Desolation Road (8 page)

Another such fool was Mikal Margolis. Because of his mother, he had never been happy in love. Once his mother announced her engagement, he became happy in love, happy with enthusiastic, vivacious, voracious Persis Tatterdemalion. Then Morton and Maiya Quinsana stepped down from the weekly supply train from Meridialt Mikal Margolis had been collecting beer barrels and crates of spirits from the station, when he noticed the tall, strong woman walking down the platform with the natural grace and implied power of a hunting cat. Their eyes had met and then passed on, but in the flicker of contact Mikal Margolis felt a shock of spinal electricity fuse the base of his heart, where all decency and honesty lay, into thick black glass. He loved her. He could not think of anything else but that he loved her.

When Dr. Alimantando gave the Quinsanas a cave, he had rushed to help build them a home. "Hey, what about the polishing, what about cleaning some glasses?" Persis Tatterdemalion had demanded. Mikal Margolis waved and went. When Dr. Alimantando gave the Quinsanas an allotment, Mikal Margolis came and ditched, dyked, and dammed until the moonring sparkled like diamonds. "How about serving a few drinks?" said Persis Tatterdemalion. "How about making some dinner for these hungry people?" And when Morton Quinsana and his sister came to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, he gave them each a bowl of hot lamb pilaf and as much complimentary beer as they could drink, then joked and chattered with them until closing time. When a chicken fell sick in the hotel even though it was destined for that night's pot, it was taken all the same to Marya Quinsana, who poked it and probed it with her skilled fingers while Mikal Margolis fantasized about her fingers doing the same thing to him. A lot of Margolis's and Tatterdemalion's animals fell ill that autumn.

Yet Mikal Margolis was not happy. He oscillated between the love of a good woman and the love of a bad woman, like a little quartz crystal ticking away time. Persis Tatterdemalion, worldly and innocent as an eagle upon the sky, asked him if he was sick. Mikal Margolis groaned a groan of pure frustrated lust.

"Maybe you should go and see someone, love, your mind hasn't been on your work these past few days. What about that lady vet, eh? I mean, humans are just another kind of animal, aren't they? She might be able to help."

Mikal Margolis turned to look at Persis Tatterdemalion.

"You're kidding, aren't you?"

"No. Straight up."

Mikal Margolis groaned all the louder.

As for Marya Quinsana, she did not care. Exactly that, she did not care, she had nothing but contempt for anyone weak enough to love her. She despised her fool of a brother, she despised that silly boy who ran the bar. Yet she could not resist a challenge. She would win that silly boy away from the doting simpleton he lived and loved with. It was the game, the game; the pieces don't matter in the game, the mind that moves them is what is important; that and the winning, for in winning she came to despise the losers all the more. With one inspired gambit she could triumph over both Mikal Margolis and her damned brother. Then she could at last break away from him and let the world hear her name. "Look after Morton" had been the dying words of her iron mother; "look after him, take care of him, let him think he's making all the decisions but ensure he makes none. Marya, I command it."

Take care of Morton, take care of Morton; yes, she had been faithful to her mother's will for five years now. She had followed him out into the desert after that affair with the little girl in the park, but the time must come, Mother, when Morton stands alone, and on that morning she would be on the first train to Wisdom.

That was why there were the games. They amused her, they kept her sane through the five years of Morton's growing infatuation, they gave her hope that through them she would be strong enough to step on that morning train to Wisdom. Oh, yes, the games kept her sane. So she contrived to be out feeding her chickens at the same time every day as Mikal Margolis across the alley in the backyard of the B.A.R./Hotel was feeding his. It was the game that made her ask him to come and look at her methane digester to see why it wasn't working properly, though Rajandra Das would have done the job better. "Chemical problems, miss," said Mikal Margolis, "someone's dumped a load of used sterilant into it and inhibited the bacteriophages." Marya Quinsana smiled. She had poured three bottles of surgery sterilizing fluid into the tank just that morning. The game was going well. Out of gratitude she invited him in for drinks, then conversation, then bed (all the while Mikal Margolis trembled like a reed), then sex.

And in that bed were the seeds of Desolation Road's destruction spilled.

he trouble between Stalins and Tenebraes began when they discovered that they had been sold the same piece of land in the idyllic, paradise town of Desolation Road by Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum, formerly land agent of the Vencatatchalum Immigration and Settlement Bureau, currently sitting in a white room facing questions on complicity to defraud from Inspector Djien Xhao-Pin of the Bleriot Constabulary. Not only had Stalins and Tenebraes been sold the same piece of land (which was not Mr. E. P. Vencatatchalum's to sell in the first place), they had also been double-booked for the same sleeping compartment on the 19:19 Solstice Landing Night Service, calling at North Ben's Town, Annency, Murchesonville, New Enterprise, Wollamurra Station and Desolation Road. Neither family would give way to the other. The sleeping car attendant locked himself in his cabin and turned his wireless up loud. They could settle their own disputes. No one got much sleep in car 36 of the Solstice Landing Night Service. Five people, with five people's luggage, were trying to live in a sleeping compartment for three, with three people's luggage. The first night only little Johnny Stalin, aged 3%, had a bed to himself. That was because he was a highly strung fat little bulb of a boy who would have screamed and screamed and screamed himself sick if he had not got a bed to himself. His mother acquiesced and popped him three or four adult-dosage sleeping pills to keep him quiet and docile. Johnny Stalin was a spoiled, junkie, highly strung fat little bulb of a boy.

