Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “What's happening?” said Rael Mandella.

  “Shh. Graphic readout of the Solstice Landing climatic and ecological regimes for the seven hundred years since terraforming commenced. We've tapped into the Anagnostas aboard the Pope Pious Station to see if we can locate the breakdown of discipline in the local microclimate, and not only is it coming at zip speed but I have to read it backward in the reflection from this water jug so we'd appreciate some shush while we concentrate.”

  “That's impossible,” said Rael Mandella. Colours flew, words whirled. The dizzying display suddenly clicked off.

  “Got it. Problem is, they've also got us. They'll have traced us through the computer link, so we'll take our breakfast, thank you, and go.”

  “Sure, but why hasn't it rained?”

  The Hand helped himself to porridge and said through mushy spoonfuls, “All kinds of things. Temporal anomalies, barometric gradients, precipital agents, jet-stream deflection, microclimate zones of probability, catastrophe fields: but chiefly, you've forgotten the name of rain.”

  And at that the children who had secretly followed Rael Mandella to the cave all cried, “Forgotten the name of the rain?”

  “What's rain?” asked Arnie Tenebrae. When The Hand explained, she said sternly, “Silly, how can water come out of the sky? The sun's in the sky, water can't come from there, water comes out of the ground.”

  “See?” said The Hand. “They've never learned the name of the rain, the true name, the heart-name, which everything has and to which everything comes when called. But if you've forgotten the heart-name, the rain can't ever hear you.”

  Rael Mandella shivered for no reason he could give.

  “Tell us the name of the rain, mister,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

  “Yes, go on, show us how water can come out of the sky,” said Limaal Mandella.

  “Yes, make it rain for us so we can call it by its name,” said Taasmin.

  “Yeah, show us,” added Johnny Stalin.

  The Hand put down his bowl and spoon.

  “Very well. You've done us a turn, so we'll do you a turn. Mister, any way of getting out into the desert?”

  “The Gallacellis have their dune buggy.”

  “Could you borrow it? We need to get quite far out: we'll be playing with forces on a pretty cosmic scale, Sonic cloud-seeding's never been tried before as far as we know, but the theory's sound. We'll make it rain in Desolation Road.”

  The Gallacelli brothers’ dune buggy was an odd mongrel of a vehicle. Knocked together by Ed in spare moments, it looked like a six-seater all-terrain motor-trike with a large shop awning over it. Rael Mandella had never driven it before. The children giggled and cheered as he bounced along the rough track down the bluffs and headed out into the dune fields. As he threaded the cumbersome vehicle along the channels between the red sand mountains, his handling grew more confident. The Hand entertained the children with the tale of his desert crossing and pointed out highlights and landmarks. They drove and they drove and they drove beneath the great grey cloud, away from the habitation of men into a landscape where time was as fluid and morphic as blown sand, where the bells of buried cities chimed out from beneath the shifting surface of the desert.

  Everyone's watches had stopped at twelve minutes of twelve.

  The Hand gestured for Rael Mandella to stop, stood up, and sniffed the air. Television clouds raced across his picture-suit.

  “Here. This is the place. Can't you feel it?”

  He jumped from the dune buggy and scrambled to the top of a great red dune. Rael Mandella and the children followed, slipping and sliding in the shifting sand.

  “There,” said The Hand, “do you see it?” Half-buried in the dune hollow stood a spidery sculpture of rusting metal, eaten by age and sand. “Come on.” Together they bounded down the slipslope of the dune in cascades of dislodged sand. The children ran up to the metal sculpture to touch their hands to its alien surfaces.

  “It feels alive,” said Taasmin Mandella.

  “It feels old and cold and dead,” said Limaal.

  “It feels like it doesn't belong here,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

  “I don't feel anything,” said Johnny Stalin.

  Rael Mandella found some writing in a strange language. No doubt Mr. Jericho could have translated it. Rael Mandella did not have the gift of tongues. He sensed a strange flat silence in the place between the dunes, as if some enormous power were draining the life out of the air and the words that hung in it.

