Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“Haran Mandella, as we say in Old New Cosmobad, you are much much gentleman,” she said.

“Anastasia Tyurischeva Margolis, as we say in Desolation Road, you are much much lady,” said Grandfather Haran.

The wedding was set for the following spring.

Mikal Margolis dreamed in his cave of the mineral springs of Paradise Valley. He would never find his fortune lying around in the rocks of Desola tion Road, but he did find crystals of sulphate of dilemma. With time it refined into a pure form: to find his fortune he must leave Desolation Road and his mother; to leave her would mean leaving on his own and he did not have the courage for that. Such was the essence of Mikal Margolis’s purified dilemma. The resolution of it into useful compounds, and his quest for personal anti-maternal courage was to lead him through adultery, murder and exile to the destruction of Desolation Road. But not yet.

One afternoon, shortly after the official end of the siesta, while people were still unofficially blinking, stretching and yawning out of sweaty sleep, a noise was heard in Desolation Road like none that had ever been heard before.

“Sounds like a big bee,” said the Babooshka.

“Or a swarm of bees,” said Grandfather Haran.

“Or a big swarm of big bees,” said Rajandra Das.

“Killer bees?” asked Eva Mandella.

“No such things,” said Rael Mandella.

The twins made gurgling sounds. They were toddling now, at the age of perpetually falling forwards. No door in town could be closed to them, they were intrepid, fearless adventurers. Killer bees would not have fazed them.

“More like an aircraft engine,” said Mikal Margolis.

“Single engine?” ventured Dr. Alimantando. “Single engine, one seater crop-sprayer?” Such things had been a familiar sight in Deuteronomy.

“More like twin engine,” said Mr. Jericho, straining his tuned hearing.

“Twin-engined, two seats, but not a crop-sprayer, a stunter, Yamaguchi and Jones, with two Maybach/Wurtel engines in pull-push configuration, if I’m not mistaken.”

Whatever its source, the noise grew louder and louder. Then Mr. Jericho spied a fleck of black on the face of the sun.

“There it is, look!”

With a howl like a big swarm of killer bees, the airplane dived out of the sun and thundered, over Desolation Road. Everybody ducked save Limaal and Taasmin, who followed it with their heads and fell over, unbalanced.

“What was that?”

“Look… he’s turning, he’s coming back.”

At the apex of its turn everyone caught full sight of the airplane that had buzzed them. It was a sleek, shark-shaped thing with two propellors nose and tail, angled wings, and a down raked tail. Nobody failed to notice the bright tiger stripes painted on its fuselage and the snarling, toothy grin on its nose. The airplane swooped over Desolation Road once more, barely skimming the top of the relay tower. Heads ducked again. The airplane hung at the point of its bank and afternoon sunlight blazed off polished metal. The people of Desolation Road waved. The airplane bore down upon the town again. “Look, the pilot’s waving back!”

The people waved all the more.

A third time the airplane swept over the adobe homes of Desolation Road. A third time it pulled into a tight bank.

“I do believe he’s coming down!” shouted Mr. Jericho. “He’s coming down!” Landing gear was unfolding from the wingtips, the nose and the downswept tail. The airplane made a final pass, almost at head height, and dropped toward the empty place on the far side of the railroad tracks.

“He’ll never do it!” said Dr. Alimantando, but nevertheless he ran with the rest of his people toward the great cloud of dust pluming up beyond the line. They met the airplane coming nose on toward them. The people scattered, the airplane swerved, snapped a wingwheel on a rock, and crashed onto its side, ploughing a huge slewing furrow in the dust. The good citizens of Desolation Road hastened to the aid of pilot and passenger, but the pilot was free and, sliding back the canopy, stood up and screamed, “You dumb bastards! You dumb, stupid bastards! What you want to go and do that for? Eh? She’s ruined, ruined, never fly again, all because you dumb bastards are too dumb to know to keep out of the way of airplanes! Look what you’ve done, just look!”

And the pilot burst into tears.

Her name was Persis Tatterdemalion.

She was born with wings, there was aviation-grade liquid hydrogen in her veins and wind in her wires. On her father’s side were three generations of Rockette Morgan’s Flying Circus, on her mother’s a genealogy of cropsprayers, commercial pilots, charter flyers and daredevils back to great-greatgrandmother Indhira, who reputedly piloted Praesidium SailShips while the world was being invented. Persis Tatterdemalion was born to fly. She was a great soaring, roaring bird. To her the loss of her airplane was no less a matter than the loss of a limb, or a loved one, or a life.

All her time, money, energy and love had, since the age of ten, been poured into the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar, a one-woman, onering flying circus, a chautauqua of the skies that not only thrilled gaping audiences with death-defying aerobatics and stunting, but also educated them by providing those who paid her modest fee with aerial views of their farms, close-ups of the weather and sight-seeing jaunts to places of local interest. Thus employed, she had moved eastward across the top half of the world until she reached the plains town of Wollamurra Station. “See the Great Desert,” she sang to the sheepfarmers of Woilamurra Station, “marvel at the dizzying depths of the mighty canyons, wonder at the forces of Nature that have sculpted stupendous natural arches and towering stone pillars. The whole history of the earth laid out in stone beneath you: I guarantee for one dollar fifty centavos, this is a trip you will never forget.”

For Junius Lambe, dazedly furious in the tail seat, the sales pitch was quite true. Twenty minutes out from Wollamurra Station, with not a canyon, stupendous arch or towering pillar within a hundred kilometers, Persis Tatterdemalion noticed that her fuel gauge had not moved. She tapped it. The red display indicators flickered and plummeted to the empty mark. She tapped it again. The indicators sat where they were.

“Oh, shit,” she said. She plugged in a taped commentary on the wonders of the Great Desert to keep Junius Lambe quiet and checked her charts for a close-by settlement where she could make a forced landing. She could not return to Wollamurra Station, that was obvious, but the ROTECH maps gave no comfort. She checked the radio location equipment. It indicated a leak of microwave radiation not twenty kilometres distant, of the type associated with the relays in the planetary communications net.

“Check it out, I suppose,” she said to herself, and committed herself, her airplane and her passenger to her decision.

She found a tiny settlement where no settlement should have been. There were neat squares of green, and light flashed from solar collectors and irrigation channels. She could make out the red tile roofs of houses. And there were people.

“Hold tight,” she said to Junius Lambe, for whom this was his first inkling that anything might be wrong. “We’re going in.”

With her last teardrop of fuel she had brought her beloved bird down, and then what had happened? So deep was her disgust that she refused to leave Desolation Road with Junius Lambe on the 14:14 Llangonedd-Rejoice Ares Express.

“I flew in, I’ll fly out,” she declared. “The only way I’m going out of here is on a pair of wings.”