Desolation Road (21 page)

"No one knows this exists, but this is the Mark Two Alimantando time winder."

"Get on. You mean all that about the time travelling little green man's true?'

"Should have talked more to your brother. He helped us build it. Dr. Alimantando left instructions for us to build this Mark Two unit in case something went wrong in time; he could put himself into stasis for a couple of million years and arrive here to pick up the replacement unit."

"Fascinating," said Louie Gallacelli, not in the least fascinated. "How does this relate to my expert witness?"

"We use it to wind time backward so that we can take a look at the night of the murder to see who really committed the crime."

"You mean you don't know?"

"Of course not. Whatever made you think I did?"

"I don't believe this."

"Watch and wait."

Rajandra Das and Ed Gallacelli were fetched from their suppers and taken to the place by the railroad line where Rajandra Das had found the body. It was a cold night, as it had been the night of the murder. The stars shone like steel spear-points. Lasers flickered fitfully across the vault of the sky. Louie Gallacelli flapped his arms for warmth and tried to read the heliograph of the heavens. His breath hung in great steaming clouds.

"You folks near ready?"

Mr. Jericho made some fine adjustments to the field generator settings.

"Ready. Let's do it."

Ed Gallacelli tripped the remote switch and imprisoned Desolation Road within a translucent blue bubble.

"Child of grace!" exclaimed brother Louie. Ed Gallacelli looked at him. That was his expression.

"That's not what's meant to happen," said Rajandra Das needlessly. "Do something before anyone notices."

"I'm trying, I'm trying," said Ed Gallacelli, frozen-fingered clumsy at the fine settings.

"I think we must have overlooked the Temporal Inversion Problem," speculated Mr. Jericho.

"Oh, what is that?" said Lawyer Louie.

"A variable-entropic gradient electromagnetogravitic field," said Ed Gallacelli.

"No, what is
that
." Something like a miniature thunderstorm was bombarding the upper curve of the bubble with rather pretty, if totally ineffectual, blue lightning.

The three engineers looked up from their time machine.

"Child of grace!" said Ed Gallacelli.

"I think it's a ghost," said Rajandra Das. The storm of entropic ectoplasm knotted into a translucent blue lifestudy of Gaston Tenebrae. His head was bent over at an improbable angle and he seemed to be boiling with suppressed rage. This could have been because he was quite naked. Garments clearly did not pass beyond the grave, not even the decorous white shifts with which public imagination covered its spooks' modesty.

"He looks pretty mad," said Rajandra Das.

"So would you if you'd been murdered," said Louie.

"No such things as ghosts," said Mr. Jericho firmly.

"Oh, no?" said three simultaneous voices.

"It's a time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial stress matrix."

"Like hell," said Rajandra Das. "It's a ghost."

"Looks like it is," said Mr. Jericho.

"All right. Then we have our expert witness. Fiddle with that thing and see if you can bring him in. I'm looking forward to presenting the ghost of the murder victim to testify on his own behalf tomorrow." Six hands reached for the field-generator controls. Mr. Jericho slapped less dextrous fingers away and stroked the verniers. The blue bubble contracted to half its volume, bisecting wind pump and cutting off a third of the community solar farm.

"Do that again," said Louie Gallacelli, drawing up a line of questioning in his mind. He would make legal history. The first attorney ever to crossexamine a ghost. The bubble shrank once again. Now less than one hundred metres distant, the ghost glowered at its captors and pelted the imprisoning dome with pixie lightning.

"I hope he doesn't decide to use that stuff onus," said Rajandra Das. The ghost was now circling at high speed under the apex of the dome, seething with unutterable fury.

"Bring him in," said Louie Gallacelli, unconsciously adopting his courtroom stance. The case was already successfully concluded in his mind. The name of Gallacelli was whispering up and down the line wherever injustice was being fought and the rights of man championed.

The electromagnetogravitic variable entropy field was now no more than a metre across. The ghost, cramped and contorted into a painful knot of ectoplasm within, mouthed oaths which Mr. Jericho, being an accomplished lipreader, found quite shocking and utterly inappropriate for one supposedly passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch. Louie Gallacelli tried some preliminary questions, but such was the ghost's indignant ingratitude that he had Rajandra Das shut the field down to an agonizing fifteen centimetres and left it that size all night until the ghost learned some respect for the due processes of the law. The Mark Two time winder and incumbent phantom were taken to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel to await the morning. Umberto Gallacelli amused himself for several hours by spitting at the force field and showing the ghost some of his vast collection of photographs of women either having, about to have, or thinking about having sex with themselves, other women, a variety of farm animals, or massive-membered men.

ustice Dunne was in poor humour for a sentencing. The local water had given him diarrhoea, which, coupled with his haemorrhoids, had felt like shitting sheets of flame. His breakfast had been cold and inadequate, he had learned from his radio that his racehorse had fallen and broken its neck in the Morongai Flats Ten Thousand Metres, and now two of his jurors were missing. He had his usher, that ragged scamp Rajandra Das, search the town for them, and when that proved to be in vain he ruled that the trial could proceed with a jury of eight. He made a mental note to add a charge of fifty golden dollars to the town's already substantial bill for this additional ruling. And now the defense counsel, a ludicrous semi-educated bumpkin with an overinflated opinion of his legal prowess, was seriously proposing that a key witness be admitted at this late stage in the proceedings.

"What is the name of this key witness?" Louie Gallacelli cleared his throat.

