Desolation Road dru-1

by Ian McDonald

  “Next time I’ll make sure of my intelligence,” Sub-major Tenebrae said.

  “There’s, ah, not likely to be a next time.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, Group 27 was obliterated and now I’m resident in the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, talking to you, Migli, and telling you your time’s up for today. What would you like to talk about tomorrow?”

  Migli shrugged.

  That night Sub-major Tenebrae lay in a shaft of bar-broken starlight, twirling a piece of string between her fingers. She thought starlight thoughts of fear and loathing. Since the morning she left Desolation Road on the back of Engineer Chandrasekahr’s terrain bike, a day had not passed that she had not woken fearful and gone to sleep fearful. Fear was the air she breathed. Fear came in greater or lesser breaths, like the bowel-loosening fear of foxhole Charlie with Hueh Linh bleeding himself away through her fingers, or the tense skyward glance of identification at the beat of an aircraft engine. She twined the bootlace around her fingers, round and round and round, and feared. Fear. Either she used fear or fear used her.

  Her fingers froze in their dance. The thought struck her with irresistible profundity of divine law. Her aimlessness was illuminated by its holy glow. Until that moment fear had used her and had bequeathed her incompetence, failure, loathing and death. From this bootlace-twining moment forward she would use fear. She would use it because she feared fear using her. She would be more terrible, more violent, more vicious, more successful than any Whole Earth Army commander before her: her very name would be a curse of fear and loathing. Children yet unborn would dread her and the dead die with her name on their lips because either she used fear or fear used her.

  She lay awake a long time that night, thinking in the slatted shaft of starlight.

  On the fourth day, at twelve minutes of eleven, Group 19 of the Deuteronomy Division of the Whole Earth Army stormed the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, eliminated the guards, released the prisoners and effected the rescue of Sub-major Arnie Tenebrae. As she buckled on the new field-inducer weapons pack her rescuers had brought for her and made her escape, a small, bespectacled young man, like a dirty-minded owl, jumped out of a doorway waving an immense Presney long-barrelled reaction pistol he clearly did not know how to use.

  “Stay, ah, where you are, don’t, ah, move, you’re all, ah, under arrest.”

  “Oh, Migli, don’t be a silly Migli,” said Arnie Tenebrae, and blew the back out of his head with a short burst from her field-inducer. Group 19 burned the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre behind them and rode off across the dull brown Stampos with the dull brown smoke hanging over them.

  42

  It was as if they had all been snatched up into the night: men, houses, big yellow machines, everything, all gone. That night there had been the worst storm anyone could remember and the brothers had laid in their beds feeling delicious thrills of scariness every time the lightning threw huge blue shadows on the wall and the thunder boomed so loud and so long it was as if it were in the room with them, in the bed beside them. They could not remember falling asleep, but they must have, for the next thing they knew their mother was pulling back the curtains to admit the peculiar sunshine you get only after huge storms that is so clear and light and clean it is as if it has been laundered. They tumbled out of bed into clothes through breakfast and up into the laundered morning.

  “Isn’t it quiet?” said Kaan. To ears accustomed to months, years of the din of day-and-night labour, the quiet was intimidating.

  “I can’t hear them working,” said Rael Jr. “Why aren’t they working?” The brothers hurried to the low place they had dug under the wire so that they could play in the most exciting of boys’ playgrounds, the construction site. They stood at the wire and looked at nothing.

  “They’re gone!” cried Kaan. There was not one earth grader, concrete pourer, or tower crane, not a single site hut, not a dormitory, canteen or social, not one welder, mason, or bricklayer, not even a foreman, site supervisor, crane driver, or truck loader to be seen. It felt as if the storm had sucked them all into the sky, never to return. Rael Jr. and his young brother rolled under the wire and explored the new and empty world.

  They trod gingerly through shadowy streets between the stupendous buttresses of steel converters. They shied at every desert bird that croaked and every distorted reflection of themselves in the jungle of metal piping. As it became apparent that the plant was utterly deserted, the boys’ daring grew.

  “Yeehee!” shouted Kaan Mandella through his cupped hands.

