Yellowcake Springs

by Salvidge, Guy

  The sterile whiteness of the room. The absence of sound. A row of plastic shells, Wang Meng’s now empty. Wei was at the end of the row.

  “You’re still there?” she asked.

  “I’m here.” No more than a whisper, even with the volume turned up.

  She looked down at him, at his ruined, ulcerated body. His skin was raw and cracked. But most of all she saw his eyes, which longed for a way out. “You waited for me,” she said. He looked like a suicide bomber rigged to blow, but the button in his hand only triggered the mechanism for the lethal injection. This was to be a solitary apocalypse.

  “I’m burning up, Ping. Can’t wait any longer.”

  “I love you, Wei!”

  “I hope I can squeeze it,” he said. “I can’t feel my fingers.”

  Ping started to say something – it was very much more of the same – and it wasn’t until she’d finished that she realised that his hand was off the trigger, that Jiang Wei was gone.

  49. Lui Ping

  On Tuesday they mainly just showed him around and made him sign all kinds of disclaimer forms, but on Wednesday Rion’s real work at the hospital began. It was explained to him that he would have to start from the bottom and work his way up. For the most part, this seemed to entail pushing hospital trolleys from Point A to Point B. Most of the trolleys had dead bodies on them. He would go to the ward in question – finding the right ward was currently the hardest part of the job – disconnect whatever equipment was connected to the body, put a sheet over it, tag it, and wheel the trolley to the service lift. The service lift went down to the hospital morgue. Sometimes the bodies would be processed and released for funeral services, but just as often no one would claim the body and it would be burned onsite. He hadn’t worked his way up to burning the bodies yet. It seemed to him that there were a lot of people dying in this hospital without anyone showing any particular interest in their doing so.

  The work was surprisingly tiring, and Wednesday morning was over before he knew it. He was entitled to a half hour lunch break in the hospital canteen, but he found that it took him five or ten minutes to get down to the canteen, so in reality it was more like twenty minutes. Rion’s feet were sore from the stiff hospital shoes he had been given to wear. He had just finished wolfing down his roll when his widget pinged again. He was learning to hate that sound.

  FLOOR 7, WARD 2A: BURNS UNIT. RADIATION CHAMBER, the message said.

  Rion shrugged and opened his drink. He still had fifteen minutes of lunch left.

  Not two minutes later, the widget pinged again with the following message:

  URGENT: FLOOR 7, WARD 2A: BURNS UNIT. RADIATION CHAMBER.

  “Shit!” Rion said. A couple of the other staff looked at him. He got up, cleared his lunch wrappers into the bin, and tramped down the hall to the service lift. He hoped it wasn’t going to be like this every day.

  By the time he’d found the Burns Unit, the widget had pinged for a third time and he was wondering whether there was a way to put it on silent. There did not appear to be.

  “Took your time,” the nurse behind the desk at the Burns Unit said.

  “I was on lunch,” Rion replied.

  “No such thing as lunch in this hospital. Where’s the rad shield?”

  “What?”

  “You’re new, aren’t you? If it says ‘Radiation Chamber’ on the widget you need to bring a rad shield. You’ll have to go back down and get one.”

  “Wonderful. Where from?”

  “Down in the morgue. There should be one on a trolley down there from the guy that died this morning. There’s four more to go after this one.”

  “Right,” he said. He went back down to the morgue. The rad shield, mounted onto a trolley, was just sitting there in the middle of the floor; he’d walked past it several times without knowing what it was. It was a human-sized, curved metal shell, like a mechanical cocoon. Rion signed the thing out and starting wheeling it over to the service lift. It weighed a ton.

  A nurse in a radiation suit was waiting for him at the Burns Unit reception. “Bring it over to the airlock.” Rion did as he was told. “I’ll take it from here,” the nurse said. “It’ll take us a few minutes to load up the body.”

  Thankful for a chance to rest his feet, Rion took a seat in the reception area. There was a thin Chinese woman crying silently there. No one was saying anything to her or offering her any support.

  “Is that your husband?” Rion asked.

  The woman looked up and nodded. Her face was wet with tears. Rion wished he had a tissue to offer her, but his pockets were empty.

  “Was he from Yellowcake Springs? The reactor there?”

  The woman nodded again. She stopped crying.

  “I was there myself,” he continued. “I saw the whole thing. In fact…” Here he cut himself off. What was he saying? He couldn’t say this.

  “Yes?” the woman said.

  “I knew the wife of the man who did this,” he said.

  “You know wife?” the woman said. Obviously she was not a native English speaker. “Why?”

  Why what? Why did he know Sylvia Baron, or why had her husband orchestrated an attack on the nuclear reactor? She was waiting for an answer. “I don’t know why,” he said.

  “He is a bad man.”

  Rion nodded. “Yes.”

  The woman reached out and grabbed his hand. “His name.”

  “I don’t think I should say anything.”

  “Please. His name.”

  “It’s David Baron.”

  “Thank you. I don’t forget this name. You are a good man. My husband, he a good man.”

  “What was his name?”

  “His name Jiang Wei. Very good man.” Now she was crying again and he held her tightly to him. It was almost certainly against regulations but he didn’t care. No one else was watching. She moaned and wailed, on and on. Finally her tears began to subside and he let her go. She snuffled and wiped her face on her sleeve.

  “My name is Orion Saunders,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  “Lui Ping. I carry his child inside.”

  His child inside? “You mean you’re pregnant?”

  She nodded.

  “Where will you go now?” he asked.

  “Back to China.” Then: “You take him?”

