Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Marya Quinsana heard him draw breath and then he declared, “Let light fall upon the future!”

The chamber was filled with gritty purple light cast from a peculiarly shaped lantern above their heads. By this strange lanternlight Marya Quinsana saw herself reflected a thousand thousand thousand times in an endless mirrormaze. The images were fleeting, fleeting, twisted away the instant the eye comprehended them by the complex mechanisms that kept the mirrors turning. Marya Quinsana learned that there was a trick of holding the images in her peripheral vision and by this visual deception she beheld numinous glimpses of her future selves: the woman in combat duns with the MRCW slung across her shoulder, the woman with the five children under her skirts and her belly swollen with the sixth, the woman noble and powerful in judge’s gowns, the woman naked upon the glycerine-filled bed, the woman weary, the woman joyful, the woman tearful, the woman dead… no sooner seen than turned away like strangers on a train, into their own futures. There were the faces of frustrated ambition, the faces of despair, the faces of hope, and the faces that have put away all hope because they know their present lot is the most they can ever possess: there were the faces of death, a thousand faces bloody or ashen pale, seared black like coals or burst into festering boils by disease, sunken by age and wasting or calm with the false tranquility death grants those who fight it most.

“Death is every man’s future,” said Marya Quinsana. “Show me the futures of the living.”

“Look here then,” said Adam Black. Marya Quinsana looked where he pointed and saw a laughing sardonic figure glance over her shoulder at her and walk away into the maze, stepping from mirror to mirror with the easy gait of the jaguar, power slung low in her belly. She walked with the steps of the powerful; the makers and moulders of worlds walked like that. It was the image of how she had always imagined herself.

“That’s the one I want.”

“Then walk forward and take it.”

Marya Quinsana stepped forward in pursuit of the future self and with every step she took, confidence swelled up in her like a bud. She broke into a run, the run of the huntress, and as the mirrors swung out of her way to show only empty reflections of each other, she saw her prey was slowing. The power and authority were ebbing out of the image’s steps into her own. Marya Quinsana drew to within an arm’s reach of the fleeing image.

“Got you!” she declared, and seized the image’s shoulder in an arresting grip. With a gasp of terror the image wheeled and she saw herself as she had been, certain yet uncertain, knowledgeable but ignorant, a slave to freedom, and she knew that at some time in the pursuit she had become the image and the image her. The image collapsed with a pop of inrushing air into glittering dust and Marya Quinsana found herself by the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors once more.

“I trust you found the experience rewarding,” said Adam Black politely.

“I think so. Here, I forgot, fifty centavos.”

“For you, madam, there is no charge. For a satisfied customer, there is never a charge. Only the dissatisfied pay. But then, they always pay, don’t you think? But now I think I remember you, madam, your face seemed familiar to me; have you any connection with a place called Desolation Road?”

“Long ago and far away, I fear, and I am not the woman now I was then.”

“Such can be said of us all, madam. Well, a good evening to you, thank you for your patronage, and if I might ask one favour, it would be for you to pass on to your friends and relatives the fascinations of Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza.”

Marya Quinsana crossed the tracks toward a sodium-lit siding where a chemical train with “Wisdom” on its tankerboards was powering up its fusion engine. It began to rain, a thin, cold, needling rain. Marya Quinsana tumbled the images of what she had seen over in her head. She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself.

Close to the chemical train now she could see the engineer waving to her. She smiled and waved back.

Two peculiarities of the evening could not be fitted into her scheme. The first was that Adam Black’s reflection had not shown in any of the time mirrors. The second was that the image she had embraced had been walking in the general direction of Desolation Road.

Ever since her father’s ghost had told her she was a changeling, Arnie Tenebrae had refused to live under the same roof as either of her parents, living or dead. If she was a Mandella, she would live a Mandella in the Mandella household. She found Grandfather Haran asleep on his porch among his seedlings (for of late he had developed a passion for gardening, born in part out of his frustrated fatherhood). His mouth was wide and snoring. Arnie Tenebrae popped a hot chili pepper in the open mouth, and when the fire and fury had been extinguished, curtsied and said, “Mr. Mandella, I am your daughter, Arnie.”

So she left the Tenebrae household and entered under the roof of the Mandella family and called herself by a new name, though everyone else called her little Arnie Tenebrae, as they always had. She hated them calling her little Arnie Tenebrae. She was nine years old and mistress of her own destiny, as her adoption of families had proven, and as such she was to be taken seriously. Had she not provoked the greatest scandal to break in Desolation Road since her father’s murder, with the result that her own mother now lived a virtual outcast with only the Stalins talking to her, and those few words only to taunt and blame? She was a person of some significance and she hated people who laughed at her vanities.

“I will show them,” she told her mirror. “Mandella or Tenebrae, I will make the heavens ring with my name. I am a person of consequence, I am.”

Desolation Road was a town without consequence or heaven-ringing names. It was, simply was, and its contentment to merely be infuriated Arnie Tenebrae, who could not be without becoming. Desolation Road bored her. Her adoptive parents bored her. She hated their little lovingnesses; their multitudinous kindnesses made her cringe.

“I will break free,” she confided to her image. “Like Limaal, making a great name for himself in Belladonna, or even Taasmin; she was strong enough to break away from the mould of society and live among the rocks like a hyrax, why can’t l?”

She shunned the presence of people, even her doting father and mother, for she knew that people thought she was a little gold-digger playing on the fond fancies of an old man and woman. She found a way into Dr. Alimantando’s house and spent long hours of blissful solitude reading his volumes and speculations on time and temporality in the privacy of the abandoned weatherroom. Gone, gone gone gone, everyone was going in Desolation Road, everyone who was interesting and adventurous: what of Arnie Tenebrae?

One day she spied rollers of dust advancing across the desert plains and knew, even before they transformed into a dozen MRCW-armed men and women in combat duns mounted on all-terrain motor trikes, that this was salvation riding across the desert for her.

At first she was wary of scaring that salvation away like a little nervous bird, so she kept to the back of the crowd when the armed soldiers read the proclamation that they were the North West Quartersphere Truth Corps of the Whole Earth Army and that this town was under temporary occupation by the same. She held her silence as the soldiers explained the declared aims of the Whole Earth Army: the closure of the world to further immigration, the passing of control of the environmental maintenance equipment from ROTECH to the planetary authorities, the delegation to each continent of a regional autonomous parliament, the promotion of a truly indigenous planetary culture untainted by the dross and degeneracy of the Motherworld, and the smashing of the transplanetary corporations whose grasping corruption was draining the earth white. She did not join the protestors when Dominic Frontera and three employees of Bethlehem Ares Railroads were taken and placed under house arrest for the duration of the occupation, neither was she present when Ruthie Frontera, distraught and smeared with tears, rolled around on the earth in front of the house where the prisoners were guarded.