SUBODHANA WIJEYERATNE - TROMIYON

Subodhana Wijeyeratne is an academic and writer living in Tokyo, Japan. Born and raised in the UK and Russia, he has been writing fiction for nearly twenty years -- primarily speculative -- and has had pieces appear in LampLight, Kzine, Liquid Imagination, The Future Fire, Expanded Horizons, and Electric Spec. In addition, he has had a piece included in Rosarium's recent anthology Sunspot Jungle. His first collection of short stories, Tales from the Stone Lotus, and his debut novel, The Slixes, are currently available on Amazon.   

TROMIYON
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0
I’m simplifying, of course, but the Reyasian Ministry of Industrial Production Type 12 Snarlthermic Generator works as follows.
     It begins with the Snarl embryo. Once secured, it is placed within a manganese-alloy container supplied with oxygen and other necessaries. This structure is called the Thermal Core. This is then placed within the Vapour Chamber, a water tank containing as little as twelve (Olsis) and as many as fifty-nine (Reyasis IV, VI, and XI) cubic metres of water. This in turn is sealed within a Shield Chamber, again of manganese alloy, which is finally placed in a larger Buffer Pool of up to eight hundred cubic metres of water. Finally, this is all housed within a Source Hangar of up to twelve square acres.
     The principle is simple: as the Snarl develops, it will attract heat from the Source Hangar (sometimes beyond – Reyasian safety protocols are well known to be lax) in order to grow. This heat heats the water in the Vapour Chamber into steam, which is then funnelled through to a series of dynamos housed outside the Source Gangar, which generate electricity.
     There are, of course, a number of potential issues with this technology.
     The first is the potential for failure within the Thermal Core-Vapour Chamber-Buffer Pool (TVB) system. Components within the structure are extremely difficult to access. Any maintenance work requires a complete shutdown of the system, which requires that the Snarl be extracted and placed in a separate Generator – an extremely dangerous process. The second major issue is graduated senescence. The TVB system intercepts between 40% and 70% of the energy attracted by the Snarl. The remainder reaches the creature and it will, inevitably, grow. Snarls are known to attain maturity at a variety of energy levels, meaning that constant surveillance of the creature is required. The third is the potential for an energy spike created by organic processes within the Snarl – the committee’s attention is drawn to our own experience in Aganaga sixty-one years ago, and the enduring consequences of the explosion at the Kanagari Pilot Facility three years ago.
            This observer does not believe, however, that this is what happened at Trо̄miyon. There is a fourth, more disturbing possibility – that the Snarl, though yet immature, attained consciousness within the Thermal Core. I invite the committee to consider the creature’s circumstances if this occurred. Coming to life in the utter dark, surrounded by what to you is excruciating cold, feeling weak and disorientated. You will have alien-seeming memories of a bright and warm world you feel compelled to seek. You will have no sense of why you are where you are, or why you are so hungry, or why that hunger – ravenous, beyond your control, so intense you want to eat yourself – won’t fade. Faced with this, wouldn’t you too conclude that ending yourself is the only option worth considering?
            For these reasons – and others – the use of snarlthermic energy sources was outlawed by the Aleto Convention on Snarlthemic Energy. The United Reyasian Republics, is not a party to this convention. Given that there are at present a staggering seventy-six snarlthermic generators active in the Union, and another six under construction, I regretfully conclude that the incident at Trо̄miyon will have no impact on the Reyasian’s commitment to this dangerous, and cruel, technology.
 
I
There’s supposed to be someone waiting for me at Arrivals, but there isn’t. There’s just a crowd of locals – ld women in flowery headscarves and children in dung-coloured factory-reject puffer jackets and young scragglebearded men, faces lobotomy-vacant – all stunned that something so obviously foreign as me would come wandering out without warning or fanfare.
     The air is as warm and thick as mucous.
Behind them, across the scuffed floor of the lobby, is a rank of dank-looking kiosks. Each is garrisoned by a bored-looking woman. I flee towards them and a small cluster of girls follows, skipping and chittering, their giggling as persistent as the rumble of planes taking off outside.
I approach a counter at random. The woman behind it is skinny-faced and pockmarked and radiates irritation on several wavelengths. 
‘Sorry, I’m supposed to be – ’
She doesn’t look up.
‘No,’ she says, in Palinka.
‘Sorry? No, can you – ’
‘No.’ Firmer, this time. ‘No.’
Outside, the sun’s setting over a charmless concrete tangle of roads and car parks. Another takeoff sets the terminal rattling, and a fat-bellied Reyasian bomber swoops overhead like an obese goose. Two men in sheepskin coats, heavy-moustached and unsubtle, wander over, scattering the girls. They lean against a pillar, smoking and watching me. I’m fucked, I think. Maybe I could just stay in one of the toilet stalls. I’ll be alright if I stuff my passport into my underwear. 
Then, a voice behind me. Accented, but fluent.
‘She can’t help you. This is for extending internal passports.’
He’s fat-faced and tangle-haired and reeks of tobacco. His beard is as uneven as the undergrowth on an abandoned urban lot. He’s wearing one of the thin jackets all Reyasian specialists wear, baby-blue and stained, shouldered with little copper epaulettes. There are three badges over the left breast pocket, and I recognize one, a red disk with the hummingbird and five stars. Hero of the Revolution.
Relief floods me like a high.  
‘Dr. Aklion?’ I say.
‘Anzon. I am only Anzon.’
‘Oh. Please call me Mursidan.’ 
He laughs. As if I’d just suggested we get married. As if I’d told him I was actually a duck in human clothes.
‘No, no. You are the Professor. Come, Professor.’
He doesn’t offer to help with my bags. He just walks off, lighting up as he goes, holding a piece of cardboard to his hip. At the doors he tosses it into a bin and moves on without looking back. It has my name on it. 
 
