Desolation Road

65

Inspiration Cadillac awoke in a steel shriek from an iron dream. Memory and awareness defied him-what were these bright lights, this high roof, these green-robed servants bowing awestruck from his presence? He sat up to require an explanation and was answered with cries of alarm and religious dread.

“Master, master, oh, it’s true, it’s true! Oh, master, bless me.”

A young postulant with a half-metal face fell to the floor in blatant adoration. Inspiration Cadillac stepped from the bed (an operating table?), caught sight of himself reflected in the white wall tiles, and remembered everything.

—Total mortification! Man made steel… He looked down at his body, his hands, his limbs. Metal; smooth, hard metal untainted by corrupt flesh, unstained by red blood, all pure, holy metal. He threw up his steel arms in thanksgiving.

“Total mortification! Successful total mortification!” Glory-alleluiaing, the technical staff prostrated themselves. Inspiration Cadillac beheld his own glory in the wall tiles and remembered…

…the voice of the Great Engineer, calling him to prophethood… army poised against army and the Poor Children, between them helpless, leaderless… bright lights, humming, luminous machines, cold cold tiles, flashing steel, darkness.

“How long has it been?” he demanded of a female cybernetician.

“Eight days, holy one. The world has gone mad, holy father: the dome of the basilica has been destroyed, the sanctuary defiled by the fleshlies in their thanksgiving for victory; a war has been fought, lost and won in these very streets, hundreds have died and… and forgive me, but time and space itself went mad. Everything is changed: madness has run loose in the universe.”

“Peace, little one. It is then time that order and harmony were restored,” said Inspiration Cadillac. In a flicker of concentration a black halo appeared around his right wrist. The technicians gasped and alleluiaed. “What the Grey Lady was, I now am, and more. She was base flesh, I am sanctified steel. I am the chosen of the Great Engineer, the Future Man; in my circuits burns the power… And he opened his right hand and darkness flowed over all the technicians save those two who had spoken with Inspiration Cadillac, and it transformed them into black smoking somethings so hideous and obscene they defied the imagination. Inspiration Cadillac laughed a metal laugh. He had the addiction for power, and each successive abuse must be richer, deeper fuller. Before his cowering acolytes he transformed himself, sprouting wings, rotor blades, buzz saws, tachyon blasters, radio antennae, portable table-harmoniums, wheels, tracks, jets, rockets, washing machines in a blur of alchemy.

“Come with me,” he commanded the cyberneticist and the technician who had hailed him master. “I am tired of transformation.” To the cyberneticist he said, “You shall be my chamberlain,” to the technician, “You my chief engineer. Don’t fear me… you must love me. I command it. Now, I wish to receive the adulation of my people.”

“Ah,” said the chamberlain.

“Eh,” said the chief technician.

“Where are the faithful?” demanded Inspiration Cadillac.

“Alas, they were not faithful as we were faithful,” said the chamberlain.

“They believed you’d died when the airplane crashed into the dome and it collapsed,” said the chief engineer.

“You were, of course, safe underground,” said the chamberlain.

“But they weren’t to know that,” said the chief engineer.

“So they, ah, turned their devotions elsewhere.”

“They’ve found something else to worship.”

“It’s, ah, a train.”

“It came out of Steeltown after the timestorm and offered to take all the Poor Children to safety.”

“You see the parallel, holy father: the prophecies you circulated about the Steel Messiah coming out of Steeltown to save the faithful from war and devastation.”

“They, eh, went with it.”

“What?” roared Inspiration Cadillac. Growing rotor blades, he leaped into the air.

“Go west,” added the chamberlain.

From the air Inspiration Cadillac could see how some calamity worse than mere war had struck Faith City. The dome of the Basilica of the Grey Lady (now, he noted, the Basilica of the Total Mortification) lay in shards and slabs on the tiled floor of the audience chamber. The entire east wing together with a dozen hectares of Faith City had been swept away and replaced with a similar area of planted and irrigated maize. The Grey Lady’s private quarters were a fused cracked crater in the rock, and beside it stood the tangled remains of some kind of clumsy three-legged device.

—What has been happening? War, dread, outrage, apostasy; with a locomotive!

It was not even a particularly good example of locomotive building skills, Inspiration Cadillac decided, spying it from afar as a line of white steam on the western horizon. A Great Southern Class 27 fusion hauler; tokamaks due a good overhaul. Paintwork blistered and peeled, what was that it read, Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza? Pathetic. Shining silver-bright in the desert sun, Inspiration Cadillac patched in his public address system and chastized his people.

“0 ye of little faith!” Faces at the windows of the ramshackle carriages. They looked frightened. That was good. “0 faithless and perverse generation! I promised that I would return to you as the Total Mortification, yet not one of you would wait the eight days for the promise to be fulfilled! Covenantbreakers! Idolators! You worship this… Golden Calf rather than the physical manifestation of the Cosmic Engineer! See how I shatter all false idols!” He helicoptered in over the speeding train and raised his hand to hurl a thunderbolt of cybernetic command.

“We’d all much rather you didn’t do that,” said the train quite unexpectedly. The power evaporated from Inspiration Cadillac’s fingertips.

“What?”

The train repeated its statement word for word.

“A talking train! My my my.”

“Something more than that,” said the Great Southern Class 27. “I am the Total Mortification.”

“Nonsense! Blasphemy! I am the Total Mortification, the one, the only.”

“You are man made machine. I am machine made man. At heart, you are flesh, for you still wear the outward form of a man, but I have gone beyond such anthropomorphic chauvinism. I am machine in the form of machine.”

Poor Children’s heads poked out of the windows, evidently enjoying the theosophical wranglings. Inspiration Cadillac found his curiosity roused despite his fury and asked, “What manner of creature are you?”

