Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  As soon as the dust of Heart of Lothian’s leavetaking had settled, Genevieve Tenebrae knocked on Marya Quinsana’s door.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Tenebrae,” said Marya Quinsana, sharp and professional in green plastic overalls. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” said Genevieve Tenebrae. She placed the support jar on the surgery table. “This is the child Heart of Lothian made for me. She didn’t have time to implant it herself, but said you would be able to do it.”

  The operation took ten minutes. When tea and caramels were done, Genevieve Tenebrae slipped home to her vain and petty husband. All guilt was gone, excised by Marya Quinsana’s clever instruments. In her skirt pocket rattled a jar of immunosuppressives so that she might not reject the foetus; in her womb she imagined she could feel the stolen child already kicking and flexing. She hoped it would be a girl. She wondered how she was going to tell her husband. His expression would be interesting to see.

  13

  Rael Mandella feared his children were growing up to be savages. For three years they had run innocent and ignorant as chickens round and round the tiny town of Desolation Road. It was the only world they knew, wide as all the sky yet so tightly described that a hyperactive threeyear-old could run all the way around it in less than ten minutes. That there was a world and a sky and even a world beyond the sky, all of them full of people and history, never occurred to the twins. The trains that steamed in and out at peculiar intervals came from somewhere and went to somewhere, but thinking about that somewhere made the children edgy and uncomfortable. They liked their world to be small and cosy as a bed quilt. Yet Rael Mandella insisted that they learn about those other worlds. “Education,” this process was called, and it involved the sacrifice of whole mornings which could be so much more profitably utilized listening to Dr. Alimantando, who was nice but not a great communicator, or Mr. Jericho, who knew so much about the world it was frightening, or learning to read from their mother’s beautifully illustrated picture books which told the stories of days when ROTECH and St. Catherine built the world.

  Limaal and Taasmin remained enthusiastic savages. They greatly preferred to spend their days making fat Johnny Stalin’s life a misery with mud, water, faeces, and inimitable feats of acrobatic skill on the water-pump gantries. Yet Rael Mandella was adamant that his children would not grow into stoop-backed slaves of the shovel, dull as old boots. They would have the things that he could not. The world would be their toy. He tried to instill the excitement of learning in them, but even Heart of Lothian’s Genetic Education Show had left them cold. Until, that is, the day Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza came to town.

  The night before the great showman’s arrival the eastern horizon had popped and sparkled silver and gold with fireworks. Desolation Road was left in no doubt that an event of great moment was due to descend upon it. Next morning an unscheduled train drew into Desolation Road’s makeshift station and was waved into a siding by Rajandra Das, unofficial stationmaster. It stood there billowing steam and blaring stirring music from loudspeakers mounted on the locomotive while the people gathered to see what had come now.

  “Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza,” read Rajandra Das from the brash playbill script painted in red and gold on the rolling stock. He spat in the dust. The music played on. Time passed. The air grew hot. The people grew tired of waiting in the heat. Genevieve Tenebrae almost fainted.

  Suddenly there was a simultaneous fanfare and blast of steam that made everybody jump.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the one and only… Adam Black!” bawled a curiously mechanical-sounding voice. Stairs unfolded from the carriages. A tall, thin elegant man stepped forward. He wore a dark longtailed coat, and pants with a real gold stripe. There was a black bootlace tie around his neck, and on his head a huge cartwheel hat. He carried a goldtopped cane and his eyes twinkled like jet. And of course he had a thin pencil-line moustache. Anyone more like an Adam Black it was difficult to imagine. He made sure everyone had taken a good long look at him. Then he shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen, you see before you the ultimate repository of human knowledge: Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza. History, art, science, nature, wonders of earth and sky, marvels of science and technology, tales of strange places and faraway lands, where the miraculous is workaday, all are within. See the mighty works of ROTECH at first hand through the Adam Black Patent Opticon; hear Adam Black’s tales of mystery and imagination from the four quarters of the globe; marvel at the latest developments in science and technology; wonder at the train, yes, this very train, which drives itself with a mind of its own; goggle in amazement at the Dumbletonians, half man, half machine; learn of the mysteries of physics, of chemistry, of philosophy, of theology, art and nature: all this can be yours, ladies and gentlemen, this cornucopia of ancient wisdom; yours for only fifty centavos, yes, fifty centavos, or equivalent value in whatever commodity you choose: yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Adam Black presents his Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza!” The prancing dandy rapped his cane smartly on the side of the red, gold and green carriage and the locomotive blew five steam rings, one inside the other, and played march music at an ear-shattering volume.

