We watched as Henni went in front of the representatives of thousands of worlds to tell them the hard facts about what the horror on Ardëe meant, and beg for the money to save a species from extinction.
2. Kwame
Kwame didn’t hear about Ardëe. He didn’t even notice the snow, which kept all of us inside for days while the blizzards turned the centre into the winter retreat it was supposed to be. Kwame never even looked out of a window. He hadn’t left the bunker for two weeks.
He slept in the officer’s quarters to begin with, and then moved into the enlisted men’s barracks a few days later. This made no immediate sense since the barracks were less comfortable and filled with the stink he’d specified, but I suspected there was a very good reason.
He spent the days going below into the lower level, sometimes tinkering with the equipment, but mostly sitting among the hibernation chambers. And while he was there, he talked. No one listened but me, and I did so from my office, taking no part in the conversation. I asked him once or twice if there was anything he wished to discuss, but he politely declined. And then, a day after the announcement of the Ardëe evacuation, he asked me to join him there.
I found him sitting by the pedestal of a hibernation unit, and he invited me to sit beside him.
“So…” I said. “Who have you been talking to?”
“I have been talking to myself.”
“I noticed that.”
“You do not perceive my meaning.”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“The person I have been speaking to… that man… is Kwame Vangona. Last President of the sovereign republic of Mutapa.”
I nodded.
“And he has been dead for many decades,” he said.
I nodded again.
“You knew this.”
“I’ve been listening.”
“I believed you would.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Everything. His whole life. After the end, he would come down to see me. He wanted someone to talk to. Someone who was in the army, but not an officer. He was a man of the people…” He looked away. “He wanted someone to know why he had done it. How he came to that decision. So he told me everything. How his wife died. Everything.”
“What did you do?”
“He was the President. I listened. We had met before — did I say that? No, of course not. We met at Horonga, when I was installing defensive systems. He was an officer, still there after the war… he was concerned that the men who would operate the defences did not have the education to understand what they were doing. He was right, but I dared not say anything. Years later, when I was injured because one of them set the rangefinder wrongly on a grenade launcher — the poor fool could not add or subtract to save his life — he raised the issue in public. He was campaigning for educational reform, and I suppose it was just what he needed… he was selected for Parliament not long after that. So when we met again, in the bunker, he remembered me. He was sorry he did not do more for me when I was injured. All the people dead in the world and he was sorry about my arm…”
He held up the withered limb, flexing the hand as far as it would go. Then let it drop and leant his head back against the pedestal.
“How long did it go on?” I asked.
“Weeks…” He looked up, towards the command centre. “Upstairs, they were trying to keep contact with survivors. It took many weeks for them to die. When it was too much, he came to see me.”
“Did anything else… happen?”
“No! No, he was not that sort of man. He loved the company of men, but… not in that way. He just wanted someone to know what happened. I think the generals pushed him into arming the cobalt bomb… he never talked about that, he only hinted. He would not blame anyone else. He accepted the responsibility as his own.” Kwame’s voice was tinged with sadness. “I was not such a man.”
“You had a very difficult life.”
“It was nothing compared to his. To do what he did with… so little.”
“Being the right man in the right place at the right time is mostly about luck. It sounds like you were a very good engineer in a country where that wasn’t appreciated.”
“Do you think my life would have been better if I had been Chifunyikan?”
“Maybe. It sounds like they were better at that kind of thing.”
“And then I would be dead. Perhaps that is something else to wish for.”
“Is that how you feel now?”
He frowned, and thought about it. “No,” he said. “I have never wanted to die…”
“Well, that’s something—”
“No. In the bunker, I had nothing to live for. I could have killed myself. Many did. I was simply a coward.”
“Okay. Maybe we can talk about that later. How did the conversation end?”
“With the President?”
“With the President.”
He sighed. “Eventually, we had to go into hibernation. But he told me the chief scientist had predicted the radiation clouds would make the surface uninhabitable for decades. Maybe longer, maybe two hundred years. The hibernation chambers would not last that long. And the chambers in the labour reserve — what you call the ‘shallow complex’ — they would fail long before then. When the bunker was built, we thought we would only have to sleep ten or twenty years at the most…” he chuckled, bitterly.
“But you did all go into the chambers?”
“Yes. I was the last one to go in. I was the only one who really knew how they worked.”
“And they failed.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I disabled them.”
“You…” I took a moment to process that. “You killed them?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Those were his last orders.”
“Can you explain that a bit more…?”
“He felt we did not deserve to live. As a species. He wept to tell me he had lost all faith in humanity. He said it again and again: we should be punished for this crime. He said that he should be punished most of all. But there was no one who could do so. Everyone knew what had happened and nobody really blamed him. So he asked me.”
“He asked you directly?”
“As much as he could.”
“It was definitely an order?”
“I remember the words: ‘We do not deserve to live, Sergeant. No one will punish us for what we have done. If there is to be any justice for this world, we must do it ourselves.’ He repeated that: “We must do it ourselves.” He looked into my eyes… and I understood. So I sabotaged the hibernation units. Everyone died in their sleep…
“But he wanted it sooner. So I opened up his casket. I had a knife, I knew he wanted it that way, but… I could not do it. I was a soldier but I never killed a man. I… kissed him… sealed him up… cut the lines instead and let him die for lack of air.”
A tear ran down his cheek. “If that is genocide… then I will stand trial for it.”
“There’ll have to be an investigation.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know what will happen. But we’ll support you.”
“Thank you.”
“So… who are you?”
He smiled, painfully. “I do not know.”
“Still?”
“I was an engineer. I had the training necessary to understand the hibernation units… I suppose that is why they recalled me, even with my injury. But… I do not know who I was.”
“Okay. It’s still progress.” He didn’t look like he agreed. “Do you feel better?”