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I am nothing and nobody; atoms
that have learned to look at themselves; dirt that has learned to
see the awe and the majesty of the universe.
The day the hover-transports
arrived in the refugee camps, huge windowless shells of titanium
floating on electrostatic cushions, the day faceless men took the
ragged little girl that was me away from the narrow, blasted valley
that had once been Salzburg to begin a new life on another
continent: that is the true beginning of my life. What came before
then is almost irrelevant, a sequence of memories etched as with
acid into my brain, but with no meaning to real life.
Sometimes I almost think that I
can remember my parents. I remember them not by what was, but by the
shape of the absence they left behind. I remember yearning for my
mother’s voice, singing to me softly in Japanese. I cannot remember
her voice, or what songs she might have sung, but I remember so
vividly the missing of it, the hole that she left behind.
My father I remember as the
loss of something large and warm and infinitely strong, smelling
of–of what? I don’t remember. Again, it is the loss that remains in
my memory, not the man. I remember remembering him as more solid
than mountains, something eternal; but in the end he was not
eternal, he was not even as strong as a very small war.
I lived in the city of music,
in Salzburg, but I remember little from before the siege. I do
remember caf\xE9s (seen from below, with huge tables and the legs of
waiters and faces looming down to ask me if I would like a sweet).
I’m sure my parents must have been there, but that I do not
remember.
And I remember music. I had my
little violin (although it seemed so large to me then), and music
was not my second language but my first. I thought in music before
ever I learned words. Even now, decades later, when I forget myself
in mathematics I cease to think in words, but think directly in
concepts clear and perfectly harmonic, so that a mathematical proof
is no more than the inevitable majesty of a crescendo leading to a
final, resolving chord.
I have long since forgotten
anything I knew about the violin. I have not played since the day,
when I was nine, I took from the rubble of our apartment the
shattered cherry-wood scroll. I kept that meaningless piece of
polished wood for years, slept with it clutched in my hand every
night until, much later, it was taken away by a soldier intent on
rape. Probably I would have let him, had he not been so ignorant as
to think my one meager possession might be a weapon. Coitus is
nothing more than the natural act of the animal. From songbirds to
porpoises, any male animal will rape an available female when given
a chance. The action is of no significance except, perhaps, as a
chance to contemplate the impersonal majesty of the chain of life
and the meaninglessness of any individual’s will within
it.
When I was finally taken away
from the city of music, three years later and a century older, I
owned nothing and wanted nothing. There was nothing of the city
left. As the hoverjet took me away, just one more in a seemingly
endless line of ragged survivors, only the mountains remained,
hardly scarred by the bomb craters and the detritus that marked
where the castle had stood, mountains looking down on humanity with
the gaze of eternity.
My real parents, I have been
told, were rousted out of our apartment with a tossed stick of
dynamite, and shot as infidels as they ran through the door, on the
very first night of the war. It was probably fanatics of the New
Orthodox Resurgence that did it, in their first round of ethnic
cleansing, although nobody seemed to know for sure.
In the beginning, despite the
dissolution of Austria and the fall of the federation of free
European states, despite the hate-talk spread by the disciples of
Dragan Vukadinovi\xB4c, the violent cleansing of the Orthodox church,
and the rising of the Pan-Slavic unity movement, all the events that
covered the news-nets all through 2081, few people believed there
would be a war, and those that did thought that it might last a few
months. The dissolution of Austria and eastern Europe into a
federation of free states was viewed by intellectuals of the time as
a good thing, a recognition of the impending irrelevance of
governments in the post-technological society with its burgeoning
sky-cities and prospering free-trade zones. Everyone talked of civil
war, but as a distant thing; it was an awful mythical monster of
ancient times, one that had been thought dead, a thing that ate
people’s hearts and turned them into inhuman gargoyles of stone. It
would not come here.
Salzburg had had a large
population of Asians, once themselves refugees from the economic and
political turmoil of the twenty-first century, but now prosperous
citizens who had lived in the city for over a century. Nobody
thought about religion in the Salzburg of that lost age; nobody
cared that a person whose family once came from the Orient might be
a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Confucian. My own family, as far as I
know, had no religious feelings at all, but that made little
difference to the fanatics. My mother, suspecting possible trouble
that night, had sent me over to sleep with an old German couple who
lived in a building next door. I don’t remember whether I said
good-bye.
