Desolation Road

by Ian McDonald

  “Usual, Miss Quinsana?”

  “Thanks, Raani.”

  The bowl of steaming fresh chowder was served by a dull-eyed paan-chewing teenage girl.

  —Kid won't last three months, let alone three years, Marya Quinsana thought. But the chowder was very good. Strange that in all the years of working here when she could have had the stuff for nothing she'd never once tasted it.

  The energy she'd possessed then amazed her still. Sixteen to midnight serving chowder, bouillabaisse and gumbo, then up at eight in the morning and off to the Party offices on Kayanga Prospect to fill envelopes and canvas down on Pier 66. Party supporter, party member, party worker, then the time had come to decide between party candidate and fish chowder. No choice, really, but she was still thankful for Raano and his dollars. She had learned a lot from the chowder-stuffed mouths of his clients, enough to rewrite the party manifesto for the Syrtia Regional Assembly Elections and sweep the party onto victory balconies all across the continent. She'd been there on the balcony with the other loyal party workers, applauding the successful candidates, but the thought in her heart had been “poor puppets, poor puppets.” She had manipulated them into power by telling them to listen to the people.

  Listen, she'd said, listen to the people, listen to what they like, what they hate, what makes them angry, what makes them happy, what they care about and what they don't care about. The party that listens is the party that wins. But what she'd really wanted them to listen to was Marya Quinsana telling them to listen.

  “You should run for office yourself,” Mohandas Gee had suggested, “you who know so much about what the people want.” She had declined. Then. It had looked like dedication. It was ambition. Her time would come with the world elections in two years. In the intervening years she was the hammer and her manifesto the anvil upon which the New Party was forged. A zealous mood of reform swept the cadres. A new Electoral College was adopted and many an old reactionary (“the professional politicians” Marya Quinsana denounced them) found himself without nomination when the regional ballots came around again. Yet Marya Quinsana trod carefully. Her essential hypocrisy must never be disclosed: that she, the decrier of professionalism, sought to bring a whole new dimension of professionalism to the political arena. There were still too many political luminaries who possessed the power to destroy her.

  She dipped her bread into the chowder and watched the fishing fleet busy with nets and sails at the piers across Ocean Boulevard. Years and decades. This election, she would be content with a counsel post. Three years after that would be the time when she would sweep to glory as party leader. Gulls squabbled and wheeled over the open hatches of the fishing boats. Years and decades. Politics was like a sea. The manifesto was the net, the populace the catch, and she the trawlerman.

  Raano Thurinnen sat himself down heavily across the table from her.

  “How goes the dinner, Miss Q.?”

  “Your usual estimable quality, Raani.”

  “Grand. You're on the radio in five minutes if you want to listen.”

  “Can't stand election broadcasts. I sound like a llama on them. Only spoil the folks’ appetites. You voting tomorrow?”

  “Of course. For you, Miss Q.”

  “Hush now, Raani. Privacy of ballot is a man's constitutional right.”

  “I'm not ashamed for everyone to know. Why, anyone disagrees with me, he can get out of my restaurant.”

  “Now, Raani, democratic rights, remember? A man can hold any opinion he chooses.”

  “Not in my restaurant. Why, today two punks came wandering in wearing Whole Earth Army badges, started handing out flyers, they did. Well, I'm not having that in my restaurant, so I threw them out. Got quite nasty, they did, had to butt a couple of heads for them. That girl they had with them, she tried to scratch my eyes, imagine that? I don't know about that Whole Earth Army, Miss Q., I mean, opinions is one thing, but killings and bombings, well, something's got to be done, hasn't it? You will do something about that Whole Earth Army, won't you, Miss Quinsana? Why, I'm half scared they'll come and burn this place down: I've heard they've done that. You will do something about them, Miss Q.? You've got to stop them, they're all mad, and that music they play, it isn't good for the kids. Drives them wild. I won't have it in here…when you get elected, I know you'll stop it.”

  “I will,” said Marya Quinsana. “You have my word on that.” Then the radio announced that there was going to be a party political broadcast on behalf of the New Party by Miss Marya Quinsana and she wondered as the music played just how many of her other election promises she would keep as surely as her promise to break the Whole Earth Army.