 
*
 
He drives like everyone else on the road has insulted him personally. Fortunately we’re mostly on a giant ten-lane road big enough for his ego and everyone else’s. It floods through huge industrial districts – endless complexities of pipes and miles-long hangars with peaked roofs stained bloodily with rust. An exceptionless realm of enslaved earth rambling in ruinous grey-white invariance to where a grey sea slicks against a black-blue coast.
It stinks in the car. I try to open a window but Anzon stops me.
‘No.’ He points at the sky. ‘Not good to breathe.’
Silence. He glances at me. 
     ‘Your flight was nice?’
     ‘Yes, thank you.’
     ‘You lie.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It was terrible. It was state airways, yes?’
     ‘It wasn’t as bad as I expected.’
     He laughs. His teeth are like little anvils.
     ‘You Salishans. You all have such low expectations of anyone who is not you.’
     ‘You just said state airways was terrible!’
     ‘Yes, but your politeness was a lie, yes?’
     ‘I –’
     ‘You did think it was terrible?’
     ‘Well –’
     ‘Ah, so there you are. Low expectations.’
     I bite my tongue and look outside.
     After an hour we take a turn into a forest road and after another hour in the evening swelter we get to a checkpoint. Pale young faces reach wordlessly for our papers and each takes turns staring at my passport. After a while Anzon gets out and storms over to them. They begin yelling and then two of them unsling their guns and I feel my bowels clench. But somehow Anzon outshouts them and they retreat, sullen and cowed.
     He stalks back to the car.
     ‘Motteridanians,’ he hisses.
We continue on, up into the hills. The nightshrouded forest is busy about us in the cooling air. I see someone standing by the roadside, in the dark. A local, I think, though it’s a strange reach for them to be in – pitch dark and remote. But as we zoom past I briefly see pajamas studded with yellow flowers and drooping eyelids in a little brown face, watching me as we go.
My throat tightens. I snap back against my seat and close my eyes.
‘What did you see?’ say Anzon.
     ‘I – nothing. Nothing.’ I gulp. ‘Just an apparition.’
     He looks back at the road.
     ‘This far out?’ he says quietly. ‘That is bad.’
 
 
I0
The road into Trо̄miyon is fortified with wire fences and here and there are guard towers blasting floodlights out into the abandoned town. Manning these are frightened-looking soldiers, boys, waving transphysic detectors like about protective talismans. At the heart of the town is a square sprawling at the feet of a towering grey-black statue of Progress holding a transphysic fragment in her hands. She looks bemused, as if she’s not sure what she’s looking at, or why she’s been asked to look. At her feet is the headquarters of the cleanup operation – a tidy collection of tents and trailers and vehicles, framed by a makeshift fortress of prefabricated concrete panels as tall as the thunderous tropical trees that loom glum and magnificent in the forest on the outskirts.
A kilometre or so to the east is the No. 7 Teyakon Memorial Transphysic Power Station. All I can see for now are the zombie-grey walls of the source hangar drowning in fierce floodlights. Rising from this is a raw concrete dome, one chunk missing. Little lights dance and squirm about the injury. It looks like some lost temple to a cruel god, uncovered by accident, when it should have been left forgotten.
 
