“I don’t think they’ll break them up after everything you’ve done… but you’re too valuable in an evacuation. So. What’ll you do if it comes to that?”
“I’d…” I thought I knew what I’d say if asked that question: I thought I would say no. It was a simple, obvious, moral issue. “They don’t trust anyone else. If I handed them over it would set some of them back months…”
He saw through me easily. “Sure. But what do you want?”
I looked out at the view from the window: the same old mountains wrapped in cloud. It was getting cold outside.
“Asha?” he asked.
“I’m sorry…” I said. “I just, I felt for a moment… just for a moment, I thought it would be good to stop. And…”
“Go on.”
There was no point in lying to him. “I don’t know. I really don’t. If they asked me to go… I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Is it the group itself?”
I shook my head, not wanting to blame them. But…
“I feel like…” I looked away, down the room, at nothing at all. Anything to get away from Ranev’s kindly eyes. “I don’t know what I can do for them. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
“You feel powerless?
“Stupid, I know…”
“Not at all. How are they?”
“Iokan’s still in shock. We had to bring him back. He won’t talk about it…”
“He will.”
“He’s not the only one. I can’t get Pew to talk to me either. And the stuff he’s reading is scaring me.”
“Oh? Such as?”
“He’s only interested in genocide. Not preventing it. Starting it.”
“Don’t you think he has a right to be angry?”
“Up to a point. I’m worried he’ll go off the edge and we’ll lose him.”
“There’s only so much you can do. If they choose not to co-operate, you can’t force them.”
“I know.”
“You have to accept that we do lose them sometimes. It’s not a failure. It’s a measure of how damaged they were to begin with.”
“It never feels like that.”
“True. But I think you’re emphasising the negative over the positive. You’re close to diagnosis on all of them, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you know as well as I do, that’s the hill you have to get over.”
“If they can actually be treated.”
“Well, yes, there’s that as well. Do you think they can’t?”
I looked out at the mountains again. If anything, they looked colder than before. “I wonder if it’s worth it.”
“Why?”
“They’re the last of their kind. They're probably never going to see another member of their own species again.”
“All the more reason to help them.”
I didn’t answer for a moment. I had another worry. “I started wondering how many members of my own species there are on Hub.”
“Ah.”
“One hundred and twenty-three. Forty-six in the delegation. Everyone else went on to the new place.”
“Is that what you’d prefer?”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking… I keep thinking about home.”
“Hub Metro?”
“No.”
“You mean your world.”
“Yes. I keep thinking, what if we hadn’t been evacuated? What if we’d gone all the way to the end?”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. My patients did.”
“Transference, Asha. You have to be careful. You’re not them.”
“I know. But… I keep…” It was hard to express it; this thing growing closer to the edge of my waking mind. “I keep thinking it’ll always be like this. We’ll always corrupt every world we find. Not just my species, not just their species, I mean every human species. And I know this is just because I’ve been closer to the bad stuff than usual…”
“I don’t have to tell you that the more advanced each species gets, the more able they are to avoid all these problems.”
“I know. I know that. I’ve seen how some of the older species live. I just don’t know how they do it.”
He took a breath. “Okay. Listen. I think if they ask you to work on the Ardëe evacuation — if that happens — I think you should say no.” I looked outside. “And I think you should take a holiday. You need some time off. You went through a lot in the attack and I don’t think you’ve really had a chance to recover.”
I didn’t reply immediately. Something outside the window caught my attention.
“Asha?” he asked. “Are you all right? Is something wrong with the signal?”
“No,” I said, and went to the window. I looked back at him. “What can you see out of this window? In your centre?”
“It’s a sunny day. Like every day. Except when the rain comes, but it’s sunny now. What do you see?”
I looked back outside. Clouds were billowing up around the mountains, the kind we’d been warned about. I looked up and saw they were coasting over the centre, heavy and black. The first snowflakes flittered down. The wind picked up and suddenly the snow was heavier, and catching in the grass.
“Winter just started,” I said.
Ranev took on an admonishing tone. “Asha… come on. It’s not a symbol. Winter always starts about this time of the year at your centre.”
I turned back and smiled, and put on a small chuckle for his benefit. “Yeah. I know.”
But the flakes were coming thick now, and burying the grounds in snow.