  “This is the heart of the desert,” said The Hand. “This is where its power is strongest, this is where its power flows from and returns to. All things are drawn here; we were as we passed through, undoubtedly so was your Dr. Alimantando as he crossed the Great Desert, and so, hundreds of years ago, this was. It's an ancient space vehicle. It landed here about eight hundred years ago as man's first attempt to assess this world's suitability for life. Its name, which is written there, Mr. Mandella, means Northern Seafarer, or to translate it literally, ‘one who inhabits bays and fjords.’ It's been here a long long time, here at the heart of the desert. The sand is strong here at the heart.”

  Overhead the clouds had grown thick and pregnant. Time snagged around the needle point of twelve minutes of twelve. No words were spoken; there was no need for them and those which had been needful the desert had taken away. The Hand unslung his red guitar and struck a harmonic. He listened intently.

  Then the rain-music began.

  Sandwhisperwindwhisperblowtheredduneface, carryanddropcarryanddrop, the granular march of the desert verbed in a risingswirlingeddying, devildrivingstoneshaping all things come from sand and to sand they return, said the red guitar, listen to the voice-of-the-sand, listen to the wind, the voice of the lion, the wind from around the shoulder of the world, cloudcarrying jetstreamingliftingfalling, airy barometric layers of occluded fronts spiraldepressions: element of zones and boundaries while yet boundaryless, shifting frontiers of the mutable kingdoms of air howling their path roundandround and round the roundroundglobe: the guitar sang the song of the air and the sand, now sing the song of light and heat: of shafts and planes and the geometrical precision of their intersections, domain of perpetualperpendiculars, shafts of light, shields of heat, solid suffocation of desert carpets and breadovens, the silver eyebrows of the sun raised quizzically over the veiling clouds’ dark perimeter: this is the song of the light, this is the song of the heat, yet there are still songs to be sung, said the guitar, before rain can fallfallfall and the song of the clouds is one of these, song of pillowfleecycottoncandyhighwispy exhalations of steamtrains and saucepans and bathrooms on winter mornings whipped by the wind and sent sailingscudding slipping in white armadas across a blueblueblue sea; and hear also the voice of the water drawn into the air, riverrundippledappleonwardflowingemptiedtrickles multiplying into streamsbrookstributariesrivers into thesea thesea! where shafts of light and heat move upon it like God's fingers and the wind draws it upup up into the realm of barometric boundaries where the sea is shaped into chords of StratusMajor and CirrusMinor and AugmentedCumulus: there were songs to each of these things, and a music that was the name people gave them in their hearts, hidden like the harmonies in the strings of a guitar. These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

  The music raged into the sky like an elemental thing. It threw itself with a roar and a howl at the walls of the clouds: wild and unbounded, growing and growing until it burst the bounds of human understanding into the place beyond understanding, where the true names are. The guitar cried for release. The clouds fretted at their tight constriction. Time strained at twelve minutes of twelve but the song would not let them go, any of them. Reflected images of insanity flickered across The Hand's suit of white picture-cloth. The children hid themselves under the flaps of Rael Mandella's desert coat.

  The world could not take very much more truth.

  Then a raindro
p fell. It ran down the flank of the derelict space-explorer and made a dark splash on the sand. Another joined it. Then another. Then another and another and another and another and suddenly it was raining.

  The rain song ended. The acappella voice of the rain filled all the earth. The children held out disbelieving hands to catch the heavy drops. Then the clouds burst open and one hundred and fifty thousand years hurled itself to the ground. Rael Mandella, blind and gasping, the wind driven from his lungs, sought the terrified children and hid them under his coat. The sky emptied itself on the huddled, miserable pile of people.

  Concentric walls of water swept out from the secret heart of the desert. At the high place called Desolation Point the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran had prepared a private siesta-time picnic. The rain transformed it into a rout. Pathetic in drenched taffeta, the Babooshka dazedly stuffed plates and rugs into a wicker hamper rapidly filling with water. Torrents of red water poured into every home and swept away carpets, chairs, tables, and loose sundries. The people were astonished. Then they heard the drumming on the roof tiles and they all shouted, “Rain, rain, rain!” and rushed out into the lanes and alleys to turn their faces to the sky and let the rain wash the dry years out of them.

