Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  One Sunday morning he went to the Company commissary and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint. He did not really know why he went and bought a brush and a big bucket of green door paint, but he had woken up that morning with an insistent vision of green in his head. Green green green. Green was a restful, meditative colour, easy on eye and soul, serene; green was the colour of green and growing things, green was God’s favourite colour: after all, He had made an awful lot of it. So he put on his old old clothes and set to work. Soon people were gathering to watch. Some wanted a go at it, so the man who liked green gave them a brush and let them paint a bit of his door. With all the help it was not very long before the door was finished and all the people who watched agreed that green was a very good colour for a front door. Then the man thanked his helpers, hung a sign reading “Wet Paint,” and went indoors to have his lunch. All afternoon Sunday, walkers came past his house to look at the green front door and pay their compliments because in street after street of buff-coloured front doors there was only one that was green.

  The next day being Monday, the man who liked green put on his vest and his pants and his hard hat and walked out of his green front door to join the stream of workers all pouring into the factory. He poured steel all morning, ate his lunch, drank some beer with his friends, went to the toilet, then poured steel again until seventeen o’clock, when the siren blew and he went home again.

  And he could not find his house.

  Every house in the street had a buff-coloured door.

  Wrong turn perhaps: he checked the street name. Adam Smith Gardens. He lived in Adam Smith Gardens. Where was his house with the green door? He counted along the rows of buff-coloured doors until he reached number seventeen. Number 17 was his house, the house with the green front door. Except the door was buff once again.

  When he had left that morning, it had been green. When he came home, it was buff. Then he saw, where someone had put a clumsy handprint, a little glow of living green shining through the buff.

  “You bastards!” shouted the man who liked green. The buff front door opened and a buck-toothed little man in a Company paper suit stepped out to deliver a short homily on the necessity of eliminating undesirable traits of individualism between labour units in the interest of greater economic harmony in accordance with the Project Manifesto and Development Plan which made no provision in the labour unit social engineering system for dysfunctional and individualistic colours: such as green, in opposition to and set against uniform, official, functional and socially harmonic colours, such as buff with reference to labour unit housing modules: sub-section entrance and exit portals.

  The man who liked green listened patiently to this. Then he took a deep breath and punched the little man in the Company paper suit as hard as ever he could right in his buck-toothed gob.

  The name of the man who liked green was Rael Mandella Jr. He was a simple man, uncomplicated, destinyless and ignorant of the mystery spreading its cursed roots around his spine. On the occasion of his tenth birthday he said as much to his mother.

  “I’m a simple person really, I like simple things like sunshine, rain and trees. I don’t much want to be one of the great people of history, I’ve seen what that’s done to Pa and Aunt Taasmin. I don’t much want to be a man of substance and consequence, like Kaan with his food franchises, I just want to be happy, and if that means never amounting to very much, that’s fine.” Next morning Rael Mandella Jr. took the short walk from the Mandella mansion down to the gates of Steeltown and passing through them became cranedriving steel-pouring Shareholder 954327186 and happily remained so, a simple man never amounting to very much until the Sunday morning the mystic urge drove him to paint his door green.

  Shareholder 954327186 was suspended from his job pending a full inquiry by an Industrial Tribunal. He bowed to the summonings officer, respectful, not in the least bitter or resentful, justice being justice, and went home to his buff-coloured front door to find a half a dozen demonstrators marching around in a circle outside.

  “Reinstate Rael Mandella!” they chanted. “Reinstate reinstate reinstate!”

  “What are you doing outside my house?” demanded Rael Mandella Jr.

  “Protesting against your unjust suspension,” said a zealous-looking young man carrying a placard reading “Buff is boring, green is glorious.”

  “We’re the voice of those that have no voice,” added a pinched woman.

  “Excuse me, but I don’t want your protests, thank you. I’ve never even seen any of you before, please go away.”

  “Oh, no,” said the zealous young man. “You’re a symbol, you see, a symbol of liberty to the oppressed slaves of the Company. You are the spirit of freedom crushed beneath the booted heel of corporate industry.”

