Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  Preflight checks completed, Sevriano and Batisto brought the fans up to speed and readied to dump ballast.

  “Child of Grace,” muttered Ed Gallacelli. Battle armoured security men advanced across the field toward the Wild Geese. Anxious glances were exchanged across the command board. Something must be done, but what and by whom was uncertain. Ed Gallacelli looked from face to face.

  “All right,” he said. “I'll get rid of them.” Before any word of protest could be voiced he had slipped out of the crew door onto the concrete.

  “By the way,” he shouted, voice barely audible over the growing roar of the engines. “It was me all along! Me! I was your father!” Then with a grin to the control cabin he waved farewell and ran toward the approaching guards. He fished in his commodious pockets.

  “Here, catch this!” He threw a mechanical dove into the air and it soared toward the Company men, singing its subsonic song. When he saw the security men double up vomiting and migraine-ridden he cock-a-doodle-dooed his inventiveness, threw up his arms, and released a swarm of robot bees into the air. Armed with laser stings, his tiny inventions warmed over the crippled security men until one of their number with greater presence of mind than his comrades downed both sonic dove and killer bees with hypersonic bursts from his MRCW.

  “Try this on for size,” shouted Ed Gallacelli. He heard the ’lighter engines roar into take-off and he suddenly felt happy for no reason that he could discern. From his sleeves issued a stream of dense black smoke. Before the cloud enveloped him he glanced over his shoulder to see the airship bank up and away from Steeltown, heading north.

  They were gone.

  He was glad.

  Slipping heat-goggles over his eyes, Ed Gallacelli closed with the security men and ran around, kicking asses and balls in utter invisibility until an unscheduled wind blew and blew his smokescreen over the horizon.

  “Oh, dear,” said Ed Gallacelli sheepishly. “I surrender.” He raised his arms. Instantly fingers were seen to tighten on MRCW firing studs. “Oops. Sorry.” He gave a clenched fist salute. “Long live Concordat. Amen!” He began to laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh because the smart security man had taken off his helmet and it was Mikal Margolis and he should have known all along and wasn't it the best joke of all, better than the tricks he'd kept hidden up his sleeve and then the squad commander gave an order and twelve laser beams spat out and bathed him in flames and did not stop firing until the ashes began to blow away on the treacherous wind.

  After the battle of Yellow Ford, Arnie Tenebrae built a pyramid of heads outside her command tent. The Parliamentarians had been routed, fleeing across rice paddies shedding weapons, helmets, uniforms, wounded in their panic to escape the tiger-painted demons loping tirelessly in pursuit. She had ordered her death's head commandos to decapitate any dead or wounded and bring the heads to her. The pyramid was as tall as Arnie Tenebrae. She looked at the grinning heads of ploughboys, riksha mechanics, ’lighter pilots, tin miners, college students, insurance salespersons, and a certain unclean madfire blazed up in her. That night she painted her face in the semblance of the deathbird and as she injected herself with morphine from the medical supplies the deathbird of the dark places rose before her summoning, and told her in shrieks like those of a tortured man that she was the Avatar, the embodiment of the Cosmic Principle; Vastator, the Destroyer, Leveller of Worlds, Slayer of Gods, She who Cannot Be Predicted.

  Yellow Ford, Hill 27, Elehanua's Ferry, Harper's Barn: the wings of the deathbird scattered the Parliamentarians like chaff.

  “Boys against men,” she told her commanders. “Hundreds to one they outnumber us, yet we reap them like rice!”

  She knew her captains feared her. They were right to do so. She was mad, she sought bodies to throw on the altar of destruction, she thought she was a god, a demon, a dark angel. They were right to think these things about her. They were true. Victory followed victory.

  “Our field-inducer weapon systems makes us invincible,” she declared to her staff after the Battle of Sakamoto Junction. Her captains and lieutenants knew that she meant that it was Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator, that made them invincible. They began to fear that she was right about that too.

  Then at the battle of Tetsenok the Parliamentarians somehow turned the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group advance into a retreat. Arnie Tenebrae was not surprised. She had smelled defeat on the wind that morning.

  “There is someone out there who wants me,” she said. Doubt began to infest her command, doubt and the wavering of commitment. Arnie Tenebrae did not accept this doubt. How could there be doubt in the living presence of the personification of the Power Cosmic?

