Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  “What is the name of this key witness?” Louie Gallacelli cleared his throat.

  “The ghost of Gaston Tenebrae.”

  Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl were on their feet instantly. Genevieve Tenebrae fainted and was carried out. Justice Dunne sighed. His anus was beginning to itch again. The counsels argued. The accused ate a breakfast of fried bread and coffee. After an hour, jury, spectators and witnesses went to tend their fields. Arguments clashed and parried. Justice Dunne fought an insistent urge to insert a forefinger into his backside and scratch the frustration until it bled. Two hours passed. Seeing no end to the wrangling unless he intervened, justice Dunne banged his gavel and declared, “The ghost may testify.”

  Rajandra Das skipped around the fields and houses of Desolation Road rounding up jurors, witnesses and spectators. There was still no sign of the two missing jurors: Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.

  “Call the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae.”

  The ghost-catchers exchanged clenched-fist signs of triumph. Ed Galla celli wheeled in the Mark Two time winder and checked the transducers he had fixed around the edge of the bubble.

  “Can you hear me?” squeaked the ghost. Newly revived, Genevieve Tenebrae promptly fainted again. The phantom’s voice came scratchy but audible through Ed Gallacelli’s radio amplifier.

  “Now, Mr. Tenebrae, or rather, Late Mr. Tenebrae, did this man, the accused, murder you on the night of thirty-first Julaugust, at approximately twenty minutes of nothing?”

  The ghost somersaulted gleefully in its blue crystal ball.

  “Joey and I have had our differences in the past, I’d be the first to admit it, but now that I’ve passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch, all that’s forgiven and forgotten. No. It wasn’t him that killed me. He didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did?”

  Genevieve Tenebrae regained consciousness to hear her husband name his murderer.

  “It was Mikal Margolis. He did it.”

  In the ensuing uproar Genevieve Tenebrae fainted for the third time and the Babooshka crowed triumphantly, “I told you so, he was no good, that son of mine,” and justice Dunne banged his gavel so hard the head came off.

  “If there is any more of this behaviour, I’ll have you all fined for contempt,” he thundered.

  Order restored, the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae unravelled its sordid testimony of adultery, glowing passion, violent death, and illicit tripartite relationships between Gaston Tenebrae, Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.

  “I suppose I should never have done it,” the phantom squeaked, “but I still thought of myself as an attractive man: I wanted to know I had not lost my touch with the ladies, so I flirted with Marya Quinsana because she’s a fine, fine woman.”

  “Gaston!” shrieked his widow, up from her third faint, ready for her fourth. “How could you do this to me!”

  “Order,” said justice Dunne.

  “What about the baby, eh, darling?” said the ghost. “Since I passed into the world beyond I’ve learned a lot of interesting things. Like where little Arnie came from.”

  Genevieve Tenebrae burst into tears and was led from the courtroom by Eva Mandella. The ghost resumed its tale of clandestine trysts and whispered intimacies beneath silk sheets to the utter amazement of the citizens of Desolation Road. Amazement, and admiration that an illicit adulterous relationship of such intensity (and with such a publicly promiscuous figure as Marya Quinsana) could have been so successfully concealed among a population of only twenty-two people.

  “She led me along good. But now I know better.” Since metempsy-chosing to the Heavenly Exalted Plane, Gaston Tenebrae had learned of Marya Quinsana’s simultaneous relationship with Mikal Margolis. “She was playing us off, one against the other; me, Mikal and her brother Morton; playing us off just for the fun of it. She enjoyed manipulating people. Mikal Margolis, well, he was always a headstrong boy and never really made it in love: having me to contend with was too much for him.” Suspicious, Mikal Margolis had followed Marya Quinsana and Gaston Tenebrae and spied upon their lovemaking. It was then that the trembling started. In the surgery he would shudder with repressed rage and drop instruments and spill things. The tension built until he could feel the blood seething around his bones like the ocean breaking upon rocks until something old and foul like a black ulcer burst inside him. He found Gaston Tenebrae walking home from a tryst along the side of the railroad line.