Johann Achtenberg became my
foster father, a stocky old man, bearded and forever smelling of
cigar smoke. "We will stay," my foster father would often say, over
and over. "It is our city; the barbarians cannot drive us
out." Later in the siege, in a grimmer mood, he might add, "They can
kill us, but they will never drive us out."
The next few months were full
of turmoil, as the Orthodox Resurgence tried, and failed, to take
Salzburg. They were still disorganized, more a mob than an army,
still evolving toward the killing machine that they would eventually
become. Eventually they were driven out of the city, dynamiting
buildings behind them, to join up with the Pan-Slavic army rolling
in from the devastation of Graz. The roads in and out of the city
were barricaded, and the siege began.
For that summer of 2082, the
first summer of the siege, the life of the city hardly changed. I
was ten years old. There was still electricity, and water, and
stocks of food. The caf\xE9s stayed open, although coffee became hard
to obtain, and impossibly expensive when it was available, and at
times they had nothing to serve but water. I would watch the pretty
girls, dressed in colorful Italian suede and wearing ornately carved
Ladakhi jewelry, strolling down the streets in the evenings,
stopping to chat with T-shirted boys, and I would wonder if I would
ever grow up to be as elegant and poised as they. The shelling was
still mostly far away, and everybody believed that the tide of world
opinion would soon stop the war. The occasional shell that was
targeted toward the city caused great commotion, people screaming
and diving under tables even for a bird that hit many blocks away.
Later, when civilians had become targets, we all learned to tell the
caliber and the trajectory of a shell by the sound of the song it
made as it fell.
After an explosion, there is
silence for an instant, then a hubbub of crashing glass and debris
as shattered walls collapse, and people gingerly touch each other,
just to verify that they are alive. The dust would hang in the air
for hours.
Toward September, when it
became obvious that the world powers were stalemated, and would not
intervene, the shelling of the city began in earnest. Tanks, even
modern ones with electrostatic hover and thin coilguns instead of
heavy cannons, could not maneuver into the narrow alleys of the old
city and were stymied by the steep-sided mountain valleys. But the
outer suburbs and the hilltops were invaded, crushed flat, and left
abandoned.
I did not realize it at the
time, for a child sees little, but with antiquated equipment and
patched-together artillery, my besieged city clumsily and painfully
fought back. For every fifty shells that came in, one was fired back
at the attackers.
There was an international
blockade against selling weapons to the Resurgence, but that seemed
to make no difference. Their weapons may not have had the most
modern of technology, but they were far better than ours. They had
superconducting coilguns for artillery, weapons that fired
aerodynamically-shaped slugs–we called them birds–that maneuvered on
twisted arcs as they moved. The birds were small, barely larger than
my hand, but the metastable atomic hydrogen that filled them held an
incredible amount of explosive power.
Our defenders had to rely on
ancient weapons, guns that ignited chemical explosives to propel
metal shells. These were quickly disassembled and removed from their
position after each shot, because the enemy’s computers could
backtrail the trajectory of our shells, which had only crude
aeromaneuvering, to direct a deadly rain of birds at the guessed
position. Since we were cut off from regular supply lines, each
shell was precious. We were supplied by ammunition carried on mules
whose trails would weave through the enemy’s wooded territory by
night and by shells carried one by one across dangerous territory in
backpacks.
But still, miraculously, the
city held. Over our heads, the continuous shower of steel eroded the
skyline. Our beautiful castle Hohensalzburg was sandpapered to a
hill of bare rock; the cathedral towers fell and the debris by slow
degrees was pounded into gravel. Bells rang in sympathy with
explosions until at last the bells were silenced. Slowly, erosion
softened the profiles of buildings that once defined the city’s
horizon.
Even without looking for the
craters, we learned to tell from looking at the trees which
neighborhoods had had explosions in them. Near a blast, the city’s
trees had no leaves. They were all shaken off by the shock waves.
But none of the trees lasted the winter anyway.