  Yet at the next staff meeting Lieutenant Lim Chung asked, “Why are we fighting if we don't gain anything?”

  Arnie Tenebrae did not feel the need to answer. Later she had Lieutenant Lim Chung taken far out into the forest, stripped, spread-eagled between two trees, and left to the elements and time.

  After the battle of Hill 66, when the Parliamentarians overran the Whole Earth Army's entrenched positions despite the latters’ invincible field-inducer weapon systems and invisibility fields, a whey-faced farmboy with a truce flag on his back came blundering into the Tactical Group rearguard command headquarters. Arnie Tenebrae listened patiently to the Parliamentarian's terms of surrender. Then she asked two questions.

  “What is your name?”

  “Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe, No. 703286543.”

  “Who is your chief of staff?”

  “Marshall Quinsana, ma'am. Marshall Marya Quinsana.”

  Marya Quinsana. Well well well.

  Arnie Tenebrae did not have her rejection terms sent back on Trooper MacNaughton Bellewe's flayed skin, as she had intended. The boy was released alive and whole at the edge of the battle zone with a salutation from general to general in his hand and a string of shrunken heads tied to his belt.

  After Hill 66 Arnie Tenebrae was quiet and dangerous. So another Cosmic Principle had entered the drama. The Avatar of the Avenger. Marvellous how all human strife and conflict was a symbolic enactment of loftier struggles between the Powers Cosmic so that every moment of the present was merely a fragment of the past repeating itself over and over again. Now the stage was set, the Götterdämmerung could fall, the Last Trump Blow and it would be her against Marya Quinsana: Vastator and Avenger as it always had been and always would be.

  Donohue's Ridge, Dharmstadt, Red Bridge: three crushing defeats in as many months. Arnie Tenebrae spent much time alone in her tent cross-legged on the floor meditating upon herself. Lieutenants and captains hurried about, little mice busy with reports of surrender, massacre, annihilation. They meant nothing. Human puppets must jig to the drums of the gods. Arnie Tenebrae's hands fluttered on the dirt floor—drumdrumdrumdrum. She and Marya Quinsana, they were the drummer girls, drumdrumdrum.

  She called all her remaining forces to her, less than two regular divisions, and withdrew them to the heart of the haunted Forest of Chryse to prepare for the final conflict.

  There was a wall. Built of old grey stone, mortarless, high as a man's waist, it did not look very important. But it was important. As with all walls, it was what was on either side of it that gave the wall meaning; whether it was a wall that shut out or a wall that shut in or a wall that merely separated. On one side of the wall was a field of potatoes, morning misty, grey, and cold as an old potato. In this field stood Bethlehem Ares Steel Transport Dirigible BA 3627S Eastern Enlightenment, powered down, empty, hatches open, cold fog swirling around its landing pods and into its open hatches. On the other side of the wall stood the Forest of Chryse, the Ladywood, oldest of all the world's young places, where St. Catherine herself planted the Tree of World's Beginning with her steel manipulators. The trees pressed close to the wall, leaning over the perimeter, dense and dark as the stones. Their branches reached toward the open potato field, in certain places their roots had tumbled sections of the old dry stone wall, yet the boundary persisted, for t
he boundary between forest and field was older than the wall that commemorated it. It was an exclusive wall, built to keep the world out of the forest rather than the forest out of the world.

  That was to prove to be important to the three men with backpacks threading through the outmost fringe of trees. Their first footfalls on the tree side of the wall made them men without state or station; exiles. They heard their explosive devices destroy the ’lighter, the blast oddly muffled by the trees, and they were glad, for now they could not go home again. The smoke of the burning rose from the potato field like an indictment of guilt.

  In their first hours they found many signs of the passing hand of man: small heaps of grey wood-ash, animal skins half gone to rot and leather, an unsightly litter of tin cans rusting to forest brown, but as their course drew them away from the wall toward the heartwoods the touches of humanity grew fewer. Here the mist seemed to defy the sun, lingering in damp dells and hollows, and even the sun itself seemed remote and impotent beyond the ceiling of leaves. The forest clung to itself, absorbed in a great root-dreaming, and the three men walked warily between the world-old trees. Here no bird sang, no vixen yelped, no jaguar mauled, no wombat grunted: not even the voices of the men disturbed the dreaming.

