Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “Brilliant,” Johnny Stalin told himself, gazing out of his 526th floor wall-window at the deformed landscapes around Kershaw. He remembered the dread that poisoned land had provoked in an eight-and-three-quarter-year-old boy arriving at the great cube. Now he loved the sludge pools and oil gushers. He had taken his many beloveds to promenade by Sepia Bay and whispered love's sweet syllables through his respirator into the receptive ears. Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.

  Knock on the door, “Enter,” bow, and Carter Housemann; rather, Carter Housemann's robot double, was beside him.

  “Postcards from China Mountain, St. Maud Station and New Brazil Jungleworld, the usual thanks and praises.” The last three replacees seemed content. And as long as the credit in their accounts continued to amass month by month they would continue to be content. “Also, the latest reports from the Desolation Road project.”

  Johnny Stalin's genial humour fled him.

  “Tell me the worst.” He rolled onto his back for Tai Manzanera to pummel his stomach. Still firm, thank God. Can't afford the least sign of weakness in upper management.

  “Good news and bad news, sir. Production levels are back to normal and resistance to industrial-feudal principles has been largely eradicated. Still some black-marketeering hitting the Company commissaries and a lack of support among the citizenry of Desolation Road, but the Concordat Organization has been effectively dispersed in the wake of the destruction of its managerial echelons.”

  “You can lay off the Company-speak with me. If that's the good news, what's the bad?” Transplant surgery kept the ulcers tolerable but three replacement stomachs and small intestines in as many years was more than the worth of the Desolation Road project.

  “We have information that Rael Mandella Jr. plans to return to Desolation Road to avenge his grandfather's death. Also, we know that he has been in contact with the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group in South Chryse.”

  “Child of grace. There, on the thighs, love. That family. Bad about the old man though. I knew him well when I was a kid. Shouldn't have done that.”

  “There was a certain revanchist element at work under the lead of the security director. However, there is an expression about omelettes and eggs, sir. I also have information that Taasmin Mandella is organizing a protest march to coincide with your visit to the works next month. I have heard that children all over the world have been receiving visions from the Blessed Lady herself: there have been two cases reported here in Kershaw, both children stole rides on transport dirigibles.”

  “Damnation. Recommendation?”

  “I would advise against you visiting the Desolation Road project at the planned time.”

  “I agree. Unfortunately, there are three board members accompanying me to make sure that I've done a good job in quelling dissent, and their diaries are very full.”

  At times the robot proxies were so human it unnerved Johnny Stalin. The double's shift of weight onto one leg as an indication that it wished to suggest something reminded him so greatly of Carter Housemann it made him shudder.

  “Might I inquire, as a related point, what is sir's favourite pursuit?”

  For an instant Johnny Stalin feared mass program failure in all his robot doubles.

  “Tilapia fishing on the Caluma River up in the Sinn Highlands. Why ask?”

  “Well, maybe sir would like to spend more time at such pleasurable pursuits and less on the dreary mundanities of the Desolation Road project.”

  So this was how it happened. He had been expecting this for a long time, that one day his robots would ask him if he would like to take a protracted holiday and slip a machine double into his shoes and behind his desk.

  “How long have you been working on the proxy?” He lay back and looked at the ceiling. Strange that it was not as fearful as he had anticipated. It wasn't like dying in the least.

  “The double has been ready for almost eighteen months.”

  “But up until now if you lacked the opportunity.”

  “Precisely, sir.”

  In his mind's eye Johnny Stalin watched fly lines plopping into the crashing dashing Caluma River. It was an attractive idea, shiny slippery and bright as a Caluma tilapia.

  “I suppose with the amount of evidence against me I have no other option.”

  The robot gave a fair impression of being scandalized.

  “By no means, sir! This is in your own best interest.”

  The leaves would be turning brown and amber up by Caluma Falls. There would be snow on the highlands and cold nights and warm fires in the Caluma lodge.

