by Adam Roberts
More food would have helped, but food was a great problem. The food-mines were having to stretch their tunnels further and further; a greater and greater number of mining missions was coming back empty-handed. And everybody knew that we needed a renewable source of food. Renewable. We needed crops and livestock and farms and market gardens and all this was as plain as the frost-pinched nose on my face. Plain as the nose on my face – what a strange phrase, a strange hangover from previous times. Nothing was obvious about faces any more. You only saw an unswaddled face if it was warm, and that was only in the brief Arctic summers. Otherwise noses were never plainly there, they were muffled up. Don’t misunderstand me: I had a better time than most, because my husband was a senior military man. We had heating in our apartment, we had more food than average. But over the year I remember thinking how hidden everybody was. The cold made them so. Men and woman and children all wore all-over woollen-plastic burkas, with only the letter box eyeslot revealing their humanity. And often that slot was covered with sunglasses.
Renewable food. I sat, briefly, on a renewable food committee, before moving on to a supplies committee (which was not at all the same thing). But I knew the problems. Optimists would say: we have abundant sunlight, abundant water, we must be able to grow things. Seeds had been saved from before; some other natural resources were cold-stored as well. But what could we do with them? The greenhouses that spread in great luminous patches to the north and south of Liberty were expensive to build; the soil that was packed into them had been expensively dug out of the mines (hard to dig frozen soil) and carted up; the heating pipes that ran the length of them were expensive to maintain. And a city of ten thousand people cannot wholly be fed on a score of greenhouses. The fruit that was grown was extraordinarily expensive. Ordinary people never saw it.
But what could we do? Crops will not grow in snow. Science will save us, people sometimes said. They’ll genetically engineer something that grows in the snow, and we’ll plant the snowfields and make them green.
But we didn’t do this. Perhaps it is just beyond our scientific ability. I don’t know.
Our best bet, we were told in committee, was fish. Many breeds of fish don’t mind cold water, provided only it could be kept from freezing solid. An array of fish eggs had been cold-stored, and could be cultivated. Senator [Blank] put a deal of publicity, and public money, into digging a seven-acre pond to the east of the city. This was lined with black plastic – enormously expensive – and with heating elements laid in a web pattern. Then meltwater was pumped in, and the whole thing left to settle, and then scientists bred up fish fry and released it into the water. It was wonderful; exciting. Everybody talked of it. The pond had guards assigned to it day and night to prevent poaching, as fishing was now called.
Ice formed on the surface, but we were told that this was alright, that the fish inside didn’t mind. Then the news went all through the city that all the fish were dead. Some said the whole body of water had frozen solid, because the engine that was supposed to keep the heating elements working had broken down and nobody had noticed for twelve hours. Others said that the mix of the water had been wrong – not enough plankton, or fish-food, or something. Truth carried the story: Fish Disaster. It was enormously depressing. NewLA has a working fish pond, Truth reported, and New NY was working on one, but what use was that to us?
I remember playing cards often. There was a mania for that pastime. What else was there to do? Gin rummy, and bridge, mostly; people were too canny with their money to play big-stakes, to play poker, or anything. But every house had a pack of cards, and every slack half hour was filled with a quick hand or two. What other pastimes were there?
You don’t want me remembering card-games. You want to know about [Blank]. So let me tell you. Though no longer lovers we continued meeting, irregularly, throughout that time. It was towards the end of it, shortly before the first attacks, that he tried to – what would the phrase be, recruit me.
‘Tira,’ he said. ‘We’re reaching a crisis now.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Crisis. Now the time comes. You got to decide whether you want to be on the side of freedom or the side of the government.’
‘This again?’
‘No, seriously, Tira.’ He was genuinely agitated. ‘Seriously. I’m not kidding. They’re behind such things – I can’t even tell you what things.’
‘They’re behind the Snow itself, you told me.’