  “Your husband’s body? Yes, I’ll take him down to the morgue.”

  “Wait! I can’t forget anything,” she said. “I can’t forget.”

  “No, you’ll remember,” Rion said. “Even when you don’t want to. Look, let me show you something.” From his innermost pocket he retrieved the newspaper article about his mother, which he’d had laminated in the city the other day. He handed it to Lui Ping, who considered it.

  “That’s my mother,” he explained. “She died when I was five. I think about her every single day.”

  “This woman your mother? She looks young.” She gave it back to him.

  “She was young when she died, just like your husband. Five years old and all I had to remember her by was this picture. And I did it. You’ll have his child to remind you of him. So, you see, you’re a little better off than I was, I think.”

  She smiled a little; it was obviously a great effort even to try. “Thank you,” she said.

  The airlock hissed open and Rion got to his feet. Ping followed him to what was presumably her dead husband hidden beneath the rad shield. The rad-suited nurse indicated that he was to take the trolley from here. Now the trolley was even heavier and Rion really had to put his back into it. It wasn’t far to the service lift. Ping was still following him.

  “I’m just taking him down to the morgue,” Rion said to her as the lift doors opened. “Will he have a funeral here in Australia?”

  “No, in China. I fly home with him.”

  Rion nodded. “I see. Well, goodbye. I’m so sorry. You won’t forget this day. ”

  Ping didn’t move. In fact she was blocking the lift doors. “I will come.”

&nbs
p; “No, that’s not allowed,” he said. “I’ll get in trouble. I’m new here, see? I can’t afford to lose my job.”

  Ping looked at him. Eventually she stepped back.

  50. Sylvia

  Sylvia was watching the news on the 3V. She paid a lot more attention to what was going on in the world these days. Partly this was because she felt herself to be a reformed character, and partly it was because it was her only access to the outside world. It’d been nearly three months since her arrest and a trial date hadn’t even been set.

  The news painted a pretty grim picture though. Today there’d been a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Peru: at least ten thousand dead in the slums there. A flood in China had caused a human calamity in the Yangtze River Basin: countless thousands dead and hundreds of thousands left homeless. There was rioting in Spain, where the government had all but lost control of a starving populace: dozens dead. And a bushfire in Victoria had destroyed dozens of houses: at least one fire-fighter dead and several people unaccounted for. Sylvia’s heart went out to all the grieving families, but it was overwhelming to think of how many people had died on planet Earth today. It wasn’t much consolation to her that just as many had been born, that the global population was still hovering around the nine billion mark, where it’d been for more than a decade now. All of those people were still individuals. They all thought of themselves as being uniquely important. And they were important to someone. This was the problem with humanism.

  The ‘verts came on, and Sylvia was about to turn off the 3V when some familiar yellow writing came up on the screen. “Welcome to Yellowcake Springs!” the 3V said.

  Sylvia sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. Was she hallucinating? She watched the screen as the perspective zoomed in closer to the reactors.

  This was her ‘vert! It was appearing at last! But some of the dialogue had been changed:

  “Why not take a drive up the coast to the pristine beachfront community of Yellowcake Springs?” the voice-over said. “CIQ Sinocorp’s first Australian Complete Community is scheduled to reopen to the public this Saturday, the 24th of August. Ring now to reserve your free ticket to the grand reopening. Act quickly to take advantage of our reopening specials on a modern apartment in the Green Zone. At these prices, they won’t last long!”

  The rest of the ‘vert was much as she remembered it. They were using her words while she languished here in prison! For some reason, this struck her as amusing, and soon she was beside herself laughing. Misanthropos – David – hadn’t changed anything. They’d set CIQ Sinocorp back a few months and probably billions of dollars patching up the reactor, but that was loose change to them. They could just exploit another hundred thousand Chinese workers to make up the difference.

  The ‘vert ended and she turned off the 3V.

  So: a nondescript cell with grey concrete walls. Sylvia had her own bed, the 3V on a stand, and a lot of miscellaneous things besides. There were no windows, but at least she could turn the light on and off when she pleased and she didn’t have to share the room with anyone. She had a nearly limitless supply of books on the prison reader, and she had pens and paper to record her thoughts. No Controlled Dreaming State console, but then Sylvia supposed that was fair enough. She’d spent too many years hooked up to one of those things. She was learning to use her own imagination again. Sylvia was allowed to mingle with some of the other prisoners for an hour or so a day, and she had access to a gymnasium daily for exercise. As a consequence, she was in better shape now than ever before.

  What was David thinking now, locked in his own cell in a different part of the prison? Had he seen the ‘vert too, and if so, had it angered him? Did he despair that his schemes had come to nothing, or had he achieved something approaching acceptance, as she herself had? Sylvia had no way of knowing: they were forbidden any form of contact. It seemed that the government didn’t want them to collude on their accounts of the attack. Not that she was planning on colluding with him.

  She supposed that their outlooks were vastly different now. Sylvia herself could look forward to a number of years of incarceration – perhaps ten, or even fewer if she was lucky. But David? He was a dead man. Sylvia felt sure that David Baron and the other two would be the next on the list of executed Australians after Ronald Ryan, the last man to be executed in Australia. In 1967. She had looked that up on her reader. And so he would finally join the ranks of his beloved dead ‘mentals. Sylvia didn’t feel too badly about this. Look at those poor Peruvian children who had been crushed to death in their homes and schools. What had they done to deserve that? She’d heard their piteous cries and seen their tortured faces on the 3V. That was a tragedy. She wasn’t going to lose any sleep over David Baron.

  There were too many people on this planet anyway.

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