Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

An extremely smart man in a beautiful high-collared white suit descended the ’lighter steps and stared at Dr. Alimantando. Dr. Alimantando, dusty and humble, bowed politely.

“I am Dr. Alimantando, Chairman Pro Tem of the Desolation Road Community, population twenty-two, elevation twelve fifty hundred, ‘one step short of paradise.’ Welcome to our town, I hope you will enjoy your stay here, we have a very good hotel for your comfort and convenience, clean, cheap, with full amenities.”

The stranger, still staring, (most rudely by a shy Deuteronomian’s standards), nodded his head in the barest recognition of formality.

“Dominic Frontera, Settlement and Development Officer, China Mountain ROTECH Planetary Maintenance Division. What the hell are you doing here?” Dr. Alimantando’s quick temper rose.

“I might ask the same of you sir.”

So Dominic Frontera told him. And Dr. Alimantando immediately convened a meeting of all citizens so that Dominic Frontera might tell them what he had told him. And this is what Dominic Frontera told them.

“On Tuesday sixteenth May, three days from today, at sixteen twentyfour, Desolation Road will be vaporized by the impact of a cometary nucleus weighing in the region of two hundred and fifty megatons, travelling at five kilometres per second, some thirty-four kilometres due south of here.”

Pandemonium broke loose. Dr. Alimantando banged his Chairman Pro Tem’s gavel until he cracked the block, then shouted himself hoarse and still the people roared and raged and waved Persis Tatterdemalion’s best chairs in the air. Dominic Frontera could scarcely credit that twenty-two people could generate such bedlam.

None of this should have happened to him. He should have completed his survey of the impact site in one morning and by now be home in Regional HeadQuarters in Meridian. He should be playing backgammon in his favorite corner of Chen Tsu’s tea rooms, sipping Belladonna brandy and watching the apricot blossom. Instead, he was facing a riotous mob eager to beat him to death with desert-pine bar stools-look at that old hag, she must be pushing forty if she’s a day, but she’d like nothing better than to lick my blood off the floor-all because he had found a pissing little town where no pissing little town should be in an oasis that was not even scheduled for environmental engineering until two years after the impact. Dominic Frontera sighed. He pulled a snub-nose Presney Reaction pistol from his pilot’s holster and fired three quick shots into the roof of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel.

The immediate shocked silence pleased him. The reaction charges hissed and fizzed in the rooftiles. Peace restored, he explained why Desolation Road must be destroyed.

It was all to do with water. There wasn’t enough of it. The world was maintained by a series of ecological equations which must always balance. On one side of the equation was the engineered environment of the earth: air, water, weather and those less tangible agents, like the orbital supercon ducting magnets that spun a protective web around the planet, banishing radiation and the storm of solar particles that would otherwise sterilize the surface of the earth, or the layer of metal ions suspended high above the tropopause that amplified ambient sunlight, and the orbital skymirrors, Vanas, that ironed out local temperature and pressure differentials: a stable equation, but fragile. On the other side of the equal sign stood the peoples of the earth, native and immigrant, their expanding populations, and the increasing demands they made upon the world and its resources. And this equation must always balance, should the population grow arithmetically, geometrically, logarithmically, the equation must always balance (here Dominic Frontera poked his pilot’s gun muzzle at the audience for added emphasis), and if this equality meant importing water now and then from somewhere ("now and then” being every ten years or so for the next half millennium, “somewhere” being the gigatons of cometary ice waiting in the wings of the solar system for its gravitational cue), then imported it must be.

“In the past,” explained Dominic Frontera to the rows of open mouths, we impacted cometary heads willy-nilly on the surface of the world: what ice did not vaporize on re-entry did so on impact, and the vast amounts of dust thrown up by the blast caused the water vapour to form into clouds and thus precipitate. In the early days comets were hitting at the rate of three per week, peak. Of course, there was no one around then for them to fall on.” Dominic Frontera remembered he was not lecturing some secondary school geography class, but a bunch of stupid farmers, and grew angry. “As you might imagine, since settlement began it’s been getting harder to find places to crash the ice; and we like to crash the ice if we can, it’s by far the cheapest way of generating water vapour. Now, we had our target area picked, an area of the North West Quartersphere Region that had no environmental engineering planned for at least four years, maybe the odd traveller, the odd train, the odd ’lighter, but they could be warned out of the area before impact and afterward we could come in, fix up any track that got busted, and call down orphs from orbit to turn the desert into a garden. That’s the plan. What do we find? What do we find?” Dominic Frontera’s voice rose to a squeak. “You. What the hell are you doing here? There shouldn’t even be an oasis here, much less a town!”

Dr. Alimantando rose to tell his tale of sailboards and mad orphs. Dominic Frontera waved him down.

“Save your explanations. You’re not responsible. There’s been a cock-up in the Orbital Environmental Engineering Division, some orph’s programming gone up the spout. Cranky things. Okay, so it’s not your fault, but there’s nothing I can do. The comet is on its way, has been for the past seventy-two months. On Tuesday sixteenth of May, at sixteen twenty-four, it will impact thirty-four kilometres south of here and this little town and this little oasis will fold up like a… like a… cardboard house.” There were howls of protest. Dominic Frontera raised hands for silence and calm. “I’m sorry. Truly I am, but there’s nothing I can do. The comet can’t be deflected, there’s nowhere for it to go, not at this late stage. If only you’d let someone, anyone, know you existed earlier, we might have been able to compute different orbits. As it is, it’s too late. I’m sorry.”

“What about Heart of Lothian?” shouted Ed Gallacelli.

“She promised she’d tell someone about us,” agreed Umberto.

“Yes, she said she’d tell China Mountain,” added Louie.

“Heart of Lothian?” asked Dominic Frontera. His pilot shrugged eloquently.

“A travelling rep for the General Education Department,” explained Dr. Alimantando.

“Ah. Different department,” said Dominic Frontera. The citizens poured scorn on his feeble excusings.

“Bureaucratic bunglings!” shouted Morton Quinsana. “Planning blight!”

Dominic Frontera attempted to calm the situation.

“All right, all right, I agree there has been bureaucratic bungling at the highest level-that isn’t the issue. What is the issue is that in three days the comet’s going to hit and splatter this town like gravy, that’s the long and short of it. What I can do is call back the ’lighter squadron and have them move you all out of here. Maybe then after we’ve cleared up the impact site, if you really like it here, then you can come back, but in three days you all have to be out of here, with all your goats, llamas, pigs, chickens, children and fixings to boot. Now, any questions?”

Rael Mandella beat the rest of the house to their feet.

“This is our town, we made it, we built it, it is ours, and we will not see it destroyed. Everything I have is here, my wife, my children, my home, my livelihood, I will not leave it to be destroyed by your comet. You, you engineers who bounce planets around like billiard balls, you send your comet somewhere else.”