  Adam Black opened the doors to his wonderland of learning and was almost swept aside as Rael Mandella and his mulish children led the rush to education. The mysteries of physics, chemistry, philosophy, art and nature did not excite Limaal and Taasmin Mandella. They yawned at the Dumbletonians, half man, half machine, they fidgeted in boredom when the computerized train with a mind of its own tried to engage them in conversation, they talked and giggled through Adam Black’s illustrated talk on the natural wonders of the world. But the mighty works of ROTECH, viewed through Adam Black’s Patent Opticon, made their eyes pop.

  They sat in a carriage on hard plastic chairs. Limaal found that the chairs squeaked if he rocked back and forward, and this is what he was doing when the room was suddenly plunged into darkness as black as death. Screams came from the back, where the Gallacelli brothers were sitting behind Persis Tatterdemalion. Then a voice said, “Space: the final frontier,” and all of a sudden the carriage was full of drifting sparks of light. The twins tried to catch them and hold them in their hands but the bright motes passed through their fingers. A swirling spiral nebula passed straight through Limaal’s chest. He snatched at it but it had flown out through the back of the carriage. A star detached itself from the glowing galactic web and grew in size and luminosity until it threw definite shadows on the walls of the carriage.

  “Our sun,” said Adam Black. “We are approaching our solar system at a simulated speed of twenty thousand times the speed of light. As we enter the system of worlds, we will slow to enable you to view the glories of the planets.” The star was now a distinct sun. Planets waltzed past in a stately procession of orbs and rings. “We are passing the outer worlds; the cloud of comets that envelops our system, there you see distant Nemesis, our sun’s far, faint companion, here is Avernus, here Charon; Poseidon, that is ringed Uranus, and Chronos with its rings also… here is Jove, mightiest of all worlds, if our world, which you see now, beyond the jumble of rocky aster oids, were peeled like an orange and placed on mighty Jove’s surface, it would seem no larger than a fifty centavo piece… this is our world, our home, we shall return to it in one moment, but first we must pay a fleeting visit to shining Aphrodite, and tiny Hermes, closest to the sun, before turning our attention to the Motherworld from which the peoples of our earth sprang.”

  A spot of light at the edge of the room exploded into a system of two great worlds, one a dull white lifeless skull, the other an opal-blue orb, milkmottled like a marble. The dead white skull-world rushed past the spectators into the stellar distance and the twins found themselves hovering over the blue womb-world like two dirty-faced seraphs of the Panarch. They saw that this busy blue world was girdled by a silver
hoop, the dimensions of which beggared their imaginations. Again the holographic focus shifted and the thin spokes, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, which bound the hoop-world to the sphere world were clearly visible to all.

  The small dark room was dense with awe. The twins sat silent and still. The terrifying things in the sky had shaken all movement out of them. Adam Black continued his lecture. “You see before you the Motherworld, the planet from which our race sprang. It is a very old world, unbelievably old. There have been people on our world for only seven hundred years, most have come since the manforming was completed less than a century ago, but upon the Motherworld there are civilizations thousands upon thousands of years old.” The blue Motherworld turned beneath the twins’ omniscient gaze. As its cloud-shrouded landscapes passed into night, they sprang to life with the ten million million lights of continent-spanning cities. “An old, old world,” sang Adam Black, mesmerizing his audience with his dancing words, “old and used up. And crowded. Very crowded. You can’t imagine how crowded.”

