Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “What the…” A battle of statues was being fought here: slugs and snails engaging each other with tachyon beams slow as drunkards’ punches.

  “Time distortion,” explained Mr. Jericho. “Let's go.”

  “You mean through?”

  “They can't see us. Watch.” Mr. Jericho danced across the battle ground, ducking under sluggardly tachyon beams, dodging sessile field-inducer bursts. “Come on.” Rajandra Das crept through the Einsteinian battlefield. He tried to imagine how his passage seemed to the time-frozen combatants: was he a whirlwind, a flash of light, a blur of multiple images, like Captain Quick in the old comics his mother had used to buy him? He followed Mr. Jericho down a corridor between two steel converters into an unexpected free-fall zone. Rajandra Das's momentum took him straight up in an elegant reverse dive.

  Mr. Jericho was shouting something, something about his field-inducers? He hadn't even thought about the device he was wearing. Defence canopy up? He didn't know how to do it. He fiddled with his wrist-control and was rewarded with a prickle of static electricity across his face in the same instant as a sudden smashing blow sent him spinning through space. As he ricocheted off the side of Number 16 smokestack, he caught a glimpse of Mr. Jericho being bounced from wall to wall like a ball in a pachinko parlour. The central fusion tokamak was clearly well defended.

  A second field-inducer blast sent Mr. Jericho zigzagging from steel furnace to ground to conveyor to converter. Only his looted defence canopy saved him from pulverizing death.

  —Too old for this, he told his Exalted Ancestors; They reminded him of duty and honour, and courage. Well they might, free as they were from the tyranny of time-bound flesh.—They can bounce us around like rubber balls all day if they want to. He saw Rajandra Das loom up before him; the two men smashed together and rebounded. As Mr. Jericho cartwheeled through the Anarchic Zone, his Exalted Ancestors reminded him that every second the world was oscillating farther from consensus reality.

  In mid-bounce Rajandra Das realized that he had passed from the stage of being too terrified to be scared into the sublime state of hysteric comedy. What could be more ridiculous than being bounced around a steel works in the middle of a time storm by a gang of terrorists defending a fusion tokamak powering an out-of-control time machine? He knew that if he laughed at the joke, he would not be able to stop.

  A crackle came over his ear-thimble.

  “Hello, boys. Having fun?”

  Mr. Jericho heard the voice on his earphone and answered.

  “Persis! Darling! Jim Jericho. Request you launch an immediate attack on the forces entrenched around the Steeltown fusion plant.”

  “Check.”

  “Persis, I suggest you beware of severe reality displacements.”

  “You don't need to tell me.”

  “And Persis…”

  “Yes?”

  “If all else fails, and only if all else fails, if we can't get through, destroy the tokamak.”

  “There'll be…”

  “A fusion explosion. Yes.”

  “Check. Here…we…g.…”

  A rally of shots from the tokamak positions volleyed Jim Jericho like a handball as the Yamaguchi and Jones stunter howled in over the smokestacks. Wing-mounted tachyon blasters kicked out, there was an explosion that made Mr. Jericho fear that maybe she had destroyed the tokamak, then Persis Tatterdemalion was climbing into the sky away from winged figures pursuing her with scimitars. Mr. Jericho dropped his canopy and caught hold of a stanchion. Rajandra Das did likewise, and as he drifted past, Mr. Jericho caught hold of his collar.

  Not so much as a scrap of flesh or cloth remained of the defenders. The generator hall was empty of everything save the song of the tokamak.

  “Spooky things,” said Rajandra Das, laying rude hands on the controls.

  “I thought you knew about these things.”

  “Locomotive tokamaks. This is different.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Well, Mr. Damantine-disciplines, you shut it down.”

  “Wouldn't have the first idea.”

  Distant explosions rent the air. Metal creaked and groaned and the iron tread of a fighting machine shook the generator hall. Rajandra Das's fingers moved over the control lamps, then hesitated.

  “What happens when the power goes off?”

  “I'm not certain.”

