Desolation Road Read online

  “Find him!” cried Taasmin Mandella, and the angels howled off along the steel canyons of Steeltown to comply. Taasmin Mandella's halo flashed again and it seemed to the watching eyes that her cumbersome dress melted and changed shape, clinging close to her thin form, and that as she leaped from the platform to give chase herself, her mask flew to her hand and transmuted into a potent weapon.

  Pandemonium reigned in Corporation Plaza. Leaderless, the demonstration surged and panicked. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a rabble. Its fury and terror had defeated it. Armed security men appeared on rooftops and walkways and drew a hail of stones. They readied their weapons but did not open fire. Rael Mandella Jr. made to stand and calm the boiling crowd but Jean-Michel Gastineau pushed past him.

  “They'll shoot you like a dog,” he said. “This is my moment. This is what I was commanded to do.” He took a deep breath and released all his mutant sarcasm in one searing satire.

  Though not directed at them, the people nevertheless felt the edge of his tongue. Some screamed, some wept, some fainted, some vomited, some bled from guilty wounds the sarcasm had opened up. He swept the beam of his satire across the security positions and there were moans and cries as the armed men realized what they were, what they had done. Some could not bear the shame and threw themselves off their high watchplaces. Others turned their own weapons on themselves or their comrades; others broke down into hysterical weeping at the words of the Amazing Scorn. Some shrieked, some gibbered, some vomited as if by vomiting they could spew out all the self-hate the little man on the steps made them feel, some voided their bowels and their bladders, some fled screaming from Steeltown into the desert and were never seen again, some collapsed in blood and broken bones as the sarcasm ripped them open and shattered their limbs.

  Having humbled the armed might of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, the Amazing Scorn turned his tongue toward the high balcony, where the directors of the Company hid themselves away. In an instant Fat Director, Thin Director and Middling Muscular Director were reduced to shuddering blobs of remorse.

  “Oh stop stop stop,” they pleaded, choking on their own bile and vomit, but the satire went on and on and on, slashing and cutting at every dark and shameful deed they had ever done. The satire ripped clothes to shreds, slit bodies open in long deep bleeding gashes, and the mighty Directors screamed and howled but the words cut cut cut at them, cut and slashed until there was nothing but dead, slashed meat and blubber on the horribly expensive carpet.

  Johnny Stalin's robot proxy watched the quivering heaps of meat with contempt mingled with puzzlement. He could not understand what had happened save that the Directors had been weak and found wanting in some incomprehensible way. He was not weak, he was not wanting, for being a robot, he was immune to sarcasm. It was intolerable that the Directors of the Company could be so weak when he and his kind were so strong. He put out a neutrino-pulse call to his machine comrades to call them together at their earliest convenience for an emergency meeting to save the Company from itself.

  On the steps Jean-Michel Gastineau fell silent. His mutant sarcasm had humbled the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The people rose from their crouches, shaken, stunned, uncomprehending. He looked at the children dressed in virginal white, the poor, idiotic Dumbletonians, the shaken artisans and shopkeepers, the reporters and cameramen whose lenses had been cracked and microphones shattered when he released his full mutant power; he looked at the bums and the goondahs and the poor foolish people, and he felt pity.

  “Go home,” he said. “Just go home.”

  Then by a prearranged signal five transport ’lighters that had been hovering unseen over the drama dropped their invisibility fields and the invasion of Desolation Road began.

  Taasmin Mandella, the digital huntress, pursued her prey deeper into labyrinthine Steeltown. She felt alive as she had felt only once before in her life, when the Blessed Catherine had visited her upon her dry desert pinnacle. This time the nature of the feeling was altogether different. The miracle-gun felt hot and hungry in her hand and her transformed garment clung silkily and sensuously to her body. She was enjoying herself. Mikal Margolis had fired at her twice with an MRCW he had obtained from somewhere: that had felt exciting and dangerous.

  Anael Sikorsky helicoptered in over the Section 2 separator plant and reported.

  “Target holding position on Level 17.”

  She dispatched a holy command to Anael Luftwaffe and was rewarded by the immediate screams of jets and the savage hammer of his wing-mounted 35mm cannons over to her right.

