of the Eighteenth
Lorarch across the track from Amjandrees. There are six windpumps, a
sun-farm, a microwave relay and a clutter of sand-blasted railroad
hulks out of which the hazers have constructed their squats. That is
Two Moons Flat.

The trains no longer stop there. The only vehicles that have come up
that road in twenty years have been the boardrunners, pennants and
banners of snapping in the wind from the Pole, boards stowed in
readyracks, girls in the back with their cut-offs and scanshades and
designer melanin and sexy little gloves doin' the hand-jive to All
Swing Radio. There are licence discs from all four quarterspheres of
Mars behind the Teahouse of the Eighteenth Lorarch.

It is those soda flats that has brought them from Meridian and O and
Grand Valley and all the world's dreary places. By day nothing can
live out on that white heat, so they sleep in their hollowed-out
hulks, or make sweaty, listless love half-listening to the radio, or
drink mint tea on the verandah of Rajneesh's establishment. But at
night, at night... The flats glow with a torches an smudge fires and
the boardrunners taste the wind on their tongues and go down to the
edge of the deadlands, boards carried on their heads, feeling the
wind, the night, the spirit of the flats, restless for the off. And it
comes, and out they go, sailing out across the flat, annihilated land,
racing and dodging and weaving to catch every last centimetre from the
night wind; far, far racing by the light of the moonring and the
strange illuminations that shine and shift beneath the surface of the
flats. The ones who are left watch, and wait, and watch. The edge of
the world touches the sun; the flats flare sudden blinding white, and
there, arrowing out the heathaze, they come, the boards.

He came for just one night to run the flats. He stayed three
years. There was something about the flats, something pure in their
utter abstraction and sterility, something perfect. A spirit. Every
night he would carry his board above his head down to the place where
the scrubby terraform vegetation of the town ended and the flats
began, and he would race. Winning no longer mattered to him, even the
concept of competition had been lost, he sailed because the spirit of
the flats had eaten his soul.

And he called himself Jammer.

The last truck of a hundred-car Bethlehem Ares ore train hauling from
Iron Mountain up over the pole had passed the front of Rajneesh's and
there was the car like no one had ever seen before. It had tail fins
and streamlines and chrome and six (count them) wheels. Those who saw
it that day will swear that flims and flams of heat-lightning clung to
its streamlines and strakes. It stopped outside the Teahouse of the
Eighteenth Lorarch where he sat on the verandah, and the woman got
out.

There is an alternative to love at first sight. It is no less
instantaneous, no less compelling, no less inescapable, but it is not
love. It is the meshing of spirits. When he saw her standing in the
light and the dust with the heathaze reflected in her wrapround
scanshades, he felt something go out from him: spirit.

She said she was looking for a guide:

--To that, (with horizonward nod of her head).

--No one goes out there, he said, though he knew in that instant that
he had been waiting all these wasted years for a reason to point the
nose of his board into the heathaze and sail out of all
remembering. 

--Can you sail?

--Can it be that hard? she asked.

--Can you make good love, he said. It is no harder than that.

They met in the last echo of a night freight's whistle. She whinnied
with nervous excitement as the night-wind tugged at the sail and set
the board bobbing and fretting. She was gauche, she was clumsy, she
was like a virgin, lacking the grace and ease and pleasure that comes
from custom, but with the virgin's enthusiasm and determination to
succeed. They sailed far down the empty highway, the promeg levitators
sending silent dervishes of dust whirling away into the darkness, far
from trashed lives and wind-scoured dreams, into the spare purity of
the desert. He saw her tightness, her rigidity, melt and flow and
reconfigure themselves, he saw the board change her and knew that they
need go no farther. The desert had her. He pushed the sail forward and
out and sent the board sweeping round in an arc and she came after him
and running low and hard, tacking back and forth, back and forth
across the Grand Trunk Road to catch the wind, they approached the
lights of Two Moons Flat.

