Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “Hey, nice shooting, Baby Bear! Like, nice shooting!”

  Gunner Johnston M'bote grinned and spat simultaneously, a feat uniquely his by dint of no one wishing to duplicate it.

  “Nothing really. Just pointing it the right way at the right time. Hey!” Wandering eyeballs registered movement on one of the tiny monochrome televisions. “Hey, there's a bogie getting away!”

  “Oh, let her go…”

  “But she's an enemy! I want to shoot her.”

  “You go easy with the T.B., Baby Bear, you'll shoot one of our legs off if you're not careful.”

  “The hell I will!” said Johnston M'bote huffily.

  He vented his ill feelings on the façade of the New Paradise Tea Rooms with a handful of rounds from his 88mm cannon before Daddy Bear (in reality Sub-commander Gabriel O'Byrne) jawed him over the waste of ammunition. So he treated himself to a good scratch deep inside his fetid underwear and Fighting Machine T27, Eastern Enlightenment, lurched off to support the big firefight around the gates of Steeltown, in the process accidentally and without malice cleaving away half the Stalin household and the whole of the Stalin wife with one careless swing of its two o'clock foot.

  “Hey, there's a guy down there!” Johnston M'bote could see him through the gunslits in the belly-turret, a curiously foreshortened Mr. Stalin waving fists of impotent fury at the fighting machine that had just killed his wife of twenty years.

  “A what?”

  “A guy down there, Daddy Bear.”

  “Looks like he owned the house you just smashed through, Daddy Bear,” chirped Mummy Bear from the glamour of the top turret. Johnston M'bote only knew Mummy Bear by his querulous voice on the interphone. He had never seen him, but suspected some kind of rivalry between number one bombardier and commander. Come to think of it, he'd never seen the commander either.

  “A what?” said Daddy Bear again.

  “A guy, down there, in a big big patch of beans,” said Johnston M'bote, ideally poised to witness what happened next. “You know, I think we should be kind of like…careful, you know, like you're always warning me to be.…Oh. Well.”

  “What, Baby Bear?”

  “Nothing Daddy Bear.”

  T27, Eastern Enlightenment Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, and Baby Bear hot-legged it over to Green Street with Mr. Stalin an unfortunate smear on the two o'clock leg.

  “Holy Catherine! Do you know what you just did?” shrieked Mummy Bear, and proceeded to tell his commander at such length and in such detail that Johnston M'bote patched out the recriminatory bickering and danced his little jigajig finger dance to “Tombolova Street Serenade” by Hamilton Bohannon and his Rhythm Aces. War was fun again.

  Fun pounding at the sand-bagged emplacement with his cannon, fun straddling fleeing guerrillas and incinerating them with a “zap!” from his TBs, fun even when it was scary, when he heard the crew on T32, Absalom's Peach, all die live on his earphones in a pother of confusion over targets.

  “I tell you there's no one there!”

  “There's got to be!”

  “The computer says…”

  “Stuff the computer!”

  “Stuff you! Look, see! I was right, there isssqrzhggmmstphughzzsss…” And T32, Absalom's Peach, took a full field inducer burst from a Whole Earth Army boy soldier that spattered its Daddy Bear and Mummy Bear and Little Baby Bear up into the air in a fountain of metal shards and red rain.

  Watching the death of Absalom's Peach, Johnston M'bote felt an unaccustomed sensation in his head. It was an original thought, an insight and a clear sign that his preordained existence was approaching the end of the tracks. It took him so by surprise, this original thought, that it was almost a full minute before he thumbed for Daddy Bear.

  “Oh, Big Bear,” he sang, “I think we are dealing with an invisible enemy.” Daddy Bear sputtered and gurgled on the interphone, a commander promoted beyond the level of his competence.

  “Well, has anyone got heat goggles?” Mummy Bear had left his with his stick of insect repellent in his tent. A bitter argument ensued. Johnston M'bote slipped his pair on and assumed the semblance of a dyspeptic owl. The fuzzy monochrome haze which he perceived paid almost immediate dividend.

  “Hey! Daddy Bear! Daddy Bear! I've got a bogie! A real live bogie!”

  “Where?”

  “Port side, one hostile…” He liked using military expressions.

  The name of the bogie was Shannon Ysangani.