My foster father made a stove
by pounding with a hammer on the fenders and door panels of a
wrecked automobile, with a pipe made of copper from rooftops and
innumerable soft-drink cans. Floorboards and furniture were broken
to bits to make fuel for us to keep warm. All through the city,
stovepipes suddenly bristled through exterior walls and through
windows. The fiberglass sides of modern housing blocks, never
designed for such crude heating, became decorated with black smoke
trails like unreadable graffiti, and the city parks became weirdly
empty lots crossed by winding sidewalks that meandered past the
craters where the trees had been.
Johann’s wife, my foster
mother, a thin, quiet woman, died by being in the wrong building at
the wrong time. She had been visiting a friend across the city to
exchange chat and a pinch of hoarded tea. It might just as easily
have been the building I was in where the bird decided to build its
deadly nest. It took some of the solidity out of Johann. "Do not
fall in love, little Leah," he told me, many months later, when our
lives had returned to a fragile stability. "It hurts too
much."
In addition to the nearly
full-time job of bargaining for those necessities that could be
bargained for, substituting or improvising those that could not, and
hamstering away in basements and shelters any storable food that
could be found, my foster father Johann had another job, or perhaps
an obsession. I only learned this slowly. He would disappear,
sometimes for days. One time I followed him as far as an entrance to
the ancient catacombs beneath the bird-pecked ruins of the beautiful
castle Hohensalzburg. When he disappeared into the darkness, I dared
not follow.
When he returned, I asked him
about it. He was strangely reluctant to speak. When he did, he did
not explain, but only said that he was working on the molecular
still, and refused to say anything further, or to let me mention it
to anyone else.
As a child, I spoke a
hodgepodge of languages; the English of the foreigners, the French
of the European Union, the Japanese that my parents had spoken at
home, the book-German of the schools, and the Austrian German that
was the dominant tongue of the culture I lived in. At home, we spoke
mostly German, and in German, "Still" is a word which means
quietude. Over the weeks and months that followed, the idea of a
molecular still grew in my imagination into a wonderful thing, a
place that is quiet even on the molecular level, far different from
the booming sounds of war. In my imagination, knowing my foster
father was a gentle man who wanted nothing but peace, I thought of
it as a reverse secret weapon, something that would bring this
wonderful stillness to the world. When he disappeared to the
wonderful molecular still, each time I would wonder whether this
would be the time that the still would be ready, and peace would
come.
And the city held. "Salzburg is
an idea, little Leah," my foster father Johann would tell me, "and
all the birds in the world could never peck it away, for it lives in
our minds and in our souls. Salzburg will stand for as long as any
one of us lives. And, if we ever abandon the city, then Salzburg has
fallen, even if the city itself still stands."
In the outside world, the world
I knew nothing of, nations quarreled and were stalemated with
indecision over what to do. Our city had been fragilely connected to
the western half of Europe by precarious roads, with a series of
tunnels through the Alps and long arcing bridges across narrow
mountain valleys. In their terror that the chaos might spread
westward, they dynamited the bridges, they collapsed the tunnels.
Not nations, but individuals, did it. They cut us off from
civilization, and left us to survive, or die, on our own.
Governments had become
increasingly unimportant in the era following the opening of the
resources of space by the free-trade zones of the new prosperity,
but the trading consortia that now ruled America and the far east in
the place of governments had gained their influence only by
assiduously signing away the capacity to make war, and although the
covenants that had secured their formation had eroded, that one
prohibition still held. Only governments could help us, and the
governments tried negotiation and diplomacy as Dragan Vukadinovi\xB4c
made promises for the New Orthodox Resurgence and broke
them.
High above, the owners of the
sky-cities did the only thing that they could, which was to deny
access to space to either side. This kept the war on the ground, but
hurt us more than it hurt the armies surrounding us. They, after
all, had no need for satellites to find out where we
were.
To the east, the Pan-Slavic
army and the New Orthodox Resurgence were pounding against the rock
of the Tenth Crusade; further south they were skirmishing over
borders with the Islamic Federation. Occasionally the shelling would
stop for a while, and it would be safe to bring hoarded solar panels
out into the sunlight to charge our batteries–the electric grid had
gone long ago, of course–and huddle around an antique solar-powered
television set watching the distant negotiating teams talk about our
fate. Everybody knew that the war would be over shortly; it was
impossible that the world would not act.
