Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“It is her! She! She’s the one!” The entire mass of Dumbletonians fell to their knees in attitudes of adoration.

“Blessed Child,” said Inspiration Cadillac, smiling a horrid smile, “behold your flock. How may we serve you?”

Taasmin Mandella looked at the metal limbs, the metal heads, the metal hearts, the empty steel mouths, the plastic eyes. They revolted her. She cried out, “No! I don’t want your service! I don’t want to be your prophetess, your mistress, I don’t want you! Go back to wherever you came from, just leave me alone!” She ran away from the furious worshippers, out along the rim rocks to her old refuge.

“I don’t want them, you hear?” she screamed at the walls of her cave. “I don’t want their hideous metal bodies, they disgust me, I don’t want them to serve me, worship me, have anything to do with me!” She threw her arms above her head and released all her holy power. The air glowed blue, the rock groaned and shuddered, and Taasmin Mandella screamed bolt after bolt of frustrated force into the roof. At length she was drained and as she sat in a knot on the stone floor she thought about power, freedom and responsibility. She pictured the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption in her mind’s eye. She saw their metal hands, metal legs, metal arms, metal shoulders, their steel eyes, their tin chins, their iron ears, their half-and-half faces peeping out of their ugly, cheap little hovels. She was moved to pity. They were pathetic. Poor weak fools, pathetic children. She would show them a better way. She would lead them to self-respect.

After four days of thoughts and resolutions in her cave Taasmin Mandella was hungry and returned to Desolation Road for a bowl of lamb chili in the B.A.R./Hotel. Her halo glowed so brightly, no one could look at it. She found her town aswarm with construction workers in hard yellow hats, driving big yellow earthmovers and big yellow diggers. Big yellow transport dirigibles were setting down twenty-ton loads of pre-stressed steel girders and big yellow trains were unloading pre-mixed concrete and building sand into small yellow dumpsters.

“What the hell is going on?” said Taasmin Mandella, unconsciously echoing the mayor’s words of greeting. She found Inspiration Cadillac surveying the pouring of foundations. He was dressed in yellow coveralls and a yellow hard hat. He gave Taasmin a similar hat for her to wear.

“Do you like it?”

“Like what?”

“Faith City,” said Inspiration Cadillac. “The spiritual hub of the world, place of pilgrimage and finding to all who seek.”

“Come again?”

“Your basilica, Lady. Our gift to you: Faith City.”

“I don’t want a basilica, I don’t want a Faith City, I don’t want to be the hub of the spiritual world, the finding of all who seek.”

A load of construction girders swung overhead beneath a descending transport ’lighter.

“Where is the money coming from for all this? Tell me that.”

Inspiration Cadillac’s eyes were on the work. By his expression Taasmin knew he was already viewing the completed basilica.

“Money? Ah, well. Why do you think it’s called Faith City?”

The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing were walking down Belladonna’s Tombolova Street one day, when the Greatest Snooker Player the

Universe Had Ever Known stopped dead outside a little street shrine wedged between a male strip club and a tempura bar.

“Look,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Before the nine-pointed starburst of St. Catherine a young woman was at prayer, her lips moving silently as she whispered the litany, her eyes catching the light from the candles as she turned her gaze toward heaven. The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing watched her finish her prayer, light an incense wand, and pin a prayer to the door lintel.

“I’m in love,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. “I must have her.”

Her name was Santa Ekatrina Santesteban. She had soft olive skin and hair and eyes as dark as the secret place next to the heart. She lived with her mother, her father, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat and her singing bird in an apartment above Chambalaya’s Speciality Spice and Condiment Store on Depot Lane. Through years of living above Mr. Chambalaya, her skin had taken on the perfume of spices and incenses. “I’m half-curried,” she used to joke. She liked to joke. She loved to laugh. She was eleven years old. Limaal Mandella loved her madly.

Drawn by the trail of cardamom, ginger and coriander, he followed her down lanes and alleys to her home above Mr. Chambalaya’s shop and there, before her father, her mother, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat, and her singing bird, fell into a humble bow and asked for her hand in marriage. Ten days later they were wed. Glenn Miller was best man and bride and groom walked from the registry to the waiting riksha under a canopy of raised snooker cues. The Glenn Miller orchestra followed the wedding procession on a special float as far as Bram Tchaikovsky Station and played a selection of their greatest hits as bride and groom boarded the train. Rice and lentils rained down on them and well-wishers taped paper prayers of good omen to the back of the riksha and the side of the train. Smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, Limaal Mandella squeezed his wife’s hand and a vagrant thought struck him.

This was the only irrational thing he had every done. But the irrationality was gathering about him. It had been drawing close for many months; halted a little in its advance by his defeat of the devil, but again closing. In that moment between the male strip club and tempura bar it had struck and bound itself to him through Santa Ekatrina…. Happy with his wife, then his first son, Rael Jr., then his younger son, Kaan, he was blissfully blind to the fact that God was setting him up for the Big One.

Since his defeat of the Anti-God, Limaal Mandella had ruled the land of Snooker absolute and unchallenged. As no one could defeat him, no one would play him. His own excellence had effectively disqualified him from the game. City and Provincial, even Continental and World Championships went on without him and champions were crowned “Belladonna Masters, except for Limaal Mandella” or “Solstice Landing Professional Champion, apart from Limaal Mandella.”

Limaal Mandella did not really care. Absence from the matchroom gave him time with his lovely wife and children. Absence from the matchroom gave the irrationality time to seep into him.

When the word of a challenger to Limaal Mandella’s supremacy passed along the snooker circuits of Belladonna, everyone knew that the challenger must be someone, or something, quite exceptional. Perhaps the Panarch Himself was taking up cue in the hand that steered the galaxies to humble the proud human….

Nothing of the sort. The challenger was an insignificant mousy little man who wore upside-down spectacles and composed himself with the nervous air of an apprentice clerk in a large corporation. And that would have been the long and short of him but for the significant fact that he had cut his wife into teeny tiny pieces and ground them into hamburger and that as punishment he was now nothing more than the fleshly vehicle for the projected personality of the ROTECH computer Anagnosta Gabriel. He was a psychonambulist, an obiman, a creature of childhood ghost stories.

“How many?” asked Limaal Mandella in the back room of Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar, for he was a player whose skill was firmly attached to his sense of place.