Desolation Road (12 page)

"Behold, the forces that shaped our world and made it a place fit for man to live. A thousand years ago certain wise men, holy sages all, I do not doubt, foresaw what you have just seen, that the Motherworld could not hold all the people who would come to be. Other worlds must be found, but all the worlds within reach were dead and lifeless, even this one. Yes, our earth was as dead and lifeless as that white skull of a world you saw but minutes ago. Yet these wise men knew that it could be made to bear life. Approaching the various governments of the nations of the Motherworld, they founded ROTECH, the Remote Orbital Terraforming and Environmental Control Headquarters, and armed with all that age's science and technology, laboured for seven hundred long years to make this earth friendly to man."

An enormous asymmetrical object, studded with tiny shining windows and bearing the holy name in letters which, full-scale, must have been two hundred metres tall, slid across the room. Tiny midge-things buzzed about it in furious industry. Limaal Mandella bounced up and down in his chair in excitement at the shapes in the sky.

"Be still," his father hissed. He looked at his mother for someone with whom to share all this excitement, but Eva Mandella had the look of nonunderstanding drawn on her face. His sister was wide-eyed and expressionless as an icon of a saint.

"What you are seeing are a few of the orbital devices by which ROTECH maintains our world's precarious environmental balance. Some are weather control machines, using infrared lasers to heat areas of the planet's surface to generate pressure differentials and thus winds. Others are magnetic supercores, magnetos, generating the intense field that protects our world from the bombardment of charged solar particles and cosmic rays. Others still are vanas, the orbital mirrors that lighten the dark nights in the absence of moons, some are orphs, which work directly upon the world, even now seeding the barren places of the earth with life, some are shunters, which move cometary ice from the cloud we saw earlier, out at the edge of the solar system, and bring it to our world so that hydrostatic equilibrium may be maintained, and some are partacs, dreadful weapons of puissant destruction with which ROTECH can defend this fragile world against attack from ... beyond. Once there were many more but most have moved on with ROTECH to greater challenges; the taming of the hell-world we call Aphrodite but is better given its old name, Lucifer; the greening of the Motherworld's airless moon. Now look at this ..."

It seemed to the children that they swooped like a great spacebird around the shoulder of the world and saw far beyond the cascading moonring something tremendous approaching the world, something like a butterfly kilometres and kilometres and kilometres across, something so huge and complex in its design that it defied imagining. It turned ponderously so that the sunlight caught it, and the twins and everyone around them gasped as three million square kilometres of sail were suddenly illuminated.

"Sails wide enough to wrap the world in," whispered Adam Black, and then let his voice rise to a dramatic pitch as he declaimed: "A SailShip of the Praesidium, arriving at the ROTECH orbital docking facilities. A year and a day ago she set sail from Metropolis with one-and-three-quarter million colonists sleeping in stasis in the cargo-pods and now their journey is over. They have arrived at our world. They will find it a strange, topsy-turvy, confusing place, much as our fathers' fathers' fathers and mothers' mothers' mothers found it. Some will die, some will return home, some will fail and sink to the bottom of society, but most, when they arrive at the entrepot cities of Touchdown, Bleriot, and Belladonna, will take a long look at the world and think they have landed in paradise."

The disembodied viewpoint plunged toward the earth, down down, plunging ever faster until it seemed as if Limaal and Taasmin must smash to pulp on the hard earth. Knuckles went white and the Babooshka screamed. The lights came on again. Dust motes floated in the beams of the lamps. Adam Black stepped into the lights and said, "That concludes our tour of the wonders of earth and sky and we now return you safely to familiar terra firma once more." Doors opened at the end of the carriage admitting a stream of dusty sunlight. The people were very quiet as they filed out into the afternoon sun.

"Well, what did you think of that?" said Rael Mandella to his children. They did not answer. They were immersed in their own thoughts.

Limaal Mandella's head was filled with falling planets pregnant with humanity, with spinning wheels of light thousands of kilometres across, with seemingly anarchic jumbles of shapes which nevertheless kept the world run ping like an oiled clock, and the rational part of him reached out and embraced all he had seen. He understood that both human and material universes operated according to fundamental principles and that if these principles were knowable, then all the universes of matter and mind must be knowable too. He embraced the Grand Design and saw it copied in miniature everywhere his eyes rested. Everything was comprehensible, everything was explainable; there were no mysteries left, all things pointed inward.

Taasmin Mandella had likewise beheld the wonders of earth and sky but chose rather the path of mysticism. She had seen that all orders of organization obeyed higher orders, and those higher orders in turn obeyed orders of more vast and splendid intelligence in an upward spiral of consciousness at the apex of which sat God the Panarch Unknowable: Ineffable, and Silent as Light, whose plans could only be guessed at from His revelations that dropped like some sweet distillate down the coils of the helix of consciousness. All things pointed outward and upward.

Rael Mandella could not know what he had done to his children, either at the instant of their births when he had cursed them with his family curse, or the germination of that curse-seed in Adam Black's Holographium. The twins seemed impressed. Maybe they had learned something valuable. If the roots of learning had taken in them, then the two bushels of strawberries and the chicken he had spent on his children's education had been money well invested.

n the night of Friday 21st Augtember, at twenty minutes of twenty, the Babooshka leaped up in the middle of one of their interminable word games just as Grandfather Haran was about to put "zoomorph" down on a triple word and exclaimed, "Is time! Is time! My baby, oh, my baby!" And she rushed into the room where the placentory had pulsed and pumped and swelled day by day, hour by hour, for two hundred and eighty days, 7520 hours, into a great bulb of blue-red flesh.

