His mother had eventually explained it in a way he could understand, even if he didn’t entirely like it.
The worry that had led to funding such a large project on such a massive scale wasn’t an attack from space. The worry was an attack from within. And when Petras had pooh-poohed that, pointing out that there had been no real attacks in any of the major cities in the entire Caado System, his mother had talked about attacks thwarted and ambitions curtailed, and things he didn’t even want to consider.
His mother had told him (not his wife, not the planner and builder, but his mother, the PPM) that the domed city’s divisions – its inner half-domes – would provide their own filters. Groups had already applied for permits to have entire levels to themselves. They would set costs and they would set the rules, and they would ensure that no other group from the outside would ever take up permanent residence on their level.
He had found it creepy. His mother had tried again, reminding him that the building he and his family lived in had its own code. Only professors with Akida University could even apply for residence there, and only tenured professors could buy their own apartments.
He had thought nothing of that at the time. Other parts of Akida had the same restrictions – covenants in neighborhoods, building codes – all of it designed to keep some families out while letting others in.
He had known, though, that such things created unrest. The idea that the segments would exist on a land space of 1,000 square kilometers had bothered him, particularly with domes stacked on top of domes inside a larger dome until Hedie had taken him on a tour of the partially finished city itself.
Don’t worry, she had told him. No one will feel left out. And there will be few differences to notice.
He hadn’t believed that either, until he had walked through the first two half-domes. They were the same. You couldn’t even tell that one was raised higher than the other.
Each level seemed like a different version of the same city – a purer, fresher, more beautiful version of Akida itself.
And Akida would empty into Hedie’s city once Hedie’s city was done.
Or would have emptied into Hedie’s city, had Hedie’s city not disappeared.
His mind couldn’t comprehend that the domed city had been here one moment, and in flight the next. He couldn’t comprehend how 1000 square kilometers had become dirt overnight.
He couldn’t comprehend life without Hedie.
“There’s no need for you to walk this part of the city with me, Ahmed,” Petras said, instantly regretting the use of the word city. “I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Just send me in the right direction.”
“I can’t,” Ahmed said, his voice a little strangled. “You have to be accompanied.”
“Watch me from here,” Petras said. “I’m sure that will fulfill your requirements.”
He nearly said, Hedie bent the rules all the time, but managed to stop himself. That probably wasn’t something any of them wanted to think about right now, particularly Ahmed. The poor man had to keep functioning, despite the deaths and destruction.
Just like Petras did.
Petras could have avoided this moment as well. He could have stayed home with his grieving children, cocooned them in their still-comfortable life, dealt with the death benefits and the funerals and the media, the sideways looks and the sadness from friends, but he didn’t want to.
He couldn’t, really. He had to be out here.
Other people didn’t understand, and he couldn’t really explain it, not to them, not to himself. The best he could do was this: Hedie traveled so much and was away from home so often that he had to see her remains or he would forever believe she would return to him. She had made him promise that he would do that, years and years ago, just after they married.
She had known about his powerful imagination, so different from hers. His was filled with fables and histories and lore; hers was filled with structures and right angles and big creations that rose from nothing.
That their twins had come out the same way had not surprised him, although it had startled her. Their daughter, who built forts with her dollies, and their son, who pretended those same dollies were magic creatures – those children weren’t replicas of Hedie and Petras, exactly, but they had the best pieces.
And Hedie had known, as she had known so many real world things, that if Petras accepted the fact of her death, he would be able to raise their children properly. If he chose to live in a fairytale world, then he would not.
So he had kept his promise to her: he had gone to Akida’s morgue, filled to the brim with victims of the domed city’s strange flight, and he had waited, silently, with all the sobbing families. He couldn’t sob, not until he saw her. And he couldn’t bring himself to shove ahead in line against all the other people who had come.
Especially since they, for the most part, weren’t people of privilege. Their spouses or children or grandchildren had had precious jobs, yes, but in a domed city that might not have welcomed them if they hadn’t been working on it.
Because the one thing Hedie had insisted upon, the one thing she had claimed made the project work, was that she wanted a level for the workers, the people who would not be able to pony up the funds for the entry deposit, especially since it had become clear as the domed city was finalized that the entry deposits would have to be higher than initially thought.
He had stood in that morgue and watched people lose not just loved ones, but opportunities and futures, and he tried to convince himself that their losses were worse than his.
But his had been Hedie. And there would never be anyone like her.
If Hedie were here, she wouldn’t be standing, broken, beside him, afraid to crawl onto the dirt. She would already be there, looking for evidence of what had gone wrong. She wouldn’t be at loose ends – not because she was mourning (she would have been) but because she wouldn’t have allowed a setback like this to derail her.
She had been strong, stronger than all of them, and he – even now – couldn’t believe she was dead.