  “Come on, let's get her, there she goes.…” Dangling from the belly hatch twenty metres up in the smoke-filled air, Gunner Johnston M'bote steered the fighting machine with directions bawled into his helmet interphone. Faithful and obedient, the fighting machine stomped through the abandoned west wing of the Mandella hacienda, popping open like a peapod that most secret room which Grandfather Haran had locked and cursed never to be opened again.

  Dust sifted down onto the heads of the Mandella dynasty hiding in the deepest sub-cellar. The rocks shuddered and groaned. Half delirious from his ride with Charley Horse, Rael Mandella Jr. hallucinated his days of leadership in the Great Strike and Kwai Chen Pak hurried to soothe his rantings with herb tea. Eva, working blithely at her loom, selected a pick of flame-red yarn from her combs and declared, “All this will have to go into the tapestry.”

  Fighting machine T27, Eastern Enlightenment, stood at attention in the Mandellas’ central courtyard, spraying steam from its pressure valves. Smoke blew around the turret and endowed it with an otherworldly, malign intelligence.

  “You see anything down there, M'bote?”

  Gunner M'bote hung out of his belly-blister, probing with his goggles the great steam and smoke thrown up from the edge of Steeltown, where Parliamentarians and Whole Earth Army defenders had broken upon each other like clashing waves. A shimmering vagueness moved through the monochrome murk.

  “Yep! There she is! Shoot her someone!” Mummy Bear swung creakingly around to comply; Daddy Bear raised the murderous two o'clock foot to stomp.

  The nature of Shannon Ysangam's belief in God had changed fundamentally in the past few minutes from Benign Big Softie who apportioned to some slightly more luck than justice demanded, to a Mean and Vengeful Old Fisherman who would not let a victim off his line. It had been luck when Murtagh Melintzakis was burned in place of her. It was vengeance now that she could not shake the agent of that burning off her. The fighting machine was playing with her. There was even some punk of a crewman hanging out of his turret tracking her every twitch with heat goggles. And her brilliant invisibility was as useless as her defence canopy. All that remained was for her to fight and die as Murtagh Melintzakis had.

  “God damn you, God!” she cried solipsistically as she scrambled toward Fortress Steeltown with the fighting machine smashing a path of relentless pursuit. “God damn you God damn you God damn you!”

  The big guns were swinging, the ugly little monkey-man pointing, the foot was rising, and she did not, categorically not, never no way not, want to end in fire the way that ten-year-old boy-soldier had ended, a shriek of agonized plasma. As she raised her field-inducer to fight, she realised how weary she was of killing things. Tired, sick, disillusioned. Stupid monkey-man was gibbering from his hatchway and she did not want to kill him.

  “I don't even know you,” she whispered. Yet to do anything else would be to end in fire. The contact closed. The instant before her defence canopy dropped for attack a pulverizing steel kick drove her against the llama-shed wall. The shot shied wide, the defence bubble popped, and Shannon Ysangani smashed into the all-too-solid adobe masonry. Body-things cracked and crunched inside her; she tasted steel and brass. In a vague miasma of semi-awareness she saw that her shot had not missed altogether. She had blasted away the upper gun turret, gunner and gun. Steam and oil fountained from the metal wound like heart-blood. She giggled a rib-gyrating giggle and went dark.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit…”

  Curled up for safety in his comfortable fun bell
y-turret, Johnston M'bote scarcely heard his commander's execrations.

  “I got you, oh, I got you, I got you you bitch bastard whore, I got you I got you…” Johnston M'bote's tongue poked beneath his teeth as he whispered furious glee to himself and spun his little brass wheels and verniers. “Oh, I got you, lady!” He pointed his big weapon at the woman lying in a cracked pile of adobe bricks. “I got you…” What was Daddy Bear shouting? Didn't he know how hard it was to shoot with the damn fighting machine swaying and heaving like a Saturday night drunk? Warning? What the hell about? Cross-hairs glowed, perfect target. Gunner Johnston M'bote pressed the little red button.

