Desolation Road Read online

  “Blessed Child,” said Inspiration Cadillac, smiling a horrid smile, “behold your flock. How may we serve you?”

  Taasmin Mandella looked at the metal limbs, the metal heads, the metal hearts, the empty steel mouths, the plastic eyes. They revolted her. She cried out, “No! I don't want your service! I don't want to be your prophetess, your mistress, I don't want you! Go back to wherever you came from, just leave me alone!” She ran away from the furious worshippers, out along the rim rocks to her old refuge.

  “I don't want them, you hear?” she screamed at the walls of her cave. “I don't want their hideous metal bodies, they disgust me, I don't want them to serve me, worship me, have anything to do with me!” She threw her arms above her head and released all her holy power. The air glowed blue, the rock groaned and shuddered, and Taasmin Mandella screamed bolt after bolt of frustrated force into the roof. At length she was drained and as she sat in a knot on the stone floor she thought about power, freedom and responsibility. She pictured the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption in her mind's eye. She saw their metal hands, metal legs, metal arms, metal shoulders, their steel eyes, their tin chins, their iron ears, their half-and-half faces peeping out of their ugly, cheap little hovels. She was moved to pity. They were pathetic. Poor weak fools, pathetic children. She would show them a better way. She would lead them to self-respect.

  After four days of thoughts and resolutions in her cave Taasmin Mandella was hungry and returned to Desolation Road for a bowl of lamb chili in the B.A.R./Hotel. Her halo glowed so brightly, no one could look at it. She found her town aswarm with construction workers in hard yellow hats, driving big yellow earthmovers and big yellow diggers. Big yellow transport dirigibles were setting down twenty-ton loads of pre-stressed steel girders and big yellow trains were unloading pre-mixed concrete and building sand into small yellow dumpsters.

  “What the hell is going on?” said Taasmin Mandella, unconsciously echoing the mayor's words of greeting. She found Inspiration Cadillac surveying the pouring of foundations. He was dressed in yellow coveralls and a yellow hard hat. He gave Taasmin a similar hat for her to wear.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Faith City,” said Inspiration Cadillac. “The spiritual hub of the world, place of pilgrimage and finding to all who seek.”

  “Come again?”

  “Your basilica, Lady. Our gift to you: Faith City.”

  “I don't want a basilica, I don't want a Faith City, I don't want to be the hub of the spiritual world, the finding of all who seek.”

  A load of construction girders swung overhead beneath a descending transport ’lighter.

  “Where is the money coming from for all this? Tell me that.”

  Inspiration Cadillac's eyes were on the work. By his expression Taasmin knew he was already viewing the completed basilica.

  “Money? Ah, well. Why do you think it's called Faith City?”

  The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing were walking down Belladonna's Tombolova Street one day, when the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known stopped dead outside a little street shrine wedged between a male strip club and a tempura bar.

  “Look,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Before the nine-pointed starburst of St. Catherine a young woman was at prayer, her lips moving silently as she whispered the litany, her eyes catching the light from the candles as she turned her gaze toward heaven. The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing watched her finish her prayer, light an incense wand, and pin a prayer to the door lintel.

  “I'm in love,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. “I must have her.”

  Her name was Santa Ekatrina Santesteban. She had soft olive skin and hair and eyes as dark as the secret place next to the heart. She lived with her mother, her father, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat and her singing bird in an apartment above Chambalaya's Speciality Spice and Condiment Store on Depot Lane. Through years of living above Mr. Chambalaya, her skin had taken on the perfume of spices and incenses. “I'm half-curried,” she used to joke. She liked to joke. She loved to laugh. She was eleven years old. Limaal Mandella loved her madly.