  “All I did was paint my door green. I’m no symbol of anything. Now, go away before you get into trouble with company security.”

  They paraded around outside his house until night fell. Rael Mandella Jr. turned his radio up very loud and closed his blinds.

  The industrial tribunal found him guilty of antisocial behavior and assault on the person of a Company executive in the execution of his duties. The chairman, in his short summing-up, used the phrase “industrial feudalism” thirty-nine times and concluded that even though junior Labour Relations Liaison Manager E. P. Veerasawmy was a fearful little shit whose punch in the gob was richly deserved and long overdue, Shareholder 954327186 was not the one to execute such judgment and was therefore fined two months wages spread over the next twelve months and barred from promotion in his section for the next two years. His job as a crane driver was reinstated. Rael Mandella shrugged. He had heard of worse sentences.

  The protestors were outside waiting for him, banners and slogans at the ready.

  “Draconian oppression of Shareholders!” shouted the pinched woman.

  “Stop the show trials!” shouted the zealous man.

  “We have a right to green doors!” cried a third protestor.

  “Rael Mandella is innocent!” a fourth bawled, and a fifth added, “Quash the sentence! Quash the sentence!”

  “Actually, I thought I got off rather lightly,” said Rael Mandella Jr.

  They followed him home. They marched around outside his house. They would have followed him into the social centre that evening had they not been involved in a boycott of Company recreational facilities, so they marched around outside waving their banners, chanting their slogans, and singing their protest songs. Agreeably mellow, Rael Mandella Jr. left by a back way so that the protestors would not follow him. He heard shouting and peeked around the side of the Company commissary to see if they had somehow learned of his evasion. What he saw sobered him instantly.

  He saw armed and armoured security police bundling protestors, slogans, banners, placards and shouts into a black and gold armoured van of a kind he had never seen before. Two black and gold guards burst out of the social shaking their heads. They piled into the back of the van and it drove away. In the direction of Rael Mandella Jr.’s house.

  He had sworn that he would never return to sleep under his parents’ roof while he still had a job and independence, but that night he revoked the vow, slipped under the wire, and slept in the Mandella household.

  The six o’clock Company news bulletin next morning carried a sombre tale. The previous night a number of Shareholders had taken themselves on a drinking spree (’doing the ring’ in popular parlance) and, utterly inebriated, had wandered too close to the desert bluffs and had fallen to their deaths. The newsreader concluded her salutary tale with a warning about the evils of drinking and a reminder that the True Shareholder permitted nothing to impair his effectiveness for the Company. She did not read names or numbers. Rael Jr. did not need to hear them. He was remembering the spiritual malaise of his childhood days, and as he remembered it returned to him, summoned by his remembrance; a nausea, a need, a destiny, a mystery, and he knew, as Santa Ekatrina ladled out breakfast eggs and ricec
akes, that he could no longer be silent, he had a destiny, he must speak, he must vindicate. Sitting in his mother’s kitchen, the clouds parted for him and he glimpsed a future for himself both awful and dreadful. And inescapable.

  “So,” said breakfast-busy Santa Ekatrina. “What now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scared… I can’t go back, they’ll arrest me too.”

  “I’m not interested in anything you have or haven’t done,” said Santa Ekatrina. “Just do what is right, that’s all. Follow the compass of your heart.”

  Armed with a borrowed megaphone, Rael Mandella Jr. crossed a field of turnips, ducked down into a culvert only he and his brother knew about, and splashed through the floating faeces into the heart of Steeltown. When no one was looking, he stood up on a concrete flower tub in Industrial Feudalism Gardens and prepared to speak.

  The words would not come.

  He was no orator. He was a simple man; he did not have the power to make words soar like eagles or strike like swords. He was a simple man. A simple man, sick in the heart, and angry. Yes… the anger, the anger would speak for him. He took the anger from his heart and placed it on his lips.

