Yellowcake Springs

by Salvidge, Guy

  She conveyed this sentiment to the AI doctor, Leona, in her halting English.

  “What you’ve got to realise is that this is no longer the man you love, but a highly radioactive object,” Leona said. “He’s right to say that exposure would prove harmful to the foetus, and at any rate we would not allow it. So please put it out of your mind.”

  He ate nothing solid now and dark hair was starting to fall from his head. She wanted to clear the fallen hair from his pillow, to stroke his burning scalp, but their only time together was in Controlled Dreaming State, and even there he seemed lethargic and confused. He spoke constantly of Lijia and had apparently started seeing her out of CDS. And so Ping felt an incredible burden, one that seemed to intensify with each passing day: a burden to live – and to bear their daughter – when she might otherwise have chosen a swift death for herself. Now she would live to tell Lijia about her father. And to remember. In aid of this, Ping forced herself to spend several hours each day in the radiation chamber and to commit every detail to memory. The hospital staff no longer tried to get her to return to her hotel in the evenings; they’d acquiesced to her demand that she be allowed to stay overnight.

  Standing over Wei’s capsule in late afternoon, Ping realised that she’d spent more time with her fiancée in the past three days than she’d done in months. Work had always held them at arm’s length from each other, but now his only task was to die and hers to watch him.

  “Are you there?” Wei suddenly asked through the intercom. His voice was harsh, rasping. He was only whispering but his voice was amplified, giving it a strange character.

  “I’m right here,” she said, moving into his field of vision. She knew that it had become too painful for him to try to lift his head. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “I’ve had enough sleep for this life. Has my application been approved yet?”

  “Not yet. There’s some hold up.”

  “They won’t even let me die,” he said. “She’s right next to you.”

  “Lijia?”

  “She’s older,” he said, his blood-filled eyes no longer seeming to blink at all.

  “How much older?”

  “I’m not sure. Nine or ten. I can’t hear what she’s saying.”

  Ping had long since stopped wondering about this apparition. If he saw his unborn daughter standing over him, who was she to tell him he was mistaken? It was a comfort to him. She wanted to tell him that she could see the girl too, but it didn’t feel right. Not yet. She knew she’d find the appropriate words when the time came.

  Another voice came over the intercom. It was the nurse: “A Mr Yang Po is here to see you, Jiang Wei.”

  “Yang Po?” Ping said. “It can’t be.”

  “He’s suiting up now.”

  Yang Po. She hadn’t realised how much anger she felt toward the man until this moment. Yang Po, the hated supervisor that hadn’t let Wei go when he complained about his visions. Yang Po, her fiancée’s murderer.

  Yang Po. All she could see of him was his ruddy face, and even that was enough to bring her hatred to the boil. He walked over to where she was standing and looked down at Wei.

  His voice came over the intercom. It was direct and unfriendly. “Can you hear me, Jiang Wei?”

  “I’m here.”

  “The company has asked me to try to convince you to reconsider your euthanasia application. No such application has been made by your colleagues. Perhaps it is because they are made of sterner stuff than you?”

  “What difference does it make?” Ping snapped.

  Yang Po straightened and faced her directly. “No difference to me, but it matters a great deal to those in the homeland. This whole disaster is a terrible tragedy, and the people need martyrs to focus on. Jiang Wei will become a national hero in death.”

  “You can’t do anything more to me now,” Wei said. “Let me die.”

  “Well, we can’t stop you. We have no jurisdiction here.”

  “Then what’s the hold-up?” Ping asked.

  “There’s no hold-up. Your application has been granted, pending my visit to request that you reconsider. I’ve made my request and now I’m leaving.”

  “Then leave,” Ping said. “No, wait. I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why weren’t they given radiation suits? You must have had them.”

  Yang Po laughed. “Nurse, is there a private channel?” he said in English. “One can’t be too careful.”

  “Transferring you now.”

  “The people need to see that others are capable of making the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the homeland, a sacrifice that they themselves may one day be asked to make.”

  “There must be more to it than that,” Ping said. “What else?”

  “There’s always more. Perhaps you feel I owe you the duty of disclosure, given that I was Jiang Wei’s superior officer and that I personally ordered him into the reactor. I feel no such obligation of disclosure, and yet I will tell you to satisfy my own curiosity regarding your response. Are you listening, Jiang Wei?”

  “I am.”

  “The Controlled Waking State program wasn’t working quite as intended, despite the best efforts of you and your men. There were...complications. Jun Shan was one such complication. You yourself, our brightest prodigy, were fast becoming another. It seems it is not so easy to manipulate a man’s mind, to bend it entirely to our will. It will come in time, of course, but not here and not now. I could have reported the program’s failure to the homeland and returned there in disgrace, maybe even to a work-camp. But I’m too old for that.”

  Yang Po was actually laughing, but it wasn’t a sound Ping imagined a human being to be capable of making. “So you sent the trial participants into the reactor,” she said, “to liquidate them before news of the program’s failure got out.”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “Get out before I strangle you!” Ping said.

