Desolation Road

19

In his days of deepest darkest duplicity Mikal Margolis often took himself on long walks into the Great Desert so that the wind might blow the women out of his head. And the wind blew as it had for a hundred and fifty thousand years and would for another hundred and fifty thousand years but that would still not be long enough to blow away the guilt Mikal Margolis felt in his heart. He had three women: a lover, a mistress and a mother, and just as the learned astronomers of the Universuum of Lyx maintain that the dynamics of a system of three stars can never be stable, so Mikal Margolis wandered, a rogue planet, through the fields of attraction of his three women. Sometimes he ached for the enduring love of Persis Tatterdemalion, sometimes he longed for the piquancy of his lascivious relationship with Marya Quinsana, sometimes when the guilt gnawed at the base of his stomach he sought his mother’s forgiveness, and sometimes he wished he could escape their whirling gravitations entirely and wander free through space.

His desert walks were his escape. He did not have the courage to escape completely from the forces that were destroying him; a few hours alone among the red dunes were the farthest he could go from the stellar women of his life, yet in those hours he was alone in delightful solitude and he could play out his fantasies in the cinema of the imagination: desert raiders; grim, unspeaking gunmen; bold adventurers seeking lost cities; tall riders; lonely prospectors close to the motherlode. He trudged for hours up slopes and down, being all the things the women would not let him be and tried to feel the wind blow and the sun sweat the guilt out of him.

On this day no wind blew and no sun shone. After a hundred and fifty thousand years of light and air unceasing, the sun and wind had failed. A dense bank of cloud lay over the Great Desert, wide as the sky, black and curdled as devil’s milk. It was the legacy of Comet 8462M, a layer of condensing water vapour that covered most of the North West Quartersphere and which had turned to rain and fallen on Belladonna and Meridian and Transpolaris and New Merionedd and everywhere except Desolation Road, where it had somehow forgotten to rain. Mikal Margolis, walker of dunes, knew little of this and cared less: he was an earth-scientist not a sky-scientist and anyway he was preoccupied because he was about to make a serendipitous discovery.

Sand. Contemptible sand. Red grit. Worthless, but Mikal Margolis, with the light of revelation in his eyes, bent down to pick up a handful and let it run through his fingers. He closed his fist on the remaining dribble, stood up, and shouted his delight to the ends of the Great Desert.

“Of course! Of course! Of course!” He stuffed his lunch satchel full of sand and danced all the way back to Desolation Road.