Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  Kid's too young for this, his comrades said, but they brought him along week in and week out because to have left him out would have broken shift solidarity. Shift solidarity was the guiding light of the production unit's life. You stuck by your mates or you didn't stick at all. That was before Johnny Stalin learned the meaning of the tiger-striped suggestion box.

  Johnny Stalin learned much in his early months in the corporation. He learned to bow to the manager and pull faces behind his back. He learned to please all men while pleasing himself. He learned the involutions of the pseudo-science called economics and its spurious laws, and he courted its idiot bastard daughter called industrial feudalism. He drank and joked with the boys at night and by day he welded pieces of plastic shaped like ears to pieces of plastic shaped like Ps and passed them on to Shareholder 703286544, who welded them to a piece of plastic shaped like a fat man. The weeks, the months passed drab and featureless as paper tissues pulled from a box until one day, in mid-weld, Johnny Stalin realized that he had no idea where the plastic pieces shaped like P's, ears and fat men went, or what they formed. For twelve months he had been welding two pieces of plastic together and now he had to know why. Dreaming in his numbered bed at night, plastic mouldings tumbled around him and fused into huge plastic mountains, into plastic cordilleras, into plastic continents, into crushing plastic moons at the heart of which lay a piece of plastic shaped like an ear welded to a piece of plastic shaped like a letter P.

  One day, feigning mild diarrhoea, he excused himself from the clocking-off shift and hid in the toilet until the gravity bus had rumbled and clanked away up its slot. Quietly slipping through the swinging doors, he sauntered past the stony silent Shareholders and reached the beginning of the line where the components came through the wall and embarked upon their journey of fusion. He followed the meandering production line, peering over Shareholders’ shoulders as they welded, screwed on knobs, pressed together housings and casings, soldered electronics, and fitted trims. Intent on Company business, most ignored him; to those few who shot him a quizzical glance, 703286543 put on his best managerial expression (perfected through months of practice) and said in a foremanly fashion, “Very good, very good, carry on.” He was beginning to gather what the device was—a combination radio, tea maker, and bedside lamp, a useful enough item to be certain, though he could not see where his plastic ear and letter P made a contribution. At the end of the production line the radioteamakerlamps passed through a slot in the wall and vanished. Beside the conveyor was a door marked Management Only. Johnny Stalin pushed the door open and found himself in a short corridor at the end of which was another door marked Management Only. Beside him the completed radioteamakerlamps moved along the conveyor toward another slot in the wall. Johnny Stalin pushed open the second door marked Management Only and found himself in a room so similar to the one he had left that he thought for a moment that he had taken the wrong door. Then he looked harder and saw that all was utterly different. The radioteamakerlamps appeared out of the wall and passed down a production line where Company Shareholders in paper worksuits and plastic identity badges reduced them to their component parts. A deproduction line, a disassembly line. Numb with surprise, Johnny Stalin found the point on the line where his counterpart placed the plastic ear and letter P under a radio beam and broke the bonds that held them together. The number of that Shareholder was 345682307. At the end of the line, down by position 215682307, a stream of plastic and chrome components passed through a slot in the wall beside which was a door marked Management Only.

  That night, while drinking fizzes in the bar, Shareholder 703286543 wrote on a small slip of paper:

  “In the interests of merchantable-product per labour-unit quotas, I suggest you investigate and subsequently close down all production lines for product 34216. Respectfully, Shareholder 703286543, J. Stalin, Esq.”

  Next morning he dropped his tiny bombshell into the yellow and black striped box marked Suggestions.

  Within two weeks the members of Shift C were relocated to new production lines. Johnny Stalin smiled to himself to think of the grey men in grey suits discovering to their horror the economic abomination of a factory that constantly built and dismantled the same article over and over and over again. When the relocation was done, Shareholder 703286543 found himself in a new room in a new corridor working on a new line at a new credit rating. He bought a little radio for his room so that he could listen to the New Big Band Hour on Sunday afternoons. He liked the new music very much; Hamilton Bohannon, Buddy Mercx, Jimmy Chung, and the greatest of the great, Glenn Miller. He could afford to buy the little trinkets and bauds from the costermongers on Miracle Mall that made all the difference to Company work overalls. He could afford to get drunk three nights a week. He could afford a girlfriend; a thin, crop-haired child with glasses whom he took for romantic (and expensive) promenades by Sepia Bay and upon whom he lavished his money but starved of his trust. Some grey suit in managerial was taking an interest in him, he reckoned, and he decided to keep the fires of that interest well-stoked and the grey-suited guardian angels hovering near.

