Unlight

by Chandra Shekhar

  “How on earth did you manage to find a pond in the desert?” asked Anna.

  “There used to be a tiny waterhole hereabouts,” said Jessica. “I saw it on a hike, but it was dry.”

  “That’s the one. We’re right on top of it.” Larry explained that he had it dug until hitting the bedrock about 200 meters below, and then had the sides lined with bricks and mortar. Finally, he had it filled with a hundred truckloads of water.

  He tapped on the water surface with a pole, and the sound reverberated within the hex. “It’s frozen now at the surface and will probably freeze right through at some point.” He pointed to drilling and ice-cutting equipment scattered around the narrow periphery. “We have machines to break off an ice chunk, melt it, and a hoist it upstairs.”

  “We’ll use this water for drinking, cooking, and showering?” Nicole asked.

  “Right.”

  “Thank heavens,” said Anna. “I was so afraid that we’d have to drink recycled waste water, you know?”

  “Oh Lord, no,” said Jessica. “Yuck.”

  “We might have to do that at some point,” Larry admitted. “It all depends on how long we stay here and how much water we use.”

  “How long will this water last?”

  “Long enough, if we’re frugal.”

  “So we won’t use waste water for now?”

  “Not for drinking, no. But we’ll recycle it for the toilets and the hothouse.”

  “Talking of the hothouse, when do we see the place where we process our wastes?” asked Anna. “Next on our list?”

  “Good guess! You’re catching on quickly too,” said Larry.

  “Well, I can’t wait,” said Anna. “There’s nothing like a pile of rotting organic matter to get the ecologist in me all excited.”

  Unlike the other hexes, which were unheated, the waste recycling hex was warm. Bioreactors marked Bath, Sanitary, or Kitchen stood in the middle, gas cylinders lined the far end of the wall, and a hoist stretched to the ceiling. The bioreactors connected via pipes to what looked like air compressors. A mild stench emanated from the sanitary bioreactors. Larry warned them that the odor would get worse as they collected more human waste.

  Jessica covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve, making sounds of disgust. Anna, in contrast, was happily opening the bioreactor to examine their contents. “How long do these reactors take to turn what we eliminate into useable manure?”

  “They might take up to a year, I’m told,” he said. “It depends on having the right mix of microbes, water, and organic matter at the right temperature. Perhaps you could figure out what goes on in there.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “The manure from here feeds the plants above?” asked Nicole.

  “It’s like a complete, closed ecosystem, Mum,” said Anna. “We eat the plants, and the waste we eliminate goes back to feeding them. So, in a sense, the same carbon molecules cycle through our bodies repeatedly. We are essentially eating our own waste. Or, as one of the Biosphere dwellers put it, it’s as if we are eating ourselves over and over again.”

  “Yuck!” said Jessica. “You could’ve spared us the details, Anna!”

  Irked by this scornful attitude toward her pet topic, Anna burst out: “Why is it, Jessica, that you can’t stand any talk about biological processes? Nature isn’t all apples and roses, you know. Things have to die and rot.”

  “Okay, but why dwell on it?” Jessica retorted.

  Anna exhaled and her frown relaxed. “I guess I got carried away a bit,” she said, already regretting her loss of composure, afraid that her sister would go into one of her dreaded sulks and make everyone miserable.

  “I must admit, this place isn’t my favorite either,” Larry admitted.

  “Oh, do you have a favorite hex, honey?” said Nicole.

  “Yes, I do, and it’s our next and final stop—the hex under the Geo dome.”

  The Geo hex resembled the one under Food in that it too had a well in the center, but there the resemblance ended. This chamber was stiflingly hot, the heat emanating from the geothermal bore hole that took up most of the floor space. A narrow bridge allowed Larry and his team to go across the well. Several thick metal pipes painted red or green came through the ceiling from the power plant above and plunged down the well until they vanished into its hidden depths.

