Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

The Hand helped himself to porridge and said through mushy spoonfuls, “All kinds of things. Temporal anomalies, barometric gradients, precipital agents, jet-stream deflection, microclimate zones of probability, catastrophe fields: but chiefly, you’ve forgotten the name of rain.”

And at that the children who had secretly followed Rael Mandella to the cave all cried, “Forgotten the name of the rain?”

“What’s rain?” asked Arnie Tenebrae. When The Hand explained, she said sternly, “Silly, how can water come out of the sky? The sun’s in the sky, water can’t come from there, water comes out of the ground.”

“See?” said The Hand. “They’ve never learned the name of the rain, the true name, the heart-name, which everything has and to which everything comes when called. But if you’ve forgotten the heart-name, the rain can’t ever hear you.”

Rael Mandella shivered for no reason he could give.

“Tell us the name of the rain, mister,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

“Yes, go on, show us how water can come out of the sky,” said Limaal Mandella.

“Yes, make it rain for us so we can call it by its name,” said Taasmin.

“Yeah, show us,” added Johnny Stalin.

The Hand put down his bowl and spoon.

“Very well. You’ve done us a turn, so we’ll do you a turn. Mister, any way of getting out into the desert?”

“The Gallacellis have their dune buggy.”

“Could you borrow it? We need to get quite far out: we’ll be playing with forces on a pretty cosmic scale, Sonic cloud-seeding’s never been tried before as far as we know, but the theory’s sound. We’ll make it rain in Desolation Road.”

The Gallacelli brothers’ dune buggy was an odd mongrel of a vehicle. Knocked together by Ed in spare moments, it looked like a six-seater allterrain motor-trike with a large shop awning over it. Rael Mandella had never driven it before. The children giggled and cheered as he bounced along the rough track down the bluffs and headed out into the dune fields. As he threaded the cumbersome vehicle along the channels between the red sand mountains, his handling grew more confident. The Hand entertained the children with the tale of his desert crossing and pointed out highlights and landmarks. They drove and they drove and they drove beneath the great grey cloud, away from the habitation of men into a landscape where time was as fluid and morphic as blown sand, where the bells of buried cities chimed out from beneath the shifting surface of the desert.

Everyone’s watches had stopped at twelve minutes of twelve.

The Hand gestured for Rael Mandella to stop, stood up, and sniffed the air. Television clouds raced across his picture-suit.

“Here. This is the place. Can’t you feel it?”

He jumped from the dune buggy and scrambled to the top of a great red dune. Rael Mandella and the children followed, slipping and sliding in the shifting sand.

“There,” said The Hand, “do you see it?” Half-buried in the dune hollow stood a spidery sculpture of rusting metal, eaten by age and sand. “Come on.” Together they bounded down the slipslope of the dune in cascades of dislodged sand. The children ran up to the metal sculpture to touch their hands to its alien surfaces.

“It feels alive,” said Taasmin Mandella.

“It feels old and cold and dead,” said Limaal.

“It feels like it doesn’t belong here,” said Arnie Tenebrae.

“I don’t feel anything,” said Johnny Stalin.

Rael Mandella found some writing in a strange language. No doubt Mr. Jericho could have translated it. Rael Mandella did not have the gift of tongues. He sensed a strange flat silence in the place between the dunes, as if some enormous power were draining the life out of the air and the words that hung in it.

“This is the heart of the desert,” said The Hand. “This is where its power is strongest, this is where its power flows from and returns to. All things are drawn here; we were as we passed through, undoubtedly so was your Dr. Alimantando as he crossed the Great Desert, and so, hundreds of years ago, this was. It’s an ancient space vehicle. It landed here about eight hundred years ago as man’s first attempt to assess this world’s suitability for life. Its name, which is written there, Mr. Mandella, means Northern Seafarer, or to translate it literally, ‘one who inhabits bays and fjords.’ It’s been here a long long time, here at the heart of the desert. The sand is strong here at the heart.”

Overhead the clouds had grown thick and pregnant. Time snagged around the needle point of twelve minutes of twelve. No words were spoken; there was no need for them and those which had been needful the desert had taken away. The Hand unslung his red guitar and struck a harmonic. He listened intently.

Then the rain-music began.

Sandwhisperwindwhisperblowtheredduneface, carryanddropcarryanddrop, the granular march of the desert verbed in a risingswirlingeddying, devildrivingstone-shaping all things come from sand and to sand they return, said the red guitar, listen to the voice-of-the-sand, listen to the wind, the voice of the lion, the wind from around the shoulder of the world, cloudcarrying jetstreamingliftingfalling, airy barometric layers of occluded fronts spiraldepressions: element of zones and boundaries while yet boundaryless, shifting frontiers of the mutable kingdoms of air howling their path roundandround and round the roundroundglobe: the guitar sang the song of the air and the sand, now sing the song of light and heat: of shafts and planes and the geometrical precision of their intersections, domain of perpetualperpendiculars, shafts of light, shields of heat, solid suffocation of desert carpets and breadovens, the silver eyebrows of the sun raised quizzically over the veiling clouds’ dark perimeter: this is the song of the light, this is the song of the heat, yet there are still songs to be sung, said the guitar, before rain can fallfallfall and the song of the clouds is one of these, song of pillowfleecycottoncandyhighwispy exhalations of steamtrains and saucepans and bathrooms on winter mornings whipped by the wind and sent sailingscudding slipping in white armadas across a blueblueblue sea; and hear also the voice of the water drawn into the air, riverrundippledappleonwardflowingemptiedtrickles multiplying into streamsbrookstributariesrivers into thesea thesea! where shafts of light and heat move upon it like God’s fingers and the wind draws it upup up into the realm of barometric boundaries where the sea is shaped into chords of StratusMajor and CirrusMinor and AugmentedCumulus: there were songs to each of these things, and a music that was the name people gave them in their hearts, hidden like the harmonies in the strings of a guitar. These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

The music raged into the sky like an elemental thing. It threw itself with a roar and a howl at the walls of the clouds: wild and unbounded, growing and growing until it burst the bounds of human understanding into the place beyond understanding, where the true names are. The guitar cried for release. The clouds fretted at their tight constriction. Time strained at twelve minutes of twelve but the song would not let them go, any of them. Reflected images of insanity flickered across The Hand’s suit of white picture-cloth. The children hid themselves under the flaps of Rael Mandella’s desert coat. The world could not take very much more truth.

Then a raindrop fell. It ran down the flank of the derelict space-explorer and made a dark splash on the sand. Another joined it. Then another. Then another and another and another and another and suddenly it was raining.

The rain song ended. The acappella voice of the rain filled all the earth. The children held out disbelieving hands to catch the heavy drops. Then the clouds burst open and one hundred and fifty thousand years hurled itself to the ground. Rael Mandella, blind and gasping, the wind driven from his lungs, sought the terrified children and hid them under his coat. The sky emptied itself on the huddled, miserable pile of people.