Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “It's all right. Look, I was crazy then, we were all crazy then…”

  She remembered lying flat on her back in a bed of red poppies the day the rains came, staring at the sky, twirling a little red poppy in her fingers, humming a silly little tune while a million million light years away something went ump-wump, ump-wump, ump-wump inside her. She had gladly ripped off her clothes when the rains fell and rubbed the beautiful red mud into her hair; it had felt good, it had felt free like flying, it had felt like she could fall forever like a fat, pregnant raindrop and burst her womanly fluids over the dry land. She had put her arms out like wings weeeeee round and round and round, down into the fields of flowers, her propellors sending daisies marigolds poppies flying in twin arcs from her round nippled engines. Child of grace, she had been crazy then, but hadn't everyone, and if this crazy town with all its same same faces wasn't an excuse to go crazy time and again, what was? Maybe she had gone a little too far: the Gallacelli brothers had never needed much encouragement, but when EdUmbertoLouie had got on top of her, she'd flown!

  “I didn't know what I was doing; hell, I thought I was flying.” The excuse did not even convince her. After they parted, Mikal Margolis felt the guilt rise like fog. He must walk away, and walk away soon, from these women who were drawing him close to the Roche limit of the heart.

  In the new snooker annex of the B.A.R./Hotel Mr. Jericho was potting balls with the consummate ease of a man who had his Exalted Ancestors calculating the angles for him. Limaal Mandella, aged seven and three-quarters watched him. When the table was free, he picked up a cue and while attention was focused on beer and bean stew, made a break of one hundred and seven. From behind the bar Ed Gallacelli heard the sound of balls falling into pockets and took interest. He watched Limaal Mandella complete his hundred and seven, then go on to make one hundred and fifteen.

  “Child of grace!” he exclaimed quietly. He went over to the boy, busy setting up the triangle of reds for another practice. “How do you do that?”

  Limaal Mandella shrugged.

  “Well, I just hit them where it seems right.”

  “You mean you've never touched a cue before now?”

  “How could I?”

  “Child of grace!”

  “Well, I watched Mr. Jericho and did what he did. It's a very good game, you're totally in control of what's happening. It's all angles and speed. I think I might go for the big break this frame.”

  “How big?”

  “Well, I think I've got the hang of it. The maximum.”

  “Child of grace!”

  And Limaal Mandella made a maximum break of one hundred and forty-seven and Ed Gallacelli was utterly amazed. Ideas of bets, challenges and purses began to trickle through his mind.

  The months of Persis Tatterdemalion's pregnancy passed. She grew great and bulbous and unaerodynamic, which depressed her more than anyone suspected. So great and bulbous grew she that her husbands took her to Marya Quinsana's veterinary surgery for a second opinion. Marya Quinsana listened for almost an hour through a device used for monitoring llama pregnancies and at the end of that time diagnosed a case of twins. The town cheered, Persis Tatterdemalion waddled ponderously around the B.A.R./Hotel in gravid misery, the rains rained, and the crops grew. Under Ed Gallacelli's management Limaal Mandella turned teen-shark, fleecing gullible visiting soil-scientists, geophysicists and plant pathologists out of their beer dollars. And Mikal Margolis drew foolishly close to Marya Quinsana's mother-mass and by the laws of emotional dynamics cast Morton Quinsana into the dark.

  On a sharp and freezing autumn night, Rajandra Das went around knocking on every front door in Desolation Road.

  “They're coming, it's time!” he said, and dashed away to spread his warning to the other households. “They're coming, it's time!”

  “Who's coming?” asked Mr. Jericho, slyly arresting the fleetfooted Mercury with a cunning arm lock.

  “The twins! Persis Tatterdemalion's twins!”

  Within five minutes the whole town, with the exception of the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran, were being served complimentary drinks in the B.A.R./Hotel, while in the master bedroom Marya Quinsana and Eva Mandella got in each other's way as Persis Tatterdemalion squeezed and huffed and huffed and squeezed and huffed a pair of fine sons into the world. As might have been expected, they were as alike in every detail as their fathers.

