Desolation Road (17 page)

"It's a man," said Limaal Mandella, who could barely distinguish its shape.

"It's a man of light," said Taasmin Mandella, noticing the way the figure shone brighter than the cloud-hidden sun.

"It's an angel," Johnny Stalin, seeing the pair of red wings folded on its back.

"It's something much much better!" squeaked Arnie Tenebrae. Then all the children looked and saw not what they wanted to see but what was there wanting to be seen, which was a tall thin man in a high-collared white suit upon which moving pictures of birds, animals, plants, and curious geometric patterns were projected, and the wings upon his back were not wings at all but a great red guitar slung across his shoulders.

The children ran down to meet the stranger.

"Hello, I'm Limaal and this is my sister, Taasmin," said Limaal Mandella. "And this is our friend, Johnny Stalin."

"And Arnie Tenebrae, me!" said little Arnie Tenebrae, bouncing up and down in excitement.

"We're called The Hand," said the stranger. He had a strange voice, as if he were speaking from deep down in a dream. "Where is this place?"

"This is Desolation Road!" chorused the children. "Come on." And the two grabbed hands and one ran outrider and one ran van and they galloped up the bluffs and through the green tree-hung alleys of Desolation Road to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, for that was the place all strangers came to first.

"Look what we've found," said the children.

"He's called The Hand," piped Arnie Tenebrae.

"He's come all the way across the Great Desert," said Limaal. A rumble passed among the clients, for only Dr. Alimantando (lost in time chasing a legendary green man, God be kind to him in his folly) had ever ever ever come across the Great Desert.

"He'll be wanting a drink then," said Rael Mandella, and nodded for Persis Tatterdemalion to draw off a glass of cold maize beer.

"Thank you kindly," said The Hand in his funny faraway voice. The offer of acceptance was made and received. "Might we take off our boots? The Great Desert's hard on feet." He unslung his guitar, sat down on a table, and the glow from his picturesuit cast odd shadows over his shark features. The children sat around him, waiting to be praised for their wonderful find. The man called The Hand pulled off his boots and everyone gave a cry of consternation.

His feet were slim and fine as ladies' hands, his toes long and flexible as fingers and his knees, his knees bent backward as well as forward, like a bird's.

Then Persis Tatterdemalion spoke and calmed the storm "Hey, mister, play us a tune on your guitar, will you?"

The Hand's eyes sought out his questioner, far away in the back-bar shadows. He stood and executed a complex bow, impossible for any less flexible than he. Time-lapse images of flowers blooming passed over his picturesuit.

"Because the lady asks, we think we will." He picked-up his guitar and struck a harmonic. Then he touched his long slender fingers to the strings and released a swarm of notes into the air.

There was never such music played as played that afternoon in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. The music found notes in the tables and the chairs and the mirrors and the walls; it found melodies in the bedroom and the kitchen, the cellar and the shithouse, and dragged tunes out of the places where they had lain hidden undiscovered for years, found them, took them, and made them part of the greater self. There were tunes that made feet tap and tunes that brought out bouts of dancing. There were tunes that kicked over the tables and tunes that made the glassware rattle. There were tunes to make you smile and tunes to make you cry and tunes that sent delicious shivers down your back. There was the grand ancient music of the desert and the airy, breathy music of the sky. There was the music of dancing firelight and the infinite whistle of distant stars, there was merriment and magic and mourning and madness; music leaping, music crying, music laughing, music loving, music living, music dying.

When it was finished no one could believe it was over. No one could believe that just one man, with a guitar lying in his lap, could have made such mighty music. A ringing stillness filled the air. The Hand flexed his curious fingers, his curious toes. Desert sunsets glowed red and purple on his picture suit. Then Umberto Gallacelli called out, "Hey, mister, just where do you come from?"

No one had heard Mr. Jericho enter. No one had seen him take a seat at the bar. No one even knew he was there until he said, "I'll tell you where he's from." Mr. Jericho pointed at the ceiling. "Am I right?"

The Hand stood up, tense and sharp-edged.

"Outside, right?" Mr. Jericho pressed home his reasoning. "The feet, that's the way they're born for use in open gravity, isn't it? Extra hands? And the picturesuit, that's a universal tool among ROTECH orbital personnel for reviewing visual information at a glance: I reckon it's just running a random test pattern in the absence of data, am I right?"

The Hand did not say yes or no. Mr. Jericho continued.

"So, what are you doing here? Exclusion orders prohibit space adapted humans from coming to the surface except under permiso. You got a permiso?" The man called The Hand tensed, ready to flee, his red guitar held defensively before him. "Maybe you should have a talk with our district supervisor, the mayor Dominic Frontera. He can have the ROTECH boys in China Mountain check you out."

Not even the prodigious experience of Mr. Jericho's Exalted Ancestors could have prepared him for what The Hand did next. A screaming powerchord from the red guitar twisted the world away and tore at the mind with chromium teeth. Under cover of the guitar-scream, The Hand was gone, the children with him.

imaal, Taasmin, Johnny Stalin, and Arnie Tenebrae hid The Hand in a small cave behind Mr. Blue Mountain's house. It was the very best of hiding places. No one would find The Hand here because no one grown up even knew there was a secret cave here. There were a lot of places around Desolation Road which no one grown up knew were there, dozens of really good places where a toy or an animal or a man could be hidden away for a long long time. Once Limaal and Taasmin had tried to hide Johnny Stalin away in a secret cave, but he had thrown a screaming tantrum and his mother had come flapping to the rescue. That was one hiding place they could not use again.