  “Not certain? Not certain?” Rajandra Das's exclamation rang from the steel walls.

  “Theoretically, reality should snap back to concensus reality.”

  “Theoretically.”

  “Theoretically.”

  “Hell of a time for theoretically.” Rajandra Das's fingers danced over the controls. Nothing happened. Again the fingers played. Nothing happened. A third time Rajandra Das played the control board like a chapel harmonium and a third time nothing happened.

  “What's wrong?”

  “I can't do it! It's been too long. I've lost the touch.”

  “Let me see.”

  Rajandra Das waved Mr. Jericho away from the control lights with the muzzle of his field-inducer. He whispered some consignatory mumbles and emptied a full power burst into the control board. The two men staggered back from the explosion, blinded by sparks and flying circuitry. The fusion tokamak's usual serene hum rose to a shriek, a howl, a roar of outrage. Rajandra Das fell on his knees for divine forgiveness for a wastrel's life when the all-destroying fusion scream was silenced. And in the same instant the men felt themselves, the power hall, Steeltown, the whole world turn inside out and inside out again. With a thunderclap of inrushing reality the time winder imploded and drew Arnie Tenebrae's five-level-deep time-control centre and all its staff into neverwhenness.

  The timewall exploded outward. Free-fallers dropped out of the air; whales, archangels and guitar players vanished, and the boiling rain blew away on the glowing wind. Every clock stopped in the time-burst and stayed stopped forever, despite the attempts of subsequent generations many kilometres removed from the day of the time storm to restart them.

  In the aftermath of the timestorm Mr. Jericho emerged from the hall of the dead tokamak to find that theoretically, he had only been partly correct, theoretically. A full quarter of Steeltown had been sheared away as if by a knife of marvellous sharpness and in place of the pipes and girders red rock stretched to the horizon. The encirclement of Crystal Ferrotropes was broken by incongruous expanses of virgin dunes, green oases of banana trees, and a pockmarking of fused glass craters. As Rajandra Das joined his friend and the two men returned to Desolation Road, they passed through a fantastical landscape of the bizarre and curious. Streets ended in empty desert or were buried in huge seif dunes; locomotives stood in the middle of market gardens, houses in lakes. One track of the railroad line ended abruptly in a small but luxuriant patch of jungle, and the whole of the new development beyond the railroad was returned to bare High Plain.

  Faces began to fill the streets. Dumbfounded by the alchemy that had engulfed Desolation Road, they searched for time-lost houses and families. They did not know, nor could they, that when the reality-warping power of the time winder was shut off, all those phantom geographies of Desolation Roads that might have been were fixed, fused, and made permanent the moment Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das closed the door to the Panplasmic Omniverse.

  The break was sealed; the battle was over. The survivors assessed degrees of victory. A full third of Marya Quinsana's Parliamentary Legion had been decreated when the timestorm struck, returned to whatever tasks, occupations, or lives they might have led had not the beat of the recruiter's drum seduced them. Those who had not been swept into otherwhenness had sustained only light casualties. The defending Whole Earth Army had been largely annihilated. Seventy percent casualties, her entire command structure beheaded in whatever had taken place within the heavily guarded redoubt under Steeltown: Shannon Ysangani surrendered her remnant army to General Emiliano Murphy and cried tears of joyous laughter as her comrades were taken to t
he desert-edge detention camps.

  “We lost!” she laughed, tears streaming down her face. “We lost! We lost!”

  The Whole Earth Army was no more.

  Two hours before nightfall the Yamaguchi and Jones twin-prop stunter GF666Z came in for landing beyond the railroad tracks. The last survivor of Tatterdemalion's Flying Circus was carried shoulder-high through the streets by the friends who loved her most, and Angel Red was brought in triumph and humility to the Bar/Hotel, where all hearts and hands saluted her.

  That same evening Marya Quinsana made a torchlight triumph through Desolation Road. The Steeltown Ring was lined with fighting machines for her, the citizens cheered for her but she was unsatisfied. She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials. She did not like to think about where all her decreated boy-soldiers had gone.