‘[expletive deleted],’ said [Blank]. It was unusual for him to swear. He was, despite himself, too much part of the puritanically-inflected American culture of which he was also such a critic. ‘Worse than that – can you believe it?’
‘What do you mean, worse than that?’
‘Jesus – Tira, join us and I’ll tell you. Treason against mankind! Humanity cries for vengeance.’ He was saying all manner of things like that, in a strangely heated, jittery way.
‘You’re pretty agitated,’ I said, trying to step a little away from him.
‘Will you join us?’ he said.
‘Join what?’
‘Justice,’ he said, in a hurried, urgent, low tone. ‘Take the battle to them – what they call terrorism, but we got to reclaim that word. That word. Imagine a world without terror? Can you imagine such blandness? Terror is our idiom, all of us. Terror is where we live. Christ, [expletive deleted], we don’t live in the cosy leafy suburbs any more, Tira. There’s nothing comfortable or cosy about our world now. Our environment is defined now by its terrible potential. Nature is the terrorist now. This propagandist, ideological bubble that the government is trying to blow around the cities, around the people in the cities – this lie, this lie that we can trot along with our lives more or less the same as before, the same pettinesses, the same mundane little stuff – we can’t! Look around.’ And he threw out his arm horizontally in front of himself, and turned, theatrically, through three-sixty, drawing a circle with the gesture as if taking in all the city and all the white fissured landscape of snow and ice behind it. ‘It’s not ordinary. It’s not petty. It’s terror, it’s terror, and we need to wake people up to this.’
‘Terrorism,’ I said, stepped back again.
But my expression, or my tone of voice, only seemed to infuriate [Blank]. ‘Jesus Christ my God,’ he called, his head moving up and down in little jerky nods of outrage or exasperation. ‘Don’t you, you, Tira, don’t you fall for the conventional Be Ess. Don’t you – terrorist is just another word for I haven’t been taken in by the government propaganda. Don’t you know that?’
‘What are you planning?’ I asked. He was starting to scare me, if I’m honest with you.
‘Think, Tira,’ he said, advancing on me with short, determined steps. ‘Think. We’re living in an army dictatorship. You wanna deny it? The Senate, the President, they’re all army, air force. It’s a dictatorship.’
‘Which is to ignore all the fuss,’ I said, my voice less certain, ‘with political parties and election, all the vogue now for democratic—’
But he cut me off. He snapped: ‘Cover-up, bread-circuses for the masses, distract them from the truth – the truth – that we are slaves. Slaves.’
This, unexpectedly, almost made me giggle. It was a false step. But his eyes were intense.
‘You know the logic under which we live, Tira,’ he said. ‘It’s Military – Equality – Fraternity. You’re a woman, so you’re no fraternal brother, you ain’t equal in their eyes, you’re not part of the military machine, so you’re nobody. Nobody. We have to strike – we have to remind the bubble-wrapped, sleepy-eyed people of this city of terror—’
His voice was now so loud that people were stopping and looking at him. Sometimes, especially in the early days, people would go cabin-crazy under the general pressure of ice and snow and whiteness, whiteness, so it wasn’t unprecedented for men or women to stop in the streets and start yelling. But it’s always a show. It’s always a diversion from the day-by-day grind. It’s the same visi
t-to-Bedlam experience that was so popular, in one form or another, before the Snow. Lunatic asylums used to make cash by charging tourists an entrance fee to goggle over the loonies. It’s a basic human impulse. Then TV served it, in the days when we had TV. Nowadays we might feel a twinge of unease as we watch somebody – a human being, memories and hopes, lovers and friends, the nexus of innumerable complexities – shatter like dry snow into particles, shouting at the sky, yelling at a passing truck. We might feel unease, but we feel a stronger impulse to spectate. It would be inhuman not to watch.
But [Blank]’s madness was not the trampish sort, vague, and windy and entertaining. It was focused and political, and he didn’t want to give himself away by yelling at all the passers-by so he bore down on me, only on me. I don’t know why, to be honest, he was so eager to recruit me, why it mattered so much to him. But he conquered his urge to yell at me, he put his head down, and when he raised his face again a moment later he looked sane and balanced once more.
