“There must be hundreds of them.” There was both wonder and awe in his voice.
“Come on,” said brother Kaan, cursed with pragmatism.
“No, I want to see what’s happening.” Rael Jr. climbed a series of sheer staircases that led to the top of a catalytic converter column. After only an instant’s hesitation Kaan followed. He was indeed pragmatic; but curious. From the walkway around the head of the column the plan of the operation became apparent. The ’lighters were taking up stations in a huge disc centred on Desolation Road.
“Wow, there must be thousands of them,” said Kaan, revising his brother’s earlier estimates. Still the airships passed over their heads. The ’lighters flew over Desolation Road for a further half hour before their formation was complete. The sky was black with them, black shot through with golden liveried lightnings, a storm of industry about to descend upon Desolation Road. As far as the boys’ desert-sharp eyes could see, the aircraft were waiting: The dark presence of the ’lighters scared them. They had known the Bethlehem Ares Corporation was powerful, but powerful enough to turn the sky black, that was awesome.
Then it was as if a magic word had been spoken.
All at once, everywhere, the cargo hatches of the dirigibles opened and clouds of orange smoke poured out.
“Gas!” the brothers shrieked in imagined alarm, but the orange smoke did not drift like gas would but hung in rippling curtains around Desolation Road. The orange smoke hung for a few seconds, then settled to the ground with uncharacteristic speed.
“That’s clever,” said Rael Jr., “They’re using their fans to make a downdraft.”
“I want to go home,” said the boy with the future planned.
“Shhh. This is interesting.” Within a minute of the cargo doors’ opening the cloud had precipitated out to lie in a thick orange-on-red scum over the Great Desert.
“I want to go home, I’m scared,” repeated the boy who wanted to be rich and famous. Rael Jr. peered at the dunes and the high, dry plateau, but all there was to be seen were the ’lighters peeling away from formation one by one.
“I’ve seen enough. We can go now.”
At home Pa was in ebullient good humour.
“Come and look at this,” he said, and took his sons into his maize field. “What do you make of that?” It reminded Rael Jr. most of the copper sulphate crystal he had grown in school but this was dull black, rusty and about half a metre in length. It was also growing out of the middle of the maize field, a thing no copper sulphate crystal ever did. Said Limaal Mandella with a note of pride in his voice, “I think I might dig it up as a souvenir.”
“What is it?”
“Haven’t you been listening to the radio? It’s an iron ferrotrope crystal! Boy, we’re living smack bang in the middle of the world’s biggest bacteriologically active zone!” They could not understand why their father sounded so pleased. “If you get the binoculars and go down to the edge of the bluffs, there are these things growing out of the sand as far as you can see! Crystal ferrotropes! It’s the way the Bethlehem Ares Corporation’s getting all the iron out of the sand, by bacteria, tiny little living organisms that eat the useless rust in the sand and shit out those things you see there. Clever? Brilliant! A real first for Desolation Road. Never been one anywhere else. We’re the first!”
“Was that what was coming out of the ’lighters?” asked Kaan. Rael Jr. kicked him to shut him up before he said anything about being under the forbidden wire in Steeltown, but his Pa’s eyes were too full of the light of technology to see anything lesser.
“Microbial spores. That’s what they were, microbial spores. But you know what’s most amazing of all? This… disease, I suppose you might call it, only affects rust, one very particular iron oxide. Won’t touch anything else; you could walk through the desert for kilometres and kilometres and kilometres and not come to any harm. Bethlehem Ares has that stuff reaching out twenty kilometres in all directions. Richest ore deposit on the whole planet I heard one of the construction men say afore he left.”
“Why is this one here?” Rael Jr. bent to examine the alien thing in the maize field.
“Must be iron deep under the soil. Some of the spores blew here and got into the rust. Tell you this, boys, Ed Gallacelli’s got them growing out of his shed roofl”
“Wow! Can I go and look?” asked Kaan.
“Sure,” said Pa. “I’ll come, too, we’ll take the binoculars and go down to the bluffs. Everyone’s down there watching the show. You coming, Rael Jr.?”
Rael Jr. did not come. He went inside and read his book about trains, and when his father and brother and mother and grandmother and grandfather came home full of descriptions of towering crystals thrusting out of the sand growing growing growing ten, twenty, fifty metres tall before their sheer weight shattered them, he pretended to be playing with the cat but he was really hating them, his father brother mother grandfather grandmother because he did not know how to hate those pilots and planners who had willed such a world-shaking change upon his universe. He did not understand why he felt this hatred, why he felt violated, emptied, soul-sick. He tried to tell his brother, his mother, even his faraway father, but they did not understand what he was trying to tell them, none of them, not even wise Eva Mandella with her wise old weaving hands. The only one in the whole of Desolation Road who would have understood Rael Jr.’s soul-deep malaise was his Aunt Taasmin, for she alone knew what it was like to be cursed with an unguessable mystic destiny.
43
At six minutes of six the sirens blew.
They blew like the horns of angels. They blew like summer storms through the pump gantries and over the red roof-tiles. They blew like the Trump of Doomsday, like the sky cracking, like the breath of the Panarch breathing life into lifelessness.
At six minutes of six the shout of the sirens broke the desert air and on every street every door in the new town flew open at once and out poured the people, people from all the continents of the world and beyond, from Metropolis, ever running backward in its chase to keep up with itself, people even from the impoverished people-weary Motherworld herself, all come to make the steel for the railroads and farm machines and power looms and rikshas and bridges and buildings of the young, vigorous world, pouring from their doors to make steel for the mighty Bethlehem Ares Steeclass="underline" workers streaming to the manufactories, tributary joining to tributary in a river of heads, hands and hearts surging down the shadowy streets of the Steeltown. Junior executives in smart paper suits fresh that morning from the slot dispenser zipped past on electric tricycles, children dawdled to their schools and Company kindergartens, shopkeepers and commissary merchants pulled up door blinds and set the chairs out on the verandas to advertise that they were open for business.
At the shout of the sirens two hundred yellow trucks shook into life like weary dogs and rumbled out from their garages. In the crystal dunefields drag-lines-and bucket-wheelers woke from prayerful repose to feed. With a roar and a thunder twenty-four black and gold Class 88 haulers fired up their fusion tokamaks and chunk-chunked over the points onto the mainline.
At the sirens’ shout smoke puffed from a hundred stacks: puffed, blew rings, then poured into the Indian summer sky, black, white, orange, brown. Conveyors rattled into motion, furnaces ignited, white-hot carbon electrodes descended into swirling vats of molten heat, rolling mills came up to speed, and at the very heart of the complex, behind walls of concrete, sound, steel, lead and magnetism, the plasmic djinn rattled its pinch-bottle and poured magical power into the city.