by Alec Saracen
The screen flashed white. A glowing bubble belched up from the ground a few dozen blocks away from the towers, a swirl of impossible fire thrusting through the sky like gunfire through wet paper, white and red and incandescent orange. Terrible wings of flame and smoke unfurled, and the city trembled in their wind. Zhai could see the shockwave race out, toppling buildings, conjuring dust storms, even shaking the mighty evacuation towers themselves, though none fell. The camera began to shake, and suddenly cut out.
“Twins,” Harod murmured.
It didn’t look real, Zhai thought blankly. But neither had Zudel, all those years ago.
Over the black screen, TruthTeller began to speak, the emotionless synthetic voice seeming oddly appropriate. It approximated shock.
“You have just witnessed footage of the nuclear attack on Landing. We have minimal information at present. The number of casualties is unknown, but must be presumed to be in the tens of thousands at the very least. We are presently unable to confirm anything beyond the basic fact that Tor has suffered an unimaginable atrocity. Since the Evacuation, the sole use of nuclear weaponry against a civilian target was the bombing of Zudel on Gorovac – until yesterday. We know nothing of the type of bomb used. Zudel was devastated by a so-called 'dirty bomb', designed to cause maximal deadly fallout. To this day, almost forty years later, Zudel is a toxic wasteland. Preliminary estimates suggest that the bomb in Landing was likely equivalent to between twenty and one hundred kilotons of TNT, whereas the bomb that destroyed Zudel was at least one megaton. Therefore, casualties are highly unlikely to reach the seven figures which observers believe that the Zudel attack approached.”
“They just blew up a fucking city, and they quote stats like football announcers,” Harod said, with bleak, helpless fury in his voice.
“What else can they do?” Zhai said. Four heads turned his way. None of them had seen him come in. He gestured helplessly at the screen. “What can you say?”
Harod sprang up and vaulted over the back of the couch, almost running to Zhai. “Twins, boss - are you OK? Can you see?”
Zhai took a deep, steadying breath, realising only then that a low note of panic was ceaselessly buzzing at the back of his mind. “Better. Around the edges, at least. Middle's still dark. Don't worry about me.”
Harod put a comforting hand on Zhai's shoulder. “Sam's the same.”
“I think I blinked at the right moment,” Sam said from the couch, in a flat voice. “It's like looking through tinted glass, but I can see.”
“Ceq,” Zhai said, suddenly remembering. Ceq had been opposite him and Sam in the car, facing back towards Landing – directly into the flash. “Where is she?”
Without waiting for an answer he strode off, ignoring Harod's pleas for him to slow down, heading straight for Ceq's quarters. He knocked on her door, received no answer, and banged louder.
“Ceq!” he called through the door, still knocking. “Ceq, are you all right?”
No reply.
“I'm coming in,” he said, and took the lack of response as consent. The door was unlocked.
Ceq's room was small and plain. She had never been one for physical possessions. Everything she cared about was available digitally, and she only ever wore a handful of self-cleaning smartsuits. The only exceptions were her guns, neatly racked and arrayed in an open cabinet in the corner, and a full-sized physical piano keyboard on a stand next to it. Ceq had never let Zhai hear her play.
She sat on her bed, up by the headboard, her arms around her knees and her eyes closed.
“Ceq,” Zhai said, taking a step forward.
Ceq didn't move, but her voice snarled out like a white-hot tongue of electricity. “Leave me alone.”
Off-balance, Zhai fumbled, could only say, “Are you–”
Wordlessly, Ceq lunged for her bedside table, fumbled for the half-empty glass of water there, and hurled it at Zhai's head. He reacted too slowly to dodge, but for once her aim was off. The glass shattered on the door frame inches away from his ear, drenching him. A shard of glass pierced his cheek, and the bright burst of pain made him gasp.
As Zhai stood in shocked silence, Ceq let out a little burbling laugh. “I'm blind, boss,” she said. “I can't see.”
With trembling fingers, Zhai reached up and carefully plucked the sliver of glass from his cheek. Warm blood trickled over his jaw.
