Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

For a year and a day he roamed the world’s interesting places, sending back picture postcards of himself standing by the Chasm of Lyx or in the floating flower market of Llangonedd or squatting outside the legendary Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar on Belladonna’s Sorrowful Street. Kaan Mandella pinned the postcards up around the back-bar mirror for all citizens to see and wonder upon. Then one Thursday Rajandra Das succumbed to the urge that he had successfully resisted for the year and the day and went to Wisdom, the most beautiful city in the world. He had resisted the temptation for so long because he feared he might be disappointed, but as he walked the shining boulevards and gazed on mighty bridges and towers and took his siesta (agreeable habits dying hard) in a cafe beneath the shade of the bo trees lining Nevsky Prospect and dined in the waterside seafood restaurants and rode a tram to the top of each of the nineteen hills, it was all as he had imagined, glorious in every detail. He wrote card after card of glowing praise to Mr. Jericho.

“This is the most wonderful place in the world,” he wrote in his final card from Wisdom, “but I can’t stay here forever. There’s other places to see and there’s always Wisdom to come back to. It’s not going anywhere. If I’m passing through, I’ll pay you a call.”

It was Rajandra Das’s final card from anywhere. Riding back to Llangonedd and wondering where he might go that would satisfy him after the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition, a tickle of dust prickled his nose. A sudden fit of sneezing seized him and he sneezed out his last little drop of power over machinery. He lost his grip on the bogie, fell with a small cry under the wheels of the Wisdom-Llangonedd Syrtis Express, and died.

On the day that Mr. Jericho received his final postcard, a train arrived in Desolation Road. Since the town died, this was a sufficiently unusual event for the entire citizenry to turn out and welcome it. Most trains thundered through at 400 km/hr., leaving dust and flying pebbles as souvenirs. Even more unusual than the train’s stopping; two passengers stepped off. Apart from traveling salesmen and gullible tourists whom Kaan Mandella lured to the Bar/Hotel with the promise of trips to the geological curiosities of the Crystal Land, the rule was that people always got on trains at Desolation Road. These passengers did not look like salesmen or tourists. They wore kneelength silk jackets of the kind that had recently become fashionable in the Big Cities. They wore high-heeled hand-tooled leather gaucho boots and upon their heads were wide-brimmed round cardinal hats. They looked like killers.

One side-of-eye glimpse was enough to convince Mr. Jericho. He slipped away from the gawking crowd and went to his bedroom. In the bottom drawer of his tallboy was the manbonehandled needle-pistol wrapped in the red paisley scarf. Mr. Jericho knew who the visitors were. They were assassins of the Exalted Families, come to kill him.

At last.

Their names were AlphaJohn and BetaJohn. Since being decanted from Paternoster Damien’s Genesis-bottle, they had spent their lives searching the world for Paternoster Jericho. For the first five years of their lives (passed in the two-in-one mutuality unique to twin clones) they had searched the cities and the towns. They had found nothing. Then for a year and a half they went back over the territory that had been covered by their predecessors before they had been in-vitroed. Killer clones bred for their gift of pair-empathy, they knew themselves infallible and scorned the skill of those predecessors. But that search, too, found nothing. Then for another year and a half they studied old records and data nets for some thread they might follow; some scent, some spoor, some fingerprint that might lead them to Paternoster Jericho. They were dogged, they were determined, they were zealous. They could not be other. But the scent was cold, the spoor rained away, the fingerprints smudged. So they called up an Exalted Families’ computer, and with its help compiled a list of places where Paternoster Jericho was not or had not been and by a process of elimination reduced the planet’s teeming millions in all its towns, cities and metropolises down to fifteen locations. Last on that list was Desolation Road. It was the last place in the world they thought of looking for him.

Therefore AlphaJohn and BetaJohn were confident when they asked Rael Mandella Jr. if there was a man named Jericho in town and when in all innocence he answered yes and told them where they might find him, they felt something close to joy that the investment made in creating them had paid its due dividend. AlphaJohn and BetaJohn counted twelve canals down and five canals in and found Mr. Jericho pollinating a stand of hybrid maize with a feather.

—Should have kept on passing through, he said to himself, and went forward to greet his assassins. Polite bows, names, pleasantries about the weather were exchanged.

“From Damien?” asked Mr. Jericho after a time. Cartwheel-brimmed hats tipped simultaneously.

“World searched,” said AlphaJohn.

“Last place,” said BetaJohn. They rested their hands above the pockets Mr. Jericho knew must hold their needle-pistols.

“Took your time,” said Mr. Jericho, rifling his Exalted Ancestors for something that might save him from the indignity of dying in a maize field. “Tell me, you boys good?” The Johns nodded. “The best?” Again the slow tilt of the wide-brimmed hats. “How do you know?” Hats halted in mid-tilt. Little black currant eyes looked out from the shade. “All you’ve ever done is hunt people. If you’re good, you’ve got to prove it. To me. Against me.” He let them cogitate on that for a few seconds, then whipped them again. “I reckon this old man could take you both. What do you say?” By their reactions to his words Mr. Jericho reckoned they must be clones, perhaps even pseudosimultaneous clones, for their eyes sparkled pseudosimultaneously at the challenge.

“Accepted,” said AlphaJohn.

“Designate,” said BetaJohn.

Mr. Jericho suppressed a little grin of triumph. He had them, and knowing that, he knew he could beat them. A true professional would have stitched him crotch to forehead immediately after wishing him “good morning.” These clone twins were vain and if they possessed the fault of vanity there would be other faults to exploit.

“Outside the bar,” said Mr. Jericho. “Whole town free-fire zone.” Their telegraphic mode of speaking was infectious. “No civilians, no hostages, no poisons, formal rules. Needle-pistols only. Take it you boys have them? Good. Be there… high noon.” No, that was siesta time. Siesta time was traditionally inviolable. Nothing must be permitted to disturb the dying town’s rest in the heat heat heat of the noontime. “Sorry, old custom, have to be fifteen o’clock.” When the second advent of the Pantochrist was heralded by the hosts of the Five Heavens, even that would have to wait until after siesta time in Desolation Road.

Mr. Jericho stood in the fifteen o’clock dust beneath the timestormed bar dock and remembered kneeling. Kneeling in the Hall of Ten Thousand Candles (no misnomer, he had been set to count them once as punishment for a boyhood misdemeanour: 10,027) trying to ascribe meaning to Paternoster Augustine’s riddlesome koans. Unvastened as he was then, bereft of the souls of his ancestors, Paternoster Augustine’s quandaries had seemed pointless; now he treasured their little wisdoms.

“Use your senses,” Paternoster Augustine had told him and told him again. “Use all your senses. Consider the rabbit.” Ah, but he had been down his burrow for five years now and he was old, and though he had of late taken up the Damantine Disciplines to ward off tightening sinews and grating bones, he was not the man he had once been. Ah, but then he would have drubbed these two vain striplings in a trice. Then. Now it was his trained senses against identity-telepathy. Witch-magic. He spat into the wind three times and crossed fingers and toes.