  At lunch one day he overheard Shareholder 108462793 whisper something to Shareholder 93674306 while passing the sauce bottle around a Union meeting in the back of Delahanty's Bar. In the cubicle in the men's toilet Johnny Stalin pencilled a little note to the angels in grey and relinquished it to the Suggestion box.

  Shareholders 108462793 and 93674306 were absent from work the next day, and the next, and the next, and then the line supervisor informed the shift that they had volunteered for redeployment to another line because of manning shortages. Johnny Stalin would almost have believed it had he not heard the sounds of Company police raiding Delahanty's rattling from his air-conditioning slot. He had had to turn his radio up quite loud to drown out the shouts and cries. Shareholder 396243088 next door had banged on the wall most unpleasantly for an hour or more for him to keep it down.

  Two days later Shareholder 396243088 made a joke over lunch about the sexual conduct of Company directors during board meetings. Johnny Stalin had roared with laughter like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, he sent a little note to the grey suit.

  “I accuse Shareholder 396243088 of not subscribing to Proper Thought with regard to the Company, its Venerable Board of Directors, and the principles of industrial feudalism. He is disloyal and disrespectful and I suspect him of holding pro-union sympathies.”

  When Shareholder 396243088's job as Section Overseer suddenly became vacant (“Relocation and Promotion,” said the line supervisor), Johnny Stalin was the youngest man ever to be promoted to the position in the light agricultural engineering division. He held the credit rating of a man five times his age and experience. The Model Worker of the Year (light engineering section) awards came upon their annual rounds. Johnny Stalin anonymously exposed a system of petty corruption and pilfering with connections as high as junior management and, by good timing, became Model Worker of the Year (light engineering section) just two days before the corporate axe fell on twelve jobs in the agricultural division. In a sound display of Shareholder solidarity, Johnny Stalin declined to attend the Company tribunal sessions in which the twelve defendants were charged by the court of workforce and management alike and summarily dismissed. “It could have been any of us,” said the Model Worker of the Year to his colleagues on Shift A as they sipped tangerine daiquiris in the newly refurbished Delahanty's Bar. “It could happen to anyone.”

  It did. It happened to Shareholder 26844437 (I suspect Shareholder of engaging in industrial espionage and gross betrayal for rival companies which I, being a loyal and true Shareholder, shall not mention by name, respectfully, J. Stalin) Shareholders 216447890 and 552706123 (I suspect Shareholders ____ of having illicit sexual congress on Company time, respectfully, J. Stalin), and Shareholder 664973505 (I accuse Shareholder ____ Line Supervisor on Production Line 76543, Light Agricultural Engineering division, of laxity, sloth and absence of zeal in promoting the Nin
efold Virtues of Industrial Feudalism, respectfully, J. Stalin).

  It was merely a matter of time before the grey suits invited this paragon of industrial virtue to join junior management. It was then that he discovered that there had not been one grey suit, but eleven of them, now covering three sides of an oak table, all of them rolled off whatever production line it was that manufactured junior managers. At the head of the table sat the oldest junior, the grey suit to whom the other grey suits deferred. At the bottom of the table, a respectful distance from the luminaries of the managerial castes, stood Johnny Stalin. Oldest grey suit made a short speech filled with expressions like “model worker,” “shining example,” “productive unit,” “Company loyalty,” “Higher values,” and “Shareholder who understands the principles of Industrial Feudalism.” Johnny Stalin carefully memorized these clichés to use in his own speeches of praise and exhortation. After the interview, sticky cocktails were served, congratulations delivered, and Johnny Stalin bowed himself out of the presence of the managerial caste. On his return to his numbered room he found an envelope containing his relocation documents to the production management training unit pushed under his door. On the back of the door he found a standard-sized paper suit, grey, hanging from a plastic hanger, grey.