  The rain rained as it had never rained before. Red rivers coursed down the narrow alleyways, a small but spectacular waterfall leaped over the bluffs, the irrigation channels in the gardens swelled into torrents of thick brown chocolaty loam studded with uprooted seedings and vegetables. Everything leaped and hissed under the deluge. The rain punished Desolation Road.

  The people did not care. It was rain: rain! Water from the sky, the end of the drought that had gripped their desert land for one hundred and fifty thousand years. The people looked at the town. They looked at the rain. It was so heavy they could barely see the relay beacon light on top of Dr. Alimantando's house. They looked at one another, clothing clinging to their bodies, hair plastered to their heads, faces streaked with red mud. Someone laughed, a little ridiculous laugh that grew and grew and grew until it was a great guffawing belly laugh. Someone else caught the laugh, then someone else and someone else, and in a moment everyone was laughing, wonderful good good laughter. They threw off their clothes and ran naked into the cloudburst to let the rain fill up their eyes and mouths and run down their cheeks, and chins, their breasts and bellies, their arms and legs. The people laughed and cheered and danced in the splashing red mud and when they looked at one another, red-painted and naked as the hill-dwelling revenants of Hansenland, they laughed all the longer.

  Drop had led to drop to drop in the rain's beginning: likewise it ended, drop by drop. There came a moment in the people's revels when they could see clearly and hear each other's voices over the roar. The deluge slackened, then eased, and it was no more than a light shower. Drop by drop the rain cleared. The last raindrop fell. After the rain it was as quiet as the hush before Creation. Water dripped from the black lozenges of the solar collectors. The clouds ROTECH had made were rained dry. The sun broke through and cast puddles of light across the desert. A double rainbow stood with its feet on the distant hills and its head in heaven. Wisps of vapour ghosted up from the ground.

  The rains were over. The people were just people again taking up the lives of men and women. Shamed by their nakedness, they pulled on their saturated, filthy clothes. Then the wonderful thing happened.

  “Oh, look!” cried Ruthie Blue Mountain. She pointed to the far horizon. Out there a mystic transformation was taking place: before the amazed eyes of the people of Desolation Road the desert was turning green. The line of alchemy advanced like a breaking wave across the dune fields. Within minutes it was green as far as even Mr. Jericho's eye could see. The clouds dissolved away and the sun shone in the bold blue sky. The people held their breath. Something enormous was about to happen.

  As if by divine command the Great Desert exploded into colour. At the touch of the sun behind the rain the dunes unfolded into a pointillist landscape of reds, blues, yellows, delicate whites. The wind stirred the ocean of petals and wafted the perfume of a hundred million blossoms over the town. The people of Desolation Road poured down from their bare stony bluffs into the endless meadows of flowers. Behind them their abandoned town steamed in the afternoon sunshine of two minutes of two.

  At the heart of the desert Rael Mandella noticed it had stopped raining. The children peeped out from under his coat like chicks. Beneath their sandals green shoots uncoiled like watchsprings and waved pale stalks in the breeze.

  The flowers had pushed their way around the red guitar. Rael Mandella went to the instrument and picked it up. In the sterile place where it had lain, thin white stems struggled for the light.

  The red guitar was dead. Its slick plastic skin was blistered and seared, its frets mangled, its strings blackened, its rosewood neck split down the middle. Smoke trickled from its fused internal synthesizers and amplifiers. As Rael Mandella turned the dead thing over in his hands, the strings snapped: precise, terminal noises. There was something clean about the red guitar after its death. It was as if the rain had washed away its sins.

  Of the man who had called himself The Hand, once King of Two Worlds, there was not so much as a single scrap of picture-cloth torn from a television suit.

  “Too much music,” whispered Rael Mandella to the red guitar. “You made much too much music this time.”