  “Sevriano and Batisto!” declared the Gallacelli brothers (senior). The two celebrated and while the Gallacelli brothers (senior) were in with the mother and the Gallacelli brothers (junior), Rajandra Das posed the question everyone wanted to ask but had lacked the courage to voice.

  “All right then, which one of them is the father?”

  The Great Question buzzed around Desolation Road like a swarm of annoying insects. Ed, Umberto or Louie? Persis Tatterdemalion did not know. The Gallacelli brothers (senior) would not say. The Gallacelli brothers (junior) could not say. Rajandra Das's question reigned absolute for twenty-four hours, then a better question replaced it. That question was: Who killed Gaston Tenebrae and left him by the side of the railroad line with his head smashed like a breakfast egg?

  There was to be a trial. It was eagerly anticipated by all. It would be the event of the year. Possibly the event of all time. It would mark Desolation Road as a real place, for no place was real until someone had died there and put a big black pin on the monochrome maps of the dead. It was of such importance that Dominic Frontera spoke with his superiors on his microwave relay and hired the services of the Court of Piepowder.

  Two days later a black and gold train climbed up over the horizon and was waved into a siding by Rajandra Das, stationmaster Pro Tem. It promptly disgorged a bustle of periwigged lawyers, judges, recorders and ushers, who subpoenaed everyone over the age of ten to form a jury.

  The courtroom of Piepowder was constructed inside one of the carriages. This made it rather long and narrow as courtrooms went. The judge presided at one end with his books, counsels and flask of brandy; at the other stood the defendant. Public and jury faced each other across the centre of the carriage and developed severe cases of tennis-neck during cross-examination. The Honourable Justice Dunne took the chair and the court was in session.

  “This legally constituted Mobile Court Service under the jurisdiction of the North West Quartersphere Justiciary (as provided by the Bethlehem Ares Corporation) for the settlement of such cases and claims as have not access to Official Circuit Courts and corresponding legal facilities is now in session.” Justice Dunne suffered dreadfully from haemorrhoids. In times past they had often adversely influenced the outcome of trials.

  “Representing the State and Company?”

  “Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl.” Three weasel-faced lawyers stood up and bowed.

  “Representing the defendant?”

  “I, Your Honour, Louie Gallacelli.” He stood and bowed. Persis Tatterdemalion thought him very smart and assured in his legal costume. Louie Gallacelli was trembling, sweating, and suffering from an overtightness in the crotch of his pants. He had neither worn his mothball-redolent suit nor practiced his art before.

  “And what is the charge?”

  The recorder rose and bowed.

  “That on the night of thirty-first Julaugust, Mr. Gaston Tenebrae, citizen of the Officially Registered Settlement of Desolation Road, was murdered in cold blood and with malice aforethought, by Mr. Joseph Stalin, citizen of Desolation Road.”

  Seldom in the history of jurisprudence had there been a suspect as clearly guilty as Mr. Stalin. He was such an obvious choice for the murder of his hated rival Gaston Tenebrae that most people thought a trial was a waste of time and money and would have gladly lynched him from a wind-pump.

  “We will have a trial,” Dominic Frontera had said. “It must all be legal and proper.” He added, “First the trial, then the hanging.” Despite his protests of innocence, all the evidence piled up against Mr. Stalin. He had the motive, the opportunity and absolutely
no alibi for the night. He was guilty as hell.

  “How does the accused plead?” asked justice Dunne. The first haemorrhoidal twitchings plucked at his rectum. This was going to be a difficult trial.

  Louie Gallacelli rose, adopted the proper legal stance, and declared in a loud voice, “Not guilty.”

  Order was restored five gavel-banging minutes later.

  “Any further disturbances and I will have the court cleared,” scolded Justice Dunne. “Further, I am not totally satisfied with complete impartiality of the jury, but lacking any other we must proceed with the jury we have. Call the first witness.”

  Rajandras Das had been taken on as a temporary usher for the duration of the trial.