  Now that the trees were full-grown and provided a lovely shade, Grandfather Haran spent more and more time in the garden he had made. He loved to spend time in the contemplation of things past. He thought of his boyhood in Thompson's Falls, he thought of his first wife, Evgeny, he thought of his son's boyhood and his son's son's boyhood. He thought of his adoptive daughter, turned into a wild, animal child, he thought of his granddaughter, turned into a deity against her own will, and his grandson, the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. He wondered if he would ever see him again. He thought the thoughts a man of forty-five thinks. When he thought these thoughts he liked to have his meals brought to him so that he could eat in the tranquility of his garden in undisturbed reminiscence and once or twice the Babooshka had had to come out at dusk to fetch him home.

  “You should open it up to the public,” said Rael Mandella, mindful of the stuffed pockets of the pilgrims flocking to see his daughter. “The Grey Lady's Garden of Serenity. Twenty centavos in.” Of late the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption had taken to calling her the Grey Lady.

  “I will do no such thing,” said Grandfather Haran. “It is my garden, for the private personal use of my wife, myself and those guests I choose to invite.” To maintain that privacy he hired a handful of desperately impoverished Poor Children from the shantytown called Faith City that surrounded the great grey basilica and paid them to build a wall around his garden. Pleased with their industry, he erected a gate which he locked with a stout padlock and put one key into his pocket and the other on a long golden chain around his wife's neck.

  When the bustle and rush of the new Desolation Road with its entrepreneurs and vendors of religious gewgaws and rentracking hoteliers grew too much, they would lock themselves in the garden and listen to the singing of the birds and the leaping of the fish in the little stream. They would plant flowers and shrubs, for a garden is never completed while its gardener lives, and as they worked their soily-fingered way along paths and flower beds they seemed to discover parts to it they could not remember having planted: secret dells, tiny waterfalls, groves of cool trees, a maze, a sand garden, a grassy lawn with a sundial at its centre.

  “Dearest wife, does it sometimes seem to you that our garden reaches out beyond the walls I have built around it?” asked Grandfather Haran. After walking for almost an hour along an intriguing flagstone path, they had come to a stone bench beneath a willow tree and here they were resting. The Babooshka looked at the sky, which seemed to her strangely soft, not like the harsh blue-black of Desolation Road at all, and full of pillowy clouds.

  “Husband Haran, I think that as we have grown this garden, so this garden has grown us, and the unexpected things we are finding in it are the seeds it has sown in our imaginations.”

  They sat quietly for a long time on the stone bench beneath the willow, watching the clouds, quiet with the quietness of old people who do not need to speak to communicate. As the world began to turn its face away from the sun they left the stone seat and returned by ways more wild and beautiful than they had ever trodden before to the gate in the wall. There pastry vendors and whey-faced tourists pushed rudely past them in the laneway as they locked the gate behind them.

  “I am thinking that if what you say is true, then our garden may be of infinite extent and variety,” said G
randfather Haran. The Babooshka clapped her hands in delight.

  “Why, husband Haran, then we must explore! Tomorrow we shall begin, yes?”

  Early the next morning, before the lanes and alleys filled with strangers, the Babooshka and Grandfather Haran embarked upon their exploration of the garden. The Babooshka fastened one end of a large ball of twine to the gate and played it out. In her satchel she carried eighteen such balls, her drawing books and pencils, so that she might map the unexplored hinterland of the imagination, and two packed lunches. Grandfather Haran led the way, equipped with opticon, sextant, watch and compass. Within ten minutes of leaving the gate, husband and wife were in unfamiliar territory.

  There should be a stand of accelerated-growth beech trees here,” said Grandfather Haran. “I planted them myself, I remember clearly.” Before him was a small wooded valley. Banks of rhododendrons gladdened the slopes and a small stream splashed over stones. “There are no rhododendrons here. They are over by the left of the gate…the garden, I think, must be constantly reshaping itself. Fascinating.”

  “Hush,” said the Babooshka, “do you hear a voice?” Grandfather Haran strained his less-acute ears.

