by Ian McDonald
The next morning the Gallacelli brothers went to see Dr. Alimantando about becoming permanent residents. He gave Umberto a large patch of land, he gave Ed a shed where he could fix machines, and because he could not give Louie an office or a district court or even a corner of the bar to practice his art, he gave him a piece of land almost as big as Umberto's and advised him to take up animal husbandry, that being the closest thing Desolation Road could offer to jurisprudence.
Mikal Margolis had a problem. He was painfully in love with the lady veterinarian across the road in House Twelve. But the object and satisfaction of his lust was Persis Tatterdemalion, his bed-and-business partner. The lady veterinarian in House Twelve, whose name was Marya Quinsana, had a problem too. It was that she was the object of lust of her brother Morton. But she did not love him, even fraternally, nor did she love Mikal Margolis. The only person she loved was herself. But that self-love was cut like a diamond with many shining facets so that beams of that self-love reflected off Marya Quinsana onto those about her and deceived them into thinking that she loved them, and they her.
One such was her brother Morton Quinsana, a dentist of strange obsessions whose possessiveness of his sister fooled no one. Everyone knew he secretly desired her, and he knew he secretly desired her, and she knew he secretly desired her, so it was no secret desire with so many people knowing. But such was Morton Quinsana's respect and possessiveness that he could not bring himself to lay so much as one finger upon his sister. So he burned an arm's length away in a hell of frustration. And the longer he burned the hotter grew the fires of obsession. One evening he caught his sister flirting with the Gallacelli brothers, laughing at their coarse farmyard humour, drinking their drinks, touching their rough and ugly hands. He swore then and there that he would never ever treat any of the Galiacelli brothers, not even when they came to him screaming and begging with toothache, not even when the agony of rotting dentine loosed the animal inside them and set them beating their heads against walls; no, he would turn them away, turn them away without another thought, banish them to moaning and suffering and gnashing of teeth for having cast the net of their prurient desires at his sister Marya.
Another such fool was Mikal Margolis. Because of his mother, he had never been happy in love. Once his mother announced her engagement, he became happy in love, happy with enthusiastic, vivacious, voracious Persis Tatterdemalion. Then Morton and Maiya Quinsana stepped down from the weekly supply train from Meridialt Mikal Margolis had been collecting beer barrels and crates of spirits from the station, when he noticed the tall, strong woman walking down the platform with the natural grace and implied power of a hunting cat. Their eyes had met and then passed on, but in the flicker of contact Mikal Margolis felt a shock of spinal electricity fuse the base of his heart, where all decency and honesty lay, into thick black glass. He loved her. He could not think of anything else but that he loved her.
When Dr. Alimantando gave the Quinsanas a cave, he had rushed to help build them a home. “Hey, what about the polishing, what about cleaning some glasses?” Persis Tatterdemalion had demanded. Mikal Margolis waved and went. When Dr. Alimantando gave the Quinsanas an allotment, Mikal Margolis came and ditched, dyked, and dammed until the moonring sparkled like diamonds. “How about serving a few drinks?” said Persis Tatterdemalion. “How about making some dinner for these hungry people?” And when Morton Quinsana and his sister came to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, he gave them each a bowl of hot lamb pilaf and as much complimentary beer as they could drink, then joked and chattered with them until closing time. When a chicken fell sick in the hotel even though it was destined for that night's pot, it was taken all the same to Marya Quinsana, who poked it and probed it with her skilled fingers while Mikal Margolis fantasized about her fingers doing the same thing to him. A lot of Margolis's and Tatterdemalion's animals fell ill that autumn.
Yet Mikal Margolis was not happy. He oscillated between the love of a good woman and the love of a bad woman, like a little quartz crystal ticking away time. Persis Tatterdemalion, worldly and innocent as an eagle upon the sky, asked him if he was sick. Mikal Margolis groaned a groan of pure frustrated lust.
“Maybe you should go and see someone, love, your mind hasn't been on your work these past few days. What about that lady vet, eh? I mean, humans are just another kind of animal, aren't they? She might be able to help.”