  “Then he picked up a short piece of rail, about half a metre long, that was lying beside the track and smashed me on the side of the neck with it. Severed my spine at once. Killed me instantly.”

  The ghost concluded its evidence here and was wheeled away. Justice Dunne delivered his summing up and after begging them to please be objective about what they had seen and heard, gave leave for the jury to retire and consider its verdict. The jury retired to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, now reduced to seven jurors. Unseen by any, Morton Quinsana had slipped away during the final testimony.

  At fourteen minutes of fourteen the jury returned.

  “How do you find the accused, guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty,” said Rael Mandella.

  “And that is the verdict of you all?”

  “It is.”

  The judge acquitted Mr. Stalin. There was cheering and clapping. Louie Gallacelli was carried shoulder-high from the Court of Piepowder and paraded all around the town so that every goat, chicken and llama might see what a fine lawyer Desolation Road had produced. Genevieve Tenebrae took her daughter and went to ask Ed Gallacelli for her husband’s ghost.

  “The time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial-stress matrix?” said engineer Ed. “Sure.” Genevieve Tenebrae took the time winder and the tiny bubble containing her late husband home, put them on the shelf, and nagged the ghost for its unfaithfulness for twelve years.

  Justice Dunne returned to his disrobing carriage and had his personal servant, an eight-year-old sloe-eyed Xanthian girl, apply soothing, lotion to his piles.

  Mr. Stalin was joyously reunited with wife and blubbering adolescent son, whose nose had generated a stream of shining goo all through the trial. Celebrating with roast turkey and peapod wine that night, the Stalins’ buoyant mood was shattered when four armed men dressed in black and gold leather smashed the door in with rifle butts.

  “Joseph Mencke Stalin?” the leader asked.

  Wife and son pointed simultaneously to husband and father. The man who had spoken held out a piece of paper.

  “This is your bill for services rendered by the Bethlehem Ares Corporation Legal Services Division, incorporating hire of courtroom, court charges, hire of court personnel for two days, wages for same, use of power and light, use of papers, file reference charges, prosecution fees, recorder’s fees, judge’s fees, comestibles, including sundries, including meals, pile ointment, and claret, justice’s servant’s fees, arrival and departure fees for the locomotive, insurance of same, hire of same, interrogation fees, acquittal fees, jury tax and replacement of one judicial gavel: total, 3548 New Dollars twenty-eight centavos.” The Stalins gaped like ducks in a thunderstorm.

  “But I’ve paid. I’ve paid Louie Gallacelli his twenty-five dollars,” stammered Mr. Stalin.

  “Normally all court fees are paid by the guilty party,” said the sergeantat-arms. “However, the guilty party having absconded, the charges, under sub-section 37, paragraph 16 of the Legal Charges Deferment Act (Regional and Sub-Contractee Courts) all pass to the defendant, as the legal next-toguilty party. However, the Company being generous to those of limited means, will accept payment in either cash or kind and will issue you, upon your request, with a court order for the restitution of payment from Mr. Mikal Margolis, the actual guilty party.”

  “But we’ve no money,” pleaded Mrs. Stalin.

  “Cash or kind,” said the sergeant-at-arms, already quartering the room with his bailiff’s eyes. His gaze rested on Johnny Stalin, a fork
ful of turkey frozen between plate and open mouth. “He’ll do.” The three armed sequestrators marched down into the dining room and lifted Johnny Stalin bodily from his chair, fork still in hand. The sergeant-at-arms scribbled something on his clipboard.

  “Sign here and here,” he said to Mr. Stalin.

  “Right. That…” he continued, ripping a pink form off at its perforations, “is one certificate for the indenture of your son against incurred court charges liable to the Court of Piepowder, for an indefinite amount of time no less than twenty years and no greater than sixty. And this"-he slapped a piece of blue paper into Mr. Stalin’s hand-"is your receipt.”

