Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

And in that bed were the seeds of Desolation Road’s destruction spilled.

The trouble between Stalins and Tenebraes began when they discovered that they had been sold the same piece of land in the idyllic, paradise town of Desolation Road by Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum, formerly land agent of the Vencatatchalum Immigration and Settlement Bureau, currently sitting in a white room facing questions on complicity to defraud from Inspector Djien Xhao-Pin of the Bleriot Constabulary. Not only had Stalins and Tenebraes been sold the same piece of land (which was not Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum’s to sell in the first place), they had also been double-booked for the same sleeping compartment on the 19:19 Solstice Landing Night Service, calling at North Ben’s Town, Annency, Murchesonville, New Enterprise, Wollamurra Station and Desolation Road. Neither family would give way to the other. The sleeping car attendant locked himself in his cabin and turned his wireless up loud. They could settle their own disputes. No one got much sleep in car 36 of the Solstice Landing Night Service. Five people, with five people’s luggage, were trying to live in a sleeping compartment for three, with three people’s luggage. The first night only little Johnny Stalin, aged 3%, had a bed to himself. That was because he was a highly strung fat little bulb of a boy who would have screamed and screamed and screamed himself sick if he had not got a bed to himself. His mother acquiesced and popped him three or four adult-dosage sleeping pills to keep him quiet and docile. Johnny Stalin was a spoiled, junkie, highly strung fat little bulb of a boy.

The next day passed in bristle silence until Gaston Tenebrae cleared his throat at fourteen o’clock precisely and suggested it might be a good idea if everyone slept shifts. He and his wife, Genevieve, would sit up all night and sleep all day if the Stalins would sit up all day and sleep all night.

The arrangement seemed equable at first. Then the simple, unkind logistics of the sleeping compartment took command. One bed would have to be folded down to form seats for the two to sit upon, which left three bodies in two beds. Then there would be three sitting and two sleeping in comfort. Mr. and Mrs. Stalin thrashed and grumbled in their tightly constricted bed, little Johnny snored asthmatically, and Gaston and Genevieve Tenebrae held little private, loving arguments, with much whispered fury and small, aggressive hand gestures as the train clashed and clanked and reversed and split to form new trains and by such fits and starts drew ever nearer to Desolation Road.

The scrambled changeover from seat to bed on the morning of the third day saw the formal commencement of hostilities. Genevieve Tenebrae accused young Johnny Stalin of trying to peer up her skirt as she climbed the steps to the upper berth. Mr. Stalin accused Gaston Tenebrae of rifling his luggage while his family were supposedly asleep. Gaston Tenebrae accused Mr. Stalin of making improper advances to his pretty wife in the line for the second-class washroom. Mrs. Stalin accused Mrs. Tenebrae of cheating at bezique. Flurries of bickering broke out, like the flurries of snow that precede the big winter; and it was the fourth day and fourth night.

“Desolation Road!” called the cabin attendant, come out of hiding and tapping on the door with a silver pencil. Tap tap tap. “Desolation Road! Three minutes!” Tap tap tap.

Anarchy paradoxically reigned for two minutes thirty seconds as Stalins and Tenebraes got up got washed got dressed collected bags books valuables, bulbous sons and crammed slammed jammed down the narrow corridors and out through the narrow door into the thin wide sunshine of seven o’clock in the morning. All this without once looking out the windows to see where they were, which was a pity, because if they had, then they might not have got off the train. But when they did look, they saw, “Green meadows .. said Mr. Stalin.

“Rich farmlands, ripe for the plough,” said Gaston Tenebrae.

“The air soft with the perfume of a million blossoms,” said Mrs. Stalin.

“A serene, tranquil heaven on earth,” said Genevieve Tenebrae.

Johnny Stalin looked at the glaring white adobe and the baked red earth, the sun-bright flickers of the solar collectors and the stark skeletons of the pump gantries. Then he screwed up his face like a wet sponge about to be wrung dry and prepared for a screaming tantrum.

“Ma!” he wailed. “I don’t…” Mrs. Stalin fetched him a stunning crack across the left ear. He wailed all the more furiously and that was the cue for Stalins and Tenebraes to release upon each other a barrage of blistering invective which left scorch marks on close-by walls. Johnny Stalin waddled away to be alone with his misery, unheeded and therefore unloved. Limaal and Taasmin Mandella found him sitting huffily beside the main methane digester as they scampered on their way to find something new to play on a new day.

“Hello,” said Limaal. “You’re new.”

“What’s your name?” said Taasmin, forty-eight seconds older than her brother.

“Johnny Stalin,” said Johnny Stalin.

“You going to be here a long time?”

“Think so.”

“Then we’ll show you where there is to play here,” said Taasmin, and the two quick, lithe children took pale and blubbery Johnny Stalin by the hand and showed him the wonderful hog wallow, the water pumps, the irrigation channels where you could sail toy boats, the pens where Rael Mandella kept the baby animals born from his germ-kit, and the berry bushes, where you could eat until you were sick and nobody would mind, not one bit. They showed him Dr. Alimantando’s house, and Dr. Alimantando, who was very tall and very old and very nice in a rather scary way, and Dr. Alimantando took the mud-shit-water-and-berry stained boy back to his still squabbling parents and made them permanent residents of Desolation Road. The first two nights they spent in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel while Dr. Alimantando pondered what to do with them. Finally he summoned his most trusted friends and advisors; Mr. Jericho, Rael Mandella and Rajandra Das, and together, aided by Mr. Jericho’s Exalted Ancestors, reached a decision of stunning simplicity.

Desolation Road was too small to afford big-city luxuries like warring families. Stalins and Tenebraes must learn to live together. Therefore Dr. Alimantando gave them houses next door to each other and allotments with a long common border and only one wind-pump. Pleased with his Solomonic wisdom, Dr. Alimantando returned to his weather-room and his studies of time, space and everything.

“Tell me again, Father, why are we going to this place?”

“To get away from the unkind people who say bad things about you and about me, away from the people who want to take me away from you.”

“Tell me again, Father, why these people want to take you away from me.”

“Because you are my daughter. Because they say you are unnatural, a freak, an engineered experiment, my little singing bird. Because they say you were born contrary to the law, and because of that I must be punished.”

“But tell me again, Father, why should they punish you? Amn’t I your daughter, your little singing bird?”

“You are my little singing bird and you are my daughter, but they say that you are nothing more than… a doll, or a machine, or any other made thing, and it is against such people’s law for a man to have such a daughter, a daughter he has made for himself, even though he loves her more than life itself.”