  “Well, Tai darling, I'm afraid you're out of a job. Robots don't have much call for masseuses.” He looked Tai Manzanera up and down. She was a good girl really. “I can't really leave you here either, not after this conversation. How'd you like to come with me? The fishing's great up in the Sinn this time of year.”

  On learning of her father's death, Taasmin Mandella imposed a vow of silence upon herself. Her final communication before her lips were sealed under a cumbersome metal mask fashioned for her by the Poor Children was that she would speak again only when justice was visited upon those criminals who had perpetrated these acts. Justice, she said, not vengeance.

  That same night she set off alone along the bluffs, away from the furnaceous hell-mouth glow of Steeltown, following her feet down the path of mortifiction she had walked those years before. She found again the little cave with its water drip. There were mummified beans and carrots on the floor. They made her smile behind her mask. She stood at the mouth of the cave and looked out at the Great Desert all scabbed and leprous under the hand of industrial man. She threw back her head and released all her power in a psalm of energy.

  Asleep in a thousand beds in a thousand homes a thousand children dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of ugly metal insects descending upon a desert plain and building a nest for themselves of towering chimneys and belching smoke and ringing metal. Pulpy white worker drones served the insects with pieces of red earth they had torn from the skin of the desert. Then a hole opened in the sky and out of the hole came St. Catherine of Tharsis dressed in a multicoloured ballet leotard. She held up her arms to show the oil oozing from her wounds and said, “Save my people, the people of Desolation Road.” Then the steel insects, who had been building an unsteady pyramid out of their interlocked metal bodies, reached the Blessed Lady with their manipulators and pulled her, shrieking and gasping, into the metal mill of their jaws.

  Kaan Mandella called them the Lost Generation.

  “Town's full of these kids,” he explained to his clients over the bar. Since Persis Tatterdemalion's grief-stricken flight into the sunset after Ed's murder, proprietorship of the Bar/Hotel had passed to him and Rajandra Das. “You trip over them going down to the store, you can't move near the station for kids sleeping on the platforms. I tell you, I don't know what that aunt of mine thinks she's going to achieve. Is a children's crusade going to impress…you know?” The name of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation was never to be mentioned in the hotel that had once borne its title. “The lost generation, that's what they are. Frightening; you look at those kids and poof! Nothing there. Empty eyes.”

  The empty eyes also unsettled Inspiration Cadillac. His arsenal of cautions, advices, admonitions and veiled threats was exhausted. All that remained was a bewildered awe at the capricious acts of the Grey Lady. He could not understand why the Divine Energy had chosen to manifest itself in such a weak and flawed vessel.

  PLGRMG SAT 12 NOVODEC 12OF12 Taasmin Mandella proclaimed in a crayoned notice on the basilica wall. ALL CLRCS, PR CHLDRN, PLGRMS, CTZNS. MRCH STLTWN: MK B.A.C. LSTN. THN WLL SPK.

  Pilgrims? The steel mask had clearly blinded the Grey Lady's statistical sense as effectively as it had gagged her. Since the dawn of Concordat the flow of pilgrims had steadily dwindled to a fanatical few fingers worth. God an
d politics, oil and vinegar. No good will come of this, Inspiration Cadillac told himself.

  Just before siesta time Mrs. Arbotinski from the mail office came round to Mr. Jericho with a letter for him from Halloway. Mr. Jericho had never received a letter in his life. Nobody knew where he was to send him a letter, and if those who were interested found out, they would have sent assassins rather than letters. The letter informed him that his nephews Rael, Sevriano, and Batisto and their Cousin Jean-Michel would be arriving on the 14:14 Ares Express the next day. Mr. Jericho loved intrigue and disguise, so when the appointed time came he tidied himself up, bought lunch at one of Mandella and Das's concession franchises on the platform, and when the 14:14 Ares Express Catherine of Tharsis pulled up in a great billow of steam and vapour, he warmly welcomed the four bearded and sidelocked gentlemen with properly familial embraces. Beards and sidelocks went down Mr. Jericho's plughole. The Gallacelli brothers paid their respects to their father and, found out from their presumptive fathers of their mother's anguished flight. This upset them bitterly. Mr. Jericho spent a pleasant and stimulating afternoon in conversation with the Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee, and Rael Jr., returned to the Mandella family manor.