*
 
They set me up in a flat overlooking the square. There’s a pair of keys on a dusty glass-topped table and a bowl of soup on the formica table in the kitchen, globs of fat floating like little icebergs on liquid the colour and consistency of diluted blood. Little green-blue islands of fungus huddle against the ceramic. It feels as if the owners had just popped out for a walk.
For a long time I can’t sleep – the bed still smells like its owners – and when I do it’s not for long. As soon as dawn breaks Anzon walks in, reeking of booze and smoke.
He sticks his head into my room and lights up a cigarette.
‘Could you not, please?’ I say.
He wanders over to a window and opens it. A blast of sultry air barges in, and he grins.
‘Fresh air!’ He hacks and spits through the window. ‘Come. The Director is waiting.’
     It’s a nicer place by daylight. There’s a pool – still in use – and a gym too. One of the restaurants facing onto the square serves as a canteen. There were five more, all once free to the workers at the power station and their families. Apartment buildings rise in proud clusters, whitewashed and airy-looking, prefab odes to the reductionist benevolence of the state. The people who lived in them until two weeks ago had allowances for clothing, food, healthcare, on top of their salaries. All this they enjoyed on clean streets with no crime, or in homes cooled year-round by rattling airconditioners. The only price they paid was that they weren’t allowed to leave. And then, when the time came, they had no choice but to.
We head by foot along the road to the power station. This too is flanked with war-grade concrete fortifications. Something ruffles the undergrowth and a dog comes trotting over, fat and short-faced and wheezing in the heat.
Anzon flings a stone at its head. It yowls, and scampers off.
‘Why did you do that?’ I ask.
That grin, again. Ripe for the punching.
‘You like dogs?’
‘They’re better than people.’ They’re better than you.
‘If the soldiers see him, they’ll shoot.’ He points to the giant, part-shattered dome of the station up ahead. ‘Superstitious country boys. Their parents tell them transphysics will take their balls off. If they don’t know something is real or not, they shoot first. That dog must learn to stay away from us, for now.’
I notice something about him: when he’s worried, or being earnest, he speaks to his shoes. 
 
*
 
The power station hunkers behind doubled containment walls penetrated only by fortified airlocks. The Director’s office is in a trailer by one of these. It’s a cramped and fraying space, reeking of cigarette smoke and cherry liquor and human body. We find her bulked behind a desk, a large woman with a jaw like a hammer, smoking and typing in bursts. There’s two chairs for visitors but she doesn’t offer me one, or say hello.
     ‘You know about the generator?’ she says. Her Palinka is accented too, but serviceable. 
‘Madam director –’
‘Just director.’
‘Oh. Yes, I’ve been briefed.’
‘What do you think of it?’
‘It’s very well designed, for its purpose.’
She snorts and points at me.
‘We know you hate the idea.’
‘Well, it is a dangerous one.’
‘Dangerous? Not dangerous. Nuclear is dangerous too, but your country has forty-three reactors. No, you think, it’s blasphemous.’ She fixes her eyes on me – grey, small, like whoever made her face only added them as an afterthought. The full intensity of her glowering heart burns through them.
‘I’m here to help.’
‘Yes, help. Thank you so much for your help.’ She takes a deep drag. ’Tomorrow you two will go in.’
‘Tomorrow? I’ll need time –’
‘No time. Aklion has made observations.’
‘How? No one’s been in yet.’
The Director looks at Anzon, infinitely weary.
‘Tomorrow,’ says Anzon cheerfully. ‘You and me.’
My head swims but before I have a chance to complain Anzon guides me out. We walk back towards Trо̄miyon, the tropical sunlight like a warm cowl on my shoulders. There’s no sound but for our soles grinding on the gravel. No insects, no birdsong, like we’d stumbled into some distant future where a swelling sun had sterilized the world and would soon consume us too.
Anzon lights a cigarette.
‘You like Reyasian food? Drink?’
     ‘I don’t really know much about it.’
     He wraps one arm around me, laughing and overclose and pungent. It’s like being seduced by a bear.
‘I like you. Many of you come here and pretend you understand us. You are lost, and you don’t hide.’
And there I was, trying to do the exact opposite.
 