  The exiles camped that night under huge beech trees older than the memories of any man. The moonring glittered incredibly high and remote in the leaf-patterned sky, and the campfire seemed very small and foolhardy; drawing the dark things out of the woods to hover around the edge of the darkness. Rael Mandella Jr. sat watch and held the darkness at fire-length by reading extracts from the books his father had given him before the escape.

  “Take them,” he'd said. “They're for you, do with them what you will. Read them, burn them, wipe your ass with them, they're for you. For all useless years. I give them back to you.”

  Page after page was filled with arcane mathematical propositions written in his father's beautiful hand. They were his transpositions of Dr. Alimantando's workbooks, his life's labour. They meant nothing to Rael Jr. He stowed them in his pack and sat staring into the dark until Sevriano Gallacelli relieved him.

  That night the exiles dreamed an un-dream, an anti-dream of emptying in which the symbols and allegories of the dreaming mind were drained away, leaving only exhausting vacant blackness, like empty eye sockets.

  The next morning the three men marched through a pavilion of light held aloft by pillars of oak. Shafts of green sunlight shone through the canopy of leaves, rippling and dappling like green river water as the branches moved in the wind, but not one rustle of the great arboreal commotion reached the forest floor. Even the exiles’ trudging footfalls were swallowed up by the thick soft leaf-mould. In the afternoon Sevriano Gallacelli discovered a crashed reconnaissance helicopter impaled on a tree. Its crew lolled from open hatches, dead so long their eyes had been picked out by silent magpies and green moss had grown on their tongues. A small hole, thin and straight as a pencil, had been melted through canopy, pilot and main engine.

  “Lasers,” said Sevriano Gallacelli. Sufficient epitaph pronounced upon the old tragedy, the three men pushed on toward the heartwoods. Until then no word had been spoken that day. In the successive hours they came upon many memories of war and outrage: streamers of ripped parachute silk waving gently from the branches of a stand of elms; a combat-fatigued skeleton with a fern growing out of its grin; charred circles in the trampled leaf-mould of deepwood clearings; bodies perched in the forks of branches, peculiar weapons propped at the ready. Toward evening they came upon the grimmest memento mori: at a path's crossing, the forked limb of a tree thrust into the earth, impaled upon its tines, human heads, eye-sockets empty, lips torn away by weasels, skin peeled into shreds and tatters.

  In the night the trees drew close around the campfire and again drained the exiles dry of dreams.

  All the next morning they travelled through a landscape shattered by war. A great battle had been fought here. Trees were blasted into white splinters, the earth was torn and ripped into craters and foxholes. The land was heavy with fresh memories of atrocity: a burned-out one-man airbike, no sign of the one man, a framed photograph of a handsome woman with “All my love, Jeanelle” written in the bottom left corner, a cleared swathe of forest where a two-man fighter had crashed, ploughing up a furrow of muck and greenery. Rael Mandella Jr. picked up the photograph of the handsome woman and placed it in his breast pocket. He felt he needed a friend.

  Yet even in the middle of destruction the Ladywood was still strong. As if trying to exorcise evil remembrances, ropes of woodbine and clematis were reaching to cover the derelict war machines, and fresh bracken had sprung up to conceal the fallen beneath a green coiled shroud. Batisto Gallacelli found an operable military radio beside a dead radio operator. The boy was no more than nine years old. The three men ate their lunch to the accompaniment of the Jimmy Wong show. The sun shone down, the late dew pinpricked the grass, and an enormous peace flowed out of the east across the deserted battlefield.

  Rael Mandella Jr. left the photograph of the handsome woman with the dead radio operator. He looked as if he needed a friend the more.

  Early in the afternoon they passed from the battle-stained lands into the secret heartwoods of Chryse. Here stupendous redwoods rose one hundred two hundred three hundred metres into the sky, a city of soft red towers and wide needle-strewn boulevards. The three travellers should have been joyful so close to the heartwood and the legendary Tree of World's Beginning, so far from the war of the Powers, but a brooding sense of horror mounted minute upon minute, step upon step. Among the grandeur of the heartwoods it felt like a poison, a poison that had been drawn out of the air into the soil and the trees and communicated through the dream-draining nights into the exiles. They began to tread cautiously, eyes and ears alert, mistrustful as cats. They could not have said why. The pulse of an aircraft engine passing far to the east had them running shrieking for shelter amid the root buttresses of the redwoods. Drop by drop their humanity was being drained from them, drop by drop the forest was filling them up with its spirit, its horrifying, poisoned, blasted, inhuman spirit. They broke into a trot, a run, they did not know why they ran, or where, there was no pursuing enemy save the darkness of their hearts inside them. They ran from the fear, they ran from the horror, plunging heedless through bramble and thorn, stream and dyke, running running running to be free from the horror, but they could not escape it for they were the horror.

