Desolation Road (34 page)

"Up here, the view is better," suggested Inspiration Cadillac, hastening Taasmin Mandella up a flight of stone steps onto a balcony. Beyond the encirclement of puzzled citizens, Taasmin Mandella could see machine limbs catching the evening sun. The Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption knelt beside the chain-link fence that surrounded the Bethlehem Ares Steel construction site. The air was filled with the humming of their binary mantras, and their ungainly arms moved in cranelike gestures of fervent devotion. Every few seconds a Poor Child would leave his place in the congregation and, in blatant disregard of the warning notices that the wire was electrified, press his metal prostheses to the mesh. Electricity sparked, the worshipper groaned and flexed in religious ecstasy. Then he returned to his place and resumed the chant of 10111010101111000001101101010 while another took his place.

"What are they doing?" asked Taasmin Mandella.

"I would think it is obvious, Lady. They are worshipping."

"A construction site?"

"Apparently a prophecy has been circulating among the lower orders in Faith City. This prophecy claims that what the Bethlehem Ares Corporation is constructing here is no less than the birthplace, if it is the right expression, of the Steel Messiah, the Liberator, the Machine with the Heart of a Man who will deliver the machines from their millennial bondage to the flesh."

"And that is why they are worshipping ... a pile of foundations and earthworks?"

Beyond the wire an off-clocking shift of construction workers paused to stare at the adoring Dumbletonians.

"Precisely. The site is holy, a place of veneration and worship."

Taasmin Mandella looked again upon the steady stream of Poor Children going joyfully forth to immolate themselves upon the electrified wire.

"It's sick," she whispered.

A voice from the crowd of townfolk cried out.

"Look! It's her! The Grey Lady!"

Heads turned, fingers pointed. The Poor Children froze in their Adoration of the Wire and swivelled metal eyeballs toward the balcony. A young woman with a metal chest and left leg stood up and screamed.

"A message! Give us a message!"

The chant spread instantaneously across the congregation.

"Message! Message! Give us a message! Message! Message! Give us a message!"

Five thousand eyes crucified Taasmin Mandella.

"They await your leadership, Lady," wheedled Inspiration Cadillac.

"I can't," whispered Taasmin Mandella. "It's disgusting. Sick, idolatry. ... It's not true spirituality, true worship ... it must stop."

"You are their leader, their spiritual head, their shepherd, guide and conscience. You must lead them."

The chanting rose to a frenzy. The ground shook beneath two and a half thousand pounding fists.

"No! I refuse! It's an abomination! I'm not God that I desire their worship I detest it. I didn't ask you to follow me, I am the servant of the Blessed Lady, not the Dumbletonians, I'm a child of the Panarch, not the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption." She tried to bite back the words but they flew from her lips like sweet birds. "Or you, Ewan P. Dumbleton!"

Suddenly she did not hear the chanting or feel the force of the Poor Children's demands. She looked into Inspiration Cadillac's fleshly eye and saw such hatred burning there that she gasped.

-Has he always hated me so? she thought, and realized even as she thought it that yes, he had, from the moment he had taken her hand in the pit by the railroad line, Inspiration Cadillac had hated and envied her because she was the true vessel of God, not self-shaped and self-justified as he was. He envied her spirituality, for all he could afford was a weary worldliness masquerading in the robes of holiness. He envied her and hated her and dedicated his every waking moment to manipulating, corrupting and ultimately controlling her.

"How you must hate me," she whispered.

"Pardon, Lady? I did not quite hear that. What message will you give to your people? They await you." His voice was hard with hypocrisy.

Taasmin Mandella clenched her left fist. Her halo brightend to an intense blue and could not be hidden from the watching eyes.

"We are enemies, Inspiration Cadillac, Ewan Dumbleton, whatever you call yourself: you are my enemy and the enemy of God."

"That is the message you wish to give your people?" The chanting pounded on her spirit.

"Yes! No! Tell them this; I was chosen by St. Catherine to be her emissary to the world of men, that after seven hundred years of being the Saint of Machines she now wishes to point men to God. To God, not to a factory. Tell that to your faithful."

She strode from the balcony and returned to her private quarters. It felt good to have an enemy as well as a friend. After years of non-achievement she felt purposeful and puissant. She was a crusader for God, a fighter of the good fight, an angel with a flaming sword. That felt good. Very good, better than any prophet of the Blessed Lady should allow a feeling to feel.

very morning at eleven minutes of eleven Arnie Tenebrae would stand on the end of her bed so that she could see the three things beyond the bars on her window. In order of perspective they were an orange tree in a terracotta pot, thirty-six kilometres of dry Stampos, and one blue sky. None of these three things ever changed in the slightest, but every day at eleven minutes of eleven Arnie Tenebrae stood on her bed not because she found those three items in the least bit interesting but because Migli had expressly forbidden her to stand on her bed (fear of hanging, she surmised) and as he arrived promptly every day at twelve minutes of eleven she liked to gain some petty victory before the indignation of the daily rehabilitation sessions.

"Miss Tenebrae, please, ah, don't stand on the bed. The, ah, warders don't like it."

Sky was blue. Stampos brown and orange tree dusty green. She could get down now.

"Morning, Migli." "Migli" was Prakesh Merchandani-Singhalong, rehabilitation psychologist at the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre: small, brown, mousy, flustered, clumsy with tape recorder and notebooks, he could be nothing but a Migli.

"What's it today, Migli?"

He experimented with various arrangements of tapes, recorder and notebooks on the table.

"I, ah, thought we might, ah, continue from where we left off yesterday."

"Where were we?" These talk sessions were a waste of government time and money. She suspected Migli felt the same, but the charade must be played out with all the busy jottings-down and lies little and not so little that the game demanded.

