Desolation Road

34

The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing were walking down Belladonna’s Tombolova Street one day, when the Greatest Snooker Player the

Universe Had Ever Known stopped dead outside a little street shrine wedged between a male strip club and a tempura bar.

“Look,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Before the nine-pointed starburst of St. Catherine a young woman was at prayer, her lips moving silently as she whispered the litany, her eyes catching the light from the candles as she turned her gaze toward heaven. The Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known and the King of Swing watched her finish her prayer, light an incense wand, and pin a prayer to the door lintel.

“I’m in love,” said the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. “I must have her.”

Her name was Santa Ekatrina Santesteban. She had soft olive skin and hair and eyes as dark as the secret place next to the heart. She lived with her mother, her father, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat and her singing bird in an apartment above Chambalaya’s Speciality Spice and Condiment Store on Depot Lane. Through years of living above Mr. Chambalaya, her skin had taken on the perfume of spices and incenses. “I’m half-curried,” she used to joke. She liked to joke. She loved to laugh. She was eleven years old. Limaal Mandella loved her madly.

Drawn by the trail of cardamom, ginger and coriander, he followed her down lanes and alleys to her home above Mr. Chambalaya’s shop and there, before her father, her mother, her four sisters and three brothers, her cat, and her singing bird, fell into a humble bow and asked for her hand in marriage. Ten days later they were wed. Glenn Miller was best man and bride and groom walked from the registry to the waiting riksha under a canopy of raised snooker cues. The Glenn Miller orchestra followed the wedding procession on a special float as far as Bram Tchaikovsky Station and played a selection of their greatest hits as bride and groom boarded the train. Rice and lentils rained down on them and well-wishers taped paper prayers of good omen to the back of the riksha and the side of the train. Smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, Limaal Mandella squeezed his wife’s hand and a vagrant thought struck him.

This was the only irrational thing he had every done. But the irrationality was gathering about him. It had been drawing close for many months; halted a little in its advance by his defeat of the devil, but again closing. In that moment between the male strip club and tempura bar it had struck and bound itself to him through Santa Ekatrina…. Happy with his wife, then his first son, Rael Jr., then his younger son, Kaan, he was blissfully blind to the fact that God was setting him up for the Big One.

Since his defeat of the Anti-God, Limaal Mandella had ruled the land of Snooker absolute and unchallenged. As no one could defeat him, no one would play him. His own excellence had effectively disqualified him from the game. City and Provincial, even Continental and World Championships went on without him and champions were crowned “Belladonna Masters, except for Limaal Mandella” or “Solstice Landing Professional Champion, apart from Limaal Mandella.”

Limaal Mandella did not really care. Absence from the matchroom gave him time with his lovely wife and children. Absence from the matchroom gave the irrationality time to seep into him.

When the word of a challenger to Limaal Mandella’s supremacy passed along the snooker circuits of Belladonna, everyone knew that the challenger must be someone, or something, quite exceptional. Perhaps the Panarch Himself was taking up cue in the hand that steered the galaxies to humble the proud human….

Nothing of the sort. The challenger was an insignificant mousy little man who wore upside-down spectacles and composed himself with the nervous air of an apprentice clerk in a large corporation. And that would have been the long and short of him but for the significant fact that he had cut his wife into teeny tiny pieces and ground them into hamburger and that as punishment he was now nothing more than the fleshly vehicle for the projected personality of the ROTECH computer Anagnosta Gabriel. He was a psychonambulist, an obiman, a creature of childhood ghost stories.

“How many?” asked Limaal Mandella in the back room of Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar, for he was a player whose skill was firmly attached to his sense of place.

