Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

The King of Carioca Station, who was The Hand, reached inside him to the dark place where the wild things were and with a prayer to the Blessed Lady he opened that dark place to the light and let the blackness pour out of him. Released, the red guitar roared like a demon in heat and sucked the dark fluid up into its internal amplifiers and synthesizers. Its strings ran with purple lightning and rang with alien harmonics like no one had ever dreamed could be. The dark music struck out like the fist of God. The audience fled screaming from the black, living unclean thing The Hand had unleashed. A tongue of dark lightning stabbed out from the red guitar and burst the stranger’s Stratocaster into smoking chunks. For an instant the inside of the stranger’s skull lit up with heavenlight and then his eye sockets burned out in a flash and smoke trickled from them and he was dead dead dead and the King of Carioca Station was King indeed, King of two worlds, but what was the price, of what was the price, the price he paid for his crown?

Then grim-faced winged women in tight yellow stretch suits swarmed out of every hatchway: Station Security, armed with shock-staves and loveguns. They rounded the King’s subjects into neat groups of six and took them away to an uncertain but assured future. They sprayed the charred, cartwheeling corpse of the King of McCartney Station with fire-retardant foam. They took away the King of Two Worlds in a bundle of narcotic floss, and his red guitar with him. They took the King to the healers of St. Catherine’s, who would execute the judgment of the Group of Nineteen by the administration of tiny, oh-so-carefully measured doses of myelin suppressants, through which they would restore the soul of the murdered man to life once more, within his murderer’s body, and that murderer would pay with his laughing screaming soul and be no more.

This would have been the end of The Hand had he not escaped from the holy doctors of St. Catherine’s. How he escaped from them, he will not say, suffice that he escaped and saved his red guitar from the furnaces and together they set the controls of the station transmat cubicle for the forbidden earth beneath. With the speed of thought he, his guitar, and the embryonic soul of the King of McCartney Station were transported into the industrial ghetto of Touchdown, where they were shown mercy mild by the Little Sisters of Tharsis and taken into their charity home for crippled mendicants. An old legless beggar had taught him to walk free from his wheelchair, another thing soon said but slowly realized, and guessing The Hand’s origin, taught him all the old man knew of this world’s ways, for he must learn such things or perish, and organized his escape from the Little Sisters of Tharsis. The Hand begged a ride on a truck convoy across the Ecclestiastes Mountains into the ancient heartland of the Great Oxus, where he wandered for a year and a day among the rice farms offering to plant seedlings in the flooded paddies with his dextrous feet. At night he would entertain the farm folk with tunes from his red guitar and earn a bowl of soup or a glass of beer or a few centavos in his pocket.

But he knew no peace, for the soul of the man he had murdered would give him no peace. At night it would wake him from his sleep in a scream and a sweat from the dreams of his own dying. Pricking him with guilt every time he touched the strings of the red guitar, the ghost drove him onward through constant reminders of what the holy doctors of St. Catherine’s had yet to do to him. So The Hand wandered the length and breadth of the wide world, for the holy doctors of St. Catherine’s were searching for him across the face of the globe and if he ever stopped moving they would find him, take him back to the sky, and destroy him. This was the curse of The Hand, forever to wander the world with his red guitar on his back, pursued by the ghost of a murdered man waiting behind his eyes to take his soul.

“That was a good story,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

“Every man’s story is a good story,” said Rael Mandella. The children shrieked in alarm. The Hand reached for his red guitar to fire another paralyzing chord. “Easy,” said Rael Mandella. “I wish you no ill.” To the children he said, “You should be more careful with the water next time you want to hide someone. I followed the trail of drips right to this place. Why did you do it?”

“Because he was our friend,” said Limaal Mandella.

“Because he needed someone to be kind to him,” said Taasmin Mandella.

“Because he was scared,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

“You’re not going to tell anyone he’s here, are you?” said Johnny Stalin. The children chorused their protest.

“Quiet,” said Rael Mandella, suddenly filling the cave with his presence. “I’ve heard your story, Mr. Hand, and I tell you this, what a man’s done in his past is no matter to me, nor should it be to anyone else. When Dr. Alimantando (you remember him, kids?) invented this place, he said that no one would ever be turned away because of what they had done before. This was to be a place of fresh starts. Well, Dr. Alimantando’s gone now, into the past or the future I don’t know, but I think he was right. This is a place for fresh starts. Now, I don’t hold with all this newfangled mayor stuff, things went much better when Dr. Alimantando looked after the place. And I don’t hold with people running up to this mayor and asking him for all the right answers; I say the right answers are inside you all along or they aren’t there at all, which is just another way of saying that I’m not telling anyone you’re here. I’ll tell them if they ask, and so will you, kids, that you saw him walking off across the tracks, because if what you say is true, you’ll have to be moving on soon enough anyway.”

The Hand nodded, a small bow of gratitude.

“Thank you, sir. We’ll be moving on tomorrow. Is there anything we can do for you to demonstrate our gratitude?”

“Yes,” said Rael Mandella. “You say you’re from the Outside, maybe then you’ll know why it hasn’t rained for one hundred and fifty thousand years. Come on, kids, practice your alibis and come for dinner at my house.”

The ground was sparkling with frost under a steel-grey sky when Rael Mandella took the pot of porridge and two bananas to the refugee in his cave. Rael Mandella enjoyed the peace of the hours before the rest of the world woke with a yawn and a fart. Usually only the birds ever woke before he; therefore he was much surprised to find The Hand awake and alert and intent upon some inscrutable private business. His picture-suit had gone black as night, and upon it lines, like the spokes of a wheel, crowded with flashing digits and scurrying graphs and coloured sentences, spun across the remarkable fabric. The small cave was filled with shimmering light.

“What’s happening?” said Rael Mandella.

“Shh. Graphic readout of the Solstice Landing climatic and ecological regimes for the seven hundred years since terraforming commenced. We’ve tapped into the Anagnostas aboard the Pope Pious Station to see if we can locate the breakdown of discipline in the local microclimate, and not only is it coming at zip speed but I have to read it backward in the reflection from this water jug so we’d appreciate some shush while we concentrate.”

“That’s impossible,” said Rael Mandella. Colours flew, words whirled. The dizzying display suddenly clicked off.

“Got it. Problem is, they’ve also got us. They’ll have traced us through the computer link, so we’ll take our breakfast, thank you, and go.”

“Sure, but why hasn’t it rained?”