Desolation Road

48

At six minutes of six the sirens blew. They blew every morning at six minutes of six, but that was not what was different about this morning. Up and down the radiating streets buff-colored doors burst open and poured labour units into the dawn. But that was not really any different from any other morning. What was different was that for every door that opened five stayed shut. Where on any other day a river of steelworkers had poured into the canyon streets of Steeltown, a trickle passed under the archway proclaiming the Three Economic Ideals of the Company: Profit, Empire, Industry. Where on any other day two hundred trucks would have bounced arrogantly through the narrow laneways of Desolation Road, today less than forty made the clangorous trip dodging children, houses and llamas. Where a hundred draglines had once trawled, only ten worked, where fifty bucketwheelers had scooped the scabs from the skin of the Great Desert there were today only five and it was the same from the locomotive sheds to the hell-mouth converters to the ’lighters shut up in their underground hangars.

All because it was strike day.

Strike day! Strike day! Strike day!

Rael Mandella Jr. called his strike committee to order around his mother’s kitchen table. There were congratulations, brief eulogies and declarations of resolution. Then Rael Jr. asked for reports.

“Strike pay’s good for three months,” said Mavda Arondello. “Plus pledges of support from bodies as diverse as the Spoonmakers’ Guild of Llangonedd and the Little Sisters of Tharsis.”

“Nothing much to report on the picketing front,” said B. J. Amritraj. “Company security is still itchy on the trigger. We have to keep a low profile.”

“Intelligence reports that the Company’s already putting out tenders for scab labour, it might be possible to nip this one in the bud by picketing in the major towns and cities, B.J., smuggle out some agitators.” Ari Osnan, chief of intelligence, folded his fat arms and sat back.

“Production down sixty percent,” said Harper Tew. “Within three days all current steel stock will be expended and they’ll have to shut down at least three furnaces. In a week there won’t be a pin’s worth of steel coming out of Steeltown.”

“Action Group, nothing to report.”

Rael Mandella Jr. stared long and hard at Winston Karamatzov.

“What do you mean, nothing to report?”

“Nothing to report: yet. If the scabs come, maybe then I’ll have something to report.”

“Explain please.” Winston Karamatzov just shrugged and Rael Mandella Jr. closed the meeting feeling faintly troubled in his heart.

Next morning all electricity, gas and water was cut off to the homes of striking steelworkers.

“The Company strikes back,” said Rael Mandella Jr. to his strike committee. Santa Ekatrina flitted about her kitchen, happy and singing, baking little ricecakes.

“You’re not going to let them get away with that,” she twittered.

The local Concordat cadres within Steeltown responded magnificently.

“We shall steal power from the Company to cook our meals, we shall run water from Desolation Road, by bucket-chain if we must, and we shall go to bed at dusk and rise at dawn as our grandfathers did,” they said. Midnight engineers ran plastic pipes under the wire and pumped water from the buried ocean out of street-corner stand-pipes into buckets. Armed security guards passed warily by, unwilling to provoke any incident. Santa Ekatrina turned the Mandella hacienda into a soup kitchen and persuaded Eva away from her tapestry history of Desolation Road to stir vast kettles of stew and rice.

“You’ve been weaving history for long enough; now you can actually be in it,” she told her mother-in-law. A ghostly film of white rice-starch settled over the room and quite surprised Limaal Mandella on one of his increasingly rare returns from his hermitage at the top of Dr. Alimantando’s house.

“What is going on?”

“A strike is going on,” sang Santa Ekatrina, never so happy as when ladling out bowls of lentil curry to a long line of strikers. The curry-eating steelworkers pointed at Limaal Mandella and muttered in recognition.

“Child of grace, not even my own house is sacred!” he exclaimed, and shut himself up in Dr. Alimantando’s house to delve deeper into the mysteries of time and temporality.

