Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“You folks near ready?”

Mr. Jericho made some fine adjustments to the field generator settings.

“Ready. Let’s do it.”

Ed Gallacelli tripped the remote switch and imprisoned Desolation Road within a translucent blue bubble.

“Child of grace!” exclaimed brother Louie. Ed Gallacelli looked at him. That was his expression.

“That’s not what’s meant to happen,” said Rajandra Das needlessly. “Do something before anyone notices.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” said Ed Gallacelli, frozen-fingered clumsy at the fine settings.

“I think we must have overlooked the Temporal Inversion Problem,” speculated Mr. Jericho.

“Oh, what is that?” said Lawyer Louie.

“A variable-entropic gradient electromagnetogravitic field,” said Ed Gallacelli.

“No, what is that .” Something like a miniature thunderstorm was bombarding the upper curve of the bubble with rather pretty, if totally ineffectual, blue lightning.

The three engineers looked up from their time machine.

“Child of grace!” said Ed Gallacelli.

“I think it’s a ghost,” said Rajandra Das. The storm of entropic ectoplasm knotted into a translucent blue lifestudy of Gaston Tenebrae. His head was bent over at an improbable angle and he seemed to be boiling with suppressed rage. This could have been because he was quite naked. Garments clearly did not pass beyond the grave, not even the decorous white shifts with which public imagination covered its spooks’ modesty.

“He looks pretty mad,” said Rajandra Das.

“So would you if you’d been murdered,” said Louie.

“No such things as ghosts,” said Mr. Jericho firmly.

“Oh, no?” said three simultaneous voices.

“It’s a time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial stress matrix.”

“Like hell,” said Rajandra Das. “It’s a ghost.”

“Looks like it is,” said Mr. Jericho.

“All right. Then we have our expert witness. Fiddle with that thing and see if you can bring him in. I’m looking forward to presenting the ghost of the murder victim to testify on his own behalf tomorrow.” Six hands reached for the field-generator controls. Mr. Jericho slapped less dextrous fingers away and stroked the verniers. The blue bubble contracted to half its volume, bisecting wind pump and cutting off a third of the community solar farm.

“Do that again,” said Louie Gallacelli, drawing up a line of questioning in his mind. He would make legal history. The first attorney ever to crossexamine a ghost. The bubble shrank once again. Now less than one hundred metres distant, the ghost glowered at its captors and pelted the imprisoning dome with pixie lightning.

“I hope he doesn’t decide to use that stuff onus,” said Rajandra Das. The ghost was now circling at high speed under the apex of the dome, seething with unutterable fury.

“Bring him in,” said Louie Gallacelli, unconsciously adopting his courtroom stance. The case was already successfully concluded in his mind. The name of Gallacelli was whispering up and down the line wherever injustice was being fought and the rights of man championed.

The electromagnetogravitic variable entropy field was now no more than a metre across. The ghost, cramped and contorted into a painful knot of ectoplasm within, mouthed oaths which Mr. Jericho, being an accomplished lipreader, found quite shocking and utterly inappropriate for one supposedly passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch. Louie Gallacelli tried some preliminary questions, but such was the ghost’s indignant ingratitude that he had Rajandra Das shut the field down to an agonizing fifteen centimetres and left it that size all night until the ghost learned some respect for the due processes of the law. The Mark Two time winder and incumbent phantom were taken to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel to await the morning. Umberto Gallacelli amused himself for several hours by spitting at the force field and showing the ghost some of his vast collection of photographs of women either having, about to have, or thinking about having sex with themselves, other women, a variety of farm animals, or massive-membered men.

Justice Dunne was in poor humour for a sentencing. The local water had given him diarrhoea, which, coupled with his haemorrhoids, had felt like shitting sheets of flame. His breakfast had been cold and inadequate, he had learned from his radio that his racehorse had fallen and broken its neck in the Morongai Flats Ten Thousand Metres, and now two of his jurors were missing. He had his usher, that ragged scamp Rajandra Das, search the town for them, and when that proved to be in vain he ruled that the trial could proceed with a jury of eight. He made a mental note to add a charge of fifty golden dollars to the town’s already substantial bill for this additional ruling. And now the defense counsel, a ludicrous semi-educated bumpkin with an overinflated opinion of his legal prowess, was seriously proposing that a key witness be admitted at this late stage in the proceedings.

“What is the name of this key witness?” Louie Gallacelli cleared his throat.

“The ghost of Gaston Tenebrae.”

Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl were on their feet instantly. Genevieve Tenebrae fainted and was carried out. Justice Dunne sighed. His anus was beginning to itch again. The counsels argued. The accused ate a breakfast of fried bread and coffee. After an hour, jury, spectators and witnesses went to tend their fields. Arguments clashed and parried. Justice Dunne fought an insistent urge to insert a forefinger into his backside and scratch the frustration until it bled. Two hours passed. Seeing no end to the wrangling unless he intervened, justice Dunne banged his gavel and declared, “The ghost may testify.”

Rajandra Das skipped around the fields and houses of Desolation Road rounding up jurors, witnesses and spectators. There was still no sign of the two missing jurors: Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.

“Call the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae.”

The ghost-catchers exchanged clenched-fist signs of triumph. Ed Galla celli wheeled in the Mark Two time winder and checked the transducers he had fixed around the edge of the bubble.

“Can you hear me?” squeaked the ghost. Newly revived, Genevieve Tenebrae promptly fainted again. The phantom’s voice came scratchy but audible through Ed Gallacelli’s radio amplifier.

“Now, Mr. Tenebrae, or rather, Late Mr. Tenebrae, did this man, the accused, murder you on the night of thirty-first Julaugust, at approximately twenty minutes of nothing?”

The ghost somersaulted gleefully in its blue crystal ball.

“Joey and I have had our differences in the past, I’d be the first to admit it, but now that I’ve passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch, all that’s forgiven and forgotten. No. It wasn’t him that killed me. He didn’t do it.”

“Then who did?”

Genevieve Tenebrae regained consciousness to hear her husband name his murderer.

“It was Mikal Margolis. He did it.”

In the ensuing uproar Genevieve Tenebrae fainted for the third time and the Babooshka crowed triumphantly, “I told you so, he was no good, that son of mine,” and justice Dunne banged his gavel so hard the head came off.

“If there is any more of this behaviour, I’ll have you all fined for contempt,” he thundered.

Order restored, the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae unravelled its sordid testimony of adultery, glowing passion, violent death, and illicit tripartite relationships between Gaston Tenebrae, Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.