Mikal Margolis turned to look at Persis Tatterdemalion.
“You're kidding, aren't you?”
“No. Straight up.”
Mikal Margolis groaned all the louder.
As for Marya Quinsana, she did not care. Exactly that, she did not care, she had nothing but contempt for anyone weak enough to love her. She despised her fool of a brother, she despised that silly boy who ran the bar. Yet she could not resist a challenge. She would win that silly boy away from the doting simpleton he lived and loved with. It was the game, the game; the pieces don't matter in the game, the mind that moves them is what is important; that and the winning, for in winning she came to despise the losers all the more. With one inspired gambit she could triumph over both Mikal Margolis and her damned brother. Then she could at last break away from him and let the world hear her name. “Look after Morton” had been the dying words of her iron mother; “look after him, take care of him, let him think he's making all the decisions but ensure he makes none. Marya, I command it.”
Take care of Morton, take care of Morton; yes, she had been faithful to her mother's will for five years now. She had followed him out into the desert after that affair with the little girl in the park, but the time must come, Mother, when Morton stands alone, and on that morning she would be on the first train to Wisdom.
That was why there were the games. They amused her, they kept her sane through the five years of Morton's growing infatuation, they gave her hope that through them she would be strong enough to step on that morning train to Wisdom. Oh, yes, the games kept her sane. So she contrived to be out feeding her chickens at the same time every day as Mikal Margolis across the alley in the backyard of the B.A.R./Hotel was feeding his. It was the game that made her ask him to come and look at her methane digester to see why it wasn't working properly, though Rajandra Das would have done the job better. “Chemical problems, miss,” said Mikal Margolis, “someone's dumped a load of used sterilant into it and inhibited the bacteriophages.” Marya Quinsana smiled. She had poured three bottles of surgery sterilizing fluid into the tank just that morning. The game was going well. Out of gratitude she invited him in for drinks, then conversation, then bed (all the while Mikal Margolis trembled like a reed), then sex.
And in that bed were the seeds of Desolation Road's destruction spilled.
The trouble between Stalins and Tenebraes began when they discovered that they had been sold the same piece of land in the idyllic, paradise town of Desolation Road by Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum, formerly land agent of the Vencatatchalum Immigration and Settlement Bureau, currently sitting in a white room facing questions on complicity to defraud from Inspector Djien Xhao-Pin of the Bleriot Constabulary. Not only had Stalins and Tenebraes been sold the same piece of land (which was not Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum's to sell in the first place), they had also been double-booked for the same sleeping compartment on the 19:19 Solstice Landing Night Service, calling at North Ben's Town, Annency, Murchesonville, New Enterprise, Wollamurra Station and Desolation Road. Neither family would give way to the other. The sleeping car attendant locked himself in his cabin and turned his wireless up loud. They could settle their own disputes. No one got much sleep in car 36 of the Solstice Landing Night Service. Five people, with five people's luggage, were trying to live in a sleeping compartment for three, with three people's luggage. The first night only little Johnny Stalin, aged 33⁄4, had a bed to himself. That was because he was a highly strung fat little bulb of a boy who would have screamed and screamed and screamed himself sick if he had not got a bed to himself. His mother acquiesced and popped him three or four
adult-dosage sleeping pills to keep him quiet and docile. Johnny Stalin was a spoiled, junkie, highly strung fat little bulb of a boy.
The next day passed in bristle silence until Gaston Tenebrae cleared his throat at fourteen o'clock precisely and suggested it might be a good idea if everyone slept shifts. He and his wife, Genevieve, would sit up all night and sleep all day if the Stalins would sit up all day and sleep all night.
The arrangement seemed equable at first. Then the simple, unkind logistics of the sleeping compartment took command. One bed would have to be folded down to form seats for the two to sit upon, which left three bodies in two beds. Then there would be three sitting and two sleeping in comfort. Mr. and Mrs. Stalin thrashed and grumbled in their tightly constricted bed, little Johnny snored asthmatically, and Gaston and Genevieve Tenebrae held little private, loving arguments, with much whispered fury and small, aggressive hand gestures as the train clashed and clanked and reversed and split to form new trains and by such fits and starts drew ever nearer to Desolation Road.
