On the fourth day, at twelve minutes of eleven, Group 19 of the Deuteronomy Division of the Whole Earth Army stormed the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre, eliminated the guards, released the prisoners and effected the rescue of Sub-major Arnie Tenebrae. As she buckled on the new field-inducer weapons pack her rescuers had brought for her and made her escape, a small, bespectacled young man, like a dirty-minded owl, jumped out of a doorway waving an immense Presney long-barrelled reaction pistol he clearly did not know how to use.
“Stay, ah, where you are, don’t, ah, move, you’re all, ah, under arrest.”
“Oh, Migli, don’t be a silly Migli,” said Arnie Tenebrae, and blew the back out of his head with a short burst from her field-inducer. Group 19 burned the Chepsenyt Regional Detention Centre behind them and rode off across the dull brown Stampos with the dull brown smoke hanging over them.
42
It was as if they had all been snatched up into the night: men, houses, big yellow machines, everything, all gone. That night there had been the worst storm anyone could remember and the brothers had laid in their beds feeling delicious thrills of scariness every time the lightning threw huge blue shadows on the wall and the thunder boomed so loud and so long it was as if it were in the room with them, in the bed beside them. They could not remember falling asleep, but they must have, for the next thing they knew their mother was pulling back the curtains to admit the peculiar sunshine you get only after huge storms that is so clear and light and clean it is as if it has been laundered. They tumbled out of bed into clothes through breakfast and up into the laundered morning.
“Isn’t it quiet?” said Kaan. To ears accustomed to months, years of the din of day-and-night labour, the quiet was intimidating.
“I can’t hear them working,” said Rael Jr. “Why aren’t they working?” The brothers hurried to the low place they had dug under the wire so that they could play in the most exciting of boys’ playgrounds, the construction site. They stood at the wire and looked at nothing.
“They’re gone!” cried Kaan. There was not one earth grader, concrete pourer, or tower crane, not a single site hut, not a dormitory, canteen or social, not one welder, mason, or bricklayer, not even a foreman, site supervisor, crane driver, or truck loader to be seen. It felt as if the storm had sucked them all into the sky, never to return. Rael Jr. and his young brother rolled under the wire and explored the new and empty world.
They trod gingerly through shadowy streets between the stupendous buttresses of steel converters. They shied at every desert bird that croaked and every distorted reflection of themselves in the jungle of metal piping. As it became apparent that the plant was utterly deserted, the boys’ daring grew.
“Yeehee!” shouted Kaan Mandella through his cupped hands.
“YEEHEE YEEhee Yeehee yeehee…” called the echoes in the settling tanks and ore conveyors.
“Look at that!” shouted Rael Jr. Neatly parked in laagers beneath the towering complexities of pipes and flues stood two hundred dump trucks. Agile as monkeys the boys climbed and crawled all over the bright yellow trucks, swinging from door handles and foot-steps, sliding down sloping backs into buckets big enough to hold the entire Mandella hacienda. Their energy led them from the big trucks onto the gantries and catwalks to play perilous games of three-dimensional tag among the pipes and ducts of the ore filtration system. Hanging by one arm over a shuddering drop into the bucket of a rear loader, Kaan Mandella let fly a whoop of glee.
“Rael! Wow! Look! Trains!”
The jungle gym of industrial chemistry was immediately abandoned in favour of the twelve waiting trains. The explorers had never seen such trains before, each was over a kilometre long and hauled by two Bethlehem Ares Railroads Class 88s hitched in tandem. The sense of slumbering power trapped within the shutdown tokamaks awed the boys into silence. Rael Jr. touched one of the titans with the flat of his hand.
“Cold,” he said. “Powered down.” He had been given a book about trains by his grandfather for his seventh birthday.
“‘Edmund Gee,’ ‘Speedwell,’ ‘Indomptable,"’ said Kaan Mandella, reading the names of the black and gold behemoths. “What would it be like if one suddenly started up?” Rael Jr. imagined the fusion engines exploding into life and the idea scared him so much he made Kaan leave the sleeping giants alone and led him into another part of the complex entirely, one they had never seen before on their clandestine playground visits.
“It’s like another Desolation Road,” said Kaan.
“Desolation Road like it ought to be,” said Rael Jr. They found themselves at the edge of a small but complete town of about six thousand inhabitants, or, rather, which would have housed six thousand inhabitants, for it was as empty as a graveyard. It was a well-ordered town with neat terraces of white adobe houses with red roofs (for some things were too sacred for even the Bethlehem Ares Corporation to change) lining spacious streets that radiated out like the spokes of a wheel from a central hub of parkland. At the end of every street where it joined the circular service road stood a Company commissary, a Company school, a Company community centre and a Company depot for small gadabout electric tricycles.
“Hey! These are great!” shouted Kaan, turning tight circles within circles on his three-wheeled buggy, “Race you!” Rael Jr. rose to the challenge, kicked a trike into action, and the two boys raced each other up and down the empty streets of Steeltown past the empty houses, the empty shops, the empty schools and socials and tea rooms and doctors’ offices and chapels, all empty empty empty like the eyes of a skull, and they whooped and cheered as their wheels threw up clouds of the red dust that had found its way even into this sacred place.
At the hub of the wheel of streets was a circular park with the name “Industrial Feudalism Gardens” above its wrought iron gate. When the boys tired of their racing they threw off their dusty sweaty clothes and splashed in the ornamental lake and sunned themselves on the neatly rolled lawns.
“Hey, this is great!” said Rael Jr.
“When do you think all the people are coming?” asked Kaan.
“Don’t care long as it isn’t today. I could stay here forever.” Rael Jr. stretched like a cat and yielded himself to the innocent sun.
“Do you think you’ll work here when you grow up?”
“Might do. Might not. Haven’t thought much about what I might want to do. How about you?”
“I want to be rich and famous and have a huge house like we had in Belladonna and a pool and a ’lighter and have everyone know me, like Pa was.”
“Huh! Seven years old and he knows exactly what he wants. How you going to get all this then?”
“I’m going to go into business with Rajandra Das.”
“That bum! He can’t do anything!”
“We’re going to open a hot food stall and when we make a lot of money on that one, we’ll open another, and another, and another, and I’ll be rich and famous, just you see!”
Rael Jr. lay back on the neatly rolled grass and wondered how his little brother could have all his days charted out before him while he wished only to be blown like a moth on the mystical desert wind.
“Listen,” said brother Kaan, sitting up, alert. “Sounds like ’lighters.”
Rael Jr. stretched his hearing and caught the beat of aircraft engines on the edge of the wind.
“Coming this way. Maybe it’s the people.”
“Oh, no, maybe it is,” said Kaan, struggling into sticky clothes. The first LTA drifted over the steel pinnacles of the city. “Let’s go.” The brothers ran down deserted streets filled with the drumming of aircraft engines and over their heads airship after airship after airship drifted past. RaelJr. ran with one eye to the sky.