They had brought The Hand stolen things they thought he would need to make him comfortable: a rug, a cushion, a plate and a glass, a jug of water, some candles, some oranges and bananas. Arnie Tenebrae gave him her colouring book and new wax crayons which she had been given for her birthday and which had come all the way from the catalogue sales shop in the big city. Miniature Magi, they presented their gifts to The Hand. He accepted their tribute graciously and rewarded them with a tune and a story.

This is the story The Hand told.

In the flying cities that circled the earth like shards of shattered glass there lived a race of men who still laid claim to the bond of common humanity with their world-bound brothers but who, in their centuries of self-imposed high exile, had grown so strange and alien that they were in truth a separate species. This magical race had been charged with two great tasks. These tasks were the reason for their people's existence. The first was the care and maintenance, and, until such time as it might govern itself, the administration of the world their ancestors had built. The second was its defence against these alien powers which might wish, out of jealousy, greed or outraged pride, to destroy man's greatest work. The fulfilling of these sacred mandates, imposed by the Blessed Lady herself, demanded such concentration of effort by the sky-folk that none could be spared for lesser tasks. Therefore one simple law was made.

It was that at the age of majority and reason, when a person assumes the mantle of responsibility, each individual must choose between their futures. The first was to follow the ways of the ever-living ancestors, take the Catherinist vows and serve ROTECH and its celestial patroness. The second was to submit to the adaptive surgery of the physicians and choose exile and a new life, wiped clean of the memories of all that was before, upon the world below. The third was either to break free from the flesh and merge with the machines to live a disembodied ghost in the computer-net, or set the controls of the transmat machine to a well-guarded set of coordinates known as Epsilon Point, where the quasi-sentient Psymbii, vegetative creatures of light and vacuum, would come and take that individual and wrap themselves around, into, through him until they became a symbiote of flesh and vegetable, living free in the vast spaces of the moonring.

Yet there were those who found all of these futures horrible to contemplate and chose their own. Some wished to remain the folk they were and went unadapted to the world below, where they lived only a short while and died in great misery. Some took ships and sailed away into the night toward the nearer stars and were never heard of again. And some sought refuge behind the walls of the world in the airshafts and lightwells, brothers and sisters of the rats.

Such a one was The Hand. Upon his tenth birthday, the traditional day of decision, he stole his brother's picturecloth suit and slipped behind the walls to run the tunnels and catwalks, for it was not the Blessed Lady he wished to serve, but Music. And he became Lord of the Dark Places, a thing quickly said in few words, not so quickly done: King in a world where music was law and the electric guitar master of light and darkness.

As evening shadows grew to infinite lengths down the lightwells of Carioca Station, bright-winged creatures like heroin angels would flash across the echoing spaces and cluster like vampires, their wings shrouded about them, upon spars and rigging wires to witness the duels of music. All darktime long until, like vampires, the strengthening sunlight drove them into the shadows, they would listen to the guitars clash. The shafts and tunnels would ring to the crazy music, the guitars would wail and scream like sweating lovers, and responsible citizens who lived by law and duty would wake from their freefall dreams to catch tailing echoes of wild, free music wafting from their airconditioning slots, music like they had never dreamed before. And when all the fights were fought and the last droplets of blood squeezed from shattered fingertips, when the last seared guitar corpse had been sent spinning out of the locks into space, the King was crowned and everyone proclaimed that The Hand and his red guitar were the greatest on Carioca Station.

For a season The Hand ruled the tunnels and runways of Carioca Station and there was none to challenge him. Then word came that the King of McCartney Station wished to call out the King of Carioca Station. The gauntlet was down. The purse was the Kingdom of the loser, and all his subjects.

They met in an open-gravity observation blister beneath slow wheeling stars. All that day the King of Carioca Station's picture suit (which he wore in preference to the rags, plastics, metals and synthetic furs of the behindwallers) had projected black and white pictures of incredible antiquity: a visual entertainment whose name, translated from the ancient languages, meant "White House." Then the King of Carioca Station's steward handed him his freshly tuned guitar. He touched his fingers to the strings and felt the evil genius thrill up his arm and liquefy his brain. The King of McCartney Station's stewards passed him his machine: a nine-hundred-yearold Stratocaster. Sunlight flared from its sunburst finish and awed the spectators, clinging by feet and tails to the traverse wires, into holy silence.

The adjudicator gave a signal. The duel began.

All through the compulsory fugues the King of McCartney Station matched the King of Carioca Station. Their melodies curled and twined around each other's themes like birds in flight with such precise skill that no one could tell where one ended and another began. Their free-form improvisations sang into the cathedral vastness of Number Twelve airshaft and flakes of crystallized powerchords sifted down like snow to powder the heads of the girls with stardust. The guitars stalked each other through the harmonic landscapes of the modes: the Ionian, the Dorian, the Phrygian, Lydian and Mixolydian, the Aeolian and the Locrian. Time slowed in a jungle of scales and arpeggios: there was no time, the stars froze in their arcing paths, tracing slow silver snail tracks across the glassite cap-dome. The guitars flashed like switchblades, like methadone dreams. The guitars cried like violated angels. Back and forth the battle swayed, but still neither could gain advantage over the other.