Desolation Road (30 page)

Limaal Mandella pulled the blinds, called the guard, and after the first stop at Cathedral Oaks there were no further disturbances.

he cylinder of rolled documents hung from Mikal Margolis's shoulder twentyfive centimetres above the track. Mikal Margolis hung from the underside of a Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 airconditioned first class carriage. The Bethlehem Ares Railroad Mark 12 airconditioned first class carriage hung from the underside of Nova Columbia and Nova Columbia hung from the backside of the world as it circled the sun at two million kilometres per hour, carrying Nova Columbia, railroad, carriage, Mikal Margolis and document cylinder with it.

Ishiwara junction was half a world away. His arms were tough now, they could carry him all the world's way around the sun hanging from the undersides of trains. He no longer felt the pain, of arms and Ishiwara Junction. He was beginning to suspect that he had a selective memory. Hanging beneath trains gave him much time for thought and self-examination. On the first such occasion after Ishiwara junction he had devised the scheme that had drawn him down the shining rails across junctions, switchovers, points, ramps and midnight marshalling yards toward the city of Kershaw. There was an irresistible attraction of dark for dark. The roll of papers across his shoulders would not permit him any other destiny.

He shifted to the least uncomfortable position and tried to picture the city of Kershaw. His imagination filled the great black cube with cavernous shopping malls where the exquisite artifacts of a thousand workshops commanded eye and purse; level upon level of recreation centres where every whim could be indulged from games of Go in secluded tea houses to concertos by the world's greatest Sinfonia to basements filled with glycerine and soft rubber. There would be museums and auditoria, Bohemian artists' quarters, a thousand restaurants representing the world's thousand gastronomies and covered parks so cleverly designed you could believe you were walking under open sky.

He could see the clanging foundries where the proud locomotives of the Bethlehem Ares Railroad Company were constructed, and the Central Depot from which they were dispatched all across the northern half of the world and the subterranean chemical plants that bubbled their effluent into the lake of Syss and the factory-farms where strains of artificial bacteria were skimmed from tanks of sewage to be processed into the thousand restaurants' thousand cuisines. He thought of the rainfall traps and the brilliantly economical systems of water reclamation and purification, he thought of the air shafts up which perpetual hurricanes spiralled, the dirty breath of two million Shareholders exhaled into the atmosphere. He imagined the outer skin penthouses of the managerial castes, their views of Syss and its grimy shore increasingly panoramic with altitude, and the apartments in the quiet family residential districts opening onto bright and breezy lightwells. He thought of the children, happy and well-scrubbed, in the Company schools learning the joyful lessons of industrial feudalism, which was not hard for them, he thought, for they were surrounded every second of every day by its pinnacle of achievement. Suspended beneath the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service, Mikal Margolis beheld the whole of the works of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation in his soul-eye and cried aloud, "Well, Kershaw, here I am!"

Then the first acid breaths of Syss caught at his throat and blinded his eyes with tears.

There is a level lower than the level of machine drudgery at which Johnny Stalin entered the capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. It is the level reserved for those who ride into the Central Depot hanging from the bottom of the first class section of the Nova Columbia Night Service. It is the level of the unnumbered. It is the level of invisibility. Not the practiced invisibility that enabled Mikal Margolis to escape from the Central Depot undetected among the masses of Company Shareholders, but the invisibility of the individual before the body corporate.

Up a flight of marble steps, through brass doors ten times the height of a man, Mikal Margolis found himself in a cavernous hall of shining marble and polished hush. Before him was a very large and ugly statue of Winged Victory bearing the legend "Laborare est Orate." Several kilometres distant across the marble plains stood a marble desk above which hung a sign reading INTERVIEWS, APPOINTMENTS AND AUDIENCES ENQUIRIES. Mikal Margolis's trainscuffed shoes clattered vulgarly on the sacred marble. The fat man in the Company paper suit stared down at him from behind the marble rampart.

"Yes?"

"I'd like to make an appointment."

"Yes?"

"I'd like to see someone in industrial development."

"That would be the Regional Developments Offices."

"To do with steel."

"Regional Developments Offices, iron and steel division."

"In the Desolation Road area ... the Great Desert, you know?"

"One moment." The fat receptionist tapped at his computer. "North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Office, iron and steel division, Regional Developments Offices, Room 156302, please join line A for your preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary." He handed Mikal Margolis a slip of paper. "Your number: 33,256. Line A through those doors."

"But this is important!" Mikal Margolis waved the roll of documents under the receptionist's nose. "I can't wait for 33,255 other people to go ahead of me just for some ... some application to see some undersecretary."

"Preliminary application for a preliminary application for an appointment with the sub-sub-planning department undersecretary. Well, if it's that urgent, sir, you should join line B, for an application for the Priority Clearance Programme." He tore off a fresh numbered strip. "There. Number 2304. Door B please."

Mikal Margolis ripped both numbers into shreds and tossed them into the air.

"Get me an appointment, now, for tomorrow at the very latest."

"That is quite impossible. The earliest appointment is next Octember, the sixteenth, to be precise, with the water and sewage treatment manager, at 13:30 hours. You can't throw the system about, sir, it's for the good of us all. Now, here is a new number. Give me yours so I know who wants an appointment, and go and join line B."

"Pardon?"

"Give me your number and go and join Line B."

"Number?"