They lounged on the bare boards of Rajneesh's verandah, uncapping
bottles of rice beer with their teeth. Beneath a sky lasing blue and
green with the launch lasers of a Praesidium Sailship. She unfolded
her scanshades from a zipped-shut pocket of her leather jacket,
carefully peeled the label from the refrigerator-dewed beer bottle and
pressed the white inside to the lens. The briefest pulse of light sent
shadows around the verandah; she unpeeled the label, passed it to
him. By skylight he saw printed on the back a colour photograph. A
woman. A car. A green hillside, strange to one with the white soda
flats in his eyes. On the green hillside, dwarfing woman and car; a
huge chair constructed from the trunks of entire trees stripped and
lashed together. A chair between the legs of which a Bethlehem Ares
Railroads Class 88 locomotive might pass with ease.

"His name, his origins are not known," she said. "All he allows us to
know of him are these works he leaves behind him as he passes on his
course over the face of the world. I was not the first to discover
them, though he is careful only to leave them in remote places far
from habitation -- perhaps he seeks to conceal the mysteries of his
method of construction, perhaps he wishes to demand a certain
sacrifice of his followers. Nor was I the first to follow the course
of his pilgrimage, but I am the only one to have followed it so far,
so purely, the only one who is dedicated to following it to its end,
to meeting the mind that writes its signature across entire
planets. And day by day, hour by hour, kilometre by kilometre, I am
closing on him. Somewhere, out there, in that desert, I will run the
clocks down to zero and find him."

"Him," she said. "All the way through, you have said him. How do you
know?"

And she knew then, because he asked that, that he would lead her, out
into the heathaze, and beyond.

Safarside. And Jammer.

This desert; they seem to have been sailing across it for all their
remembered lives. There must be an end, a place where the purity of
stone and grit gives way to life and growth, red to green. Or perhaps
time, like light, is distorted by heat into a haze of shifting
yesterdays and uncertain tomorrows.

He thinks about that the next day as they sail, that perhaps beyond
the desert of stone and the desert of sand and the desert of soda and
the desert of dust lies the Desert of Time where the moments are as
shifting and mutable as wind-blown sand and a man might, in his
pursuit of a legendary place, himself become the legend that draws him
onward.

A blink, a dazzle, the light shifts, and it is gone, shifts again, and
the silver heliograph beams out of the heat dazzle. She has seen it
too, that pinprick of blinding light along the edge of the world. They
warp their courses toward the light but they both know in the pith of
their bones it is not one of his. After an hour following the dazzle
they strike a railroad track running straight and undeviating and
endless across the red desert. Their boards seem to outrun the wind
itself as they follow the steel lines, as if this piece of human
geometry has somehow impressed an order of space and time upon the
great orderlessness. At the end of the line stands the tower. It is an
insect-like thing of girders and modules, a steel mantis with two
great praying limbs that are the mirror panels they saw from so far
away. The arms track the sun, catching it in their silver paddles,
juggling it from hand to hand to hand like a baked yam fresh from the
oven.

Like others who have lived too close too long to the heart of the
desert, the woman in the sun-tower has forgotten she had name,
forgotten all but a disjointed memories of angels flocking over the
pantiles of her childhood home on the plains of Great Oxus, of a
yearning to be swallowed by the sky, of nights whispering seductions
to a Bethlehem Ares automated tracklayer, stroking its pistons,
licking its tokamak housing until she persuaded it to take her out
across the desert in pursuit of angels, it laying its own track before
it until there, at the place where the angels sang loudest, she
ordered the machine to dismantle itself into this tower, this divine
heliograph. In her theology, angels are creations of the infinite
regress of the reflection between heaven and earth, caught between God
and humanity, mortality and immortality, finitude and eternity. She
shows, as parents will show pictures of their children to those who do
not care mush less understand, her videotapes of fleeting somethings;
feedback angels, quicksilver creatures of the light caught between her
spirit-mirrors.