  “Is it Rael?”

  “Yes. Hush, listen. Did you hear what he said?”

  “I thought I heard my son shout something about Limaal coming home.”

  “He did. So, huband, shall we go back?”

  Grandfather Haran let the twine run through his fingers. Behind him he could just discern the iron gate. Before him he saw the new valley and it seemed to him that beyond it a huge, virgin landscape, a land of wooded hillsides and rushing rivers, bright meadows and leaping deer.

  “Forward,” he said, and together they went down into the valley, he sighting on the sun and marking compass bearings, she reeling out the twine behind her. They crossed the stream and hand in hand climbed up into the wooded hillsides and flower filled meadows and never came back.

  When Rael Mandella came to look for them he found only the twine the Babooshka had played out behind her. He followed its devious course around trees and flower beds, fountains and shubberies in a great spiral inward from the walls toward the heart of the garden. He burst through the final screen of privet into a small, neat lawn and came to the end of the twine. It was tied around the trunk of a great elm tree, one of a pair that stood so close together that their branches and roots were intertwined beyond the power of any man to separate.

  Limaal Mandella had come with wife, children and fixings to boot to Desolation Road to escape from the plague of people, but such was his fame that he spent most of his first year a virtual prisoner in his own home.

  “I am not the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known!” he shouted in frustration to the crowds of admirers who gathered every morning outside the Mandella house. “Not anymore. Go away! Go and give yourselves to the ROTECH Anagnosta Gabriel, I don't want you!”

  Finally Rael Mandella Sr. made daily patrols with his shotgun to keep the chaff away, and Eva Mandella, who in the summer wove out of doors beneath the great umbrella tree in front of the house, performed magnificently as receptionist and vetter of visitors. Then, just as Limaal Mandella was settling into the first period of peace he had known since he walked into Glenn Miller's Jazz Bar, cue under arm, the plague of surveyors descended upon Desolation Road.

  And the plague of surveyors begat the plague of plastic grid squares, the plague of plastic grid squares begat the plague of planners, the plague of planners begat the plague of construction workers, and the plague of construction workers drove Limaal Mandella back into isolation. Just as he had gotten used to the pilgrims and entrepreneurs, and they to him, the town was suddenly filled up with successive waves of surveyors, planners, and construction workers until the hotels, hostelries, taverns, inns and bunkhouses bulge with them. He could no longer walk to Pentecost's General Merchandise Stores to buy the Meridian Herald without a dozen voices calling out, “Hey, look, Sanchi, it's Limaal Mandella,” “It is him, I tell you, the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known,” “Is that…yes it is…Limaal Mandella,” and dozens of hands reaching out scraps of paper, bills, wage slips, betting forms, for him to autograph and dozens of invitations for him to play exhibition matches in some hotel, bar, workers’ social.

  “Just what the hell is going on!” he fumed to Santa Ekatrina. “First of all the whole damn desert's carved up like a dartboard into squares with plastic tape, now there's enough heavy construction gear flying in night and day to build an extra continent. And just as the folks here learn that I've retired and that I don't want to talk about snooker or beating the Devil or the competition to be the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known; just when I can go down to the bar again, or the shop, I have to go into hiding again. Just what the hell are they doing out there, building an extra space elevator or something?”

  Kaan Mandella, four years old, bright, cheeky and stuffed full of lamb pilaf, piped up, “Iron, Pa. Whole desert's full of iron. Virtually pure rust, says teacher, and she should know, she used to be a geolly…a geoggy…”

  “Geologist. Iron! Sweet Lady, what next? So that's the Bethlehem Ares Corporation out there. I don't know…what's to become of Desolation Road?”