  “Ah, Rael, you have returned,” said Santa Ekatrina, surprisingly unsurprised. “We knew you would be back. Your father would like to see you. He is over in the Alimantando house.”

  Limaal Mandella greeted his son amid the four panoramas of the weather-room.

  “You know your grandfather's dead.”

  “No!”

  “The Company raided the house, you might have seen some of the damage. Rael was killed trying to protect his property.”

  “No!”

  “The grave is down in the town cemetery if you want to visit it. Also, I think you should go and see your grandmother. She very much holds you responsible for the death of her husband.” Limaal Mandella left to give his son the privacy of mourning, but before he closed the door he said, “Incidentally, your aunt would like to see you.”

  “How does she know I'm back?”

  “She knows everything.”

  New posters appeared on gable ends: PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE: 12 NOVO-DECEMBER 12 OF 12. RAEL MANDELLA JR WILL SPEAK.

  Mikal Margolis was in a quandary. The Pilgrimage of Grace coincided with the visit of Johnny Stalin and the three board members. But for the presence of Rael Mandella Jr. he would have been inclined to turn a blind eye to the march, it was futile; great popular appeal, doubtless, but ineffectual. He did not much want to risk another foray into Desolation Road to arrest the troublemakers: Dominic Frontera had obtained a district court injunction against the Company with promise of military assistance should the injunction be flagrantly violated. An undercover operation might be a good idea, but with the town filling up with media hawks, drawn by the children, who had started appearing from every which where, the slightest incident would have the public relations department breathing fire. He'd done enough damage to the Corporate chromework with his heavy-handed police tactics in crushing Concordat. Child of grace, what did they want, a Company or a mishmash of squabbling trade unions? Quandaries quandaries quandaries. Sometimes he wished he had dropped the roll of geological reports down an airshaft and remained a Freelancer. As director of security of the Desolation Road project, he had fulfilled all his adolescent fancies yet still he was not free from gravity. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that black and gold did not really suit him.

  Twelfth November 12 of 12 was beautiful for a pilgrimage. It should have been. Taasmin Mandella had been subtly tinkering with the orbital weather-control stations for a month previous to ensure not a drop of rain would spoil the Pilgrimage of Grace. A large crowd had gathered outside the Basilica of the Grey Lady. Out in the siesta heat the thousand children, arrayed in virginal white, fretted and grumbled and felt sick and threw up and fainted, like any other collection of sinners waiting in the afternoon swelter. At the appointed moment the gongs chimed and the cymbals crashed in the belfries and the great bronze gates of the Basilica swung open on unused mechanisms, and Taasmin Mandella, the Grey Lady of Silence, walked out. It was not even a very dignified walk. It was the tired walk of a woman who behind her machine mask has felt time breaking over her. A respectful distance behind her walked Rael Mandella Jr.; her brother, his father, Limaal, Mavda Arondello and Harper Tew, the two surviving strike committee members, Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli, and Jean-Michel Gastineau in his guise as the Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee. The halo around Taasmin Mandella's left wrist burned so deep a blue it was almost black.

  The pilgrimage formed up around her: Children of Grace, Children of the Immaculate Contraption (Poor), various Steeltown sodalities carrying votaries, icons, relics and holy statues, among which was the Celestial Patron of Concordat, the Bryghte Chylde of Chernowa. Behind the ecclesiastes processed the artisans, the representatives of the trades and professions of Steeltown gathering under banners that had lain hidden in cellars and attics since the Company destroyed Concordat and yes, even a few defiant Concordat banners, small but unmistakable with their bold green Circles of Life. Behind the artisans came the populace, the wives, husbands, children, parents of the workers, and among them the smaller populace of Desolation Road, its farmers, lawyers, storekeepers, mechanics, whores and policemen. And after them came the goondahs, bums, wastrels and pie dogs, and after them the newspaper, wireless, cinema and television reporters with their attendant cameramen, sound men, photographers and apoplectic directors.