“Take a look in my liveried carriage,” the train replied. Inspiration Cadillac retracted his rotors and made a jet-power landing on the paintpeeling roof. He extended a telescopic camera eye over the edge to peer in. The windows were thick with cobwebs and dirt, as was the carriage itself; dust, cobwebs, age and neglect. In the center of the carriage sat a cracked leather armchair and in the armchair sat a mummified corpse. Upon the corpse’s head was a metal diadam of peculiar and intricate design.

“Adam Black that was,” said the train. “When his soul passed to me, I sealed the carriage, never to be opened again. All that the carriage represents is past me now, I am a machine/man, the true future man, the Total Mortification if you wish. For many years I travelled the railroads of the world searching for some purpose for my spiritual identity, then I heard of the Dumbletonians of Desolation Road, a place I knew well in my fleshly incarnation, and my heart told me that here was the reason for my being. So I came, and they hailed me the Steel Messiah, and so they came with me in their tattered caravan of old carriages and wagons. And as there can be only one Steel Messiah, alas we must now do battle.”

Inspiration Cadillac sprang away from the speeding train with a pulse of pure jet power as Adam Black sent a circuit-fusing cybernetic command crackling along his superstructure. Inspiration Cadillac climbed to a safe altitude, then unleashed a bolt of purest God-power that severed the Poor Children’s shanty-coaches from the Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza. By the time the blasphemous train had applied emergency braking and ground to a halt, Inspiration Cadillac had spun a diamond-filament cable out of his feet and was towing his faithful back to Desolation Road. Adam Black blew white steam, reversed direction, and accelerated after the Poor Children.

Inspiration Cadillac dropped his cargo and turned to meet his aggressor. Adam Black braked and stood pulsing with fusion power on the track.

“Not here,” he said. “You will agree that the safety of the Poor Children is paramount?”

“Agreed.”

“Very well then.” Adam Black throttled up and accelerated along the westbound line. Inspiration Cadillac loosed a blistering command for his rival’s fusion engines to explode. Adam Black’s computerized defences effortlessly nullified the spell. Rocketman and trainman battled with commands and countercommands for fifty kilometres into the desert without success. For the next twenty kilometres they employed physical weaponry. Sonic clashed with sonic, missiles were met with swarms of robot killer bees, machine guns with roof-mounted laser turrets, limpet mines with robo-monkeys, lightning with lightning, claws with water cannon, servo-assisted punches with polymer foam, blasts of superheated steam with microwave bursts: the Total Mortifications battled until Desolation Road was no more than a memory over the eastern horizon.

Then Inspiration Cadillac saw a dazzlesome flash far off on the edge of the world. It was followed by another flash, then another, then another, and in the blinking of a blinded eye he was embedded in a cone of white-hot light. Even as the realization of what Adam Black had done came to him, his chromed skin began to glow cherry red then scarlet, then yellow, and his circuits fused and ran like tar.

—Most ingenious, redirecting ROTECH sky mirrors to focus on me. I didn’t think mine enemy was so resourceful. Brave thoughts but empty. He was now shining white-hot. Though they repaired themselves as rapidly as the heat destroyed them, his transmogrification circuits would hold only a matter of minutes before they dissolved. He tried to reach out and break Adam Black’s control of the Vanas but the locomotive will was too entrenched.

He could feel his yet-human brain boiling in its metal skull.

Then he had it.

—One better, he cried to his fiery systems. One better. He summoned all his failing strength and reached into the sky, up, up, past the sky-mirrors and the orphs and the blitches and the habitats, to the world-bursting partacs. He slipped in, possesed the guidance and firing systems and aimed fifteen orbital subquarkal particle accelerators at Adam Black, a tiny hurtling flea on the skin of the round earth.

In the instant before Inspiration Cadillac gave the command to fire, Adam Black guessed his strategy.

“Stupid stupid stupid, the blast will destroy us both! No! Don’t!”

“Yes yes yes!” cried Inspiration Cadillac as his sanity melted and his brain dissolved and he fired the partacs.

In Desolation Road the people said it was like a second dawn: it was beautiful, they said. They had seen fifteen violet beams strike down from the sky like the justice of the Panarch and then the white blast, pure as virtue, had filled the western horizon for a whole two seconds. Beautiful, they said, beautiful… the afterblast had dyed the western lip of the world pink and blue and the insubstantial veils of auroral discharges had wavered like ghosts over the scene of the explosion. For a month after, Desolation Road was treated to stunningly beautiful sunsets.

When the Poor Children returned, towing a rickety train of old carriages and rolling stock made from reprocessed favelas behind them, they brought with them the true story of the end of Adam Black’s Travelling Chautauqua and Educational ’Stravaganza and Inspiration Cadillac, Chamberlain of the Grey Lady, Total Mortification.

“The world was not ready for Total Mortification,” they said. Chamberlain and chief engineer, cyberneticist and technician deliberated over the significance of what had happened at the western edge of the world, then gave the long-awaited and half-forgotten order that sent the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption into Steeltown by dead of night to steal one of the abandoned and forgotten Class 88 steel haulers that had lain gathering rust and spiders since the days of the Great Strike.

Under the leadership of the chamberlain and chief engineer, whose names were Plymouth Glyde and Spirit Dynamo, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption departed Desolation Road to pursue the still unresolved issue of machine rights. They steamed out of Desolation Road in the opposite direction to that from which they had come so many years before, because to go that way would have led them to a yawning hole in the desert, a crater of green glass where Adam Black’s aged tokamaks had exploded under the shriek of superaccelerated sub-quarkal beams from heaven and dispersed the atoms of man, machine and mortification into the beautiful sunset.