They eat vegetables and synthetics from her hydroponics module while
the mirror arms click and grind and gyre on their search for
angels. The two women talk, of angels, and artists. The old woman
tells the young woman that yes, she has seen a traveller, just two
weeks before, well, she thinks it is two weeks, how sure can one be of
anything to do with time in this place? not close, not well, just a
shiver in the general shimmer of the heathaze, like them, riding a
windboard, she thinks.

The woman who once was Safarside will not sleep with him that
night. He wonders if it is because she now feels herself to almost
within reach of touching the hem of the Makers garment. He listens to
the arms swinging through the night, hunting for angels, the angel of
memory.

That first morning, when wind filled the sails with a strong, sudden
crack and Two Moons Flat and all its waste and sterility fell away
behind him, he had been filled with the most joy in his life. As they
had sailed he had taught her the ways of the desert; of navigation, of
the names and nature of sands, of the hundred forms the wind might
take according to season and quarter, the art of finding the ancient
ocean buried deep in the earth, and how the perfusion generator would
summon it up through rock and sand into the sip walls he dug and lined
with black plastic. "Taste," he had said, "you will never taste water
like that anywhere else. That is liquid history, that water. That is
all the history of the world." In that sip of water he had passed,
like some unseen landmark between the edgelands and the deep desert,
from fascination to love. And on the night when the first big dust
storm had come spilling across the land he had lain in his desert bag
with the opaque walls of hypersonic dust scratching the plastic
bubble, thinking about her, so close beside him yet invisible in the
storm, two souls sealed in their private hermetic universes and
realised that it was love now. No helping it. The next storm, he had
vowed, they would share together; two bodies in one bag, two souls
beneath one plastic bubble.

Of course, there never was another dust storm.

All the next day he had practised the words, the difficult ones that
man so want to say but find so hard. He could feel them coming, the
words, in a thrill, a rush and spurt; he was going to say them,
nothing would stop him, and she was scanning the horizon, peering into
the heathaze and as the words touched his tongue she said, "There,
look. Ahead of us. On the same line, just as I predicted." and the
words fled from him and never came back again.

They had come cutting in across the grit-scoured stone pavement toward
the irregular latticework of interwoven tree branches, stripped bare
of bark and polished to kiss-smoothness by the dust storm. She
marvelled that it had withstood the blast. She photographed and imaged
and digitised the sculpture from every aspect and marked its position
on her maps and how it fitted into the Grand Scheme that seemed part
if a huge ideogram, a proclamation of sentience, inscribed across the
face of Mars and he had wished that he might be able to excite her as
much, no more, than this construction of inarticulate wood and stone.

The night she found the curious construction of fused sand, like a
room of many porticos each looking out upon a different horizon; that
night when the stars caught in those windows seemed like the
constellations of other worlds or other times, she asked him to sleep
with her. Afterwards, he lay awake, as men are expected to, listening
to the wind from the edge of the world dissolve away the impacted sand
walls that surrounded them, grain by grain by grain. He had asked
himself those pointless questions that assume a vital significance at
that hour of the night and no other. Whys and wherefores, analyses of
motivations and motives. Rejoice, he concluded. Analysis is fruitless,
she came to you, and you were glad. That is the only valid
interpretation. He slept with a smile on his face for the first time
since the flop-sweat days in Two Moons Flat. That was the last time he
could remember being a discreet person, before he and she and the
desert and the sculptor melted and melded and merged in the heat of
the sun.

He is late for breakfast; the old woman busies herself with the
rituals of mint tea and she, night-pale under the artificial lights,
tells him of a dream she had of greeness. Will they find some new and
marvellous artifact on this day's sail? Surely she cannot be far
behind him now, why, even this day, they might...

