Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

Weaving by gaslight in her loomroom, Eva Mandella saw the end of time stretched across her tapestry frame. She tied off Genevieve Tenebrae’s lifethreads and wove them back into the ground. So few threads remained.

“Where do they lead, what is their future?” she asked the hissing gas jets. They knew and she knew, for both the gas jets and she had worked upon the tapestry of time too long for them not to know the shape of it, the cut of it, and that the form of what had been woven demanded the form the unwoven must take. The end of all things was approaching; all the threads led into the red dust and beyond that she could not see, for the future was not the future of Desolation Road. She wove fearful of that future under the hissing gas lamps and all the while the thread ran down to nothing through her fingers and the rain rained down.

For three days the rain rained as no rain had ever rained before, not even when The Hand sang one hundred and fifty thousand years of rain out of the dry, mocking sky. Rael Mandella watched the rain from each of the hacienda’s windows in turn. From those windows he saw the dashing rivers of rainwater swirl away the next season’s crops and it seemed to him that he heard the laughter of the Panarch in the heavy drops: divine syllables telling him that the future was not for Desolation Road. For three days it was so, then the grey clouds curled, the sun broke through the intestinal moilings, and a great wind from the south drove the rain before it and left the world steaming and vapouring in the fifteen-minutes-of-fifteen sun. That night, cries broke the meditative desert quiet: terrible, racking cries filled with fear and anguish, the cries of a woman in labour.

“Whish whish whish, easy there, little chicken-bones, little piece-of-themoon, let it come, let it come, come on….” Santa Ekatrina pleaded and Kwai Chen Pak, little chicken bones, little piece-of-the-moon; squeezed and huffed and let out another racking cry which sent Rael Jr., fretting in the parlour with his mystical grandmother, leaping up from his chair and reaching for the door handle. Toward dawn Santa Ekatrina turned that door handle and summoned her son into the birth room.

“It’s near now, but she’s very weak, poor child. Take her hand and give her all the strength you can.”

As the sky began to lighten scarlet and gold, Kwai Chen Pak’s eyes opened wide wide wide and her mouth stretched ohahoh big enough to swallow a world and she squeezed squeezed squeezed squeezed squeezed.

“Come on come on come on come on come on,” whispered Santa Ekatrina, and Rael Jr. closed his eyes because he could not bear to see what was happening to his wife but he gripped her hand as if he would never let it go again. “Come on come on come on come on come on,” then there was a gasping cry and Rael Jr. opened his eyes to see the ugly red squawling thing in his wife’s arms and the sheet was stained red and black with vile, evil female things.

“A son,” said Santa Ekatrina, “a son.” Rael Jr. took the tiny red squirming thing from his wife and carried it out into the morning, where the sun cast giant shadows across the land. Gently, passionately, Rael Jr. carried his son through the ruined fields and laneways to the edge of the bluffs and there held the boychild tip to the sky and whispered his name to the desert.

“Haran Mandella.”

Lightning answered along the horizon. Rael Mandella Jr. looked into his son’s empty black eyes and saw the lightning crackle beyond the open pupils. Though those eyes could not yet focus on his face, it seemed to him that they saw into a greater, wider world than that bounded by the circle of the horizon. The dim rumble of the thunder disturbed Desolation Road’s weary ruins, and Rael Mandella Jr. trembled, not by dint of the rolling thunder but because he knew from the eyes that he held in his arms the long-awaited complete one who ended the curse of the Mandella generations, the child in whom mystical and rational were harmoniously reconciled.

The thunder shivered the red rocks of the sub-cellar where Eva Mandella’s thread of time wound itself onto the tapestry frame and gas jets trembled in anticipation and whispered “red dust red dust red dust.” History was closing its wolf-jaws behind Eva Mandella: she was now weaving events only minutes old into the history of Desolation Road. The birth of a son, the thunder; her fingers warped the threads with a hasty dexterity that frightened her. It was as if Desolation Road were impatient to be rid of itself. Her fingers wove through the present moment and on into the future, the end times she remembered from the tapestry Dr. Alimantando had shown her. Dust red, red dust, it was the only thread that remained, it was the only colour that would finish the tapestry and make it whole. She wrapped a long pick of dust red onto her shuttle and completed the history of Desolation Road. As the thread ran down to a nubbin end and history ended, Eva Mandella saw the gas jets shudder and felt an alien breeze stroke the backs of her hands.

Finished. The tapestry was finished. The history was complete. Desolation Road, its beginnings, its endings, were written here. She traced with her fingers the four threads that led onward, outward, through the end times into the future. One thread had been started only minutes before, its ending she could not see in the gathering gloom though she sensed with a sudden mystical shock that it led out through the rocks and stone into a place beyond her understanding.

Of the thread of her own life she could not find where it ended. She could trace it from its starting place in far New Merionedd along the silvery line to the green place within the storm; she saw the twin threads of mysticism and rationality issue from her womb, she followed herself down the years of tranquility and tragedy until she reached the place where the thread joined the annihilating dust, and there it was lost. It did not end, it was not snapped or cut, it was simply lost. Yet hints of its colour spread throughout the tapestry. Perplexed, Eva Mandella placed her finger on the point of junction and a strange thrill ran through her. She felt light-headed, girlish, lost in innocence. She felt herself floating, attenuating, dissolving, all her hopes, dreams, fears, loves and loathings turned to glittering dust and fell into the tapestry. Eva Mandella’s body grew insubstantial and transparent. She passed body and soul into the latticework of threads that was the history of Desolation Road. For her part in the history was to record, and through recording become that history. The time-tapestry sparkled with the silvery love of Eva Mandella, then a gust of the alien wind reached into the room and snuffed out the hissing gas jets.

The wind was rising, gusting and buffeting maliciously, a forewarning of the brown dust-rollers combing in across the Great Desert. The dust storm broke across the wasteland in a hurricane of flying needles and a fury of lightning. Drawn to the earth by the Crystal Ferrotropes, the lightning bolts crashed and blasted them to black wind-whipped powder. The Great Dust Storm was coming, growing greater, stronger, more hungry with every metre it advanced across the dune fields. Rael Mandella Jr. pressed his son to his breast and ran before it. Needles of dust whipped at him as he squeezed through his door into his home.

“Quickly, quickly, the Big Dust is coming,” he cried. Son and mother wrapped themselves in headcloths and mittens and braved the searing sandscour to stable the animals and shutter the windows. The Big Dust crashed upon Desolation Road in a screaming and howling of demons. In an instant the air was opaque, abrasive, deadly. With a shrill of windblown sand every centimetre of proud paintwork was stripped, sanded, blasted down to bare wood and metal. Trees were planed, then whittled to matchsticks, the metal gantries of the wind-pumps shined to silver brightness. The black lozenges of the solar collectors were pitted and cracked; before the afternoon was done their black glass faces lay ground to wind-rounded pebbles.