Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

“How far do you think it reaches?” asked Rajandra Das. A powerful wind had sprung up, driving them inward toward Steeltown, where the heart of the madness was spinning faster faster faster, reaching into the Panplasmic Omniverse.

“Local as yet,” replied Mr. Jericho. The steel wind whipped at him. “But the longer the time winder runs, the greater the zone of interference.”

“Suppose I shouldn’t say this, but my feet don’t want to go on. I’m terrified.”

Mr. Jericho looked on the spinning curtain of lightning-streaked smoke that shrouded Steeltown.

“So am I,” he said. As Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das raced for the time wall, reality shuddered and shook. A whale swam into Desolation Road station. An Archangelsk urinated in a cabbage patch. A ghostly figure, tall as a tree, stood astride the community solar plant and ripped searing solos from his red guitar. Lightning flew from his fingertips and gathered into tiny balls which blew like tumbleweeds around the two men’s feet. Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das plunged into the whirlwind of smoke.

“What the…” A battle of statues was being fought here: slugs and snails engaging each other with tachyon beams slow as drunkards’ punches.

“Time distortion,” explained Mr. Jericho. “Let’s go.”

“You mean through?”

“They can’t see us. Watch.” Mr. Jericho danced across the battle ground, ducking under sluggardly tachyon beams, dodging sessile field-inducer bursts. “Come on.” Rajandra Das crept through the Einsteinian battlefield. He tried to imagine how his passage seemed to the time-frozen combatants: was he a whirlwind, a flash of light, a blur of multiple images, like Captain Quick in the old comics his mother had used to buy him? He followed Mr. Jericho down a corridor between two steel converters into an unexpected freefall zone. Rajandra Das’s momentum took him straight up in an elegant reverse dive.

Mr. Jericho was shouting something, something about his fieldinducers? He hadn’t even thought about the device he was wearing. Defence canopy up? He didn’t know how to do it. He fiddled with his wrist-control and was rewarded with a prickle of static electricity across his face in the same instant as a sudden smashing blow sent him spinning through space. As he ricocheted off the side of Number 16 smokestack, he caught a glimpse of Mr. Jericho being bounced from wall to wall like a ball in a pachinko parlour. The central fusion tokamak was clearly well defended.

A second field-inducer blast sent Mr. Jericho zigzagging from steel furnace to ground to conveyor to converter. Only his looted defence canopy saved him from pulverizing death.

—Too old for this, he told his Exalted Ancestors; They reminded him of duty and honour, and courage. Well they might, free as they were from the tyranny of time-bound flesh.-They can bounce us around like rubber balls all day if they want to. He saw Rajandra Das loom up before him; the two men smashed together and rebounded. As Mr. Jericho cartwheeled through the Anarchic Zone, his Exalted Ancestors reminded him that every second the world was oscillating farther from consensus reality.

In mid-bounce Rajandra Das realized that he had passed from the stage of being too terrified to be scared into the sublime state of hysteric comedy. What could be more ridiculous than being bounced around a steel works in the middle of a time storm by a gang of terrorists defending a fusion tokamak powering an out-of-control time machine? He knew that if he laughed at the joke, he would not be able to stop.

A crackle came over his ear-thimble.

“Hello, boys. Having fun?”

Mr. Jericho heard the voice on his earphone and answered.

“Persis! Darling! Jim Jericho. Request you launch an immediate attack on the forces entrenched around the Steeltown fusion plant.”

“Check.”

“Persis, I suggest you beware of severe reality displacements.”

“You don’t need to tell me.”

“And Persis . .

“Yes?”

“If all else fails, and only if all else fails, if we can’t get through, destroy the tokamak.”

“There’ll be . .

“A fusion explosion. Yes.”

“Check. Here… we… g……

A rally of shots from the tokamak positions volleyed Jim Jericho like a handball as the Yamaguchi and Jones stunter howled in over the smokestacks. Wing-mounted tachyon blasters kicked out, there was an explosion that made Mr. Jericho fear that maybe she had destroyed the tokamak, then Persis Tatterdemalion was climbing into the sky away from winged figures pursuing her with scimitars. Mr. Jericho dropped his canopy and caught hold of a stanchion. Rajandra Das did likewise, and as he drifted past, Mr. Jericho caught hold of his collar.

Not so much as a scrap of flesh or cloth remained of the defenders. The generator hall was empty of everything save the song of the tokamak.

“Spooky things,” said Rajandra Das, laying rude hands on the controls.

“I thought you knew about these things.”

“Locomotive tokamaks. This is different.”

“Now you tell me.”

“Well, Mr. Damantine-disciplines, you shut it down.”

“Wouldn’t have the first idea.”

Distant explosions rent the air. Metal creaked and groaned and the iron tread of a fighting machine shook the generator hall. Rajandra Das’s fingers moved over the control lamps, then hesitated.

“What happens when the power goes off?”

“I’m not certain.”

“Not certain? Not certain?” Rajandra Das’s exclamation rang from the steel walls.

“Theoretically, reality should snap back to concensus reality.”

“Theoretically.”

“Theoretically.”

“Hell of a time for theoretically.” Rajandra Das’s fingers danced over the controls. Nothing happened. Again the fingers played. Nothing happened. A third time Rajandra Das played the control board like a chapel harmonium and a third time nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t do it! It’s been too long. I’ve lost the touch.”

“Let me see.”

Rajandra Das waved Mr. Jericho away from the control lights with the muzzle of his field-inducer. He whispered some consignatory mumbles and emptied a full power burst into the control board. The two men staggered back from the explosion, blinded by sparks and flying circuitry. The fusion tokamak’s usual serene hum rose to a shriek, a howl, a roar of outrage. Rajandra Das fell on his knees for divine forgiveness for a wastrel’s life when the all-destroying fusion scream was silenced. And in the same instant the men felt themselves, the power hall, Steeltown, the whole world turn inside out and inside out again. With a thunderclap of inrushing reality the time winder imploded and drew Arnie Tenebrae’s five-level-deep time-control centre and all its staff into neverwhenness.

The timewall exploded outward. Free-fallers dropped-out of the air; whales, archangels and guitar players vanished, and the boiling rain blew away on the glowing wind. Every clock stopped in the time-burst and stayed stopped forever, despite the attempts of subsequent generations many kilometres removed from the day of the time storm to restart them.

In the aftermath of the timestorm Mr. Jericho emerged from the hall of the dead tokamak to find that theoretically, he had only been partly correct, theoretically. A full quarter of Steeltown had been sheared away as if by a knife of marvellous sharpness and in place of the pipes and girders red rock stretched to the horizon. The encirclement of Crystal Ferrotropes was broken by incongruous expanses of virgin dunes, green oases of banana trees, and a pockmarking of fused glass craters. As Rajandra Das joined his friend and the two men returned to Desolation Road, they passed through a fantastical landscape of the bizarre and curious. Streets ended in empty desert or were buried in huge self dunes; locomotives stood in the middle of market gardens, houses in lakes. One track of the railroad line ended abruptly in a small but luxuriant patch of jungle, and the whole of the new development beyond the railroad was returned to bare High Plain.