Yellowcake Springs

by Salvidge, Guy

  “You won’t try to run? You might be able to slip away.”

  “No, but thanks for the suggestion,” Clyde said, patting him on the back. “I have to face up to my responsibilities. I’ve done a questionable thing. Some might say a terrible thing. Hell, you might say that. That it was a terrible thing.”

  Rion said nothing.

  “You can trust me, Rion. I’m not going to implicate you. You haven’t done a thing wrong. Not at all. In actual fact, it was for you, or at least people like you, that I did this thing.”

  “I don’t understand, Clyde.”

  The big man rested his hand on Rion’s shoulder in a way that was almost fatherly. “Of course you don’t understand. You haven’t been given the information necessary for you to understand, and I suppose all I’ve done is talk around in circles. Look, we’d better head back to the group. They’re doing the roll call now. Could I ask you one thing, Rion? A dying man’s final request?”

  “Ask away,” Rion said, instantly regretting his flippant choice of words.

  But Clyde did not seem to have noticed. “You’ll stand with me in the line? You won’t disown me? It’s going to be very lonely for me soon.”

  “I’ll stand with you,” Rion said. He led the bigger man over to the back of the nearest queue. It was all that he could do to be polite.

  A fine mist was falling from the red sky.

  37. Prognosis

  When Jiang Wei opened his eyes, he couldn’t remember where he was or what had happened to him. He was lying in a bed in a bright room, and there was some kind of plastic barrier around him. “Where am I?” he croaked.

  “You’re in Regal Perth Hospital,” a person in a radiation suit said in his ear, over the intercom. “You’re quite ill. My name is Marcos. I’m a nurse here.”

  Then Wei’s attention turned to the groans emanating from somewhere on his left, so he tilted his head and saw, through the plastic shielding, someone lying on another bed. There were more beds beyond. It was a hospital ward.

  “Who’s that?” he asked the nurse.

  “It’s your colleague, Zhou Sen.” The words rang through the shrunken confines of his world.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s suffering from radiation sickness.”

  Then it came back to him in a sudden, horrific flood. The reactor, the accident, and the work they had done there cleaning up the debris. The vomiting. “How much radiation did we get?” he asked.

  “The doctor will explain everything to you,” the nurse said. “I’ll put her on.”

  A screen descended into position above him. “Can you hear my voice?” the smooth-faced doctor on the screen asked.

  “Yes,” Wei said. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Leona. I am a computerised simulacra and the resident doctor on this ward.”

  “Which ward is this?”

  “The Burns Unit,” Leona said. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you and I don’t wish to prolong your state of ignorance, so with your permission, I will outline your current condition.”

  “Go on.”

  Her face was kind and yet she was not a real person. Her voice was soothing, a voice you could get lost in, and her eyes were the lightest of blues. Wei wanted to stare at that face forever. “You and your colleagues received a very high dose of radiation in the reactor at Yellowcake Springs. Your employer, CIQ Sinocorp, has asked me to pass on their thanks and also their deepest regrets on hearing of your current condition. They fervently hope that you will make a full and speedy recovery from your illness. They wish to remind you that you will be welcomed back with open arms to your place of employment at such a time that you are fit to resume your duties. Until then, you are receiving indefinite sick leave on full pay. Your fiancée has been informed of your condition, and I am pleased to say that she is flying out from China to be at your bedside at this very moment.”

  “But what is my condition? You didn’t say.”

  “You are suffering from acute radiation sickness. At this point in time, the symptoms include headaches, vomiting, acute nausea and rashes, but these symptoms are expected to worsen in the coming days. I can assure you that you will receive the very best of treatment here at Regal Perth Hospital, and that every measure will be taken to…”

  “How much radiation did I receive?” Wei interjected.

  “The dose was around 8200 millisieverts or 8.2 sieverts.”

  “What?!” He tried to sit up in bed and failed. His limbs did not seem to be responding. “Then I’m a dead man.”

  “While the prognosis is…”

  “Shut up! Fucking shut up! I need to think for a minute. Eight sieverts? We’re dead. That’s enough to kill bone marrow isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  “Your bone marrow has been completely destroyed, yes.”

  “Then I’m dead,” Wei said, more quietly this time. “I’m dead. No bone marrow. How long? When will Lui Ping be here? Wait a second, she can’t come in here! Nobody can! That’s why that nurse is in a rad-suit, isn’t it? We’re radioactive now!”

  “To answer your first question, the prognosis is death within fourteen days. The longest period of survival for a patient suffering from acute radiation sickness of this severity is around 25 days. To answer your second question, your fiancée Lui Ping will be here tomorrow. I can assure you that you will be in a state to speak with her at this time, and to pass on any last wishes or requests. And to respond to your third statement, it is correct to say that no one must enter this room without a radiation suit. This includes Lui Ping. You are correct in saying that your body and the bodies of your colleagues are now highly radioactive. You will remain in this sealed chamber for the duration of your life.”

