Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Strike strike strike!” they chanted, pressing counterwedges through the police lines and holding them open with shock-staves and riot guns. “Strike strike strike!” The crowd broke through the encirclement and fled down the open streets crying, “Strike strike strike.” The security guards sniped at their heels with flechette shot.

Hours later the guards were still searching Corporation Plaza for Rael Mandella Jr., poking between the crushed placards and the snapped banners and the discarded helmets, checking the bleeding and the wounded and yes, even the dead, for dead there were, and they looked into the faces, of the keeners who knelt disconsolate by the sides of sons, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers, daughters, lovers to see if they wore the face of the traitor Rael Mandella Jr., the fool who had brought this down upon innocent people. They expected to find him wounded, hoped to find him dead, but he had escaped in the black burnoose of an old woman from New Glasgow, dead of contagious panic. Clutched to his chest were the Six Just Demands and the furled green and white banner of Concordat.

At six minutes of six the sirens blew. They blew every morning at six minutes of six, but that was not what was different about this morning. Up and down the radiating streets buff-colored doors burst open and poured labour units into the dawn. But that was not really any different from any other morning. What was different was that for every door that opened five stayed shut. Where on any other day a river of steelworkers had poured into the canyon streets of Steeltown, a trickle passed under the archway proclaiming the Three Economic Ideals of the Company: Profit, Empire, Industry. Where on any other day two hundred trucks would have bounced arrogantly through the narrow laneways of Desolation Road, today less than forty made the clangorous trip dodging children, houses and llamas. Where a hundred draglines had once trawled, only ten worked, where fifty bucketwheelers had scooped the scabs from the skin of the Great Desert there were today only five and it was the same from the locomotive sheds to the hell-mouth converters to the ’lighters shut up in their underground hangars.

All because it was strike day.

Strike day! Strike day! Strike day!

Rael Mandella Jr. called his strike committee to order around his mother’s kitchen table. There were congratulations, brief eulogies and declarations of resolution. Then Rael Jr. asked for reports.

“Strike pay’s good for three months,” said Mavda Arondello. “Plus pledges of support from bodies as diverse as the Spoonmakers’ Guild of Llangonedd and the Little Sisters of Tharsis.”

“Nothing much to report on the picketing front,” said B. J. Amritraj. “Company security is still itchy on the trigger. We have to keep a low profile.”

“Intelligence reports that the Company’s already putting out tenders for scab labour, it might be possible to nip this one in the bud by picketing in the major towns and cities, B.J., smuggle out some agitators.” Ari Osnan, chief of intelligence, folded his fat arms and sat back.

“Production down sixty percent,” said Harper Tew. “Within three days all current steel stock will be expended and they’ll have to shut down at least three furnaces. In a week there won’t be a pin’s worth of steel coming out of Steeltown.”

“Action Group, nothing to report.”

Rael Mandella Jr. stared long and hard at Winston Karamatzov.

“What do you mean, nothing to report?”

“Nothing to report: yet. If the scabs come, maybe then I’ll have something to report.”

“Explain please.” Winston Karamatzov just shrugged and Rael Mandella Jr. closed the meeting feeling faintly troubled in his heart.

Next morning all electricity, gas and water was cut off to the homes of striking steelworkers.

“The Company strikes back,” said Rael Mandella Jr. to his strike committee. Santa Ekatrina flitted about her kitchen, happy and singing, baking little ricecakes.

“You’re not going to let them get away with that,” she twittered.

The local Concordat cadres within Steeltown responded magnificently.

“We shall steal power from the Company to cook our meals, we shall run water from Desolation Road, by bucket-chain if we must, and we shall go to bed at dusk and rise at dawn as our grandfathers did,” they said. Midnight engineers ran plastic pipes under the wire and pumped water from the buried ocean out of street-corner stand-pipes into buckets. Armed security guards passed warily by, unwilling to provoke any incident. Santa Ekatrina turned the Mandella hacienda into a soup kitchen and persuaded Eva away from her tapestry history of Desolation Road to stir vast kettles of stew and rice.

“You’ve been weaving history for long enough; now you can actually be in it,” she told her mother-in-law. A ghostly film of white rice-starch settled over the room and quite surprised Limaal Mandella on one of his increasingly rare returns from his hermitage at the top of Dr. Alimantando’s house.

“What is going on?”

“A strike is going on,” sang Santa Ekatrina, never so happy as when ladling out bowls of lentil curry to a long line of strikers. The curry-eating steelworkers pointed at Limaal Mandella and muttered in recognition.

“Child of grace, not even my own house is sacred!” he exclaimed, and shut himself up in Dr. Alimantando’s house to delve deeper into the mysteries of time and temporality.

Rael Jr. and his strike committee watched the first of the food consignments arrive at Desolation Road. On the far side of the railroad tracks Gallaceili/Mandella Land Developments had marked off several hectares with orange plastic tape preparatory to construction of a big new housing complex for the town’s projected population mushroom. The orange grid squares made a perfect landing field for the three chartered relief ’lighters to set down and offload thirty tons of assorted comestibles.

“Sign here,” said the pilot, proffering a bill of receipt and a pencil to Rael Mandella Jr. The supplies were passed by human chain to the storehouse of the new Mandella and Das Hot Snacks and Savouries Emporium. The crates and boxes bore the stencilled names of their donors: the Little Sisters of Tharsis, Great Southern Railroads, the Argyre Separatists, the Friends of the Earth, the Poor Madeleines.

“What does this do to the strike fund?” asked Rael Jr., counting off crates of cabbages, lentils, soap and tea.

“Not having to expend so much on food, and with the successful introduction of the ration coupon scheme against cash payments, I’d say five months.”

When the last sack was inside Rajandra Das and Kaan Mandella’s warehouse, the doors were double-locked and a guard posted. The Company was not beyond acts of petty arson.

“Production figures?” asked Rael Jr. It was growing increasingly difficult to maintain order in strike committee meetings now that his mother had turned the family home into a cantina.

“As I estimated.” Harper Tew smiled with self-satisfaction. Before the strike he had been a subassistant production manager; somehow the Company had failed to purge the humanity out of him. “Steel production is down to a trickle, less than eight percent of total capacity. I estimate the Company should be approaching economic make-or-break point in about ten days.”

At five o’clock in the morning of the sixteenth day of the strike Mr. E. T. Dharamjitsingh, a striking train engineer, his wife, Misa and eight children were woken from hungry sleep by the unmistakable sound of rifle butts breaking down the front door. Four armed security men burst into the bedroom, MRCW muzzle first.