Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

There was a tempest of applause. Dominic Frontera weathered it out.

“Next.”

Persis Tatterdemalion stood and shouted, “This is my business here, what you’ve been putting gunshot holes into, mister. Now, I’ve already lost one business, the flying business, and I don’t intend to lose another one. I’m staying. Your comet can go someplace else.”

Mikal Margolis nodded his head vigorously and shouted, “Hear hear.”

Then Ruthie Blue Mountain stood up and hush fell around her like snow.

“Yes?” said Dominic Frontera wearily. “I’d appreciate a question please, not a monologue from the condemned dock.”

“Mr. Frontera,” said the simple Ruthie, who had understood from all the furore only that her friends were in danger, “you must not hurt my friends.”

“Lady, the last thing I want to do is hurt your friends. If, however, they are intent on hurting themselves by not having the common sense to get out of the way of danger, that is a different question entirely.” Ruthie did not understand the ROTECH representative’s reply.

“I won’t let you hurt my friends,” she muttered dully. There was a shuffling silence in the room of the kind that precedes something out of the ordinary. “If you loved them as much as I do, then you wouldn’t hurt them. So I’m going to make you love me.”

Up on the podium Dr. Alimantando saw her face brighten the splitsecond before Ruthie Blue Mountain released four years of accumulated beauty on Dominic Frontera. The Chairman Pro Tern ducked under the Chairman Pro Tern’s table and put his hands over his eyes. Dominic Frontera had no such warning. He stood a fully thirty seconds in the nova-light before emitting a curious squawk and falling like a sack of beans to the floor.

Dr. Alimantando took control. He pointed to the er pilot, saved by his polarizing contact lenses. “Get him out of here down to one of the rooms,” he ordered. “You two show him where.” He indicated for Persis Tatterde malion and Mikal Margolis to help the pilot carry the love-stunned ROTECH agent to a place of recuperation. He quelled the popular hubbub with a glance.

“Well, you’ve all heard what our friend here has to say, and I don’t for one moment doubt that it’s true. Therefore, I am ordering each and every one of you to prepare for evacuation.” Consternation rose. “Quiet, quiet. Evacuation, as a last resort. For I, Alimantando, am going to try and save our town!” He stood and acknowledged the public acclamation for a few minutes, then swept out of the B.A.R./Hotel to save the world.

For a night and a day Dr. Alimantando filled the walls of his weatherroom with chronodynamic symbols. The stream of logic had started three years before in the bottom left-hand corner of his kitchen, wound through parlour, dining room and hall, up the stairs, taking small disgressionary detours into number one and number two bedrooms, through the bathroom, across the toilet walls, up another flight of stairs and into the weather-room, where it wound round the walls, round and round and up and up until only a blank area about the size of a dollar bill was left in the centre of the ceiling.

Beneath this spot sat Dr. Alimantando with his head buried in his hands. His shoulders shook. It was not tears that shook them but rage, monumental rage at the mocking universe which, like a painted rumbo dancer in a Belladonna opium hell, casts off successive layers of concealment only for the lights to black out at the moment of ultimate revelation.

He had told his people he was going to save their town.

And he couldn’t do it.

He couldn’t find the missing inversion.

He couldn’t find the algebraic formula that would balance out fifteen years of wall-filling in Desolation Road and Jingjangsoreng and the Universuum of Lyx and reduce it all to zero. He knew it must exist. The wheel must turn, the serpent swallow its own tail. He suspected it must be simple, but he could not find it.

He had failed himself. He had failed science. He had failed his people. That was the most crushing of all failures. He had come to care deeply for his people; that was how he saw them, his people, the children he had thought he’d never desire. When they had not needed saving, he had saved them. Now that they must be saved, he could not.

The realization brought Dr. Alimantando a great release of tension. Like the animal that fights and fights and fights and then in the jaws of inevitability surrenders to death, his anger drained out of him, down through his house, down through the sinkholes in the rocks out into the Great Desert.

It was six minutes of six in the morning of Monday sixteenth. The gas lamps were popping and the insects beating themselves against the glass. From the east window he saw Rael Mandella going about his solitary six-o’clock-in-the-morning labours. They were not necessary now. He would come down from the mountain and tell his people to go. He did not want their forgiveness, though they would give it. All he wanted was their understanding. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt a great peace blow out of the desert, a wave of serenity breaking over him, through him. The morning mist carried an aroma of things growing in wet, rich earth, black as chocolate, rich as King Solomon. A sound like tinkling wind-chimes caused him to look away from the windows.

He should have been shocked, or stunned, or some variety of the human emotion of surprise, but the presence of the greenperson sitting on the edge of his table seemed quite the most natural thing.

“Good morning,” said the greenperson. “I must have missed you at that next camp… five years is it?”

“Are you a figment of my imagination?” said Dr. Alimantando. “I think you are something of that ilk: an archetype, a corstruction of my mind while under stress: hallucination, that’s what you are-a symbol.”

“Come now, would you like to think of yourself as the kind of man visited by hallucinations?”

“I would not like to think of myself as the kind of man visited by animated leftover vegetables.”

“Touche. Which way will this convince you, then?” The greenperson stood up on the table. It produced a stick of red chalk out of somewhere unseen and wrote a short equation in symbolic logic in the dollar-bill-sized space in the centre of the ceiling. “I think that’s what you’re looking for.” The greenperson swallowed the stick of red chalk. “The nutrients are very useful, you know.” Dr. Alimantando climbed onto the table and peered at the equation.

“Yes,” he muttered, “yes… yes…” He traced the spiral of black char coal equations outward across the ceiling, around the walls, round round and round, across the floor on hands and knees, all the while muttering, “Yes…, yes… yes” down the stairs, round the toilet, through the bathroom, detoured into number two and number one bedrooms, down more stairs, across the hall, the dining room and the parlour, into the kitchen. Up in the weather-room the greenperson sat on the table with a very smug smile on its face.

A great cry of triumph came up from the depths of Dr. Alimantando’s house. He had followed the trail of reason to its source in the bottom left corner of his kitchen.

“Yeehah! It fits! It fits! Zero! Pure, beautiful, round, absolute zero!” By the time he reached the weather-room the greenperson was gone. A few dry leaves lay scattered on the table.

The Mark One Alimantando time winder looked like a small sewingmachine tangled up in a spider’s web. It sat on Dr. Alimantando’s breakfast table awaiting the approval of its designer.