  “Call Genevieve Tenebrae!” he shouted. Genevieve Tenebrae took the witness stand and gave her testimony. As witness after witness was called it became manifestly clear that Mr. Stalin was as guilty as hell. The prosecution demolished his alibi (that he had been playing dominoes with Mr. Jericho) and unearthed the longstanding feud between the Stalins and Tenebraes. They settled upon the lone wind-pump for both gardens with the glee of vultures settling upon a dead llama. “Prime motivation!” they chorused, forefingers raised in triumph. In speedy succession they threw the rumoured dalliance on the train to Desolation Road, the envy over the children (at which point Genevieve Tenebrae left the court), and a thousand and one petty loathings and hatreds into the laps of the jury. Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl were triumphant. The defense was demoralized. Everything was set for the conviction of Mr. Stalin for the murder of his neighbour Gaston Tenebrae.

  In desperation Louie Gallacelli, having realized that he was well out of his league in the company of Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl, moved for an adjournment. To his surprise, Justice Dunne agreed. Two motives moved His Honour. The first was that the Court of Piepowder worked on daily rates, the second that his piles had reached a point of such excruciation that he could not face another hour on the judge's bench. Court was adjourned, all rose, and justice Dunne retired to a dinner of cutlets and claret followed by an intimate appointment with a jar of Mammy Lee's Calendula Pile Ointment.

  In the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel Louie Gallacelli sat in a quiet corner and reviewed the day's proceedings over a bottle of complimentary Belladonna brandy.

  “Holy Mother, I was lousy.”

  He saw Mr. Jericho enter and order a beer. He did not like Mr. Jericho. None of the Gallacelli brothers liked Mr. Jericho. He made them feel coarse and clumsy, more animals than men. But it was not dislike that made Louie Gallacelli call loudly for Mr. Jericho to get himself over here, but the fact that Mr. Jericho had refused to stand witness and corroborate his client's alibi.

  “Why the hell, I say, why the hell didn't you substantiate Joey's alibi? Why the hell didn't you come forward as a witness and say, ‘We were playing dominoes at such and such a time on such and such a night’ and end the case?” Mr. Jericho shrugged.

  “Well, were you playing dominoes together the night of the murder or weren't you?”

  “Of course we were,” said Mr. Jericho.

  “Well, then damn well say so in court! Listen, I'm going to subpoena you as a defence key witness and then you'll damn well have to say you were playing dominoes the night of the murder!”

  “I will not appear as a witness, even under subpoena.”

  “Why the hell not? Afraid of someone recognizing you? The judge perhaps? Afraid of cross-examination?”

  “Precisely.” Before Louie Gallacelli could ask any difficult lawyer's questions, Mr. Jericho said in a confidential whisper, “I can get you all the evidence you need without my having to take the witness stand.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “Come with me, please.”

  Mr. Jericho led the attorney to Dr. Alimantando's old house, empty and dusty since the day two years before when Dr. Alimantando had magically vanished into time to hunt down a mythical greenperson. In Dr. Alimantando's workshop Mr. Jericho dusted off a small machine that looked like a sewing machine tangled up in a spider's web.

  “No one knows this exists, but this is the Mark Two Alimantando time winder.”

  “Get on. You mean all that about the time travelling little green man's true?’

  “Should have talked more to your brother. He helped us build it. Dr. Alimantando left instructions for us to build this Mark Two unit in case something went wrong in time; he could put himself into stasis for a couple of million years and arrive here to pick up the replacement unit.”

  “Fascinating,” said Louie Gallacelli, not in the least fascinated. “How does this relate to my expert witness?”

  “We use it to wind time backward so that we can take a look at the night of the murder to see who really committed the crime.”

  “You mean you don't know?”

  “Of course not. Whatever made you think I did?”

  “I don't believe this.”

  “Watch and wait.”

  Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli were fetched from their suppers and taken to the place by the railroad line where Rajandra Das had found the body. It was a cold night, as it had been the night of the murder. The stars shone like steel spear-points. Lasers flickered fitfully across the vault of the sky. Louie Gallacelli flapped his arms for warmth and tried to read the heliograph of the heavens. His breath hung in great steaming clouds.

  “You folks near ready?”

  Mr. Jericho made some fine adjustments to the field generator settings.

  “Ready. Let's do it.”

  Ed Gallacelli tripped the remote switch and imprisoned Desolation Road within a translucent blue bubble.

