Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  He left and Trick-Shot O'Rourke gathered up his magic balls and fortune-telling cloth.

  After that night Limaal Mandella became convinced of his greatness. Though his rationalism would not allow him the generous oracle of the balls, his heart had seen his name written large in the stars and he began to play not for love or money but for power. His greatness was buttressed every time he smashed some visiting geologist, geophysicist, botanist, plant pathologist, soil engineer or meteorologist. The stake money was meaningless, he used it to buy drinks for the house. The name of Limaal Mandella passed up and down the line, together with the legend of the boy from Desolation Road who was unbeatable as long as he remained in his hometown. There was no shortage of young headhunters eager to disprove the legend: their defeat only reinforced it the more. Like the tumbling planets of his childhood nightmares, the rolling balls crushed all Limaal Mandella's opponents.

  Sometime in the early morning of his tenth birthday, his coming of age, when the covers had been pulled over another victory on the baize and the chairs upturned on the tables, Limaal Mandella went to Persis Tatterdemalion.

  “I want more,” he said as she washed glasses. “There has to be more, there has to be somewhere outside of here where the lights are bright and the music's loud and the world doesn't close down at three minutes of three. And I want it. God, I want it more than anything. I want to see that world, I want to show it how good I am. There are folks out there, up there, who knock worlds around like snooker balls, I want to take them on, I want to match my skill against theirs, I want out of here.”

  Persis Tatterdemalion put down her glass and looked for a long time into the morning. She was remembering how it felt to be trapped in a small, confusing place.

  “I know. I know. But listen to this, and listen for once. Today you are a man and master of your own destiny. You decide what it will be, where it will lead. Limaal, the world can be any shape you want it to be.”

  “You mean go?”

  “Go. Go now, before you change your mind, before you lose your nerve. God, I wish I had the courage and the freedom to go with you.”

  There were tears in the barwoman's eyes.

  That morning Limaal Mandella packed a small backsack with clothes, put eight hundred dollars purse money he had saved into his shoe, and slipped two cues into a cue case. He wrote a note for his parents and crept into their room to leave it by their bedside. He did not ask their forgiveness, only their understanding. He saw the presents his mother and father were to give him on his birthday and faltered. He breathed deeply, quietly, and left forever. He waited in the frosty cold beneath the star-sparkling sky for the night-mail to Belladonna. By dawn he was half a continent away.

  She never washed. She never cut her hair. Her fingernails, her toenails, curled over at the ends, and the hair of her head hung to the small of her back in a greasy, dusty rope, thickly plaited. A legion of parasites found shelter there, and in the hair of her loins and the fetid sweat-glued mats in her armpits. She itched and festered but never scratched. To scratch would have been to surrender to the body.

  She had commenced the war against her body on her tenth birthday. That was the day Limaal had gone. The maple cue her father had planed himself stood wrapped by the kitchen table. When the evening came and it was apparent that Limaal would not return, it was put away in a cupboard and the cupboard locked and forgotten. Then Taasmin went up alone to the red rim rocks to look again at the shape of the world. She stood before the Great Desert and let the wind whip at her, trying to learn from it what it was to be a woman. The wind that never stopped blowing tugged at her as if she were a kite to be whisked away into the heavens.

  She realized she would love that. She would love the spiritual wind to carry her away like a paper bag, a piece of human refuse swept higher and higher away from the burning dry dry land into a sky filled with angelic beings and pieces of orbital engineering equipment. She felt herself sailing, lifting before the Godwind and in panic she called with the voice inside for her brother but the closeness was gone, stretched beyond the breaking point, dissipated, gone. The twins were unbalanced. No longer did the one's mysticism govern the other's rationalism: like machines without control they flew apart into space. Unchecked, the mysticism rushed into the emptiness in Taasmin's mind where her brother had been, and transformed her into a creature of purest light; white, shining light eternal, fountaining into the sky.

  “Light,” she whispered, “we are all light, of light, to light we return.” She opened her eyes and beheld the base red desert and the ugly little town crouched beside it. She regarded her body, newly womaned, and hated its round sleekness and muscular smoothness. Its endless hungers, its insatiable appetites, its blind disregard for anything but itself disgusted her.

  Then it seemed to Taasmin Mandella that she heard a voice carried on the wind from very very far away, beyond the world, beyond time, and it cried, “The mortification of the flesh! The mortification of the flesh!”

