Desolation Road (24 page)

The Blue Plymouth halted above the rock pillar and as Taasmin tried to guess its possible function (ROTECH engineering facility, celestial chariot, flying market, trick of sun and stone) a choir of angels banked in beneath it and sang, to the accompaniment of zither, serpent, okarina, crumhorn and stratocaster:

A solitary angel detached itself from the celestial choir and dropped on its helicopter vanes until face-to-face with Taasmin Mandella.

It declaimed this in flawless iambic pentameter. Contrarotating blades snatched the angel up to heaven. The Big Blue Plymouth played an ancient, ancient tune called "Dicksee" on its quintuple airhorns and extended an access ramp. A small crophaired woman dressed in a glowing white picturesuit descended the ramp and walked toward Taasmin Mandella, arms outstretched in the universal symbol of welcome.

eeing for the first time the city of Kershaw, capital of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation, Johnny Stalin could not properly comprehend what he beheld. From the viewpoint of the guardroom of a train rattling through a range of hills the colour of slate and rust, it seemed to him that he saw a cube, black as his closed eyelids, bearing on its topmost edges the words BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION BETHLEHEM ARES CORPORATION lettered in gold. Still, he could not assign any proportions to the cube, for it stood in a pond of dirty water which robbed it of any sense of perspective. Then he saw the clouds. They were dirty white cumulus clouds, like soiled cotton, gathering together three quarters of the way up the face of the cube. Johnny Stalin spun away from the window and hid away from what he had beheld.

The cube must have been almost three kilometres on a side.

Now the world took on its proper proportions: the hills scabbed with blast furnaces and foundries, the pool that was no pool at all but a great lake in the centre of which stood Kershaw. A dreadful fascination drew him back to the scene outside. The tiny threads that tied the cube to lake shores he now saw to be wide earth causeways, wide enough to carry twin railroad tracks, and what he had thought to be birds swooping around the faces of the cube were helicopters and dirigibles.

The Court of Piepowder rattled onto a causeway. Proud black and gold expresses bulleted past, rocking the train with their pressure waves. In their wake Johnny Stalin received his first close look at the lake. It seemed to be full of oily sludge, bubbling and steaming gently. Patches of chrome yellow and rust red stained the surface, in the far distance an oil geyser spouted black filth and an area of lake the size of a small town exploded into yellow sulphurous boiling flinging cascades of acid mud hundreds of metres in all directions. Not half a kilometre distant from the causeway some enormous waxy pink object lifted out of a froth of polymerized bubbles, a complex thing of spires and lattices like a capsized cathedral, forever crumbling back into dissolution under its own weight.

Johnny Stalin whimpered in fear. He could not comprehend this hellish place. Then he saw what seemed to be a human figure, strangely clothed, walking on the far lake shore. The sight of humanity in the chemical wilderness cheered him. He did not know, much less care, that the figure was that of a Shareholder of the City of Kershaw strolling by the pleasant shores of Syss, the poisoned lake, in elephantine respirator and isolation suit. The lake's prismatic colors and rainbow sheen, its gushing geysers, eruptions and spontaneous polymer accretions were much prized by the Shareholders of Kershaw: the melancholy air of Sepia Bay, properly filtered through respirator and rebreathed, was most conducive to reflections on love and love lost; Green Bay, rich in copper nitrates, promoted the tranquility of thought and serenity necessary for managerial decision-making; sickly decaying Yellow Bay, redolent of mortality, favourite spot for suicides; Blue Bay pensive, thoughtful; Red Bay, much beloved by junior Executive Levels, aggressive, dynamic. The executives astroll upon the rusty shores saw the return of the Court of Piepowder, saw the strange polymer chemoid raise itself out of the chemical brew and chattered excitedly through their microphones. Such phenomena were considered fortunate, bestowing upon the beholder luck in love, success in business, and good omens. To the traveller arriving in Kershaw they were foretellers of great fortune. Johnny Stalin, locked in the guardsvan for eight days, knew nothing of omens and harbingers. He knew of the Bethlehem Ares Corporation nothing whatsoever. He would soon.

"Shareholder 703286543," they told him. "Don't forget it. 703286543." He should have been hard put to forget it. It was printed on the plastic badge they gave him, on the one-piece paper suit they gave him, on the door of the room they gave him, and it was stamped on every item in the tiny windowless room: the table, the chair, the bed, the lamp, the towels, the soap, the copy of
Toward a New Feudalism
under the number-stamped pillow: Shareholder 703286543. At corridor roll call every morning the fat woman in the grey paper junior executive suit called out, "Shareholder 703286543" and every morning Johnny Stalin would raise his hand and call out, "Present." He came just after Shareholder 703286542 and just before Shareholder 703286544 and learned where to stand in the row by number, not face. After the roll call the fat woman would read a short piece from
Toward a New Feudalism
, deliver a brief homily on the virtues of industrial feudalism, and shout out the day's production quotas which the Shareholders shouted back while performing forty press-ups, forty knee-bends and jogging on the spot to rather martial music blaring from the loudspeakers. Then they would doff paper caps and hold them over hearts to sing the Company song. As Shift C marched down the corridor to the gravity bus, the fat woman would shout out the state of the Company's shares in the world markets. It was Company policy for all Shareholders to feel personal satisfaction from their minuscule contribution to the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The fat woman would check Shift C into the gravity bus, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah. The doors would close and the gravity bus would shoot upanddownandforwardandbackwardandleftandright and Shareholder 703286543 would have his shift in ructions of laughter with his impersonation of the fat grey woman going blah blah blah. With a lurch that pushed everyone against everyone else the gravity bus would arrive at its destination, doors would slam open, and the laughter and smiles switch off like late-night radio programmes as Shift C marched into the factory.

