Desolation Road (6 page)

"Mother!" he roared. "Mother!"

The Babooshka looked up and waved, a tiny, happy china doll of a woman. Her voice was as doll's.

"Misha! Come on! Can't waste time. Have to find the other station."

"Mother!" bellowed Mikal Margolis, "This is not the right stop!" But his words were lost in a billow of steam and the thunder of fusion engines powering up. Creakingly, agedly, the train began to roll. "Sir, sir!" cried the flapping steward. Mikal Margolis straight-armed him into an empty seat and dashed for the door. He jumped as the carriage passed the end of the makeshift platform.

The Babooshka swirled up the platform in a storm of small indignation.

"Misha, the shock you are giving me, your poor dear mother! Falling asleep on the train, no less. Come, we shall miss the mountain railroad."

The cheeky porter-type had to put the bags down, he was laughing so hard.

"Mother, where are the mountains?"

"Behind the buildings."

"Mother, you can see right over the buildings, they are so low. Mother, this is not the right station."

"Oh, no? Then where is this your poor dear mother has put you?"

Mikal Margolis pointed to some words laid out in pretty white pebbles by the edge of the track.

"Desolation Road, Mother."

"And this is the next stop, no?"

"We were meant to get off at Pandemonium. The train was not supposed to stop here. This town is not supposed to be here."

"Then blame the railroad company, blame the town, but not your poor dear mother!" fumed the Babooshka, and lambasted, lampooned, be-jasused and generally cursed the railroad company, their trains, their tracks, their signals, their rolling stock, their drivers, their engineers, their guards and anyone even remotely connected with Bethlehem Ares Railroads down to the meanest lavatory attendant, third-class, for approximately twenty minutes.

Finally Dr. Alimantando, nominal head of Desolation Road, pop. 7, elev. 1250 m., "one step short of Paradise," arrived to settle the altercation so he could return to his chronokinetic studies in peace. Only the day before he had commissioned Rajandra Das, general factotum, sorcerer's apprentice, odd-job man and station porter, to spell out the name of the town in proud white pebbles so that any train that might pass would know that the people of Desolation Road had pride in their town. As if lured by a malicious sympathetic magic, the train bearing the Babooshka and Mikal Margolis pulled over the horizon and stopped to take a look. Rajandra Das's charm over machines was powerful, but surely not that powerful. Nevertheless, he had charmed the Babooshka and her son into being, and now Dr. Alimantando had to decide what to do with them. He offered them refuge in one of the warm dry caves that riddled the bluffs until such time as they chose to leave or had a more permanent residence constructed. Stiff with indignation, the Babooshka refused the offer of sanctuary. She would not sleep in a dirty cave with bat droppings on the floor and lizards for company; no, nor would she share it with a son who was a faithless wastrel and did not know how to treat an old lady who was his poor dear mother. Dr. Alimantando listened with what little grace he could muster and then prevailed upon the Mandellas, whose house was built with family in mind, to take in the waif. Mikal Margolis took the cave. There were bat droppings and there were lizards, but there was no mother so it was not that bad.

In the Mandella household the Babooshka found a contemporary in Grandfather Haran, who entertained her with peapod wine and honeytongued flatteries and asked his son to build an extra room onto the already rambling Mandella home especially for the Babooshka. Every night they would sip wine, reminisce on the days when both they and the world were young, and play the word games the Babooshka loved so much. On one such night, in early autumn, as Grandfather Haran was putting the word "bauxite" down on a double-word triple-letter, the Babooshka noticed for the first time his distinguished grey hair and fine upright body, chipped by time like a china god, but strong and uneroded. She let her eyes rest upon the ironstiff beard and the lovely little shiny button-eyes, and she let out a quiet sigh and fell in love with him.

"Haran Mandella, as we say in Old New Cosmobad, you are much much gentleman," she said.

"Anastasia Tyurischeva Margolis, as we say in Desolation Road, you are much much lady," said Grandfather Haran.

The wedding was set for the following spring.

Mikal Margolis dreamed in his cave of the mineral springs of Paradise Valley. He would never find his fortune lying around in the rocks of Desola tion Road, but he did find crystals of sulphate of dilemma. With time it refined into a pure form: to find his fortune he must leave Desolation Road and his mother; to leave her would mean leaving on his own and he did not have the courage for that. Such was the essence of Mikal Margolis's purified dilemma. The resolution of it into useful compounds, and his quest for personal anti-maternal courage was to lead him through adultery, murder and exile to the destruction of Desolation Road. But not yet.

ne afternoon, shortly after the official end of the siesta, while people were still unofficially blinking, stretching and yawning out of sweaty sleep, a noise was heard in Desolation Road like none that had ever been heard before.

"Sounds like a big bee," said the Babooshka.

"Or a swarm of bees," said Grandfather Haran.

"Or a big swarm of big bees," said Rajandra Das.

"Killer bees?" asked Eva Mandella.

"No such things," said Rael Mandella.

The twins made gurgling sounds. They were toddling now, at the age of perpetually falling forwards. No door in town could be closed to them, they were intrepid, fearless adventurers. Killer bees would not have fazed them.

"More like an aircraft engine," said Mikal Margolis.

"Single engine?" ventured Dr. Alimantando. "Single engine, one seater cropsprayer?" Such things had been a familiar sight in Deuteronomy.

"More like twin engine," said Mr. Jericho, straining his tuned hearing.

"Twin-engined, two seats, but not a cropsprayer, a stunter, Yamaguchi and Jones, with two Maybach/Wurtel engines in pull-push configuration, if I'm not mistaken."