Rael Jr. and his strike committee watched the first of the food consignments arrive at Desolation Road. On the far side of the railroad tracks Gallaceili/Mandella Land Developments had marked off several hectares with orange plastic tape preparatory to construction of a big new housing complex for the town’s projected population mushroom. The orange grid squares made a perfect landing field for the three chartered relief ’lighters to set down and offload thirty tons of assorted comestibles.

“Sign here,” said the pilot, proffering a bill of receipt and a pencil to Rael Mandella Jr. The supplies were passed by human chain to the storehouse of the new Mandella and Das Hot Snacks and Savouries Emporium. The crates and boxes bore the stencilled names of their donors: the Little Sisters of Tharsis, Great Southern Railroads, the Argyre Separatists, the Friends of the Earth, the Poor Madeleines.

“What does this do to the strike fund?” asked Rael Jr., counting off crates of cabbages, lentils, soap and tea.

“Not having to expend so much on food, and with the successful introduction of the ration coupon scheme against cash payments, I’d say five months.”

When the last sack was inside Rajandra Das and Kaan Mandella’s warehouse, the doors were double-locked and a guard posted. The Company was not beyond acts of petty arson.

“Production figures?” asked Rael Jr. It was growing increasingly difficult to maintain order in strike committee meetings now that his mother had turned the family home into a cantina.

“As I estimated.” Harper Tew smiled with self-satisfaction. Before the strike he had been a subassistant production manager; somehow the Company had failed to purge the humanity out of him. “Steel production is down to a trickle, less than eight percent of total capacity. I estimate the Company should be approaching economic make-or-break point in about ten days.”

At five o’clock in the morning of the sixteenth day of the strike Mr. E. T. Dharamjitsingh, a striking train engineer, his wife, Misa and eight children were woken from hungry sleep by the unmistakable sound of rifle butts breaking down the front door. Four armed security men burst into the bedroom, MRCW muzzle first.

“Up dressed out,” they ordered. “Five minutes.”

As they fled down 12th street clutching hastily snatched valuables, the Dharamjitsinghs saw an armoured van draw up and a team of armed men start in on the buff-coloured doors of every house on the street. Behind them they heard shouts, shots and the sound of smashing furniture.

“Not this one!” a sergeant yelled to his men, eager to boot down a buff front door. “This one’s loyal. Leave them be. Next door.”

Two hundred striking families were evicted that morning. A further two hundred were unhomed the following dawn and the day after that two hundred more. The streets of Desolation Road were filled with unsteady ziggurats of furniture topped off with sob-eyed children. Families sheltered under improvised tents made from bed-linen and plastic refuse sacks.

“This is bankrupting us,” declared Mavda Arondello. “We can’t afford to keep evacuating children and dependants out of Desolation Road to safe houses in the Grand Valley. The train fares are horrifying: at this rate the strike fund’11 be empty in less than two months.”

“Go talk to your aunt, Rael,” said Santa Ekatrina, white as a ghost with rice-starch, flour and selfless labour. Families were not just fed now, but also housed in the Mandella homestead, sleeping on the bedroom floors, fifteen to a room. “Taasmin’ll help.”

That same evening a sealed train steamed slowly through Desolation Road Station. From behind the counter of his trackside food bar, Rajandra Das noticed the locked doors, the shuttered windows and the carriage plates that showed it to be made up of rolling stock from all across the northern hemisphere. The train ghosted across the switchover and into the Steeltown sidings. Security men cleared the freight yards and imposed a strict curfew, but Rajandra Das could see what those shut away behind window blinds could not see; the armed men in black and gold escorting grim-faced men with bags and suitcases into the newly vacated houses.

At six o’clock the sirens cried and a thousand and a half strike-breakers got out of their stolen beds and put on their working clothes and marched under heavy guard along the radial streets, along the Ring and past the mobs chanting “scab scab scab!” into the factory. Then smoke trickled from the cold chimneys and the rumble of dozing machinery shook the air.

“This is serious,” Rael Mandella Jr. told his strike committee. They had moved to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel (recently renamed, more honestly, as had always been the intent, BAR/Hotel by painting out the periods) due to pressure of mouths in the Mandella family home.

