Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Rather, she hid under the shade of an umbrella tree and watched the guerrillas swarm over Dr. Alimantando’s house doing things to the microwave tower. She saw the logo on the crates of radio equipment and suddenly the occupation was clear.

“ All Swing Radio ,” she murmured to herself, tracing the words on the crates with her fingertips. “ All Swing Radio. ”

All Swing Radio was vampire music. In some towns to be caught listening to All Swing Radio would earn you a fine, fifty days community service, confiscation of the radio, or even a public flogging. It was the music of subversives, terrorists, anarchists who roamed the empty places of the world on their terrain trikes looking for microwave towers into which they could plug their illegal transmitters and broadcast their subversive, terrible, anarchic music to the kids in the dead-end alleys, the empty gymhalls, the backseats of rikshas, closed-down bars, shut-up co-ops, and little Arnie Tenebrae/Mandella listening to the Big Big Sound of the New Music under the quilts at two minutes of two in the morning. It was the best music in the world, it set your feet on fire, friend, it made you want to dance, friend, it made the girls hitch up their skirts or roll up their overalls and dance and the boys somersault and back-flip and spin around the floor, or the concrete, or the packed brown earth: the bold, bad basement music of Dharamjit Singh and Hamilton Bohannon, Buddy Mercx and the King of Swing himself, the Man Who Fell Through the Time Warp: Glenn Miller, and his Orchestra. It was basement music from smoky cellars deep under Belladonna and hole-inthe-wall recording studios with names like American Patrol and Yellow Dog and Zoot Money: it was music that shocked your mother, it was All Swing Radio , and it was illegal.

It was illegal because it was propaganda though it carried no political message. It was subversion through joy. It was the best PR job in the history of the profession, and its success could be measured by the fact that half a million kids a day whistled its famous call sign, and as many parents found the tune on their lips without ever knowing what it was. From the rice paddies of the Great Oxus to the towers of Wisdom, from the favelas of Rejoice to the cattle stations of Woolamagong, as the hour of twenty o’clock approached, the kids would tune their dials to the Fun 881, and tonight that famous call sign would thunder across the globe from Desolation Road.

“Fun 881,” said Arnie Tenebrae. “Here, in Desolation Road.” It was as if God had sent down his holy angels to sing and dance just for her.

“Hey!” A burly young woman was waving a Multi-Role Combat Weapon at her. “Don’t poke around with the gear, kid.” Arnie Tenebrae fled back to her hiding place beneath the umbrella tree and watched the soldiers at work until dinner time. That night she listened to All Swing Radio at two minutes of two under the quilts so that her adoptive parents would not hear. Tears of frustration ran down her cheeks as the mad, bad music played and played and played.

There was a certain Engineer Chandrasekahr, a farm boy not much older than herself from Great Oxus who smiled at her next morning as she pulled carrots from the garden. Arnie Tenebrae smiled back and bent lower so he could see all the way down the front of her overall. That afternoon Engineer Chandrasekahr came over to engage her in conversation and tried to touch her, but Arnie Tenebrae was a little frightened by the forces she had released in the boy soldier and rebuffed his puppylike approaches. But that evening she went to the wooden hut the Truth Corps used as a broadcasting studio and asked for Sublieutenant Chandrasekahr. When he came to the door, Arnie Tenebrae flashed her shining white teeth at him and opened her blouse to display her proud nine-year-old breasts gleaming like temple domes in the light of the moonring.

Afterwards they lay in slots of skylight beaming through the shutters. Arnie Tenebrae turned on the radio and said, “Take me with you.”

Engineer Chandrasekahr’s foot tapped unconsciously in time with the Big Swing Beat.

“That is not so easy.”

“It is too. You have to move to a new relay in a couple of days. Just take me with you.”

“We are a secret, high-mobility unit, we cannot take just anyone who wants to come along. You are asking for much trust.”

“I’ve just given you the most trust any woman can give. Can’t you give me some in return?”

“What about your ideological commitment?”

“You mean all that ‘close the sky’ stuff? Sure, I know the facts. Listen to this.” Arnie Tenebrae sat, up and dominated Engineer Chandrasekahr with her light-slatted body as she counted off ideologies on her sticky fingers. “It’s like this, isn’t it? One Praesidium SailShip can hold a million and a half colonists, and when they come to our earth there has to be houses and farms and food and water and jobs for them. And if ten of these vehicles arrive every year, that’s fifteen million people, which is five cities the size of Meridian, every year. And if this goes on for a hundred years, that’s three hundred cities, a thousand SailShips, a billion and a half people, and where is the food, the water, the jobs, the houses, the factories, the farms going to come from for all these people? And that is what the Whole Earth Army is about, keeping the earth for its own people, keeping away all the greedy people who would take our beautiful world away from us and fill it up with their horrid bodies. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s putting it simply.”

“So, I know the principles. Am I in, then?”

“No…”

Arnie Tenebrae shrieked her frustration and bit Engineer Chandrasekahr’s chest. Grandfather Haran banged on the wall and shouted for her to keep the radio down a bit.

“I want in!”

“It’s not up to me.”

“Look, I can do things for you you wouldn’t believe.”

“You already have, my little cherry-pip.”

“I don’t mean that way. I mean like weapons, like things that would make you unbeatable. Listen, there was an old man used to live here years ago. He invented this place and the story goes that he met a green man and went off to travel through time with him, though I don’t know about that bit. But his house is right over there where you’ve got the transmitters and it’s full of ideas for things like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Like what wouldn’t I believe?”

“Like sonic blasters, like electromagnetogravitic field inducers you can use either offensively or defensively, you can even use them to shut down gravity over short ranges; like light-scatter fields that make you the next best thing to invisible…

“Good God.”

“I know it’s there, I’ve seen it. Now, this is the deal. If you want it, you’ve got to take me with it. So, am I in or am I out?”

“We leave tomorrow at dawn. If you want to come, be there.”

“Bet your ass I do. Now, get your clothes on and tell your chief Arnie Mandella’s coming.”

Arnie Tenebrae believed in paying only as much as a thing was worth to her. That was why she found the unfamiliar discomfort between her thighs good value received for being able to sit behind Engineer Chandrasekahr on his terrain trike as the Truth Corps revved and roared into the pre-dawn glow. She clung close to Engineer Chandrasekahr and felt the desert wind burn her cheeks and try to tug the tube of rolled documents from her shoulder.

—No, no, she told the wind, that is mine, with these papers I can make the heavens ring with my name. She looked down at the Whole Earth Army badge pinned to her khaki overalls and felt a glow of excitement swell up inside her.

The horizon dipped beneath the sun and the world was flooded with shape and light. Arnie Tenebrae turned to look back on Desolation Road, a jumble of amber, red and shining silver. Nothing could have looked more like an insignificant, stultifying little hole and as she realized she was leaving it behind, Arnie Tenebrae knew a savage and keening joy. She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck. This was her consummation, bouncing along on the back of a rebel terrain trike into exile with the romantic revolutionaries. This was the pinnacle of Arnie Tenebrae’s insignificant, stultified little life.