  “I’m on my way. Goodbye, Jiang Wei. Lui Ping. Enjoy the time you have left together. But don’t worry – your name will live on. I mean this literally. There’s a proposal to rename one of the reactors after you. As it turns out, there isn’t too much structural damage to the plant. It’ll be completely repaired in a couple of months. Unfortunately you won’t be able to witness the grand reopening in person, but I can assure you that you’ll be there in spirit.

  “One final thing. Lui Ping, if you try to incriminate me over this matter, then I give you my personal assurance that I will make it my life’s work to ensure that you join me in the work-camps. I hear that the life expectancy is quite low there. And for one in your condition...”

  “And my condition is?” Ping asked.

  “You are pregnant. I know everything there is to know about you, sometimes even before you know it yourself. And now I must leave to prepare my report for the inquest.”

  Yang Po left. They remained silent for some time.

  Finally Wei said: “Do you think I can die later today, or will I have to wait until tomorrow?”

  47. The Barons

  Sylvia was in a dark place with little in the way of light. She couldn’t be sure how much time had passed, but it must have been a couple of days. A guard periodically brought food and there was a toilet in her cell. Other than that there was nothing and no one except that which she could conjure in her mind. CDS had robbed her of the power of organic imagination, of mental image formation. To daydream alone, without computerised assistance, seemed arcane.

  Mainly she lay on the bed, reviewing the steps that had led her to this point in her life. At first she had been angry – at Peters, at Rion, and most of all at David. The men in her life had failed her. She explored each betrayal at length, identifying moments and remembering specific phrases they had uttered. Each one had let her down.

  But then a curious thing happened. At the peak of her anger, at a moment when she felt that the whole world had calculated to plot her downfall, her ang
er blew out.

  It was her own fault.

  Something Peters had said returned to her: “And still you won’t face up to your actions.” In her own sly way, she’d allowed much of this to happen. She should have brought David to someone’s attention years ago, at a time when he might have been talked down from the place he was climbing to. Her main problem had been that she hadn’t cared enough. She hadn’t cared about him, or his idealism, or anything. Now she was paying for her indifference. If they ever let her out of here, she’d make one resolution and one only: she’d care.

  When the door finally did open after what seemed an eternity of reflection, Sylvia felt calmer. She was to come with the guards, which was quite all right with her. They didn’t bother with the handcuffs, seeing that she posed no threat to anyone. She would be entirely passive. The guards led her through a dingy corridor that seemed vaguely familiar and into a boardroom with a long table. This room was better lit. There were a number of people sitting around the table, all formally dressed. They were high-ranking CIQ Sinocorp employees. One of them was Peters.

  “Please sit,” one of them said. She didn’t quite catch who had spoken.

  She sat down in the nearest empty seat, painfully aware of the dirty fish farm uniform she was still wearing. In her cell she’d barely thought of it, but now she felt self-conscious amidst the suits.

  “So this is Sylvia Baron,” one of the men across from her said. “It’s time for a decision to be made about you. Jeremy?”

  Peters cleared his throat. There were bags under his eyes, but his voice was stern. “In some sense, Sylvia has been an unwitting pawn in this situation. Upon discovering that her husband David intended to carry out his attack on the facility here at Yellowcake Springs, she attempted to leave town. As per directive, I intercepted her at the bus station and brought her to the safehouse. Sylvia was told that this was the Misanthropos safehouse. I explained that I was a Misanthropos agent but one who had misgivings about attacking the reactor. At my request, she contacted David and tried to convince him to call off the attack. This served two purposes: the first being that I thought she might genuinely be able to convince him to abort; and secondly in case she could get him to reveal his location. Neither turned out to be possible. After the attack, we fled on foot and were taken to the camp. There she tried to elicit the help of another man, known only to this organisation as Rion, who declined. Thereafter she attempted to leave the town on foot – via the main gate – and was allowed to do so in the hope that she might lead us to other Misanthropos operatives. When it became clear that Sylvia had no further information for us, she was arrested and brought here.”

  “Have you anything to add to this?” one of the women asked her.

  “No,” she said. “It’s as Mr Peters says.”

  “What about this ‘Rion’?” the same woman asked.

  “He knew nothing,” Sylvia said. “Except what I told him, which wasn’t much.”

  “Is this man in our custody?” someone else asked.

  “No,” Peters said. “He’s managed to get himself a job in Perth. He’s on their government database.”

  “Irretrievable?”

  “We could apply pressure, but I’m not sure it’s worthwhile.”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong,” Sylvia said. “I’m the one you want.”

  “You aren’t, actually,” Peters said. “Shall we bring in the other prisoner?”

  “Yes, do so.”

  They waited for a few seconds, and then a man hobbled in flanked by two guards. It was David and his face was badly bruised. They threw him down into a chair. He was in handcuffs.

  “David, you’re alive!” Sylvia said.

  He peered up at her through bloodshot eyes. “Yep.” His voice was hoarse.

  Sylvia felt a range of emotions very rapidly: from alarm, through relief, and then finally to contempt. “They got you then,” she said.

  “Not before I did what I intended to do. Isn’t that right?”

  “We need to make a decision about this one too,” one of the men said. “Maybe he died in the attack after all.”