  Limaal Mandella clung to his father in fear, for he could imagine it only too well. He could see all the naked, bald people jammed shoulder to shoulder; a living, breathing carpet of flesh draped over hill and dale and mountain and plain until it reached the edge of the sea. Here the people had been pushed waist-deep into the oily water, pushed deeper and deeper by the evergrowing Malthusian mass urtil the water closed over their heads. He imagined that ponderous globe of exploding flesh falling from the sky by its sheer weight and crushing him with its masses.

  “So great is the population that the land masses have long ago been filled up, and even the great cities that sail the oceans of the world cannot hold any more. So the people have been forced up these spokes, these orbital elevators, to live in the ring city they have built in the space around their world, where energy and resources are abundant.”

  The projection focus closed in upon the silver hoop and resolved it into a disturbing jumble of geometric shapes growing out of each other like crystals. Closer yet and the details of the geometric shapes, huge as whole towns, became apparent; tubes, spheres, fanlike formations and odd protruberances, cubes and skewed trapezoids. Closest of all, the transparent roofs could be clearly seen, and beneath them bacteria-small figures bustled and hustled.

  Taasmin Mandella’s eyes were tightly shut and hidden behind her closed fingers. On the other side of her father Limaal Mandella sat with mouth wide open, annihilated by knowledge.

  “The name of this city is Metropolis,” said Adam Black. Mr. Jericho had mouthed the name “Metropolis” in simultaneous silence. He had half-feared that he might have seen himself beneath that great transparent roof, sitting at the feet of Paternoster Augustine. “Despite its great size, its population is growing so fast that the machines that are adding to it every hour of every day still cannot match the pace of expansion. Now we say farewell to the Motherworld,” and the blue opal-world, its hoop, its skull-satellite, and its pressing trillions dwindled to a distant dot, “and turn our attention closer to home.”

  Now the earth swelled before the twins and they beheld its atlas-familiar snowy poles, its blue land-locked seas, its green forests and yellow plains and wide red deserts. They looked down upon Mount Olympus, so tall her summit rose about the highest snows, and the bustling lands of the Grand Valley, thick with cities and towns. As their earth loomed closer, they saw the

  glittering moonring and here the oracle-eye rested, filling the room with incomprehensible drifting shapes. Some were so huge they took minutes to cross the room, some were tiny and tumbling, some were busy as insects, flitting through the spectators intent upon their small errands; all of them bore the name ROTECH somewhere upon them.

  “Behold, the forces that shaped our world and made it a place fit for man to live. A thousand years ago certain wise men, holy sages all, I do not doubt, foresaw what you have just seen, that the Motherworld could not hold all the people who would come to be. Other worlds must be found, but all the worlds within reach were dead and lifeless, even this one. Yes, our earth was as dead and lifeless as that white skull of a world you saw but minutes ago. Yet these wise men knew that it could be made to bear life. Approaching the various governments of the nations of the Motherworld, they founded ROTECH, the Remote Orbital Terraforming and Environmental Control Headquarters, and armed with all that age’s science and technology, laboured for seven hundred long years to make this earth friendly to man.”

  An enormous asymmetrical object, studded with tiny shining windows and bearing the holy name in letters which, full-scale, must have been two hundred metres tall, slid across the room. Tiny midge-things buzzed about it in furious industry. Limaal Mandella bounced up and down in his chair in excitement at the shapes in the sky.

  “Be still,” his father hissed. He looked at his mother for someone with whom to share all this excitement, but Eva Mandella had the look of nonunderstanding drawn on her face. His sister was wide-eyed and expressionless as an icon of a saint.

