Desolation Road (23 page)

It was all-of-a-sudden cold in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel. Limaal Mandella smiled and asked, "Do I win?"

"Your ball's next to the cushion. You win. But look, see there, the white ball, the Love ball, hasn't moved from the break-off point. And the Answers ball, the lime green one, lies in Great Circle while the purple Questions lies in Changes and Changing. You leave here to seek answers to your questions, they will be found only when you return home where your heart is."

"My heart? In this place?" Limaal Mandella's laugh was ugly, too old for a boy of nine.

"That's what the balls say."

"And do the balls say when Limaal Mandella must die, old man?"

"Look at the black Death ball. See how it lies next to Hope on the line between Word and Darkness. You will fight your greatest battle where your heart is and in losing it you lose everything."

Limaal Mandella laughed again. He clutched his heart.

"My heart, old man, is in my chest. That is the only place my heart is. In me."

"That is a true saying."

Limaal Mandella rolled the black Death ball with the tip of his forefinger.

"Well, we must all die and none of us can choose the time or the place or the way of it. Thank you for the fortune-telling, Mr. O'Rourke, but I want to make my own future out of the balls. Snooker's a game for rationalists, not mystics. Say, isn't that deep thinking for a nine-year-old? But you played well, mister, you played the best. Time this nine-year-old was in bed, though."

He left and TrickShot O'Rourke gathered up his magic balls and fortune-telling cloth.

After that night Limaal Mandella became convinced of his greatness. Though his rationalism would not allow him the generous oracle of the balls, his heart had seen his name written large in the stars and he began to play not for love or money but for power. His greatness was buttressed every time he smashed some visiting geologist, geophysicist, botanist, plant pathologist, soil engineer or meteorologist. The stake money was meaningless, he used it to buy drinks for the house. The name of Limaal Mandella passed up and down the line, together with the legend of the boy from Desolation Road who was unbeatable as long as he remained in his hometown. There was no shortage of young headhunters eager to disprove the legend: their defeat only reinforced it the more. Like the tumbling planets of his childhood nightmares, the rolling balls crushed all Limaal Mandella's opponents.

Sometime in the early morning of his tenth birthday, his coming of age, when the covers had been pulled over another victory on the baize and the chairs upturned on the tables, Limaal Mandella went to Persis Tatterdemalion.

"I want more," he said as she washed glasses. "There has to be more, there has to be somewhere outside of here where the lights are bright and the music's loud and the world doesn't close down at three minutes of three. And I want it. God, I want it more than anything. I want to see that world, I want to show it how good I am. There are folks out there, up there, who knock worlds around like snooker balls, I want to take them on, I want to match my skill against theirs, I want out of here."

Persis Tatterdemalion put down her glass and looked for a long time into the morning. She was remembering how it felt to be trapped in a small, confusing place.

"I know. I know. But listen to this, and listen for once. Today you are a man and master of your own destiny. You decide what it will be, where it will lead. Limaal, the world can be any shape you want it to be."

"You mean go?"

"Go. Go now, before you change your mind, before you lose your nerve. God, I wish I had the courage and the freedom to go with you."

There were tears in the barwoman's eyes.

That morning Limaal Mandella packed a small backsack with clothes, put eight hundred dollars purse money he had saved into his shoe, and slipped two cues into a cue case. He wrote a note for his parents and crept into their room to leave it by their bedside. He did not ask their forgiveness, only their understanding. He saw the presents his mother and father were to give him on his birthday and faltered. He breathed deeply, quietly, and left forever. He waited in the frosty cold beneath the star-sparkling sky for the night-mail to Belladonna. By dawn he was half a continent away.

he never washed. She never cut her hair. Her fingernails, her toenails, curled over at the ends, and the hair of her head hung to the small of her back in a greasy, dusty rope, thickly plaited. A legion of parasites found shelter there, and in the hair of her loins and the fetid sweat-glued mats in her armpits. She itched and festered but never scratched. To scratch would have been to surrender to the body.

She had commenced the war against her body on her tenth birthday. That was the day Limaal had gone. The maple cue her father had planed himself stood wrapped by the kitchen table. When the evening came and it was apparent that Limaal would not return, it was put away in a cupboard and the cupboard locked and forgotten. Then Taasmin went up alone to the red rim rocks to look again at the shape of the world. She stood before the Great Desert and let the wind whip at her, trying to learn from it what it was to be a woman. The wind that never stopped blowing tugged at her as if she were a kite to be whisked away into the heavens.

She realized she would love that. She would love the spiritual wind to carry her away like a paper bag, a piece of human refuse swept higher and higher away from the burning dry dry land into a sky filled with angelic beings and pieces of orbital engineering equipment. She felt herself sailing, lifting before the Godwind and in panic she called with the voice inside for her brother but the closeness was gone, stretched beyond the breaking point, dissipated, gone. The twins were unbalanced. No longer did the one's mysticism govern the other's rationalism: like machines without control they flew apart into space. Unchecked, the mysticism rushed into the emptiness in Taasmin's mind where her brother had been, and transformed her into a creature of purest light; white, shining light eternal, fountaining into the sky.

"Light," she whispered, "we are all light, of light, to light we return." She opened her eyes and beheld the base red desert and the ugly little town crouched beside it. She regarded her body, newly womaned, and hated its round sleekness and muscular smoothness. Its endless hungers, its insatiable appetites, its blind disregard for anything but itself disgusted her.