The world did not
act.
I remember taking batteries
from wrecked cars to use a headlight, if one happened to survive
unbroken, or a taillight, to allow us to stay up past sunset. There
was a concoction of boiled leaves that we called "tea," although we
had no milk or sugar to put in it. We would sit together, enjoying
the miracle of light, sipping our "tea," perhaps reading, perhaps
just sitting in silence.
With the destruction of the
bridges, Salzburg had become two cities, connected only by
narrow-beam microwave radio and the occasional foray by individuals
walking across the dangerous series of beams stretched across the
rubble of the Old Stone Bridge. The two Salzburgs were distinct in
population, with mostly immigrant populations isolated in the modern
buildings on the east side of the river, and the old Austrians on
the west.
It is impossible to describe
the Salzburg feeling, the aura of a sophisticated ancient city,
wrapped in a glisteningly pure blanket of snow, under siege, faced
with the daily onslaught of an unseen army that seemed to have an
unlimited supply of coilguns and metastable hydrogen. We were never
out of range. The Salzburg stride was relaxed only when protected by
the cover of buildings or specially constructed barricades, breaking
into a jagged sprint over a stretch of open ground, a cobbled
forecourt of crossroads open to the rifles of snipers on distant
hills firing hypersonic needles randomly into the city. From the
deadly steel birds, there was no protection. They could fly in
anywhere, with no warning. By the time you heard their high-pitched
song, you were already dead, or, miraculously, still
alive.
Not even the nights were still.
It is an incredible sight to see a city cloaked in darkness suddenly
illuminated with the blue dawn of a flare sent up from the hilltops,
dimming the stars and suffusing coruscating light across the
glittering snow. There is a curious, ominous interval of quiet: the
buildings of the city dragged blinking out of their darkness and
displayed in a fairy glow, naked before the invisible gunners on
their distant hilltops. Within thirty seconds, the birds would begin
to sing. They might land a good few blocks away, the echo of their
demise ringing up and down the valley, or they might land in the
street below, the explosion sending people diving under tables,
windows caving in across the room.
They could, I believe, have
destroyed the city at any time, but that did not serve their
purposes. Salzburg was a prize. Whether the buildings were whole or
in parts seemed irrelevant, but the city was not to be simply
obliterated.
In April, as buds started to
bloom from beneath the rubble, the city woke up, and we discovered
that we had survived the winter. The diplomats proposed partitioning
the city between the Slavs and the Germans–Asians and other ethnic
groups, like me, being conveniently ignored–and the terms were set,
but nothing came of it except a cease-fire that was violated before
the day was over.
The second summer of the siege
was a summer of hope. Every week we thought that this might be the
last week of the siege; that peace might yet be declared on terms
that we could accept, that would let us keep our city. The defense
of the city had opened a corridor to the outside world, allowing in
humanitarian aid, black-market goods, and refugees from other parts
of the war. Some of the people who had fled before the siege
returned, although many of the population who had survived the
winter used the opportunity to flee to the west. My foster father,
though, swore that he would stay in Salzburg until death. It is
civilization, and if it is destroyed, nothing is
worthwhile.
Christians of the Tenth Crusade
and Turks of the Islamic Federation fought side by side with the
official troops of the Mayor’s Brigade, sharing ammunition but not
command, to defend the city. High above, cities in the sky looked
down on us, but, like angels who see everything, they did
nothing.
Caf\xE9s opened again, even those
that, without black-market connections, could only serve water, and
in the evenings there were night-clubs, the music booming even
louder than the distant gunfire. My foster father, of course, would
never let me stay up late enough to find out what went on in these,
but once, when he was away tending his molecular still, I waited for
darkness and then crept through the streets to see.
One bar was entirely Islamic
Federation Turks, wearing green turbans and uniforms of dark maroon
denim, with spindly railgun-launchers slung across their backs and
knives and swords strung on leather straps across their bodies. Each
one had in front of him a tiny cup of dark coffee and a clear glass
of whisky. I thought I was invisible in the doorway, but one of the
Turks, a tall man with a pocked face and a dark moustache that
drooped down the side of his mouth, looked up, and without smiling,
said, "Hoy, little girl, I think that you are in the wrong
place."
