Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  Desolation Road was a town without consequence or heaven-ringing names. It was, simply was, and its contentment to merely be infuriated Arnie Tenebrae, who could not be without becoming. Desolation Road bored her. Her adoptive parents bored her. She hated their little lovingnesses; their multitudinous kindnesses made her cringe.

  “I will break free,” she confided to her image. “Like Limaal, making a great name for himself in Belladonna, or even Taasmin; she was strong enough to break away from the mould of society and live among the rocks like a hyrax, why can't I?”

  She shunned the presence of people, even her doting father and mother, for she knew that people thought she was a little gold-digger playing on the fond fancies of an old man and woman. She found a way into Dr. Alimantando's house and spent long hours of blissful solitude reading his volumes and speculations on time and temporality in the privacy of the abandoned weather-room. Gone, gone gone gone, everyone was going in Desolation Road, everyone who was interesting and adventurous: what of Arnie Tenebrae?

  One day she spied rollers of dust advancing across the desert plains and knew, even before they transformed into a dozen MRCW-armed men and women in combat duns mounted on all-terrain motor trikes, that this was salvation riding across the desert for her.

  At first she was wary of scaring that salvation away like a little nervous bird, so she kept to the back of the crowd when the armed soldiers read the proclamation that they were the North West Quartersphere Truth Corps of the Whole Earth Army and that this town was under temporary occupation by the same. She held her silence as the soldiers explained the declared aims of the Whole Earth Army: the closure of the world to further immigration, the passing of control of the environmental maintenance equipment from ROTECH to the planetary authorities, the delegation to each continent of a regional autonomous parliament, the promotion of a truly indigenous planetary culture untainted by the dross and degeneracy of the Motherworld, and the smashing of the transplanetary corporations whose grasping corruption was draining the earth white. She did not join the protestors when Dominic Frontera and three employees of Bethlehem Ares Railroads were taken and placed under house arrest for the duration of the occupation, neither was she present when Ruthie Frontera, distraught and smeared with tears, rolled around on the earth in front of the house where the prisoners were guarded.

  Rather, she hid under the shade of an umbrella tree and watched the guerrillas swarm over Dr. Alimantando's house doing things to the microwave tower. She saw the logo on the crates of radio equipment and suddenly the occupation was clear.

  “All Swing Radio,” she murmured to herself, tracing the words on the crates with her fingertips. “All Swing Radio.”

  All Swing Radio was vampire music. In some towns to be caught listening to All Swing Radio would earn you a fine, fifty days community service, confiscation of the radio, or even a public flogging. It was the music of subversives, terrorists, anarchists who roamed the empty places of the world on their terrain trikes looking for microwave towers into which they could plug their illegal transmitters and broadcast their subversive, terrible, anarchic music to the kids in the dead-end alleys, the empty gymhalls, the backseats of rikshas, closed-down bars, shut-up co-ops, and little Arnie Tenebrae/Mandella listening to the Big Big Sound of the New Music under the quilts at two minutes of two in the morning. It was the best music in the world, it set your feet on fire, friend, it made you want to dance, friend, it made the girls hitch up their skirts or roll up their overalls and dance and the boys somersault and back-flip and spin around the floor, or the concrete, or the packed brown earth: the bold, bad basement music of Dharamjit Singh and Hamilton Bohannon, Buddy Mercx and the King of Swing himself, the Man Who Fell Through the Time Warp: Glenn Miller, and his Orchestra. It was basement music from smoky cellars deep under Belladonna and hole-in-the-wall recording studios with names like American Patrol and Yellow Dog and Zoot Money: it was music that shocked your mother, it was All Swing Radio, and it was illegal.

  It was illegal because it was propaganda though it carried no political message. It was subversion through joy. It was the best PR job in the history of the profession, and its success could be measured by the fact that half a million kids a day whistled its famous call sign, and as many parents found the tune on their lips without ever knowing what it was. From the rice paddies of the Great Oxus to the towers of Wisdom, from the favelas of Rejoice to the cattle stations of Woolamagong, as the hour of twenty o'clock approached, the kids would tune their dials to the Fun 881, and tonight that famous call sign would thunder across the globe from Desolation Road.