  “What's happened to The Hand?” asked Limaal.

  “Where's he gone?” asked Taasmin.

  “Have the bad doctors got him? asked Arnie Tenebrae.

  “Yes, the bad doctors have him,” said Rael Mandella.

  “Will they push the dead man into him?” asked Johnny Stalin.

  “I don't think so,” said Rael Mandella, looking to the sky. “And I'll tell you why. Because I think what they have is neither The Hand nor the dead man. I think it is both, that at the very peak of the music they fused together like sand into glass, and now it's like starting out all over again for them.”

  “Like being born again?” asked Arnie Tenebrae.

  “Just like being born again. It was a pity they found him and took him back so soon; we never thanked him for the rain. That was bad of us. I hope he doesn't hold it against us. Well, kids, let's go.”

  Limaal Mandella tried to drag the red guitar after him to take home as a souvenir, but it was too heavy and his father told him to leave it there at the heart next to the old space-explorer and he went back to the world with empty hands.

  Persis Tatterdemalion was married to Ed Gallacelli, Louie Gallacelli and Umberto Gallacelli at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning in the early spring of the year 127. By the power invested in him as town manager, Dominic Frontera declared them polyandrously wed and saw them off on the train to Meridian to honeymoon under the volcanoes. The wedding had been a moving experience for him. The minute the train left he went and asked Meredith Blue Mountain for the hand of drab Ruthie. Meredith Blue Mountain was reluctant. Dominic Frontera confessed his mystic love born in another dimension, his obsessive vision of beauty that tormented him night and day, and burst into tears.

  “Ah, the poor man, what can I do to make you happy again?” asked innocent Ruthie, entering the room at the sound of blubbing.

  When Dominic Frontera told her she said, “If that's all, of course I will.”

  The second happily wedded couple in as many days honeymooned among the thousand exquisite and unique villages of China Mountain.

  A sign was hung on the door of the B.A.R/Hotel; It read:

  CLOSED FOR ONE WEEK: REOPENING SUNDAY 23RD 20 O'CLOCK, PROPS: P. TATRERDEMALION, E., L., &U. GALLACELLI. The sign had been painted by Mikal Margolis. As he painted out his name and replaced it with those of his successful rivals in love, he felt no jealousy, no hatred, only a numb sense of fate closing in around him. He locked the door and dropped the key down a well. Then he went and knocked on Marya Quinsana's door.

  Marya Quinsana rapidly grasped the situation.

  “M
orton, I'm taking on Mikal as an extra hand in the surgery. Right?”

  Morton Quinsana said nothing but stormed out in a petulance of slamming doors.

  “What was that all about?” asked Mikal Margolis.

  “Morton's very attached to me,” said Marya Quinsana. “Well, he'll just have to get used to the fact that things have changed a bit now that you're here.”

  A week later Persis Tatterdemalion returned to Desolation Road with her old, proud name, her three husbands and a full-size professional-quality snooker table made by MacMurdo and Chung of Landhries Road. All hands were set to hauling it from the station to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Complimentary refreshments were promised and the children, who had danced around pulling ropes and carrying cues, gave a hooray in anticipation of bottomless jugs of clear lemonade. When Persis Tatterdemalion/Gallacelli saw the locks and the sign, she went straight to find Mikal Margolis.

  “You don't have to go.”

  Mikal Margolis was sterilizing a pair of pig castrators. He found it impossible to hold any anger against her, though rationality demanded that he should. It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.

  “I thought it was best that I leave.” Mikal Margolis's voice was heavy with congested love. “It wouldn't have worked, we couldn't have gone back to the old days, not knowing that you belonged to someone else, were bearing someone else's child. It won't work again. Take my share of the hotel as a wedding present and I hope it brings you joy. Honestly. One thing though…tell me, why did you have to do it?”

  “What?”

  “Get pregnant by…by the Gallacelli brothers, of all people! What were you doing that day the rains came? That's what I can't understand, why them, have you seen the place they live in? It's like a pigsty…I'm sorry.”