  “I don’t know why you haven’t shot me yet,” David said. “I’d shoot the lot of you. And why are you bullying my wife? She’s done nothing wrong.”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” the same man said. “You don’t seem to be aware of the kind of pain we can put you through, if we so choose. We might even start working on Sylvia here.”

  “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Perhaps not, but it might have the desired effect on you.”

  David turned to her. “You should have gone when I told you to,” he said.

  “I tried,” she explained, “but Peters here brought me back. I thought he was working with you.”

  “I knew he was a stooge. Hard luck, Jeremy.”

  “Are you going to give us the names, or shall we extract them from you?” Peters snapped.

  “Names! I told you the fucking names!”

  “Three.” Peters slammed his fist on the desk, a comical gesture for such a small man to make. “You’re saying that there were three of you.”

  David laughed. Some of his teeth were broken. “The rest were all proxies. Ghosts. Now are you going to shoot us, or are you handing us over to the Australian Government?”

  Their captors looked at one other. They all started speaking at once.

  “Do they have the death penalty in this country?”

  “It’s been recently reintroduced, yes.”

  “They’ll be murder charges?”

  “Six counts. One of them died this morning.”

  “And there was that young girl who died in the town?”

  “Probably not a murder charge on that one.”

  “But a link can be established, surely?”

  “I’d expect so. Anyhow, sabotage and terrorism can be life sentences.”

  “But the murders can result in the death penalty?”

  “Yes, as long as they’re regarded as murder and not manslaughter. Lethal injection.”

  “What about the other two ringleaders?”

  “Same charges.”

  “And her?”

  “Lesser charges. Withholding information from the national interest.”

  “She won’t die for that?”

  “Not in this country, no.”

  “Then we’re in agreement?”

  “We don’t want to damage relations with the Australian Government, so yes.”

  “It’ll be a big trial. Lots of publicity for the company.”

  “Let’s go for it then.”

  “Well done,” David said. “That’s a fastest committee decision-making process I’ve seen in my life. I guess we’re going to Canberra? Hear that, Sylvia? There’s hope for us yet.”

  She looked at the man who’d been her husband, and despite herself, she smiled.

  48. Jiang Wei

  The cabin. The bed. The fire. For the last time.

  “What are you thinking?” Lui Ping asked. Jiang Wei had long since lapsed into silence.

  “About how frightened I am,” he replied. “About how I don’t want to let go.”

  “Then don’t…” Foolish words; she regretted them immediately.

  “If I don’t do it now, I might be too weak to do it at all,” he said.

  “You don’t seem angry, Wei. Why aren’t you angry?”

  He sighed. “I’ve no use for anger now,” he said. “I always knew that something like this would happen. I never thought I’d reach old age.”

  Just like that, this gentle, timorous man she loved so dearly would go to his death.

  “Is she here with us now?” Ping asked.

  “Can’t you see her? She’s on your side of the bed.”

  Ping turned to look. For a moment she thought she saw a shadowy something at the corner of her vision, but there was nothing there.

  “You see her?”

  “I do,” Ping said. “She’s right next to
me.”

  Wei exhaled. His lungs were breathing and his eyes were seeing, but they weren’t his real lungs and eyes. His real body lay on a bed inside a plastic shell, in a radiation shielded room, in a strange hospital, in a foreign land. His real body was broken beyond repair. She held his illusory hand.

  “I’ll love you forever,” she said.

  “I’ll love you too. I’ll watch over you.”

  Ping wanted to accept his words, but although she wanted to, she did not believe in any kind of hereafter. But as this was no ordinary time, she held her tongue. Let him believe if it helped him in these final, frail moments.

  “I want to be next to you,” she said. “Even if I can’t touch you. You’ll have to give me fifteen minutes to suit up. Promise me you’ll wait until I’m at your side.”

  Wei got out of the bed. “Come outside for a moment. I want to look at the forest.”

  She followed him out of the cabin and into the simulation proper. The weather was perfect here, as always, and the sun shone brightly but not with venom. What was he looking for as he stood there considering the pine trees, his expression wistful?

  “You’re a good man, Wei. You never hurt anyone,” she said. “How many people can say that?”

  He squeezed her hand. “You’ll take good care of Lijia. But she’ll need a father.”

  “You’re her father.”

  “A living father,” he insisted. “And she’ll want a brother or sister.”

  “I understand.”

  He nodded, looking around once more, and in that moment she wished beyond wishing that she could trade places with him, that he could live on instead.

  “No more dreams,” he said.

  “You’re leaving right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  He nodded and then winked out like a fading meteor trail. Nothing lasted; nothing endured. Her only certitude was this. Ping looked once more at the forest and the secluded cabin before following him out of Controlled Dreaming State.

  Ping tore at the CDS veil, getting herself all tangled with trying to unhook herself and trying to leave the room at the same time. Her face was wet from crying. It wasn’t far to the Burns Unit from here and her feet knew how to get there. People got out of her way. At the reception, she demanded that someone come out and help her with the radiation suit this instant. One of the nurses helped her in, enduring her, and Ping knew that she’d have to apologise to the woman for her manner later. Then she was wading along the corridor to the airlock for what must be the hundredth time.