  Plunging through an enclosing ring of stupendous redwoods, they entered a circular clearing at the centre of which stood the mightiest tree of all, the Father Tree, head and shoulders taller than its strongest children. Branches swayed and swished in the wind cloud-high above them, beams of stained-glass light reached down through needles and lit the forest floor. The three men stood beneath the Tree of World's Beginning and looked up into the moving branches with unalloyed awe and joy. The holiness of that place had touched their buried humanity and released them from the horror. The branches moved and passed blessing over them.

  A figure in white stood among the roots of the tree, face lifted to the sun, a figure turning slowly, ecstatically, illuminated in a column of light. In its holy revolving the figure glimpsed the three spell-caught men.

  “Oh, hello,” said the figure in white, stepping out of the light to greet them, no longer a mystical angel but a middle-aged man in soiled samite. “What the hell kept you?”

  His name was Jean-Michel Gastineau, “also known as the Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee, one-time Most Sarcastic Man in the World,” and he loved to talk. The three exiles were content for him to do so as he busied himself with frying eggs and mushrooms in his small lean-to amid the root buttresses.

  “Used to be something of a celebrity, years back, when the world was younger, was in a travelling show; you know, ‘Wonders of Earth and Heaven,’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ all that; there was me (The Amazing Scorn), Leopold Lenz, the dwarf swor
d-swallower, one metre ten tall, given to swallowing one metre fifty swords; Tanqueray Bob the werewolf, a couple of others whose names I can't remember, the usual stuff anyway. Used to demonstrate how my sarcasm could kill cockroaches and peel paint off walls, pretty trivial stuff, till one day this poet fellow, big big guy, big as a beer tun, with a red beard, he comes and says he is the Greatest Satirist the World's Ever Known, and I says, no way son, I was born with the gift of sarcasm; you ever hear of some folks are born with the power of command in their voices so no one can resist them? Well, I had like the power of sarcasm and satire; why, did you know that at age two, the age kids say things to make each other blub, when I said things they made little cuts on them? Thought not. Anyway; there was to be this big duel of sarcasm in a fine and fancy hotel…half the district turned out and well, to cut a long story short, which has always been my problem, I got a teeny bit carried away. Soon as I started on this poet guy these big long rips opened up all over his skin and the blood came pouring out, I shoulda stopped then, I shoulda, but I couldn't, the sarcasm had hold of me, I kept going and everyone in the audience starts bleeding and crying and tearing their hair out and the big guy, well, he just had one big coronary and dropped dead, right there. Well, that was the end of that, but what I didn't know was that this guy was some kind of local hero, a pretty big man in more than the obvious sense, and shoot, they came after me with guns and dogs and hawks and hunting pumas and, well, I was pretty shook up, I just ran and ran and ended up here.

  “I said to myself, Jean-Michel Gastineau, you're too dangerous to live among folks, if that tongue of yours ever gets out of control again folks are going to die, so I vowed there would be no more Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee; I would see out my days as a lonely hermit, harming no one, shunning the company of my fellow humans. You see, the trees here they can't feel sarcasm. Their perceptions is too deep to be hurt by mere words. Anyhows, like youse I was drawn here to the heartwood, the Tree of World's Beginning. Those days the Ladywood was a friendly place, there was birds and wallabies and butterflies and all, not like now, not since the soldiers come: who'da thought it, pitched battles in Chryse Wood? Not Jean-Michel Gastineau: tell you this, since theyse come the place has got dark. You know what I mean, youse seen it closer than I; the forest has this kind of like…mind, all those roots and branches intertwining and all that, connections and connectivity, so I was told, each tree is like an element in the network; that big scrap over Bellweather way last month ripped up a lot of higher cognitive levels: things is back to the deep dreamtime again. Anyhows, I'm getting off the subject.”