  Enough had become of Desolation Road in his Belladonna years for it to be virtually unrecognizable to Limaal Mandella. Saints, prophets, basilicas, men with metal arms, hotels, inns, flophouses all aglow, with gaudy neon, prayer kites, gongs and windharps, belfries full of clamour, vanished grandparents, walled gardens, mystery relations who vanished as rapidly as they had appeared, putty-featured aliens astonished on street corners, five trains a day, and a er port too, shops, bars, shanties and slums, people sleeping in the alley at night, people standing in line all day by the door marked “Supplicants”; theft, rape, abduction: police! Constables with shock staves, courts, and Louie Gallacelli draped in attorney robes, real-estate, property, and leases. Pastry vendors on every street corner; barrow boys, costermongers, hawkers of religious curios: streets! Poured concrete and corrugated tin, glass, steel and plastic; beer that tasted like piss: imported food! Lines at water pumps, acres of solar generators, the all-pervasive smell of ordure from overloaded methane digesters. Bicycles, rikshas, trikes: trucks! People shouting during the siesta, people entering without knocking, people, strangers, staring staring staring, talking, opening mouths, making noises. Even his sister was a stranger to him, shut up inside the ugly concrete carbuncle that called itself the Basilica of the Grey Lady; admission only to pious supplicants, penitents and those with the heart of a pilgrim. Limaal Mandella still possessed enough worldly pride to refuse to join the line by the door marked “Supplicants.”

  “This house, this town, this world, what is it coming to?” he shouted, and banged out of the house across the courtyard to his parents’ house. In the twenty seconds it took him to cross the llama-dunged yard, two flash photographs were taken of him and a darkness-hidden female behind a potted bay tree begged for him to sexually abuse her.

  “Mother, this town has me driven to distraction!”

  At work upon her tapestry frame, Eva Mandella smiled and said, “Limaal! How nice to see you!”

  “Mother, I have no privacy! Just thirty seconds ago some woman implored me to tie her up, gag her, wrap her in plastic film, and piss all over her! It can't go on! I must have privacy!”

  “You have a famous face, Limaal.”

  “That part of my life is over, Mother.”

  “While you are alive, no part of your life is over. That is what this is for. Tell me, Limaal, what do you think of it?” She showed him the tapestry upon which she had been at work.

  “Very nice,” said Limaal Mandella, still trembling with rage.

  “Isn't it? It's the history of this town. Everything that has ever happened I am putting into this tapestry so that when I am long gone your children and their children will be able to look at it and know they have a proud history. It's very impor
tant to know where you are coming from, and where you are going to. That is your problem, Limaal, you have come from, but as yet you have nowhere to go. You must have a purpose.”

  Limaal Mandella said nothing but stood twisting his foot on the dusty flagstones. Then he kissed his mother a brief smack on the cheek, spun on his heel, and ran out of the house, past the frustrated woman and the pirate photographers in the branches of the mulberry trees, through his kitchen, past his startled wife and sons, out into a night roaring with heavy construction machinery. He pressed on with grim determination, ignoring the workers’ cries of recognition and praise, and entered the overgrown garden surrounding Dr. Alimantando's cave house. The door had been forced, the vestibule was dusty and rank. Bats fled from their ceiling roosts as the light panels came to life.

  Somewhere in this place must be the key to the dissatisfaction, the irritability, the bad temper, the restlessness. As a child he had believed that Dr. Alimantando had all human wit and wisdom inscribed upon his walls, now all he needed was some target at which to aim his rationalism. Limaal Mandella stood before the wailfuls of chronodynamic hieroglyphics and a smile grew. A light was lit in him. He might no longer be the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known, but before him lay the key to becoming Master of Space and Time. Here was a lifetime of mystery, achievement, failure and triumph.

  “Pa?” The voice startled him. “Pa, you all right?” It was Rael Jr., five and already cursed with the family curse. Limaal Mandella rested a hand on his son's head.

  “I'm all right. It's just that since we came here I've not known what I wanted to do with myself.”

  “I know. You were like a paper glider in the wind.”

  Had be been that inept at concealing his frustration?

  “Well, that's all over now. Rael, your father is going to be a Gentleman of Science and Learning, like Dr. Alimantando in the stories I told you about this place. See here…” Father and son knelt to examine the faded scribblings. “This is where it all begins.” He traced the line of reasoning along the wall and up and around, Rael Jr. following him, and embarked upon the years of line-following that were to lead him to the centre of the ceiling in Dr. Alimantando's weather-room.