  “Come tools come toys come steel come iron,” she enchanted, and from the pieces of machine junk she called by name she fashioned a small gravity-sled. The wind streamed back her hair as she rode the surf of industry, agile between pipes and girders and ducts. This is what she was made for, the wind in her hair and a weapon in her hand, zigzagging down Henry Ford Street between the blasts of Mikal Margolis's missiles. She laughed and drove him from cover with a blast from her portable tachyon beamer.

  “Take him, Luftwaffe.” The jet-powered angel swooped over her head and strafed the separator plant with its finger cannons. Explosions ripped the roof off the plant and peppered Taasmin Mandella with shrapnel but she did not care; she laughed astride her air-board and transmuted the hail of metal into further attachments to her arcane weaponry. Anael Luftwaffe climbed for a roll into another attack. At the apex of his climb a wedge of three MRCW heatseekers streaked out of concealment. Anael Luftwaffe exploded into smoking ruin and rained down on Steeltown.

  There. Taasmin Mandella's tachyon beam struck mere moments after the black and gold figure danced down a narrow gully between two airshafts. The Grey Lady gave a whoop and a cheer and a chase. She sniped at Mikal Margolis's heels. She could have evaporated him at any moment of her choosing, but she wanted him in the open, in the desert, where it would be middle-aged man to middle-aged saint.

  Anael Sikorsky hovered close, harrying the prey. It was a very tight alley…Taasmin Mandella's concentration was focused to its utmost point manoeuvring her sled around the valves and pipework.

  “Sikorsky, get back.” A fan of laser fire raked the air. Anael Sikorsky swerved to avoid the ruby beams, glanced against a settling tank, bounced wall to wall to wall, and crashed in a blossom of flame.

  So it was to be man to saint after all. She was pleased. In the distance the voice of holy conscience niggled her, but only in the distance. Her twin's death was closer and more intimate. She could taste the darkness still. Mikal Margolis broke from the tangle of industrial plumbing and sprinted across the ’lighter field. Taasmin Mandella whipped him with a swarm of robot bees from one of the multitudinous muzzles of her God-gun. She willed her sled high into the sky so that she might dramatically swoop down upon her prey and cut him off.

  Mikal Margolis released an arc of missiles from his MRCW. A pulse of power flowed along the printed circuits in her costume and transformed them into birds. Taasmin Mandella shrieked in delight. Her power had never been so great. Her halo glowed collapsar-black; twinkling with the swallowed white stars of conscience. She drew a ring of fire around Mikal Margolis with her flame-thrower and slid the sled to a halt before him. She put up her weapon before her face and willed the flames into extinction. Mikal Margolis responded in cautious kind. Behind him the smoke of Sikorsky's burning went up into the sky together with the sound of a great despairing wail from Steeltown.

  “Let me see your face,” said the Grey Lady. “I want to see how you've changed.”

  Mikal Margolis removed his helmet. Taasmin Mandella was surprised at how little he had changed. Aged, wearied, tanned, greyed, but unchanged. Still the victim of circumstance.

  “Please spare me any melodrama,” said Mikal Margolis. He dropped his MRCW. “I don't suppose this would have worked against you anyway. And please don't go on about your father and your brother. It's pointless. I don't feel any special remorse; I'm not that kind of person, and anyway, I was just doing my job. Now, get
on with it.”

  The dust blew in little eddies around his feet. Taasmin Mandella slowly channelled all her power into one God-bolt that would transform Mikal Margolis to carbon steel. She raised her left hand to strike and was suddenly, stunningly, embedded in a shaft of solid light.

  A figure walked across the landing field toward her. Where it had come from, Taasmin could not see, but the figure was that of a small, slim, crop-haired woman wearing a suit of glowing picture-cloth.

  “No!” wailed Taasmin Mandella, the Grey Lady. “No! Not now! Not you, not now, of all times!”

  “You may recall that part of the conditions of your prophethood was that you would be called to give an account of your stewardship of your power,” said Catherine of Tharsis. Mikal Margolis made to recover his weapon and leave. St. Catherine froze him into immobility with a gesture.

