“Who wants to know?”
“Inspiration Cadillac, formerly Ewan P. Dumbleton of Hirondelle; Poor Child of the Immaculate Contraption.”
Taasmin Mandella was unsure whether his final comment had been about himself or her.
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly serious. I have read about you in the magazines, young woman, and I must know, are you the one?”
“Well, I might be.”
“Give me a hand up, will you?”
Taasmin stretched out her haloed left hand. It closed on Inspiration Cadillac’s metal hand and blue fire crackled along his mechanical limbs and forked from his artificial eye.
“You are the one, no mistaking,” he declared.
Two days later a train drew up in Desolation Road. It was like no train anyone had ever seen before. It was a clanking, rattling, hissing old contraption threatening to burst its boilers at every stroke of its labouring driveshafts. It hauled five dilapidated carriages trailing a squadron of prayer kites and prayer blimps and was decked out in a junkpile of religious flags, banners, emblems and holy paraphernalia of all types. The carriages were jammed with passengers. They poured from the doors and windows as if under pressure, and at Inspiration Cadillac’s command tore carriage and train apart and built from the fragments a hasty shantytown of tents, lean-tos and favelas. In the midst of the furious activity none of the spectators failed to notice that all the workers possessed at least one mechanical part to their bodies.
An official delegation soon arrived headed by Dominic Frontera and his three newly appointed constables, whom he had requisitioned from Meridian in case the Whole Earth Army should attempt another coup.
“Just what the hell are you doing?”
“We have come to be servants of the prophet of the Blessed Lady,” said Inspiration Cadillac, and on cue the cyborg shantybuilders genuflected.
“We are the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption,” continued Inspiration Cadillac. “Formerly known as Dumbletonians, we believe in the emulation of St. Catherine’s example of the mortification of the flesh by replacing our sinful fleshly parts with pure, spiritual mechanical ones. We believe in the spirituality of the mechanical, the total transubstantiation of flesh into metal, and equal rights for machines. Alas, our zeal for this last principle led to our expulsion from the Ecumenical Enclave of Christadelphia: the burning of the factories was quite unintentional, we were sadly misunderstood and much abused. However, we have learned through various channels, spiritual and secular, of a young woman blessed by the Lady to be a prophet and so we have come in response to an angelic vision to serve her and through her attain our perfect mortification.” As Inspiration Cadillac concluded, Taasmin Mandella arrived, disturbed from her meditations by the growing din. As she beheld the shantytown and its ragged tenants, a cry went up from the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption.
“It is her! She! She’s the one!” The entire mass of Dumbletonians fell to their knees in attitudes of adoration.
“Blessed Child,” said Inspiration Cadillac, smiling a horrid smile, “behold your flock. How may we serve you?”
Taasmin Mandella looked at the metal limbs, the metal heads, the metal hearts, the empty steel mouths, the plastic eyes. They revolted her. She cried out, “No! I don’t want your service! I don’t want to be your prophetess, your mistress, I don’t want you! Go back to wherever you came from, just leave me alone!” She ran away from the furious worshippers, out along the rim rocks to her old refuge.
“I don’t want them, you hear?” she screamed at the walls of her cave. “I don’t want their hideous metal bodies, they disgust me, I don’t want them to serve me, worship me, have anything to do with me!” She threw her arms above her head and released all her holy power. The air glowed blue, the rock groaned and shuddered, and Taasmin Mandella screamed bolt after bolt of frustrated force into the roof. At length she was drained and as she sat in a knot on the stone floor she thought about power, freedom and responsibility. She pictured the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption in her mind’s eye. She saw their metal hands, metal legs, metal arms, metal shoulders, their steel eyes, their tin chins, their iron ears, their half-and-half faces peeping out of their ugly, cheap little hovels. She was moved to pity. They were pathetic. Poor weak fools, pathetic children. She would show them a better way. She would lead them to self-respect.
After four days of thoughts and resolutions in her cave Taasmin Mandella was hungry and returned to Desolation Road for a bowl of lamb chili in the B.A.R./Hotel. Her halo glowed so brightly, no one could look at it. She found her town aswarm with construction workers in hard yellow hats, driving big yellow earthmovers and big yellow diggers. Big yellow transport dirigibles were setting down twenty-ton loads of pre-stressed steel girders and big yellow trains were unloading pre-mixed concrete and building sand into small yellow dumpsters.
“What the hell is going on?” said Taasmin Mandella, unconsciously echoing the mayor’s words of greeting. She found Inspiration Cadillac surveying the pouring of foundations. He was dressed in yellow coveralls and a yellow hard hat. He gave Taasmin a similar hat for her to wear.
“Do you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Faith City,” said Inspiration Cadillac. “The spiritual hub of the world, place of pilgrimage and finding to all who seek.”
“Come again?”
“Your basilica, Lady. Our gift to you: Faith City.”
“I don’t want a basilica, I don’t want a Faith City, I don’t want to be the hub of the spiritual world, the finding of all who seek.”
A load of construction girders swung overhead beneath a descending transport ’lighter.
“Where is the money coming from for all this? Tell me that.”
Inspiration Cadillac’s eyes were on the work. By his expression Taasmin knew he was already viewing the completed basilica.
“Money? Ah, well. Why do you think it’s called Faith City?”
34
The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing were walking down Belladonna’s Tombolova Street one day, when the Greatest Snooker Player the
Universe Had Ever Known stopped dead outside a little street shrine wedged between a male strip club and a tempura bar.
“Look,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Before the nine-pointed starburst of St. Catherine a young woman was at prayer, her lips moving silently as she whispered the litany, her eyes catching the light from the candles as she turned her gaze toward heaven. The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing watched her finish her prayer, light an incense wand, and pin a prayer to the door lintel.
“I’m in love,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. “I must have her.”
Her name was Santa Ekatrina Santesteban. She had soft olive skin and hair and eyes as dark as the secret place next to the heart. She lived with her mother, her father, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat and her singing bird in an apartment above Chambalaya’s Speciality Spice and Condiment Store on Depot Lane. Through years of living above Mr. Chambalaya, her skin had taken on the perfume of spices and incenses. “I’m half-curried,” she used to joke. She liked to joke. She loved to laugh. She was eleven years old. Limaal Mandella loved her madly.