 
I00
It’s a suffocating equatorial night. The air is as still and damp as an unexhaled breath. The bellies of distant clouds grumble and their amorphous silhouettes swell blackly in the brief flash of lightning-strikes.
I am, reluctantly, shitfaced.
Anzon is too, less reluctantly. We’ve spent the afternoon stuffing our faces in the canteen with piles of steamed dumplings, plump with sweet pink meat, and endless slices of perforated Reyasian cheese on velvety rice pancakes. All this washed down with mug after mug of sweet cherry wine diluted in fizzy water. We’re sweaty and unsteady but once we get to the gates out of the camp the young faces watching from the guard towers seem more scared of us than of anything out in Trо̄miyon.
     ‘Why’re they so scared?’ I say.
     ‘Their balls.’ Anzon chuckles. ‘You’ll make their balls fall off.’
     We head off into the darkening town passing a bottle of cherry wine between us. Drunk straight it’s oversweet and cloying and irresistible. It’s barely been a month since evacuation but already the lawns are infected with pockings of weeds and windows have shattered into fangs of glass. Everywhere is jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of life – a white trainer, laces tied. A tricycle on its side by a bush. A plant in a cracked pot bleeding soil out of an open window in a tenement.
We come to a crossroads with a statue of two revolutionaries. Someone’s spraypainted them pink at the crotch.
     ‘Are we really going in tomorrow?’ I say. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
     Anzon stares up at the statue for a while, and then nods.
     ‘It is dangerous. But with you, there is hope, maybe. You know about hope, don’t you? You people are so positive. You’re lucky enough to have hope. She doesn’t. She had it snatched away from her, poof, like that.’
     He gags and throws up on the ground. I watch him heaving for a few moments and consider helping and then decide I can’t be bothered. Off to the left a distant lightning strike burns like an electric tree over towering foliage.
That’s when I see her again.
She’s standing off in the undergrowth in the same direction. Perfect little face watching me without malice or judgement, as poised as a saint in an icon. The sight of her is like a punch to the plexus. I want to walk over and wrap my arms around her. Tell her I’m sorry, that I didn’t know it wasn’t her on the sofa, that I looked everywhere, I really did. But I’m not drunk enough to do it.
In any case, even if I was, Anzon gets the drop on me. He heaves himself to his feet, whimpering, and staggers towards her.
‘My girl,’ he groans. ‘Oh, my little one…’
‘Anzon.’ I grab him but he shoves me off. I grab him again. ‘It’s an apparition!’
     ‘Get off!’ he bellows. ‘Imperialist!’
     ‘It’s not real,’ I say.
     ‘What’s not real? Esren polyon ekiente eies! Eies, eies!’
     I breathe deep and centre myself and cleanse the area. A bulging flash of blue-white light domes around us and the apparition evaporates. The air chills in the aftermath, briefly. My drunken body can’t handle the energies. Vomit ascends my gullet like lava in a volcano, and then it’s my turn to slump to the ground.
     Anzon staggers back.
     ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Ah, she’s gone again.’
     I wipe my mouth. And, perhaps, tears.
     ‘She is,’ I say.
     I’m so drunk it doesn’t occur to me we’re not talking about the same person.
 
 
I0I
It takes me six bottles of water and a whole plate of dumplings doused in sour cream but by the next afternoon I’m almost human again. Decontamination happens in a tiled shower room where we’re scrubbed by old women with what look and feel like brooms. Then we don our bulky airsuits and head to the airlocks.
The Director’s already there, along with a small army of folk in the same sky-blue jackets as Anzon. The fewer their medals, the harder they’re working. They load us with equipment and soon oxygen canisters cling like iron gremlins to my back and bulky Reyasian transphysic monitors sprout from my belt like iron mushrooms. Anzon has it worse – he gets a fat deflector pack clipped on over his tanks, its wand as long as his leg.
He gives me a thumbs up. ‘Helmets on,’ he says.
I slip the glass-domed helmet over my head and realize that we’re wearing adapted spacesuits. Here, too, it somehow smells of boiled meat, especially the small stick topped with what looks like velcro pointing at my face.
A voice buzzes in my ear, rough with distortion.
     ‘Radio check,’ says Anzon.
     ‘Um.’ I blink. ‘Copy?’
     Laughter.
     ‘Very army.’
     ‘What’s this stick by my face?’
     ‘For scratching,’ says Anzon. ‘How to scratch your face through that helmet?’
Two red lights by the airlock spin up and the door opens. Beyond is a rippling white tunnel of plastic leading to a pair of blast doors, rust-red and sealed. We waddle over, me dragging a cart piled with material, my brain sliding about on a slick of residual booze. Fragments of our conversation from the previous night bubble back.
     ‘Anzon?’
     ‘Yes?’
     ‘Last night. When we wandered into the village. Who did you see?’
     He doesn’t respond. I glance back and see the others watching us, the Director at their head, like they were witnessing two witches being burned. The Director raises one arm. I wave back and then realize she’s just signalling the doors shut. A second later they swing together like iron lips, Anzon and me twin specks of life in the gullet behind them.
     Anzon reaches for the blast doors and heaves them open. Beyond is a strangely idyllic scene, doused in syrupy Reyasian sunlight. A circular driveway curled around a small fountain. Behind this, the entrance to the power station – glass-fronted, undistinguished, as innocuous as a school abandoned for the summer. The only sign of any danger is the colossal bulk of the shattered Source Hangar dome looming over it all.
     Anzon holds the deflector wand in front of him like a sword.
     ‘Ready?’ he says.
     I swallow, and realize that six bottles of water weren’t enough. 
     ‘Ready.’
 