Whatever its source, the noise grew louder and louder. Then Mr. Jericho spied a fleck of black on the face of the sun.

"There it is, look!"

With a howl like a big swarm of killer bees, the airplane dived out of the sun and thundered, over Desolation Road. Everybody ducked save Limaal and Taasmin, who followed it with their heads and fell over, unbalanced.

"What was that?"

"Look ... he's turning, he's coming back."

At the apex of its turn everyone caught full sight of the airplane that had buzzed them. It was a sleek, shark-shaped thing with two propellors nose and tail, angled wings, and a down raked tail. Nobody failed to notice the bright tiger stripes painted on its fuselage and the snarling, toothy grin on its nose. The airplane swooped over Desolation Road once more, barely skimming the top of the relay tower. Heads ducked again. The airplane hung at the point of its bank and afternoon sunlight blazed off polished metal. The people of Desolation Road waved. The airplane bore down upon the town again. "Look, the pilot's waving back!"

The people waved all the more.

A third time the airplane swept over the adobe homes of Desolation Road. A third time it pulled into a tight bank.

"I do believe he's coming down!" shouted Mr. Jericho. "He's coming down!" Landing gear was unfolding from the wingtips, the nose and the downswept tail. The airplane made a final pass, almost at head height, and dropped toward the empty place on the far side of the railroad tracks.

"He'll never do it!" said Dr. Alimantando, but nevertheless he ran with the rest of his people toward the great cloud of dust pluming up beyond the line. They met the airplane coming nose on toward them. The people scattered, the airplane swerved, snapped a wingwheel on a rock, and crashed onto its side, ploughing a huge slewing furrow in the dust. The good citizens of Desolation Road hastened to the aid of pilot and passenger, but the pilot was free and, sliding back the canopy, stood up and screamed, "You dumb bastards! You dumb, stupid bastards! What you want to go and do that for? Eh? She's ruined, ruined, never fly again, all because you dumb bastards are too dumb to know to keep out of the way of airplanes! Look what you've done, just look!"

And the pilot burst into tears.

Her name was Persis Tatterdemalion.

She was born with wings, there was aviation-grade liquid hydrogen in her veins and wind in her wires. On her father's side were three generations of Rockette Morgan's Flying Circus, on her mother's a genealogy of cropsprayers, commercial pilots, charter flyers and daredevils back to great-greatgrandmother Indhira, who reputedly piloted Praesidium SailShips while the world was being invented. Persis Tatterdemalion was born to fly. She was a great soaring, roaring bird. To her the loss of her airplane was no less a matter than the loss of a limb, or a loved one, or a life.

All her time, money, energy and love had, since the age of ten, been poured into the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar, a one-woman, onering flying circus, a chautauqua of the skies that not only thrilled gaping audiences with death-defying aerobatics and stunting, but also educated them by providing those who paid her modest fee with aerial views of their farms, close-ups of the weather and sightseeing jaunts to places of local interest. Thus employed, she had moved eastward across the top half of the world until she reached the plains town of Wollamurra Station. "See the Great Desert," she sang to the sheepfarmers of Woilamurra Station, "marvel at the dizzying depths of the mighty canyons, wonder at the forces of Nature that have sculpted stupendous natural arches and towering stone pillars. The whole history of the earth laid out in stone beneath you: I guarantee for one dollar fifty centavos, this is a trip you will never forget."

For Junius Lambe, dazedly furious in the tail seat, the sales pitch was quite true. Twenty minutes out from Wollamurra Station, with not a canyon, stupendous arch or towering pillar within a hundred kilometers, Persis Tatterdemalion noticed that her fuel gauge had not moved. She tapped it. The red display indicators flickered and plummeted to the empty mark. She tapped it again. The indicators sat where they were.

"Oh, shit," she said. She plugged in a taped commentary on the wonders of the Great Desert to keep Junius Lambe quiet and checked her charts for a close-by settlement where she could make a forced landing. She could not return to Wollamurra Station, that was obvious, but the ROTECH maps gave no comfort. She checked the radio location equipment. It indicated a leak of microwave radiation not twenty kilometres distant, of the type associated with the relays in the planetary communications net.

"Check it out, I suppose," she said to herself, and committed herself, her airplane and her passenger to her decision.

She found a tiny settlement where no settlement should have been. There were neat squares of green, and light flashed from solar collectors and irrigation channels. She could make out the red tile roofs of houses. And there were people.

"Hold tight," she said to Junius Lambe, for whom this was his first inkling that anything might be wrong. "We're going in."

With her last teardrop of fuel she had brought her beloved bird down, and then what had happened? So deep was her disgust that she refused to leave Desolation Road with Junius Lambe on the 14:14 Llangonedd-Rejoice Ares Express.

"I flew in, I'll fly out," she declared. "The only way I'm going out of here is on a pair of wings."

Rajandra Das tried to charm the wheel back onto the wingtip, but it was beyond his power or even the power of Rael Mandella's welding torch to make the airplane airworthy again. What was most galling of all to the sole survivor of the Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar was that Rael Mandella's welding torch ran on nothing less than hundred percent, pure, unadulterated aviation-grade liquid hydrogen.

So Dr. Alimantando found Persis Tatterdemalion a home and a garden so that she would not starve, but she could not be happy because the sky was in her eyes. She saw the lean desert birds gather on the aerials of the relay tower and grew bitter because her wings had been broken by foolish people. She stood on the edge of the bluffs and watched the birds ride the thermals up the evening and wondered how wide she would have to spread her arms to rise like them and be drawn up the spiral of air until she vanished from view.