  “Child of grace!” exclaimed brother Louie. Ed Gallacelli looked at him. That was his expression.

  “That's not what's meant to happen,” said Rajandra Das needlessly. “Do something before anyone notices.”

  “I'm trying, I'm trying,” said Ed Gallacelli, frozen-fingered clumsy at the fine settings.

  “I think we must have overlooked the Temporal Inversion Problem,” speculated Mr. Jericho.

  “Oh, what is that?” said Lawyer Louie.

  “A variable-entropic gradient electromagnetogravitic field,” said Ed Gallacelli.

  “No, what is that.” Something like a miniature thunderstorm was bombarding the upper curve of the bubble with rather pretty, if totally ineffectual, blue lightning.

  The three engineers looked up from their time machine.

  “Child of grace!” said Ed Gallacelli.

  “I think it's a ghost,” said Rajandra Das. The storm of entropic ectoplasm knotted into a translucent blue lifestudy of Gaston Tenebrae. His head was bent over at an improbable angle and he seemed to be boiling with suppressed rage. This could have been because he was quite naked. Garments clearly did not pass beyond the grave, not even the decorous white shifts with which public imagination covered its spooks’ modesty.

  “He looks pretty mad,” said Rajandra Das.

  “So would you if you'd been murdered,” said Louie.

  “No such things as ghosts,” said Mr. Jericho firmly.

  “Oh, no?” said three simultaneous voices.

  “It's a time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial stress matrix.”

  “Like hell,” said Rajandra Das. “It's a ghost.”

  “Looks like it is,” said Mr. Jericho.

  “All right. Then we have our expert witness. Fiddle with that thing and see if you can bring him in. I'm looking forward to presenting the ghost of the murder victim to testify on his own behalf tomorrow.” Six hands reached for the field-generator controls. Mr. Jericho slapped less dextrous fingers away and stroked the verniers. The blue bubble contracted to half its volume, bisecting wind pump and cutting off a third of the community solar farm.

  “Do that again,” said Louie Gallacelli, drawing up a line of questioning in his mind. He would make legal history. The first attorney ever to cross-examine a ghost. The bubble shrank once again. Now less
than one hundred metres distant, the ghost glowered at its captors and pelted the imprisoning dome with pixie lightning.

  “I hope he doesn't decide to use that stuff on us,” said Rajandra Das. The ghost was now circling at high speed under the apex of the dome, seething with unutterable fury.

  “Bring him in,” said Louie Gallacelli, unconsciously adopting his courtroom stance. The case was already successfully concluded in his mind. The name of Gallacelli was whispering up and down the line wherever injustice was being fought and the rights of man championed.

  The electromagnetogravitic variable entropy field was now no more than a metre across. The ghost, cramped and contorted into a painful knot of ectoplasm within, mouthed oaths which Mr. Jericho, being an accomplished lipreader, found quite shocking and utterly inappropriate for one supposedly passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch. Louie Gallacelli tried some preliminary questions, but such was the ghost's indignant ingratitude that he had Rajandra Das shut the field down to an agonizing fifteen centimetres and left it that size all night until the ghost learned some respect for the due processes of the law. The Mark Two time winder and incumbent phantom were taken to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel to await the morning. Umberto Gallacelli amused himself for several hours by spitting at the force field and showing the ghost some of his vast collection of photographs of women either having, about to have, or thinking about having sex with themselves, other women, a variety of farm animals, or massive-membered men.

  Justice Dunne was in poor humour for a sentencing. The local water had given him diarrhoea, which, coupled with his haemorrhoids, had felt like shitting sheets of flame. His breakfast had been cold and inadequate, he had learned from his radio that his racehorse had fallen and broken its neck in the Morongai Flats Ten Thousand Metres, and now two of his jurors were missing. He had his usher, that ragged scamp Rajandra Das, search the town for them, and when that proved to be in vain he ruled that the trial could proceed with a jury of eight. He made a mental note to add a charge of fifty golden dollars to the town's already substantial bill for this additional ruling. And now the defense counsel, a ludicrous semi-educated bumpkin with an overinflated opinion of his legal prowess, was seriously proposing that a key witness be admitted at this late stage in the proceedings.