*
 
Grief is an ambush predator. It lurks, malign and odourless, in the corners of your life. It stalks amidst the little — the incidental, the innocuous — and turns them into conduits for memories that crush the breath from your chest. It ages, but never relents, and the first rush of its attack catches you off guard, always, always.
     The fountain is rimmed by a circular flower bed. All the flowers in it are clustered into cones of tiny budlets. As I watch they all flush a yellow, so vivid they look like they’d taste like butter in the softening sunlight.
I turn to Anzon, breathing hard.
     ‘What colour were these flowers? Before?’
     ‘These yellow flowers? Yellow.’
     ‘Were they always yellow?’
     A chuckle.
‘Why, are you are —‘
‘Just tell me what fucking colour they were?’
A brief silence. Then, chastened:
‘I don’t know, Professor.’
     I straighten and head towards the power station.
     ‘Wait,’ says Anzon. ‘We need samples.’
     ‘You get them.’
     I hear him panting after me over the radio.
     ‘Professor, we should turn back.’
     ‘I’m fine. ’
     ‘Professor –’  
     ‘I said I’m fine.’ I look at him. ‘She knows we’re here. She knows about you and me. No mere embryo can do that. What aren’t you telling me?’
     The sun shines off Anzon’s helmet and blots out his face. He doesn’t respond, and I turn away quickly. These damn helmets come with scratching sticks, but there’s no way in them of wiping away tears.
 
*
 
The offices of the power station sprawl about the Source Hangar like concrete barnacles clinging to the corpse of a beached leviathan. We enter through the main hallway where a statue of Power has toppled over and broken and something’s driven its head halfway into the wall. The place is graveyard-silent and lightless and we plod past gaping doorways half expecting something to leap out and take our heads off too. Eventually we come to a pair of blast doors, pastel blue and deformed. Anzon checks them, and takes off his helmet.
‘It’s sealed,’ he says. ‘Safe.’
‘Something could have filtered in from outside.’
‘Not enough to hurt us.’ He breathes deep, and grins. ‘See. Human, still.’
We set ourselves up in the lobby as swift night falls outside and shadows slither across the garden. In the diminished lights finally we see the true extent of the transphysic infection outside. The foliage teems with miniature snarls, cryptic semi-entities that can mimic life without actually living. Shimmering veils of light drift about. Fluorescing shapes bloom in midair and ride the logic of their own growth to mesmerizing fractal collapse. That all this is always with us takes my breath away. An endless complexity of energies and wills and laws existing orthogonal to normal life, impossible to touch or see unless you look at them right. Or, unless you break them.
Anzon deploys small transphysic shield generators in a circle around us –  badly-calibrated things that clatter and generate a field that makes my blood itch. He pulls out a blueprint and we inspect it in the light of the torches strapped to our helmets.
‘The generator is here,’ he says, pointing.
     I peer at the schematics.
     ‘I’ve never understood how it gets energy through from the source hangar.’
     ‘Ah,’ Anzon grins. ‘No, no. That is a precious secret of this design’s creator.’
     I have a hunch.
     ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
     He beams for an instant, and abruptly subsides.
     ‘Yes. Yes, it is me.’
     ‘Is that why they’re sending you in, and not a cleanup specialist?’
     ‘You made it, they say. You go clean it up.’
     We plot our route forward and then lean up against the doors and eat dumplings from the self-heating packs they give soldiers.
‘Yellow flowers make you sad?’ says Anzon.
     ‘I…’ I don’t want to tell him but somehow there, in that glittering semidark, in the eerie silence of a dead place, I want to hear my own voice. ‘My daughter used to have a pair of pajamas with yellow flowers, just like those. That’s why I said it know. It’s tapping our memories.’
     ‘Yes, yes. That night. I saw…’
He stops and pops another dumpling in his mouth.
‘Saw what?’
‘Where is your daughter now?’
‘I lost her.’
‘Ah. Terrible.’
‘What did you see that night?’
For a few moments his face goes blank. Then, a look I recognized – one I’ve seen on my own face. The brittle blankness of someone ambushed by grief.
     ‘I lost mine too,’ he says.
     We both want the other to say more, but neither asks for it. Instead we sit, staring at the garden. Watching half-lives play in the outer dark, while other half-lives haunt our inner ones.
 