“We'll get you help,” he said. Words had never felt so useless. “I'll–”
“Get out,” Ceq said, in a low, calmer tone that triggered some primal prey reflex in Zhai. He backed away, sensing real danger as Ceq looked up at him with blank, sightless eyes. “Get out now.”
“I'm going,” Zhai said. He stepped out of the room, glanced over his shoulder at Ceq's motionless form, and closed the door.
He stood there, numb. The hallway was empty. At the end, a reinforced window looked out over Macard's pristine skyline, the grey light of the clouded morning filtering weakly in around the gaping wound in his vision. From the main room, he could hear TruthTeller's indistinct voice, declaiming a litany of atrocity.
Abruptly, his knees buckled, and Zhai slumped to sit with his back to Ceq's door. His every action felt like he was bowing to the inevitable rather than making a conscious decision, as if his body had taken charge and had left his mind behind. He sat there, limp, useless, a fat old sack of spent words. What was the point of men like him in a world where cities could evaporate at the press of a button?
His memories of last night were a washed-out haze, bleached by the fire in the sky. There’d been no panic at the Coalition embassy, just – incomprehension. Thousands dead in an instant, a city laid waste, a delicate political situation upended, and what he remembered most was barking his shin on a door as a taut, silent Harod helped him to the bathroom, and the tongue-scalding coffee Lho had pressed into his hands, and the unsettling blend of the quiet TruthTeller commentary and the muttering of his staff, and the fingers of rain brushing the windows.
But Zudel he remembered with the diamond clarity of trauma. He'd been twenty, right at the end of his final year at Alleker, celebrating the end of exams with friends in a basement student bar. The Underworld, he thought, and wondered vaguely if it was still open. He remembered that Harod, still female-presenting and going by Hala, had stolen a march on the rest of them and, seven drinks in, was fondling faces and singing operettas. The rest of them were working to catch up. Zhai even recalled the loud, good-natured argument between the embryonic Consolidationists and Developists among them, something about whether to intervene in the syndicate crisis on Bayard. What side had he taken? He didn’t recall. The one Lockley Satterkale hadn’t, probably.
Then the news had come in, fresh off the latest data runner from the cluster of unstable, impoverished worlds in the galactic south-east. It had dropped into orbit around Gorovac, taken one look at the basic news package vibrating off the irradiated ionosphere, and hightailed it right back to Armenaiakon, skipping the rest of its route. Conversation had faded to nothing as the first images were plastered across the bar’s screens: the surreal sight of the mushroom cloud rising over Zudel, raised on stilts of fire to stain the sky with apocalyptic flame. 'ZUDEL ATTACK', the breaking news headline had read, and Zhai remembered thinking how utterly inadequate those words, or any others, were. How could words capture it? That kind of madness was beyond language, and language had always been his only tool. This was language inverted. It was the negation of the communication and information that were Zhai's mental lifeblood, and he had no answer.
He remembered a long night of awful silence as more and more news rolled in. Even Harod had quickly sobered up. And now it had happened again, the same dreadful shadow creeping across the twilight of his career as well as its dawn, black bookends that made a mockery of the peace he had spent a lifetime working towards.
“You're bleeding,” Lho said. Zhai glanced up to see a blur standing over him. With his vision crippled, he hadn't even seen her approach.
&nb
sp; He had no idea how long he'd been sitting there.
He touched his cheek, and his fingers came away wet with blood. “I am,” he said.
Lho clucked her tongue. “Are you just going to sit there?”
“Right now?” Zhai laughed hollowly. “Yes.”
Lho scoffed in the quiet, vicious way only she could. “How will that help?”
“It won't. But nothing will.”
“Get up,” Lho said.
Zhai stayed still.
Lho loomed. “Get up.”
That tone of voice bypassed his brain and plugged directly into his nervous system. Slowly, automatically, he climbed to his feet, feeling like Lho's marionette.
She looked him up and down with veins of iron in her eyes.
“What's wrong with you?”