  Drawn by the trail of cardamom, ginger and coriander, he followed her down lanes and alleys to her home above Mr. Chambalaya's shop and there, before her father, her mother, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat, and her singing bird, fell into a humble bow and asked for her hand in marriage. Ten days later they were wed. Glenn Miller was best man and bride and groom walked from the registry to the waiting riksha under a canopy of raised snooker cues. The Glenn Miller orchestra followed the wedding procession on a special float as far as Bram Tchaikovsky Station and played a selection of their greatest hits as bride and groom boarded the train. Rice and lentils rained down on them and well-wishers taped paper prayers of good omen to the back of the riksha and the side of the train. Smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, Limaal Mandella squeezed his wife's hand and a vagrant thought struck him.

  This was the only irrational thing he had every done. But the irrationality was gathering about him. It had been drawing close for many months; halted a little in its advance by his defeat of the devil, but again closing. In that moment between the male strip club and tempura bar it had struck and bound itself to him through Santa Ekatrina.…Happy with his wife, then his first son, Rael Jr., then his younger son, Kaan, he was blissfully blind to the fact that God was setting him up for the Big One.

  Since his defeat of the Anti-God, Limaal Mandella had ruled the land of Snooker absolute and unchallenged. As no one could defeat him, no one would play him. His own excellence had effectively disqualified him from the game. City and Provincial, even Continental and World Championships went on without him and champions were crowned “Belladonna Masters, except for Limaal Mandella” or “Solstice Landing Professional Champion, apart from Limaal Mandella.”

  Limaal Mandella did not really care. Absence from the matchroom gave him time with his lovely wife and children. Absence from the matchroom gave the irrationality time to seep into him.

  When the word of a challenger to Limaal Mandella's supremacy passed along the snooker circuits of Belladonna, everyone knew that the challenger must be someone, or something, quite exceptional. Perhaps the Panarch Himself was taking up cue in the hand that steered the galaxies to humble the proud human.…

  Nothing of the sort. The challenger was an insignificant mousy little man who wore upside-down spectacles and composed himself with the nervous air of an apprentice clerk in a large corporation. And that would have been the long and short of him but for the significant fact that he had cut his wife into teeny tiny pieces and ground them into hamburger and that as punishment he was now nothing more than the fleshly vehicle for the projected personality of the ROTECH computer Anagnosta Gabriel. He was a psychonambulist, an obiman, a creature of childhood ghost stories.

  “How many?” asked Limaal Mandella in the back room of Glenn Miller's Jazz Bar, for he was a player whose skill was firmly attached to his sense of place.

  “Thirty-seven frames,” said Casper Milquetoast, the obiman. Side bets were not discussed. They were not important. The stake was the title of the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Limaal Mandella won the toss and broke off to begin the first of the thirty-seven frames. As he had so correctly surmised years before when Trick-Shot O'Rourke had shown him the destiny he had refused to accept, snooker was the supreme game of rationalism. But the Anagnosta Gabriel was rationalism incarnate. To its superconducting soul the balls on the table were no different from the ballet of orbital technology ranging from grape-sized monitors to habitats tens of kilometres across, all of which it routinely choreographed. Behind Casper Milquetoast's every cue action a tiny fragment of that computive power made precise calculations of spin, impulse and momentum. “Luck” had no analogue in the glossolal
ia of the Anagnostas. Always before, there had been the lucky fluke, the chance mistake by an opponent that put Limaal Mandella in a framewinning position; the accumulated run of misfortune that demoralized the enemy into self-defeat, but computers do not demoralize and they do not make mistakes. Limaal Mandella had always maintained that skill would always defeat luck. Now he was being proved correct.

  In the midsession break (for even obimen must eat, drink and urinate) Glenn Miller drew Limaal Mandella aside and whispered to him, “You made some mistakes there. Bad luck.”

  Limaal Mandella flew into a temper and pushed his sweating face close to the jazz musician.

