Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Pa?” The voice startled him. “Pa, you all right?” It was Rael Jr., five and already cursed with the family curse. Limaal Mandella rested a hand on his son’s head.

“I’m all right. It’s just that since we came here I’ve not known what I wanted to do with myself.”

“I know. You were like a paper glider in the wind.”

Had be been that inept at concealing his frustration?

“Well, that’s all over now. Rael, your father is going to be a Gentleman of Science and Learning, like Dr. Alimantando in the stories I told you about this place. See here…” Father and son knelt to examine the faded scribblings. “This is where it all begins.” He traced the line of reasoning along the wall and up and around, Rael Jr. following him, and embarked upon the years of line-following that were to lead him to the centre of the ceiling in Dr. Alimantando’s weather-room.

“Behold!” cried Inspiration Cadillac, surgical lamps glinting off his steel cranium. “The first total mortification!” Surgeons, nurses, prostheticians went down on their knees, arms uplifted in adoration. Taasmin Mandella backed away from the metal thing on the operating table. It horrified her.

Beneath a plastic dome the brain pulsed, studded with electromechanical transducers. A neuron fired, a transducer twitched, a metal arm raised itself, metal fingers opened to grip the air.

“Glory glory glory!” shrieked the surgeons nurses prostheticians.

“Get it away from me,” muttered Taasmin Mandella. “It sickens me.” Inspiration Cadillac was at her side in an instant, whispering suave persuasions. “Consider the achievement, Lady, the first total mortification! Flesh made metal. This is indeed a hallowed moment!” The undisguised envy in his voice made Taasmin Mandella flinch. The thing opened a metal eyeshutter and rotated a steel eyeball at her. The smooth steel orb was pierced by three black slits. The mouth opened and a stream of gurgled gibberish vomited forth. It tried to sit up, embrace her.

“Kill it, kill the filthy thing, get it away from me!” the Lady Taasmin screamed. The Total Mortification sat up. A spasm shook it. The cybernetic gibberish rose to a shriek of metal on metal. Oil trickled from the trembling mouth; Surgeons nurses prostheticians leaped from their knees to the operating table. The Total Mortification spasmed, shuddered and collapsed with a crashing of grinding gears. In the confusion Taasmin Mandella slipped out of the operating theatre and fled down empty antiseptic corridors and sunbaked cloisters in a rustle of circuit-printed fabric.

She was meditating in the sand garden at twilight when she heard the chanting. The machine mantras of the Poor Children co-mingled with the coarser cries of the populace touched the edge of her perceptions with a silver chime and drew her back into the world of men again. Troubles never end. She stretched, arching her back against the strictures of the form-fit meditation stool. In one minute Inspiration Cadillac would come knocking on the door, calling her back to responsibilities. She rose from the stool, went to her room, and pulled on a pair of grey bib & braces. Inspiration Cadillac found her nudity unspiritual and disturbing.

She was ready for the knock.

“What is it?”

“A problem, Lady. The Poor Children…”

“I heard them.”

“I think it best if you see for yourself.” Inspiration Cadillac led her along sun-baked cloisters returning their daytime heat to the sky.

“How was your… experiment?” Taasmin could not conceal the shudder in her voice and Inspiration Cadillac evidently heard it, for he replied, “With respect, you should not denigrate the labour of the scientists, they are trying to perfect the new humanity, the future man. Alas, in this instance, the patient’s system terminated but his courage and faith have surely earned him immediate passage into the presence of the Great Engineer.”

Inspiration Cadillac pushed open a heavily ornate door that led onto the street. The sound of chanting and cheering swelled.

“What is going on?”

“Please to follow me, Lady.” Chamberlain and prophetess rounded a corner and came face-to-back with a dense throng of people.

“Up here, the view is better,” suggested Inspiration Cadillac, hastening Taasmin Mandella up a flight of stone steps onto a balcony. Beyond the encirclement of puzzled citizens, Taasmin Mandella could see machine limbs catching the evening sun. The Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption knelt beside the chain-link fence that surrounded the Bethlehem Ares Steel construction site. The air was filled with the humming of their binary mantras, and their ungainly arms moved in cranelike gestures of fervent devotion. Every few seconds a Poor Child would leave his place in the congregation and, in blatant disregard of the warning notices that the wire was electrified, press his metal prostheses to the mesh. Electricity sparked, the worshipper groaned and flexed in religious ecstasy. Then he returned to his place and resumed the chant of 10111010101111000001101101010 while another took his place.

“What are they doing?” asked Taasmin Mandella.

“I would think it is obvious, Lady. They are worshipping.”

“A construction site?”

“Apparently a prophecy has been circulating among the lower orders in Faith City. This prophecy claims that what the Bethlehem Ares Corporation is constructing here is no less than the birthplace, if it is the right expression, of the Steel Messiah, the Liberator, the Machine with the Heart of a Man who will deliver the machines from their millennial bondage to the flesh.”

“And that is why they are worshipping… a pile of foundations and earthworks?”

Beyond the wire an off-clocking shift of construction workers paused to stare at the adoring Dumbletonians.

“Precisely. The site is holy, a place of veneration and worship.”

Taasmin Mandella looked again upon the steady stream of Poor Children going joyfully forth to immolate themselves upon the electrified wire.

“It’s sick,” she whispered.

A voice from the crowd of townfolk cried out.

“Look! It’s her! The Grey Lady!”

Heads turned, fingers pointed. The Poor Children froze in their Adoration of the Wire and swivelled metal eyeballs toward the balcony. A young woman with a metal chest and left leg stood up and screamed.

“A message! Give us a message!”

The chant spread instantaneously across the congregation.

“Message! Message! Give us a message! Message! Message! Give us a message!”

Five thousand eyes crucified Taasmin Mandella.

“They await your leadership, Lady,” wheedled Inspiration Cadillac.

“I can’t,” whispered Taasmin Mandella. “It’s disgusting. Sick, idolatry.… It’s not true spirituality, true worship… it must stop.”

“You are their leader, their spiritual head, their shepherd, guide and conscience. You must lead them.”

The chanting rose to a frenzy. The ground shook beneath two and a half thousand pounding fists.

“No! I refuse! It’s an abomination! I’m not God that I desire their worship I detest it. I didn’t ask you to follow me, I am the servant of the Blessed Lady, not the Dumbletonians, I’m a child of the Panarch, not the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption.” She tried to bite back the words but they flew from her lips like sweet birds. “Or you, Ewan P. Dumbleton!”

Suddenly she did not hear the chanting or feel the force of the Poor Children’s demands. She looked into Inspiration Cadillac’s fleshly eye and saw such hatred burning there that she gasped.