Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Despite the halo around her left wrist and all things mechanical hers to command, Taasmin Mandella was finding sainthood rather boring. She resented spending hour after hour in the little shrine her father had added onto his already haphazard domicile: outside, the sun was shining and the green things were growing and here she was in her small dark room taking lists of supplications from old women with dead husbands (properly dead husbands; from time to time she wondered where her erstwhile aunt had gone on the morning she vanished from Desolation Road with the ragtag rebels) or placing her healing left hand upon broken radios, autoplanters, riksha engines and water pumps to make them whole again.

As one devout old woman left and another entered, a shaft of yellow sunlight would beam through the door and Taasmin Mandella wished she could return to her lizard days, basking naked and spiritual on the hot red rocks, free of any responsibility save to God the Panarchic. But the Blessed Lady had laid a holy onus upon her.

“My world is changing,” the little crop-haired urchin of a woman dressed in picture-cloth had said. “For seven hundred years I was a saint of machines and machines only, for machines were all there were, and through them I shaped this world and made it a good and pleasant place for man. And now that man has come, my relationships must be redefined. They have made me their god: I did not ask them to make me their god, much less desire to be that god, but it is what I am and I must bear the responsibility. Thus I have chosen selected mortals; if you’ll forgive the expression, but it comes rather readily to me, to be my agents upon the earth. You see, I have no voice with which to speak to humans but human voices. Therefore to you I am freely giving my prophetic voice and my power over machinery: this halo"-and it had sprung into luminescence around her left wrist-"is the sign of your prophethood. It is a pseudo-organic informational resonance field, by its power all machinery is yours to command. Use it wisely and well, for you will be called to account for your stewardship of it someday.”

It seemed like a dream now. But for that same halo around her left wrist none of it might ever have happened. Small-town girls do not meet saints. Small-town girls who wander crazy and souldriven into the Great Desert are not transported home in a beam of light from a flying Blue Plymouth. They die in the desert and are turned to bone and leather. Small-town girls do not possess the power to control all machines through halos around their left wrists. Small-town girls are not prophets.

That much was true. The Blessed Catherine ("call me Cathy, for God’s sake: never, ever let anyone give you a title you haven’t chosen yourself’) had demanded no especial virtue of her, merely to be wise and true. But there had to be more to Taasmin Mandella’s prophetic mission than sitting in an incense-smoky room performing one-a-minute miracles for superstitious grandmothers from up and down the line.

The magazine reporters had not helped either. She hadn’t seen the magazine yet, for some reason her parents had hidden the advance copies from her, but she was sure that when it went onto the world’s news-stands the pilgrims would be lined up all the way to Meridian. She would never see daylight at all.

So she rebelled.

“If they want me, they can come and find me.”

“But Taasmin darling, you have responsibilities,” cooed her mother.

“Use it wisely and well, for someday you will be called to account for your stewardship of it; that was all she said. Nothing about responsibility.”

“She? Is that what you call Our Lady of Tharsis?”

“That, and Cathy.”

The Prophetess Taasmin kegan lunching in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, snoozing with the radio on at siesta time, planting rows of beans in her father’s garden, and painting the white walls even whiter. If a miracle was needed, or a healing, or a prayer, she would perform it there and then, in the hotel, on the veranda, in the field, by the wall. When the demands of the faithful grew too much, she would take herself off to a quiet corner of Grand father Haran’s garden and, finding a quiet spot among the trees, slip out of her clothes into the simple pleasure of simply being.

One summer morning an old man appeared on the edge of town. He had a mechanical left arm, leg, and eye. He borrowed a spade from the Stalins, whose feud, in the absence of a worthy enemy, had internalized into mere husband/wife strife, and dug a large hole in the ground beside the railroad tracks. He walked round and round and round in this hole all day and all night, drawing much comment from the bemused citizens of Desolation Road, and all the next morning until Taasmin Mandella came to have a laugh at the curiosity. Seeing her, the old man stopped, looking long and hard at her, and asked, “Well, are you the one then?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Inspiration Cadillac, formerly Ewan P. Dumbleton of Hirondelle; Poor Child of the Immaculate Contraption.”

Taasmin Mandella was unsure whether his final comment had been about himself or her.

“Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious. I have read about you in the magazines, young woman, and I must know, are you the one?”

“Well, I might be.”

“Give me a hand up, will you?”

Taasmin stretched out her haloed left hand. It closed on Inspiration Cadillac’s metal hand and blue fire crackled along his mechanical limbs and forked from his artificial eye.

“You are the one, no mistaking,” he declared.

Two days later a train drew up in Desolation Road. It was like no train anyone had ever seen before. It was a clanking, rattling, hissing old contraption threatening to burst its boilers at every stroke of its labouring driveshafts. It hauled five dilapidated carriages trailing a squadron of prayer kites and prayer blimps and was decked out in a junkpile of religious flags, banners, emblems and holy paraphernalia of all types. The carriages were jammed with passengers. They poured from the doors and windows as if under pressure, and at Inspiration Cadillac’s command tore carriage and train apart and built from the fragments a hasty shantytown of tents, lean-tos and favelas. In the midst of the furious activity none of the spectators failed to notice that all the workers possessed at least one mechanical part to their bodies.

An official delegation soon arrived headed by Dominic Frontera and his three newly appointed constables, whom he had requisitioned from Meridian in case the Whole Earth Army should attempt another coup.

“Just what the hell are you doing?”

“We have come to be servants of the prophet of the Blessed Lady,” said Inspiration Cadillac, and on cue the cyborg shantybuilders genuflected.

“We are the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption,” continued Inspiration Cadillac. “Formerly known as Dumbletonians, we believe in the emulation of St. Catherine’s example of the mortification of the flesh by replacing our sinful fleshly parts with pure, spiritual mechanical ones. We believe in the spirituality of the mechanical, the total transubstantiation of flesh into metal, and equal rights for machines. Alas, our zeal for this last principle led to our expulsion from the Ecumenical Enclave of Christadelphia: the burning of the factories was quite unintentional, we were sadly misunderstood and much abused. However, we have learned through various channels, spiritual and secular, of a young woman blessed by the Lady to be a prophet and so we have come in response to an angelic vision to serve her and through her attain our perfect mortification.” As Inspiration Cadillac concluded, Taasmin Mandella arrived, disturbed from her meditations by the growing din. As she beheld the shantytown and its ragged tenants, a cry went up from the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption.