Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Rael! Wow! Look! Trains!”

The jungle gym of industrial chemistry was immediately abandoned in favour of the twelve waiting trains. The explorers had never seen such trains before, each was over a kilometre long and hauled by two Bethlehem Ares Railroads Class 88s hitched in tandem. The sense of slumbering power trapped within the shutdown tokamaks awed the boys into silence. Rael Jr. touched one of the titans with the flat of his hand.

“Cold,” he said. “Powered down.” He had been given a book about trains by his grandfather for his seventh birthday.

“‘Edmund Gee,’ ‘Speedwell,’ ‘ Indomptable ,"’ said Kaan Mandella, reading the names of the black and gold behemoths. “What would it be like if one suddenly started up?” Rael Jr. imagined the fusion engines exploding into life and the idea scared him so much he made Kaan leave the sleeping giants alone and led him into another part of the complex entirely, one they had never seen before on their clandestine playground visits.

“It’s like another Desolation Road,” said Kaan.

“Desolation Road like it ought to be,” said Rael Jr. They found themselves at the edge of a small but complete town of about six thousand inhabitants, or, rather, which would have housed six thousand inhabitants, for it was as empty as a graveyard. It was a well-ordered town with neat terraces of white adobe houses with red roofs (for some things were too sacred for even the Bethlehem Ares Corporation to change) lining spacious streets that radiated out like the spokes of a wheel from a central hub of parkland. At the end of every street where it joined the circular service road stood a Company commissary, a Company school, a Company community centre and a Company depot for small gadabout electric tricycles.

“Hey! These are great!” shouted Kaan, turning tight circles within circles on his three-wheeled buggy, “Race you!” Rael Jr. rose to the challenge, kicked a trike into action, and the two boys raced each other up and down the empty streets of Steeltown past the empty houses, the empty shops, the empty schools and socials and tea rooms and doctors’ offices and chapels, all empty empty empty like the eyes of a skull, and they whooped and cheered as their wheels threw up clouds of the red dust that had found its way even into this sacred place.

At the hub of the wheel of streets was a circular park with the name “Industrial Feudalism Gardens” above its wrought iron gate. When the boys tired of their racing they threw off their dusty sweaty clothes and splashed in the ornamental lake and sunned themselves on the neatly rolled lawns.

“Hey, this is great!” said Rael Jr.

“When do you think all the people are coming?” asked Kaan.

“Don’t care long as it isn’t today. I could stay here forever.” Rael Jr. stretched like a cat and yielded himself to the innocent sun.

“Do you think you’ll work here when you grow up?”

“Might do. Might not. Haven’t thought much about what I might want to do. How about you?”

“I want to be rich and famous and have a huge house like we had in Belladonna and a pool and a ’lighter and have everyone know me, like Pa was.”

“Huh! Seven years old and he knows exactly what he wants. How you going to get all this then?”

“I’m going to go into business with Rajandra Das.”

“That bum! He can’t do anything!”

“We’re going to open a hot food stall and when we make a lot of money on that one, we’ll open another, and another, and another, and I’ll be rich and famous, just you see!”

Rael Jr. lay back on the neatly rolled grass and wondered how his little brother could have all his days charted out before him while he wished only to be blown like a moth on the mystical desert wind.

“Listen,” said brother Kaan, sitting up, alert. “Sounds like ’lighters.”

Rael Jr. stretched his hearing and caught the beat of aircraft engines on the edge of the wind.

“Coming this way. Maybe it’s the people.”

“Oh, no, maybe it is,” said Kaan, struggling into sticky clothes. The first LTA drifted over the steel pinnacles of the city. “Let’s go.” The brothers ran down deserted streets filled with the drumming of aircraft engines and over their heads airship after airship after airship drifted past. RaelJr. ran with one eye to the sky.

“There must be hundreds of them.” There was both wonder and awe in his voice.

“Come on,” said brother Kaan, cursed with pragmatism.

“No, I want to see what’s happening.” Rael Jr. climbed a series of sheer staircases that led to the top of a catalytic converter column. After only an instant’s hesitation Kaan followed. He was indeed pragmatic; but curious. From the walkway around the head of the column the plan of the operation became apparent. The ’lighters were taking up stations in a huge disc centred on Desolation Road.

“Wow, there must be thousands of them,” said Kaan, revising his brother’s earlier estimates. Still the airships passed over their heads. The ’lighters flew over Desolation Road for a further half hour before their formation was complete. The sky was black with them, black shot through with golden liveried lightnings, a storm of industry about to descend upon Desolation Road. As far as the boys’ desert-sharp eyes could see, the aircraft were waiting: The dark presence of the ’lighters scared them. They had known the Bethlehem Ares Corporation was powerful, but powerful enough to turn the sky black, that was awesome.

Then it was as if a magic word had been spoken.

All at once, everywhere, the cargo hatches of the dirigibles opened and clouds of orange smoke poured out.

“Gas!” the brothers shrieked in imagined alarm, but the orange smoke did not drift like gas would but hung in rippling curtains around Desolation Road. The orange smoke hung for a few seconds, then settled to the ground with uncharacteristic speed.

“That’s clever,” said Rael Jr., “They’re using their fans to make a downdraft.”

“I want to go home,” said the boy with the future planned.

“Shhh. This is interesting.” Within a minute of the cargo doors’ opening the cloud had precipitated out to lie in a thick orange-on-red scum over the Great Desert.

“I want to go home, I’m scared,” repeated the boy who wanted to be rich and famous. Rael Jr. peered at the dunes and the high, dry plateau, but all there was to be seen were the ’lighters peeling away from formation one by one.

“I’ve seen enough. We can go now.”

At home Pa was in ebullient good humour.

“Come and look at this,” he said, and took his sons into his maize field. “What do you make of that?” It reminded Rael Jr. most of the copper sulphate crystal he had grown in school but this was dull black, rusty and about half a metre in length. It was also growing out of the middle of the maize field, a thing no copper sulphate crystal ever did. Said Limaal Mandella with a note of pride in his voice, “I think I might dig it up as a souvenir.”

“What is it?”

“Haven’t you been listening to the radio? It’s an iron ferrotrope crystal! Boy, we’re living smack bang in the middle of the world’s biggest bacteriologically active zone!” They could not understand why their father sounded so pleased. “If you get the binoculars and go down to the edge of the bluffs, there are these things growing out of the sand as far as you can see! Crystal ferrotropes! It’s the way the Bethlehem Ares Corporation’s getting all the iron out of the sand, by bacteria, tiny little living organisms that eat the useless rust in the sand and shit out those things you see there. Clever? Brilliant! A real first for Desolation Road. Never been one anywhere else. We’re the first!”