  “Zap!” he shouted, and in a dazzling flash blasted the ten o'clock leg clean off.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  “You stupid bastard!” shrieked Daddy Bear. “I warned you, I said be careful…” T27, Eastern Enlightenment, tottered like a tree on the edge of a precipice. Metal shrieked and clanged, gyro stabilizers howled as they fought to hold the fighting machine upright, then failed, catastrophically, unequal to the test. With majestic, balletic grace, the fighting machine toppled, tachyon blasters firing wildly in all directions, steam exploding from the wrecked joints, and smashed itself open on the adamant earth of Desolation Road. In the closing seconds of his plummet Johnston M'bote was permitted to see that his whole life had been directed toward this moment of glorious annihilation. In the instant before the belly-turret popped and he was crushed beneath the weight of falling metal like a ripe plum, Johnston M'bote saw back to the moment of his birth and realized as he saw his perfectly shaped head emerging from between his mother's thighs that he had been doomed to begin with. He felt a sense of deep deep disgust. Then he felt nothing ever again.

  Oscillating across the boundary between pain and consciousness, Sublieutenant Shannon Ysangani saw the behemoth fall, brought low by its own weapon. She felt a great, agonizing, flesh-tearing fit of giggling boil up inside her.

  Buried five levels deep beneath Steeltown in her time-transport centre, Arnie Tenebrae, too, saw the behemoth fall. To her it was a more colourful fragment from the mosaic of war. Her wall of television monitors presented her with war in all its many colours, and Arnie Tenebrae savoured each, eyes flicking from monitor to monitor to monitor; quick, brief encounters with war, jealous of losing so much as an instant of the War Between the Powers.

  The Vastator turned her attention from the televised massacre to the time winder in the middle of the floor.

  “How long now?”

  “Two minutes. We're hooking up the field generators to the fusion tokamak now.”

  A cry came from the observers monitoring the monitors.

  “Ground troops! They're sending in ground troops!”

  Arnie Tenebrae spun her attention back to the picture wall. A thin white skirmish line was slipping effortlessly through the trenchways toward Steeltown. The fighting machines’ artillary provided withering cover. She thumbed up the magnification and saw familiar bulky packs on white Parliamentarian shoulders.

  “Clever clever clever Marya Quinsana,” she whispered, so that no one would hear and think her insane. “You've the measure of me pretty close, but not quite neat enough.” Weapons-fire reached her ears like the sound of childhood pop guns as skirmishers fell upon defenders. A pop-gun war, a lie-down-for-twenty-seconds-you're-dead war, and when it was all over everyone would get up and go home for their dinners. Field-inducers hammered at field-inducers until the tachyon equipment on board the fighting machines spoke and declared game over for today and always.

  “Ready to go!” shouted Dhavram Mantones.

  “Then we'll do it, shall we?” said Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator. She shouldered her battle pack. Dhavram Mantones threw the handswitch that diverted all the power from the Steeltown tokamak into the time winder. The eons opened up before Arnie Tenebrae like a mouth, and she threw herself into the chasm in a cascade of afterimages.

  Then reality ended.

  The first that Mr. Jericho and the refugees in the Bar/Hotel knew of the end of reality was when they found themselves bobbing against the ceiling. Though separated at the time of the air strike, they had all come together by means of the tunnels and caves that honeycombed the rocks beneath Desolation Road: no sooner had worried greetings been exchanged than they found tables, cups, carpets, bottles and chairs floating around their ears. Kaan Mandella chased after the beer-crate radio transmitter in a kind of unsteady breast-stroke beneath the roof beams. Rajandra Das anchored himself to the pelmet and peered upside down out of the window. Attackers, defenders, life-careless camera teams, llamas, pigs and pie dogs were floating around the eaves of the houses. Halfway down the street, gravity seemed to have reversed completely, houses, trees, animals, soldiers, earth and rocks were falling into the sky. In the other direction three empty hotels and the Excelsior Curry House were submerged in a huge red sand dune. A dark shadow fell across the free-fall street; something big as a barn, blocky and dirty orange, was flying over Desolation Road.

  “What is going on?”

  Mr. Jericho's Exalted Ancestors had been arguing deep in his hypothalamus as he bobbed against the candle brackets. Their final conclusion was appalling.

  “They must have got the time winder to work.”

  “It wasn't like this when Dr. A used it.”

  Half the room could not understand what Rajandra Das and Mr. Jericho were talking about.