II0
We find our first bodies the next morning, lying face-down in the corner of the canteen. One is a deep-jowled man with huge pink bags under his eyes and thinning grey hair the consistency of cotton. His torso is embedded in the other’s shoulder. and the back of his head domes through the other’s back like a hairy tumour. Their flesh ripples, anemone-like, as we approach.
Anzon crouches by them, and sighs.
‘He was a good one. That’s his wife.’
‘They worked here?’
‘No.’ Anzon snips a little bit of the man’s hair and puts it in a sample packet. ‘He did, but she only came to pick him up, when he is finished, every day. At four in the morning, before her own work.’
We try to move them but they’re stuck to the floor so we get some tablecloths from behind the serving counter – the dishes still heaped with cold dumplings and beet soup and bowls of sour cream – and cover them up. Then we leave them, a tangle of undead flesh quivering silently in the gloom.
We sweep the outer buildings and find nothing so we check in with the Director and head to the inner airlock. Beyond is a maze of tumbled masonry and shattered glass and broken equipment. Miasmas lurk in the shadows like lost children and flinch just like them when we look. It’s fully dark by the time we squeeze our way out the other side. We clamber out, and dust ourselves down. Then we both freeze.
Up ahead, standing at a junction between a flickering light, are two small figures. Obese humanoid mockeries, a single giant eye perched on their inflated shoulders, watching us with the inimitable stillness of things not quite alive.
Anzon raises his deflector stick.
‘Figla,’ he hisses.
Someone responds in Bsolon. They bark at each other for a few moments as we walk slowly towards the strangers. Then, abruptly, I realize what we’re looking at, and the blood stops punching my temples.
‘It’s us,’ I say.
‘What?’
They’re replicas, half-sized, of us. The fat bodies are our bulky suits. The giant eyes our domed helmets. Anzon lowers his stick and says something in Bsolon. A burst of static and a curt response follow, and then we’re back in silence.
‘It knows we’re coming,’ I say.
Anzon grunts, and kicks the figures. They crumble, dirty-grey and particulate, like they were made of dandruff.
‘What will she do about it?’ he growls. ‘What can she do?’
We keep on to where the corridor opens into the source hangar itself. One look and we know there’s no way we’re going to make it across that evening. The ground’s frozen solid and the air’s been fully infected by sheets of undulating disturbances that drift about, predatory and seeking. Great herds of manic homunculi migrate across the glistening frost at our feet, hunted by tendrils of glowing growth that erupt jointlessly from the ground and drag them down, tiny arms flailing, half-formed faces gaping in approximations of horror.
‘How old was she?’ I say.
Anzon shrugs.
‘When I received her, an embryo.’
‘Yes but how old?’
He hesitates.’
‘I can’t tell help you if you don’t tell me everything. I won’t.’
He stares at his feet. It’s amazing how such a huge man can look like such a small boy with the slightest change of posture. Then he walks back down the corridor to the wall of rubble we just navigated and takes off his helmet. He signals me to do the same. I point to the source hangar but he shakes his head and signals back, it’s fine. It take mine off, slowly. The air smells like flowers and sweat. Anzon takes the helmet and leaves both his and mine on the ground down the wall and comes back.
‘We will be fine,’ he whispers. ‘She was from Motteridania.
‘From the mines? From the mines?’
‘Be quieter. Yes. Yes, from the mines.’
‘Then she could be a thousand years old!’
He looks grave.
‘Two thousand?’
‘Around,’ he says. ‘We estimate one thousand six hundred.’
‘What the…’ I glance back at the mess in the source chamber. ‘What were you people thinking?’
‘You people?’ He scowls. ‘No, you do not say that.’
‘You’ve dragged basically a demigod out of the most dangerous place in your country to stick in a power station and expect – ’
‘We did what we had to.’
‘You didn’t have to do this. You have a thousand alternatives. This is just...idiocy.’
Anzon postures up and I expect violence. I want violence. But he just smiles and it’s a different kind of smile, one that leaves him looking very old, and very tired.
‘We don’t have time,’ he says. ‘Do you know how I lost my daughter?’
‘Your daughter? No. What does –’
He looks down at his shoes.
‘During the war, the Kuvatalese – they bombed us with defoliants. My daughter was out in the fields. Of course, I’m from a farm. Down south, on the peninsula. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?’
Of course I have. On the news, every few months, for ten years. Great silver scalings of paddy tumbling down the sides of lush Reyasian valleys. The sky reflected in scalloped mirrors of water. People fleeing across them, strafed by Kuvatalese fighters, hunted by walls of flame descending down the ridges.
‘Yes, you’ve seen them. My daughter was caught in one attack. She breathed in too much and it began to eat her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. We took her to the hospital but they bombed the power plant, so – the power went out as we went in. We rushed her to the next one but no power there, either. Now she can barely breathe, you understand? Just yesterday she was pulling my hair to wake me up. Come on, she said. Let’s go, my friend found some duck eggs. Let’s go collect.’ He sniffs, brittle with age and resignation. ‘Now her breath comes in bursts. Like this – ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha. We go to the next hospital. They put her in a bubble full of oxygen, but there’s nothing left of her lungs. She’s dead before they turn the machine on. When they give her back to me, she is growing cold.’ He lifts his hands up, thick-fingered and calloused and quaking. ‘So you see we don’t have time.There are millions of children here in Reyasis who needed this. If I have to bring one of your gods themselves here in chains I will do that to bring us what you all take for granted.’
He trudges back to the helmets and holds mine out to me.
‘I don’t hate you, Professor,’ he says. ‘But you know where they got the chemicals from.’
I do. I knew before I ever came here that, like the bodies in the canteen, our nations were welded together by death.
 