  After the service of thanksgiving in the Basilica of the Grey Lady she demanded that Arnie Tenebrae be brought to her. She wanted very much to vent her dissatisfaction in mutilation and torment, but the subsequent search of Desolation Road and Steeltown did not turn up so much as her corpse. So after five days of triumph and victory before the cameras of the nine continents, Marya Quinsana returned to the hills of Wisdom to take the First Ministerial ring of office from the finger of the Honourable Vangelis Karolaitis only to find that that fine old gentleman was neither fine, gentlemanly, nor ultimately honourable, for he had enough accounts of his security minister's atrocities and outrages in quashing the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group to be very very sure that she would never take the ring from him while he lived. As for Little Arnie Tenebrae, Deathbird, Vastator, she was never heard of again, though there was no shortage of explanations, rumours and idle gossip which in time became the fabric of folk story, which in time became legend, which in time became myth, and so Little Arnie Tenebrae's name came to be written in the sky which was only what she always ever wanted.

  Inspiration Cadillac awoke in a steel shriek from an iron dream. Memory and awareness defied him—what were these bright lights, this high roof, these green-robed servants bowing awestruck from his presence? He sat up to require an explanation and was answered with cries of alarm and religious dread.

  “Master, master, oh, it's true, it's true! Oh, master, bless me.”

  A young postulant with a half-metal face fell to the floor in blatant adoration. Inspiration Cadillac stepped from the bed (an operating table?), caught sight of himself reflected in the white wall tiles, and remembered everything.

  —Total mortification! Man made steel…He looked down at his body, his hands, his limbs. Metal; smooth, hard metal untainted by corrupt flesh, unstained by red blood, all pure, holy metal. He threw up his steel arms in thanksgiving.

  “Total mortification! Successful total mortification!” Glory-alleluiaing, the technical staff prostrated themselves. Inspiration Cadillac beheld his own glory in the wall tiles and remembered…

  …the voice of the Great Engineer, calling him to prophethood…army poised against army and the Poor Children, between them helpless, leaderless…bright lights, humming, luminous machines, cold cold tiles, flashing steel, darkness.

  “How long has it been?” he demanded of a female cybernetician.

  “Eight days, holy one. The world has gone mad, holy father: the dome of the basilica has been destroyed, the sanctuary defiled by the fleshlies in their thanksgiving for victory; a war has been fought, lost and won in these very streets, hundreds have died and…and forgive me, but time and space itself went mad. Everything is changed: madness has run loose in the universe.”

  “Peace, little one. It is then time that order and harmony were restored,” said Inspiration Cadillac. In a flicker of concentration a black halo appeared around his right wrist. The technicians gasped and alleluiaed. “What the Grey Lady was, I now am, and more. She was base flesh, I am sanctified steel. I am the chosen of the Great Engineer, the Future Man; in my circuits burns the power…” And he opened his right hand and darkness flowed over all the technicians save those two who had spoken with Inspiration Cadillac, and it transformed them into black smoking somethings so hideous and obscene they defied the imagination. Inspiration Cadillac laughed a metal laugh. He had the addiction for power, and each successive abuse must be richer, deeper fuller. Before his cowering acolytes he transformed himself, sprouting wings, rotor blades, buzz saws, tachyon blasters, radio antennae, portable table-harmoniums, wheels, tracks, jets, rockets, washing machines in a blur of alchemy.

  “Come with me,” he commanded the cyberneticist and the technician who had hailed him master. “I am tired of transformation.” To the cyberneticist he said, “You shall be my chamberlain,” to the technician, “You my chief engineer. Don't fear me…you must love me. I command it. Now, I wish to receive the adulation of my people.”

  “Ah,” said the chamberlain.

  “Eh,” said the chief technician.

  “Where are the faithful?” demanded Inspiration Cadillac.

  “Alas, they were not faithful as we were faithful,” said the chamberlain.