  Larry explained that the green pipes pumped cold fluid into a heat exchanger 2,500 meters below the surface, where it boiled and emerged as vapor up through the red pipes to drive the generator. “Then it condenses and goes back down.”

  “Oh, is that how we get our heat?” asked Anna.

  “Yes, and our electricity too. This is the most complex and critical part of the Shell.”

  “Very impressive!” said Nicole. “How long is it designed to last?”

  “The equipment should last forever, according to the engineers. As for the well, under normal circumstances it should stay hot practically forever.”

  “But our circumstances aren’t normal.”

  “Right, so it’s hard to tell how long it will stay hot. About twenty years is my guess.”

  The tour completed, the team found themselves back in the living space at Central. Larry showed Nicole how to work the coffee machine. It was just after 6:00 p.m., and the make-believe sun had now traveled all the way across the dome to hover just above the horizon on the other side.

  “Now that you’ve had the tour, it’s time for us to take stock,” said Larry. “But let’s take a rest break before that.”

  While Larry went to the console and checked the performance of the different sub-systems, Jessica and Elizabeth went downstairs to their private rooms. Nicole picked up the last edition of the Simpsonville Weekly and settled herself on a couch. Anna put on her headphones and listened to a violin concerto by Telemann.

  It feels almost like a normal afternoon at home, Anna thought.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Meeting

  Around 7:00 p.m., the Shell’s sun set and soft indirect lighting came on, rousing Larry from his reverie. A few minutes later, Jessica and her grandmother came back upstairs. Elizabeth appeared refreshed, as she usually did after an hour of meditation. Larry arranged the couches into an inward-facing circle. He cleared his throat and rubbed his chin.

  “It’s time to do some planning.”

  “Oh, no.” Anna groaned. “That sounds serious.”

  “Our holiday can’t last forever,” her mother said.

  “Yes, now that we’re rested and refreshed, we should start helping Larry run this place,” said Elizabeth.

  “Well, since we might be here for some time …”

  “How long, do you think?” Nicole asked.

  While Larry was thinking of some way of answering Nicole’s question without causing too much alarm, Jessica cut in: “It might take twenty years for the Shroud to thin out. That’s how long.”

  Although the others were aware of the fact to some extent, they flinched at hearing it plainly stated.

  “Oh dear …” Elizabeth’s voice trailed off.

  “Jessica’s right,” said Larry. “We might need to be here for a long time. Perhaps up to twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!” said Nicole.

  They sat in tense silence for several seconds. “Oh, well,” said Anna finally. “It might not feel that long. It’s so nice here, you know.” Nicole and Elizabeth nodded in agreement, but Jessica snorted.

  “Nice? Like a nice prison, maybe,” she said.

  Larry winced, and Anna turned red. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. She gestured around her. “Does this look like a prison? Did the lovely meal we had taste like prison food?”

  Jessica shrugged. “I call it as I see it. There’s no freedom. Plush rooms and fancy food don’t alter that.”

  Anna, furious, wanted to yell at her sister: If you feel that way, you’re free to open the door and walk out into the desert, you ungrateful brat. But she bit her lip and said nothing. />
  Elizabeth observed the sisters with concern. “Twenty years in a deluxe prison with loved ones doesn’t seem like such a terrible fate, dear,” she consoled Jessica. “Besides, what choice do we have? It’s stay here or go outside and die.”

  “I’m not saying we have a choice. Just that it’s not going to be much of a life here.”

  As if we didn’t know! thought Anna.

  Larry had recovered his poise. “Jessica has a point,” he said in a measured tone. “Compared to the life we led before the Shroud, things are going to be restricted. No walks, no shopping, no travel, and no socializing outside our narrow circle.”

  “No universities, newspapers, seminars, concerts,” Jessica added.

  “Yes, all that’s gone, perhaps forever. I tried to gather as much of the best art and culture as I could, but we might soon tire of those. And there won’t be anything new from the world outside.”

  “Like prison,” said Jessica.