  And the mothers children old folk off-shift strollers stopped and listened to his stumbling, angry sentences. He spoke about green doors and buff doors. He spoke about people and soft, peopley things that did not appear on Company reports or Statements of Account; of trust, and choice, and selfexpression, and the things which everyone needed because they were not things, material, Company-provided things, without which the people withered and died. He spoke about being a simple man and not a thing. He spoke about the terrible thing the Company did to people who wanted to be people and not things, he spoke of the black and gold police and the van he had never seen before and people taken away in the middle of a Friday night and thrown off a cliff because they wanted more than the Company was prepared to give. He spoke of neighbours and workmates taken from their homes or workplaces on the whisper of Company informers, he spoke the inarticulate speech of the heart and opened great gaping wounds in his listeners’ souls.

  “What do you suggest we do?” asked a tall thin man whose slight build marked him a man of Metropolis. The by-now sizeable crowd took up the cry.

  “I… don’t… know,” said Rael Mandella Jr. The spirit fled. The people wavered, taken to the edge, then abandoned. “I don’t know.” The cries rang around him what do we do what do we do what do we do, and then it came to him. He knew what to do, it was as simple, uncomplicated and clear as a summer morning. He snatched up the fallen megaphone.

  “Organize!” he cried."Organize! We are not property!”

  47

  It was a beautiful day for a march.

  So said the steelworkers buttoned up in their best clothes, full to the gills with breakfast pineapple and fried egg, striding out into the crisp morning sunlight.

  So said the railroad men, straightening their peaked caps and examining the burnish of their brass buttons before stepping out to join the growing throng.

  So said the truck drivers, all suspenders and check shirts, inspecting their worn denims for the professionally correct amount of dirt.

  So said the crane drivers, so said the rolling-mill operators, so said the steel puddlers and the drag-line drivers, the furnace men and the baling men, the separator men, the washers, the grinders, the fusion-plant operators; and their wives, and their husbands, and their parents and their children: they all said as they stepped out of their buff-coloured front doors that it was a beautiful day for a march.

  As they streamed toward Industrial Feudalism Gardens their feet stirred up pamphlets only minutes before bundled out of the rear seat of a small, fast propeller ‘plane to snow down upon the roofs and gardens of Steeltown. The printing of these pamphlets was coarse, the paper cheap, the language blunt and uneducated.

  THERE WILL BE A MASS MEETING ON SUNDAY 15TH AUGTEMBER AT TEN MINUTES OF TEN. A PARADE WILL FORM UP OUTSIDE INDUSTRIAL FEUDALISM GARDENS ON THE CORNER OF HEARTATTACH AND 12TH AND MARCH TO THE COMPANY OFFICES TO DEMAND AN EXPLANATION OF THE DEATHS OF

  (and here the crude broadsheet named the poor, silly protestors)

  AND RECOGNITION OF THE RIGHTS OF EVERY SHAREHOLDER. RAEL MANDELLA, JR., WILL SPEAK.

  Rael Mandella waited on the corner of Heartattack and 12th dressed in his father’s most elegant black snooker suit.

  “You must look the part,” Santa Ekatrina had told him that morning. “Your father was a fine figure of a man when he took on the world, you must be no less when you do the same.”

  He looked at his father’s fob watch. His five colleagues: pamphleteer, brother of martyr, disaffected junior manager, political firebrand, empathist, looked at their respective timepieces. Ten o’clock. Tick tock. Rael Mandella Jr. rocked forward and back on the heels of his father’s black snooker shoes.

  What if no one showed?

  What if no one were prepared to defy the Company, to defy the warning messages broadcast from the black and gold vans, the new ones more like armoured cars?

  What if no one were disloyal? What if every hand was a Company hand, every heart a Company heart?

  What if no one cared?

  “Beautiful day for a march,” said Harper Tew, and then they heard it, the sound of a thousand buff-coloured front doors slamming, the sound of a thousand pairs of feet stepping into the morning and falling into line and the sound swelled and swelled into a gentle roar like that of a forgotten sea. The first of the marchers rounded Industrial Feudalism Gardens and Rael Mandella’s questions were answered.