The next day passed in bristle silence until Gaston Tenebrae cleared his throat at fourteen o'clock precisely and suggested it might be a good idea if everyone slept shifts. He and his wife, Genevieve, would sit up all night and sleep all day if the Stalins would sit up all day and sleep all night.

The arrangement seemed equable at first. Then the simple, unkind logistics of the sleeping compartment took command. One bed would have to be folded down to form seats for the two to sit upon, which left three bodies in two beds. Then there would be three sitting and two sleeping in comfort. Mr. and Mrs. Stalin thrashed and grumbled in their tightly constricted bed, little Johnny snored asthmatically, and Gaston and Genevieve Tenebrae held little private, loving arguments, with much whispered fury and small, aggressive hand gestures as the train clashed and clanked and reversed and split to form new trains and by such fits and starts drew ever nearer to Desolation Road.

The scrambled changeover from seat to bed on the morning of the third day saw the formal commencement of hostilities. Genevieve Tenebrae accused young Johnny Stalin of trying to peer up her skirt as she climbed the steps to the upper berth. Mr. Stalin accused Gaston Tenebrae of rifling his luggage while his family were supposedly asleep. Gaston Tenebrae accused Mr. Stalin of making improper advances to his pretty wife in the line for the second-class washroom. Mrs. Stalin accused Mrs. Tenebrae of cheating at bezique. Flurries of bickering broke out, like the flurries of snow that precede the big winter; and it was the fourth day and fourth night.

"Desolation Road!" called the cabin attendant, come out of hiding and tapping on the door with a silver pencil. Tap tap tap. "Desolation Road! Three minutes!" Tap tap tap.

Anarchy paradoxically reigned for two minutes thirty seconds as Stalins and Tenebraes got up got washed got dressed collected bags books valuables, bulbous sons and crammed slammed jammed down the narrow corridors and out through the narrow door into the thin wide sunshine of seven o'clock in the morning. All this without once looking out the windows to see where they were, which was a pity, because if they had, then they might not have got off the train. But when they did look, they saw, "Green meadows .. said Mr. Stalin.

"Rich farmlands, ripe for the plough," said Gaston Tenebrae.

"The air soft with the perfume of a million blossoms," said Mrs. Stalin.

"A serene, tranquil heaven on earth," said Genevieve Tenebrae.

Johnny Stalin looked at the glaring white adobe and the baked red earth, the sun-bright flickers of the solar collectors and the stark skeletons of the pump gantries. Then he screwed up his face like a wet sponge about to be wrung dry and prepared for a screaming tantrum.

"Ma!" he wailed. "I don't ..." Mrs. Stalin fetched him a stunning crack across the left ear. He wailed all the more furiously and that was the cue for Stalins and Tenebraes to release upon each other a barrage of blistering invective which left scorch marks on close-by walls. Johnny Stalin waddled away to be alone with his misery, unheeded and therefore unloved. Limaal and Taasmin Mandella found him sitting huffily beside the main methane digester as they scampered on their way to find something new to play on a new day.

"Hello," said Limaal. "You're new."

"What's your name?" said Taasmin, forty-eight seconds older than her brother.

"Johnny Stalin," said Johnny Stalin.

"You going to be here a long time?"

"Think so."

"Then we'll show you where there is to play here," said Taasmin, and the two quick, lithe children took pale and blubbery Johnny Stalin by the hand and showed him the wonderful hog wallow, the water pumps, the irrigation channels where you could sail toy boats, the pens where Rael Mandella kept the baby animals born from his germ-kit, and the berry bushes, where you could eat until you were sick and nobody would mind, not one bit. They showed him Dr. Alimantando's house, and Dr. Alimantando, who was very tall and very old and very nice in a rather scary way, and Dr. Alimantando took the mud-shit-water-and-berry stained boy back to his still squabbling parents and made them permanent residents of Desolation Road. The first two nights they spent in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel while Dr. Alimantando pondered what to do with them. Finally he summoned his most trusted friends and advisors; Mr. Jericho, Rael Mandella and Rajandra Das, and together, aided by Mr. Jericho's Exalted Ancestors, reached a decision of stunning simplicity.

Desolation Road was too small to afford big-city luxuries like warring families. Stalins and Tenebraes must learn to live together. Therefore Dr. Alimantando gave them houses next door to each other and allotments with a long common border and only one wind-pump. Pleased with his Solomonic wisdom, Dr. Alimantando returned to his weatherroom and his studies of time, space and everything.

ell me again, Father, why are we going to this place?"