  Taasmin Mandella echoed that cry and declared war on her body and the material things of the world. There and then she cast off her clothes, finely woven by Eva Mandella upon the loom of her devotion. She walked barefoot, even when the rain turned the lanes to liquid filth or the frost pecked at the earth. She drank rainwater from a barrel, ate vegetables earthy from the garden, and slept unroofed beneath the cottonwood trees in the company of llamas. At noontime, when other citizens enjoyed the enshrined siesta, she would squat upon the burning rocks of Desolation Point, immersed in prayer, oblivious to the sun tanning her skin to leather and bleaching her hair the colour of bones. She meditated upon the life of Catherine of Tharsis, whose quest for spirituality in a pagan worldly age had led her to cast off fleshly humanity and merge her soul with those of the machines that built the world.

  The mortification of the flesh.

  Taasmin Mandella passed beyond humanity. Her parents could not touch her, Dominic Frontera's attempts to order modesty of dress were ignored. Only the inner symphony mattered, the cascade of saintly voices pointing the way through the veil of flesh to heaven's gate. It was the way the Blessed Lady had walked before her, and if that walk meant earning the disgusted stares of the newcomers to Desolation Road, the farmers and shop owners and mechanics and railroad staff, then that was the price of it. They saw her ugly, these new faces from Iron Mountain and Llangonnedd, New Merionedd and Grand Valley, they whispered so behind her back. She saw herself beautiful beyond words, beautiful in spirit.

  One day in the month of July, when the summer sun was at its peak and the noontime heat cracked pebbles and shattered rooftiles, Dominic Frontera came hot and sweaty to Taasmin Mandella, perched high like a leather bird on the red rim rocks.

  “This can't go on,” he told her. “The town is growing, there are new people coming in all the time: the Merchandanis, the Pentecost sisters, the Chungs, the Axamenides, the Smiths: what kind of place are they going to think this is where girls…women wander around naked all day, stinking like a hog wallow? It won't do, Taasmin.”

  Taasmin Mandella stared straight ahead of her at the horizon, eyes narrowed against the glare.

  “Look, we have to do something. Right? Good. Now, how you say you come back with me to your parents, or if you don't want that, Ruthie'll look after you, have a bath, get cleaned up, put on some pretty clothes, eh? How would that be?”

  A gust of wind carried a waft of fetor over Dominic Frontera. He gagged.

  “Taasmin, Desolation Road is not what it was and we can't go back to what it was. It's growing, reaching for the Fourteenth Decade. We can't accept certain kinds of behaviour. Now, are you coming?”

  Without breaking her stare, Taasmin Mandella said, “No.” She had not spoken for fifty-five days prior to that word and the speaking of it disgusted her. Dominic Frontera stood, shrugged, and climbed down from the rim rocks to what remained of his siesta. The same night Taasmin Mandella took herself away from the people of the 13th Decade and wandered far alon
g the bluffs until she found a cave where water trickled up from the subterranean ocean. Here she dwelt for ninety days, by day sleeping and praying, by night walking twelve kilometres to Desolation Road to raid the 13th Decaders’ gardens. When dogs and shotguns began to appear, she felt the divine call to take herself farther away, and one bright morning she walked and walked and walked into the Great Desert, walked and walked until she had passed out of the desert of red sand into the desert of red stone. There she found a stone pillar upon which to stylitize herself, a needle of rock to impale herself. That night she slept at the base of the stone column that pointed her way to the Five Heavens and for moisture licked the dew that had settled on her naked body. From dawn to dusk of that day she climbed the stone pillar; lithe and agile as a desert lizard. The splintered nails, the torn toes, the blistered fingers, the shredded flesh: all meant as little to her as the hunger in her belly; all beautiful little mortifications, petty victories over the flesh.

