by Ian McDonald
Above Desolation Road hung a thousand silver saucers, so shiny-bright in the dawn sun that they blinded the eye: a thousand silver sky-craft shaking earth and heaven with the pounding of their engines. Each was a full fifty metres across, each bore the holy name of ROTECH in conjunction with a serial number and the subscript, in bold black: <
With a roar of stone-shattering power, twenty-two ’lighters lifted high into the air and banked away into the west, searchlights tracing long raking stains against the sky. The one remaining dirigible settled lower and came in for a landing on the far side of the railroad tracks, in the exact spot where Persis Tatterdemalion had crashed into Desolation Road. ROTECH's landing was fully controlled and performed with arrogant ease. The ’lighter's fans swiveled upward for landing and threw stifling clouds of dust into the air. When the coughing had stopped, the ’lighter was resting upon its landing pads and unfolding a flight of steps from its brightly lit interior. With the steps came the smell of breakfast cooking.
The citizens of Desolation Road were all gathered on the town side of the tracks, all save Persis Tatterdemalion, who had fled at the first touch of the searchlights on her skin, for the ’lighters were free to fly and she was not. The people watched the events aound the airship with trepidation mixed with excitement. These could be the best visitors yet.
“Go on,” said Mr. Jericho to Dr. Alimantando. “You're the boss.” Dr. Alimantando brushed some dust from his perpetually dusty clothes and walked the hundred metres over the line to the ’lighter. There was not one encouraging cry to urge him on.
An extremely smart man in a beautiful high-collared white suit descended the ’lighter steps and stared at Dr. Alimantando. Dr. Alimantando, dusty and humble, bowed politely.
“I am Dr. Alimantando, Chairman Pro Tem of the Desolation Road Community, population twenty-two, elevation twelve fifty hundred, ‘one step short of paradise.’ Welcome to our town, I hope you will enjoy your stay here, we have a very good hotel for your comfort and convenience, clean, cheap, with full amenities.”
The stranger, still staring, (most rudely by a shy Deuteronomian's standards), nodded his head in the barest recognition of formality.
“Dominic Frontera, Settlement and Development Officer, China Mountain ROTECH Planetary Maintenance Division. What the hell are you doing here?”
Dr. Alimantando's quick temper rose.
“I might ask the same of you sir.”
So Dominic Frontera told him. And Dr. Alimantando immediately convened a meeting of all citizens so that Dominic Frontera might tell them what he had told him. And this is what Dominic Frontera told them.
“On Tuesday sixteenth May, three days from today, at sixteen twenty-four, Desolation Road will be vaporized by the impact of a cometary nucleus weighing in the region of two hundred and fifty megatons, travelling at five kilometres per second, some thirty-four kilometres due south of here.”
Pandemonium broke loose. Dr. Alimantando banged his Chairman Pro Tem's gavel until he cracked the block, then shouted himself hoarse and still the people roared and raged and waved Persis Tatterdemalion's best chairs in the air. Dominic Frontera could scarcely credit that twenty-two people could generate such bedlam.
None of this should have happened to him. He should have completed his survey of the impact site in one morning and by now be home in Regional HeadQuarters in Meridian. He should be playing backgammon in his favorite corner of Chen Tsu's tea rooms, sipping Belladonna brandy and watching the apricot blossom. Instead, he was facing a riotous mob eager to beat him to death with desert-pine bar stools—look at that old hag, she must be pushing forty if she's a day, but she'd like nothing better than to lick my blood off the floor—all because he had found a pissing little town where no pissing little town should be in an oasis that was not even scheduled for environmental engineering until two years after the impact. Dominic Frontera sighed. He pulled a snub-nose Presney Reaction pistol from his pilot's holster and fired three quick shots into the roof of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel.
The immediate shocked silence pleased him. The reaction charges hissed and fizzed in the rooftiles. Peace restored, he explained why Desolation Road must be destroyed.
It was all to do with water. There wasn't enough of it. The world was maintained by a series of ecological equations which must always balance. On one side of the equation was the engineered environment of the earth: air, water, weather and those less tangible agents, like the orbital superconducting magnets that spun a protective web around the planet, banishing radiation and the storm of solar particles that would otherwise sterilize the surface of the earth, or the layer of metal ions suspended high above the tropopause that amplified ambient sunlight, and the orbital skymirrors, Vanas, that ironed out local temperature and pressure differentials: a stable equation, but fragile. On the other side of the equal sign stood the peoples of the earth, native and immigrant, their expanding populations, and the increasing demands they made upon the world and its resources. And this equation must always balance, should the population grow arithmetically, geometrically, logarithmically, the equation must always balance (here Dominic Frontera poked his pilot's gun muzzle at the audience for added emphasis), and if this equality meant importing water now and then from somewhere (“now and then” being every ten years or so for the next half millennium, “somewhere” being the gigatons of cometary ice waiting in the wings of the solar system for its gravitational cue), then imported it must be.