"What is it, flower of my heart?" cried Grandfather Haran. "What is the matter?" Receiving no reply, he hurried into the room and found his wife standing with her hands to her mouth, staring at the placentory. The artificial womb was shuddering and contracting and a foul, fetid stench filled the room.

"Is time!" gabbled the Babooshka. "My baby is come! Our Baby! Oh, Haran! Husband."

Grandfather Haran sniffed the foul air. A trickle of black fluid squeezed out of the placentory and stained the nutrient liquid. A sense of great evil clutched at his heart.

"Out," he commanded the Babooshka.

"But Haran ... our child! I, a mother, must be with my child." She reached for the fleshy obscenity on the window-ledge.

"Out! I, your husband, command it!" Grandfather Haran seized his wife by the shoulders, turned her around, and thrust her out of the door, which he bolted behind him. Hideous beichings were now erupting from the spasming placentory. Grandfather Haran approached with trepidation. He tapped the jar. The placentory emitted a keening whine as if gas were streaming out under high pressure. Bubbles boiled to the surface of the Belden jar and burst, emitting a suffocating stench. Grandfather Haran covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and prodded the womb with a pencil. The placentory con vulsed and, with a tearing, belching sound, spewed vile grey slime into the air. It spat a torrent of foul black fluid interspersed with stifling farts, then ripped down the middle and died. Holding his breath lest he vomit, Grandfather Haran poked about the decomposing remains with his pencil. There was no sign of there ever having been a child within. He did find some rotting black segments of what looked like mango skin. Satisfied that there was no child, alive or dead, he left the room and locked it behind him.

"A terrible, blasphemous thing has happened here tonight," he told his wife. "As long as I live, no one will ever enter that room again." He strode to the front door and threw the key as far into the night as he could.

"My child, Haran, my child, is she alive, is she dead?" The Babooshka swallowed. "Is she ... human?"

"There never was a child," said Grandfather Haran, looking straight ahead of him. "Heart of Lothian has deceived us. The womb was empty. Quite empty." There and then he broke the vow his wife had made for him and went down to Tatterdemalion's B.A.R to drink himself stupid.

At the precise moment the Babooshka leaped up and abandoned her game, Genevieve Tenebrae felt a tearing pain wrench at her. She let out a tiny, sobbing moan and knew that the time had come.

"Dearest, is there anything wrong?" said Gaston Tenebrae from his chair by the fire, where he sat of an evening smoking his hookah pipe and dreaming of sweet adultery.

Another contraction wrenched Genevieve Tenebrae.

"The child," she whispered, "It's coming."

"Child," said Gaston Tenebrae, "What child?"

Genevieve Tenebrae smiled through the pain. She had purposefully kept the pregnancy secret for nine months in anticipation of this delicious moment.

"Your child," she whispered. "Your child, you vain idiot."

"What?" roared Gaston Tenebrae, a thousand kilometres away, tall and futile as a wet reed.

"You slipped up, husband. Your child ... you've denied me ... and denied me, and kept ... me ... waiting, so I kept you waiting and now ... the waiting's done." She gasped as a new pain gripped her. Gaston Tenebrae fluttered and flustered like a tiny, pathetic bird in a grenhouse. "Get me to Quinsana ... Marya Quinsana."

She collected her remaining dignity and walked to the door. There the fiercest set of contractions yet racked her.

"Help me, you good-for-nothing pig," she moaned, and Gaston Tenebrae came and helped her through the cold dark night to Quinsana's Dental and Veterinary Surgery.

Seeing it loom out of post-anaesthetic torpor, Marya Quinsana's face looked rather like a llama's, thought Genevieve Tenebrae. This plangent thought circled in the superconducting circuit of her mind until the gift-wrapped bundle of baby was placed in her arms and she remembered everything.

"Not that much harder than delivering a goat," said Marya Quinsana, smiling all over her llama face. "But I thought it best to knock you right out anyway."

"Gaston, where is Gaston?" asked Genevieve Tenebrae. Her husband's goateed face bent close to hers.

It said to her in a confidential whisper, "I'll speak to you when we're alone."

Genevieve Tenebrae smiled distantly, her husband of no more importance than an irritating fly. What mattered was the child in her arms, her child; had she not borne it herself, carried it within her for nine months, made it a part of her for almost half a year?

"Arnie Nicolodea," she whispered. "Little Arnie."

When the news of the surprise birth of the third natural citizen of Desolation Road broke in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, Persis Tatterdemalion declared drinks all round and there was toasting and merrymaking by all save Grandfather Haran, who came to realize as the night passed into morning exactly what had been done to him. He also came to realize that he could never prove anything.

"Isn't it strange," commented Rajandra Das, made loquacious by maize beer and wine from the hotel fermentory, "that the couple who wanted the baby didn't get one and the couple who didn't did?" Everyone thought that a pithy summarization.