  “Don't say that, never say that, never let me hear that again. You make your own luck, you understand? Luck is skill.” He released the shaken bandleader, ashamed and frightened at how high the tide of irrationality had risen around him. Limaal Mandella never lost his temper, he told himself. That was what the legends said. Limaal Mandella hid his soul. But his outburst had shamed and demoralized him and when play resumed the Anagnosta Gabriel capitalized on his every mistake. He was outrationalized. As he sat in his chair automatically wiping his cue while Casper Milquetoast's computer-guided hands built break after break, he learned how it felt to play himself. It felt like a great boulder rolling up and crushing him. That was how he had made others feel: crucified on their own self-hate. He hated the self-hatred he had summoned up in the countless opponents he had defeated. It was a dreadful, grinding, gnawing thing which ate the soul away. Limaal Mandella learned remorse in his quiet corner, and the self-hatred ate away at his power.

  His hands were numb and stupid, his eyes dry as two desert stones; he could not hit the balls. “Limaal Mandella is losing, Limaal Mandella is losing”: the word spiralled out from Glenn Miller's Jazz Bar through the streets and alleys of Belladonna and behind it came a silence so profound that the click and the clack of the balls carried through the ventilators into every part of the city.

  The computer ground him fine as sand. There was no pity, no quarter. Play would continue until victory was assured. Limaal Mandella lost frame after frame. He began to concede frames which with determination he might have won.

  “What's wrong, man?” asked Glenn Miller, not understanding his protégé's agony. Limaal Mandella returned in silence to the table. He was being destroyed before the spectators’ gaze. He could not bear to look up and see Santa Ekatrina watching. Even his enemies ached for him.

  Then it was over. The last ball was down. ROTECH Anagnosta Gabriel operating through the synapses of the condemned murderer was the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. City and world hailed him. Limaal Mandella sat in his chair shot with his own gun. Santa Ekatrina knelt to take him in her arms. Limaal Mandella stared ahead of him, seeing nothing but the full tide of irrationality that had engulfed him.

  “I'm going back,” he said. “I can't stay here; not with the shame around me every minute of every day. Back. Home.”

  Five days later he snapped all his cues in half and burned them. On top of the fire he threw his contract with Glenn Miller. Then he took his wife, his sons, his bags, his baggage and as much money as he could bear the sight of and with that black money bought four tickets on the next train to Desolation Road.

  At Bram Tchaikovsky Siation porters scratched at his coat-tails. “Carry your bags, Mr. Mandella, sir, please, carry your bags? Sir, Mr. Mandella, carry your bags?” He loaded the luggage onto the train. As it passed out from under the immense mosaicked dome of Bram Tchaikovsky Station, goondahs, gutter boys and urchins too poor for even a third class bench dropped from the signal gantries onto the roof. They leaned over and banged on the compartment windows, calling, “For the love of God, Mr. Mandella, let us in, kind sir, good sir, please let us in, Mr. Mandella, for the love of God, let us in!”

  Limaal Mandella pulled the blinds, called the guard, and after the first stop at Cathedral Oaks there were no further disturbances.

  The cylinder of rolled documents hung from Mikal Margolis's shoulder twenty-five centimetres above the track. Mikal Margolis hung from the underside of a Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 air-conditioned first class carriage. The Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 air-conditioned first class carriage hung from the underside of Nova Columbia and Nova Columbia hung from the backside of the world as it circled the sun at two million kilometres per hour, carrying Nova Columbia, railroad, carriage, Mikal Margolis and document cylinder with it.

  Ishiwara junction was half a world away. His arms were tough now, they could carry him all the world's way around the sun hanging from the undersides of trains. He no longer felt the pain, of arms and Ishiwara Junction. He was beginning to suspect that he had a selective memory. Hanging beneath trains gave him much time for thought and self-examination. On the first such occasion after Ishiwara junction he had devised the scheme that had drawn him down the shining rails across junctions, switchovers, points, ramps and midnight marshalling yards toward the city of Kershaw. There was an irresistible attraction of dark for dark. The roll of papers across his shoulders would not permit him any other destiny.