*
 
It’s freezing and dark in the source hangar. Frost crunches beneath our feet and our breath condenses before us like intermittent comet-tails on a journey towards a dead star. There’s no light but the cones of illumination spilling from our helmet-torches, no sound but that of the unlife seething about us – an eerie hum rising and falling with the cadence of language but not words. I expect the manifestations to interfere but they seem to have no interest. I realize they know nothing beyond the world they’ve created in this gloomy ruin – this peculiar island of reverse entropy, flourishing in defiance of nature. We should just leave it to grow and age and fade in its own time. Let these creatures live out their odd lives and then return to the oblivion we conjured them from. Why should creation give the creator the right to destroy?
     But then, some rights are awarded, and others seized.
     We head towards the Thermal Core. The great shredded shell of the thing squats in the dark at the far end of the hall like some iron bud frozen in midst of a violent bloom. Shards of metal lie embedded in the floor and the wall like cancerous fangs. One of them is framed by a great fractal mess of gore, guts and a glorious array of bones spreading in gruesome magnificence halfway up to the ceiling. We walk slowly past to the back of the Core, and that’s where we find her. A little girl with an old woman’s snowy hair, lying face-down in a pool of shimmering crimson liquid, stuff that looks like blood but distorts one way and another like a slowed-down amoeba. I kneel and touch her. Her skin’s dry, tepid, too smooth and too yielding for a healthy human child. She twitches on contact, twice, and falls still. But inside, she’s seething, a flowery topography of billowing membranes and disturbed fields whipping around a hot core of transphysic instability. Not a she but an it, and it older than my homeland, an it as far beyond me as a mountain or a river or the vast billowing wall of a dust storm racing across a dry plain.
It turns its attention to me.
How did you lose her? It says.
I tell her. It listens with the distant empathy of a creature for whom I will only ever be a single droplet in a life full of rain. But it understands. It’s lost people too.
Very well, it says, and pushes me back out.     
I stand, relieved, a little dizzy. Anzon steadies me. 
‘It’s transzoothermic and biothermic,’ I say. ‘And very, very old.’
‘How old?’
‘Three thousand years at least.’
‘Then – ‘ Anzon’s eyes widen. ‘What do we do?’
‘You quarantine the whole place.’
‘What do we do about her?’
‘She’s beyond you. She’s beyond me, or anyone else. You can dissipate her for a while, but she’ll come back, eventually.’
He peers at me.
‘Why do you sound happy about it?’
‘Because I am. Because she deserves to live.’
‘At the cost of all those who lived here?’
I hold up my hands.
‘I’m not being a callous imperialist. But this creature never asked for you to enslave her – even if your intentions were good.’
‘We have to leave. She’ll kill us.’
‘She won’t. She won’t resist.’
‘Why not?’
I take the disruptor wand from him and put it on the back of the Snarl’s head, and activate it. A brief, hot ripple in the air, and she evaporates. An instant later there’s nothing there but the crimson puddle swelling into a brittle dome, like a bubble in vat of boiling blood.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I think she felt sorry for us.’
 
*
 
Outside, in the steaming Reyasian sun, the flowers around the fountain have turned grey and brittle. They crumble to the touch, the exquisite complexity of the shadow and light between their clustered petals turning to nothing. Another transient moment of beauty, barely witnessed before it’s gone.
 