‘Anyway,’ he said, eyeing me carefully. ‘Maybe we can agree to disagree. Agree,’ he said, managing to sound vaguely sinister, ‘to disagree.’
‘What you going to do?’ I asked. But it was a dumb question. I knew what he was going to do without him telling me.
But, abruptly, he looked around, and stepped away from me.
‘See ya,’ he said, backing away. He turned and started crunching through the snow towards the covered walkway that led to sixville and the make-n-mend stores.
‘You slept with [Blank],’ I called after him.
He stopped, half-turned, looked at me.
‘Was it to get to her husband?’ I asked, my voice clear in the cold air. ‘Or was it for her own sake? She’s a beautiful woman.’
He turned again and hurried away.
‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ I yelled after him, into the cold air, as if it were a rebuke.
I didn’t mention [Blank]’s threats to anybody. I wasn’t having, at that stage, the sort of conversations with Crow that would have admitted such expressions at any rate; do you know I met [Blank], – and he’s going to start a career as an anti-government terrorist – this wasn’t how Crow and I talked any more. Maybe I hoped nothing would come of it. Maybe I didn’t care. It’s a hard thing for me to think myself back into my state of memory at that time. Had [Blank] really tried to recruit me to some terrorist cell? Or had it just been an amplified version of the sort of ranting he’d indulged in when we’d been together? Or was it nothing to do with the government, was it a transferred anger at my no longer sleeping with him? Military! Equality! Fraternity! That was cute, in a sophomore sort of way. But the first explosion happened two days later.
Shall I write about the explosions, the attacks, chaos raining from heaven, fire in the snow? You know about it, you remember it. I really don’t need to write about it.
I’ll write about it.
I’m so sick of this city. If I could only travel to another city – but it’d be the same, more or less the same. I could go out on the ice, but that’s the very definition of same. Look up monotony in the dictionary and it should have a picture of the snow. But a picture of the snow would be – what? A blank page.
I went to work in the morning, one morning. I felt weary, chilled, underfed, like everybody else in the city. I moved through the multicoloured crowd – the red, the green, the blue, the black, the yellow, the luminous orange, all the various grimy, stained, dirty shapes made by winter coats, ski-jackets, wraps and scarves. So much whiteness, and humanity had put on butterfly colours. The crowd on the street looked as if it was composed of fat people, but underneath the padding and layers everybody was thin. It looked like a rainbow nation, but underneath nearly everybody was white. Whiteness had got into our bones.
The first explosion happened mid-morning. Boom! Then, boom-crac.
Bewilderment. Then people crying aloud.
A great bending sock of smoke, a hundred feet tall, reaching up to the empty sky.
People running, or standing and staring at this new apparition.
Enough.
What I mean is: is that enough description for you of that first attack? It’s not the first two explosions that interest me, actually: it’s the later ones. But the first one is the one that shocks, of course. I don’t want to blank it out. But how can I do it justice? People of my generation, we’ve been conditioned by TV and cinema to think we know what explosions are: great outrushes of fire, streaking out in every direction, sparkler bunches of dune-grass, orange and yellow and white, like fireworks. Yeah? Energetic splashes of painterly colour. But this is not what I saw. The first explosion I didn’t see anything at all. I heard a noise, that was all. It was the sound that a paraffin lamp makes when it ignites, only magnified a hundred fold; a sort of folding, heavy, flabby noise, a wh-umf. Then almost immediately after this I heard a deep-throated crackling sound, like aluminium foil being crunched and rustled, again magnified by a hundred times. Mixed into this was a distant tinkling noise, like fairy-bells – glass splintering and breaking into tiny needles and prisms and sector plates and falling through the air. A deadly snow, this glass: of the five people who died in the explosion, four died from glass injuries.
