He looked back at me, surprised and unsure of his answer. He thought about it for a moment, and then found words: “Every answer I find becomes another question. Do you think… there will ever be an end to the questions?”
“I don’t know, Kwame… is it still okay to call you Kwame?”
“I was called Kobe, before. I think. I am not sure…”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to make your mind up right away. But with your injuries, there’s no telling what else you might recover.”
“I am not certain I wish to know more.”
I put a hand on his. “You’ve made a massive step. Now we know what we’re doing, we can treat your PTSD. There’s one thing, though.”
“Yes?”
“We can’t do it here. We have to move the group again, soon.”
“Was there another attack…?”
“No. A world is ending. We’ve just started an evacuation and they’re going to need this place for the refugees.”
“Of course. What happened?”
“Solar flares. They’re so bad they’re killing the planet. They have less than a year before there’s nothing left.”
“It never ends,” he sighed.
“No. But it always gets better. And it’ll get better for you as well. I can’t promise you’ll get back everything you lost, but it will get better.”
He sighed and leaned his head back against the pedestal.
“Then I shall have to accept that.”
3. Pew
The bunker disappeared more quickly than it had been built, as a small crew came in to rescape the building to another purpose: shelter and therapy for fifty or more refugees, probably those who were judged to be most disturbed when the triage teams did their work on the way down the Lift. It was only days after the announcement, and the first ships were already lifting the most vulnerable people from the battered arcologies of Ardëe to orbit and the portal to Hub.
We were not in the first batch of centres to be made available, but nevertheless the group had to pick their way around the work crew as it opened up the shuttered rooms and shaped them into dormitories and therapy rooms and everything the refugees would need. We found ourselves confined to a small corner of the building; it was simple enough to pack and we could have left straight away, but until the Diplomatic Service were ready to take us, we had to wait and carry on as best we could. With Ranev’s agreement, I decided to stay with the group until the move was made, but I hadn’t decided what I would do then. I couldn’t see past the present moment, and went on with therapy, hoping I wouldn’t stumble and let them down.
My biggest worry was still Pew. He’d been refusing therapy sessions for some time now, and had grown obsessed with physical fitness, increasing his regimen to include self-defence training from security — only the most defensive of martial arts, but pursued with a troubling zeal. However, it was his academic studies that gave me the most concern. He’d completely abandoned his university course in mathematics and physics, and moved on to a syllabus bound by a single theme: genocide. He’d read dozens of case studies of such horrors (including several from my world), and found endless disappointment and dismay at how little was done to bring perpetrators to justice. Historical crimes were forgotten or denied. Legal systems shied away from the worst excesses. Time and time again, the people who were to blame went unpunished. Even the most advanced societies did their best to cover up crimes they had committed on other worlds, and there was complicity throughout the multiverse. The dead were given memorials. The murderers continued their lives. Survivors went unheard and ignored. Business as usual.
He looked into one other set of cases: those where there were survivors, who had then committed their own genocide against their former oppressors. It was very rare for anyone to be able to turn the tables so completely, and he seemed to be frustrated even with these cases. The former victims became just like their former persecutors, displaying exactly the same behaviour of denial and forgetting, acting as though they were the guilty parties. And by any rational standards, that was precisely what they were. But while Pew was as contemptuous of their denial as any other scholar, his reasoning was different. He thought the crime of counter-genocide should be celebrated.
After he had missed three sessions, I called him in for a compulsory meeting. I made sure the security man I sent was the one who had been teaching him self-defence; they had a rapport, and I wanted as little chance of conflict as possible. Pew submitted to the summons with a sullen, petulant attempt at gravitas, ignoring pleasantries and the drink I put in front of him.
“Do you know why I’ve called you in, Pew?” I asked. He didn’t reply. “You’ve been avoiding therapy.” He stayed sullen. “And quite frankly, some of what you’ve been up to is troubling me. We need to talk about this.”
He looked up at me. Half angry, half guilty at being found out. But it subsided and he looked away again.
“Pew? Can we talk about what’s bothering you?”
He kept his silence.
“You should know that since you’re on the euthanasia track, you do have certain obligations towards keeping up with your therapy. If you’re unable to attend therapy sessions, we won’t have any choice other than to take you out of the programme.”
He looked up at me again, as though he were being victimised somehow. I went on: “Unless of course you don’t want to die any more?”
His brow furrowed.
“Pew, if you want to stay on the euthanasia track, you have to commit to therapy. At the moment you’re not doing that. So… are you feeling better?”
He swallowed. “I feel different.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you’ve been doing a lot of exercise. Has that helped?”
“Yes.”
“Has your research helped as well?”
“Yes.”
“Does that give you something to live for?”
He looked straight at me, unblinking. Deciding what to tell me. Almost trying to intimidate me with his stare. “Something like that,” he said.
I sighed. “I’m not sure your research has been healthy…”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“What does that mean, Pew?”
“It’s happening again. And you’re letting it happen.”
“I’m sorry, Pew — what do you mean?”
“Ardëe.”
“That’s a natural disaster.”
“No it fucking isn’t!”
“Pew! Control yourself!”
“Why can’t anyone fucking see!”
“Pew!”
I realised that as much as he was shouting, I was shouting back at the same level. He was as shocked as I was. I took a breath.
“I’m sorry, Pew, but I don’t see your point. Their sun’s unstable. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.”
“Bullshit.”
“They are just accidents, sometimes.”
He hunched over his knees, sullen.
“Pew, is there something you know that I don’t?”
“They were doing experiments. On the sun.”
“And where did you hear about this?”
“On the net.”
“Where on the net?”
“It’s all over. It was on the news on Ardëe, and then they stopped talking about it when it went wrong. They had a station on Mercury and they were dropping bombs into the photosphere. Bigger than nukes. It’s antimatter. They dropped a whole fucking reservoir of antimatter in there and it’s burning up a bit at a time and that’s what’s happening.”
So now he was down as far as believing in conspiracy theories without questioning them in the slightest. The antimatter accusation wasn’t the only crazy story doing the rounds, and the others made about as much sense. It didn’t matter. Once someone starts believing in conspiracies, they lose touch with objective reality and treat every little bit of news as evidence for what they’ve already decided. And Pew had decided that humanity in all its forms was not just prone to genocide, but addicted to it.