But she had been right: he knew she wasn’t coming back to him. When his turn finally came, he had gone into the morgue room – not looking imagery on a screen or a 3D projection. He had asked for – and gotten – permission to see her, to touch her, even though he hadn’t touched her at first.
Because part of him, the sensitive, imaginative, terrified part of him, believed, deep down, that touching her would hurt her, and he would leave touching her to the doctors.
Even knowing she was dead.
And there was no doubt of that after seeing her beloved frame, damaged and destroyed. The face had resembled hers, but the rest of it – oh, the rest of it – looked like a broken bowl inside a pillow case. For a moment, you could imagine the bowl was still there, but if you touched any part of it, you could feel the shards.
He knew she was dead, but that wasn’t enough.
He had to know what killed her.
And he couldn’t quite admit that to anyone, not in a clear way. Instead, he had bullied his way to this platform, and he was now forcing Ahmed to face the loss of an entire project, and the death of nearly 600 workers, all of whom who had ended up just like Hedie – crumpled in the dirt where the city used to be.
At least, that was how Petras imagined it.
But his wife always told him that imagining wasn’t enough. Seeing helped. Touching helped more. Using all five senses would bring an understanding that mere thought could not.
Such a hard lesson for a man who lived inside his mind rather than in his body.
Ahmed was watching Petras, waiting for Petras to say something else, do something else. Ahmed’s mouth pointed downward and his dark eyes had lines along the sides that they hadn’t had last month. His temples were flecked with silver that hadn’t been there two weeks before.
He was living with Hedie’s legacy as well. With all of their legacies.
“Let’s go,” Petras said, clapping Ahmed
on the back. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we will be done.”
As if they could ever be done. As if this place or this moment would leave them behind.
Petras knew it wouldn’t; he had a hunch Ahmed knew it as well.
iv
HEDIE HAD BUILT the platform first, and in typical Hedie fashion, she had built it herself. She loved getting her hands dirty, constructing things, not just in her imagination, but the old-old-fashioned way, with her fingers.
She had actually fired some engineers from her projects for suggesting that they use molds and printers and automated machines to build parts of her projects, the easy parts, she called them, like a platform that covered a bit of ground, a platform that existed to survey – as she would say with just a bit of humor – her entire kingdom.
She built the first platform for Petras. Because he didn’t like walking in nature. And there had been a lot of nature. Spindly trees and dry underbrush, vegetation that grew on bark and boulders that had toppled down faraway hills in even more faraway times.
It looked both impassable and impossible to him, an unconquerable land that should be left to rot, just like the Akida government had done since humans first colonized this planet five hundred years ago.
Hedie had seen possibilities. Use the trees for wood and supplies, ground up the underbrush for mulch for the city’s gardens, figure out what exactly the vegetation was on that bark, and then level everything – including the ground.
She had done that and so much more, taking the boulders and putting them inside her domed city as decoration, removing stone and selling it to home builders inside Akida for people who would never qualify to live in the dome itself.
But back then, when she had first taken Petras to the platform and surveyed her kingdom, she had laughed at his unease. His dislike of the fact that the platform had no railings, that one misstep would send him tumbling to the ground ten meters below. She had climbed down the side, something he hadn’t been willing to do, and she had shown him – that day – with her little pocket knife, the way that the strata varied, and told him about ground stability and fuel sources and the perfect sites for cities that could survive on their own.
He had seen none of it, but he had tried to – catching her imagination and holding it against his.
He saw fairytale cities made of clouds, giant cities made of ivory, paintings in two dimensions transposed against the ugly ground before him.
She had seen an actual city, one she could build, one she thought would be better than any city either of them had been to.
And she had it three quarters finished when it killed her. Somehow. Quietly. During the night.
v
PETRAS AND AHMED had gone to the destruction the way that everyone used to go to the half-finished city: they took a skimmer off the platform onto the uneven ground.
As they stood in the skimmer’s hollow surface, a slight wind pulling at their clothing, the automated system issued a series of warnings. The newly revealed land was untested, the area was restricted, the preponderance of dead bodies discovered at the site might lead to disease...
Petras tuned it out after the third warning. If he died here, so be it. His mother would make sure the children had enough money to make it through the rest of their lives; Hedie’s parents would provide the love and nurturing.
He’d already made plans with both sets of parents, not because he expected to die any time soon, but he was keenly aware after the events of the past two weeks that he could die just as suddenly as Hedie had, and the children would have nothing.
It seemed his comfortable lifestyle had prevented that realization until now; he was ashamed that he had fought with Hedie on every step involving a future without the two of them. The estate planning, the care of the children, an outline of a world in which neither he nor Hedie existed.
It had seemed unimaginable one month ago; it was halfway to a reality now.
The skimmer was not allowed to cross over the site where the city project had been. The investigators had yet to finish their report. They were as much in the dark as everyone else. The city had been there, unfinished, in progress, at midnight local time; by 1 am, it was gone.