  With Taasmin Mandella at its head the procession moved off. As it passed the Mandella residence the hymn singers and psalm chanters fell silent in respect. The gates of Steeltown were barred against the Pilgrimage of Grace. Taasmin Mandella applied the tiniest glimmer of God-power and the locks burst and the gates swung back on their hinges. The back-tracking guards aimed the MRCWs more in fear than anger and dropped them with howls of pain as under the Grey Lady's command they glowed red hot. The crowd whooped and cheered. Driving the Bethlehem Ares security men before it, the procession advanced toward Corporation Plaza.

  Upon a balcony on the glass-fronted Company offices Johnny Stalin's robot double and three members of the board of directors watched in increasing stupefaction.

  “What is the meaning of this?” asked Fat Director.

  “I was under the impression that these untoward disturbances had ended,” said Thin Director.

  “Indeed, if this Concordat nonsense has been crushed, as you led us to believe, what were those green banners doing there?” asked Middling Muscular Director.

  “Impolitic though it is for such a march to be taking place within the project,” said the North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Manager/Director's robot double, “it would have been vastly more embarrassing to have taken action against it with the film crews of nine continents watching. I suggest we just swallow the indignity, gentlemen.”

  “Harumph,” said Fat Director.

  “Intolerable,” said Thin Director.

  “Quite uneconomic,” said Middling Muscular Director.

  “Mikal Margolis will take care of things,” said Robot Stalin. “Concordat will not rise again.”

  The speeches began.

  First Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli spoke of the murder of their father by the lasers of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. Then Limaal Mandella spoke of the murder of his father by the missiles of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. Taasmin Mandella nodded for Rael Mandell Jr. to come forward and speak. He looked at the sea of faces and felt a great weariness. He had seen enough platforms, podiums and lecterns for a lifetime. He sighed and stepped forward for the people to see.

  From his position on the catwalk of Number 5 converter Mikal Margolis took full benefit of the short step into the public eye to focus his telescopic sight.

  One bullet. All it needed. One bullet jacketed in and silenced by Bethlehem Ares Steel. Then th
ere would be no more quandaries.

  Limaal Mandella watched his son step forward and the people's adulation warmed him. He had done well by his sons. They were all his father would have wished grandsons to be. Then he saw a glitter of light in the pipework overhanging Corporation Plaza. He had lived too many years in the wickedest place in the world not to know what it was.

  He brought his son down in a crunching tackle as his matchroom-attuned ears heard the silenced shot clear and sharp as the clarion of an Archangelsk above the voice of the masses. Something huge and black exploded out of his back, something he had not suspected had laid hidden there. He felt surprise, anger, pain, tasted brass money in his mouth and said, “Good God, I'm hit.” He said it in such a matter-of-fact manner that he was still being surprised by it when the darkness came over his shoulder and took him away with it.

  The crowd swayed and screamed. Two thousand index fingers pointed to where the guilty one was scrambling down a flight of ladders that led into the heart of the industrial labyrinth. Rael Mandella Jr. was huddled over his father's body; Taasmin Mandella pulverized by the death of her twin. At the last instant of his life the mystic link between Limaal and his sister had been restored and she had tasted the blood in his mouth and felt the pain and the fear and the blackness swallow him. Though she still lived, she had died with her brother.

  Then the Grey Lady rose before the people, and, removing her mask, they saw that her face was dark and terrible so that they cried out in fear.

  “This is between my family and Mikal Margolis!” she cried out, breaking her silence. She raised her holy left hand and thunder rocked Corporation Plaza. At her summoning every loose piece of machinery in Steeltown leaped into the air: pipes, welding torches, garden rakes, radios, electro-trikes, pumps, voltmeters, even the Bryghte Chylde of Chemowa left its pole and flew to her call. The junk formed a wheeling flock above Corporation Plaza. It drew closer, closer still, and the terrified masses saw metal running and fusing and reforming into two steel angels, grim and vengeful, swooping above their heads. One sported airfoils and jet engines, the other twin sets of rotor blades.