Disquieted, he take his tea and goes to fill the board tanks from the
old woman's dew traps. He does not want to catch up with the Maker. He
does not want all to end. It has become everything for him, this
journey, this exalted flight across the desert, with her and the
boards and the wind. He cannot think of what might happen after it is
over. He wishes that the desert might go on forever, so that it will
not have to be over.

The old woman blesses them on their way with gifts of salt and
bread. As the boards draw speed from the wind, he turns to wave and
sees it. He calls to her: look There. Caught between the mirrors, a
dazzle that for one moment becomes something more than reflected
light, a spectrum of possibilities; wings, silver sails, the legendary
air-sharks of Grand Valley folk tales, torpedoes, two streamlined
rocketships all portholes and tailfins, comets, Catharine wheels;
angels.

Gone.

Within the hour, they see the pattern of green in the heathaze. It is
a maze of fused glass, inviting the traveller in with graceful
simplicity, within minutes complexifying into a mandala of interlacing
glass lines that strive toward the boundaries of mathematics, and
abruptly stops.

She peels off her salt-stained glove, touches the glass.

"How?"

"Partacs," he says. "Orbital weapons." He imagines the violet beams of
the orbital defences dancing across the sand to the command of a
different caller; honouring partners, allemand left, allemand right.

"I know," she says, peeling off her scanshades and squinting at the
sky. "I know what he's saying to me. He setting me a puzzle; a maze of
meanings and motivations and reasons and artistic statements that the
more I try to understand, the more it defies me. What he is saying
about this artifact, about the whole pilgrimage, is that there is no
message. It is what it is. No more and no less."

He touches the glass now with the palm of his hand.

"Still warm." He calculates what he knows of the cooling curves of
glasses.  Which is no great deal. "He cannot be more that a day ahead
of us. A few hours, even." He does not want to tell her what he has
suspected about her dream of greenness; that it is a premonition of
the end of the desert.

They sail on. He smells it long before he sees it, and when he sees
it, it is nothing to look at. Just a small, ugly, desert bush. But it
is the edge of the end. That one small, tough, ugly bush will become
five, and ten, and many, and there will be scrub and tussock grass and
then small terraform trees, and cacti ten, twenty, thirty meters tall,
and arrowbush and desert gum and lightning tree, and agave and the
tiny, delicate bells of the desert orchids. The desert will end. But
the sculpture pilgrimage will lead onward, into soft green hills,
where there is no need for a man stilled in the ways of the desert,
where there is no need to know the names of the sand and the winds
according to their season and quarter, where there is no need to smell
out the ancient oceans buried billenia deep beneath the rocks. No
need. No more.

He wants to, that night when they bank their boards up with scavenged
stones. He wants to because it is the last night and he must have
something to take with him. But she does not read the signs and he
does not ask her. He has understood from the first that it was not his
to ask. Long after she has rolled over in her bag into sleep he can
smell the green hills and the people and the voices and the faces and
the lives down beyond the edge of the world. Others. If he cannot to
share her with her even the Maker, how much harder will it be with all
those faces, all those voices, all those other lives?

The next day he watches her turn dark in the desert sun and they sail
out of the red desert. The heathaze evaporates and before them is a
land of scrub and shrub an terraform saguaro cactus. Cactus bats have
hollowed out the tops of the cactus towers. From each hole black eyes
watch the boards tacking between the tall cacti, over the carpet of
orchids and poppies. As the desert is lost behind them over the edge
of the world it is as if they are waking from a long and involved
dream and the pieces of their pasts the desert took from them are
returned.

They reach the edge of a scarp. The land falls away sheer before them
into the low hills and eroded impact craters of Deuteronomy, a green
land scatteret with ten thousand thousand trees. On the scarp edge,
they become themselves again. Safarside. And Jammer.

Jammer knows it will not be long now. He knows there will never be a
better time than this for Safarside, a better place than this place
overlooking Deuteronomy. He is a fool enough, or still in love enough,
to want to make it easy for her.

