Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Was that what was coming out of the ’lighters?” asked Kaan. Rael Jr. kicked him to shut him up before he said anything about being under the forbidden wire in Steeltown, but his Pa’s eyes were too full of the light of technology to see anything lesser.

“Microbial spores. That’s what they were, microbial spores. But you know what’s most amazing of all? This… disease, I suppose you might call it, only affects rust, one very particular iron oxide. Won’t touch anything else; you could walk through the desert for kilometres and kilometres and kilometres and not come to any harm. Bethlehem Ares has that stuff reaching out twenty kilometres in all directions. Richest ore deposit on the whole planet I heard one of the construction men say afore he left.”

“Why is this one here?” Rael Jr. bent to examine the alien thing in the maize field.

“Must be iron deep under the soil. Some of the spores blew here and got into the rust. Tell you this, boys, Ed Gallacelli’s got them growing out of his shed roofl”

“Wow! Can I go and look?” asked Kaan.

“Sure,” said Pa. “I’ll come, too, we’ll take the binoculars and go down to the bluffs. Everyone’s down there watching the show. You coming, Rael Jr.?”

Rael Jr. did not come. He went inside and read his book about trains, and when his father and brother and mother and grandmother and grandfather came home full of descriptions of towering crystals thrusting out of the sand growing growing growing ten, twenty, fifty metres tall before their sheer weight shattered them, he pretended to be playing with the cat but he was really hating them, his father brother mother grandfather grandmother because he did not know how to hate those pilots and planners who had willed such a world-shaking change upon his universe. He did not understand why he felt this hatred, why he felt violated, emptied, soul-sick. He tried to tell his brother, his mother, even his faraway father, but they did not understand what he was trying to tell them, none of them, not even wise Eva Mandella with her wise old weaving hands. The only one in the whole of Desolation Road who would have understood Rael Jr.’s soul-deep malaise was his Aunt Taasmin, for she alone knew what it was like to be cursed with an unguessable mystic destiny.

At six minutes of six the sirens blew.

They blew like the horns of angels. They blew like summer storms through the pump gantries and over the red roof-tiles. They blew like the Trump of Doomsday, like the sky cracking, like the breath of the Panarch breathing life into lifelessness.

At six minutes of six the shout of the sirens broke the desert air and on every street every door in the new town flew open at once and out poured the people, people from all the continents of the world and beyond, from Metropolis, ever running backward in its chase to keep up with itself, people even from the impoverished people-weary Motherworld herself, all come to make the steel for the railroads and farm machines and power looms and rikshas and bridges and buildings of the young, vigorous world, pouring from their doors to make steel for the mighty Bethlehem Ares Steel: workers streaming to the manufactories, tributary joining to tributary in a river of heads, hands and hearts surging down the shadowy streets of the Steeltown. Junior executives in smart paper suits fresh that morning from the slot dispenser zipped past on electric tricycles, children dawdled to their schools and Company kindergartens, shopkeepers and commissary merchants pulled up door blinds and set the chairs out on the verandas to advertise that they were open for business.

At the shout of the sirens two hundred yellow trucks shook into life like weary dogs and rumbled out from their garages. In the crystal dunefields drag-lines-and bucket-wheelers woke from prayerful repose to feed. With a roar and a thunder twenty-four black and gold Class 88 haulers fired up their fusion tokamaks and chunk-chunked over the points onto the mainline.

At the sirens’ shout smoke puffed from a hundred stacks: puffed, blew rings, then poured into the Indian summer sky, black, white, orange, brown. Conveyors rattled into motion, furnaces ignited, white-hot carbon electrodes descended into swirling vats of molten heat, rolling mills came up to speed, and at the very heart of the complex, behind walls of concrete, sound, steel, lead and magnetism, the plasmic djinn rattled its pinch-bottle and poured magical power into the city.

At the sirens’ shout guards in black and gold uniforms with black and gold emblems on their shoulders swung wide the wire gates and the two hundred trucks burst through them and bounced through Desolation Road down the red dirt track into the ore fields.

At the sirens’ shout the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption poured from their cardboard and plastic hovels around the Basilica and streamed through the alleys of old Desolation Road in a welter of psalms and mantras to ring the Steeltown gates and scatter prayer confetti under the house-high wheels of the trucks. The guards smiled and waved, the plaidshirted drivers flashed their lights and blared their horns. The rag-clad Poor Children danced and sang for them. Prayer kites improvised from plastic refuse sacks were run up into the dawn wind and fastened to the wire fence: great was the celebration on that, the first day of the Advent of the Steel Messiah! The trucks thundered past, fifty, one hundred, two hundred. The shouting of their engines drowned out the hymns of the worshippers, the churning wheels showered them with red dust. The dawn light brightened, flooding through the factorial geometries, casting beautiful industrial shadows through the wire onto the dancing Poor Children. Floodlights switched off as the day grew stronger.

At the sirens’ shout Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli awoke and it was their tenth birthday. Ten today. Hooray hooray. The day of majority, the day of adulthood, the day of putting behind the things of boyhood: the days of play-tough nearly-nine-years-old jostling on street corners, days of corn beer and sunshine and music from the B.A.R/Hotel radio, girls to glad-eye, pockets to pick, cards to bet on, jokes to tell, boys to fight, policemen to sass, the occasional guilty sniff of burning hemp from Mr. Jericho’s garden and the Saturday night dances at the construction workers’ social, where they sometimes had the Big Bands from the Big Cities, like Buddy Mercx and Hamilton Bohannon and once the legendary King of Swing himself, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, and sometime even that new stuff they played on All Swing Radio, samba, salsa, whatever they called it. Ah, the Saturday night socials! From the moment the doors closed on Sunday morning the count was on until they opened at twenty minutes of twenty next Saturday. The dressing and the preening, the painting and the swaggering, the drinking and the vomiting, the posing and the passing and sometimes at the end of a really good night, the thrashing and heaving in the riksha lot behind the dance hall. All past now. All gone, all put away, for today the sirens shouted and the Gallacelli brothers (mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison…) were ten.

So it was that as Steeltown woke to its first morning Sevriano and Batisto’s mother called her sons to her.

“Today you are ten,” she told them. “Now you are men and must take on the responsibilities of adults. For instance, have you thought of what you might like to do with your lives?”

They had not. They had rather liked what up till then they had been doing with their lives. But they promised their mother and fathers that within five days they would know what they wanted to do with their lives. So they asked their school career advisor, they asked their friends, they asked the girls they had met at the Saturday night socials, they asked their neighbours, they asked priests, politicians, policemen and prostitutes and at the end of five days they knew what they wanted to do with their lives.