Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Make it work for me, Dhav,” she said, then went to watch the progress of the construction. She liked to walk along the trenches and revetments and play heroes and demons in her head.

Dhavram Mantones was back first thing next morning.

“It can’t be done,” he declared, “The best I can achieve is a localized temporal stability field.”

“If Dr. Alimantando can do it, you can do it, Dhav,” said Arnie Tenebrae, glancing out of the window of her Steeltown headquarters as if to emphasize the fleetingness of time. “If you need help, get Mr. Jericho, Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli. They worked on the original time winder. We should be able to persuade them.”

The instrument of persuasion was a device called Charley Horse. It was nothing more than a triangular billet of metal, apex upward, suspended a metre and a half above the floor. It was equally simple in operation. The person to be persuaded was stripped, hands bound to a beam above the head to encourage secure seating, and placed astride the metal billet. A few hours of Charley Horse was enough to persuade the most recalcitrant of riders. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das did not even require a minute’s persuasion.

“We don’t know anything more than you do.”

“What about Ed Gallacelli?”

“He’s dead.”

“Might he have told his dear wife?”

“Might have, but she’s left. Flown away.”

“Then who might know?”

“Limaal Mandella.”

“Don’t be clever. He’s dead too.”

“Maybe Rael, then. Limaal passed a lot of Dr. Alimantando’s secrets to Rael Jr.”

“We know. We didn’t find anything in the notebooks. Or in the house.”

“Maybe you should ask him personally. Limaal might have told him something not in the books.”

“Indeed he might.”

To Rael Mandella Jr., virtual recluse since the murder of his father and the disappearance of his aunt and his Pyrrhic victory over the Company, came the surprise invitation for a ride on Charley Horse. He was not appreciative of the treat; after only four hours he was removed in a near comatose state by which time Arnie Tenebrae was convinced anyway that he knew nothing of the inner arcana of Dr. Alimantando’s chronokinetic arts. She did obtain one piece of information from him that earned him his reprieve: that all Dr. Alimantando’s secrets, including the mystic Temporal Inversion that made chromodynamism possible, were somewhere on the walls of his house. Dhavram Mantones was dispatched to take a closer look at the frescoes on pain of a permanent visit to Charley Horse. Rael Mandella Jr. was cut down and taken back to his family home. A pity Arnie Tenebrae would quite have enjoyed leaving him there to see if he could beat the current thirty-hour record for horseback riding.

Rael Mandella Jr. was taken delirious into his grandmother’s kitchen, where she and his own mother tended him and put him to bed. There he hallucinated that he had once had a father made from maple and a mother made from flowers and bean cans. He lay thus for three days and a neighbour’s daughter, a shy girl called Kwai Chen Pak who had assisted Santa Ekatrina in the soup kitchen days, brought him flowers and pretty stones and from the scanty rations made him candy kangaroos and raisin-bread men. At the end of this time he awoke to learn two important things. The first was that he desperately loved Kwai Chen Pak. The second was that in the night the host of the Parliamentarians had settled around Desolation Road in readiness for the last battle.

“Must be well on eight thousand of them,” said Mr. Jericho, straining his disciplined eyesight to make sense of the shifting heatshimmer out among the crystalloids. Sevriano Gallacelli shifted his shovel and pretended to be working while the guard was watching.

“So, what are those things then?” He nodded toward the enormous threelegged machines that had been stalking arrogantly around the crystal landscape vaporizing chunks of ferrotrope with vicious blue-white beams.

“I don’t rightly know,” said Mr. Jericho. “They’re something like the scout walkers ROTECH used to use years back. Tell you one thing, when the action starts, it’s going to get mighty hot around here. Those things are toting tachyon beams.”

The two men swung their shovels and pretended to dig while they watched the ungainly contraptions march around the desert without the slightest attempt at concealment, and they formed the mutual and inescapable conclusion that the end was nigh for Desolation Road.

In forward observation post 5 Arnie Tenebrae was reaching similar conclusions.

“Evaluation?” she asked her aide, Sub-colonel Lennard Hecke.

“Fighting machines, ideally suited to the terrain. I hate to say such things, ma’am, but they could step right over our mine defences.”

“That’s what I thought. Weaponry?”

“Ma’am, I hate to say this too, but…”

“But those tachyon beams could timeslip past our field-inducer defences and punch holes right through our canopies.” She left Lennard to inspect the invincible fighting machines and went in search of Dhavram Mantones. She wished to ascertain the state of her own invincible fighting machine. As she climbed the bluffs she passed the bodies of the two SRBC newsmen who had tried to fly a flag of surrender. Spreadeagled upside down on wooden frames, their bodies were beginning to turn to leather after three days in the sun and smelled abominably. Surrender was not just impermissible, it was inconceivable.

In forward command station Zebra, Marya Quinsana observed the mummifying bodies through field glasses. It was not the barbarism of the execution that shocked her; it was the familiarity of many of the stooped figures at work upon the terraces and fortification. Even the town of Desolation Road itself, that part of it sandwiched between the ugly concrete carbuncle of the basilica and the towering pipeworks of the factory, was unchanged, a messy conglomerate of wind-pumps, flashing solar lozenges, and red tile roofs. She wondered what Morton was doing. She had not seen him at work upon the bluffs, but there were other constructions under progress within the town. She had not thought of him in twelve years. She thought, too, of Mikal Margolis; poor stupid boy who let the wind blow him where it would. She wondered what had become of him after she had left him at the soba bar in Ishiwara Junction.

There would be time enough for reverie afterward. The Whole Earth Army defences looked strong but not so strong, she thought, as to defy her tachyon-beaming fighting machines. She had spent a lot of political capital in obtaining the specifications for ROTECH’s scout walkers from the wise ones of China Mountain and she was confident that the investment would be well spent. Her ground forces outnumbered the opposition three or four to one, her tachyonic weapons systems gave her the edge over the Whole Earth Army field-inducers… It was tempting to toy with notions of victory and ambition. She needed a clear head and a calm constitution. As she left command post Zebra she became aware of a faraway insect drone.

The same sound infringed upon the lunatic perceptions of Arnie Tenebrae while she sat at her desk toying with string. Her mind latched onto the insect drone and forgot to listen to

Dhavram Mantone’s report on the progress in deciphering Dr. Alimantando’s hieroglyphics. Drone, buzz, lazzzy beee in the bonnet of winter-she remembered flower-filled mornings splashing in the irrigation canals, days filled with sun and bee buzz.

“Pardon?”

“We’ve something you might like to take a look at.”