He says that he supposes she will not be needing a guide now they have
come to the edge of the desert. (Though it is needles in his eyes to
say it.)

She says yes, she supposes so.

He wonders what she will do now.

She reckons she will sail the board to a town, sell it, pick up a car,
follow the trail to the ending.

And what if there is no ending? What if the whole message of the
pilgrimage is that true pilgrimages never end, what if it leads her on
and on, wrapping the thread of her life around and around the world?

She will follow. Down under the ten thousand thousand trees, out
across the world, wherever it leads.

And is there a place for him, down under these trees, across the rest
of the world?

She looks at him as if he is a kind of idiot too stupid even to
imagine.

And he understands. Always, always, it had been the Maker she had been
in love with. That first time, that time under the rock arch, every
time: the receeding silhouette of the Maker -- man, woman, angel, god,
vanishing into the shimmering.

She thanks him for his services. Didn't they have some time together,
rare, strange, holy, she will never forget him and their passage of
the great desert and how he has helped her on her journey. They will
make stories about them some day, the ones who sailed and sailed and
sailed. See if they do not. She wonders how he will get back to Two
Moons Flat again. She has money; here, take it, for you, for your
services.

He strikes her. It feels nothing like as good as he thought it
would. There is not even any satisfaction in the look of dawning
comprehension on her face as she shakes the dust and humiliation from
her and picks up the scanshades from where they have fallen and
examines the hairline crack across the lens. He turns his board and
plunges recklessly, heedlessly, down the steep scarp slope, hoping to
be smashed into annihilation by the adamant earth.

Services. An itch to be scratched.

She had never loved him. He had wished they were still two nameless
creatures, forgetful of everything except the chain of sculptures
drawing them onward, sailing and sailing and sailing through a desert
of time that eternally slips away beneath their boards only to
recreate itself before them from the heathaze. But it was illusion,
mirage, a trick of the heat and the light that seemed real, like the
angels caught in the hands of the light-tower. Real enough for him to
love it in return. With deadly revelation comes understanding. A huge,
incredible certainty, as if he has been touched by the hand of God the
Pararchic. He is the legend. He is the one who sailed and sailed and
sailed beyond all knowing, into the desert of time where time is as
shifting and mutable as blown sand. And beyond even the desert of
time, out of time into the world again.

He knows what he has to do now, and how he is to do it. The magnitude
of the task does not daunt him. He sees the prize far behind him and
at the same time far ahead of him, in the great Martian desert.

In the morning he finds them in the hollow of the hillside not far
from where he tethered the board to sleep the night beneath one of
Deuteronomy's ten thousand thousand trees. A few meters more in the
night and he would have missed them altogether. But he was meant to
find them. All before him, all behind him, whipped up into a dust
devil somewhere in the desert of time. How the logs and trunks come to
be here he cannot guess. The hand of God. The hand of man. A miracle,
wrought back there in the desert of time, where he and she were caught
up in the shifting sands. But there they are, the logs, and seeing
them he knows what he has to do with them so that, at some place in
the spiral of time in the heart of the red desert, the only woman he
ever loved will come to him on a verandah in Two Moons Flat and ask
him to take her out beyond the edge of knowing.

There is rope in his panniers, and a folding shovel for digging
foundations. He has never performed a more grinding, strenous task
than hauling those logs into the footings he has dug for them, lashing
them together, heaving the cross members into position and fixing
them. But when your work is a work of the heart it makes even the most
ardous task a little lighter.

He looks back, once, at it standing on the green hillside. One look is
enough. He runs lightly onto his board and the wind fills the sail and
carries him away over the green hills of Deuteronomy. One look is
enough: the ideas, the plans, the crazy notions are tumbling through
his mind like that thousand thousand satellites of the morning. There
are a thousand tasks to be done, and anyway, he has heard, distant but
growing closer, the sound of the engine of a big, black six-wheeled
car, like no one has ever dreamed a car could be.