  “But on the other hand, we’ll enjoy many advantages here.”

  “Yes, how lucky we are compared to everyone else,” said Anna, “so incredibly lucky to be alive.”

  “True, but that’s not what I meant,” said Larry. “I was comparing our present and future life with our pre-Shroud past. Sure, we’re going to lack many of the things that enriched our lives, and we face an uncertain future with unknown risks. On the other hand, we’ll also be spared much of the inconveniences and dangers that plagued us before—germs, pests, crime, weather, traffic, smog, noise …”

  Nicole nodded. “And no more pressure to earn a living, to compete, to maintain appearances.”

  “Yes, life could be a lot worse, dear,” Elizabeth told Jessica.

  “And death would be a whole lot worse!” said Anna.

  Jessica laughed without mirth. “Sure, it’s nice and pleasant here—for now. What if something breaks down tomorrow and leaves us to freeze?”

  Anna couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Trust you to always look at the dark side!” she shouted. “If you’re so clever, why didn’t you build a shelter instead of whinging about what Larry has created?” She had never felt angrier with her sister. Here was her hero, Larry, who had saved them from certain death and brought them to this incredible place, a veritable paradise compared to the moonscape outside, and all her sister could do was gripe. She wished Larry would retaliate and put Jessica in her place, but he never did. She had noticed this before in Larry—he never showed any anger and responded to even the most unfair and nasty verbal attacks with calmness and compassion. Larry had explained his philosophy to her using a modified quotation from George Washington Carver: “Be tender with the young, gentle with the old, protective of the weak, and tolerant of the strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”

  The problem was that Jessica didn’t fall into any of these categories. She wasn’t a child, but she lacked the maturity of an adult. With her social awkwardness, vulnerabilities, and neuroses, she wasn’t strong, but neither was she weak—when it came to things that mattered to her, she could bulldoze anyone who stood in her path. Larry couldn’t deal with her at all, Anna felt. He reminded Anna of a character in The Razor’s Edge, also called Larry, whom the narrator described as “lacking that slight touch of ruthlessness that even the saint needs to earn his halo.” Like his fictional namesake, the real Larry was simply too nice.

  Nicole and Elizabeth exchanged a concerned look. Larry came to Anna and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Actually, we do need to talk about our long-term survival here,” he said. “I was hoping to do it much later, but perhaps it’s just as well not to put it off.”

  Larry returned to his seat and paused to gather his thoughts while Nicole ruffled his hair and kissed him. “A great many things have to work properly for this shelter to be livable,” he began.

  “Meaning a great many things could fail,” said Jessica.

  “True. It can get too hold or too cold, too dry or too humid. Carbon dioxide levels could rise to unhealthy levels. Conversely, oxygen levels could drop too low. The central computer could die. We could run out of food or water. One or more of us might fall ill.”

  “But I’m sure you’ve figured out how to deal with all those situations,” said Anna.

  “I’ve tried to. Everything here has redundancy and fault-tolerance built into its design. If the main heating unit or power generator fails, an auxiliary one will take over until we fix it. Likewise for the bioreactors and the air purifier. The entire complex has two independent sets of heat, air, and drain pipes, one below and one above ground. So if one set fails, we’ll still have the other. The pond shouldn’t run dry if we use it frugally, but if its level drops too low we can drink recycled water. As for food, we’ll grow some of it in the hothouse, but even if that fails we’ll still have enough canned food to last us a long time.”

  “And if someone gets sick, I can treat them in that fabulous clinic,” added Nicole.

  “We’re fortunate to have the world’s best doctor and surgeon with us,” smiled Larry.

  “Perhaps the world’s only doctor now,” Nicole said ruefully.

  “What if you fall sick?” Jessica said.

  “I’ll try not to,” smiled her mother, preventing another sharp reaction from Anna.