  “YEEHEE YEEhee Yeehee yeehee…” called the echoes in the settling tanks and ore conveyors.

  “Look at that!” shouted Rael Jr. Neatly parked in laagers beneath the towering complexities of pipes and flues stood two hundred dump trucks. Agile as monkeys the boys climbed and crawled all over the bright yellow trucks, swinging from door handles and foot-steps, sliding down sloping backs into buckets big enough to hold the entire Mandella hacienda. Their energy led them from the big trucks onto the gantries and catwalks to play perilous games of three-dimensional tag among the pipes and ducts of the ore filtration system. Hanging by one arm over a shuddering drop into the bucket of a rear loader, Kaan Mandella let fly a whoop of glee.

  “Rael! Wow! Look! Trains!”

  The jungle gym of industrial chemistry was immediately abandoned in favour of the twelve waiting trains. The explorers had never seen such trains before, each was over a kilometre long and hauled by two Bethlehem Ares Railroads Class 88s hitched in tandem. The sense of slumbering power trapped within the shutdown tokamaks awed the boys into silence. Rael Jr. touched one of the titans with the flat of his hand.

  “Cold,” he said. “Powered down.” He had been given a book about trains by his grandfather for his seventh birthday.

  “‘Edmund Gee,’ ‘Speedwell,’ ‘Indomptable,"’ said Kaan Mandella, reading the names of the black and gold behemoths. “What would it be like if one suddenly started up?” Rael Jr. imagined the fusion engines exploding into life and the idea scared him so much he made Kaan leave the sleeping giants alone and led him into another part of the complex entirely, one they had never seen before on their clandestine playground visits.

  “It’s like another Desolation Road,” said Kaan.

  “Desolation Road like it ought to be,” said Rael Jr. They found themselves at the edge of a small but complete town of about six thousand inhabitants, or, rather, which would have housed six thousand inhabitants, for it was as empty as a graveyard. It was a well-ordered town with neat terraces of white adobe houses with red roofs (for some things were too sacred for even the Bethlehem Ares Corporation to change) lining spacious streets that radiated out like the spokes of a wheel from a central hub of parkland. At the end of every street where it joined the circular service road stood a Company commissary, a Company school, a Company community centre and a Company depot for small gadabout electric tricycles.

  “Hey! These are great!” shouted Kaan, turning tight circles within circles on his three-wheeled buggy, “Race you!” Rael Jr. rose to the challenge, kicked a trike into action, and the two boys raced each other up and down the empty streets of Steeltown past the empty houses, the empty shops, the empty schools and socials and tea rooms and doctors’ offices and chapels, all empty empty empty like the eyes of a skull, and they whooped and cheered as their wheels threw up clouds of the red dust that had found its way even into this sacred place.

  At the hub of the wheel of streets was a circular park with the name “Industrial Feudalism Gardens” above its wrought iron gate. When the boys tired of their racing they threw off their dusty sweaty clothes and splashed in the ornamental lake and sunned themselves on the neatly rolled lawns.

  “Hey, this is great!” said Rael Jr.

  “When do you think all the people are coming?” asked Kaan.

  “Don’t care long as it isn’t today. I could stay here forever.” Rael Jr. stretched like a cat and yielded himself to the innocent sun.<
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  “Do you think you’ll work here when you grow up?”

  “Might do. Might not. Haven’t thought much about what I might want to do. How about you?”

  “I want to be rich and famous and have a huge house like we had in Belladonna and a pool and a ’lighter and have everyone know me, like Pa was.”

  “Huh! Seven years old and he knows exactly what he wants. How you going to get all this then?”

  “I’m going to go into business with Rajandra Das.”

  “That bum! He can’t do anything!”

  “We’re going to open a hot food stall and when we make a lot of money on that one, we’ll open another, and another, and another, and I’ll be rich and famous, just you see!”

  Rael Jr. lay back on the neatly rolled grass and wondered how his little brother could have all his days charted out before him while he wished only to be blown like a moth on the mystical desert wind.

  “Listen,” said brother Kaan, sitting up, alert. “Sounds like ’lighters.”

  Rael Jr. stretched his hearing and caught the beat of aircraft engines on the edge of the wind.