Then it seemed to Taasmin Mandella that she heard a voice carried on the wind from very very far away, beyond the world, beyond time, and it cried, "The mortification of the flesh! The mortification of the flesh!"

Taasmin Mandella echoed that cry and declared war on her body and the material things of the world. There and then she cast off her clothes, finely woven by Eva Mandella upon the loom of her devotion. She walked barefoot, even when the rain turned the lanes to liquid filth or the frost pecked at the earth. She drank rainwater from a barrel, ate vegetables earthy from the garden, and slept unroofed beneath the cottonwood trees in the company of llamas. At noontime, when other citizens enjoyed the enshrined siesta, she would squat upon the burning rocks of Desolation Point, immersed in prayer, oblivious to the sun tanning her skin to leather and bleaching her hair the colour of bones. She meditated upon the life of Catherine of Tharsis, whose quest for spirituality in a pagan worldly age had led her to cast off fleshly humanity and merge her soul with those of the machines that built the world. The mortification of the flesh.

Taasmin Mandella passed beyond humanity. Her parents could not touch her, Dominic Frontera's attempts to order modesty of dress were ignored. Only the inner symphony mattered, the cascade of saintly voices pointing the way through the veil of flesh to heaven's gate. It was the way the Blessed Lady had walked before her, and if that walk meant earning the disgusted stares of the newcomers to Desolation Road, the farmers and shop owners and mechanics and railroad staff, then that was the price of it. They saw her ugly, these new faces from Iron Mountain and Llangonnedd, New Merionedd and Grand Valley, they whispered so behind her back. She saw herself beautiful beyond words, beautiful in spirit.

One day in the month of July, when the summer sun was at its peak and the noontime heat cracked pebbles and shattered rooftiles, Dominic Frontera came hot and sweaty to Taasmin Mandella, perched high like a leather bird on the red rim rocks.

"This can't go on," he told her. "The town is growing, there are new people coming in all the time: the Merchandanis, the Pentecost sisters, the Chungs, the Axamenides, the Smiths: what kind of place are they going to think this is where girls ... women wander around naked all day, stinking like a hog wallow? It won't do, Taasmin."

Taasmin Mandella stared straight ahead of her at the horizon, eyes narrowed against the glare.

"Look, we have to do something. Right? Good. Now, how you say you come back with me to your parents, or if you don't want that, Ruthie'll look after you, have a bath, get cleaned up, put on some pretty clothes, eh? How would that be?"

A gust of wind carried a waft of fetor over Dominic Frontera. He gagged.

"Taasmin, Desolation Road is not what it was and we can't go back to what it was. It's growing, reaching for the Fourteenth Decade. We can't accept certain kinds of behaviour. Now, are you coming?"

Without breaking her stare, Taasmin Mandella said, "No." She had not spoken for fifty-five days prior to that word and the speaking of it disgusted her. Dominic Frontera stood, shrugged, and climbed down from the rim rocks to what remained of his siesta. The same night Taasmin Mandella took herself away from the people of the 13th Decade and wandered far along the bluffs until she found a cave where water trickled up from the subterranean ocean. Here she dwelt for ninety days, by day sleeping and praying, by night walking twelve kilometres to Desolation Road to raid the 13th Decaders' gardens. When dogs and shotguns began to appear, she felt the divine call to take herself farther away, and one bright morning she walked and walked and walked into the Great Desert, walked and walked until she had passed out of the desert of red sand into the desert of red stone. There she found a stone pillar upon which to stylitize herself, a needle of rock to impale herself. That night she slept at the base of the stone column that pointed her way to the Five Heavens and for moisture licked the dew that had settled on her naked body. From dawn to dusk of that day she climbed the stone pillar; lithe and agile as a desert lizard. The splintered nails, the torn toes, the blistered fingers, the shredded flesh: all meant as little to her as the hunger in her belly; all beautiful little mortifications, petty victories over the flesh.

For three days she sat crosslegged atop the red rock pillar, neither sleeping nor eating, drinking nor making the least movement, driving the body's scream down down down, out out out. Upon the morning of the fourth day Taasmin Mandella moved. In the long night. she dreamed she had turned to stone but in the morning she moved. Not a great movement, only a swivelling of dry eyeballs to behold a cloud passing out of the south, a solitary dark cloud shot through with lightnings. From this cloud came a sound like that of a swarm of furious bees. As it drew nearer, Taasmin Mandella saw that it was composed of many tiny particles in desperate motion, indeed like a swarm of insects. Nearer drew the cloud, nearer still, and she saw to her astonishment (Taasmin Mandella yet being remotely capable of some human emotion) that the cloud consisted of thousands upon thousands of angelic beings beating their holy way through the upper air. They were similar to the angel freed by Rajandra Das from Adam Black's Chautauqua and were supported in their flight by a bewildering diversity of wings, vanes, rockets, airfoils, propellors, balloons, rotors and jet engines. The angel host swept past her out of the South, so many of them that they might be looping high into the tropopause to parade past again. Then out of the buzzing cloud loomed a massive device, a boxy flying object glittering blue and silver, a full kilometre long. In its peculiar construction it reminded Taasmin of the pictures of rikshas and autocars she had seen in her mother's picture books. Upon its blunt prow was a chromium grin of a grille bearing the title "Plymouth" in letters as tall as Taasmin Mandella. Beneath the grille was a rectangular shield, bright blue, with the legend lettered in yellow: STATE OF BARSOOM ST. CATH