“What's wrong with me?” Zhai echoed, but he couldn’t find the incrediblity he’d intended. “You know what's wrong with me. Thousands of people are dead. Probably hundreds of thousands. Everything I’ve been working for is in ruins. Oh, and I'm half-blind.”
Lho shrugged. “So what? They're not coming back, but there are more lives to be saved. You don't need to see to do your job.”
“It's not just that,” Zhai said. “It's...” He lifted a hand, then let it drop back to his side, as if that small gesture could possibly encapsulate the formlessness, the futility, the fragility of it all, the stupid, infinite chaos of the world and his irrelevance to it.
But to his surprise, Lho seemed to understand. She reached up and put a small, wrinkled hand on his shoulder.
“Don't stop. Not yet. Keep going.”
“Why? You wanted me to stop not long ago.”
Lho nodded. “I promised your mother I’d keep you safe, and you were risking your life for nothing.”
Zhai laughed out loud. “I know. I see what you mean now. You were right, Lho.”
“No,” Lho said sharply. “I was wrong. It wasn’t nothing. You were reaching for something beyond yourself, and you thought it was worth the danger.” An old, scarred-over pain tightened the line of her jaw in the corner of Zhai’s vision. “So I thought about your mother. A free Xanang was always just a dream. Everyone knew that. But she had to do it. Part of her wouldn’t let her stop.”
She sighed, brushing her hands down an imaginary apron and drew in a long, slow breath.
“I hated her for what she did,” she said. Zhai looked up in mute surprise, but his blind spot hid Lho’s face from him. “For a time. To abandon your father was her right, but to do what she did knowing that she would leave you behind was – shameful. So proud, she was, so unrelenting. It took me years to understand that she had no choice. There was something she had to reach for, even at the risk of death, or else she would lose herself and be only–” She broke off and shrugged. “–a shell. Empty. I think you’re following the same path. There’s something you need to reach, and if you can’t – you won’t be you any more.”
Zhai shook his head, amazed by Lho’s sudden honesty. “And what is it?”
“I don't know.” Lho reached down and touched a wrinkled finger to Zhai’s forehead. “But you do. Somewhere in here.”
“I don't, Lho,” Zhai said wearily. “I really don't.”
“Then you will. 'With the flow of time, even stones will become as clear as water'.”
Zhai snorted at the sentimental Xoma proverb. “We both know that's not true.”
Lho chuckled. “Well, believe it anyway. Didn't you always tell me that was what really mattered? What you believe, not what's really true?”
Zhai managed a thin smile. “Probably. It sounds like something I'd say.”
Lho turned and walked off down the corridor. “Get back to work,” she called over her shoulder, just before she turned the corner.
He stood there, staring at the emptiness she had left in her wake.
Work, he thought, hoping the word would spark something into life within him. It didn't. And everywhere he looked, no matter whether his eyes were open or closed, that coloured stain hung in front of his eyes, a constant reminder of the terrible light that had laid waste to thousands.
Work. The world would spin on with or without him, and nothing would change either way. The system didn't care what he did. It would grind on regardless, carrying them all on to whatever fate the universe had in store. The truth yawned beneath him, threatening to drag him down into a deep and inescapable darkness.
Work. Work had killed his mother, obsessed to the last with reforming the unreformable fiasco that was Xanang. Lho’s words had changed nothing. So she had been striving towards her impossible goal – and that justified knowingly going to her death? What had it achieved? There were mechanisms in place to stamp out ideals, towering structural violences that demanded surrender or death.
He thought of the dead in Landing. Grigori Thier. Grey Hawk. Two brilliant minds snuffed out in a heartbeat, their dreams of sweeping change extinguished – two among thousands. So many people, gone in a flash, leaving only the shadows of their cauterised lives.
And he was still there. Ambassador Gumeigo Zhai, the Coalition’s man. Old, compromised, useless. A thousand regrets stuffed into a suit.
“Boss,” Ceq said. Zhai jumped at the sound of her voice, and turned to see her door open a crack. By tilting his head he could see Ceq looking out, her unfocused eyes searching for him in darkness.