  “Alimantando kept his Temporal Inversion Formula a secret: Tenebrae's engineers must have guessed wrong. Instead of creating fluidity through time, they've created a zone of temporal fluidity here, now, and reality is breaking down. The laws of space-time are bending, and I think pieces of alternative universes are being superimposed onto this one.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Santa Ekatrina Mandella, who had been married to the laws of space-time for eleven years.

  “It means the end of consensus causal reality.” The first earth tremors shook the Bar/Hotel. Freed from gravity, the very rocks beneath the street were shifting and stirring. “Unless.”

  “Unless?” asked Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli simultaneously. The Exalted Ancestors had already answered this question, too, and their answer was no less appalling than their first one.

  “Unless we can shut down the power supply to the time winder.”

  “You mean close down the Steeltown tokamak?”

  “I do. And I need you with me, Rajandra Das. I need your charm over machines.”

  “You'll never, do it, old man,” said Kaan Mandella. “Let me.”

  Mr. Jericho already had the door open. A glowing wind filled with ghostly faces swept along the street, driving all unanchored free-fallers out into the desert.

  “I'm afraid only I can do it. Can you keep a secret? Ever heard of the Damantine Disciplines?”

  “Only the Exalted Families…” started Kaan Mandella, but Mr. Jericho said “precisely” and dived out into the street. Rajandra Das plunged after him after a moment's hesitation. “Try Persis on the radio again,” he called in parting. “We may need her to run interference for us.” He did not add, “if she's still alive.”

  At the junction of Bread Alley gravity was restored but a downpour of boiling rain drove Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das into shelter. Under a window-ledge they found a parboiled guerrilla. Mr. Jericho stripped him of his battle armour and dressed Rajandra Das in helmet, power pack and weapons pack.

  “You might need it,” Mr. Jericho said. It did not take Damantine-disciplined hearing to make out the booms of small-arms fire close by. The two men dashed through the tailing drops of scalding rain into Mosman's Court, where the hands of the municipal dock were spinning around at a rate that compressed hours into seconds. Aging visibly as they ran, refugees from the accelerated timezone fled up the street into a jungle of green lianas and vines which had snagged around the smoking skeletons of two fighting machines. Mr. Jericho detoured around the relativistic zone, passed through a region of inexplicable night into
Alimantando Street. The shocking concussion of a close-by field-inducer charge knocked him and Rajandra Das off their feet. Rajandra Das followed Mr. Jericho to cover as a volley of shots from the roof of the mayoral office shattered the façades of the houses on Alimantando Street. One second later a time quake ripped away the mayoral office into anywhen and replaced it with a quarter hectare of green pasture, white picket fence, and three and a half black and white cows.

  “Child of Grace!” whispered Rajandra Das. Mr. Jericho found a dead Parliamentarian boy-soldier in the doorway of a burned-out house and looted him of his clean white combat gear. Purple lightning flickered fitfully at one end of the street.

  The two men scrambled through a world fallen into insanity. Here gravity had shifted ninety degrees to change streets into cliff faces, there bubbles of weightlessness bounced down the lanes waiting to trap the foolhardy who ventured out from their cellars; here half a house ran backward, there garden plants grew to shady trees in seconds. Green figures like long, thin men were seen capering on rooftops and drew the fire of those soldiers capable of fighting. Phantoms of children yet unborn danced hand in hand under trees that were yet seeds.

  “How far do you think it reaches?” asked Rajandra Das. A powerful wind had sprung up, driving them inward toward Steeltown, where the heart of the madness was spinning faster faster faster, reaching into the Panplasmic Omniverse.

  “Local as yet,” replied Mr. Jericho. The steel wind whipped at him. “But the longer the time winder runs, the greater the zone of interference.”

  “Suppose I shouldn't say this, but my feet don't want to go on. I'm terrified.”

  Mr. Jericho looked on the spinning curtain of lightning-streaked smoke that shrouded Steeltown.

  “So am I,” he said. As Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das raced for the time-wall, reality shuddered and shook. A whale swam into Desolation Road station. An Archangelsk urinated in a cabbage patch. A ghostly figure, tall as a tree, stood astride the community solar plant and ripped searing solos from his red guitar. Lightning flew from his fingertips and gathered into tiny balls which blew like tumbleweeds around the two men's feet. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das plunged into the whirlwind of smoke.