Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Oscillating across the boundary between pain and consciousness, Sublieutenant Shannon Ysangani saw the behemoth fall, brought low by its own weapon. She felt a great, agonizing, flesh-tearing fit of giggling boil up inside her.

Buried five levels deep beneath Steeltown in her time-transport centre, Arnie Tenebrae, too, saw the behemoth fall. To her it was a more colourful fragment from the mosaic of war. Her wall of television monitors presented her with war in all its many colours, and Arnie Tenebrae savoured each, eyes flicking from monitor to monitor to monitor; quick, brief encounters with war, jealous of losing so much as an instant of the War Between the Powers.

The Vastator turned her attention from the televised massacre to the time winder in the middle of the floor.

“How long now?”

“Two minutes. We’re hooking up the field generators to the fusion tokamak now.”

A cry came from the observers monitoring the monitors.

“Ground troops! They’re sending in ground troops!”

Arnie Tenebrae spun her attention back to the picture wall. A thin white skirmish line was slipping effortlessly through the trenchways toward Steeltown. The fighting machines’ artillary provided withering cover. She thumbed up the magnification and saw familiar bulky packs on white Parliamentarian shoulders.

“Clever clever clever Marya Quinsana,” she whispered, so that no one would hear and think her insane. “You’ve the measure of me pretty close, but not quite neat enough.” Weapons-fire reached her ears like the sound of childhood pop guns as skirmishers fell upon defenders. A pop-gun war, a liedown-for-twenty-seconds-you’re-dead war, and when it was all over everyone would get up and go home for their dinners. Field-inducers hammered at fieldinducers until the tachyon equipment on board the fighting machines spoke and declared game over for today and always.

“Ready to go!” shouted Dhavram Mantones.

“Then we’ll do it, shall we?” said Arnie Tenebrae, Vastator. She shouldered her battle pack. Dhavram Mantones threw the handswitch that diverted all the power from the Steeltown tokamak into the time winder. The eons opened up before Arnie Tenebrae like a mouth, and she threw herself into the chasm in a cascade of afterimages.

Then reality ended.

The first that Mr. Jericho and the refugees in the Bar/Hotel knew of the end of reality was when they found themselves bobbing against the ceiling. Though separated at the time of the air strike, they had all come together by means of the tunnels and caves that honeycombed the rocks beneath Desolation Road: no sooner had worried greetings been exchanged than they found tables, cups, carpets, bottles and chairs floating around their ears. Kaan Mandella chased after the beer-crate radio transmitter in a kind of unsteady breast-stroke beneath the roof beams. Rajandra Das anchored himself to the pelmet and peered upside down out of the window. Attackers, defenders, life-careless camera teams, llamas, pigs and pie dogs were floating around the eaves of the houses. Halfway down the street, gravity seemed to have reversed completely, houses, trees, animals, soldiers, earth and rocks were falling into the sky. In the other direction three empty hotels and the Excelsior Curry House were submerged in a huge red sand dune. A dark shadow fell across the free-fall street; something big as a barn, blocky and dirty orange, was flying over Desolation Road.

“What is going on?”

Mr. Jericho’s Exalted Ancestors had been arguing deep in his hypothalamus as he bobbed against the candle brackets. Their final conclusion was appalling.

“They must have got the time winder to work.”

“It wasn’t like this when Dr. A used it.”

Half the room could not understand what Rajandra Das and Mr. Jericho were talking about.

“Alimantando kept his Temporal Inversion Formula a secret: Tenebrae’s engineers must have guessed wrong. Instead of creating fluidity through time, they’ve created a zone of temporal fluidity here, now, and reality is breaking down. The laws of space-time are bending, and I think pieces of alternative universes are being superimposed onto this one.”

“What does that mean?” asked Santa Ekatrina Mandella, who had been married to the laws of space-time for eleven years.

“It means the end of consensus causal reality.” The first earth tremors shook the Bar/Hotel. Freed from gravity, the very rocks beneath the street were shifting and stirring. “Unless.”

“Unless?” asked Sevriano and Batisto Gallacelli simultaneously. The Exalted Ancestors had already answered this question, too, and their answer was no less appalling than their first one.

“Unless we can shut down the power supply to the time winder.”

“You mean close down the Steeltown tokamak?”

“I do. And I need you with me, Rajandra Das. I need your charm over machines.”

“You’ll never, do it, old man,” said Kaan Mandella. “Let me.”

Mr. Jericho already had the door open. A glowing wind filled with ghostly faces swept along the street, driving all unanchored free-fallers out into the desert.

“I’m afraid only I can do it. Can you keep a secret? Ever heard of the Damantine Disciplines?”

“Only the Exalted Families…” started Kaan Mandella, but Mr. Jericho said “precisely” and dived out into the street. Rajandra Das plunged after him after a moment’s hesitation. “Try Persis on the radio again,” he called in parting. “We may need her to run interference for us.” He did not add, “if she’s still alive.”

At the junction of Bread Alley gravity was restored but a downpour of boiling rain drove Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das into shelter. Under a window-ledge they found a parboiled guerrilla. Mr. Jericho stripped him of his battle armour and dressed Rajandra Das in helmet, power pack and weapons pack.

“You might need it,” Mr. Jericho said. It did not take Damantine-disciplined hearing to make out the booms of small-arms fire close by. The two men dashed through the tailing drops of scalding rain into Mosman’s Court, where the hands of the municipal dock were spinning around at a rate that compressed hours into seconds. Aging visibly as they ran, refugees from the accelerated timezone fled up the street into a jungle of green lianas and vines which had snagged around the smoking skeletons of two fighting machines. Mr. Jericho detoured around the relativistic zone, passed through a region of inexplicable night into Alimantando Street. The shocking concussion of a close-by field-inducer charge knocked him and Rajandra Das off their feet. Rajandra Das followed Mr. Jericho to cover as a volley of shots from the roof of the mayoral office shattered the facades of the houses on Alimantando Street. One second later a time quake ripped away the mayoral office into anywhen and replaced it with a quarter hectare of green pasture, white picket fence, and three and a half black and white cows.

“Child of Grace!” whispered Rajandra Das. Mr. Jericho found a dead Parliamentarian boy-soldier in the doorway of a burned-out house and looted him of his clean white combat gear. Purple lightning flickered fitfully at one end of the street.

The two men scrambled through a world fallen into insanity. Here gravity had shifted ninety degrees to change streets into cliff faces, there bubbles of weightlessness bounced down the lanes waiting to trap the foolhardy who ventured out from their cellars; here half a house ran backward, there garden plants grew to shady trees in seconds. Green figures like long, thin men were seen capering on rooftops and drew the fire of those soldiers capable of fighting. Phantoms of children yet unborn danced hand in hand under trees that were yet seeds.