  He shifted to the least uncomfortable position and tried to picture the city of Kershaw. His imagination filled the great black cube with cavernous shopping malls where the exquisite artifacts of a thousand workshops commanded eye and purse; level upon level of recreation centres where every whim could be indulged from games of Go in secluded tea houses to concertos by the world's greatest Sinfonia to basements filled with glycerine and soft rubber. There would be museums and auditoria, Bohemian artists’ quarters, a thousand restaurants representing the world's thousand gastronomies and covered parks so cleverly designed you could believe you were walking under open sky.

  He could see the clanging foundries where the proud locomotives of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad Company were constructed, and the Central Depot from which they were dispatched all across the northern half of the world and the subterranean chemical plants that bubbled their effluent into the lake of Syss and the factory-farms where strains of artificial bacteria were skimmed from tanks of sewage to be processed into the thousand restaurants’ thousand cuisines. He thought of the rainfall traps and the brilliantly economical systems of water reclamation and purification, he thought of the air shafts up which perpetual hurricanes spiralled, the dirty breath of two million Shareholders exhaled into the atmosphere. He imagined the outer skin penthouses of the managerial castes, their views of Syss and its grimy shore increasingly panoramic with altitude, and the apartments in the quiet family residential districts opening onto bright and breezy light-wells. He thought of the children, happy and well-scrubbed, in the Company schools learning the joyful lessons of industrial feudalism, which was not hard for them, he thought, for they were surrounded every second of every day by its pinnacle of achievement. Suspended beneath the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service, Mikal Margolis beheld the whole of the works of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation in his soul-eye and cried aloud, “Well, Kershaw, here I am!”

  Then the first acid breaths of Syss caught at his throat and blinded his eyes with tears.

  There is a level lower than the level of machine drudgery at which Johnny Stalin entered the capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. It is the level reserved for those who ride into the Central Depot hanging from the bottom of the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service. It is the level of the unnumbered. It is the level of invisibility. Not the practiced invisibility that enabled Mikal Margolis to escape from the Central Depot undetected among the masses of Company Shareholders, but the invisibility of the individual before the body corporate.

  Up a flight of marble steps, through brass doors ten times the height of a man, Mikal Margolis found himself in a cavernous hall of shining marble and polished hush. Before him was a very large and ugly statue of Wingèd Victory bearing the legend “Laborare est Orare.” Several kilometres distant across the marble plains stood a marble desk above which hung a sign reading
INTERVIEWS, APPOINTMENTS AND AUDIENCES ENQUIRIES. Mikal Margolis's trainscuffed shoes clattered vulgarly on the sacred marble. The fat man in the Company paper suit stared down at him from behind the marble rampart.

  “Yes?”

  “I'd like to make an appointment.”

  “Yes?”

  “I'd like to see someone in industrial development.”

  “That would be the Regional Developments Offices.”

  “To do with steel.”

  “Regional Developments Offices, iron and steel division.”

  “In the Desolation Road area…the Great Desert, you know?”

  “One moment.” The fat receptionist tapped at his computer. “North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Office, iron and steel division, Regional Developments Offices, Room 156302, please join line A for your preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary.” He handed Mikal Margolis a slip of paper. “Your number: 33,256. Line A through those doors.”

  “But this is important!” Mikal Margolis waved the roll of documents under the receptionist's nose. “I can't wait for 33,255 other people to go ahead of me just for some…some application to see some undersecretary.”

  “Preliminary application for a preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary. Well, if it's that urgent, sir, you should join line B, for an application for the Priority Clearance Programme.” He tore off a fresh numbered strip. “There. Number 2304. Door B please.”

  Mikal Margolis ripped both numbers into shreds and tossed them into the air.

  “Get me an appointment, now, for tomorrow at the very latest.”

  “That is quite impossible. The earliest appointment is next Octember, the sixteenth, to be precise, with the water and sewage treatment manager, at 13:30 hours. You can't throw the system about, sir, it's for the good of us all. Now, here is a new number. Give me yours so I know who wants an appointment, and go and join line B.”