"Shareholder's number. You have a Shareholder's number?"

"Then you'll have a temporary visitor's visa. Could I have that, please?"

"I don't have a temporary ..." The fat receptionist's outraged shriek turned heads all the way across the marble cathedral.

"No number! No visa! Holy Lady, you're one of those ... one of those ..." Bells began to ring. Black and gold Company policemen appeared from unnoticed doors and advanced. Mikal Margolis looked for a place to run.

"Arrest this, this gutter boy, this tramp, this freebooter, goondah and bum!" screamed the receptionist. "Arrest this ... Freelancer!" Thick foam sprayed from his mouth. The police drew short shock-staves and charged.

A sudden explosion of automatic fire threw everyone to the ground. The customary shrieker in such events shrieked. A figure in a grey paper suit stood by the door to line A, intimidating the lobby with a small black MRCW.

"Nobody move!" he shouted. Nobody moved. "Get over here!"

Mikal Margolis looked around for someone else the gunman could have meant. He pointed at himself, mouthing the word me?

"Yes, you! Get over here! Move!" One of the Company policemen must have reached for his communicator, for another burst of fire sent marble chips screaming and whining. Mikal Margolis stood up sheepishly. The gunman motioned for him to come around by the side, leaving clear his field of fire.

"What's happening?" asked Mikal Margolis.

"You're being rescued," said the gunman in the business suit. "Now, whatever happens, follow me and don't bother me with any questions." From an inside pocket he flipped a smoke grenade into the lobby. "Run."

Mikal Margolis did not know how far he ran, along how many marble, oak or plastic corridors: he just ran, with the high stepping gait of one expecting a bullet in the spine at any moment. When the sounds of search and pursuit were sufficiently remote, the rescuer stopped and opened a section of plastic wall panelling with a rather clever tool.

"In here."

"Here?"

The sounds of search and pursuit suddenly increased.

"In here." The two men dived into the wall cavity and sealed the wall behind them. The rescuer thumbed the laser setting on his MRCW to random emission and by its blue light led Mikal Margolis through a jungle of cables, ducts, pipes and conduits.

"Mind that," he said as Mikal Margolis reached for a cable to steady himself after teetering at the lip of a two kilometre airshaft. "There's twenty thousand volts going through that." Mikal Margolis snatched back his hand as if from a snake, or a cable carrying twenty thousand volts.

"Just who are you?" he asked.

"Arpe Magnusson, Systems Service Engineer."

"With an MRCW?"

"Freelance," said the systems service engineer, as if that word explained everything. "See those glowing dust motes there, mind them. There's a communications laser in there. Take your head clean off, it would."

"Freelance?"

"An independent in the closed Company economy. Term of abuse. See, like you, I wanted to see someone in the Company, I had this great idea for revolutionizing the Kershaw airconditioning system, but no one wanted to see me, not without a number or a visa. So I came here, behind the walls, because you don't need numbers back here, and joined the Freelancers. That was about four years back."

"There's more than one of you?"

"About two thousand. There's places in this cube don't appear on any Company schematics. Time to time, I do some independent work for the Shareholders; domestic stuff mainly, something breaks, things are always breaking, Company policy, built-in failure rate, and they're not keen on repairing things, better for the Company if you buy new, so they pass the word and I come and fix it. Also, I keep a look out at Enquiries there for potential Freelancers: every so often someone like you turns up and I get them away behind walls."

"With an MRCW?"

"First time I've ever had to use it. Bit slow getting to you, the computer almost missed tracking that call to the police. Watch the draft from that ventilator ... it's not easy living here, but if you make it past the first twelve months, you're all right." Magnusson turned and extended a hand to Mikal Margolis. "Welcome to the Freelancers, friend."

Between pitfalls, acid, chemical waste, power blackouts and electrocution, the months that followed were the happiest of Mikal Margolis's life. He was in constant danger, from both the perils between the walls and the sporadic raids of Company Kleenteems and had never felt more comfortable or relaxed. This was what he had dreamed of in his long sojourns on the desert rim. Life was brutish, dangerous and wonderful. The Freelancers' computer, Jitney, which lived in their headquarters, a web of support cables stretched across Airshaft 19, provided him with the identity number of dead Shareholders and thus equipped, Mikal Margolis could eat with impunity in any Company refectory in the city, bathe in Company bath houses, dress in Company paper suits dispensed from street-corner slot machines, and even sleep in a Company bed until the Company withdrew the deceased's number from circulation. At such times he would return to the world of the crawlways and access shafts and doze in his hammock suspended over a kilometre-deep airwell, rocked with the breathings of a hundred thousand Shareholders.

When the alarm came he almost vaulted out of his hammock. But for his Freelancer-trained wits, he would have jumped straight down the airwell. He paused to gain composure. Composure was survival. Think before you act. Forethought, no spontaneity. He checked that the roll of documents was on his shoulder, then seized the swing rope and tarzaned to the lip of the shaft. Proximity alarms. Kleenteems. The backlog of complaints about vermin in the circuitry had built up until the department of water and sewage treatment was pressured into action. He felt for his gas mask. It was exactly where he had left it. He slipped it on and swung up into a major power conduit running parallel to the service duct. Thousands of amperes pulsed next to his cheek. He squinted through a chink in the cladding and watched the clouds of riot gas roll down the tunnel.