The scrambled changeover from seat to bed on the morning of the third day saw the formal commencement of hostilities. Genevieve Tenebrae accused young Johnny Stalin of trying to peer up her skirt as she climbed the steps to the upper berth. Mr. Stalin accused Gaston Tenebrae of rifling his luggage while his family were supposedly asleep. Gaston Tenebrae accused Mr. Stalin of making improper advances to his pretty wife in the line for the second-class washroom. Mrs. Stalin accused Mrs. Tenebrae of cheating at bezique. Flurries of bickering broke out, like the flurries of snow that precede the big winter; and it was the fourth day and fourth night.
“Desolation Road!” called the cabin attendant, come out of hiding and tapping on the door with a silver pencil. Tap tap tap. “Desolation Road! Three minutes!” Tap tap tap.
Anarchy paradoxically reigned for two minutes thirty seconds as Stalins and Tenebraes got up got washed got dressed collected bags books valuables, bulbous sons and crammed slammed jammed down the narrow corridors and out through the narrow door into the thin wide sunshine of seven o'clock in the morning. All this without once looking out the windows to see where they were, which was a pity, because if they had, then they might not have got off the train. But when they did look, they saw, “Green meadows…” said Mr. Stalin.
“Rich farmlands, ripe for the plough,” said Gaston Tenebrae.
“The air soft with the perfume of a million blossoms,” said Mrs. Stalin.
“A serene, tranquil heaven on earth,” said Genevieve Tenebrae.
Johnny Stalin looked at the glaring white adobe and the baked red earth, the sun-bright flickers of the solar collectors and the stark skeletons of the pump gantries. Then he screwed up his face like a wet sponge about to be wrung dry and prepared for a screaming tantrum.
“Ma!” he wailed. “I don't…” Mrs. Stalin fetched him a stunning crack across the left ear. He wailed all the more furiously and that was the cue for Stalins and Tenebraes to release upon each other a barrage of blistering invective which left scorch marks on close-by walls. Johnny Stalin waddled away to be alone with his misery, unheeded and therefore unloved. Limaal and Taasmin Mandella found him sitting huffily beside the main methane digester as they scampered on their way to find something new to play on a new day.
“Hello,” said Limaal. “You're new.”
“What's your name?” said Taasmin, forty-eight seconds older than her brother.
“Johnny Stalin,” said Johnny Stalin.
“You going to be here a long time?”
“Think so.”
“Then we'll show you where there is to play here,” said Taasmin, and the two quick, lithe children took pale and blubbery Johnny Stalin by the hand and showed him the wonderful hog wallow, the water pumps, the irrigation channels where you could sail toy boats, the pens where Rael Mandella kept the baby animals born from his germ-kit, and the berry bushes, where you could eat until you were sick and nobody would mind, not one bit. They showed him Dr. Alimantando's house, and Dr. Alimantando, who was very tall and very old and very nice in a rather scary way, and Dr. Alimantando took the mud-shit-water-and-berry stained boy back to his still squabbling parents and made them permanent residents of Desolation Road. The first two nights they spent in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel while Dr. Alimantando pondered what to do with them. Finally he summoned his most trusted friends and advisors; Mr. Jericho, Rael Mandella and Rajandra Das, and together, aided by Mr. Jericho's Exalted Ancestors, reached a decision of stunning simplicity.
Desolation Road was too small to afford big-city luxuries like warring families. Stalins and Tenebraes must learn to live together. Therefore Dr. Alimantando gave them houses next door to each other and allotments with a long common border and only one wind-pump. Pleased with his Solomonic wisdom, Dr. Alimantando returned to his weather-room and his studies of time, space and everything.
“Tell me again, Father, why are we going to this place?”
“To get away from the unkind people who say bad things about you and about me, away from the people who want to take me away from you.”
“Tell me again, Father, why these people want to take you away from me.”
“Because you are my daughter. Because they say you are unnatural, a freak, an engineered experiment, my little singing bird. Because they say you were born contrary to the law, and because of that I must be punished.”