In the next club, mercenaries
wearing cowboy hats, with black uniforms and fingerless leather
gloves, had parked their guns against the walls before settling in
to pound down whisky in a bar where the music was so loud that the
beat reverberated across half the city. The one closest to the door
had a shaven head, with a spiderweb tattooed up his neck, and
daggers and weird heraldic symbols tattooed across his arms. When he
looked up at me, standing in the doorway, he smiled, and I realized
that he had been watching me for some time, probably ever since I
had appeared. His smile was far more frightening than the impassive
face of the Turk. I ran all the way home.
In the daytime, the snap of a
sniper’s rifle might prompt an exchange of heavy machine-gun fire, a
wild, rattling sound that echoed crazily from the hills. Small-arms
fire would sound, tak, tak, tak, answered by the singing of small
railguns, tee, tee. You can’t tell the source of rifle fire in an
urban environment; it seems to come from all around. All you can do
is duck, and run. Later that summer, the first of the omniblasters
showed up, firing a beam of pure energy with a silence so loud that
tiny hairs all over my body would stand up in fright.
Cosmetics, baby milk, and
whisky were the most prized commodities on the black
market.
I had no idea what the war was
about. Nobody was able to explain it in terms that an
eleven-year-old could understand; few even bothered to try. All I
knew was that evil people on hilltops were trying to destroy
everything I loved, and good men like my foster father were trying
to stop them.
I slowly learned that my foster
father was, apparently, quite important to the defense. He never
talked about what he did, but I overheard other men refer to him
with terms like "vital" and "indispensable," and these words made me
proud. At first I simply thought that they merely meant that the
existence of men like him, proud of the city and vowing never to
leave, were the core of what made the defense worthwhile. But later
I realized that it must be more than this. There were thousands of
men who loved the city.
Toward the end of the summer,
the siege closed around the city again. The army of the Tenth
Crusade arrived and took over the ridgetops just one valley to the
west; the Pan-Slavic army and the Orthodox Resurgence held the
ridges next to the city and the territory to the east. All that
autumn the shells of the Tenth Crusade arced over our heads toward
the Pan-Slavs, and beams of purple fire from pop-up robots with
omniblasters would fire back. It was a good autumn; mostly only
stray fire hit the civilians. But we were locked in place, and there
was no way out.
There was no place to go
outside; no place that was safe. The sky had become our enemy. My
friends were books. I had loved storybooks when I had been younger,
in the part of my childhood before the siege that even then I barely
remembered. But Johann had no storybooks; his vast collection of
books were all forbidding things, full of thick blocks of dense text
and incomprehensible diagrams that were no picture of anything I
could recognize. I taught myself algebra, with some help from
Johann, and started working on calculus. It was easier when I
realized that the mathematics in the books was just an odd form of
music, written in a strange language. Candles were precious, and so
in order to keep on reading at night, Johann made an oil lamp for
me, which would burn vegetable oil. This was nearly as precious as
candles, but not so precious as my need to read.
A still, I had learned from my
reading–and from the black market–was a device for making alcohol,
or at least for separating alcohol from water. Did a molecular still
make molecules?
"That’s silly," Johann told me.
"Everything is made of molecules. Your bed, the air you breathe,
even you yourself, nothing but molecules."
In November, the zoo’s last
stubborn elephant died. The predators, the lions, the tigers, even
the wolves, were already gone, felled by simple lack of meat. The
zebras and antelopes had gone quickly, some from starvation-induced
illness, some killed and butchered by poachers. The elephant,
surprisingly, had been the last to go, a skeletal apparition
stubbornly surviving on scraps of grass and bits of trash, protected
against ravenous poachers by a continuous guard of armed watchmen.
The watchmen proved unable, however, to guard against starvation.
Some people claim that kangaroos and emus still survived, freed from
their hutches by the shelling, and could be seen wandering free in
the city late at night. Sometimes I wonder if they survive still,
awkward birds and bounding marsupials, hiding in the foothills of
the Austrian Alps, the last survivors of the siege of
Salzburg.
