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.
66
On dusty evenings when the summer lightning brought ephemeral life to the cracked neon tubes of the closed-up hotels and diners, Mr. Jericho and Rajandra Das would sit on the porch to drink beer and remember.
“Hey, remember Persis Tatterdemalion,” Rajandra Das would say.
“She was a fine lady,” Mr. Jericho would reply, watching the lightning crackle along the horizon. “A fine fine lady,” and they would call to mind the colourful thread of history she had woven into the tale of Desolation Road until it reached an end with her flying off into the sunset after being lauded saviour of the town with her two sons on either wing in the cargo ’lighters bought at crash-out prices from the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The money from the sale of the Bar/Hotel had enabled her to hire two additional pilots: Callan and Venn Lefteremides, war scarred but intact after the attack on Desolation Road.
“Wonder what she’s up to these days?” Rajandra Das would say, and Mr. Jericho would reply, “Flying still. Last thing I heard she had set up the Flying Circus over Transpolaris way, New Glasgow, I think, and she was making it pretty big.”
Then Rajandra Das would say, “Wonder what Umberto and Louie are doing?”
After the final battle, while the ROTECH time-security teams were tooth-combing Desolation Road for whatever it was that had so rudely shattered their contemplative peace, Persis Tatterdemalion had made it clear to the Gallacelli brothers that she had not returned for them but to gather her sons to her and sell the Bar/Hotel. The brothers’ one-and-only love for her had never been reciprocated. It was possible for three men to love the same ideal woman, but not for that one woman to love three men. So they packed all the years into cardboard suitcases along with their underpants, their documents, their cash boxes and Umberto’s collection of pornographic photo graphs. In the absence of trains (the Company was being tardy about repairing the gap in the line seventy kilometres due west due to disputes over the danger money payable on account of the radiation) an overland truck convoy took Umberto and Louie on to Meridian, where Umberto had established a real-estate business, selling plots of land in the Ecclesiastes Mountains and Louie leased an office from which to practice the business of lawyering, some years later obtaining a famous acquittal in the case of the Butcher of Llandridnodd Wells.
“The old place was never the same after the war,” Rajandra Das would always say. This was a conversation he and Mr. Jericho had held so many times that it had passed through the meaningless mumbles of prayers and responses into renewed meaningfulness. “When the folks went, the place just died.”
First the pilgrims and the Holy Children, then the gentlemen of the media. Next, the hoteliers, hostel keepers and restaurateurs who had sheltered, fed and watered them. Then, blown away in a day and a night, the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, blown away in a hurricane of tumbling profit margins and drawn knives up in the lofty troposphere of the executive levels as the scandal of the robot duplicates was gradually unearthed, like buried excrement. All its labour units, its managers and section overseers, all were dispersed like so much red dust across the face of the planet. Finally, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption, after the Battle of the Prophets blew a ten-megaton hole in the Meridian-Pandemonium mainline. And last of all, jean-Michel Gastineau, the Most Sarcastic Man in the World, sarcasm forever blunted, went home to his woods and glens in haunted Chryse.