“In the past,” explained Dominic Frontera to the rows of open mouths, “we impacted cometary heads willy-nilly on the surface of the world: what ice did not vaporize on re-entry did so on impact, and the vast amounts of dust thrown up by the blast caused the water vapour to form into clouds and thus precipitate. In the early days comets were hitting at the rate of three per week, peak. Of course, there was no one around then for them to fall on.” Dominic Frontera remembered he was not lecturing some secondary school geography class, but a bunch of stupid farmers, and grew angry. “As you might imagine, since settlement began it's been getting harder to find places to crash the ice; and we like to crash the ice if we can, it's by far the cheapest way of generating water vapour. Now, we had our target area picked, an area of the North West Quartersphere Region that had no environmental engineering planned for at least four years, maybe the odd traveller, the odd train, the odd ’lighter, but they could be warned out of the area before impact and afterward we could come in, fix up any track that got busted, and call down orphs from orbit to turn the desert into a garden. That's the plan. What do we find? What do we find?” Dominic Frontera's voice rose to a squeak. “You. What the hell are you doing here? There shouldn't even be an oasis here, much less a town!”
Dr. Alimantando rose to tell his tale of sailboards and mad orphs. Dominic Frontera waved him down.
“Save your explanations. You're not responsible. There's been a cock-up in the Orbital Environmental Engineering Division, some orph's programming gone up the spout. Cranky things. Okay, so it's not your fault, but there's nothing I can do. The comet is on its way, has been for the past seventy-two months. On Tuesday sixteenth of May, at sixteen twenty-four, it will impact thirty-four
kilometres south of here and this little town and this little oasis will fold up like a…like a…cardboard house.” There were howls of protest. Dominic Frontera raised hands for silence and calm. “I'm sorry. Truly I am, but there's nothing I can do. The comet can't be deflected, there's nowhere for it to go, not at this late stage. If only you'd let someone, anyone, know you existed earlier, we might have been able to compute different orbits. As it is, it's too late. I'm sorry.”
“What about Heart of Lothian?” shouted Ed Gallacelli.
“She promised she'd tell someone about us,” agreed Umberto.
“Yes, she said she'd tell China Mountain,” added Louie.
“Heart of Lothian?” asked Dominic Frontera. His pilot shrugged eloquently.
“A travelling rep for the General Education Department,” explained Dr. Alimantando.
“Ah. Different department,” said Dominic Frontera. The citizens poured scorn on his feeble excusings.
“Bureaucratic bunglings!” shouted Morton Quinsana. “Planning blight!”
Dominic Frontera attempted to calm the situation.
“All right, all right, I agree there has been bureaucratic bungling at the highest level—that isn't the issue. What is the issue is that in three days the comet's going to hit and splatter this town like gravy, that's the long and short of it. What I can do is call back the ’lighter squadron and have them move you all out of here. Maybe then after we've cleared up the impact site, if you really like it here, then you can come back, but in three days you all have to be out of here, with all your goats, llamas, pigs, chickens, children and fixings to boot. Now, any questions?”
Rael Mandella beat the rest of the house to their feet.
“This is our town, we made it, we built it, it is ours, and we will not see it destroyed. Everything I have is here, my wife, my children, my home, my livelihood, I will not leave it to be destroyed by your comet. You, you engineers who bounce planets around like billiard balls, you send your comet somewhere else.”
There was a tempest of applause. Dominic Frontera weathered it out.
“Next.”
Persis Tatterdemalion stood and shouted, “This is my business here, what you've been putting gunshot holes into, mister. Now, I've already lost one business, the flying business, and I don't intend to lose another one. I'm staying. Your comet can go someplace else.”
Mikal Margolis nodded his head vigorously and shouted, “Hear hear.”
Then Ruthie Blue Mountain stood up and hush fell around her like snow.
“Yes?” said Dominic Frontera wearily. “I'd appreciate a question please, not a monologue from the condemned dock.”
“Mr. Frontera,” said the simple Ruthie, who had understood from all the furore only that her friends were in danger, “you must not hurt my friends.”
“Lady, the last thing I want to do is hurt your friends. If, however, they are intent on hurting themselves by not having the common sense to get out of the way of danger, that is a different question entirely.” Ruthie did not understand the ROTECH representative's reply.
“I won't let you hurt my friends,” she muttered dully. There was a shuffling silence in the room of the kind that precedes something out of the ordinary. “If you loved them as much as I do, then you wouldn't hurt them. So I'm going to make you love me.”
Up on the podium Dr. Alimantando saw her face brighten the split-second before Ruthie Blue Mountain released four years of accumulated beauty on Dominic Frontera. The Chairman Pro Tem ducked under the Chairman Pro Tem's table and put his hands over his eyes. Dominic Frontera had no such warning. He stood a fully thirty seconds in the nova-light before emitting a curious squawk and falling like a sack of beans to the floor.
Dr. Alimantando took control. He pointed to the er pilot, saved by his polarizing contact lenses. “Get him out of here down to one of the rooms,” he ordered. “You two show him where.” He indicated for Persis Tatterdemalion and Mikal Margolis to help the pilot carry the love-stunned ROTECH agent to a place of recuperation. He quelled the popular hubbub with a glance.
