Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“More speed, more speed!” he cried, and Grandfather Haran and dear, beautiful Eva Mandella, mystical wife, heavily pregnant, hung out every last handkerchief of sail until the railschooner hummed and sang along the straight steel tracks. Spars creaked, hawsers twanged and shrieked, the windbogie rocked and swayed. In the equipment trailer the goats and llamas bleated fearfully and the pigs scrabbled at the bars of their cages. Behind, rollers of brown dust spilled across the land in ever-closing pursuit.

Again Rael Mandella lashed himself for the rash decision to bring wife, father and unborn child across the Great Desert. Four days ago, at Murcheson Flats, the choice had been simple. Throwing the points lever one way would send his family south into the settled lands of Deuteronomy and the Great Oxus, throwing it the other would send them out across the Great Desert to the empty places of Northern Argyre and Transpolaris. He had not hesitated then. It had pleased him to think of himself as a bold pioneer breaking new ground, building his own land with his own hands. He had been proud. This then was the punishment for it. His charts and maps were relentless, the ROTECH surveyors marked no habitation for a thousand kilometres along this line.

A crack of wind caught the mainsail and ripped it down the middle. Rael Mandella stared dumbfounded at the flapping rags of sailcloth. Then he gave the order to close-haul. Even as he did so, three more sails split with cracks like gunshots. The railschooner shuddered and lost some of its headlong momentum. Then Eva Mandella stood up, swaying, clutching a humming hawser. Her belly heaved in imminent labour, but her eyes had the far look and her nostrils were wide as startled deer’s.

“There’s something out there,” she said in a voice that slipped under the shriek of the wind and the wires. “I can smell it; something’s green and growing out there. Haran, you’ve got the eye for it, what can you see?” Grandfather Haran pointed his weather-eye down the geometrically perfect line and in the swirling dust and haze that presaged the storm he saw what Eva Mandella had smelled: a blob of green growingness, and more besides; a tall metal tower and some lozenge-shaped solar collectors.

“Habitation!” he cried. “A settlement! We’re saved.”

“More sail!” roared Rael Mandella, the shreds of sailcloth flapping around his ears. “More sail!” Grandfather Haran sacrificed the ancient family banner of finest New Merionedd silk, with which he would have proudly proclaimed his son’s kingdom in the land beyond the desert, and Eva Mandella her cream organdie wedding dress and finest petticoats. Rael Mandella sacrificed six sheets of irreplaceable plastic solar sheeting, and together they were all hoisted up the mast. The wind caught the rail-schooner and it gave a little shudder and a little jump, and looking more like a travelling carnival caught up in a waterspout than pioneers intent on the new lands, the frontier-family Mandella spun down the line to sanctuary.

Dr. Alimantando and Mr. Jericho had seen the rail-schooner while still far off, a scrap of many-coloured cloth flying before the front of the storm. They had braved the first tugs and gusts of the dust-devils to fold up the delicate petals of the solar collectors into tight buds and retract the feathery antennae and dish aerials into the relay tower. While they worked, heads and hands wrapped in thick turbans of cloth, the wind rose to a shout-defying shriek and filled the air with flying needles of dust. As the rail-schooner braked furiously in a shower of shrieks, screeches and sparks, Dr. Alimantando and Mr. Jericho ran up to help unload the caboose. They worked with the silent, selfless synchronization of men who have known only each other for a long and solitary time. Eva Mandella found their tireless, mechanical lifting and carrying rather frightening: livestock, rootstock, seedstock, tools, machinery, materials, fabrics, domestic items, nails, screws, pins and paints; carry and set, carry and set, all without a word being spoken.

“Where can we put them?” screamed Rael Mandella.

Dr. Alimantando beckoned with a cloth-wrapped finger and led them to a warm, dry cave.

“This for you, the one connecting there for your equipment.”

At seventeen minutes of seventeen the dust storm struck. The same moment, Eva Mandella went into labour. As her wedding dress, her petticoats, the family banner and six sheets of valuable solar sheeting were whirled up into the atmosphere on winds that might shred a man’s flesh from his bones, she squeezed and squeezed and moaned and gasped and squeezed and squeezed in the warm dry cave by the light of tallow candles; squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until she squeezed two squawling infants into the world. Their advent wails were lost beneath the greater wailing of the storm. A little red sand trickled into the mouth of the cave. In the yellow flickering candlelight Rael Mandella picked up his son and daughter.

“ Limaal,” he said to the child in his right hand. “Taasmin,” he said to the child in his left, and in doing so he cursed them with his curse, so that his right-handed rationalism passed into his son and his wife’s left-handed mysticism passed into his daughter. They were the first natural citizens of Desolation Road, and their citizenship bestowed citizenship upon their parents and grandparent, for they could not press on to the land beyond the desert while there were still infants at the teat. So they stayed forever and never found the land beyond the mountains for which all Mandellas have been searching ever since, for they know that Desolation Road is always one step short of paradise and they are not content with that.

Rajandra Das lived in a hole under Platform 19 of Meridian Main Station. He shared this hole with a lot of other people, and there were a lot of holes under Meridian Main Station, so there were a lot of people. They called themselves gentlemen of leisure, connoisseurs of freedom, scholars in the Universuum of Life, Blythe Spirits. The railroad managers called them gutterboys, tramps, beggars, freebooters, goondahs and bums. The passengers called them distressed gentlefolk, unfortunates, fallen souls and knights of misfortune and opened their purses to them as they squatted on the station steps, hands outstretched to receive showers of centavos, their eyes gazing milky-blind, courtesy of special cataract contact lenses manufactured by the Eastern Light Spectacle and Optics Company on East Bread Street. Rajandra Das, however, was above the largesse of the train-traveling people of Meridian. He existed wholly within the subterranean community of Main Station and lived on what the beggars could afford to pay for his services. He enjoyed a certain measure of respectability, (though what respectability might amount to in a kingdom of tramps was questionable), because he had a talent.

Rajandra Das had been given the power of charming machinery. There was nothing mechanical, electrical, electronic or submolecular that would not work for Rajandra Das. He loved machines, he loved to take them apart, tinker with them, put them back together again and make them better than before, and the machines loved the feel of his long, dextrous fingers stroking their insides and tweaking their sensitive components. Machines would sing for him, machines would purr for him, machines would do anything for him. Machines loved him madly. Whenever any device went wrong in the holes under Meridian Main Station, it went straight to Rajandra Das, who would hum and haw and stroke his neat brown beard. Then he would produce screwdrivers from his jacket of many pockets, take the device apart and within five minutes have it fixed and running better than before. He could coax two years out of four-month light bulbs. He could tune wirelesses so fine they could pick up the cosmic chitchat between ROTECH habitats in high orbit. He could rewire prosthetic arms and legs (of which there was no shortage in Meridian Main Station) to be faster and stronger than the fleshly parts they replaced.