PART THIRTEEN — DIAGNOSES
1. Committee
The word spread through the Refugee Service as quickly as the snow piled up around the centre: a world was dying, and we would soon be called on to save as many as we could. The pictures from Ardëe were terrifying. The sun bristled in the sky, coronal mass ejections bursting out every few minutes and spitting more plasma into the solar system. The storm of charged particles smashed into Ardëe’s magnetic field, making auroras flare up from pole to equator, so bright they turned night into day. The frail magnetic protection that had kept the sun’s electromagnetic gales away from the planet for billions of years was being battered into submission, allowing the solar hurricane to strip away the upper layers of atmosphere. Views from space showed a churning stream of air blasting away from the planet for millions of kilometres, as though Ardëe had been turned to a streaking comet. The ozone layer was already gone, and standing outside in the daytime could result in first degree burns just from the ultraviolet. The shower of deadly light did even worse: it fused nitrogen and oxygen together to make nitrogen dioxide, a dirty brown gas you could see polluting the clouds of Ardëe. The slight protection it gave from the UV was no consolation for the acid rain, or the freezing cold that would settle on the world as it blocked out the rest of the sun’s light. The turbulence stirred up by the fleeing atmosphere set off shrieking winds and storms, overwhelming the weather control systems and making it even worse. If the sun continued these outbursts, then eventually there wouldn’t be any air left to breathe; but it seemed hardly likely anyone would be left by then. The death toll was already more than a million only days after the sun went into this new phase, on a planet of nine billion closely packed people.
“Nine billion…” said the ambassador from Ardëe, beneath the vast screen in the IU Assembly Hall that showed the pictures of apocalypse. Handheld footage now, of people streaming from vast, sky-arcologies into the undercities, crowds looking up at cavern roofs, fearing collapse as the cityscrapers above groaned under the typhoon’s assault. “Nine billion people… who have less than a year to live.” There were already tears tracking down his face. “My own cityscraper… Erbesoon… fell last night. I…” And the grief choked him, but he waved away an assistant. Hundreds of representatives watched him in the assembly hall, many more observing remotely.
I watched from my office: I’d seen many apocalypses
before, but it never prepares you for the raw grief of someone who has just seen his planet begin to die.
“My world is ancient, and proud, and famous, and doomed,” said the ambassador. “And perhaps we built too high. Perhaps there are too many of us. Perhaps only a few need to survive… but there are nine billion who will die if the Interversal Union cannot act…”
A chime came from my office wall and dampened the sound. It was the call I had been expecting: a conference, assembled on screens because none of us had time to get to a remote meeting room. They popped up on my wall one by one: Mykl Teoth in his office; Baheera om-challha Isnia on the Lift, making what looked like an ascent, though it was hard to tell; Koggan BanOrishel somewhere outdoors in Hub Metro, blue lights reflecting on a metre-thick crystal wall behind him; Eremis Ai walking through the new ICT headquarters; Henni Ardassian using a pad, sitting in the back of the IU Assembly Hall itself; no one else. Quorate enough for decisions.
“I’m addressing the assembly as soon as the ambassador from Ardëe is finished,” said Henni. “So let’s make this quick. We’ve gone from thinking a worst case scenario was a ten year evacuation to having only eight or nine months. No matter what the ambassador says, we’re probably only going to be able to get a billion out.” She shook her head. “Only!”
“How the hell did it happen…?” asked Koggan.
“We don’t know and I’m not discussing it now. I only want opinions about what happens to the group, given that resources are going to be very thin for the foreseeable future. We’re going to need the centre back, for a start. We’ll be flooded with refugees and we won’t have enough room for them as it is.”
“I think, for our purposes, I’d like the group to continue with Dr Singh,” said Eremis. “I’m not too worried where. Hub Metro would actually be more convenient.”
“I don’t want them outside a secure environment,” said Koggan. “There’s only two places we can keep them: the Psychiatric Centre or the Correctional Facility. I suppose you don’t want the latter.”
“The Psychiatric Centre isn’t the best place for them either,” said Mykl.
“We can provide something,” said Baheera, making Henni frown for a moment. “I think I can loan you a high security negotiation facility, at least in the short term.”
“Well,” said Henni. “That’s a solution for now…” she looked up at a sound in the Assembly Hall; the ambassador choking back tears.
I drew a breath. It was time to own up to my own frailties, much as I didn’t want to. “There’s another problem,” I said.
“Yes,” agreed Henni without letting me finish. “We might need to reassign you to the evacuation. You have no idea how big this is going to be. I’m about to ask for half the IU budget for the next five years to cover it.” She pushed on, overriding what she assumed would be my objections. “I know what you’re going to say, I know you’ve got your moral obligation, but there’s going to be at least a billion people coming out of Ardëe and we’ve never handled those kinds of numbers before.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
“Well? What did you mean?” demanded Henni, eyes flicking up at the events in the IU Assembly Hall.
“You might need to find someone else anyway.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“I might have to spend some time away from the group. And… I might be joining my species, on the colony world.”
“You’re what?”
Mykl didn’t share Henni’s outrage. He’d been the one to arrange the therapy with Ranev. “Medical reasons?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“At a time like this?” demanded Henni.
“I might not be much help,” I said.
“We’ll be sorry to lose you,” said Eremis. “But I think we would understand if you had to go.”
Henni shook her head in exasperation, then looked up at another sound in the hall. “I’m on. We’ll talk about this another time.”
