Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Every four hours they would take a sixty-minute break. Limaal Mandella would eat or bathe or drink some beer or catch a few winks of sleep. The Enemy would sit alone in his chair and sip from a glass of absinthe topped up by a nervous bartender. As word passed around the corridors and alleyways that Limaal Mandella was playing the devil for his very soul, crowds of the curious pressed into Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar, concentrated and compressed almost to the point of suffocation and implosion, mounted policemen rode back and forth along the boulevard outside, keeping the crowd away from the doors. Teenage runners hotfooted it to the press agencies with the latest frame scores and excited Belladonians watched posters go up reading “Mandella leads by one frame” or sat in bars and cafes listening to Maelstrom Morgan’s radio commentary on the epic contest. In barber shops, sushi bars, bath houses, and rikshas the city of Belladonna cheered on the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known.

But the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known knew that he was losing. The quality of his play strained the credible, but he knew he was losing. There was a dreadful precision to the enemy’s shots, a foresightedness to his play that echoed the omniscient, and Limaal Mandella knew that play as he might, his human talent could never match the demonic perfection of Satan. He lost the initiative, slipped behind, and began to trail the Devil, always making up the frame’s deficit to stay in touch with the match but never forging ahead to take control of the table. The cries and shouts of the well-wishers now held a note of desperation.

After thirty-two hours at the table Limaal Mandella was a man destroyed. Haggard, unshaven, fatigue oozed from every pore as he bent to the table again. Only his rationalism, his unshakable faith that skill must triumph over dark sorcery in the end, kept his cue arm moving.

The final frame ground into play. The third change of referees announced the frame score: Limaal Mandella 38 frames, the Challenger 38 frames. The game was down to the colours. Limaal needed blue, pink, and black to win. The Enemy needed black and pink. Sipping his absinthe, he was as fresh and bright as a dandelion in a summer hedge. The green baize universe with its tiny coloured solar systems swirled before Limaal Mandella’s eyes, and suddenly it was a black ball game. Limaal took a deep breath and let the dregs of his rationalism flow through him. The black ball glided alone the table, wriggled in the jaws, wriggled free.

The audience moaned.

The devil sighted down his cue. And then Limaal Mandella had it. He stood on his side table, pointed his cue at the Enemy, and shouted, “You can’t win! You can’t win, you’re not real! There is no devil, there is no Panarch, no St. Catherine, there is only us, we ourselves. Man is his own god, man is his own devil, and if I am being defeated by the devil, it is by the devil within me. You are an impostor, an old man who dresses up and says ‘I am the Devil’ and you all believe him! We believe him! I believe him! But I don’t now, I don’t believe in you! There’s no room for a devil in the rational world!”

The referee tried to restore the contemplative calm of the snooker hall. Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar settled after the untoward outburst. The Goat of Mendes sighted down his cue once more and struck. Cue ball struck black ball, black ball ran toward the pocket. As the balls ran down the table, the hellfire flickered in the gentleman’s eyes and snuffed out. The infernal power, the unworldly perfection, had gone out of him, wiped away by Limaal Mandella’s act of unbelief. The city of Belladonna held its breath. The black ball was losing momentum, losing impetus. A breath short of the pocket the black ball came to rest. There was utter silence. Even gabbling garrulous Maelstrom Morgan fell silent, words frozen in his microphone. Ten kilometres tall, Limaal Mandella stepped to the table. The city of Belladonna let out a shriek of anticipation.

Suddenly the Devil was just a tired, scared old gentleman.

Limaal Mandella swept his cue down into the striking position, oblivious of the fatigue tearing at every muscle. The room fell quiet again, as if his gesture had stopped time. His arm pistoned back, the same precise machine motion that he had performed ten thousand identical times in the past day and a half. He smiled just for himself and let the cue barely touch the ball. The white ball rolled down the table and stroked the black ball soft as a lover’s caress. The black shivered and tumbled into the pocket, like the plummeting porcelain planetoids of his nightmares.

After she walked away from Mikal Margolis at a soba bar in Ishiwara Junction, Marya Quinsana pointed her heart in the general direction of Wisdom and let her freedom waft her away.

Freedom. She had been so long the prisoner of other people’s needs that she had forgotten the flavour of freedom. But freedom had a taste. It tasted like a centimetre of Belladonna brandy in the bottom of a glass when you think the glass is empty. It tasted like hot soba noodles with gravy on a cold morning after a colder night. It tasted so good that she got up from her breakfast and walked away from Mikal Margolis, away from the soba bar, across the street where the old men aimed jets of brown hemp juice at a battered brass spittoon to the freight train slumbering in the siding. She felt Mikal Margolis’s eyes on her every step as she went up to the cab where two engineers, neither more than ten years old, loafed, waiting for the signal.

“Any chance of a ride?” she asked. As the two paan-chewing youths looked her up and down, she shot a glance across the street to MacMurdo’s soba bar and was regarded by Mikal Margolis’s betrayed eyes behind the glass window.

“Might say the same to you,” said the dark brown engineer-boy whose cap bore the name Aron.

“Sure. Why not?” Marya Quinsana rolled the flavour of freedom around her mouth like rolled up paan leaves. Whoring was small change in the currency of ambition.

“In that case, sure, why not?” Engineer Aron opened the cab door. Marya Quinsana climbed up and sat between the suddenly tense boy engineers. The signal changed, the tokamaks roared, and the train pulled away from Ishiwara Junction.

Changing trains in the dawn hours, waiting for half days on end at the side of Grand Trunk Roads holding aloft the totem of the windswept thumb, hitching rides on overnight transport dirigibles, Marya Quinsana pursued the ghost of freedom across half the world until she caught up with it in a freight siding behind l’Esperado Main Station.

The train was shabby, paint-peeled, and dowdy, eroded by years of exposure to the marvellous and wonderful, but Marya Quinsana could make out the legend by the yellow sodium glow: Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza. A small crowd of station bums stood idly around at the foot of the steps, lacking even the small change to share in the wonders of Adam Black’s show. Marya Quinsana could not have said what it was that made her go there that night; perhaps mellow nostalgia, perhaps some atavistic urge, perhaps the desire to pick at scabs. She pushed the bums aside and entered. Adam Black was a little greyer and a little sadder but otherwise unchanged. It pleased Marya Quinsana that she should know him and that he should not know her.

“How much is it?”

“Fifty centavos.”

“In cash or kind. As ever.”

Adam Black regarded her with the expression of one trying to place a memory. “If you will come with me, I will show you the wonders of my Hall of Mirrors.” He took Marya Quinsana by the hand and led her into a darkened carriage. “The mirrors of Adam Black’s Hall of Mirrors are no ordinary mirrors, they have been cast by the Master Mirror Moulders of Merionedd who have refined their art to such a pinnacle of perfection that their mirrors reflect not the physical image, but the temporal one. They reflect chronons, not photons, time images of the myriad possible futures that may befall you, which diverge through time when the searcher gazes upon them. To you they will display the futures possible for you at life’s diverse junctures, and the wise man will mark, meditate and amend his life accordingly.” As he delivered his stale spiel, Adam Black had guided Marya Quinsana through a pitch-dark maze of claustrophobic twistings and turnings. With the conclusion of his speech he stopped.