  “Fun 881,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “Here, in Desolation Road.” It was as if God had sent down his holy angels to sing and dance just for her.

  “Hey!” A burly young woman was waving a Multi-Role Combat Weapon at her. “Don't poke around with the gear, kid.” Arnie Tenebrae fled back to her hiding place beneath the umbrella tree and watched the soldiers at work until dinner time. That night she listened to All Swing Radio at two minutes of two under the quilts so that her adoptive parents would not hear. Tears of frustration ran down her cheeks as the mad, bad music played and played and played.

  There was a certain Engineer Chandrasekahr, a farm boy not much older than herself from Great Oxus who smiled at her next morning as she pulled carrots from the garden. Arnie Tenebrae smiled back and bent lower so he could see all the way down the front of her overall. That afternoon Engineer Chandrasekahr came over to engage her in conversation and tried to touch her, but Arnie Tenebrae was a little frightened by the forces she had released in the boy soldier and rebuffed his puppylike approaches. But that evening she went to the wooden hut the Truth Corps used as a broadcasting studio and asked for Sublieutenant Chandrasekahr. When he came to the door, Arnie Tenebrae flashed her shining white teeth at him and opened her blouse to display her proud nine-year-old breasts gleaming like temple domes in the light of the moonring.

  Afterwards they lay in slots of skylight beaming through the shutters. Arnie Tenebrae turned on the radio and said, “Take me with you.”

  Engineer Chandrasekahr's foot tapped unconsciously in time with the Big Swing Beat.

  “That is not so easy.”

  “It is too. You have to move to a new relay in a couple of days. Just take me with you.”

  “We are a secret, high-mobility unit, we cannot take just anyone who wants to come along. You are asking for much trust.”

  “I've just given you the most trust any woman can give. Can't you give me some in return?”

  “What about your ideological commitment?”

  “You mean all that ‘close the sky’ stuff? Sure, I know the facts. Listen to this.” Arnie Tenebrae sat, up and dominated Engineer Chandrasekahr with her light-slatted body as she counted off ideologies on her sticky fingers. “It's like this, isn't it? One Praesidium SailShip can hold a million and a half colonists, and when they come to our earth there has to be houses and farms and food and water and jobs for them. And if ten of these vehicles arrive every year, that's fifteen million people, which is five cities the size of Meridian, every year. And if this goes on for a hundred years, that's three hundred cities, a thousand SailShips, a billion and a half people, and where is the food, the water, the jobs, the houses, the factories, the farms going to come from for all these people? And that is what the Whole Earth Army is about, keeping the earth for its own people, keeping away all the greedy people who would take our beautiful world away from us and fill it up with their horrid bodies. Isn't that right?”

  “That's putting it simply.”

  “So, I know the principles. Am I in, then?”

  “No…”

  Arnie Tenebrae shrieked her frustration and bit Engineer Chandrasekahr's chest. Grandfather Haran banged on the wall and shouted for her to keep the radio down a bit.

  “I want in!”

  “It's not up to me.”

  “Look, I can do things for you you wouldn't believe.”

  “Yo
u already have, my little cherry-pip.”

  “I don't mean that way. I mean like weapons, like things that would make you unbeatable. Listen, there was an old man used to live here years ago. He invented this place and the story goes that he met a green man and went off to travel through time with him, though I don't know about that bit. But his house is right over there where you've got the transmitters and it's full of ideas for things like you wouldn't believe.”

  “Like what wouldn't I believe?”

  “Like sonic blasters, like electromagnetogravitic field inducers you can use either offensively or defensively, you can even use them to shut down gravity over short ranges; like light-scatter fields that make you the next best thing to invisible…

  “Good God.”

  “I know it's there, I've seen it. Now, this is the deal. If you want it, you've got to take me with it. So, am I in or am I out?”