  Wisdom, capital of the world, stands upon forty hills by the edge of the Syrtic Sea and its crystal towers are draped in curtains of green vines and summer blossoms. Llangonnedd is built upon an island in a lake and over the centuries has burst these bounds to grow whole districts that float upon a lattice of pontoons or perch precariously upon thousands of pilings. Lyx stands upon both lips of a great chasm and across its twenty bridges, each the masterpiece and care of one of the departments of the Universuum, go the hooded and gowned Masters of the Faculties, and from its short cylindrical towers fly ten thousand prayer-kites, supplications for the continued wisdom of the Masters of Lyx. The ROTECH redoubt, China Mountain, is a federation of a hundred small villages set in an exquisite parkland. There is a village suspended from the branches of trees like the woven nests of certain birds, another is made from exquisitely glazed and fired porcelain, another stands upon a floating island in a lake, another is of gaily painted caravans and pavilions that wends and wanders through the woods, another is built upon a web of diamond filaments caught between the pinnacles of China Mountain peak.

  These are some of the great cities of the world. To this list, Belladonna must be added. Without doubt, it is the peer of any mentioned here but its wonders are less apparent. To the traveller coming upon Belladonna across the dry and dusty Stampos all that can be seen of her are a few dish antennae, a tall air-traffic control tower, a few dirty adobe lean-tos, and several square kilometres of tyre-marked runway. Yet Belladonna is there, present yet unseen like the Divine essence in the Paschal host: it is no lie, the wickedest city in the world awaits the traveller, just a few metres beneath his feet, like the ant-lion, hungry to draw men down its maw.

  Belladonna is proud of its appetites, proud of its wickedness. It is an old hard bitch of a city; a port city, a sailor's whore of a city. It is always three o'clock in the morning in Belladonna under the concrete sky. There are more street corners in her than anywhere in the world. And in a city with more bars, sushi houses, tavernas, sex boutiques, wineries, whorehouses, seraglios, bath houses, private cinema clubs, all-night cabarets, cafés, amusement arcades, restaurants, pachinko parlours, billiard halls, opium dens, gambling hells, dance palaces, card schools, beauticians, craps joints, body shops, massage parlours, private detective's offices, narcotics refineries, speakeasies, saunas, bunco booths, gin palaces, bondage basements, singles bars, flesh markets, flea markets, slave auctions, gymnasiums, art galleries, bistros, reviews, floor shows, gun shops, book stalls, torture chambers, relaxariums, jazz clubs, beer cellars, costermongers’ barrows, rehearsal rooms, geisha houses, flower shops, abortion clinics, tea rooms, wrestling rings, cock pits, bear pits, bull and badger pits, Russian roulette salons, barber shops, wine bars, fashion boutiques, sports halls, cinemas, theatres, public auditoria, private libraries, museums of the bizarre and spectacular, exhibitions, displays and performance areas, casinos, freak shows, onearmed-bandit malls, strip shows, side shows, tattoo parlours, religious cults, shrines, temples and morticians than any other place on earth, it can be hard to find one man if he does not want to be found. But if he is as famous as Limaal Mandella, then it is easier to find him in Belladonna than in any other of the world's great cities, for Belladonna loves to flatter famous men. There was not a street sweeper or shit shoveller who did not know that Limaal Mandella, the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known could be found in the back room of Glenn Miller's Jazz Bar on Sorrowful Street. Likewise, there were few people who could not stream off Limaal Mandella's lists of conquests, Belladonna being a city where lists ascribe greatness. There is not a single great Belladonian who has not several great lists behind him.

  What then, were the names of those Limaal Mandella defeated to become champion? It is soon told.