  Shrieking and blubbering like a stuck pig, Johnny Stalin, aged 8%, was marched out of his house, up the alley and onto the train. With an earshattering roar of power the locomotive fired up its fusion engines and drew away from Desolation Road. The Court of Piepowder was never seen again.

  Morton Quinsana returned to the empty office. He took all his dental tools, his dental books, his dental coats, his dental chair, and made a pile of them in the middle of the office and set fire to them. When it had died to ashes, he took a piece of hemp rope from a cupboard, made a strong noose, and hanged himself in the name of love from the roofbeam. His feet pendulumed through the pile of ashes and fused metal and drew little grey trails across the floor.

  26

  For a year now it had been the same all day every day: how unfaithful he had been to her, how she had loved only him, only him, always and only, never a thought crossed her mind of another man, no, never, not once in all those years, not ever, and while she was sitting at home worshipping him in the temple of her heart, what had he been doing, oh, yes, you know only too well; yes, that, with that jade of a woman, that scarlet woman of bad parentage (may her womb rot within her and her breasts wither like dry eggplants) and he had earned no better than he deserved, yes, justice had been done, for the betrayal of a wife as adoring as she and what had he done, what had he done; shamed her before the whole town, yes the whole town, where she could no longer hold up her head in dignity or pride again, where she must hide from the people who said of her as she passed by “there she goes, there, look at her, the woman whose husband cheated on her and who never knew"; well, now everyone knew thanks to him, thanks to the goodness of his heart, his wonderful lofty intentions getting that Stalin man off the hook, his own rival and enemy, no less, he had given plenty of thought for rivals and enemies, yes, but was there ever a single thought for poor devoted wives, the kind who love with a love incomparable, and what had he done with all that love, eh? what had he done?: only squandered it on some cheap bawd who was not nagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnag from rising to set the fire at dawn until she went to bed at sunset, and he saw how the nagging had made her ugly in body and soul and he hated her for it, hated the maliciousness that made her nag nag nag him for eternity in the bosom of the Panarch, he hated her and so he decided to punish her, so one day he whistled and called to his daughter until she put down the book and pushed her face against the blue bubble and he said to her, “Arnie daughter, have you ever wondered where you came from?” and Arnie replied, lips brushing the blue forcefield, “You mean sex and all that?” to which he said, “Oh, no, I mean, you, personally, because, Arnie, I’m not your daddy,” and then he told her what he had learned from his brush with the Panarchical Omniscience of how a woman had stolen a baby from a childless old woman and how that woman wanted that baby more than anything else in the visible or invisible world and enfolded and nurtured and birthed that baby as if it were her own, and after he had told her all this he said, “Go look in the mirror, Arnie, and ask yourself, do you really look like a Tenebrae, or do you look like a Mandella, for that is what you are; Rael’s sister, Limaal and Taasmin’s aunt,” and when she went to the mirror in her room and he heard her sobbing, he was much pleased, for he had sown the seeds of his wife’s destruction in the girl who was not and never had been his daughter’s heart and such was his malignant glee that he turned little cartwheels of delight in his shimmering blue bubble.

  27

  His name was Trick-Shot O’Rourke. He had diamond fillings in his teeth and a gold inlad cue. His suit was of the finest organza silk and his shoes of Christadelphia leather. He called himself many grand things: “The Champion of the World,” “Sultan of Snooker,” “Master of the Green Baize,” “The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known,” but he was a fading star and everyone knew it, for a man who was all those things he claimed to be would not be playing for ten-dollar jackpots in the snooker room of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Yet even at its dimmest, his star was brighter than any of the other cuemen in Desolation Road and he had amassed a considerable pile of bills by the time he asked for any more challengers.

  “I know one,” said Persis Tatterdemalion, “if he isn’t in bed yet. Anyone seen Limaal?”