  “We leave tomorrow at dawn. If you want to come, be there.”

  “Bet your ass I do. Now, get your clothes on and tell your chief Arnie Mandella's coming.”

  Arnie Tenebrae believed in paying only as much as a thing was worth to her. That was why she found the unfamiliar discomfort between her thighs good value received for being able to sit behind Engineer Chandrasekahr on his terrain trike as the Truth Corps revved and roared into the pre-dawn glow. She clung close to Engineer Chandrasekahr and felt the desert wind burn her cheeks and try to tug the tube of rolled documents from her shoulder.

  —No, no, she told the wind, that is mine, with these papers I can make the heavens ring with my name. She looked down at the Whole Earth Army badge pinned to her khaki overalls and felt a glow of excitement swell up inside her.

  The horizon dipped beneath the sun and the world was flooded with shape and light. Arnie Tenebrae turned to look back on Desolation Road, a jumble of amber, red and shining silver. Nothing could have looked more like an insignificant, stultifying little hole and as she realized she was leaving it behind, Arnie Tenebrae knew a savage and keening joy. She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck. This was her consummation, bouncing along on the back of a rebel terrain trike into exile with the romantic revolutionaries. This was the pinnacle of Arnie Tenebrae's insignificant, stultified little life.

  Despite the halo around her left wrist and all things mechanical hers to command, Taasmin Mandella was finding sainthood rather boring. She resented spending hour after hour in the little shrine her father had added onto his already haphazard domicile: outside, the sun was shining and the green things were growing and here she was in her small dark room taking lists of supplications from old women with dead husbands (properly dead husbands; from time to time she wondered where her erstwhile aunt had gone on the morning she vanished from Desolation Road with the ragtag rebels) or placing her healing left hand upon broken radios, autoplanters, riksha engines and water pumps to make them whole again.

  As one devout old woman left and another entered, a shaft of yellow sunlight would beam through the door and Taasmin Mandella wished she could return to her lizard days, basking naked and spiritual on the hot red rocks, free of any responsibility save to God the Panarchic. But the Blessed Lady had laid a holy on us upon her.

  “My world is changing,” the little crop-haired urchin of a woman dressed in picture-cloth had said. “For seven hundred years I was a saint of machines and machines only, for machines were all there were, and through them I shaped this world and made it a good and pleasant place for man. And now that man has come, my relationships must be redefined. They have made me their god: I did not ask them to make me their god, much less desire to be that god, but it is what I am and I must bear the responsibility. Thus I have chosen selected mortals; if you'll forgive the expression, but it comes rather readily to me, to be my agents upon the earth. You see, I have no voice with which to speak to humans but human voices. Therefore to you I am freely giving my prophetic voice and my power over machinery: this halo”—and it had sprung into luminescence around her left wrist—“is the sign of your prophethood. It is a pseudo-organic informational resonance field, by its power all machinery is yours to command. Use it wisely and well, for you will be called to account for your stewardship of it someday.”

  It seemed like a dream now. But for that same halo around her left wrist none of it might ever have happened. Small-town girls do not meet saints. Small-town girls who wander crazy and souldriven into the Great Desert are not transported home in a beam of light from a flying Blue Plymouth. They die in the desert and are turned to bone and leather. Small-town girls do not possess the power to control all machines through halos around their left wrists. Small-town girls are not prophets.

  That much was true. The Blessed Catherine (“call me Cathy, for God's sake: never, ever let anyone give you a title you haven't chosen yourself”) had demanded no especial virtue of her, merely to be wise and true. But there had to be more to Taasmin Mandella's prophetic mission than sitting in an incense-smoky room performing one-a-minute miracles for superstitious grandmothers from up and down the line.

  The magazine reporters had not helped either. She hadn't seen the magazine yet, for some reason her parents had hidden the advance copies from her, but she was sure that when it went onto the world's news-stands the pilgrims would be lined up all the way to Meridian. She would never see daylight at all.