“I'm here,” Zhai said.
There was a pause. “I'm sorry.”
Zhai touched his cheek again. It was still bleeding slightly. “It's all right, Ceq. You missed.”
“I know.”
“Flash blindness is usually temporary,” Zhai said, trying his hand at being comforting. “Harod looked it up last night. Your retinas will probably need replacing, but at least you'll be able to see within a few days.”
“Yeah,” Ceq said.
“Want to come out? Get some breakfast?”
“No.” Another pause. “But I will.”
She pushed the door open the rest of the way. Her smartsuit was still in the same dark configuration as last night.
“Give me your arm,” she said, and Zhai obliged. Together, arm in arm, they stumbled off towards the kitchen.
Lho was already at work on lunch, kneading the dough for her unbeatable steamed buns with a brittle cheerfulness. Zhai risked an omelette, while Ceq stuck to her inexhaustible supply of energy bars rather than attempt to eat something she couldn't see. They ate in silence, but it was more comfortable than awkward. Slowly, Zhai felt his mental energy beginning to return, and with it, a goal began to materialise.
He would make a difference. Somehow, he would find a way. No matter his disagreements with Thier and Grey Hawk, they could all agree that nothing could justify this barbarity. They were dead and gone, but he was alive, and the injustice of that threaded Zhai with guilt. What use was it to anyone that he had survived, and their fires had been extinguished? Something of them had to live on through him if his survival was anything more than a bleak joke played on the universe. There could be no giving up, even in the face of the atrocious. He would find out who had done it, and he would bend every fibre of his being towards seeing them pay.
How?
His only assets were Violet Hactaur and Chrysia Salmi, but they were valuable ones – and he had contacted neither since the blast. Cursing himself for letting self-pity and weakness get in the way, he dashed off quick messages to both, expecting no immediate response. Violet wouldn’t have time for him for a while, and Salmi – who knew? Still, he had to put his pieces in play before the game got away from him–
But Thier and Grey Hawk wouldn’t have approved of that thinking, would they? It wasn’t just a game to them, but a life-or-death struggle of ideals, and one they’d faced knowing full well they risked everything on it.
Zhai glanced up at Lho, who was shaping her dough into buns. An old sight, one he’d seen ten, thirty, fifty years ago.
They’d been reaching for something, just as his mot
her had.
Just as he had to.
“Zhai!” Harod shouted from the common room. “Chang's making a statement!”
About time, Zhai thought. He pushed back his chair and stood.
“Lho,” he said, and saw the old woman’s eyes flit his way. “Thank you.”
“Just doing my job,” Lho said pointedly.
Zhai sighed. It was as good as either of them would get. “Point taken. Ceq?”
As they stumbled towards the main room, Zhai fancied he could see a little better.
25
They made it in time to hear the first words of Chang's address. Zhai squinted sideways to see the president's expression. It was exactly as he imagined: sombre, sorrowful, serious, and questionably sincere. The face of a man with one foot either side of a political chasm just as the earthquake begins.
“Good morning,” Chang began.
“Why didn't he do this last night?” Harod said. “Get out ahead of the speculation, for God’s sake. Waiting this long looks awful.”
Zhai remembered Harod's off-colour drunken jokes in the immediate aftermath of Zudel with some discomfort. Harod's response to these things was always to talk at them, as he could debate and ridicule them into fading away. He was right, though; delaying the official response was a terrible PR move, sure to be perceived on Tor as governmental callousness of the worst kind, even if data delays would make the wait seem insignificant to the galaxy at large. The gears began to spin up at the back of Zhai's mind.
“At five forty-three yesterday afternoon,” Chang said, “the city of Landing, home to more than seven million people, was subjected to the most heinous, the most evil of crimes. The detonation of an antimatter bomb–”
“Antimatter!” Harod exlaimed. “Not nuclear?”
“Means no fallout,” Fleischer said. Zhai hadn't even registered that she was in the room, but now that he looked away from the screen, he saw that the entire staff was watching the broadcast. “It was clean, or close to it. Storing it's a nightmare, though...”