Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Upon a balcony on the glass-fronted Company offices Johnny Stalin’s robot double and three members of the board of directors watched in increasing stupefaction.

“What is the meaning of this?” asked Fat Director.

“I was under the impression that these untoward disturbances had ended,” said Thin Director.

“Indeed, if this Concordat nonsense has been crushed, as you led us to believe, what were those green banners doing there?” asked Middling Muscular Director.

“Impolitic though it is for such a march to be taking place within the project,” said the North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Manager/Director’s robot double, “it would have been vastly more embarrassing to have taken action against it with the film crews of nine continents watching. I suggest we just swallow the indignity, gentlemen.”

“Harumph,” said Fat Director.

“Intolerable,” said Thin Director.

“Quite uneconomic,” said Middling Muscular Director.

“Mikal Margolis will take care of things,” said Robot Stalin. “Concordat will not rise again.”

The speeches began.

First Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli spoke of the murder of their father by the lasers of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. Then Limaal Mandella spoke of the murder of his father by the missiles of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. Taasmin Mandella nodded for Rael Mandell Jr. to come forward and speak. He looked at the sea of faces and felt a great weariness. He had seen enough platforms, podiums and lecterns for a lifetime. He sighed and stepped forward for the people to see.

From his position on the catwalk of Number 5 converter Mikal Margolis took full benefit of the short step into the public eye to focus his telescopic sight.

One bullet. All it needed. One bullet jacketed in and silenced by Bethlehem Ares Steel. Then there would be no more quandaries.

Limaal Mandella watched his son step forward and the people’s adulation warmed him. He had done well by his sons. They were all his father would have wished grandsons to be. Then he saw a glitter of light in the pipework overhanging Corporation Plaza. He had lived too many years in the wickedest place in the world not to know what it was.

He brought his son down in a crunching tackle as his matchroom-attuned ears heard the silenced shot clear and sharp as the clarion of an Archangelsk above the voice of the masses. Something huge and black exploded out of his back, something he had not suspected had laid hidden there. He felt surprise, anger, pain, tasted brass money in his mouth and said, “Good God, I’m hit.” He said it in such a matter-of-fact manner that he was still being surprised by it when the darkness came over his shoulder and took him away with it.

The crowd swayed and screamed. Two thousand index fingers pointed to where the guilty one was scrambling down a flight of ladders that led into the heart of the industrial labyrinth. Rael Mandella Jr. was huddled over his father’s body; Taasmin Mandella pulverized by the death of her twin. At the last instant of his life the mystic link between Limaal and his sister had been restored and she had tasted the blood in his mouth and felt the pain and the fear and the blackness swallow him. Though she still lived, she had died with her brother.

Then the Grey Lady rose before the people, and, removing her mask, they saw that her face was dark and terrible so that they cried out in fear.

“This is between my family and Mikal Margolis!” she cried out, breaking her silence. She raised her holy left hand and thunder rocked Corporation Plaza. At her summoning every loose piece of machinery in Steeltown leaped into the air: pipes, welding torches, garden rakes, radios, electro-trikes, pumps, voltmeters, even the Bryghte Chylde of Chemowa left its pole and flew to her call. The junk formed a wheeling flock above Corporation Plaza. It drew closer, closer still, and the terrified masses saw metal running and fusing and reforming into two steel angels, grim and vengeful, swooping above their heads. One sported airfoils and jet engines, the other twin sets of rotor blades.

“Find him!” cried Taasmin Mandella, and the angels howled off along the steel canyons of Steeltown to comply. Taasmin Mandella’s halo flashed again and it seemed to the watching eyes that her cumbersome dress melted and changed shape, clinging close to her thin form, and that as she leaped from the platform to give chase herself, her mask flew to her hand and transmuted into a potent weapon.

Pandemonium reigned in Corporation Plaza. Leaderless, the demonstration surged and panicked. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a rabble. Its fury and terror had defeated it. Armed security men appeared on rooftops and walkways and drew a hail of stones. They readied their weapons but did not open fire. Rael Mandella Jr. made to stand and calm the boiling crowd but JeanMichel Gastineau pushed past him.

“They’ll shoot you like a dog,” he said. “This is my moment. This is what I was commanded to do.” He took a deep breath and released all his mutant sarcasm in one searing satire.

Though not directed at them, the people nevertheless felt the edge of his tongue. Some screamed, some wept, some fainted, some vomited, some bled from guilty wounds the sarcasm had opened up. He swept the beam of his satire across the security positions and there were moans and cries as the armed men realized what they were, what they had done. Some could not bear the shame and threw themselves off their high watchplaces. Others turned their own weapons on themselves or their comrades; others broke down into hysterical weeping at the words of the Amazing Scorn. Some shrieked, some gibbered, some vomited as if by vomiting they could spew out all the self-hate the little man on the steps made them feel, some voided their bowels and their bladders, some fled screaming from Steeltown into the desert and were never seen again, some collapsed in blood and broken bones as the sarcasm ripped them open and shattered their limbs.

Having humbled the armed might of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, the Amazing Scorn turned his tongue toward the high balcony, where the directors of the Company hid themselves away. In an instant Fat Director, Thin Director and Middling Muscular Director were reduced to shuddering blobs of remorse.

“Oh stop stop stop,” they pleaded, choking on their own bile and vomit, but the satire went on and on and on, slashing and cutting at every dark and shameful deed they had ever done. The satire ripped clothes to shreds, slit bodies open in long deep bleeding gashes, and the mighty Directors screamed and howled but the words cut cut cut at them, cut and slashed until there was nothing but dead, slashed meat and blubber on the horribly expensive carpet.

Johnny Stalin’s robot proxy watched the quivering heaps of meat with contempt mingled with puzzlement. He could not understand what had happened save that the Directors had been weak and found wanting in some incomprehensible way. He was not weak, he was not wanting, for being a robot, he was immune to sarcasm. It was intolerable that the Directors of the Company could be so weak when he and his kind were so strong. He put out a neutrino-pulse call to his machine comrades to call them together at their earliest convenience for an emergency meeting to save the Company from itself.

On the steps jean-Michel Gastineau fell silent. His mutant sarcasm had humbled the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The people rose from their crouches, shaken, stunned, uncomprehending. He looked at the children dressed in virginal white, the poor, idiotic Dumbletonians, the shaken artisans and shopkeepers, the reporters and cameramen whose lenses had been cracked and microphones shattered when he released his full mutant power; he looked at the bums and the goondahs and the poor foolish people, and he felt pity.