  “Jessica has an amazing way of anticipating my remarks,” said Larry. “I was going to talk about what happens if Nicole falls ill. Indeed, about when any of us fall ill. But before that, let’s take a look at ourselves. I dragged you all here to be with me in this shelter because I love you. But even otherwise I’d still consider us an ideal team. Do you know why?”

  “Because we’re cute?” Anna said.

  “That’s actually icing on the cake,” smiled Larry. “But let’s pretend you were all ugly as sin. I’d still want you and nobody else here for two reasons. The first has to do with demographics. Small, tightly-knit groups survive best when they aren’t too homogenous—a group of just twenty-year-old men, for instance, won’t do well in survival situations.”

  “They’d start fighting from day one,” said Anna. “So would a bunch of twenty-year-old women, for that matter.”

  “We’re just five, but between us we have both genders and three generations.”

  “Not to mention the blood of at least three races,” Anna said.

  “Exactly. In the days to come that diversity might be valuable in ways we can’t anticipate.”

  Nicole nodded. “There’s something in that.”

  “And your second reason?” Jessica asked.

  “It has to do with diversity of a different sort. Each of you brings a unique and essential skill. Nicole’s inclusion needs no justification—any of us could fall ill at any time. Anna, we need you because you alone can understand this ecosystem and keep it healthy. Jessica, your computer and mechanical skills are going to be vital when things start to break down, as they inevitably will with time.”

  “I guess I’m the deadweight here,” Elizabeth said ruefully.

  “Deadweight?” Larry laughed incredulously. “You might be the most important member of our team.”

  “Me? I’m not much good with plants or machines or computers,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not even that much of a cook.”

  “Your dishes are the only ones I like, Grandma,” said Jessica. Elizabeth smiled at her granddaughter and pinched her cheek gently. Jessica couldn’t stand much physical contact, but she allowed her grandmother to caress her once in a while. Elizabeth was so warm and gentle that even Jessica, with her touchiness and frayed nerves, found her soothing.

  “I’m a pretty fair cook, and so is Anna,” said Larry. “No, we love your cooking, but it’s your professional skills we need.”

  “But what professional skills? The only work I’ve ever done was as a spiritual counselor.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You have an incredible ability to help people develop healthy emotions and relationships.”

  “You are very kind,
but what use will that be here?”

  Larry got up and took a quick stroll around his couch, almost bumping into the incense bubble which was now emitting fragrances of moonflower and evening primrose. He returned to his seat. “Elizabeth, the biggest danger we face is not some mechanical or supply issue, or even a medical emergency. What I’m really worried about is how well we’ll all get along, being confined to this tiny space with only each other for company and a dead planet outside. We might start to get on each other’s nerves.”

  Nicole shook her head. “We’ve had a couple of scenes, true. But we’ll settle down.”

  “I hope so,” said Larry. “But what if one of us goes crazy and tries to wreck the place?”

  Nicole shook her head with more emphasis. “That can never happen to us.” And after a pause she added: “Can it?”

  “Remember Biosphere?” Jessica said. “By the time it ended its residents were like cats and dogs.”

  “I’m not saying we’ll fall apart,” said Larry. “But we need to anticipate and prevent potential problems. You, Elizabeth, are our emotional insurance.”

  “Exactly!” said Anna. “You’re always underrating yourself, Grandma.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Jessica. “You’re smarter than any of us.”

  Elizabeth blushed. “You’re all so sweet to me. I’m terribly lucky.”

  A short pause ensued. “All right, it’s clear that each of us has a role,” said Nicole at length. “But we know so little about this place. How will we be able to help run it?”

  Larry cleared his throat. “Okay, let’s start with me. I’m your generalist, your jack of all trades. I know a little bit about everything here. I know how to turn things on or off and check if they’re working. But if there’s a big problem—I don’t know how to fix things. On my own, I can’t run this place for more than a few months. But we have to keep things running for years, and some things will fail.”

  “Of course we’ll help,” said Anna. “You’ve done so much, it’s time we all chipped in, right?” She turned to the others, who all nodded. “Even if we screw things up.”