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Geoffrey A. Landis: Winter Fire
First appeared in Asimov Science
Fiction, August 1997. Nominated for Best
Short Story.

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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 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 off what? I don
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廥 (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 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 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惡, 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 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 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廥 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 slugse called
them birdshat 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 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 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 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 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 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惡 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 batterieshe electric grid
had gone long ago, of coursend 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 Germanssians and other ethnic
groups, like me, being conveniently
ignorednd 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 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廥 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
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 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 readingnd
from the black marketas a device for
making alcohol, or at least for separating
alcohol from water. Did a molecular still
make molecules?

"That 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
ever make my imagination actually believe
in it. There was enough sex going on
around mee 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 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 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霵chsberg, 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惡,
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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