  For three days she sat cross-legged atop the red rock pillar, neither sleeping nor eating, drinking nor making the least movement, driving the body's scream down down down, out out out. Upon the morning of the fourth day Taasmin Mandella moved. In the long night she dreamed she had turned to stone but in the morning she moved. Not a great movement, only a swivelling of dry eyeballs to behold a cloud passing out of the south, a solitary dark cloud shot through with lightnings. From this cloud came a sound like that of a swarm of furious bees. As it drew nearer, Taasmin Mandella saw that it was composed of many tiny particles in desperate motion, indeed like a swarm of insects. Nearer drew the cloud, nearer still, and she saw to her astonishment (Taasmin Mandella yet being remotely capable of some human emotion) that the cloud consisted of thousands upon thousands of angelic beings beating their holy way through the upper air. They were similar to the angel freed by Rajandra Das from Adam Black's Chautauqua and were supported in their flight by a bewildering diversity of wings, vanes, rockets, airfoils, propellors, balloons, rotors and jet engines. The angel host swept past her out of the South, so many of them that they might be looping high into the tropopause to parade past again. Then out of the buzzing cloud loomed a massive device, a boxy flying object glittering blue and silver, a full kilometre long. In its peculiar construction it reminded Taasmin of the pictures of rikshas and autocars she had seen in her mother's picture books. Upon its blunt prow was a chromium grin of a grille bearing the title “Plymouth” in letters as tall as Taasmin Mandella. Beneath the grille was a rectangular shield, bright blue, with the legend lettered in yellow:

  STATE OF BARSOOM

  ST. CATH

  The Blue Plymouth halted above the rock pillar and as Taasmin tried to guess its possible function (ROTECH engineering facility, celestial chariot, flying market, trick of sun and stone) a choir of angels banked in beneath it and sang, to the accompaniment of zither, serpent, okarina, crumhorn and stratocaster:

  Doo wop a bee bop

  Shooby-dooby doo

  Doo wop showaddy-showaddy

  A-bop bam boo

  Be-bop a lulah

  Shebop shooby-doo

  Re bop a lulah

  Bebop bam boo.

  A solitary angel detached itself from the celestial choir and dropped on its helicopter vanes until face-to-face with Taasmin Mandella.

  O Blesssede Mortalle, nowe thys Newes Receive:

  Prepare Thyselfe to Entertaine a Sainte,

  Oure Sainte, Oure Blessede Ladie, She of Tharsis

  Beholde the Advente of the Blessede Cathie!

  It declaimed this in flawless iambic pentameter. Contrarotating blades snatched the angel up to heaven. The Big Blue Plymouth played an ancient, ancient tune called “Dicksee” on its quintuple airhorns and extended an access ramp. A small crop-haired woman dressed in a glowing white picture-suit descended the ramp and walked toward Taasmin Mandella, arms outstretched in the universal symbol of welcome.

  Seeing for the first time the city of Kershaw, capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, Johnny Stalin could not properly comprehend what he beheld. From the viewpoint of the guardroom of a train rattling through a range of hills the colour of slate and rust, it seemed to him that he saw a cube, black as his closed eyelids, bearing on its topmost edges the words BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION lettered in gold. Still, he could not assign any proportions to the cube, for it stood in a pond of dirty water which robbed it of any sense of perspective. Then he saw the clouds. They were dirty white cumulus clouds, like soiled cotton, gathering together three quarters of the way up the face of the cube. Johnny Stalin spun away from the window and hid away from what he had beheld.

  The cube must have been almost three kilometres on a side.

  Now the world took on its proper proportions: the hills scabbed with blast furnaces and foundries, the pool that was no pool at all but a great lake in the centre of which stood Kershaw. A dreadful fascination drew him back to the scene outside. The tiny threads that tied the cube to lake shores he now saw to be wide earth causeways, wide enough to carry twin railroad tracks, and what he had thought to be birds swooping around the faces of the cube were helicopters and dirigibles.

  The Court of Piepowder rattled onto a causeway. Proud black and gold expresses bulleted past, rocking the train with their pressure waves. In their wake Johnny Stalin received his first close look at the lake. It seemed to be full of oily sludge, bubbling and steaming gently. Patches of chrome yellow and rust red stained the surface, in the far distance an oil geyser spouted black filth and an area of lake the size of a small town exploded into yellow sulphurous boiling flinging cascades of acid mud hundreds of metres in all directions. Not half a kilometre distant from the causeway some enormous waxy pink object lifted out of a froth of polymerized bubbles, a complex thing of spires and lattices like a capsized cathedral, forever crumbling back into dissolution under its own weight.