  “Two weeks,” Wei said. “I’ll be in a state to talk to her tomorrow, will I? What kind of state will I be in the day after that? And the day after that? You can’t lie to me. I know all about radiation sickness. I studied it at university.”

  “Then you will accept my heartfelt personal sympathies,” Leona said.

  “Bullshit,” Wei said. “You don’t know what this feels like. You aren’t alive. They’ve programmed you to think that you know, but you can’t feel a thing, can you? You don’t know what it’s like to have lived, and you don’t know what it’s like to die. You can’t feel pain. You don’t know what it is to feel desire. You’re nothing.”

  “You’re upset,” the computer simulacra said. “We will speak again later, when you have had time to compose your thoughts. I realise that this is a tremendous shock. One final question I must ask you: do you feel any pain? The dosage of painkillers can be increased if required.”

  “No pain,” Wei said.

  “Very well,” Leona replied. The screen folded up.

  Wei was in a rage, a fury. He wanted to get up and tear down the plastic shielding over his bed. He wanted to smash, to rend, to tear. He wanted to take the nurse by the throat and strangle the life from him, to punish him for his vigour, his motility. But he did no such thing. His body was limp and lifeless. He felt no physical pain.

  “Zhou Sen!” he screamed. “Can you hear me?”

  The man groaned and turned to face him. His face was covered in weeping sores. “Jiang Wei? I’m dying.”

  “I know,” Wei said. “We’re all dying. Why didn’t they give us radiation suits? That fucker’s got one, why not us? Nurse! Tell me why we didn’t get radiation suits! Sent to clean up the accident with no rad-suits! How about that!”

  Now needles were puncturing his skin. Yes, they had thought of everything. They were trying to sedate him. They wanted to silence his voice. They wanted him to go quietly. But he would do no such thing. He would –

  38. Sunset

  So there Sylvia was – watching the sun go down on the day everything had changed. This day, the 1st of June 2058, would long be remembered for the crime committed upon it, like so many other notorious days in history.

  The reactor was still burning, but tha
nkfully the smoke and fallout had been caught up in the strong south-westerly breeze that blew in the afternoon here. The site for the camp had been chosen with this in mind. The sun was setting in a red haze and the sky itself seemed to be bleeding. Was there something else she might have done to prevent this? Could the blame be placed on her? There was a feeling in her chest unlike any she could recall: a twisting, churning sensation with an associated shortness of breath. Perhaps this was what the onset of a heart attack felt like. Or maybe it was just the smoke she had inhaled.

  There were no trees, nothing to catch the moving air; just the low, barren scrubland that CIQ Sinocorp had chosen as the site for its facility. The Chinese had not thought to plant trees here, and in any case the soil was no good. This was a nothing land, a nothing place. Just an empty spot on the map that had looked like a good site for a nuclear reactor. Sinocorp had bought up this whole area forty years before, when it’d been a sandy coastal plain with little in the way of habitation. The closest town – a sleepy fishing community with a population of under two thousand in those days – was located at the periphery of the proposed Green Zone. And so money had changed hands, and this nothing had become something. It had become Yellowcake Springs.

  And now it was being unmade, and her husband David Baron was the unmaker.

  Not that Sinocorp would give up so easily. For all Sylvia knew, the radiation might have been contained by now. The Chinese wouldn’t let a setback like this dissuade them. No doubt they would redouble their efforts. David had been a fool to think otherwise, if he had thought otherwise. Thinking this depressed her; he had done all that he could and yet it hadn’t been enough. She had tried to prevent him from doing it and that hadn’t been enough. In their differing ways they had been equally inadequate.

  People were lining up to have their implants read.

  “What are you thinking?” Peters asked. He had been quiet for a long time.

  “Just daydreaming,” she replied.

  “Do you want to join the line?” he asked. “Everyone else is.”

  “Are you mad?” she said. “We can’t.”

  Peters shook his head. “I won’t run. But you will, I’m guessing.”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “Perhaps our employer will show leniency to those who confess their crimes,” he said.

  “You’ve changed your tune. You’re going to give yourself up?”

  “My conscience will not allow me to do otherwise,” Peters said. “I can see that you feel no such emotion.”

  “What have I done? Nothing.”

  “That’s correct, Sylvia. You did nothing.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you could have taken steps to avert this,” he said, waving his hands broadly.

  “I tried to talk him out of it, didn’t I? He wouldn’t listen. You saw what he’s like. And it was you that got me off the bus, remember that. Anyway, you’ve got much more to answer to than I do. They’ll string you up from a flagpole yet.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” he said. He pointed to the back of the line that had swelled to several hundred shuffling bodies. “Coming?”

  “You’re really turning yourself in?”

  “Yes, but I’m curious. Where will you run?”

  “I’ve got to find someone,” Sylvia said. “I know just the man.”

  “And still you won’t face up to your actions,” Peters said. “You’re a lost cause, Sylvia Baron. A good ‘vert writer, but a lost cause all the same.”

