Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Then the first acid breaths of Syss caught at his throat and blinded his eyes with tears.

There is a level lower than the level of machine drudgery at which Johnny Stalin entered the capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. It is the level reserved for those who ride into the Central Depot hanging from the bottom of the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service. It is the level of the unnumbered. It is the level of invisibility. Not the practiced invisibility that enabled Mikal Margolis to escape from the Central Depot undetected among the masses of Company Shareholders, but the invisibility of the individual before the body corporate.

Up a flight of marble steps, through brass doors ten times the height of a man, Mikal Margolis found himself in a cavernous hall of shining marble and polished hush. Before him was a very large and ugly statue of Winged Victory bearing the legend “Laborare est Orate.” Several kilometres distant across the marble plains stood a marble desk above which hung a sign reading INTERVIEWS, APPOINTMENTS AND AUDIENCES ENQUIRIES. Mikal Margolis’s trainscuffed shoes clattered vulgarly on the sacred marble. The fat man in the Company paper suit stared down at him from behind the marble rampart.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to make an appointment.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see someone in industrial development.”

“That would be the Regional Developments Offices.”

“To do with steel.”

“Regional Developments Offices, iron and steel division.”

“In the Desolation Road area… the Great Desert, you know?”

“One moment.” The fat receptionist tapped at his computer. “North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Office, iron and steel division, Regional Developments Offices, Room 156302, please join line A for your preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary.” He handed Mikal Margolis a slip of paper. “Your number: 33,256. Line A through those doors.”

“But this is important!” Mikal Margolis waved the roll of documents under the receptionist’s nose. “I can’t wait for 33,255 other people to go ahead of me just for some… some application to see some undersecretary.”

“Preliminary application for a preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary. Well, if it’s that urgent, sir, you should join line B, for an application for the Priority Clearance Programme.” He tore off a fresh numbered strip. “There. Number 2304. Door B please.”

Mikal Margolis ripped both numbers into shreds and tossed them into the air.

“Get me an appointment, now, for tomorrow at the very latest.”

“That is quite impossible. The earliest appointment is next Octember, the sixteenth, to be precise, with the water and sewage treatment manager, at 13:30 hours. You can’t throw the system about, sir, it’s for the good of us all. Now, here is a new number. Give me yours so I know who wants an appointment, and go and join line B.”

“Pardon?”

“Give me your number and go and join Line B.”

“Number?”

“Shareholder’s number. You have a Shareholder’s number?”

“Then you’ll have a temporary visitor’s visa. Could I have that, please?”

“I don’t have a temporary…” The fat receptionist’s outraged shriek turned heads all the way across the marble cathedral.

“No number! No visa! Holy Lady, you’re one of those… one of those…” Bells began to ring. Black and gold Company policemen appeared from unnoticed doors and advanced. Mikal Margolis looked for a place to run.

“Arrest this, this gutter boy, this tramp, this freebooter, goondah and bum!” screamed the receptionist. “Arrest this… Freelancer!” Thick foam sprayed from his mouth. The police drew short shock-staves and charged.

A sudden explosion of automatic fire threw everyone to the ground. The customary shrieker in such events shrieked. A figure in a grey paper suit stood by the door to line A, intimidating the lobby with a small black MRCW.

“Nobody move!” he shouted. Nobody moved. “Get over here!”

Mikal Margolis looked around for someone else the gunman could have meant. He pointed at himself, mouthing the word me?

“Yes, you! Get over here! Move!” One of the Company policemen must have reached for his communicator, for another burst of fire sent marble chips screaming and whining. Mikal Margolis stood up sheepishly. The gunman motioned for him to come around by the side, leaving clear his field of fire.

“What’s happening?” asked Mikal Margolis.

“You’re being rescued,” said the gunman in the business suit. “Now, whatever happens, follow me and don’t bother me with any questions.” From an inside pocket he flipped a smoke grenade into the lobby. “Run.”

Mikal Margolis did not know how far he ran, along how many marble, oak or plastic corridors: he just ran, with the high stepping gait of one expecting a bullet in the spine at any moment. When the sounds of search and pursuit were sufficiently remote, the rescuer stopped and opened a section of plastic wall panelling with a rather clever tool.

“In here.”

“Here?”

The sounds of search and pursuit suddenly increased.

“In here.” The two men dived into the wall cavity and sealed the wall behind them. The rescuer thumbed the laser setting on his MRCW to random emission and by its blue light led Mikal Margolis through a jungle of cables, ducts, pipes and conduits.

“Mind that,” he said as Mikal Margolis reached for a cable to steady himself after teetering at the lip of a two kilometre airshaft. “There’s twenty thousand volts going through that.” Mikal Margolis snatched back his hand as if from a snake, or a cable carrying twenty thousand volts.

“Just who are you?” he asked.

“Arpe Magnusson, Systems Service Engineer.”

“With an MRCW?”

“Freelance,” said the systems service engineer, as if that word explained everything. “See those glowing dust motes there, mind them. There’s a communications laser in there. Take your head clean off, it would.”

“Freelance?”

“An independent in the closed Company economy. Term of abuse. See, like you, I wanted to see someone in the Company, I had this great idea for revolutionizing the Kershaw airconditioning system, but no one wanted to see me, not without a number or a visa. So I came here, behind the walls, because you don’t need numbers back here, and joined the Freelancers. That was about four years back.”

“There’s more than one of you?”

“About two thousand. There’s places in this cube don’t appear on any Company schematics. Time to time, I do some independent work for the Shareholders; domestic stuff mainly, something breaks, things are always breaking, Company policy, built-in failure rate, and they’re not keen on repairing things, better for the Company if you buy new, so they pass the word and I come and fix it. Also, I keep a look out at Enquiries there for potential Freelancers: every so often someone like you turns up and I get them away behind walls.”

“With an MRCW?”

“First time I’ve ever had to use it. Bit slow getting to you, the computer almost missed tracking that call to the police. Watch the draft from that ventilator… it’s not easy living here, but if you make it past the first twelve months, you’re all right.” Magnusson turned and extended a hand to Mikal Margolis. “Welcome to the Freelancers, friend.”

Between pitfalls, acid, chemical waste, power blackouts and electrocution, the months that followed were the happiest of Mikal Margolis’s life. He was in constant danger, from both the perils between the walls and the sporadic raids of Company Kleenteems and had never felt more comfortable or relaxed. This was what he had dreamed of in his long sojourns on the desert rim. Life was brutish, dangerous and wonderful. The Freelancers’ computer, Jitney, which lived in their headquarters, a web of support cables stretched across Airshaft 19, provided him with the identity number of dead Shareholders and thus equipped, Mikal Margolis could eat with impunity in any Company refectory in the city, bathe in Company bath houses, dress in Company paper suits dispensed from street-corner slot machines, and even sleep in a Company bed until the Company withdrew the deceased’s number from circulation. At such times he would return to the world of the crawlways and access shafts and doze in his hammock suspended over a kilometre-deep airwell, rocked with the breathings of a hundred thousand Shareholders.