The winch engine laboured, making a high, screeching noise. The drag lines had stopped. He ran on to the knot of people gathering near the inclined plane.
I know what happens here, he thought. I know what happens to me. I remember the pain. I see the girl. I know this bit. I know what happens. I must stop running. Why don’t I stop running? Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I wake up?
As he got to the others, the strain on the trapped drag line – still being pulled by the winch engine – proved too much. The steel hawser parted somewhere down inside the bowl of mist with a noise like a shot. The steel cable came hissing and sizzing up through the air, snaking and wriggling as it ripped up the slope towards the lip, loosing most of its grisly cargo from its hooks as it came, like drops of ice off a whip.
He screamed to the men at the top of the inclined plane, and tripped, falling onto his face in the snow.
Only one of the engineers dropped in time.
Most of the rest were cut neatly in half by the scything hawser, falling slowly to the snow in bloody sprays. Loops of the hawser smacked off the railway engine with a thunderous clanging noise and wrapped themselves around the winch housing as though with relief; other coils thumped heavily to the snow.
Something hit his upper leg with the force of a fully swung sledgehammer, breaking his bones in a cataclysm of pain. The impact rolled him over and over in the snow while the bones ground and dug and pierced; it went on for what felt like half a day. He came to rest in the snow, screaming. He was face-to-face with the thing that had hit him.
It was one of the bodies the drag line had flicked off as it tore up the slope, another corpse they had hacked and loosened and pulled like a rotten tooth from the new face of the glacier that morning, a dead witness that it was their duty to discover and remove with all dispatch and secrecy to the charnel wagons in the valley below to be turned from an accusatory body to innocent smoke and ash. What had hit him and shattered his leg was one of the bodies which had been dumped in the glacier half a generation ago, when the enemies of the Race had been expunged from the newly conquered territories.
The scream forced its way out of his lungs like something desperate to be born to the freezing air, like something aching to join the screams he could hear spread around him near the lip of the inclined plane.
The commandant’s breath was gone; he stared into the rock-hard face of the body that had hit him and he sobbed for breath to scream again. It was a child’s face; a girl’s.
The snow burned his face. His breath would not come back. His leg was a burning brand of pain lighting up his whole body.
But not his eyes. The view began to dim.
Why is this happening to me? Why won’t it stop? Why can’t I stop it? Why can’t I wake up? What makes me re-live these terrible memories?
Then the pain and the cold went away, seemed to be taken away, and another kind of coldness came upon him, and he found himself… thinking. Thinking about all that had happened. Reviewing, judging
… In the desert we burned them immediately. None of this sloppiness. Was it some attempt at poetry, to bury them in the glacier? Interred where they were so far up the ice sheet, their bodies would stay in the ice for centuries. Buried too deep for anyone to find without the killing effort we had to put into it. Did our leaders begin to believe their own propaganda, that their rule would last a hundred lifetimes, and so started to think that far ahead? Could they see the melt-lakes below the glacier’s ragged, dirty skirt, all those centuries from now, covered with the floating bodies released from the ice’s grip? Did it start to worry them what people would think of them then? Having conquered all the present with such ruthlessness, did they embark on a campaign to defeat the future too, make it love them as we all pretend to?
… In the desert we burned them immediately. They came out in the long trains through the burning heat and the choking dust and the ones that hadn’t died in the black trucks we offered copious water; no will could resist the thirst those baking days spent amongst death had built up in them.
They drank the poisoned water and died within hours. We incinerated the plundered bodies in solar furnaces, our offering to the insatiable sky gods of Race and Purity. And there seemed to be something pure about the way they were disposed of, as though their deaths gave them a nobility they could never have achieved in their mean, degraded lives. Their ashes fell like a lighter dust on the powderous emptiness of the desert, to be blown away together in the first storm.
The last furnace loads were the camp workers – gassed in their dormitories, mostly – and all the paperwork: every letter, every order, every requisition pad, stores sheet, file, note and memo. We were all searched, even I. Those the special police found hiding diaries were shot on the spot. Most of our effects went up in smoke, too. What we were allowed to keep had been searched so thoroughly we joked they had managed to remove each grain of sand from our uniforms, something the laundry had never been able to do.
We were split up and moved to different posts throughout the conquered territories. Reunions were not encouraged.
I thought of writing down what had happened – not to confess but to explain.
And we suffered, too. Not just in the physical conditions, though those were bad enough, but in our minds, in our consciences. There may have been a few brutes, a few monsters who gloried in it all (perhaps we kept a few murderers off the streets of our cities for all that time), but most of us went through intermittent agonies, wondering in moments of crisis if what we were doing was really right, even though in our hearts we knew it was.
So many of us had nightmares. The things we saw each day, the scenes we witnessed, the pain and terror; these things could not help but affect us.
Those we disposed of; their torment lasted a few days, maybe a month or two, then it was over as quickly and efficiently as we could make the process.
Our suffering has gone on for a generation.
I am proud of what I did. I wish it had not fallen to me to do what bad to be done, but I am glad that I did it to the best of my capabilities, and I would do it again.
That was why I wanted to write down what had happened; to witness our belief and our dedication and our suffering.
I never did.
I am proud of that too.
He awoke and there was something inside his head.
He was back in reality, back in the present, back in the bedroom of his house in the retirement complex, near the sea; he could see the sunlight hitting the tiles of the balcony outside the room. His twinned hearts thumped, the scales had risen on his back, prickling him. His leg ached, echoing with the pain of that ancient injury on the glacier.
The dream had been the most vivid yet, and the longest, finally taking him to the ice-fall in the western face and the accident with the drag line (deep buried, that had been, in his memory, submerged beneath all the dread white weight of his remembered pain). As well as that, whatever he had experienced had gone beyond the normal course, the usual environment of dreams, propelled there by the reliving of the accident and the image of fighting for breath while he stared transfixed into the face of the dead girl.
He had found himself thinking, explaining, even justifying what he had done in his army career, in the most definitive part of his life.
And now he could feel something inside his head.
Whatever it was inside his head got him to close his eyes.
~ At last, it said. It was a deep, deliberately authoritative voice, its pronunciation almost too perfect.
At last? he thought. (What was this?)
~ I have the truth.
What truth? (Who was this?)
~ Of what you did. Your people.
What?
~ The evidence was everywhere; across the desert, caked in loam, lodged in plants, sunk to the bottom of lakes, and there in the cultural record too; the sudden vanishings of art works, changes in architecture and agriculture. There were a few hidden records – books, photographs, sound recordings, indices, which contradicted the re-written histories – but they still didn’t directly explain why so many people, so many peoples seemed to vanish so suddenly, without any sign of assimilation.