Harper Tew estimated production would be back to sixty percent nominal within ten days.

“We’ll miss economic break-point by fifty-two hours,” he said. “Unless we can find a way to bust the strikebusters, Concordat is all folded up.”

“We’ll take care of the scabs,” said Winston Karamatzov. A dark nimbus seemed to gather around him.

“At last the Action Group has something to report,” said Ari Osnan.

“Quiet.” Rael Mandella Jr. locked his fingers and was suddenly terribly terribly empty. The vision, the spiritual wind, the mystic power which had driven him before it like a rail-schooner, which had set a burning coal on his tongue, faltered and failed him. He was human and isolated, weak and fallible. Events had trapped him. He could not say no to the Action Group organizer and by saying yes he would become the creature of the mob. The dilemma had pinned him perfectly.

“Very well. The Action Group must do what is necessary.”

That night the Economic Analogy Social Centre burned down. Among the sifted ashes Dominic Frontera and his constables found the remains of eighteen strikebusters, a Company kindergarten teacher, the proprietor, his wife and twin babies. That night a strikebuster was knifed fifteen times on the corner of Heartattack and Ring. By a miracle he survived to carry the scars to his grave. That night three of the strangers were abducted to an empty signalman’s hut, where they were stripped, tied to chairs, and had their genitals snipped off with a pair of garden shears.

That night Rael Mandella Jr. slipped home and confessed his doubts, his failings, his helplessness to his mother. Despite her absolution, he was not absolved.

Violence multiplied violence as night followed night. Atrocity piled upon atrocity. Although sympathetic to the strike, Dominic Frontera found he could no longer turn a blind eye to the madness and mayhem rocking his town. The Company had threatened direct action against the perpetrators though their security men held no authority beyond the wire. Dominic Frontera had promised the Company security chief immediate action though uncertain how he might deliver it. He went to visit Rael Mandella Jr. in the Bar/Hotel.

Rael Mandella Jr.’s personal bodyguard would not permit him to approach closer than three metres.

“This has to stop, Rael.”

The strike leader shrugged.

“I’m sorry, but as soon as the scabs go it’ll stop. It’s their fault. If you want a peaceful resolution, go to the Company, not to me.”

“I’ve just come from the Company. They said exactly the same thing but turned around. Don’t play simpleton with me, Rael. I’ve known you since you were a boy. Now, I haven’t got proof, or names, but the law is the law, whatever my sympathies, and as soon as I have the evidence, the law will be enforced.”

“Are you threatening me?”

Dominic Frontera was only too aware of the futility of threatening with his handful of fat, friendly constables a man who dared the transplanetary empire of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation; nevertheless, he said, “Not threatening, Rael. Just advising.”

By the end of the week all but three hundred strikebusters had left. Of those remaining, fifty-two would be remaining permanently in the town cemetery. The same weekend Concordat held its first martyr’s funeral. Willy Goomeera, 9, single, separator plant operator, had been killed by a blow to the neck with a brick while attempting to close with, and knife, a scab separator plant operator from Maginot outside the Industry Is Ecstasy Infants’ School. Willy was a martyr, the intended victim, turned victor, a monster. Willy was lowered into the earth in a funeral urn draped with the green and white Concordat banner while mother two sisters lover cried a river.

Rael Mandella Jr. and his strike committee attended the funeral.

“So what about the production figures now?”

“Levelling off at about ten percent optimal. I calculate plant profitability to reach marginal in twenty-two days.”

“Strike fund’s only good for fifteen. Mavda, see if you can arrange cash aid from our supporters as well as the regular air drops. B.J., keep hammering at the other Transplanetaries, Bethlehem Ares’s misfortune is their fortune. I think I’ll have that word with my aunt to see if she can release us some free accommodation in church hostels. That should free some money from the rehousing budget.”

The six conspirators bowed and went their ways and the first shovels of fine red dirt thumped down on Willy Goomeera’s ceramic coffin.