  “Coming this way. Maybe it’s the people.”

  “Oh, no, maybe it is,” said Kaan, struggling into sticky clothes. The first LTA drifted over the steel pinnacles of the city. “Let’s go.” The brothers ran down deserted streets filled with the drumming of aircraft engines and over their heads airship after airship after airship drifted past. RaelJr. ran with one eye to the sky.

  “There must be hundreds of them.” There was both wonder and awe in his voice.

  “Come on,” said brother Kaan, cursed with pragmatism.

  “No, I want to see what’s happening.” Rael Jr. climbed a series of sheer staircases that led to the top of a catalytic converter column. After only an instant’s hesitation Kaan followed. He was indeed pragmatic; but curious. From the walkway around the head of the column the plan of the operation became apparent. The ’lighters were taking up stations in a huge disc centred on Desolation Road.

  “Wow, there must be thousands of them,” said Kaan, revising his brother’s earlier estimates. Still the airships passed over their heads. The ’lighters flew over Desolation Road for a further half hour before their formation was complete. The sky was black with them, black shot through with golden liveried lightnings, a storm of industry about to descend upon Desolation Road. As far as the boys’ desert-sharp eyes could see, the aircraft were waiting: The dark presence of the ’lighters scared them. They had known the Bethlehem Ares Corporation was powerful, but powerful enough to turn the sky black, that was awesome.

  Then it was as if a magic word had been spoken.

  All at once, everywhere, the cargo hatches of the dirigibles opened and clouds of orange smoke poured out.

  “Gas!” the brothers shrieked in imagined alarm, but the orange smoke did not drift like gas would but hung in rippling curtains around Desolation Road. The orange smoke hung for a few seconds, then settled to the ground with uncharacteristic speed.

  “That’s clever,” said Rael Jr., “They’re using their fans to make a downdraft.”

  “I want to go home,” said the boy with the future planned.

  “Shhh. This is interesting.” Within a minute of the cargo doors’ opening the cloud had precipitated out to lie in a thick orange-on-red scum over the Great Desert.

  “I want to go home, I’m scared,” repeated the boy who wanted to be rich and famous. Rael Jr. peered at the dunes and the high, dry plateau, but all there was to be seen were the ’lighters peeling away from formation one by one.

  “I’ve seen enough. We can go now.”

  At home Pa was in ebullient good humour.

  “Come and look at this,” he said, and took his sons into his maize field. “What do you make of that?” It reminded Rael Jr. most of the copper sulphate crystal he had grown in school but this was dull black, rusty and about half a metre in length. It was also growing out of the middle of the maize field, a thing no copper sulphate crystal ever did. Said Limaal Mandella with a note of pride in his voice, “I think I might dig it up as a souvenir.”

  “What is it?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to the radio? It’s an iron ferrotrope crystal! Boy, we’re living smack bang in the middle of the world’s biggest bacteriologically active zone!” They could not understand why their father sounded so pleased. “If you get the binoculars and go down to the edge of the bluffs, there are these things growing out of the sand as far as you can see! Crystal ferrotropes! It’s the way the Bethlehem Ares Corporation’s getting all the iron out of the sand, by bacteria, tiny little living organisms that eat the useless rust in the sand and shit out those things you see there. Clever? Brilliant! A real first for Desolation Road. Never been one anywhere else. We’re the first!”

  “Was that what was coming out of the ’lighters?” asked Kaan. Rael Jr. kicked him to shut him up before he said anything about being under the forbidden wire in Steeltown, but his Pa’s eyes were too full of the light of technology to see anything lesser.

  “Microbial spores. That’s what they were, microbial spores. But you know what’s most amazing of all? This… disease, I suppose you might call it, only affects rust, one very particular iron oxide. Won’t touch anything else; you could walk through the desert for kilometres and kilometres and kilometres and not come to any harm. Bethlehem Ares has that stuff reaching out twenty kilometres in all directions. Richest ore deposit on the whole planet I heard one of the construction men say afore he left.”

  “Why is this one here?” Rael Jr. bent to examine the alien thing in the maize field.

