Conversation · Paledriver

"Great." The lieutenant concedes with a head shake. "He's figured out the pale. And now he's talking to everyone about it..."

"This is about turning back time, Kim."

"We're still on this ridiculous side-task, I see..." He sighs and turns to the woman. "Ma'am, my partner wanted to know if you work in pale transport."

"No offence, but your partner..." She lights the cigarette, a white and silver cloud of smoke disappears into her mouth.

"...seems like a bit of an idiot." She breathes out. The air tastes sweet.

'República', a filterless cigarette from Mesque.

"I'm not an idiot. I'm a detective of the RCM. Don't say I'm an idiot."

"You are an idiot. And you're keeping me here. Glued to this racket. Unless there was anything else..." She puts the cigarette out and stares at something in the distance.

No-no-no... you'll never figure out how to turn back time if you're not honest with her. Explain what's going on with you.

"I blacked out after a night of heavy drinking and lost all memory of the world."

"Like Gabriel Buenguerro in 'Pergunte à Poeira.'" She nods and smiles, unkindly. "You're the opposite of me, then. I remember everything -- even things I never knew."

"Things you never knew?"

"The smell of liquor on Gabriel's lips after the shoot. In the motor park. The roses on the day of Franconegro's coronation. On the grand stairs of Raehl. The smoke from the fowling piece, when Dolores Dei was shot..."

Yes, yes. This is what you've been searching for...

"The look on her face -- like an orgasm. The wound in her chest. My hand in my father's hand..." She closes her eyes, her eyelids trembling. "Except I never had a father. And I never shot Her Innocence Dolores Dei."

"Over-radiation?"

"Heroic doses, xerife. Heroic."

"It sounds... wonderful."

"Thought insertion? Dithering? The Graad-Katla Magistral?" She savours the lungful. "There's a kind of wonder there -- a sad wonder. But... at first I had to make a living. Now..."

"When you've seen it all go away like that. Rolling off like the sea. And then come back to this..." She gestures at the square: the broken horse monument, the shadows of the machines in the night.

"What are we doing here? For thousands of years, Gabriel... It doesn't have to be like this. We can just give up. We can just become vapour."

"What is it?"

"Beautiful... it's beautiful."

That's the most you can get out of her -- only shapes and sensations, no dictionary definitions or scientific explanations...

"What does it look like? The pale?"

"Like looking into the ocean at night. In the dark."

"And..."

"You cannot see it but you know it's there. And it's big -- bigger than anything. Bigger than all the other things combined."

"How do you pass through it?"

"In the belly of an airship, behind steel windows -- so you don't look straight into it. It's not advised to look into it."

"Not on this lorry then?"

"No -- the same one. A roller. They all are nowadays. Special wheels for connecting to the floor of the hold." She points to the machines, clumped up like toys.

Their wheels all small and round, multi-axle trailers.

"What does it feel like?"

"Nothing. Until it starts. When you're deep enough -- then, for me... it's like autumn. Dark grey and orange, the orange of streetlights and the colour of trees in the electric light. It smells like autumn too. It smells terrible."

Nostalgia. Cooped up in the cabin, shaking... Terrible nostalgia. For yourself. For humans. It's too much to bear. She loves it.

"One last thing. You said we can just become... vapour?"

"Yes."

No elaboration.

This is your chance. Ask her, is it really possible?

"Hold on, you said it was possible to turn back time, through the pale..."

"Xerife, what you understand wouldn't fill a pamphlet..."

"You don't need to turn back time. The pale is already churning with it. As the tide of pale rises, so does the past. Someday both will cover the whole world. That's it. That's the story."

"You're saying the future will be the past..."

"And that's just fine with me. I don't mind becoming vapour. I like vapour..." She gathers a cloud of smoke in her mouth, then slowly exhales.

There is a name for this ideology: Entropolism. A faith in and desire to accelerate the spread of pale across the world, until humanity has reached what its adherents call the 'rest state' of humanity, the final reconciliation of past, present, and future in timeless spirit...

You don't like the sound of that, chief. All the really good stuff is right here, in the present...

"You mean, we'll all be drowned in our own past..."

"You're saying, one day I'll be able to return to love..."

"If you wait long enough, it's going to be much more than just 'love'... It's going to be the entire history -- vapourised."

"I would rather have what I have than what you have."

"They say there is a point -- one that I have not crossed -- in the pale superdeep. If you stray too far off course on the U41-A, or in Lomonossov's Land... where every step you take is one step further from home, no matter the direction."

"It's a point you cannot come back from. Your mind becomes so radiant with the past -- there is a flip." She flicks the ash from her cigarette. "Instead of writing, it erases memory. Nearing some kind of..." She shakes her head. "Indescribable finale."

"Maybe you've been down the Motorway South?" She looks at her cigarette, it's almost out. She has swallowed it hungrily. Then at you...

"The Motorway South?"

"It's a story us longhaulsmen tell -- longhaulsmen, xerife, not paledrivers -- way beyond the established pale that's lit by radio frequencies. Where it goes silent."

"And dark. And the process begins. Erasure. Kilometre by kilometre. In any direction. The Motorway South is a road you cannot come back from."

'In the centre of this town there's a ghostly motorway', she sang.

"'It takes all the people where they want to stay.'"

"'They say I've been away on a kind of holiday'..." She replies, silently.