The committee building in which I worked was located on the north of the city, so we were quite close to the detonation. Of course we all hurried to the window, but we were ground-floor and could see nothing except the buildings around us. The bar of sky visible at the top of the window gave nothing away. Some of the people on the committee – [Blank] amongst them – ran upstairs to get a better view. I was one of three who rushed out through the main entrance and ran through the cold streets to the edge of town. From where we were standing it wasn’t possible to see things clearly, but it was evident what had happened. A column of smoke was rising from the middle of the northern greenhouses, bent by the wind a little. Sunlight glittered remorselessly on the myriad little specks of brilliance that seemed to hang in the air, as if glitter had been applied liberally to the sky. Eventually, of course, all those dendrites of glass fell back to the ground.
For the rest of that day there was no official news. Rumour invented appalling stories – a malfunction, a build-up of flammable oxygen, a weapons test that had gone awry, a terrorist attack. This last notion gripped the gossip-imagination, and variants of it circulated throughout the afternoon: a plane had crashed nine-eleven-style into the greenhouse. A rival city, a Russian city, had launched a missile at Liberty, for reasons of its own. It was (some anonymous person whispered to me, as we sat in separate cubicles in the toilet) the Australians – this was why the government refused to admit that the southern hemisphere was uncovered by snow, it was because the southerners now considered themselves the world superpower and were acting haughty, belligerent, as they thought befitted their situation. ‘We made overtures, I heard,’ said the cubicle-woman, ‘but they rebuffed.’
Nine people had been working in the glasshouses when the bomb was detonated. Of these, two had escaped injury, two more had suffered only light wounds, one had suffered severe burns and had later died, and four people had been killed by airborne glass. That last phrase, airborne glass, stuck in my mind for some reason. Glass born in the air, and fluttering down. A glittery glass-cloud drifting overhead and downpouring a billion droplets of glass shards upon us. Great drifts of ground glass, a hundred miles high. This is the way the world ends.
After that there was a deal of scurrying. Troops quick-marched up and down the streets in formation, holding their weapons before them. Police were suddenly evident everywhere. Helicopters circled in the air over the bombsite. Soldiers cleared crowds away, sweeping them off with the length of their rifles in both hands. People stood, looking stunned.
The radio had no news all day, which, since its only broadcasting station was officially sponsored, raised levels of worry. The six o’clock news show announced that ‘terrorists’ had planted a bomb in greenhouse four, two blocks of glass away from the perimeter of
the town. It had been a bomb of such-and-such tonnage (I forget the figures), and had caused ‘injury and death’. I don’t know why they weren’t more specific, because that phrase resulted in wild gossip-speculation about scores and hundreds of corpses. The next day the crowds huddling to read Truth as it was pasted up were the largest I’ve ever seen. Even here the gossip followed its natural course; people waiting at the back of the crowd heard the news from people who had just read it and were now leaving, even though they were only moments away from reading it themselves. It is one powerful impulse, this urge that grips us to tell friends and strangers gossip-news.
I didn’t see the first explosion, and I didn’t see the second one either. In fact, of all the scores of explosions I only saw one, and that was out on the ice. But I’ll recall it now, so that there’s something visual to add to the otherwise mere sound effect of my memorial here. I was in the snow, away from the city, and I heard a scratching, screechy sort of noise. The noise was coming from above. Then I saw the brown threadworm track of a projectile coming down, and I followed it with my eyes until it crashed into the snow a couple of hundred yards from me. Maybe less. The impact made a rushing, almost a splashy sound, and at the impact point I could see an oval of spreading orange-white, roiling and flickering, like a brain, expanding briefly and then opaqueing, turning to brown-white smoke and hurling off in various directions a few skittering arms of flashy smoke with shrapnel at their tips. By the time these had arced through the air and hit the snow the whole thing was over, except for a curling belly of smoke rising into the air over the impact point, and threads of dark steam coming out of the crater.