Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

He saw armed and armoured security police bundling protestors, slogans, banners, placards and shouts into a black and gold armoured van of a kind he had never seen before. Two black and gold guards burst out of the social shaking their heads. They piled into the back of the van and it drove away. In the direction of Rael Mandella Jr.’s house.

He had sworn that he would never return to sleep under his parents’ roof while he still had a job and independence, but that night he revoked the vow, slipped under the wire, and slept in the Mandella household.

The six o’clock Company news bulletin next morning carried a sombre tale. The previous night a number of Shareholders had taken themselves on a drinking spree (’doing the ring’ in popular parlance) and, utterly inebriated, had wandered too close to the desert bluffs and had fallen to their deaths. The newsreader concluded her salutary tale with a warning about the evils of drinking and a reminder that the True Shareholder permitted nothing to impair his effectiveness for the Company. She did not read names or numbers. Rael Jr. did not need to hear them. He was remembering the spiritual malaise of his childhood days, and as he remembered it returned to him, summoned by his remembrance; a nausea, a need, a destiny, a mystery, and he knew, as Santa Ekatrina ladled out breakfast eggs and ricecakes, that he could no longer be silent, he had a destiny, he must speak, he must vindicate. Sitting in his mother’s kitchen, the clouds parted for him and he glimpsed a future for himself both awful and dreadful. And inescapable.

“So,” said breakfast-busy Santa Ekatrina. “What now?”

“I don’t know. I’m scared… I can’t go back, they’ll arrest me too.”

“I’m not interested in anything you have or haven’t done,” said Santa Ekatrina. “Just do what is right, that’s all. Follow the compass of your heart.”

Armed with a borrowed megaphone, Rael Mandella Jr. crossed a field of turnips, ducked down into a culvert only he and his brother knew about, and splashed through the floating faeces into the heart of Steeltown. When no one was looking, he stood up on a concrete flower tub in Industrial Feudalism Gardens and prepared to speak.

The words would not come.

He was no orator. He was a simple man; he did not have the power to make words soar like eagles or strike like swords. He was a simple man. A simple man, sick in the heart, and angry. Yes… the anger, the anger would speak for him. He took the anger from his heart and placed it on his lips.

And the mothers children old folk off-shift strollers stopped and listened to his stumbling, angry sentences. He spoke about green doors and buff doors. He spoke about people and soft, peopley things that did not appear on Company reports or Statements of Account; of trust, and choice, and selfexpression, and the things which everyone needed because they were not things, material, Company-provided things, without which the people withered and died. He spoke about being a simple man and not a thing. He spoke about the terrible thing the Company did to people who wanted to be people and not things, he spoke of the black and gold police and the van he had never seen before and people taken away in the middle of a Friday night and thrown off a cliff because they wanted more than the Company was prepared to give. He spoke of neighbours and workmates taken from their homes or workplaces on the whisper of Company informers, he spoke the inarticulate speech of the heart and opened great gaping wounds in his listeners’ souls.

“What do you suggest we do?” asked a tall thin man whose slight build marked him a man of Metropolis. The by-now sizeable crowd took up the cry.

“I… don’t… know,” said Rael Mandella Jr. The spirit fled. The people wavered, taken to the edge, then abandoned. “I don’t know.” The cries rang around him what do we do what do we do what do we do, and then it came to him. He knew what to do, it was as simple, uncomplicated and clear as a summer morning. He snatched up the fallen megaphone.

“Organize!” he cried."Organize! We are not property!”

It was a beautiful day for a march.

So said the steelworkers buttoned up in their best clothes, full to the gills with breakfast pineapple and fried egg, striding out into the crisp morning sunlight.

So said the railroad men, straightening their peaked caps and examining the burnish of their brass buttons before stepping out to join the growing throng.

So said the truck drivers, all suspenders and check shirts, inspecting their worn denims for the professionally correct amount of dirt.

So said the crane drivers, so said the rolling-mill operators, so said the steel puddlers and the drag-line drivers, the furnace men and the baling men, the separator men, the washers, the grinders, the fusion-plant operators; and their wives, and their husbands, and their parents and their children: they all said as they stepped out of their buff-coloured front doors that it was a beautiful day for a march.

As they streamed toward Industrial Feudalism Gardens their feet stirred up pamphlets only minutes before bundled out of the rear seat of a small, fast propeller ‘plane to snow down upon the roofs and gardens of Steeltown. The printing of these pamphlets was coarse, the paper cheap, the language blunt and uneducated.

THERE WILL BE A MASS MEETING ON SUNDAY 15TH AUGTEMBER AT TEN MINUTES OF TEN. A PARADE WILL FORM UP OUTSIDE INDUSTRIAL FEUDALISM GARDENS ON THE CORNER OF HEARTATTACH AND 12TH AND MARCH TO THE COMPANY OFFICES TO DEMAND AN EXPLANATION OF THE DEATHS OF

(and here the crude broadsheet named the poor, silly protestors)

AND RECOGNITION OF THE RIGHTS OF EVERY SHAREHOLDER. RAEL MANDELLA, JR., WILL SPEAK.

Rael Mandella waited on the corner of Heartattack and 12th dressed in his father’s most elegant black snooker suit.

“You must look the part,” Santa Ekatrina had told him that morning. “Your father was a fine figure of a man when he took on the world, you must be no less when you do the same.”

He looked at his father’s fob watch. His five colleagues: pamphleteer, brother of martyr, disaffected junior manager, political firebrand, empathist, looked at their respective timepieces. Ten o’clock. Tick tock. Rael Mandella Jr. rocked forward and back on the heels of his father’s black snooker shoes.

What if no one showed?

What if no one were prepared to defy the Company, to defy the warning messages broadcast from the black and gold vans, the new ones more like armoured cars?

What if no one were disloyal? What if every hand was a Company hand, every heart a Company heart?

What if no one cared?

“Beautiful day for a march,” said Harper Tew, and then they heard it, the sound of a thousand buff-coloured front doors slamming, the sound of a thousand pairs of feet stepping into the morning and falling into line and the sound swelled and swelled into a gentle roar like that of a forgotten sea. The first of the marchers rounded Industrial Feudalism Gardens and Rael Mandella’s questions were answered.

“They did!” he shouted. “They cared!”

The procession formed up under the banners of its constituent trades and professions. Here truck drivers gathered under the symbol of a snarling orange truck, here puddlers and pourers carried the likeness of a glowing white ingot, here a black and gold locomotive snapped proudly in the air above the freight handlers and drivers. Those without banner or emblem gathered under regional flags, holy icons and various slogans from the humorous through the scatological to the venomous. Rael Mandella Jr. and his five deputies positioned themselves at the head of the procession. They raised a furled banner. The release was pulled and the wind streamed out the pure white ground emblazoned with a green circle. A rumble of puzzlement passed through the procession. This was not the banner of any known trade, profession, region or religion represented in Steeltown.