Changing trains in the dawn hours, waiting for half days on end at the side of Grand Trunk Roads

holding
aloft the totem of the windswept thumb, hitching rides on overnight transport dirigibles, Marya
Quinsana pursued the ghost of freedom across half the world until she caught up with it in a freight
siding behind l'Esperado Main Station.

The train was shabby, paint-peeled, and dowdy, eroded by years of exposure to the marvellous and
wonderful, but Marya Quinsana could make out the legend by the yellow sodium glow: Adam Black's
Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza. A small crowd of station bums stood idly around at
the foot of the steps, lacking even the small change to share in the wonders of Adam Black's show.
Marya Quinsana could not have said what it was that made her go there that night; perhaps mellow
nostalgia, perhaps some atavistic urge, perhaps the desire to pick at scabs. She pushed the bums aside
and entered. Adam Black was a little greyer and a little sadder but otherwise unchanged. It pleased
Marya Quinsana that she should know him and that he should not know her.

“How much is it?”

“Fifty centavos.”

“In cash or kind. As ever.”

Adam Black regarded her with the expression of one trying to place a memory. “If you will come with
me, I will show you the wonders of my Hall of Mirrors.” He took Marya Quinsana by the hand and led
her into a darkened carriage. “The mirrors of Adam Black's Hall of Mirrors are no ordinary mirrors, they
have been cast by the Master Mirror Moulders of Merionedd who have refined their art to such a
pinnacle of perfection that their mirrors reflect not the physical image, but the temporal one. They
reflect chronons, not photons, time images of the myriad possible futures that may befall you, which
diverge through time when the searcher gazes upon them. To you they will display the futures possible
for you at life's diverse junctures, and the wise man will mark, meditate and amend his life accordingly.”
As he delivered his stale spiel, Adam Black had guided Marya Quinsana through a pitch-dark maze of
claustrophobic twistings and turnings. With the conclusion of his speech he stopped.

Marya Quinsana heard him draw breath and then he declared, “Let light fall upon the future!”

The chamber was filled with gritty purple light cast from a peculiarly shaped lantern above their
heads. By this strange lanternlight Marya Quinsana saw herself reflected a thousand thousand thousand
times in an endless mirror-maze. The images were fleeting, fleeting, twisted away the instant the eye
comprehended them by the complex mechanisms that kept the mirrors turning. Marya Quinsana
learned that there was a trick of holding the images in her peripheral vision and by this visual deception
she beheld numinous glimpses of her future selves: the woman in combat duns with the MRCW slung
across her shoulder, the woman with the five children under her skirts and her belly swollen with the
sixth, the woman noble and powerful in judge's gowns, the woman naked upon the glycerine-filled bed,
the woman weary, the woman joyful, the woman tearful, the woman dead…no sooner seen than turned
away like strangers on a train, into their own futures. There were the faces of frustrated ambition, the
faces of despair, the faces of hope, and the faces that have put away all hope because they know their
present lot is the most they can ever possess: there were the faces of death, a thousand faces bloody or
ashen pale, seared black like coals or burst into festering boils by disease, sunken by age and wasting or
calm with the false tranquility death grants those who fight it most.

“Death is every man's future,” said Marya Quinsana. “Show me the futures of the living.”

“Look here then,” said Adam Black. Marya Quinsana looked where he pointed and saw a laughing
sardonic figure glance over her shoulder at her and walk away into the maze, stepping from mirror to
mirror with the easy gait of the jaguar, power slung low in her belly. She walked with the steps of the
powerful; the makers and moulders of worlds walked like that. It was the image of how she had always
imagined herself.

“That's the one I want.”

“Then walk forward and take it.”

Marya Quinsana stepped forward in pursuit of the future self and with every step she took,
confidence swelled up in her like a bud. She broke into a run, the run of the huntress, and as the mirrors
swung out of her way to show only empty reflections of each other, she saw her prey was slowing. The
power and authority were ebbing out of the image's steps into her own. Marya Quinsana drew to within
an arm's reach of the fleeing image.

“Got you!” she declared, and seized the image's shoulder in an arresting grip. With a gasp of terror the
image wheeled and she saw herself as she had been, certain yet uncertain, knowledgeable but ignorant,
a slave to freedom, and she knew that at some time in the pursuit she had become the image and the
image her. The image collapsed with a pop of inrushing air into glittering dust and Marya Quinsana
found herself by the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors once more.

“I trust you found the experience rewarding,” said Adam Black politely.
 “I think so. Here, I forgot, fifty centavos.”

“For you, madam, there is no charge. For a satisfied customer, there is never a charge. Only the
dissatisfied pay. But then, they always pay, don't you think? But now I think I remember you, madam,
your face seemed familiar to me; have you any connection with a place called Desolation Road?”

“Long ago and far away, I fear, and I am not the woman now I was then.”

“Such can be said of us all, madam. Well, a good evening to you, thank you for your patronage, and if I
might ask one favour, it would be for you to pass on to your friends and relatives the fascinations of
Adam Black's Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza.”

Marya Quinsana crossed the tracks toward a sodium-lit siding where a chemical train with “Wisdom”
on its tankerboards was powering up its fusion engine. It began to rain, a thin, cold, needling rain. Marya
Quinsana tumbled the images of what she had seen over in her head. She knew what she was now. She
had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility,
for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for
responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of
liberties within herself.

Close to the chemical train now she could see the engineer waving to her. She smiled and waved back.

Two peculiarities of the evening could not be fitted into her scheme. The first was that Adam Black's
reflection had not shown in any of the time mirrors. The second was that the image she had embraced
had been walking in the general direction of Desolation Road.