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.