"The ghost of Gaston Tenebrae."

Messrs. Prye, Peake and Meddyl were on their feet instantly. Genevieve Tenebrae fainted and was carried out. Justice Dunne sighed. His anus was beginning to itch again. The counsels argued. The accused ate a breakfast of fried bread and coffee. After an hour, jury, spectators and witnesses went to tend their fields. Arguments clashed and parried. Justice Dunne fought an insistent urge to insert a forefinger into his backside and scratch the frustration until it bled. Two hours passed. Seeing no end to the wrangling unless he intervened, justice Dunne banged his gavel and declared, "The ghost may testify."

Rajandra Das skipped around the fields and houses of Desolation Road rounding up jurors, witnesses and spectators. There was still no sign of the two missing jurors: Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.

"Call the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae."

The ghost-catchers exchanged clenched-fist signs of triumph. Ed Galla celli wheeled in the Mark Two time winder and checked the transducers he had fixed around the edge of the bubble.

"Can you hear me?" squeaked the ghost. Newly revived, Genevieve Tenebrae promptly fainted again. The phantom's voice came scratchy but audible through Ed Gallacelli's radio amplifier.

"Now, Mr. Tenebrae, or rather, Late Mr. Tenebrae, did this man, the accused, murder you on the night of thirty-first Julaugust, at approximately twenty minutes of nothing?"

The ghost somersaulted gleefully in its blue crystal ball.

"Joey and I have had our differences in the past, I'd be the first to admit it, but now that I've passed into the nearer presence of the Panarch, all that's forgiven and forgotten. No. It wasn't him that killed me. He didn't do it."

"Then who did?"

Genevieve Tenebrae regained consciousness to hear her husband name his murderer.

"It was Mikal Margolis. He did it."

In the ensuing uproar Genevieve Tenebrae fainted for the third time and the Babooshka crowed triumphantly, "I told you so, he was no good, that son of mine," and justice Dunne banged his gavel so hard the head came off.

"If there is any more of this behaviour, I'll have you all fined for contempt," he thundered.

Order restored, the ghost of Gaston Tenebrae unravelled its sordid testimony of adultery, glowing passion, violent death, and illicit tripartite relationships between Gaston Tenebrae, Mikal Margolis and Marya Quinsana.

"I suppose I should never have done it," the phantom squeaked, "but I still thought of myself as an attractive man: I wanted to know I had not lost my touch with the ladies, so I flirted with Marya Quinsana because she's a fine, fine woman."

"Gaston!" shrieked his widow, up from her third faint, ready for her fourth. "How could you do this to me!"

"Order," said justice Dunne.

"What about the baby, eh, darling?" said the ghost. "Since I passed into the world beyond I've learned a lot of interesting things. Like where little Arnie came from."

Genevieve Tenebrae burst into tears and was led from the courtroom by Eva Mandella. The ghost resumed its tale of clandestine trysts and whispered intimacies beneath silk sheets to the utter amazement of the citizens of Desolation Road. Amazement, and admiration that an illicit adulterous relationship of such intensity (and with such a publicly promiscuous figure as Marya Quinsana) could have been so successfully concealed among a population of only twenty-two people.

"She led me along good. But now I know better." Since metempsy-chosing to the Heavenly Exalted Plane, Gaston Tenebrae had learned of Marya Quinsana's simultaneous relationship with Mikal Margolis. "She was playing us off, one against the other; me, Mikal and her brother Morton; playing us off just for the fun of it. She enjoyed manipulating people. Mikal Margolis, well, he was always a headstrong boy and never really made it in love: having me to contend with was too much for him." Suspicious, Mikal Margolis had followed Marya Quinsana and Gaston Tenebrae and spied upon their lovemaking. It was then that the trembling started. In the surgery he would shudder with repressed rage and drop instruments and spill things. The tension built until he could feel the blood seething around his bones like the ocean breaking upon rocks until something old and foul like a black ulcer burst inside him. He found Gaston Tenebrae walking home from a tryst along the side of the railroad line.

"Then he picked up a short piece of rail, about half a metre long, that was lying beside the track and smashed me on the side of the neck with it. Severed my spine at once. Killed me instantly."

The ghost concluded its evidence here and was wheeled away. Justice Dunne delivered his summing up and after begging them to please be objective about what they had seen and heard, gave leave for the jury to retire and consider its verdict. The jury retired to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, now reduced to seven jurors. Unseen by any, Morton Quinsana had slipped away during the final testimony.

At fourteen minutes of fourteen the jury returned.

"How do you find the accused, guilty or not guilty?"

"Not guilty," said Rael Mandella.

"And that is the verdict of you all?"

"It is."

The judge acquitted Mr. Stalin. There was cheering and clapping. Louie Gallacelli was carried shoulder-high from the Court of Piepowder and paraded all around the town so that every goat, chicken and llama might see what a fine lawyer Desolation Road had produced. Genevieve Tenebrae took her daughter and went to ask Ed Gallacelli for her husband's ghost.

"The time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial-stress matrix?" said engineer Ed. "Sure." Genevieve Tenebrae took the time winder and the tiny bubble containing her late husband home, put them on the shelf, and nagged the ghost for its unfaithfulness for twelve years.

Justice Dunne returned to his disrobing carriage and had his personal servant, an eight-year-old sloe-eyed Xanthian girl, apply soothing, lotion to his piles.