“But tell me again, Father, why should they punish you? Amn't I your daughter, your little singing bird?”
“You are my little singing bird and you are my daughter, but they say that you are nothing more than…a doll, or a machine, or any other made thing, and it is against such people's law for a man to have such a daughter, a daughter he has made for himself, even though he loves her more than life itself.”
“And do you love me more than life itself, Father?”
“I do, my little cherry pip, and that is why we are running away from these unkind people, because they would take me away from you and I could not bear that.”
“Nor could I, Father, I couldn't not have you.”
“So we will be together, eh? Always.”
“Yes, Father. But tell me again, what is this place we are going to?”
“It is called Desolation Road, and it is so tiny and far away that it is known only because of the stories that have been told about it.”
“And that is where we are going?”
“Yes, kitten-bone, to the last place in the world. To this Desolation Road.”
Meredith Blue Mountain and his daughter, Ruthie, were quiet people. They were plain people, unremarkable people, unnoticeable people. In the third-class compartment of the slow Meridian-Belladonna cross-desert stopper they were invisible under piles of other people's luggage, other people's chickens, other people's children, and other people. No one talked to them, no one asked if they could sit beside them or pile their luggage chickens children selves on top of them. When they got off at the tiny desert station, no one noticed for well over an hour that they were gone, and even then they could not remember what their travelling companions had looked like.
No one noticed them step off the train, no one saw them arrive in Desolation Road, not even Rajandra Das, the self-appointed station-master who greeted every train that arrived in his ramshackle station, no one noticed them enter the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel at twenty minutes of twenty. Then something very much like a sustained explosion of light filled the hotel and there, at the epicentre of the glare, was the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen. Every man in the room had to swallow hard. Every woman fought an inexpressible need to sigh. A dozen hearts cracked down the middle and all the love flew out like larks and circled round the incredible being. It was as if God Himself had walked into the room.
Then the God-light went out and there was a blinking, eye-rubbing darkness. When vision was restored, everyone saw before them a small, very ordinary man and a young girl of about eight who was quite the plainest, drabbest creature
anyone had ever seen. For it was the nature of Ruthie Blue Mountain, a girl of stunning ordinariness, to absorb like sunlight the beauty of everything around her and store it until she chose to release it, all at once, like a flashbulb of intense beauty. Then she would return again to dowdy anonymity, leaving behind her an afterimage in the heart of unutterable loss. This was Ruthie Blue Mountain's first secret. Her second was that this was the way her father had created her in his genesis-bottle.
The remarkable goings-on in the B.A.R. were still talk as Meredith Blue Mountain and his daughter went up to see Dr. Alimantando. The great man was at work in his weather-room, filling the walls with illegible algebraic symbols in black charcoal.
“I am Meredith Blue Mountain and this is Ruthie, my daughter (here Ruthie bobbed and smiled the way her father had patiently rehearsed her in their hotel room). I am a livestock breeder from Marsaryt sadly misunderstood by his community. My daughter, she means more to me than anything but she needs shelter, she needs protection from cruel and hurtful people, for my daughter is alas a poor and simple creature, arrested at the mental age of five. So I am asking for shelter for myself and my poor daughter.” So pleaded Meredith Blue Mountain.
Dr. Alimantando wiped his glasses.
“My dear sir, I understand perfectly what it is to be misunderstood by one's community and I can assure you that no one is ever turned away from Desolation Road. Poor, needy, persecuted, despairing, hungry, homeless, loveless, guilty, consumed by the past, there is a place for everyone here.” He consulted the master Five Hundred Year Plan on the weather-room wall, threatened by encroaching mathematics. “And your place is Plot 17, Cave 9. See Rael Mandella about tools for farming and Mr. Jericho about building a house. Until it's built you can stay free of charge at the town hotel.” He handed Meredith Blue Mountain a scroll. “Documents of citizenship. Fill them out in your own time and return them to me or Persis Tatterdemalion. Now, don't forget the two rules. Rule one is knock before you enter. Rule two is no shouting during the siesta. Keep those rules and you'll be happy here.”