Ian McDonald - Desolation Road

The dust storm blew on into the night. Kwai Chen Pak, lying on her bed of birth, baby Haran hunting blindly for the nipple, listened to the wind shrieking round the roof tiles and cried out in fear, for suddenly it seemed to her that every demon from Desolation Road’s demon-haunted past was howling for her flesh. Santa Ekatrina and Rael Jr. did not hear the cries of irrational panic. They searched by candlelight the wind-gusty rooms and cellars for Eva, who had vanished as the storm broke upon the Mandella house. Rael Jr. feared her dead and blasted to polished bone but Santa Ekatrina had glimpsed the glowing tapestry and a strange and terrible fear gripped her. She felt as if the wind had swept into the house and shivered her bones to sand. She suspected, but never said, for she was not sure herself that she believed Eva Mandella had passed into the tapestry and thus returned to the beginning of the history of Desolation Road.

For five days the dust storm scourged Desolation Road. The wind capered around the abandoned hotels and luncheonettes, it swept over the cracked eggdome of the Basilica of the Total Mortification, it eddied around the humming steel chimneys of Steeltown, and played upon the intestinal pipeworks like a harmonium. It heaped dust upon the skeletons, tumbled walls, filled fields with dunes, wore homes to sand. It split open the stump of Dr. Alimantando’s rock house and scattered books, tools, rugs, kitchen implements, bathroom fittings, eschatometers, thanatoscopes, to the end of the earth. The wind blew and blew and blew and stone by stone, brick by brick, grain by grain, speck by speck, it carried Desolation Road away with it. It tried to carry away the Mandella household; it gibbered and clawed, it ripped tiles from the roof and threw them into the air, it shrieked fear and fury at the refugees who daily and nightly dreaded the gust that would whirl away their roof and walls and expose them soft and naked to the knives of the storm.

For five days it was so, then on the sixth morning Rael Mandella Jr. heard a noise over the screaming wind. He heard the sound of a locomotive whistle. It was not very loud, or very different from the whistling of the wind, but once he had heard it he could not mistake it again.

“A train, a train!” he cried, bustling mother, wife, son into a flurry of cardboard-suitcase packing. “We can escape!” The wind had abated sufficiently for them to wrap themselves in headcloths and heavy burnooses and brave the dust storm. Rael Jr. released the animals from the stables. Llamas, goats, pigs, chickens, galloped into the dust and vanished. He wondered what might become of them. Then blindly, dust-bound, the Mandella family groped along the suffocated streets of the disintegrated town to the railroad track. There they squatted and listened to the singing of the sand on the polished rails.

Desolation Road was no more. The wind had blown everything away. The houses were gone, the streets were gone, the fields were gone, the hotels and inns were gone, God and Mammon were gone; everything was as it had been in the beginning: bare rock and steel. The refugees waited and waited and waited. Twice Rael Jr. thought he heard the whistle of a locomotive, twice he leaped to his feet in anticipation, twice he was disappointed. The wind slackened, the orange opacity grew less impenetrable. Baby Haran Mandella warbled and moaned. Kwai Chen Pak pressed him close to her and suckled him beneath the safety of her windproof robes.

“Listen!” cried Rael Jr., mad-eyed from five days of dust-devils. “There! Did you hear it? I heard it. Listen!” Santa Ekatrina and Kwai Chen Pak listened as bidden and this time, yes, they did hear it, a locomotive whistle, far off down the line. Then a light glowed through the blowing dust and there it was again, the call of the whistle and the last train in history ground into Desolation Road and took the refugees aboard.

As the train pulled away, Rael Mandella Jr. took his tiny son into his arms and kissed him. The Great Dust passed over toward the north and the sun came out from behind the clouds of dust and shone down on the desolation.

Desolation Road was gone. There was no need for it now. It had served its purpose and could return thankfully to the dust; its time over, its name forgotten.

But its name could not be forgotten, for the things that had happened there in the twenty-three years it bore that name were too wonderful to be forgotten and in the Pelnam’s Park district of Meridian its last child grew into manhood: kind, respected, and beloved by all. One summer’s day that man’s father called his son into the bee-busy garden and said to him, “Son, in three weeks you will be ten years old and a man: what will you do with your life then?”

And the son said, “Father, I am going to write a book about all the things you have told me, all the wonders and miracles, all the joys and sadnesses, the victories and the failures.”

“And how do you intend to write this book? There is more to the story than I have told you.”

“I know,” said the son, “for I’ve seen it all written in this.” He showed his father a strange, glowing tapestry, of intricate, brilliant craftmanship, marvelous and magical.

“How did you come by this?” the father asked his son. And the son laughed and said, “Father, do you believe in little green men?”

So he wrote that book, the son, and it was called Desolation Road : the story of a little town in the middle of the Great Desert of the North West Quartersphere of the planet Mars, and this is the end of it.

Ian McDonald is the author of many science fiction novels, including Desolation Road ; King of Morning , Queen of Day ; Out on Blue Six ; Chaga ; Kirinya ; River of Gods ; and Brasyl . He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the BSFA Award, been nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award, and has several nominations for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Washington Post called him “one of the best SF novelists of our time.” He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Visit Ian McDonald online at ianmcdonald.livejournal.com.

“This is the kind of novel I long to find yet seldom do-extraordinary and more than that!”

“ Desolation Road is wild, original, exuberant, profound, moving, magical, hilarious, fantastic, fabulous…. It is also good science fiction.”

“Most exciting and promising debut since Ray Bradbury’s…. Here’s a first novel brimming with colourful writing, poetic imagination, and outrageous events recounted in a persuasively matter-of-fact manner… hugely readable.”

“…destined to be a classic… perhaps a work of true genius. Desolation Road will drift along timelessly, undoubtedly outliving its creator-though may he live long and prosper-and occupying its own special place by the dust-blown literary highways travelled by countless generations of future readers.”

“A spectacular first novel. A lively wit leavens the dense complexity of this epic tale. From the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known to a mysteriously transported Glenn Miller (father of the Martian swing craze) and the technoevangelist Inspiration Cadillac, the characters are madly memorable, the most extraordinary mix of human and not-quite human since Cordwainer Smith’s tales of Norstrilia.”