  So this was the way it was going to be. She didn’t need Peters and his defeatism. Sylvia needed to find Rion in the torrent of faces. She turned away from Peters and moved along the nearest line as unobtrusively as she was able, but people seemed to think she was trying to jump ahead of them in the queue. “Hey you!” a woman said. “Back of the line.”

  “My boy,” Sylvia replied. The woman backed off. If only she did have a child, then maybe things would be different. She might never have landed herself in this mess. “I can’t find my little boy,” she reiterated for those further ahead. She repeated this second phrase over and over as though it were a mantra that would lead her to safety. Her little boy, the one that she had never had.

  “What does he look like?” people asked her, and: “What’s his name?” But Sylvia would not acknowledge them.

  “His name is Rion,” she finally said. “Rion! Rion!” She moved along the queue with increasing speed. But everyone was dressed in the beige overalls and their faces all looked the same. She came to the front of the line and the loathsome implant scanner, but before anyone could say anything she was off to the next line, this time progressing front to back.

  “Rion!” she cried. “Rion! Where are you?”

  She was causing such a ruckus that there was every chance that she would be arrested. A security officer tried to placate her with the knowledge that if her son was here, he’d be identified in good time, but she was having nothing of that and she brushed past him. She had to remind herself that in actual fact she wasn’t looking for a small child but a grown man.

  “Sylvia,” a voice finally called out, though none too loudly. It was him; it was Rion. His lips with thin, his nose pointed, his eyes squinting, but she knew in that moment that this was a face she could love and come to rely on. She had never felt as glad to see anyone in her life.

  “Sylvia,” he repeated. “What’s wrong?”

  People were looking. Lots of people.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “You’re not pushing in,” another woman said. “He can go to the back with you.”

  “I’m not going to the back, but I am going to talk to her privately for a minute,” Rion said. “That’s fair? I’ll talk to her over there and then I’ll come back to my place in the line.”

  It was agreed. Rion left the line and walked with her.

  39. Roll Call

  It had come to this. Rion and Sylvia: facing one another, their bodies squared off in confrontation. The sky was red and smoky. He would have to tell her straight and tell her now, before she got them both shot.

  “You’ve got to help me,” Sylvia implored. “We need to get away.”

  “We need to get away?” Rion replied. “You need. I need to stand over there in the line.”

  There were tears in her eyes, but he was determined that he wouldn’t waver. He looked at her lips instead. Her eyebrows. Anything. “Why won’t you help me?” she asked.

  “I’ll help you,” he said.

  “You will?” Her face lit up with hope.

  “Yes. Sneak out tonight. It’ll be your last chance. Call in any favours you have, but do it quickly. Once you’re outside, stay off the main roads. You’ll need to find water. After that, you’ll need to find your way back to Perth.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “Coming with you? Why would I do that, Sylvia? I’ve risked my life getting here, only for your fucking husband to ruin everything. But I’m a Citizen now and I’m not about to throw that away.”

  She glared at him. “I’ll take you down with me. Don’t think I won’t. I’ll walk right up to that guard and tell him you’re a Misanthropos agent.”

  “You do that,” he heard himself say. All bluff, all bluster, but what else did he have? There were stabbing pains in his stomach; his insides were tied in knots. Sylvia Baron – she had been his saviour and now she would be his destroyer.

  And then it was as though Sylvia was seeing him for the first time. He supposed he’d been glaring back at her. The look on her face was one of surprise, even wonder.

  “You really won’t come with me?”

  “I’m going to take my chances here.”

  “But all these…”

  “Will be evacuated, yes. All these people will be displaced from their homes. But that’s all right with me. I don’t have a home.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” she said in a quiet voice.
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  “It’s possible,” he replied. “But I feel that my conscience is clear.”

  “Your conscience,” she said dully. And then: “I can’t do this.”

  “Then give yourself up.”

  She turned away without another glance and began trudging off in the direction of the scanners. He watched her long enough to see that she was not about to hand herself in to the guards, and nor did she seem to be about to join one of the lines. It was then that his resolve began to evaporate. There was a part of him that wanted to call out to her again, but he saw now that this was the cowardly part of himself, the part that would not accept responsibility for his actions.

  “Come on, then,” Clyde called out to him. Rion returned to his place in the line. “I think you did the right thing.”

  Rion had nothing further to say to that. There were too many pairs of ears pressed together in close proximity, and who knew what they had overheard already?

  “It’s going to be all right,” Clyde said, although whether he was referring to Rion’s fate or his own wasn’t clear.

  Rion said nothing, and for a while he concentrated on shuffling forward at the appropriate moments and standing on his heels the rest of the time. He had stood in queues before, but never one as long as this. But he felt that he had almost infinite patience, that he would wait all night if necessary. The sun was gone and the breeze was starting to become chilly, but at least there were no mosquitoes. Rion scanned for Sylvia’s face in the crowd but he couldn’t see her.

  They were getting to the front at last. He counted twenty people in the queue ahead of him, and then fifteen. Ten. He tried to steel himself. Already the scanner had flashed red once to indicate that a person was to be detained, but he had been too far back in the line to see properly. Now it was time, his moment of reckoning.