It was a hard winter. We
learned to conserve the slightest bit of heat, so as to stretch a
few sticks of firewood out over a whole night. Typhus, dysentery,
and pneumonia killed more than the shelling, which had resumed in
force with the onset of winter. Just after New Year, a fever
attacked me, and there was no medicine to be had at any price.
Johann wrapped me in blankets and fed me hot water mixed with salt
and a pinch of precious sugar. I shivered and burned, hallucinating
strange things, now seeing kangaroos and emus outside my little
room, now imagining myself on the surface of Mars, strangling in the
thin air, and then instantly on Venus, choking in heat and darkness,
and then floating in interstellar space, my body growing alternately
larger than galaxies, then smaller than atoms, floating so far away
from anything else that it would take eons for any signal from me to
ever reach the world where I had been born.
Eventually the fever broke, and
I was merely back in my room, shivering with cold, wrapped in sheets
that were stinking with sweat, in a city slowly being pounded into
rubble by distant soldiers whose faces I had never seen, fighting
for an ideology that I could never understand.
It was after this, at my
constant pleading, that Johann finally took me to see his molecular
still. It was a dangerous walk across the city, illuminated by the
glow of the Marionette Theater, set afire by incendiary bombs two
days before. The still was hidden below the city, farther down even
than the bomb shelters, in catacombs that had been carved out of
rock over two thousand years ago. There were two men there, a man my
foster father’s age with a white moustache, and an even older
Vietnamese-German man with one leg, who said nothing the whole
time.
The older man looked at me and
said in French, which perhaps he thought I wouldn’t understand,
"This is no place to bring a little one."
Johann replied in German. "She
asks many questions." He shrugged, and said, "I wanted to show
her."
The other said, still in
French, "She couldn’t understand." Right then I resolved that I
would make myself understand, whatever it was that they thought I
could not. The man looked at me critically, taking in, no doubt, my
straight black hair and almond eyes. "She’s not yours, anyway. What
is she to you?"
"She is my daughter," Johann
said.
The molecular still was nothing
to look at. It was a room filled with curtains of black velvet,
doubled back and forth, thousands and thousands of meters of
blackness. "Here it is," Johann said. "Look well, little Leah, for
in all the world, you will never see such another."
Somewhere there was a fan that
pushed air past the curtains; I could feel it on my face, cool, damp
air moving sluggishly past. The floor of the room was covered with
white dust, glistening in the darkness. I reached down to touch it,
and Johann reached out to still my hand. "Not to touch," he
said.
"What is it?" I asked in
wonder.
"Can’t you smell
it?"
And I could smell it, in fact,
I had been nearly holding my breath to avoid smelling it. The smell
was thick, pungent, almost choking. It made my eyes water.
"Ammonia," I said.
Johann nodded, smiling. His
eyes were bright. "Ammonium nitrate," he said.
I was silent most of the way
back to the fortified basement we shared with two other families.
There must have been bombs, for there were always the birds, but I
do not recall them. At last, just before we came to the river, I
asked, "Why?"
"Oh, my little Leah, think. We
are cut off here. Do we have electrical generators to run coilguns
like the barbarians that surround us? We do not. What can we do, how
can we defend ourselves? The molecular still sorts molecules out of
the air. Nitrogen, oxygen, water; this is all that is needed to make
explosives, if only we can combine them correctly. My molecular
still takes the nitrogen out of the air, makes out of it ammonium
nitrate, which we use to fire our cannons, to hold the barbarians
away from our city."
I thought about this. I knew
about molecules by then, knew about nitrogen and oxygen, although
not about explosives. Finally something occurred to me, and I asked,
"But what about the energy? Where does the energy come
from?"
Johann smiled, his face almost
glowing with delight. "Ah, my little Leah, you know the right
questions already. Yes, the energy. We have designed our still to
work by using a series of reactions, each one using no more than a
gnat’s whisker of energy. Nevertheless, you are right, we must needs
steal energy from somewhere. We draw the thermal energy of the air.
But old man entropy, he cannot be cheated so easily. To do this we
need a heat sink."
I didn’t know then enough to
follow his words, so I merely repeated his words dumbly: "A heat
sink?"