  Tony Julius, Oliphaunt Dow, Jimmy “Jewel” Petrolenko, “Aces” Quartuccio, Ahmed Sinai Ben Adam, “Sack” Johnson, Itamuro (Sammy) Yoshi, Louie Manzanera, Raphael Raphael Jr., “Fingers” Lo, Noburo G. Washington, Henry Naminga, Bishop R. A. Wickramasinghe, Mr. C. Asiim, “Jaws” Jackson Jr., “Iceman” Larry Lemescue, Jesus Ben Sirach, Valentine Quee, Mr. Peter Melterjones, “Frenchy” Rey, Dharma Ailmangansoreng, Nehemiah Chung (The Ripper), Mr. David Bowie, Mikal “Micky” Manzanera (no relation), Saloman Salrissian, Vladimir “The Impaler” Dracul, Mr. Norman Mailer, Mr. Hairan Elissian, Mercedes Brown, “Red” Futuba, Judge (Judge Dread) Simonsenn, “Prof.” Chaz Xavier, Black John Delorean, Hugh O'Hare, Mr. Peter Melterjones (again).

  In victory Limaal Mandella was a modest man. He scorned the expensive affectations of his opponents; the mink-lined cue cases, the diamond-filled teeth, the mother-of-pearl inlaid cues, the shop-built bodyguards, the solid gold flechette pistols: all the trivia of losers. Of the fortune he amassed, sixteen percent went to his manager, Glenn Miller, who launched his own “American Patrol” label for new underground bands and built a studio for them to record in, he kept enough to hold body and soul together and gave the rest anonymously to charities for the relief of retired prostitutes, hot stew for Belladonna's 175,000 registered mendicants, and the rehabilitation for alcohol, narcotic and pornography addicts.

  However modest, even charitable, his personal lifestyle, Limaal Mandella could not be said to possess a surfeit of self-effacement. He believed he was the best with a conviction unshakable as heaven. He grew zealous, he grew thin, he grew a beard which only highlighted the steely tint in his eyes. Concerned at his protégé's fanaticism, Glenn Miller watched him one morning after the band had packed up and gone home, potting ball after ball after ball, practicing practicing practicing, perfecting, honing, never satisfied.

  “You drive yourself too hard, Limaal,” said Glenn Miller, resting his trombone on the table. Balls clunked into pockets, impelled by relentless mathematics of cue. “No one could do more than you. Look, you've been here, a year, yes? Just over, twenty-six months, to be precise; you're not long turned eleven, you've beaten men years more experienced than you; you're the champion, the toast of Belladonna, isn't that enough? What more can you want?”

  Limaal Mandella waited to clear the table before answering.

  “Everything. It all.” The white rolled to rest in the centre of the table. “Best in Belladonna's not enough while there's someone out there who might be better than me. Until I know that there either is or isn't, I can't rest.” He picked the balls out of the pockets and squared them up for another match against himself.

  The challenge was born. To the man who could defeat him Limaal Mandella would give him his crown, half his personal riches, and his word that he would never touch a cue again. Of the man he defeated he asked only that he bow and acknowledge the victor. The challenge went out on the airwaves of Glenn Miller's Sunday evening Big
Band Hour and the nine continents rose to meet it.

  And the challengers, they are another list.

  There were young men, old men, middle-aged men, tall men, short men, fat men, thin men, sick men, healthy men, bald men, hairy men, clean-shaven men, bearded men, men with moustaches, men without hats, black men, red men, brown men, yellow men, off-white men, happy men, sad men, clever men, simple men, nervous men, confident men, humble men, arrogant men, serious men, laughing men, silent men, men who liked to talk, straight men, gay men, men who were both, men who were neither, blue-eyed men, brown-eyed men, green-eyed men, radar-eyed men, bad men, good men, men from O and Meridian and Wisdom, men from Xanthe and Chryse and the Great Oxus, men from Grand Valley and Great Desert and the Archipelago, Transpolaran men and men from Borealis, the men of Solstice Landing, men from Llangonnedd and Lyx, from Kershaw and Iron Mountain, men from Bleriot and Touchdown, men from great cities and tiny hamlets, men from the mountains and men from the valleys, men from the forests and men from the plains, men from the deserts and men from the seas; they came and they came and they came until the towns were emptied and the machines stood idle in the factories and the crops filled and ripened in the fields under the summer sun.