Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

In the night the trees drew close around the campfire and again drained the exiles dry of dreams.

All the next morning they travelled through a landscape shattered by war. A great battle had been fought here. Trees were blasted into white splinters, the earth was torn and ripped into craters and foxholes. The land was heavy with fresh memories of atrocity: a burned-out one-man airbike, no sign of the one man, a framed photograph of a handsome woman with “All my love, Jeanelle” written in the bottom left corner, a cleared swathe of forest where a two-man fighter had crashed, ploughing up a furrow of muck and greenery. Rael Mandella Jr. picked up the photograph of the handsome woman and placed it in his breast pocket. He felt he needed a friend.

Yet even in the middle of destruction the Ladywood was still strong. As if trying to exorcise evil remembrances, ropes of woodbine and clematis were reaching to cover the derelict war machines, and fresh bracken had sprung up to conceal the fallen beneath a green coiled shroud. Batisto Gallacelli found an operable military radio beside a dead radio operator. The boy was no more than nine years old. The three men ate their lunch to the accompaniment of the Jimmy Wong show. The sun shone down, the late dew pinpricked the grass, and an enormous peace flowed out of the east across the deserted battlefield.

Rael Mandella Jr. left the photograph of the handsome woman with the dead radio operator. He looked as if he needed a friend the more.

Early in the afternoon they passed from the battle-stained lands into the secret hertwoods of Chryse. Here stupendous redwoods rose one hundred two hundred three hundred metres into the sky, a city of soft red towers and wide needle-strewn boulevards. The three travellers should have been joyful so close to the heartwood and the legendary Tree of World’s Beginning, so far from the war of the Powers, but a brooding sense of horror mounted minute upon minute, step upon step. Among the grandeur of the heartwoods it felt like a poison, a poison that had been drawn out of the air into the soil and the trees and communicated through the dream-draining nights into the exiles. They began to tread cautiously, eyes and ears alert, mistrustful as cats. They could not have said why. The pulse of an aircraft engine passing far to the east had them running shrieking for shelter amid the root buttresses of the redwoods. Drop by drop their humanity was being drained from them, drop by drop the forest was filling them up with its spirit, its horrifying, poisoned, blasted, inhuman spirit. They broke into a trot, a run, they did not know why they ran, or where, there was no pursuing enemy save the darkness of their hearts inside them. They ran from the fear, they ran from the horror, plunging heedless through bramble and thorn, stream and dyke, running running running to be free from the horror, but they could not escape it for they were the horror.

Plunging through an enclosing ring of stupendous redwoods, they entered a circular clearing at the centre of which stood the mightiest tree of all, the Father Tree, head and shoulders taller than its strongest children. Branches swayed and swished in the wind cloud-high above them, beams of stained-glass light reached down through needles and lit the forest floor. The three men stood beneath the Tree of World’s Beginning and looked up into the moving branches with unalloyed awe and joy. The holiness of that place had touched their buried humanity and released them from the horror. The branches moved and passed blessing over them.

A figure in white stood among the roots of the tree, face lifted to the sun, a figure turning slowly, ecstatically, illuminated in a column of light. In its holy revolving the figure glimpsed the three spell-caught men.

“Oh, hello,” said the figure in white, stepping out of the light to greet them, no longer a mystical angel but a middle-aged man in soiled samite. “What the hell kept you?”

His name was jean-Michel Gastineau, “also known as the Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee, one-time Most Sarcastic Man in the World,” and he loved to talk. The three exiles were content for him to do so as he busied himself with frying eggs and mushrooms in his small lean-to amid the root buttresses.

“Used to be something of a celebrity, years back, when the world was younger, was in a travelling show; you know, ‘Wonders of Earth and Heaven,’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ all that; there was me (The Amazing Scorn), Leopold Lenz, the dwarf sword-swallower, one metre ten tall, given to swallowing one metre fifty swords; Tanqueray Bob the werewolf, a couple of others whose names I can’t remember, the usual stuff anyway. Used to demonstrate how my sarcasm could kill cockroaches and peel paint off walls, pretty trivial stuff, till one day this poet fellow, big big guy, big as a beer tun, with a red beard, he comes and says he is the Greatest Satirist the World’s Ever Known, and I says, no way son, I was born with the gift of sarcasm; you ever hear of some folks are born with the power of command in their voices so no one can resist them? Well, I had like the power of sarcasm and satire; why, did you know that at age two, the age kids say things to make each other blub, when I said things they made little cuts on them? Thought not. Anyway; there was to be this big duel of sarcasm in a fine and fancy hotel… half the district turned out and well, to cut a long story short, which has always been my problem, I got a teeny bit carried away. Soon as I started on this poet guy these big long rips opened up all over his skin and the blood came pouring out, I shoulda stopped then, I shoulda, but I couldn’t, the sarcasm had hold of me, I kept going and everyone in the audience starts bleeding and crying and tearing their hair out and the big guy, well, he just had one big coronary and dropped dead, right there. Well, that was the end of that, but what I didn’t know was that this guy was some kind of local hero, a pretty big man in more than the obvious sense, and shoot, they came after me with guns and dogs and hawks and hunting pumas and, well, I was pretty shook up, I just ran and ran and ended up here.

“I said to myself, jean-Michel Gastineau, you’re too dangerous to live among folks, if that tongue of yours ever gets out of control again folks are going to die, so I vowed there would be no more Amazing Scorn, Mutant Master of Scintillating Sarcasm and Rapid Repartee; I would see out my days as a lonely hermit, harming no one, shunning the company of my fellow humans. You see, the trees here they can’t feel sarcasm. Their perceptions is too deep to be hurt by mere words. Anyhows, like youse I was drawn here to the heartwood, the Tree of World’s Beginning. Those days the Ladywood was a friendly place, there was birds and wallabies and butterflies and all, not like now, not since the soldiers come: who’da thought it, pitched battles in Chryse Wood? Not Jean-Michel Gastineau: tell you this, since theyse come the place has got dark. You know what I mean, youse seen it closer than I; the forest has this kind of like… mind, all those roots and branches intertwining and all that, connections and connectivity, so I was told, each tree is like an element in the network; that big scrap over Bellweather way last month ripped up a lot of higher cognitive levels: things is back to the deep dreamtime again. Anyhows, I’m getting off the subject.”

The little man served mushroom omelette and mate.

“Make the tea myself from herbs and roots. Gets you going like a goat, it does. Anyhows… now, you eat, I’ll talk… . I was brought here to the Tree of World’s Beginning and the Blessed Lady came to me… word of honour, St. Catherine herself, beautiful she was, shimmering white and her face… like I don’t know what it was. Better than an angel. Anyhows, she says to me, ‘Jean-Michel Gastineau, I’ve a job for you. You mind my forest for me and I’ll forgive you what happened in that town. The forest needs someone to be looking after it, mind it, tend it, care for it, love it even. You’ll have the power of knowing everything that happens in Chryse, (that’s how I knew you guys were coming; shame about that ’lighter) and you’ll have command of all the Genesis zones, the hatcheries; that’s where the angels are born from, under the roots of the trees; and the machines too… there are still a lot of them left about from the manforming days; until such a time as you’re called to a higher mission, which you will be someday.’ So, here jean-Michel Gastineau is and here jean-Michel Gastineau stays. It’s a good life if you like fresh air and the like; I haven’t breathed a word of sarcasm in five years. Imagine that. But these days, well, the place is going dark. I’ll explain that now.”