He waved his arm, encompassing
the river, flowing dark beneath a thin sheet of ice. "And what a
heat sink! The barbarians know we are manufacturing arms; we fire
the proof of that back at them every day, but they do not know
where! And here it is, right before them, the motive power for the
greatest arms factory of all of Austria, and they cannot see
it."
Molecular still or not, the
siege went on. The Pan-Slavics drove back the Tenth Crusade, and
resumed their attack on the city. In February the armies entered the
city twice, and twice the ragged defenders drove them back. In
April, once more, the flowers bloomed, and once more, we had
survived another winter.
It had been months since I had
had a bath; there was no heat to waste on mere water, and in any
case, there was no soap. Now, at last, we could wash, in water drawn
directly from the Salzach, scrubbing and digging to get rid of the
lice of winter.
We stood in line for hours
waiting for a day’s ration of macaroni, the humanitarian aid that
had been air-dropped into the city, and hauled enormous drums across
the city to replenish our stockpile of drinking water.
Summer rain fell, and we
hoarded the water from rain gutters for later use. All that summer
the smell of charred stone hung in the air. Bullet-riddled cars,
glittering shards of glass, and fragments of concrete and
cobblestone covered the streets. Stone heads and gargoyles from
blasted buildings would look up at you from odd corners of the
city.
Basements and tunnels under the
city were filled out with mattresses and camp beds as makeshift
living quarters for refugees, which became sweaty and smelly during
summer, for all that they had been icy cold in winter. Above us, the
ground would shake as the birds flew in, and plaster dust fell from
the ceiling.
I was growing up. I had read
about sex, and knew it was a natural part of the pattern of life,
the urging of chromosomes to divide and conquer the world. I tried
to imagine it with everybody I saw, from Johann to passing soldiers,
but couldn’t ever make my imagination actually believe in it. There
was enough sex going on around me–we were packed together tightly,
and humans under stress copulate out of desperation, out of boredom,
and out of pure instinct to survive. There was enough to see, but I
couldn’t apply anything of what I saw to myself.
I think, when I was very young,
I had some belief that human beings were special, something more
than just meat that thought. The siege, an unrelenting tutor, taught
me otherwise. A woman I had been with on one day, cuddled in her lap
and talking nonsense, the next day was out in the street, bisected
by shrapnel, reduced to a lesson in anatomy. If there was a soul it
was something intangible, something so fragile that it could not
stand up to the gentlest kiss of steel.
People stayed alive by eating
leaves, acorns, and, when the humanitarian aid from the sky failed,
by grinding down the hard centers of corn cobs to make cakes with
the powder.
There were developments in the
war, although I did not know them. The Pan-Slavic Army, flying their
standard of a two-headed dragon, turned against the triple cross of
the New Orthodox Resurgence, and to the east thousands of square
kilometers of pacified countryside turned in a day into flaming
ruin, as the former allies savaged each other. We could see the
smoke in the distance, a huge pillar of black rising kilometers into
the sky.
It made no difference to the
siege. On the hilltops, the Pan-Slavic Army drove off the New
Orthodox Resurgence, and when they were done, the guns turned back
on the city. By the autumn, the siege had not lifted, and we knew we
would have to face another winter.
Far over our heads, through the
ever-present smoke, we could see the lights of freedom, the
glimmering of distant cities in the sky, remote from all of the
trouble of Earth. "They have no culture," Johann said. "They have
power, yes, but they have no souls, or they would be helping us.
Aluminum and rock, what do they have? Life, and nothing else. When
they have another thousand years, they will still not have a third
of the reality of our city. Freedom, hah! Why don’t they help
us, eh?"
The winter was slow frozen
starvation. One by one, the artillery pieces that defended our city
failed, for we no longer had the machine shops to keep them in
repair, nor the tools to make shells. One by one the vicious birds
fired from distant hilltops found the homes of our guns and ripped
them apart. By the middle of February, we were
undefended.
And the birds continued to
fall.
Sometimes I accompanied Johann
to the molecular still. Over the long months of siege, they had
modified it so that it now distilled from air and water not merely
nitrate, but finished explosive ready for the guns, tons per hour.
But what good was it now, when there were no guns left for it to
feed? Of the eight men who had given it birth, only two still
survived to tend it, old one-legged Nguyen, and Johann.
