Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Faces began to fill the streets. Dumbfounded by the alchemy that had engulfed Desolation Road, they searched for time-lost houses and families. They did not know, nor could they, that when the reality-warping power of the time winder was shut off, all those phantom geographies of Desolation Roads that might have been were fixed, fused, and made permanent the moment Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das closed the door to the Panplasmic Omniverse.

The break was sealed; the battle was over. The survivors assessed degrees of victory. A full third of Marya Quinsana’s Parliamentary Legion had been decreated when the timestorm struck, returned to whatever tasks, occupations, or lives they might have led had not the beat of the recruiter’s drum seduced them. Those who had not been swept into otherwhenness had sustained only light casualties. The defending Whole Earth Army had been largely annihilated. Seventy percent casualties, her entire command structure beheaded in whatever had taken place within the heavily guarded redoubt under Steeltown: Shannon Ysangani surrendered her remnant army to General Emiliano Murphy and cried tears of joyous laughter as her comrades were taken to the desert-edge detention camps.

“We lost!” she laughed, tears streaming down her face. “We lost! We lost!”

The Whole Earth Army was no more.

Two hours before nightfall the Yamaguchi and Jones twin-prop stunter GF666Z came in for landing beyond the railroad tracks. The last survivor of Tatterdemalion’s Flying Circus was carried shoulder-high through the streets by the friends who loved her most, and Angel Red was brought in triumph and humility to the Bar/Hotel, where all hearts and hands saluted her.

That same evening Marya Quinsana made a torchlight triumph through Desolation Road. The Steeltown Ring was lined with fighting machines for her, the citizens cheered for her but she was unsatisfied. She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials. She did not like to think about where all her decreated boy-soldiers had gone.

After the service of thanksgiving in the Basilica of the Grey Lady she demanded that Arnie Tenebrae be brought to her. She wanted very much to vent her dissatisfaction in mutilation and torment, but the subsequent search of Desolation Road and Steeltown did not turn up so much as her corpse. So after five days of triumph and victory before the cameras of the nine continents, Marya Quinsana returned to the hills of Wisdom to take the First Ministerial ring of office from the finger of the Honourable Vangelis Karolaitis only to find that that fine old gentleman was neither fine, gentlemanly, nor ultimately honourable, for he had enough accounts of his security minister’s atrocities and outrages in quashing the Whole Earth Army Tactical Group to be very very sure that she would never take the ring from him while he lived. As for Little Arnie Tenebrae, Deathbird, Vastator, she was never heard of again, though there was no shortage of explanations, rumours and idle gossip which in time became the fabric of folk story, which in time became legend, which in time became myth, and so Little Arnie Tenebrae’s name came to be written in the sky which was only what she always ever wanted.

Inspiration Cadillac awoke in a steel shriek from an iron dream. Memory and awareness defied him-what were these bright lights, this high roof, these green-robed servants bowing awestruck from his presence? He sat up to require an explanation and was answered with cries of alarm and religious dread.

“Master, master, oh, it’s true, it’s true! Oh, master, bless me.”

A young postulant with a half-metal face fell to the floor in blatant adoration. Inspiration Cadillac stepped from the bed (an operating table?), caught sight of himself reflected in the white wall tiles, and remembered everything.

—Total mortification! Man made steel… He looked down at his body, his hands, his limbs. Metal; smooth, hard metal untainted by corrupt flesh, unstained by red blood, all pure, holy metal. He threw up his steel arms in thanksgiving.

“Total mortification! Successful total mortification!” Glory-alleluiaing, the technical staff prostrated themselves. Inspiration Cadillac beheld his own glory in the wall tiles and remembered…

…the voice of the Great Engineer, calling him to prophethood… army poised against army and the Poor Children, between them helpless, leaderless… bright lights, humming, luminous machines, cold cold tiles, flashing steel, darkness.

“How long has it been?” he demanded of a female cybernetician.

“Eight days, holy one. The world has gone mad, holy father: the dome of the basilica has been destroyed, the sanctuary defiled by the fleshlies in their thanksgiving for victory; a war has been fought, lost and won in these very streets, hundreds have died and… and forgive me, but time and space itself went mad. Everything is changed: madness has run loose in the universe.”

“Peace, little one. It is then time that order and harmony were restored,” said Inspiration Cadillac. In a flicker of concentration a black halo appeared around his right wrist. The technicians gasped and alleluiaed. “What the Grey Lady was, I now am, and more. She was base flesh, I am sanctified steel. I am the chosen of the Great Engineer, the Future Man; in my circuits burns the power… And he opened his right hand and darkness flowed over all the technicians save those two who had spoken with Inspiration Cadillac, and it transformed them into black smoking somethings so hideous and obscene they defied the imagination. Inspiration Cadillac laughed a metal laugh. He had the addiction for power, and each successive abuse must be richer, deeper fuller. Before his cowering acolytes he transformed himself, sprouting wings, rotor blades, buzz saws, tachyon blasters, radio antennae, portable table-harmoniums, wheels, tracks, jets, rockets, washing machines in a blur of alchemy.

“Come with me,” he commanded the cyberneticist and the technician who had hailed him master. “I am tired of transformation.” To the cyberneticist he said, “You shall be my chamberlain,” to the technician, “You my chief engineer. Don’t fear me… you must love me. I command it. Now, I wish to receive the adulation of my people.”

“Ah,” said the chamberlain.

“Eh,” said the chief technician.

“Where are the faithful?” demanded Inspiration Cadillac.

“Alas, they were not faithful as we were faithful,” said the chamberlain.

“They believed you’d died when the airplane crashed into the dome and it collapsed,” said the chief engineer.

“You were, of course, safe underground,” said the chamberlain.

“But they weren’t to know that,” said the chief engineer.

“So they, ah, turned their devotions elsewhere.”

“They’ve found something else to worship.”

“It’s, ah, a train.”

“It came out of Steeltown after the timestorm and offered to take all the Poor Children to safety.”

“You see the parallel, holy father: the prophecies you circulated about the Steel Messiah coming out of Steeltown to save the faithful from war and devastation.”

“They, eh, went with it.”

“What?” roared Inspiration Cadillac. Growing rotor blades, he leaped into the air.

“Go west,” added the chamberlain.

From the air Inspiration Cadillac could see how some calamity worse than mere war had struck Faith City. The dome of the Basilica of the Grey Lady (now, he noted, the Basilica of the Total Mortification) lay in shards and slabs on the tiled floor of the audience chamber. The entire east wing together with a dozen hectares of Faith City had been swept away and replaced with a similar area of planted and irrigated maize. The Grey Lady’s private quarters were a fused cracked crater in the rock, and beside it stood the tangled remains of some kind of clumsy three-legged device.