Free Desolation Road by Ian McDonald Page A

canvas and flashing neon lights. A tethered helium balloon hovered a hundred metres overhead, trailing a long banner proclaiming the glories of Heart of Lothian's Travelling Genetic Education Show. Loudspeakers poured out fast foot-twitching dance music. Everyone was very excited, not on account of the benefits their smallholdings might reap (Rael Mandella was growing increasingly worried at the depletion of his germ bank and the resulting inbreeding of the town's livestock), but because in a place of ten houses, where even the arrival of the weekly train was an event, the advent of a travelling show was only a little less awesome than if the Panarch and all the hosts of the Five Heavens had marched over Desolation Road to the sound of flutes and drums.
     
    At twenty minutes of twenty Heart of Lothian threw the doors open and the people streamed in in a jostling, elbowing mass. Everyone got a bag of mixed ROTECH goodies: given Desolation Road's tiny population, to limit the largesse to the first ten would have been unjust. Glasses of wine in hand, the people beheld the wonders of ROTECH's genetic science. They were amazed by the fertility hormones that enabled a goat to give birth to as many as eight kids at one time; they marveled at the clone-kits that could grow live chickens out of nothing but eggshells and feathers; they oohed and ahhed at the growth accelerators that could bring any living thing, vegetable or animal (even human, said Heart of Lothian), to full maturity in a couple of days; they wondered at the engineered bacteria which could eat rock, make plastic, cure plant diseases, generate methane gas, and produce iron from sand; they goggled at Heart of Lothian's fermentory, a great bag of blue artificial flesh that digested any form of household waste and bled red, white or rose wine on demand from its nipples; and they crept timorously into the darkened room marked Monster Mash and pretended to be offended by the genetic mishmashs that lurked, roared or slithered within their protective environments. Decked out in orange paper caps printed with the word ROTECH and the nine-spoked Catherine wheel symbol in black, Limaal, Taasmin, and Johnny Stalin stayed there for hours, taunting the agapanthas to snap their metre-wide jaws and the dragons to puff little balls of witchfire. Finally Heart of Lothian herself had to throw them out when she found Limaal and Taasmin trying to force Johnny Stalin through the gas lock into the piranha bats' low temperature cage.
    The people stayed late, very late for farming folk who rose and set with the sun. They asked questions, placed orders, lifted armfuls of the abundant free literature, and drank down glass after glass of Heart of Lothian's excellent red, white or rose. Rael Mandella bought a job lot of germ plasm ("guaranteed stronger and healthier," said Heart of Lothian) to replenish his failing stock. The Gallacelli brothers, too much red, white and rose in them, asked Heart of Lothian if she could engineer for each of them the same wife, perfect in every physical detail. Heart of Lothian laughed them out of her office but told them to come back after the show was folded up if they wanted to sample the perfection of her own ample flesh. Mr. Jericho and his Exalted Ancestors engaged her in stimulating and high-flown conversation for over an hour, Meredith Blue Mountain bought some bacterial treatment for his potatoes, Tenebraes and Stalins obtained various breeds of huge and disgusting slugs to use against each other's gardens, Persis Tatterdemalion put down an order for a garbage-eating home winery (even though the Great PaisleyPattern Biotech Show had reminded her sadly of the lamented Astounding Tatterdemalion Air Bazaar), and last of all came the Babooshka.
     
    The neons had all flickered out, the awnings and paisleypatterned tents were folding back into the trailers, the Gallacelli brothers lurking unnecessarily under a wind-pump, and the stars shining bright when the