  “Must be iron deep under the soil. Some of the spores blew here and got into the rust. Tell you this, boys, Ed Gallacelli’s got them growing out of his shed roofl”

  “Wow! Can I go and look?” asked Kaan.

  “Sure,” said Pa. “I’ll come, too, we’ll take the binoculars and go down to the bluffs. Everyone’s down there watching the show. You coming, Rael Jr.?”

  Rael Jr. did not come. He went inside and read his book about trains, and when his father and brother and mother and grandmother and grandfather came home full of descriptions of towering crystals thrusting out of the sand growing growing growing ten, twenty, fifty metres tall before their sheer weight shattered them, he pretended to be playing with the cat but he was really hating them, his father brother mother grandfather grandmother because he did not know how to hate those pilots and planners who had willed such a world-shaking change upon his universe. He did not understand why he felt this hatred, why he felt violated, emptied, soul-sick. He tried to tell his brother, his mother, even his faraway father, but they did not understand what he was trying to tell them, none of them, not even wise Eva Mandella with her wise old weaving hands. The only one in the whole of Desolation Road who would have understood Rael Jr.’s soul-deep malaise was his Aunt Taasmin, for she alone knew what it was like to be cursed with an unguessable mystic destiny.

  43

  At six minutes of six the sirens blew.

  They blew like the horns of angels. They blew like summer storms through the pump gantries and over the red roof-tiles. They blew like the Trump of Doomsday, like the sky cracking, like the breath of the Panarch breathing life into lifelessness.

  At six minutes of six the shout of the sirens broke the desert air and on every street every door in the new town flew open at once and out poured the people, people from all the continents of the world and beyond, from Metropolis, ever running backward in its chase to keep up with itself, people even from the impoverished people-weary Motherworld herself, all come to make the steel for the railroads and farm machines and power looms and rikshas and bridges and buildings of the young, vigorous world, pouring from their doors to make steel for the mighty Bethlehem Ares Steel: workers streaming to the manufactories, tributary joining to tributary in a river of heads, hands and hearts surging down the shadowy streets of the Steeltown. Junior executives in smart paper suit
s fresh that morning from the slot dispenser zipped past on electric tricycles, children dawdled to their schools and Company kindergartens, shopkeepers and commissary merchants pulled up door blinds and set the chairs out on the verandas to advertise that they were open for business.

  At the shout of the sirens two hundred yellow trucks shook into life like weary dogs and rumbled out from their garages. In the crystal dunefields drag-lines-and bucket-wheelers woke from prayerful repose to feed. With a roar and a thunder twenty-four black and gold Class 88 haulers fired up their fusion tokamaks and chunk-chunked over the points onto the mainline.

  At the sirens’ shout smoke puffed from a hundred stacks: puffed, blew rings, then poured into the Indian summer sky, black, white, orange, brown. Conveyors rattled into motion, furnaces ignited, white-hot carbon electrodes descended into swirling vats of molten heat, rolling mills came up to speed, and at the very heart of the complex, behind walls of concrete, sound, steel, lead and magnetism, the plasmic djinn rattled its pinch-bottle and poured magical power into the city.

  At the sirens’ shout guards in black and gold uniforms with black and gold emblems on their shoulders swung wide the wire gates and the two hundred trucks burst through them and bounced through Desolation Road down the red dirt track into the ore fields.

  At the sirens’ shout the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption poured from their cardboard and plastic hovels around the Basilica and streamed through the alleys of old Desolation Road in a welter of psalms and mantras to ring the Steeltown gates and scatter prayer confetti under the house-high wheels of the trucks. The guards smiled and waved, the plaidshirted drivers flashed their lights and blared their horns. The rag-clad Poor Children danced and sang for them. Prayer kites improvised from plastic refuse sacks were run up into the dawn wind and fastened to the wire fence: great was the celebration on that, the first day of the Advent of the Steel Messiah! The trucks thundered past, fifty, one hundred, two hundred. The shouting of their engines drowned out the hymns of the worshippers, the churning wheels showered them with red dust. The dawn light brightened, flooding through the factorial geometries, casting beautiful industrial shadows through the wire onto the dancing Poor Children. Floodlights switched off as the day grew stronger.