Her crotch itched; she stopped and scratched. Raw, and despite it all she ought to have taken the time to have a proper bath. But there you were; she hadn't had the time, and -
Suddenly, without warning, she was sick.
There was little enough in her stomach, so it was mostly bile, but she watched what there was come out, and tried to do it as silently as possible, while feeling the deepest surprise. This was unexpected. She hadn't felt sick. She forced the last heave, spat, then rolled over under a welded collar between two lengths of pipe above her, where the rain was dripping so hard and fast it was an almost unbroken stream. She let the water splash into her mouth, rinsing and spitting and rinsing and spitting and then swallowing and swallowing.
Huh, she said to herself.
She got back on her front, and kept on crawling. The rain would soon rinse the sickness away; there'd be no sign for them to find. The lightning glare burst through the pipes above and threw black bars across her back.
She got to the valve cluster and paused, looked up at the bridge again, through the pounding lines of rain. She watched for a while. Just the one man. Then two more came from behind. They held what looked like a SAM launcher. One of them took the nightscope and stood scanning the deck; she had to duck now and again, but watched when she could. It looked as though one of them was showing the man on the bridge how to work the launcher; holding it up, sighting, letting the other man repeat the actions. She ducked at each flash of lightning. The lightning was closer now, the thunder louder.
She stayed ducked after one flash, thinking. She looked around her, checking the bow cameras but unable to see which way they were pointing through the driving rain. She shivered again in the cool wash of water glueing the fatigues to her skin, and ran her hand over the rough-painted surface of the valve-head controls. Her hand stopped, invisible.
She patted the metal hatch cover.
The catches came undone easily, and the hatch swung open. She waited.
Darkness for a long time, then a brilliant flash, leaving an after-image. It was difficult to decide whether the controls here were set out similarly to those on the bridge, which she thought she could just about remember.
She remembered something else, and decided she was sufficiently hidden from the bridge by the high, thick pipes of the valve cluster. She took out the cigarette lighter from the fatigues' breast pocket. It sputtered, clicking. She blew on it, shook it hard, then tried it again, using her other hand as an umbrella. The lighter hissed, made a series of clicking noises at the same time, then lit. The clicking noises stopped. Still sheltering it, she held the little yellow flame to the open white cavity of the pump controls. The flame lessened, shrank, and the hiss decreased. She shook the lighter but its light continued to fade, running out. Never mind; she'd seen all she wanted.
She snapped the lighter off. Peeped at the bridge. No sign of concern; just the one man, scanning. The rain sang on the metal deck and pipes around her. She waited. The lightning preceded the thunder by ten seconds, then by five, then one or two. She put her hands on the switches.
Lightning flared and thunder bellowed all around the ship; probably hit it, she guessed. She turned the switches. The echoes of the thunder were still dying away as the pumps beneath her feet started up, making the deck thrum. Red lights appeared in front of her eyes.
She heard hisses and gurgles, then, over the noise of the rain, the rumble of the thick oil pouring out through the pipes and into the lake.
She wondered how long it would take them to realise. She watched the bridge for a few seconds. Nothing. Same man, same actions. Quite undisturbed. She felt the deck tremble as the pumps pulled the oil from the tanks and threw it into the lake. She watched the man on the red length of the bridge for a while longer, her eyes screwed up, trying to drill her sight through the waves of rain. Nothing; nada. Hadn't even seen the damn stuff spewing out from the sides of the ship. Hadn't noticed the lights on the cargo-handling board on the bridge. She looked at the lighter in her hand, thought about trying to set fire to the torrent of oil pouring from the pumps over the side of the boat and into the lake, then looked up, mouth opening, into the night, and with a last hurried look at the lighter, put it away, squatted on her haunches, and thought. She nodded once to herself, then spent a long time looking through the rain, through a small space between two pipes she reckoned would screen her from the nightscope and the lightning, watching the man on the bridge. She started to worry about the lightning.
After a while she got dizzy with tiredness. The storm was departing; the rain had settled to a steady downpour; the lightning had become less dramatic and urgent, the thunder less immediate and crackly.
She felt the deck resound beneath her, and lay down in the pouring rain, only half-sheltered by the thick pipes above. She curled up, and slept.
Hisako Onoda dreamed of a lake full of blood and a sky full of fire. She watched from the depths of space and saw a great lever strike the world; it rang false and shattered, disintegrating into all the separate states and creeds, beliefs and prejudices that had riven it over the years, blowing like seeds from a flower.
She kept waking up, thinking she'd heard steps, or voices. Or maybe she only thought she kept waking up, she thought later.
Blood and fire, the dreams were always there waiting for her when she drifted off again.
When she did awake, properly, finally, the rain was gone, the first light of dawn was trying to burrow under the dark lid. of the sky, the deck still trembled beneath her, the air smelled thick and the lake was full of blood.
12: The Heart of the Universe
Her father died three months before she was born; she had never been held by him. They told her she was lucky, all the same; she might have been born deformed. It was years after the Pikadon, and maybe he'd have died of cancer anyway. That was the way it worked, by statistics. It came down to probabilities, a cellular image of the jeopardising indeterminacies that lay beneath the physical world, and were its absolute — but absolutely uncertain — foundations. So maybe the bomb did kill him, eventually, or maybe it didn't.
They'd opened him up, hoping to deal with the tumour in his belly, but when they saw what was inside him, they just closed the incision again. He stayed in hospital, went home for a while to be with his pregnant wife, but after a few weeks the pain got so bad they took him back into the hospital once more.
He'd been with his unit in Kaita, a town a few kilometres from the city suburbs, when the Pikadon came. They'd seen the lone bomber from the barracks; tiny in the sky. One of the men claimed he'd seen the bomb itself, a dot falling. They heard the sirens from the city, went back to cleaning their rifles.
Then another sun lit the parade ground and the barrack buildings. They shielded their eyes, felt the heat, and watched dumbly while the light faded slowly and the vast cloud rose soundlessly into the sky, like the leg of a giant boot that had stamped upon the city. The noise came much later, like continuous heavy thunder.
On the way to the city, to help, they met the burned people, and once passed a group of soldiers; young men like themselves, but looking like black men, stumbling along in a crocodile line down the dusty road, each man with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, following the leader. The soldier at the head of the strange, silent column had one eye left; the others were all blind. They weren't Negroes. They were Japanese. They'd been closer, and watched the bomb all the way, until it exploded in the air above the city, and that was the last thing they were ever to see; the light had melted their eyes. The fluids were still wet on their charcoal-black cheeks.