  “They believed you'd died when the airplane crashed into the dome and it collapsed,” said the chief engineer.

  “You were, of course, safe underground,” said the chamberlain.

  “But they weren't to know that,” said the chief engineer.

  “So they, ah, turned their devotions elsewhere.”

  “They've found something else to worship.”

  “It's, ah, a train.”

  “It came out of Steeltown after the timestorm and offered to take all the Poor Children to safety.”

  “You see the parallel, holy father: the prophecies you circulated about the Steel Messiah coming out of Steeltown to save the faithful from war and devastation.”

  “They, eh, went with it.”

  “What?” roared Inspiration Cadillac. Growing rotor blades, he leaped into the air.

  “Go west,” added the chamberlain.

  From the air Inspiration Cadillac could see how some calamity worse than mere war had struck Faith City. The dome of the Basilica of the Grey Lady (now, he noted, the Basilica of the Total Mortification) lay in shards and slabs on the tiled floor of the audience chamber. The entire east wing together with a dozen hectares of Faith City had been swept away and replaced with a similar area of planted and irrigated maize. The Grey Lady's private quarters were a fused cracked crater in the rock, and beside it stood the tangled remains of some kind of clumsy three-legged device.

  —What has been happening? War, dread, outrage, apostasy; with a locomotive!

  It was not even a particularly good example of locomotive building skills, Inspiration Cadillac decided, spying it from afar as a line of white steam on the western horizon. A Great Southern Class 27 fusion hauler; tokamaks due a good overhaul. Paintwork blistered and peeled, what was that it read, Adam Black's Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza? Pathetic. Shining silver-bright in the desert sun, Inspiration Cadillac patched in his public address system and chastized his people.

  “O ye of little faith!” Faces at the windows of the ramshackle carriages. They looked frightened. That was good. “O faithless and perverse generation! I promised that I would return to you as the Total Mortification, yet not one of you would wait the eight days for the promise to be fulfilled! Covenant-breakers! Idolators! You worship this…Golden Calf rather than the physical manifestation of the Cosmic Engineer! See how I shatter all false idols!” He helicoptered in over the speeding train and raised his hand to hurl a thunderbolt of cybernetic command.

  “We'd all much rather you didn't do that,” said the train quite unexpectedly. The power evaporated from Inspiration Cadillac's fingertips.

  “What?”

  The train repeated its statement word for word.r />
  “A talking train! My my my.”

  “Something more than that,” said the Great Southern Class 27. “I am the Total Mortification.”

  “Nonsense! Blasphemy! I am the Total Mortification, the one, the only.”

  “You are man made machine. I am machine made man. At heart, you are flesh, for you still wear the outward form of a man, but I have gone beyond such anthropomorphic chauvinism. I am machine in the form of machine.”

  Poor Children's heads poked out of the windows, evidently enjoying the theosophical wranglings. Inspiration Cadillac found his curiosity roused despite his fury and asked, “What manner of creature are you?”

  “Take a look in my liveried carriage,” the train replied. Inspiration Cadillac retracted his rotors and made a jet-power landing on the paint-peeling roof. He extended a telescopic camera eye over the edge to peer in. The windows were thick with cobwebs and dirt, as was the carriage itself; dust, cobwebs, age and neglect. In the center of the carriage sat a cracked leather armchair and in the armchair sat a mummified corpse. Upon the corpse's head was a metal diadam of peculiar and intricate design.

  “Adam Black that was,” said the train. “When his soul passed to me, I sealed the carriage, never to be opened again. All that the carriage represents is past me now, I am a machine/man, the true future man, the Total Mortification if you wish. For many years I travelled the railroads of the world searching for some purpose for my spiritual identity, then I heard of the Dumbletonians of Desolation Road, a place I knew well in my fleshly incarnation, and my heart told me that here was the reason for my being. So I came, and they hailed me the Steel Messiah, and so they came with me in their tattered caravan of old carriages and wagons. And as there can be only one Steel Messiah, alas we must now do battle.”