The investigators were reviewing the security footage now, trying to see if someone had hooked it up unbeknownst to the engineers. Unbeknownst to Hedie.
The skimmer landed on the last bit of shaved ground before the devastation. The ground had been primed for some kind of working sidewalk, something that the teams would use as they entered and left the city itself.
Petras could even see the mark in the dirt, the footprint – as Hedie would have called it – of the city’s edge.
The city’s missing edge.
He stepped off the skimmer onto the smooth pale brown surface. Ahmed did not follow, but instead, seemed to be waiting for Petras to come to some kind of realization.
Petras wasn’t going to ask what Ahmed wanted him to see, but Petras could guess.
The ground didn’t look benign down here. It was laden not only with dirt from below, but with bits and pieces of the city itself. Some blue shards of clear material, chunks of piping, unidentifiable metal pieces that looked sharp enough to be knives, even though they clearly were not.
Ahmed had warned Petras to wear protective shoes – and he had – but he had the dizzying sense that if he fell, he would be sliced to ribbons. He had the sense that he should have been wearing some kind of gear, but what kind, he did not know.
He half-expected the air to be warmer down here – that desert imagery again, even though Akida was not situated on a desert.
He could almost see Hedie, standing not too far from here, grinning at the vegetation, knife in hand.
It couldn’t be more perfect, she had said, as if she had discovered paradise.
He wondered what would happen if he had been able to go back in time and warn her that she would die here, crushed by the very city she had wanted to develop.
Would she have given all this up? Or would she have grinned again, and said that she would be happy to go out with her boots on?
Sometimes he thought she would be happy to give it all up, and sometimes he thought she would have been happy with this death. And mostly, he realized how little he knew about her inner life, despite how much she had understood his.
The smell of rotting vegetation and mold was long gone. The air wasn’t damp either. All the water had been removed from the property long ago, diverted to wells that would provide water to the city.
Ahmed stood on the skimmer a moment longer than Petras had. If anything, Ahmed looked even more bent and broken than he had up on the platform, as if this ruined ground itself was destroying him.
As brilliant as Ahmed was, he wasn’t Hedie. The city hadn’t been his vision. It had been Hedie’s. She used to tell Petras how hard it was to be the second-in-command on a project like this, not just because of all the stress and the work and the obligations, but because the vision for the project was never quite focused. Yes, the plans helped, and yes, the models made it clearer, and yes, even the partial completion helped realize the vision.
But the actual idea – the thing from which it sprang – the energy for the project, its heart and life’s blood – that was impossible for anyone else to grasp except the person who designed it and brought it to completion.
Hedie’s ability to make her projects live was the reason she got hired all over the Caado System, the reason she was always in demand, and the reason she argued for a project here, in Akida, so she could help raise her children.
The domed city had been close enough to completion, though, that her restless mind was looking for a new project, new sites, new inspirations.
She had been thinking of leaving him again, and the hell of it was, he had understood.
Petras had to forget that Ahmed was behind him. Ahmed made it harder to focus on Hedie, on the remains of her final, failed project. Petras had come here to say a final good-bye to his
wife, not to take care of a man who was tasked with dealing with the remains of her vision.
Petras took a step forward, his boot sinking into the dirt. He frowned at the ground around him, something bothering his fuzzy brain. He tried to dismiss the sensation, blaming it on the fact that the ground was not all that firm beneath his feet.
“Where was she found?” he asked, half turning, trying to focus on the task before him.
Ahmed pointed. “Just over that rise,” he said. “They all were.”
Petras stopped. That disquieting sensation filled him. It felt like an outside force, not an internal one.
“I thought six hundred people died here,” he said.
“That’s right.” Ahmed’s lips puckered, as if he tasted something sour. He didn’t look at Petras. Ahmed looked forward, at the dirt ahead of them, as if he didn’t really see it, as if he saw the domed city that had been here before.
“All of them ended up in the same place?” Petras asked. His hands were shaking. His stomach had become queasy.
Something was wrong here – many somethings were wrong here. The city, gone. Six hundred people, gone. Hedie, gone.
“Yeah,” Ahmed said.
“That’s unusual, right?” Petras asked. He would think so, but he wasn’t an engineer.
Ahmed shrugged one shoulder. Even that seemed like an effort for him. “All of this is unusual.”
“What, were they working in the same building?” Petras asked.
“We don’t know,” Ahmed said. “We lost the security cameras with the domed city itself.”
“Except the stuff from the platforms,” Petras said.
Ahmed nodded.
Petras turned away from him, trudged up a mound of dirt, felt it slide beneath his boots. There was nothing firm here, no foundation for the entire city, nothing.
Petras had lived with an engineer long enough to know the fundamentals. Besides, Hedie had shown him how the city would be laid out.
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