  A patch of darkness detached itself from the darkest table in the darkest corner and coiled toward the snooker table. Trick-Shot O’Rourke regarded his opponent. He guessed his age to be between nine and ten, that indefinable and painful age between boyhood and manhood. Young, confident; look at the way he folds his cue chalk back into his vest pocket. Which will he be: gritty grinder or master tactician, prince of potters or king of psywar?

  “How much down?” he asked.

  “How much do you want?”

  “The whole wad?”

  “I think we could match that.” There were nods of consent from the faces at the bar. They seemed to be grinning. A pile of ten-dollar bills built up on the counter.

  “Toss for break?”

  “Heads.”

  “Tails. I break.” Where did a nine-year-old man-boy learn such selfassuredness? Trick-Shot O’Rourke watched his opponent bend to the cue.

  —He is like a snake, thought the hustler, lithe and elegant. But I think I can beat him.

  And he played with all his might and spun the thread of his skill so fine that it seemed it must snap, but the thin, hollow-eyed boy must have drawn power from the darkness, for each shot he played was as carefully composed and executed as the one before. He played with a deadly consistency that wore Trick-Shot O’Rourke away like a grindwheel. The old hustler played five frames against the boy. By the end of the fifth he was tired and stale but the boy was as fresh and accurate as when he had broken off in the first. He stood back in blatant admiration of the boy’s skill and when the final black gave the boy his three-two victory, the professional was the first to congratulate him.

  “Son, you’ve got talent. Real talent. I don’t mind losing a hundred dollars to an opponent like you. It was a joy to behold. Let me do you one favour, though. Let me tell your fortune.”

  “You tell fortunes?”

  “By the table and the balls. Never seen it done before?” Trick Shot O’Rouke took a wide roll of black baize from his case and spread it across the table. The baize was divided into sections, each marked with arcane symbols and peculiar names in gold lettering: “Self Unseeing,” “Changes and Changing,” “Vastness,” “Behind him,” “Before him,” “Beyond him.” TrickShot O’Rourke formed up a triangle of multicoloured balls and placed the cue ball on a golden spot marked “To come.”

  “Rules are simple. Just drive the cue ball at that pack. It’s all up to you what side, what spin, what angle, what speed, what swerve, what screw, and from the way you scatter them I can interpret your fortune.” The skinny boy picked up the cue and wiped it with a rag. “One word of advice. You play the rational game; you’ve probably got it all worked out where you want to put the balls. If you do that, it won’t work. You’ve got to switch off the mind and let the heart decide.”

  The boy nodded. He sighted along the cue. A sudden crackle of dark energy made everyone shudder and the cue ball burst the pack of coloured balls apart. For a second or so the table was a quantum nightmare of ricocheting spheres. Then all was rest again. Trick-Shot O’Rourke hummed and hawed around the table.

  “I
nteresting. Never seen one like that before. Look, see. The tangerine ball, journey, is resting in Golden Trove, next to the Crimson Heart ball, which lies equally in Golden Trove and God’s Mansion. You’ll leave here, soon, if the Fleetingness ball is anything to go by; also someone to love who you will find in this place of fame and fortune, but will not be of it. But this is the best bit. See that turquoise ball, Ambition; it’s resting right on the cushion in Strife next to the grey Darkness ball. I would interpret this to mean that you’re going to come into conflict with a mighty force of darkness-possibly even the Destroyer himself.”

  It was all-of-a-sudden cold in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Limaal Mandella smiled and asked, “Do I win?”

  “Your ball’s next to the cushion. You win. But look, see there, the white ball, the Love ball, hasn’t moved from the break-off point. And the Answers ball, the lime green one, lies in Great Circle while the purple Questions lies in Changes and Changing. You leave here to seek answers to your questions, they will be found only when you return home where your heart is.”

  “My heart? In this place?” Limaal Mandella’s laugh was ugly, too old for a boy of nine.

  “That’s what the balls say.”

  “And do the balls say when Limaal Mandella must die, old man?”