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.