  “Tight-focus timeloop,” she explained with a smile. “Soon as we're gone he'll snap out of it.”

  “You have a lousy sense of timing,” said Taasmin Mandella, frozen in white radiance.

  “Like the outfit,” said the Blessed Lady. “Like it a lot. Very becoming to you. We servants of the Panarch, incidentally, do not have to justify our comings and goings to you mortals. This is the appointed time, you must come with me and give an account of how you have used your privileges.”

  The column of light began to spin about Taasmin Mandella, and she felt herself being stretched, pulled like festival taffy, transformed into something other than human. She felt the earth slip away from her. She was light; light.…She gave a final spit of disgust, then the Catherine-power enfolded her and, as she had once fantasized naked on the burning bluffs, she was transformed into a creature of purest light, white, shining light eternal, purest information, and fountained into the sky.

  The small skinny woman which was the biological construct of the Blessed Lady of Tharis's incarnation moved her hand in the special way that manipulates space and time and vanished.

  Disguised as a Penitential Mendicant, Arnie Tenebrae spent five days wallowing in mud, flagellation, prostrate prayer and kneeling upon sharp stones submerged in sewage before she slipped away from the main pilgrimage by the Steeltown gates, concealed herself behind a domestic methane tank, and spoke the five words into her thumb-communicator that gave the order for invasion. At her command the five transport dirigibles that had slipped with muffled fans into position over Steeltown shed their invisibility fields and began to broadcast messages of reassurance and liberation to the stunned faces beneath them. From their belly hatches Whole Earth Army shock-troops dropped suspended by LTA harnesses, field-inducers at the ready to pound the enemy into the red jam at the slightest display of resistance. The enemy were past resistance.

  “Do not be afraid,” boomed the taped messages. “Desolation Road is being liberated from the tyranny of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation by the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group: do not be alarmed. We repeat, you are being liberated. Please remain calm and render all assistance to the liberation forces. Thank you.”

  Behind the methane tank Arnie Tenebrae slipped off the excrement-smeared burnoose that had for five days concealed her battle suit and combat pack. She painted her face in the semblance of the Deathbird and slipped on her microphone set.

  “Group 19, to me,” she whispered. “All other battle groups as ordered.” In their prearranged positions around the perimeter of Corporation Plaza, a dozen similarly attired Penitential Mendicants threw off their disguises and moved through the crowd toward the Company offices. Even as the airborne troops touched down, released their harnesses, and moved to their planned positions controlling the power plant, the landing field, the station, the truck depot, the mayor's office, the police barracks, the microwave link, the solar power plant, the banks, the law offices and transport depots, Arnie Tenebrae rendezvoused with her battle group and stormed the sanctum of Bethlehem Ares Steel.

  As old Mrs. Kanderambelow, who operated the telephone exchange, made tea for the six polite if rather frighteningly decorated young men in battle dress, and Dominic Frontera found himself staring down the emission heads of four field inducers, Group 19 rode up to the executive levels in the executive elevator. Miss Fanshaw, the Company Secretary of the Year, rose from her desk to protest the unwarranted invasion and was smeared all over the wall by a ram of gravito-strong force. Arnie Tenebrae blew in the black and gold door with its black and gold crest and strolled in.

  “Good afternoon,” she said to the tear-stained, blood-stained, humiliated section managers, plant supervisors, financial directors, marketing chiefs and personnel consultants. “Where's the North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Manager/Director?” A sudden shrill of energy answered her and stabbed a crater in Sub-lieutenant Henry Chan's stomach. He goggled at the unfamiliar sight of his spine and then collapsed in two halves. “Shields, boys, he's got an F. I.” Defence canopies rang like temple gongs under the field-inducer sledgehammers. The besarcasmed executives fled, shrieking, past the red crushed patch that had been the Model Secretary of the Year.

  “Where the hell is he?” someone shouted.

  “He has a light-scatter field up around him,” said Arnie Tenebrae, relishing the tight tactical situation. “Everybody out. We'll only get in each other's way. I'll take him myself.” She had a personal private interest in doing so. The troops withdrew to the elevator head to guard the executive prisoners.