"Your early days with the North West Quartersphere Truth Corps, the, ah, various sexual, ah, liaisons with its members." Migli leered owlishly through his bottle-end spectacles. Arnie Tenebrae folded her hands and sat back on the bed. She opened her mouth and let the lies flow.

"Well, after I'd had about half a year on the Truth Corps-it was okay but kind of boring-the romance wore off and it was just long hot dusty trike rides and a couple of days in some ass-end village plugged into the telecommunications net: it wouldn't have been so bad if we'd actually got to record the music. But all that travelling, I got bike-itch between my legs; what I really wanted was to get onto an Active Service Unit."

"And what did you do?" Migli leaned forward eagerly. He'd probably already heard this from the interrogation tapes. Arnie Tenebrae stretched an arm to scratch the back of her nails against the plaster.

"Invited Paschal O'Hare, Commander North West Quartersphere Brigade, to sample the sweet joys of my nine-year-old body behind the communications shack at Oblivionville HQ. He was resupplying at NWQHQ same time we were and the opportunity was just too good to miss. Have you any idea how good a lover he was?" Migli slavered in classic Pavlovian fashion. Arnie Tenebrae was disgusted that a graduate of the Universuum of Lyx should be so credulous of her tale of seduction and khaki sex. Nothing of what she had described had ever happened, but Migli did not really want to know that. She had indeed met Paschal O'Hare at Oblivionville and traded all Dr. Alimantando's secrets for a place on an active service unit and only dribbled her sordid tale of sexual humiliation, torture, deprivation, torment and discipline to titillate Migli. For a rehabilitative psychologist he was very much in need of some of his own therapy. Spotty deviate. She described her three months combat training in graphic detail while in the cinema of the imagination she reviewed the reality. Months of sitting on hands, of cold winter bivouacs in the Ecclesiastes Mountains, of boredom and dysentery and diving for slit trenches every time an aircraft passed overhead.

"And what happened then?" asked Migli, vicariously high on death and glory.

"It'll keep for tomorrow," said prisoner Tenebrae. "Time's up." Migli glanced at his watch and scooped up his armfuls of tape recorders, notebooks and pens.

"Same time tomorrow, Migli?"

"Yes, and, ah ..."

"Don't stand on the bed."

But she was standing on the bed same time tomorrow, and Migli's small tantrum of temper pleased her so much she closed her eyes and extemporized a lengthy and glorious fantasia on her first year's active service for the Whole Earth Army, a spectacular of gun battles, bombings, ambushes, bank robberies, kidnappings, assassination and diverse atrocities in places with euphonious names like Jatna Ridge, Hotwater Valley, Naramanga Plain and Chromiumville. But when Migli was gone and she sat on her bed weaving cat's cradles from her bootlaces, she remembered the way Group Leader Heuh Linh's blood had leaked away through her fingers into the muddy foxhole at Superstition Mountain. She remembered how, with his death all over her hands, she had looked up from the red mud to see the Black Mountain Militia charging, charging charging, their mouths wide wide open. She remembered the fear that had smelled like the blood on her hands and the shit in her pants and had driven her fear-crazy with its howling until she dragged up the MRCW and screamed and fired and screamed and fired until the fear was gone and it was still. She hadn't wanted the promotion. The citation had read "Gallantry against overwhelming odds" but she knew that it was the fear that had made her shoot. It was not until several months later that she discovered that Paschal O'Hare's first raid with the new fieldinducer weaponry had been a turkey shoot and the citation had been his way of thanking her. Sub-major of the Deuteronomy division. Cat's cradling in her cell in the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, she couldn't even remember what she had done with the medal.

On the third day Migli came again with his tapes and his notebooks. Arnie Tenebrae was sitting on her bed.

"Not at the, ah, window today?" His attempts at sarcasm were puny.

"Haven't seen what I'm looking for yet." She had decided that today she would tell nothing but the truth. There was no satisfaction in lying when only she knew she was lying. "Today, Migli, I am going to tell you about the raid on the Cosmobad landing guidance system. Got enough tape? Enough paper? Batteries all right? Wouldn't want you to miss any of this." She sat back against the wall, closed her eyes, and began her tale.

"Orders came down from the regional command for a major offensive during the planetary assembly elections. After the battle of Smith's Shack several of the Deuteronomy division's command levels got knocked out-we didn't have F. I. weapon systems yet-and I was left in charge of the fifth and sixth brigades. Because we hadn't been issued the new equipment, we thought, I thought, we'd aim for a low-level target, namely, the landing guidance systems at Cosmobad. They drop off the Skywheel on remote, so if we knocked out the guidance radars, no shuttles would be coming in at Belladonna. We synchronized our action with the others in the sector and moved into position at Cosmobad."

The raid had been adeptly planned and flawlessly executed. At twelve minutes of twelve the 65 radar beacons were destroyed by mines and the guidance computer scrambled with a hunter-killer program bought from the Exalted Families. All ground-to-orbit communications in the Belladonna landing sector were hopelessly scrambled. It had been beautiful, not with the beauty of yellow explosions and collapsing towers, but the intellectual inherent beauty of something done right. Platoon leaders reported all primary targets destroyed. Arnie Tenebrae gave the order to withdraw and disperse. Her own command group, Group 27, had retreated toward the town of Clarksgrad and ran straight into A and C Company of the New Merionedd Volunteers who had been on manoeuvres in the area. The firefight had been short and bloody. She remembered she hadn't fired a single shot during the brief engagement. She had been too stunned by her own stupidity for not checking the military presence in the area to even raise her MRCW. Group 27 sustained 82 percent casualties before Sub-major Tenebrae surrendered.