  So she rebelled.

  “If they want me, they can come and find me.”

  “But Taasmin darling, you have responsibilities,” cooed her mother.

  “Use it wisely and well, for someday you will be called to account for your stewardship of it; that was all she said. Nothing about responsibility.”

  “She? Is that what you call Our Lady of Tharsis?”

  “That, and Cathy.”

  The Prophetess Taasmin kegan lunching in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, snoozing with the radio on at siesta time, planting rows of beans in her father's garden, and painting the white walls even whiter. If a miracle was needed, or a healing, or a prayer, she would perform it there and then, in the hotel, on the veranda, in the field, by the wall. When the demands of the faithful grew too much, she would take herself off to a quiet corner of Grandfather Haran's garden and, finding a quiet spot among the trees, slip out of her clothes into the simple pleasure of simply being.

  One summer morning an old man appeared on the edge of town. He had a mechanical left arm, leg, and eye. He borrowed a spade from the Stalins, whose feud, in the absence of a worthy enemy, had internalized into mere husband/wife strife, and dug a large hole in the ground beside the railroad tracks. He walked round and round and round in this hole all day and all night, drawing much comment from the bemused citizens of Desolation Road, and all the next morning until Taasmin Mandella came to have a laugh at the curiosity. Seeing her, the old man stopped, looking long and hard at her, and asked, “Well, are you the one then?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Inspiration Cadillac, formerly Ewan P. Dumbleton of Hirondelle; Poor Child of the Immaculate Contraption.”

  Taasmin Mandella was unsure whether his final comment had been about himself or her.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Deadly serious. I have read about you in the magazines, young woman, and I must know, are you the one?”

  “Well, I might be.”

  “Give me a hand up, will you?”

  Taasmin stretched out her haloed left hand. It closed on Inspiration Cadillac's metal hand and blue fire crackled along his mechanical limbs and forked from his artificial eye.

  “You are the one, no mistaking,” he declared.

  Two days later a train drew up in Desolation Road. It was like no train anyone had ever seen before. It was a clanking, rattling, hissing old contraption threatening to burst its boilers at every stroke of its labouring drive-shafts. It hauled five dilapidated carriages trailing a squadron of prayer kites and prayer blimps and was decked out in a junkpile of religious flags, banners
, emblems and holy paraphernalia of all types. The carriages were jammed with passengers. They poured from the doors and windows as if under pressure, and at Inspiration Cadillac's command tore carriage and train apart and built from the fragments a hasty shantytown of tents, lean-tos and favelas. In the midst of the furious activity none of the spectators failed to notice that all the workers possessed at least one mechanical part to their bodies.

  An official delegation soon arrived headed by Dominic Frontera and his three newly appointed constables, whom he had requisitioned from Meridian in case the Whole Earth Army should attempt another coup.

  “Just what the hell are you doing?”

  “We have come to be servants of the prophet of the Blessed Lady,” said Inspiration Cadillac, and on cue the cyborg shantybuilders genuflected.

  “We are the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption,” continued Inspiration Cadillac. “Formerly known as Dumbletonians, we believe in the emulation of St. Catherine's example of the mortification of the flesh by replacing our sinful fleshly parts with pure, spiritual mechanical ones. We believe in the spirituality of the mechanical, the total transubstantiation of flesh into metal, and equal rights for machines. Alas, our zeal for this last principle led to our expulsion from the Ecumenical Enclave of Christadelphia: the burning of the factories was quite unintentional, we were sadly misunderstood and much abused. However, we have learned through various channels, spiritual and secular, of a young woman blessed by the Lady to be a prophet and so we have come in response to an angelic vision to serve her and through her attain our perfect mortification.” As Inspiration Cadillac concluded, Taasmin Mandella arrived, disturbed from her meditations by the growing din. As she beheld the shantytown and its ragged tenants, a cry went up from the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption.

  “It is her! She! She's the one!” The entire mass of Dumbletonians fell to their knees in attitudes of adoration.