One day Nguyen stopped coming.
The place he lived had been hit, or he had been struck in transit.
There was no way I would ever find out.
There was nothing left of the
city to defend, and almost nobody able to defend it. Even those who
were willing were starved too weak to hold a weapon.
All through February, all
through March, the shelling continued, despite the lack of return
fire from the city. They must have known that the resistance was
over. Perhaps, Johann said, they had forgotten that there was a city
here at all, they were shelling the city now for no other reason
than that it had become a habit. Perhaps they were shelling us as a
punishment for having dared to defy them.
Through April, the shelling
continued. There was no food, no heat, no clean water, no medicine
to treat the wounded.
When Johann died, it took me
four hours to remove the rubble from his body, pulling stones away
as birds falling around me demolished a building standing a block to
the east, one two blocks north. I was surprised at how light he was,
little more than a feather pillow. There was no place to bury him;
the graveyards were all full. I placed him back where he had lain,
crossed his hands, and left him buried in the rubble of the basement
where we had spent our lives entwined.
I moved to a new shelter, a
tunnel cut out of the solid rock below the M\xF6nchsberg, an artificial
cavern where a hundred families huddled in the dark, waiting for an
end to existence. It had once been a parking garage. The moisture
from three hundred lungs condensed on the stone ceiling and dripped
down on us.
At last, at the end of April,
the shelling stopped. For a day there was quiet, and then the
victorious army came in. There were no alleys to baffle their tanks
now. They came dressed in plastic armor, faceless soldiers with
railguns and omniblasters thrown casually across their backs; they
came flying the awful standard of the Pan-Slavic Army, the
two-headed dragon on a field of blue crosses. One of them must have
been Dragan Vukadinovi\xB4c, Dragan the Cleanser, the Scorpion of
Bratislava, but in their armor I could not know which one. With them
were the diplomats, explaining to all who would listen that peace
had been negotiated, the war was over, and our part of it was that
we would agree to leave our city and move into camps to be resettled
elsewhere.
Would the victors write the
history, I wondered? What would they say, to justify their deeds? Or
would they, too, be left behind by history, a minor faction in a
minor event forgotten against the drama of a destiny working itself
out far away?
It was a living tide of ragged
humans that met them, dragging the crippled and wounded on
improvised sledges. I found it hard to believe that there could be
so many left. Nobody noticed a dirty twelve-year-old girl, small for
her age, slip away. Or if they did notice, where could she
go?
The molecular still was still
running. The darkness, the smell of it, hidden beneath a ruined,
deserted Salzburg, was a comfort to me. It alone had been steadfast.
In the end, the humans who tended it had turned out to be too
fragile, but it had run on, alone in the dark, producing explosives
that nobody would ever use, filling the caverns and the dungeons
beneath a castle that had once been the proud symbol of a proud
city. Filling it by the ton, by the thousands of tons, perhaps even
tens of thousands of tons.
I brought with me an alarm
clock, and a battery, and I sat for a long time in the dark,
remembering the city.
And in the darkness, I could
not bring myself to become the angel of destruction, to call down
the cleansing fire I had so dreamed of seeing brought upon my
enemies. In order to survive, you must become tough, Johann had once
told me; you must become hard. But I could not become hard enough. I
could not become like them.
And so I destroyed the
molecular still, and fed the pieces into the Salzach. For all its
beauty and power, it was fragile, and when I had done, there was
nothing left by which someone could reconstruct it, or even
understand what it had been. I left the alarm clock and the battery,
and ten thousand tons of explosives, behind me in the
catacombs.
Perhaps they are there
still.
It was, I am told, the most
beautiful, the most civilized, city in the world. The many people
who told me that are all dead now, and I remember it only through
the eyes of a child, looking up from below and understanding
little.
Nothing of that little girl
remains. Like my civilization, I have remade myself anew. I live in
a world of peace, a world of mathematics and sky-cities, the opening
of the new renaissance. But, like the first renaissance, this one
was birthed in fire and war.
I will never tell this to
anybody. To people who were not there, the story is only words, and
they could never understand. And to those who were there, we
who lived through the long siege of Salzburg and somehow came out
alive, there is no need to speak.
In a very long lifetime, we
could never forget. |
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