III
I don’t see Anzon again for three days and I spend most of those in the flat. Sometimes at night I’m certain I hear noises, in the living room, out in the corridor, but there’s never anyone there. Then, just after dawn on the third day, I hear a series of cracking detonations from the power station. I look over in time to see the dome of the source hangar collapsing, like an old moon subsiding into the earth.
     In the distance, cheers. Anzon turns a few minutes later.
‘Come,’ he says. The smile’s back, and the armour of good cheer. ‘You’re going home today.’
No one else in the camp acknowledges our departure. No one says thank you, or shakes my hand, or even looks at me. Mostly they’re all just wandering around Trо̄miyon, poking at other people’s lives, peering through windows they were too afraid to approach until now. It’s as if they’ve only just realized they’ve been squatting at the heart of a dead city. Back on those magnificent asphalt rivers Anzon just smokes and keeps his eyes on the road. Every now and then he grins and he looks at me and nods. For a few moments it looks like someone might say something. But no one does and, too polite to abide silence with someone, I look away.
We sail past our final checkpoint, unmolested, and finally he turns to me.
‘Who did you see?’ he says. ‘In Trо̄miyon?’
‘I…’ I close my eyes. ‘It would take a long time to explain.’    
‘I will listen.’ The smile broadens. ‘Good stories are worth telling, even if it takes long.’
‘This isn’t a good story. This is a dreadful one.’
‘But it is your story, yes? So it is worth telling, my friend.’
     It’s the first time I felt like he meant it. That I really was his friend.
     ‘I saw my daughter. I...lost her too.’
‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘How?’
I don’t want to tell him. Not because of who he is, but because telling it is no different to reaching into my chest and wrapping my fingers around my wet and squirming heart and pulling it out. Because it’s a story without end or lesson – just the beginning of something dreadful, with no codicil but silence.
But then – his story was just like that too.
‘My primary and I were divorced,’ I say. ‘Are divorced. We shared our child, of course – that’s how things are in Salish. We lived near each other, so she lived at both of ours – she had a room at mine, a room at hers. My primary’s. My ex-primary’s. One day I came home, late. I’d been smoking all evening, so I wasn’t all there. Someone was sleeping on the sofa. I thought, oh, it’s her. We’ll make breakfast together tomorrow, and go to the park. She was twelve – she still thought I was cool. When I went to bed, it smelled like her. She slept in there with me sometimes, and I remember thinking, how odd – why’d she climb into bed and then go out to the living room? I should have checked. Maybe if I had...’ I wipe my nose. ‘I woke up the next day and found her pajamas folded up by the back door. It was unlocked. I went to ask her why she’d done that and why she was sleeping on the sofa, except it wasn’t her. It was one of her friends. A girl called Ayukaira. She said she’d come over with her and some boy the night before, and they’d heard someone coming up the stairs to my flat, and the boy’d left through the back door because he thought I’d be angry if I found him there. Then my daughter...she’d gone out to the landing and the girl says she heard her speaking to someone. A man. Then she’d come back in and said she was sleepy and went to bed. That was the last she saw of her. That was the last anyone saw of her.’
Anzon frowns.
‘But – where? Did she go?’
‘That’s just it – no one knows. We looked everywhere. It was in the newspapers. No trace. The front door was locked when I got in. They found her shoe in a park nearby. Fifty-six people called to say they’d seen her in Malen, in Pārikxa. They even saw her in the Pirate Cities. What the hell would my little girl be doing in the Pirate Cities?’
I turn to him.
‘I literally lost her, Anzon. She was there, in my bed, just an hour before I got home. And then – she was just gone. I don’t know where she is. Still, and it’s like acid in my blood, every day. Because I see her everywhere. Just standing by the roadside. Sitting in an airplane as it taxis past. In the crowd in a TV show. For a while I followed up every lead but then I realized...’ I breathe, deep, ragged. ‘But that’s it. She’s gone, and I don’t know where.’
Anzon takes a deep drag of his cigarette, and nods.
‘When was this?’
‘Twelve years ago, now.’
‘Perhaps, she is still alive?’
Then I say the thing I can never bring myself to say:
‘That’s the worst part. I don’t know. I’m just growing old, waiting to find out how it ends.’
Anzon reaches over and squeezes my shoulder.
‘But that, my friend, is all of life,’ he says. 
 
*
 
He hugs me at the airport. A pungent embrace, long and heartfelt. I hold him back, a great mountain of flesh and glee built like a vault about a fragment of indescribable grief.
‘Thank you, my friend,’ he says. He steps back, and holds me by the shoulders. ‘It was good to meet you. It was good to talk.’
He doesn’t wait for me to check in. Reyasians, I realize, are bad with farewells. The crowds are still there – the old women, the gawping men, a gaggle of little girls milling about unsupervised by the security gates. These ones are in uniforms, little black pinafores over white shirts, their state-issued shoes glossy and stubby and identical. They stare and giggle as I pass. One of them is familiar – slip of a child with long brown hair. No one seems to notice that she alone is wearing pajamas studded with yellow flowers.
She raises her hand and waves, slowly. She mouths, thank you. I wave back.
The other girls all start waving, and laughing, and yelling bye-bye in their terrible, endearing Palinka. They’re still waving when the doors to departures slide shut behind me. It’s the last thing I see in Trо̄miyon. A cluster of vivid young lives, delighted by the existence of another.
 
 
THE END
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