Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Under the leadership of the chamberlain and chief engineer, whose names were Plymouth Glyde and Spirit Dynamo, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption departed Desolation Road to pursue the still unresolved issue of machine rights. They steamed out of Desolation Road in the opposite direction to that from which they had come so many years before, because to go that way would have led them to a yawning hole in the desert, a crater of green glass where Adam Black’s aged tokamaks had exploded under the shriek of superaccelerated sub-quarkal beams from heaven and dispersed the atoms of man, machine and mortification into the beautiful sunset.

On dusty evenings when the summer lightning brought ephemeral life to the cracked neon tubes of the closed-up hotels and diners, Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das would sit on the porch to drink beer and remember.

“Hey, remember Persis Tatterdemalion,” Rajandra Das would say.

“She was a fine lady,” Mr. Jericho would reply, watching the lightning crackle along the horizon. “A fine fine lady,” and they would call to mind the colourful thread of history she had woven into the tale of Desolation Road until it reached an end with her flying off into the sunset after being lauded saviour of the town with her two sons on either wing in the cargo ’lighters bought at crash-out prices from the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The money from the sale of the Bar/Hotel had enabled her to hire two additional pilots: Callan and Venn Lefteremides, war scarred but intact after the attack on Desolation Road.

“Wonder what she’s up to these days?” Rajandra Das would say, and Mr. Jericho would reply, “Flying still. Last thing I heard she had set up the Flying Circus over Transpolaris way, New Glasgow, I think, and she was making it pretty big.”

Then Rajandra Das would say, “Wonder what Umberto and Louie are doing?”

After the final battle, while the ROTECH time-security teams were tooth-combing Desolation Road for whatever it was that had so rudely shattered their contemplative peace, Persis Tatterdemalion had made it clear to the Gallacelli brothers that she had not returned for them but to gather her sons to her and sell the Bar/Hotel. The brothers’ one-and-only love for her had never been reciprocated. It was possible for three men to love the same ideal woman, but not for that one woman to love three men. So they packed all the years into cardboard suitcases along with their underpants, their documents, their cash boxes and Umberto’s collection of pornographic photo graphs. In the absence of trains (the Company was being tardy about repairing the gap in the line seventy kilometres due west due to disputes over the danger money payable on account of the radiation) an overland truck convoy took Umberto and Louie on to Meridian, where Umberto had established a real-estate business, selling plots of land in the Ecclesiastes Mountains and Louie leased an office from which to practice the business of lawyering, some years later obtaining a famous acquittal in the case of the Butcher of Llandridnodd Wells.

“The old place was never the same after the war,” Rajandra Das would always say. This was a conversation he and Mr. Jericho had held so many times that it had passed through the meaningless mumbles of prayers and responses into renewed meaningfulness. “When the folks went, the place just died.”

First the pilgrims and the Holy Children, then the gentlemen of the media. Next, the hoteliers, hostel keepers and restaurateurs who had sheltered, fed and watered them. Then, blown away in a day and a night, the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, blown away in a hurricane of tumbling profit margins and drawn knives up in the lofty troposphere of the executive levels as the scandal of the robot duplicates was gradually unearthed, like buried excrement. All its labour units, its managers and section overseers, all were dispersed like so much red dust across the face of the planet. Finally, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption, after the Battle of the Prophets blew a ten-megaton hole in the Meridian-Pandemonium mainline. And last of all, jean-Michel Gastineau, the Most Sarcastic Man in the World, sarcasm forever blunted, went home to his woods and glens in haunted Chryse.

“And what did it all achieve?” Rajandra Das would finally ask. By timehonoured tradition Mr. Jericho refrained from reply though he perhaps knew better then anyone else left in Desolation Road. “Nothing,” Rajandra Das would self-answer. “I tell you, all that praying and marching and striking, all that fighting and bloodshed and days and nights of fear, what did it get them? Nothing. Nothing at all. Waste of time, energy, lives.”

Mr. Jericho did not speak of words like “principles” or “absolutes” when Rajandra Das vilified Concordat’s failure to win a true victory over Bethlehem Ares Steel, for he was no longer sure he believed in absolutes or principles. To him the collapse of the company and thus of Desolation Road was of little consequence so long as the sun kept shining, the crops kept growing, and the occasional rains kept falling from heaven. His belief in Desolation Road was more selfish than Rajandra Das’s. He liked to think it was also more realistic. He remembered the first day it had ever rained. Fifteen years had gone past since then. Time passed by so soon. There was an irrational fear wandering around inside him that Desolation Road might vanish entirely from existence and he would not notice the difference. The people had gone, the shops had closed, the banks transferred their credit back to the big cities of the Grand Valley, the lawyers, hairdressers, mechanics, counsellors, doctors, had left the same day the railroad was repaired; all that remained were the farms and the solar panels and the creaking wind-pumps and the empty empty streets. These days the trains called only once a week, if even that. Everything was as it had been at the beginning. History had stopped for Desolation Road and Desolation Road was thankful for it.

One day as the two men sat in their leather chairs watching the desert dust whip along the street, Rajandra Das said, “You know, I suppose I mustn’t have been the marriageable type.”

Mr. Jericho did not know what he meant.

“I always thought one of those Pentecost sisters would lay ahold of me, but they never did. Funny thing. I always reckoned they would. Well, now they’re away God knows where, and here I am, without a wife, without a farm, with only a token half-share in the porch I’m sitting on. Haven’t even got my charm over machines, that got took back; what I am is a bum again. Maybe that’s what I always was, that’s why they never married me.”

“You thinking of leaving?” asked Mr. Jericho. He had known Rajandra Das long enough to read his heart like a railroad timetable.

“There’s nothing holding me here, least of all this place. You see, I always wanted to see Wisdom, those sparklin’ towers beside the Syrtic Sea.”

“Should have asked Miss Quinsana to take you back with her.”

Rajandra Das spat at the moonring.

“She wouldn’t give me a wipe of her ass now and she ain’t worth one of mine. No, if I go, I want to go on my own. I’ve got time enough to learn to be a bum again and I’m old enough to enjoy that time. No future to worry about.”

Mr. Jericho looked into the heavens. The stars seemed close enough to touch that night.

“Maybe I should go with you,” he mused. “I always said I was just passing through.” But he stayed and Rajandra Das found himself running up on the blindside of a slow early-morning ore train. As he swung onto the wagon-plate and scrambled up the ladder onto the top of the car, he felt the years fall away. This was what he had meant to do all his life. He was the Bum Eternal, the archetype of the Travelling Man. He had just taken a long wait between trains.