  “They did!” he shouted. “They cared!”

  The procession formed up under the banners of its constituent trades and professions. Here truck drivers gathered under the symbol of a snarling orange truck, here puddlers and pourers carried the likeness of a glowing white ingot, here a black and gold locomotive snapped proudly in the air above the freight handlers and drivers. Those without banner or emblem gathered under regional flags, holy icons and various slogans from the humorous through the scatological to the venomous. Rael Mandella Jr. and his five deputies positioned themselves at the head of the procession. They raised a furled banner. The release was pulled and the wind streamed out the pure white ground emblazoned with a green circle. A rumble of puzzlement passed through the procession. This was not the banner of any known trade, profession, region or religion represented in Steeltown.

  The whistles blew, airhorns trumpeted, and the march made the short and pleasant walk from the Industrial Feudalism Gardens through the belching burning factories to the befountained and statued Corporation Plaza. It took twenty minutes for Corporation Plaza to fill, and as the marchers passed through the ringing steel canyons that led to the offices of the Company, shouts of encouragement volleyed from the shiftworkers on their gantries and catwalks. Counting heads, Rael Mandella Jr. estimated a full third of the workforce was present.

  “Can’t see any police around,” he said to Mavda Arondello. “Shall we begin?” The gang of five nodded. Rael Mandella Jr. summoned up the mystic anger and let it pour through his loudhailer into Corporation Plaza.

  “I’d like to thank you all, all of you, for coming here today. Thank you, from myself, from my friends here: I can’t begin to tell you how much this means to me, how it felt to be marching with all of you behind me. The Company has bullied us, the Company has threatened us, the Company has even killed some of us, but you, the people of Steeltown, you rise above the bullying and the threats.” He could feel the mystic current flowing now. He snatched the green on white banner and let it fly in the wind. “Well, today you can be proud of yourselves, today we are giving a name to that strength and determination, and when your grandchildren ask at your knee where you were on Augtemper fifteenth, you can say, yes, I was there, I was in Corporation Plaza, I was there when Concordat was born! Yes, friends, I give you: the Concordat!”

  Puzzlement yielded to expression. Rael Jr. turned to his deputies and shouted over t
he clamour, “Well, did I do it right?”

  “You did it right, Rael.”

  When there was quiet he held high a crumpled sheet of paper.

  “I have here our Manifesto; our Six Just Demands. They are fair, they are just. I will read them to you, and to the Company, so that it can hear the voice of its Shareholders.

  “Just Demand One: Recognition of a Shareholders’ Representative Organization, namely Concordat, as the official voice of workforce and management alike.”

  “Just Demand Two: Withdrawal of Company specie redeemable only in Company commissaries and the introduction of government legal tender, New Dollars.”

  “Just Demand Three: Full labour force representation and consultation on all matters pertaining to the labour force, including deployment, shift work, overtime, production quotas, automation and efficiency programmes.”

  “Just Demand Four: the gradual scaling down of the system of industrial feudalism in private life, including the spheres of education, recreation, health and public services.”

  “Just Demand Five: Full freedom of expression, association and religion recognized for all Company members. All property to be held in common by all Shareholders rather than by the Company on the supposed behalf of all Shareholders.”

  “Just Demand Six: Abolition of the system of promotion based on spying and informing on workmates.”

  After reading the Six Just Demands, Rael Mandella Jr. folded the sheet of crumpled paper, then his arms, and waited for the Bethlehem Ares Corporation’s reply.

  Five minutes passed. Five more and the early siesta sun began to pour heat and sweat into Corporation Plaza. Yet five more minutes passed. The people were patient. The five deputies were patient. Rael Mandella Jr. was patient. After twenty minutes a glass and steel door in the glass and steel face of the Company offices opened and a man dressed in the black and gold of Company security stepped into Corporation Plaza. His cross-polarized helmet prevented his face from being seen by the demonstrators, but it was an unnecessary precaution for there was no one present who could have recognized him as Mikal Margolis.