  “What you are seeing are a few of the orbital devices by which ROTECH maintains our world’s precarious environmental balance. Some are weather control machines, using infrared lasers to heat areas of the planet’s surface to generate pressure differentials and thus winds. Others are magnetic supercores, magnetos, generating the intense field that protects our world from the bombardment of charged solar particles and cosmic rays. Others still are vanas, the orbital mirrors that lighten the dark nights in the absence of moons, some are orphs, which work directly upon the world, even now seeding the barren places of the earth with life, some are shunters, which move cometary ice from the cloud we saw earlier, out at the edge of the solar system, and bring it to our world so that hydrostatic equilibrium may be maintained, and some are partacs, dreadful weapons of puissant destruction with which ROTECH can defend this fragile world against attack from… beyond. Once there were many more but most have moved on with ROTECH to greater challenges; the taming of the hell-world we call Aphrodite but is better given its old name, Lucifer; the greening of the Motherworld’s airless moon. Now look at this…”

  It seemed to the children that they swooped like a great spacebird around the shoulder of the world and saw far beyond the cascading moonring something tremendous approaching the world, something like a butterfly kilometres and kilometres and kilometres across, something so huge and complex in its design that it defied imagining. It turned ponderously so that the sunlight caught it, and the twins and everyone around them gasped as three million square kilometres of sail were suddenly illuminated.

  “Sails wide enough to wrap the world in,” whispered Adam Black, and then let his voice rise to a dramatic pitch as he declaimed: “A SailShip of the Praesidium, arriving at the ROTECH orbital docking facilities. A year and a day ago she set sail from Metropolis with one-and-three-quarter million colonists sleeping in stasis in the cargo-pods and now their journey is over. They have arrived at our world. They will find it a strange, topsy-turvy, confusing place, much as our fathers’ fathers’ fathers and mothers’ mothers’ mothers found it. Some will die, some will return home, some will fail and sink to the bottom of society, but most, when they arrive at the entrepot cities of Touchdown, Bleriot, and Belladonna, will take a long look at the world and think they have landed in paradise.”

  The disembodied viewpoint plunged toward the earth, down down, plunging ever faster until it seemed as if Limaal and Taasmin must smash to pulp on the hard earth. Knuckles went white and the Babooshka screamed. The lights came on again. Dust motes floated in the beams of the lamps. Adam Black stepped into the lights and said, “That concludes our tour of the wonders of earth and sky and we now return you safely to familiar terra firma once more.” Doors opened at the end of the carriage admitting a stream of dusty sunlight. The people were very quiet as they filed out into the afternoon sun.

  “Well, what did you think of that?” said Rael Mandella to his children. They did not answer. They were immersed in their own
thoughts.

  Limaal Mandella’s head was filled with falling planets pregnant with humanity, with spinning wheels of light thousands of kilometres across, with seemingly anarchic jumbles of shapes which nevertheless kept the world run ping like an oiled clock, and the rational part of him reached out and embraced all he had seen. He understood that both human and material universes operated according to fundamental principles and that if these principles were knowable, then all the universes of matter and mind must be knowable too. He embraced the Grand Design and saw it copied in miniature everywhere his eyes rested. Everything was comprehensible, everything was explainable; there were no mysteries left, all things pointed inward.

  Taasmin Mandella had likewise beheld the wonders of earth and sky but chose rather the path of mysticism. She had seen that all orders of organization obeyed higher orders, and those higher orders in turn obeyed orders of more vast and splendid intelligence in an upward spiral of consciousness at the apex of which sat God the Panarch Unknowable: Ineffable, and Silent as Light, whose plans could only be guessed at from His revelations that dropped like some sweet distillate down the coils of the helix of consciousness. All things pointed outward and upward.

  Rael Mandella could not know what he had done to his children, either at the instant of their births when he had cursed them with his family curse, or the germination of that curse-seed in Adam Black’s Holographium. The twins seemed impressed. Maybe they had learned something valuable. If the roots of learning had taken in them, then the two bushels of strawberries and the chicken he had spent on his children’s education had been money well invested.