“Well, you've all heard what our friend here has to say, and I don't for one moment doubt that it's true. Therefore, I am ordering each and every one of you to prepare for evacuation.” Consternation rose. “Quiet, quiet. Evacuation, as a last resort. For I, Alimantando, am going to try and save our town!” He stood and acknowledged the public acclamation for a few minutes, then swept out of the B.A.R./Hotel to save the world.
For a night and a day Dr. Alimantando filled the walls of his weather-room with chronodynamic symbols. The stream of logic had started three years before in the bottom left-hand corner of his kitchen, wound through parlour, dining room and hall, up the stairs, taking small disgressionary detours into number one and number two bedrooms, through the bathroom, across the toilet walls, up another flight of stairs and into the weather-room, where it wound round the walls, round and round and up and up until only a blank area about the size of a dollar bill was left in the centre of the ceiling.
Beneath this spot sat Dr. Alimantando with his head buried in his hands. His shoulders shook. It was not tears that shook them but rage, monumental rage at the mocking universe which, like a painted rumbo dancer in a Belladonna opium hell, casts off successive layers of concealment only for the lights to black out at the moment of ultimate revelation.
He had told his people he was going to save their town.
And he couldn't do it.
He couldn't find the missing inversion.
He couldn't find the algebraic formula that would balance out fifteen years of wall-filling in Desolation Road and Jingjangsoreng and the Universuum of Lyx and reduce it all to zero. He knew it must exist. The wheel must turn, the serpent swallow its own tail. He suspected it must be simple, but he could not find it.
He had failed himself. He had failed science. He had failed his people. That was the most crushing of all failures. He had come to care deeply for his people; that was how he saw them, his people, the children he had thought he'd never desire. When they had not needed saving, he had saved them. Now that they must be saved, he could not.
The realization brought Dr. Alimantando a great release of tension. Like the animal that fights and fights and fights and then in the jaws of inevitability surrenders to death, his anger drained out of him, down through his house, down through the sinkholes in the rocks out into the Great Desert.
It was six minutes of six in the morning of Monday sixteenth. The gas lamps were popping and the insects beating themselves against the glass. From the east window he saw Rael Mandella going about his solitary six-o'clock-in-the-morning labours. They were not necessary now. He would come down from the mountain and tell his people to go. He did not want their forgiveness, though they would give it. All he wanted was their understanding. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt a great peace blow out of the desert, a wave of serenity breaking over him, through him. The morning mist carried an aroma of things growing in wet, rich earth, black as chocolate, rich as King Solomon. A sound like tinkling wind-chimes caused him to look away from the windows.
He should have been shocked, or stunned, or some variety of the human emotion of surprise, but the presence of the greenperson sitting on the edge of his table seemed quite the most natural thing.
“Good morning,” said the greenperson. “I must have missed you at that next camp…five years is it?”
“Are you a figment of my imagination?” said Dr. Alimantando. “I think you are something of that ilk: an archetype, a corstruction of my mind while under stress: hallucination, that's what you are—a symbol.”
“Come now, would you like to think of yourself as the kind of man visited by hallucinations?”
“I would not like to think of myself as the kind of man visited by animated leftover vegetables.”
“Touché. Which way will this convince you, then?” The greenperson stood up on the table. It produced a stick of red chalk out of somewhere unseen and wrote a short equation
in symbolic logic in the dollar-bill-sized space in the centre of the ceiling. “I think that's what you're looking for.” The greenperson swallowed the stick of red chalk. “The nutrients are very useful, you know.” Dr. Alimantando climbed onto the table and peered at the equation.
“Yes,” he muttered, “yes…yes…” He traced the spiral of black charcoal equations outward across the ceiling, around the walls, round round and round, across the floor on hands and knees, all the while muttering, “Yes…yes…yes” down the stairs, round the toilet, through the bathroom, detoured into number two and number one bedrooms, down more stairs, across the hall, the dining room and the parlour, into the kitchen. Up in the weather-room the greenperson sat on the table with a very smug smile on its face.
A great cry of triumph came up from the depths of Dr. Alimantando's house. He had followed the trail of reason to its source in the bottom left corner of his kitchen.
“Yeehah! It fits! It fits! Zero! Pure, beautiful, round, absolute zero!” By the time he reached the weather-room the greenperson was gone. A few dry leaves lay scattered on the table.
The Mark One Alimantando time winder looked like a small sewing-machine tangled up in a spider's web. It sat on Dr. Alimantando's breakfast table awaiting the approval of its designer.
“One hell of a job to build,” said Ed Gallacelli.
“Half the time we really didn't know what we were doing,” said Rajandra Das. “But there it is.”
“It's basically two synchronized unified field generators working in tandem but with variable phase control,” said Mr. Jericho, “thus creating a temporal difference between the two unphased fields.”
“I know how it works,” said Dr. Alimantando. “I designed it, didn't I?” He studied the time machine with growing delight. “It does look the job, though. Can't wait to try it out.”