  “Hey, Johnny, where did you get the F. I.?” A howl of power blew a stuffed antelope's head to duff and sawdust. Johnny Stalin became visible for an instant, crouching behind the Manager/Director's chair. He vanished the instant Arnie Tenebrae blasted the end of the board table to flinders with a beam of hypersound.

  “Invisibility screen too. Not bad.” She circled the room, fully visible, defence canopy up, senses pricked like a cat's ears. “Johnny,” she sang, “I had to come to see you when I found out it was you. Remember me? The sweet little girl you kissed behind Rael Mandella's methane digester?” Her pulse of power screeched and howled off Johnny Stalin's defence canopy. He flickered into momentary translucency. “Come on, Johnny, make a decent fight of it. You know the kind of weapon you're using, you know you can't use it offensively and defensively at the same time, and I know that invisibility field's draining your power. How say you show yourself and make a decent fight of it?” A patch of air shimmered and Johnny Stalin shivered into visibility. Arnie Tenebrae was surprised at how he had changed: gone was the chubby, scared little boy, whining and obstreperous; the figure before her could almost have been the masculine counterpart of herself.

  “You're looking well, Johnny.” She checked her wrist gauges: 85 percent charge. Good. She circled to her left. Johnny Stalin circled to her right. Both watched for the tell-tale moment when the other's canopy went down in the instant before firing. Arnie Tenebrae circled, waited. The air grew stale within her defence canopy.

  “Oh, Johnny,” she said again, “remember, there's a dozen of them waiting for you if you get past me.” She fired, plunged for cover. Stalin's return fire was slow slow slow. Arnie Tenebrae had all the time in the world to turn, aim, and punch a force-field fist through his lowered canopy that smashed him apart like an egg.

  Commander Tenebrae had her men search through the smoke and the rubble for some souvenir of Johnny Stalin that she might add to her collection of trophies, but they found only pieces of charred machinery. Then trooper Jensenn brought Arnie Tenebrae Johnny Stalin's head and she sat for a long time laughing at the wires and the complex articulated aluminium joints that served for cervical vertebrae.

  “A robot,” she laughed. “An olly-o, jolly-o robot.” She tossed the head away and laughed and laughed and laughed so long and so hard that it began to scare the soldiers of Group 19.

  Dominic Frontera was first to learn that the liberation of Desolation Road was actually an occupation and that all the rejoicing citizens who had carried the Whole Earth Army guerrillas shoulder high through the alleys were hostage
s to Arnie Tenebrae's dream of Götterdämmerung. He learned this at six minutes of six in the morning when five armed men took him from the cellar of Pentecost's General Merchandise Store, where he had been held incommunicado and stood him against the brilliant white wall. The soldiers drew a line in the dust and stood him behind it.

  “Any last requests?” said Captain Peres Estoban.

  “What do you mean, last requests?” said Dominic Frontera.

  “It's customary for a man facing a firing squad to be granted a last request.”

  “Oh,” said Dominic Frontera, and voided his bowels into his nice white ROTECH uniform. “Um, can I clean up this mess?” The firing squad smoked a pipe or two while the mayor of Desolation Road dropped his pants and made himself presentable. Then they blindfolded him and put him back in front of his wall.

  “Firing party, shoulder arms, firing party, aim, firing party…firing party…Child of grace, what now?”

  While feeding the chickens, loyal but unintelligent Ruthie had seen the soldiers take her husband and stand him against a wall and point weapons at him. She emitted a cry like a little astonished bird and chased pell-mell, helter-skelter all the way across to the mayor's office to arrive just as Peres Estoban was mouthing the order to fire.

  “Don't kill my husband,” she shrieked, throwing herself between executioners and executionee in a welter of flying arms and skirts.

  “Ruthie?” whispered Dominic Frontera.

  “Madam, out of my way,” ordered Peres Estoban. Ruthie Frontera stood solid, a drab Valkyrie with fat legs. “Madam, this is a legally constituted Revolutionary Firing Party executing its legally constituted sentence. Please move out of the line of fire. Or,” he added, “I will have you arrested.”