“A son,” said Santa Ekatrina, “a son.” Rael Jr. took the tiny red squirming thing from his wife and carried it out into the morning, where the sun cast giant shadows across the land. Gently, passionately, Rael Jr. carried his son through the ruined fields and laneways to the edge of the bluffs and there held the boychild tip to the sky and whispered his name to the desert.
“Haran Mandella.”
Lightning answered along the horizon. Rael Mandella Jr. looked into his son’s empty black eyes and saw the lightning crackle beyond the open pupils. Though those eyes could not yet focus on his face, it seemed to him that they saw into a greater, wider world than that bounded by the circle of the horizon. The dim rumble of the thunder disturbed Desolation Road’s weary ruins, and Rael Mandella Jr. trembled, not by dint of the rolling thunder but because he knew from the eyes that he held in his arms the long-awaited complete one who ended the curse of the Mandella generations, the child in whom mystical and rational were harmoniously reconciled.
The thunder shivered the red rocks of the sub-cellar where Eva Mandella’s thread of time wound itself onto the tapestry frame and gas jets trembled in anticipation and whispered “red dust red dust red dust.” History was closing its wolf-jaws behind Eva Mandella: she was now weaving events only minutes old into the history of Desolation Road. The birth of a son, the thunder; her fingers warped the threads with a hasty dexterity that frightened her. It was as if Desolation Road were impatient to be rid of itself. Her fingers wove through the present moment and on into the future, the end times she remembered from the tapestry Dr. Alimantando had shown her. Dust red, red dust, it was the only thread that remained, it was the only colour that would finish the tapestry and make it whole. She wrapped a long pick of dust red onto her shuttle and completed the history of Desolation Road. As the thread ran down to a nubbin end and history ended, Eva Mandella saw the gas jets shudder and felt an alien breeze stroke the backs of her hands.
Finished. The tapestry was finished. The history was complete. Desolation Road, its beginnings, its endings, were written here. She traced with her fingers the four threads that led onward, outward, through the end times into the future. One thread had been started only minutes before, its ending she could not see in the gathering gloom though she sensed with a sudden mystical shock that it led out through the rocks and stone into a place beyond her understanding.
Of the thread of her own life she could not find where it ended. She could trace it from its starting place in far New Merionedd along the silvery line to the green place within the storm; she saw the twin threads of mysticism and rationality issue from her womb, she followed herself down the years of tranquility and tragedy until she reached the place where the thread joined the annihilating dust, and there it was lost. It did not end, it was not snapped or cut, it was simply lost. Yet hints of its colour spread throughout the tapestry. Perplexed, Eva Mandella placed her finger on the point of junction and a strange thrill ran through her. She felt light-headed, girlish, lost in innocence. She felt herself floating, attenuating, dissolving, all her hopes, dreams, fears, loves and loathings turned to glittering dust and fell into the tapestry. Eva Mandella’s body grew insubstantial and transparent. She passed body and soul into the latticework of threads that was the history of Desolation Road. For her part in the history was to record, and through recording become that history. The time-tapestry sparkled with the silvery love of Eva Mandella, then a gust of the alien wind reached into the room and snuffed out the hissing gas jets.
The wind was rising, gusting and buffeting maliciously, a forewarning of the brown dust-rollers combing in across the Great Desert. The dust storm broke across the wasteland in a hurricane of flying needles and a fury of lightning. Drawn to the earth by the Crystal Ferrotropes, the lightning bolts crashed and blasted them to black wind-whipped powder. The Great Dust Storm was coming, growing greater, stronger, more hungry with every metre it advanced across the dune fields. Rael Mandella Jr. pressed his son to his breast and ran before it. Needles of dust whipped at him as he squeezed through his door into his home.
“Quickly, quickly, the Big Dust is coming,” he cried. Son and mother wrapped themselves in headcloths and mittens and braved the searing sandscour to stable the animals and shutter the windows. The Big Dust crashed upon Desolation Road in a screaming and howling of demons. In an instant the air was opaque, abrasive, deadly. With a shrill of windblown sand every centimetre of proud paintwork was stripped, sanded, blasted down to bare wood and metal. Trees were planed, then whittled to matchsticks, the metal gantries of the wind-pumps shined to silver brightness. The black lozenges of the solar collectors were pitted and cracked; before the afternoon was done their black glass faces lay ground to wind-rounded pebbles.
The dust storm blew on into the night. Kwai Chen Pak, lying on her bed of birth, baby Haran hunting blindly for the nipple, listened to the wind shrieking round the roof tiles and cried out in fear, for suddenly it seemed to her that every demon from Desolation Road’s demon-haunted past was howling for her flesh. Santa Ekatrina and Rael Jr. did not hear the cries of irrational panic. They searched by candlelight the wind-gusty rooms and cellars for Eva, who had vanished as the storm broke upon the Mandella house. Rael Jr. feared her dead and blasted to polished bone but Santa Ekatrina had glimpsed the glowing tapestry and a strange and terrible fear gripped her. She felt as if the wind had swept into the house and shivered her bones to sand. She suspected, but never said, for she was not sure herself that she believed Eva Mandella had passed into the tapestry and thus returned to the beginning of the history of Desolation Road.
For five days the dust storm scourged Desolation Road. The wind capered around the abandoned hotels and luncheonettes, it swept over the cracked eggdome of the Basilica of the Total Mortification, it eddied around the humming steel chimneys of Steeltown, and played upon the intestinal pipeworks like a harmonium. It heaped dust upon the skeletons, tumbled walls, filled fields with dunes, wore homes to sand. It split open the stump of Dr. Alimantando’s rock house and scattered books, tools, rugs, kitchen implements, bathroom fittings, eschatometers, thanatoscopes, to the end of the earth. The wind blew and blew and blew and stone by stone, brick by brick, grain by grain, speck by speck, it carried Desolation Road away with it. It tried to carry away the Mandella household; it gibbered and clawed, it ripped tiles from the roof and threw them into the air, it shrieked fear and fury at the refugees who daily and nightly dreaded the gust that would whirl away their roof and walls and expose them soft and naked to the knives of the storm.
For five days it was so, then on the sixth morning Rael Mandella Jr. heard a noise over the screaming wind. He heard the sound of a locomotive whistle. It was not very loud, or very different from the whistling of the wind, but once he had heard it he could not mistake it again.
“A train, a train!” he cried, bustling mother, wife, son into a flurry of cardboard-suitcase packing. “We can escape!” The wind had abated sufficiently for them to wrap themselves in headcloths and heavy burnooses and brave the dust storm. Rael Jr. released the animals from the stables. Llamas, goats, pigs, chickens, galloped into the dust and vanished. He wondered what might become of them. Then blindly, dust-bound, the Mandella family groped along the suffocated streets of the disintegrated town to the railroad track. There they squatted and listened to the singing of the sand on the polished rails.