She switched off her pad, and her screen was replaced with a feed disconnected icon. The others made haste to turn to the news channel, just as I did.
An assistant led the ambassador from Ardëe away, still weeping as images from his world played on the screen behind him. A view from space, lit up with the blue glow of cities spraying out across a continent. The lights flickered and died from electrical overload as electronics all over the world failed in the teeth of the solar storm. Someone had the decency to fade out the image as the ambassador was taken outside, and it was replaced with a simple caption: Henni Ardassian, Director, Refugee Service.
We watched as Henni went in front of the representatives of thousands of worlds to tell them the hard facts about what the horror on Ardëe meant, and beg for the money to save a species from extinction.
2. Kwame
Kwame didn’t hear about Ardëe. He didn’t even notice the snow, which kept all of us inside for days while the blizzards turned the centre into the winter retreat it was supposed to be. Kwame never even looked out of a window. He hadn’t left the bunker for two weeks.
He slept in the officer’s quarters to begin with, and then moved into the enlisted men’s barracks a few days later. This made no immediate sense since the barracks were less comfortable and filled with the stink he’d specified, but I suspected there was a very good reason.
He spent the days going below into the lower level, sometimes tinkering with the equipment, but mostly sitting among the hibernation chambers. And while he was there, he talked. No one listened but me, and I did so from my office, taking no part in the conversation. I asked him once or twice if there was anything he wished to discuss, but he politely declined. And then, a day after the announcement of the Ardëe evacuation, he asked me to join him there.
I found him sitting by the pedestal of a hibernation unit, and he invited me to sit beside him.
“So…” I said. “Who have you been talking to?”
“I have been talking to myself.”
“I noticed that.”
“You do not perceive my meaning.”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“The person I have been speaking to… that man… is Kwame Vangona. Last President of the sovereign republic of Mutapa.”
I nodded.
“And he has been dead for many decades,” he said.
I nodded again.
“You knew this.”
“I’ve been listening.”
“I believed you would.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Everything. His whole life. After the end, he would come down to see me. He wanted someone to talk to. Someone who was in the army, but not an officer. He was a man of the people…” He looked away. “He wanted someone to know why he had done it. How he came to that decision. So he told me everything. How his wife died. Everything.”
“What did you do?”
“He was the President. I listened. We had met before — did I say that? No, of course not. We met at Horonga, when I was installing defensive systems. He was an officer, still there after the war… he was concerned that the men who would operate the defences did not have the education to understand what they were doing. He was right, but I dared not say anything. Years later, when I was injured because one of them set the rangefinder wrongly on a grenade launcher — the poor fool could not add or subtract to save his life — he raised the issue in public. He was campaigning for educational reform, and I suppose it was just what he needed… he was selected for Parliament not long after that. So when we met again, in the bunker, he remembered me. He was sorry he did not do more for me when I was injured. All the people dead in the world and he was sorry about my arm…”
He held up the withered limb, flexing the hand as far as it would go. Then let it drop and leant his head back against the pedestal.
“How long did it go on?” I asked.
“Weeks…” He looked up, towards the command centre. “Upstairs, they were trying to keep contact with s
urvivors. It took many weeks for them to die. When it was too much, he came to see me.”
“Did anything else… happen?”
“No! No, he was not that sort of man. He loved the company of men, but… not in that way. He just wanted someone to know what happened. I think the generals pushed him into arming the cobalt bomb… he never talked about that, he only hinted. He would not blame anyone else. He accepted the responsibility as his own.” Kwame’s voice was tinged with sadness. “I was not such a man.”
“You had a very difficult life.”
“It was nothing compared to his. To do what he did with… so little.”
“Being the right man in the right place at the right time is mostly about luck. It sounds like you were a very good engineer in a country where that wasn’t appreciated.”
“Do you think my life would have been better if I had been Chifunyikan?”
“Maybe. It sounds like they were better at that kind of thing.”
“And then I would be dead. Perhaps that is something else to wish for.”
“Is that how you feel now?”
He frowned, and thought about it. “No,” he said. “I have never wanted to die…”
“Well, that’s something—”
“No. In the bunker, I had nothing to live for. I could have killed myself. Many did. I was simply a coward.”
“Okay. Maybe we can talk about that later. How did the conversation end?”
“With the President?”
“With the President.”
He sighed. “Eventually, we had to go into hibernation. But he told me the chief scientist had predicted the radiation clouds would make the surface uninhabitable for decades. Maybe longer, maybe two hundred years. The hibernation chambers would not last that long. And the chambers in the labour reserve — what you call the ‘shallow complex’ — they would fail long before then. When the bunker was built, we thought we would only have to sleep ten or twenty years at the most…” he chuckled, bitterly.
“But you did all go into the chambers?”
“Yes. I was the last one to go in. I was the only one who really knew how they worked.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 51