  Johnny Stalin whimpered in fear. He could not comprehend this hellish place. Then he saw what seemed to be a human figure, strangely clothed, walking on the far lake shore. The sight of humanity in the chemical wilderness cheered him. He did not know, much less care, that the figure was that of a Shareholder of the City of Kershaw strolling by the pleasant shores of Syss, the poisoned lake, in elephantine respirator and isolation suit. The lake's prismatic colors and rainbow sheen, its gushing geysers, eruptions and spontaneous polymer accretions were much prized by the Shareholders of Kershaw: the melancholy air of Sepia Bay, properly filtered through respirator and rebreathed, was most conducive to reflections on love and love lost; Green Bay, rich in copper nitrates, promoted the tranquility of thought and serenity necessary for managerial decision-making; sickly decaying Yellow Bay, redolent of mortality, favourite spot for suicides; Blue Bay pensive, thoughtful; Red Bay, much beloved by Junior Executive Levels, aggressive, dynamic. The executives astroll upon the rusty shores saw the return of the Court of Piepowder, saw the strange polymer chemoid raise itself out of the chemical brew and chattered excitedly through their microphones. Such phenomena were considered fortunate, bestowing upon the beholder luck in love, success in business, and good omens. To the traveller arriving in Kershaw they were foretellers of great fortune. Johnny Stalin, locked in the guardsvan for eight days, knew nothing of omens and harbingers. He knew of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation nothing whatsoever. He would soon.

  “Shareholder 703286543,” they told him. “Don't forget it. 703286543.” He should have been hard put to forget it. It was printed on the plastic badge they gave him, on the one-piece paper suit they gave him, on the door of the room they gave him, and it was stamped on every item in the tiny windowless room: the table, the chair, the bed, the lamp, the towels, the soap, the copy of Toward a New Feudalism under the number-stamped pillow: Shareholder 703286543. At corridor roll call every morning the fat woman in the grey paper junior executive suit called out, “Shareholder 703286543” and every morning Johnny Stalin would raise his hand
and call out, “Present.” He came just after Shareholder 703286542 and just before Shareholder 703286544 and learned where to stand in the row by number, not face. After the roll call the fat woman would read a short piece from Toward a New Feudalism, deliver a brief homily on the virtues of industrial feudalism, and shout out the day's production quotas which the Shareholders shouted back while performing forty press-ups, forty knee-bends and jogging on the spot to rather martial music blaring from the loudspeakers. Then they would doff paper caps and hold them over hearts to sing the Company song. As Shift C marched down the corridor to the gravity bus, the fat woman would shout out the state of the Company's shares in the world markets. It was Company policy for all Shareholders to feel personal satisfaction from their minuscule contribution to the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The fat woman would check Shift C into the gravity bus, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah. The doors would close and the gravity bus would shoot upanddownandforwardandbackwardandleftandright and Shareholder 703286543 would have his shift in ructions of laughter with his impersonation of the fat grey woman going blah blah blah. With a lurch that pushed everyone against everyone else the gravity bus would arrive at its destination, doors would slam open, and the laughter and smiles switch off like late-night radio programmes as Shift C marched into the factory.

  There were numbers on the machines too: machine number 703286543 stood on the conveyor between machine 703286542 and machine 703286544. The Shareholders would take up their positions, and when the hooter blew, the hatch at the end of the conveyor would open and components start to come down the serpentine production line. From 0900 to 1100 hours (when there was a break for tea) and from 1115 to 1300 (when it was lunchtime) Shareholder 703286543 took a piece of plastic shaped a bit like a human ear and a piece of plastic shaped like an ornate letter P and heat-welded them together on his bonding machine. From 1330 hours to 1630 hours he would weld some more ears and letter Ps and then Shift C would clock out and march out of the factory to meet Shift A marching in. They would enter the gravity bus once again, there would be more upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing and then the Shareholders of Shift C would be back in their familiar corridors. There would be a noisy, joking hour-and-a-bit in the corridor bath house, then dinner in the refectory (so similar to the factory refectory that Shareholder 703286543 sometimes wondered if they were the same refectory), and after that the comrades of Shift C would go to a bar and run up phenomenal charge accounts buying ridiculous daquiri ices and ludicrous drinks made primarily from puréed mulberries. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went to the bar. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they went to see a movie or a live show, and on Saturdays they went dancing because the Palais de Danse was the only place they could meet girls. Shareholder 703286543 was a little bit too short and a little bit too young to enjoy the dancing. His teeth came uncomfortably close to nipple height on his dancing partners, but he liked the music, especially the new music by that man Glenn Miller. Buddy Mercx was good too. On Sunday there was the Miracle Mall and in the evening everyone went to the Company relaxarium, where the young Shareholder learned all about Men's Fun well before his due.