“Thirty-seven frames,” said Casper Milquetoast, the obiman. Side bets were not discussed. They were not important. The stake was the title of the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. Limaal Mandella won the toss and broke off to begin the first of the thirty-seven frames. As he had so correctly surmised years before when Trick-Shot O’Rourke had shown him the destiny he had refused to accept, snooker was the supreme game of rationalism. But the Anagnosta Gabriel was rationalism incarnate. To its superconducting soul the balls on the table were no different from the ballet of orbital technology ranging from grape-sized monitors to habitats tens of kilometres across, all of which it routinely choreographed. Behind Casper Milquetoast’s every cue action a tiny fragment of that computive power made precise calculations of spin, impulse and momentum. “Luck” had no analogue in the glossolalia of the Anagnostas. Always before, there had been the lucky fluke, the chance mistake by an opponent that put Limaal Mandella in a framewinning position; the accumulated run of misfortune that demoralized the enemy into self-defeat, but computers do not demoralize and they do not make mistakes. Limaal Mandella had always maintained that skill would always defeat luck. Now he was being proved correct.

In the midsession break (for even obimen must eat, drink and urinate) Glenn Miller drew Limaal Mandella aside and whispered to him, “You made some mistakes there. Bad luck.”

Limaal Mandella flew into a temper and pushed his sweating face close to the jazz musician.

“Don’t say that, never say that, never let me hear that again. You make your own luck, you understand? Luck is skill.” He released the shaken bandleader, ashamed and frightened at how high the tide of irrationality had risen around him. Limaal Mandella never lost his temper, he told himself. That was what the legends said. Limaal Mandella hid his soul. But his outburst had shamed and demoralized him and when play resumed the Anagnosta Gabriel capitalized on his every mistake. He was outrationalized. As he sat in his chair automatically wiping his cue while Casper Milquetoast’s computerguided hands built break after break, he learned how it felt to play himself. It felt like a great boulder rolling up and crushing him. That was how he had made others feel: crucified on their own self-hate. He hated the self-hatred he had summoned up in the countless opponents he had defeated. It was a dreadful, grinding, gnawing thing which ate the soul away. Limaal Mandella learned remorse in his quiet corner, and the self-hatred ate away at his power.

His hands were numb and stupid, his eyes dry as two desert stones; he could not hit the balls. “Limaal Mandella is losing, Limaal Mandella is losing": the word spiralled out from Glenn Miller’s Jazz Bar through the streets and alleys of Belladonna and behind it came a silence so profound that the click and the clack of the balls carried through the ventilators into every part of the city.

The computer ground him fine as sand. There was no pity, no quarter. Play would continue until victory was assured. Limaal Mandella lost frame after frame. He began to concede frames which with determination he might have won.

“What’s wrong, man?” asked Glenn Miller, not understanding his protege’s agony. Limaal Mandella returned in silence to the table. He was being destroyed before the spectators’ gaze. He could not bear to look up and see Santa Ekatrina watching. Even his enemies ached for him.

Then it was over. The last ball was down. ROTECH Anagnosta Gabriel operating through the synapses of the condemned murderer was the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Had Ever Known. City and world hailed him. Limaal Mandella sat in his chair shot with his own gun. Santa Ekatrina knelt to take him in her arms. Limaal Mandella stared ahead of him, seeing nothing but the full tide of irrationality that had engulfed him.

“I’m going back,” he said. “I can’t stay here; not with the shame around me every minute of every day. Back. Home.”

Five days later he snapped all his cues in half and burned them. On top of the fire he threw his contract with Glenn Miller. Then he took his wife, his sons, his bags, his baggage and as much money as he could bear the sight of and with that black money bought four tickets on the next train to Desolation Road.

At Bram Tchaikovsky Siation porters scratched at his coat-tails. “Carry your bags, Mr. Mandella, sir, please, carry your bags? Sir, Mr. Mandella, carry your bags?” He loaded the luggage onto the train. As it passed out from under the immense mosaicked dome of Bram Tchaikovsky Station, goondahs, gutter boys and urchins too poor for even a third class bench dropped from the signal gantries onto the roof. They leaned over and banged on the compartment windows, calling, “For the love of God, Mr. Mandella, let us in, kind sir, good sir, please let us in, Mr. Mandella, for the love of God, let us in!”

Limaal Mandella pulled the blinds, called the guard, and after the first stop at Cathedral Oaks there were no further disturbances.