There were numbers on the machines too: machine number 703286543 stood on the conveyor between machine 703286542 and machine 703286544. The Shareholders would take up their positions, and when the hooter blew, the hatch at the end of the conveyor would open and components start to come down the serpentine production line. From 0900 to 1100 hours (when there was a break for tea) and from 1115 to 1300 (when it was lunchtime) Shareholder 703286543 took a piece of plastic shaped a bit like a human ear and a piece of plastic shaped like an ornate letter P and heatwelded them together on his bonding machine. From 1330 hours to 1630 hours he would weld some more ears and letter Ps and then Shift C would clock out and march out of the factory to meet Shift A marching in. They would enter the gravity bus once again, there would be more upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing and then the Shareholders of Shift C would be back in their familiar corridors. There would be a noisy, joking hour-anda-bit in the corridor bath house, then dinner in the refectory (so similar to the factory refectory that Shareholder 703286543 sometimes wondered if they were the same refectory), and after that the comrades of Shift C would go to a bar and run up phenomenal charge accounts buying ridiculous daquiri ices and ludicrous drinks made primarily from pureed mulberries. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went to the bar. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they went to see a movie or a live show, and on Saturdays they went dancing because the Palais de Danse was the only place they could meet girls. Shareholder 703286543 was a little bit too short and a little bit too young to enjoy the dancing. His teeth came uncomfortably close to nipple height on his dancing partners, but he liked the music, especially the new music by that man Glenn Miller. Buddy Mercx was good too. On Sunday there was the Miracle Mall and in the evening everyone went to the Company relaxarium, where the young Shareholder learned all about Men's Fun well before his due.

Kid's too young for this, his comrades said, but they brought him along week in and week out because to have left him out would have broken shift solidarity. Shift solidarity was the guiding light of the production unit's life. You stuck by your mates or you didn't stick at all. That was before Johnny Stalin learned the meaning of the tiger-striped suggestion box.

Johnny Stalin learned much in his early months in the corporation. He learned to bow to the manager and pull faces behind his back. He learned to please all men while pleasing himself. He learned the involutions of the pseudo-science called economics and its spurious laws, and he courted its idiot bastard daughter called industrial feudalism. He drank and joked with the boys at night and by day he welded pieces of plastic shaped like ears to pieces of plastic shaped like Ps and passed them on to Shareholder 703286544, who welded them to a piece of plastic shaped like a fat man. The weeks, the months passed drab and featureless as paper tissues pulled from a box until one day, in mid-weld, Johnny Stalin realized that he had no idea where the plastic pieces shaped like P's, ears and fat men went, or what they formed. For twelve months he had been welding two pieces of plastic together and now he had to know why. Dreaming in his numbered bed at night, plastic mouldings tumbled around him and fused into huge plastic mountains, into plastic cordilleras, into plastic continents, into crushing plastic moons at the heart of which lay a piece of plastic shaped like an ear welded to a piece of plastic shaped like a letter P.

One day, feigning mild diarrhoea, he excused himself from the clockingoff shift and hid in the toilet until the gravity bus had rumbled and clanked away up its slot. Quietly slipping through the swinging doors, he sauntered past the stony silent Shareholders and reached the beginning of the line where the components came through the wall and embarked upon their journey of fusion. He followed the meandering production line, peering over Shareholders' shoulders as they welded, screwed on knobs, pressed together housings and casings, soldered electronics, and fitted trims. Intent on Company business, most ignored him; to those few who shot him a quizzical glance, 703286543 put on his best managerial expression (perfected through months of practice) and said in a foremanly fashion, "Very good, very good, carry on." He was beginning to gather what the device was-a combination radio, tea maker, and bedside lamp, a useful enough item to be certain, though he could not see where his plastic ear and letter P made a contribution. At the end of the production line the radioteamakerlamps passed through a slot in the wall and vanished. Beside the conveyor was a door marked Management Only. Johnny Stalin pushed the door open and found himself in a short corridor at the end of which was another door marked Management Only. Beside him the completed radioteamakerlamps moved along the conveyor toward another slot in the wall. Johnny Stalin pushed open the second door marked Management Only and found himself in a room so similar to the one he had left that he thought for a moment that he had taken the wrong door. Then he looked harder and saw that all was utterly different. The radioteamakerlamps appeared out of the wall and passed down a production line where Company Shareholders in paper worksuits and plastic identity badges reduced them to their component parts. A depro-duction line, a disassembly line. Numb with surprise, Johnny Stalin found the point on the line where his counterpart placed the plastic ear and letter P under a radio beam and broke the bonds that held them together. The number of that Shareholder was 345682307. At the end of the line, down by position 215682307, a stream of plastic and chrome components passed through a slot in the wall beside which was a door marked Management Only.