Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Ngoyi shook his head. “Not for crimes committed after the war.”

  Mativi was alarmed. “After?”

  “They’ve been using the machines as execution devices,” said Ngoyi. “No mess, no body, no incriminating evidence. And they work, too. The bacheques are terrified of them, will do anything to avoid being killed that way. They think they’re the homes of demons – ”

  “They’re not far wrong,” muttered Mativi.

  “ – and then there are the undertakers,” continued Ngoyi. “They’ve been using the machines for mass burials. Otherwise the bodies would just have piled up in the streets in the epidemics. And the domestic waste trucks, about five of them stop there several times a week and dump stuff in through the skylights. And my own trucks – ”

  “Your own trucks?”

  “Yes. Three times a week, sometimes four or five.” Ngoyi returned Mativi’s accusing stare. “Oh, sure, the UN gives us Geiger counters and that bacterial foam that fixes fallout, and the special vehicles for sucking up the fixed material and casting it into lead glass bricks – ”

  “Which you’re supposed to then arrange for disposal by the IAEA by burial underground in the Devil’s Brickyard in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica,” finished Mativi. “Only you haven’t been doing that, have you? You thought you’d cut a few corners.”

  “The UN gives us a budget of only five million a year!” complained Ngoyi. “And by the time that reaches us, it has, by the magic of African mathematics, become half a million. Have you any idea what it costs to ship a single kilo of hazardous waste to Antarctica?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do,” repeated Mativi, staring up the barrel of the gun, which somehow did not matter quite so much now.

  “We were talking astrophysics in the Bar B Doll only the other night. You told me then that once something crosses the Event Horizon, it never comes out!” said the civil servant, mortified. “You promised!”

  “That’s absolutely correct,” said Mativi. “Absolutely, totally and utterly correct.”

  “Then,” said Ngoyi, his face brightening insanely, “then there is no problem. We can throw as much stuff in as we want to.”

  “Each one of those containers,” said Mativi, “is designed to hold a magnetically charged object that weighs more than ten battleships. Hence the reinforced concrete floor, hence the magnetized metal casing that attracts every bit of ferrous metal in the room. Now, what do you think is going to happen if you keep piling in extra uncharged mass? Nothing that crosses the Event Horizon comes out, Jean. Nothing. ever. Including you, including me, including Makemba and Kimbareta and little laurent.”

  Ngoyi’s face fell. Then, momentarily, it rose again. “But our stuff is only a few hundred kilos a week,” he began. “Much less than what the domestic waste people put in.”

  “I feel better already. You’re not going to be personally responsible for getting the whole planet sucked into oblivion, it’s going to be some other guy.”

  “The sewage outlet, mind you,” continued Ngoyi. “That must be pumping in a good thousand litres a day – ”

  Mativi’s jaw dropped. “Sewage outlet?”

  “Sure. The sanitation guys rerouted the main waste pipe for the city as a temporary measure. They have to keep replacing the last few metres – the machine keeps eating the pipe.” Ngoyi shrugged. “How else do you think they keep five million people’s shit out of the drinking water?”

  “Jean-Baptiste, you people have to stop this. You have to stop it now. You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.”

  The gun was still pointing at the centre of Mativi’s chest; now, just for a moment, it stopped wavering and hit dead centre.

  “I know exactly what I’m doing. I am making sure I can feed my wife and children.”

  The finger coiled round the trigger, slowed down as if falling down gravity slopes. Mativi winced.

  The gun clunked and did nothing.

  Ngoyi stared at his uncooperative weapon tearfully.

  “I must warn you,” lied Mativi, “that I led my university karate team.”

  “You should leave,” said Ngoyi. “I think I recognized the municipal sanitation inspector’s car following the bus I took down here. He had a rocket propelled grenade launcher on his parcel shelf.”

  The road surface rose and fell under the Hyundai like a brown ocean swell, testing its suspension to the limit. Mativi heard things grounding that probably ought not to.

  “Can I drop you off anywhere?” He braked gently as the traffic hit the blast craters around the freeway/railway junction, which had been a prime military target. Robot repair units were still working on it, and their operators did not pay much attention to cars that weighed one tenth what a mine clearance tractor did. The streetlights seemed to be out on this stretch of road, and the only illumination came from car headlights bouncing up and down like disco strobes. The robot tractors did not need visible light to see.

  “The stadium will do fine. I can catch a bus out to Ndjili from there.”

  “You live that far out of town?”

  “We don’t all live on Geneva salaries, you know.” Ngoyi’s face blanched suddenly as he stared into the evening traffic. “Stop the car! Handbrake turn! Handbrake turn!”

  Mativi stared into the traffic. “Why?”

  “Four secret police cars, dead ahead!”

  It was true, and Mativi cursed himself for not having seen it. The SUV’s stood out like aluminium islands in the sea of polyurea AfriCars. Each one of them would have cost ten times an ordinary Kinshasan’s annual salary.

  “It’s not a roadblock,” said Mativi.

  “So I should care? They’re out looking for you!”

  “looks like an escort. They’re not even coming down this road. They’re turning onto the freeway to Djelo-Binza. They’re escorting that big, heavy launch tractor…one of the ones designed to carry clutches of heavy ballistic missiles out to the pads at Malebo.” He peered out of the driver-side window. “The one whose suspension is scraping the ground – ”

  He did a handbrake turn and left the road in the direction of Djelo-Binza. The suspension hardly noticed the difference. The only reason people drove on roads any more in Kinshasa was because the road was slightly more likely to have been checked for explosives.

  There was only desultory hooting when he rejoined the road. leaving the road and rejoining it after a four-wheel-drive short-cut was common. The four-by-fours were clearly visible now, crammed with whatever men the police chiefs had been able to get their hands on at short notice – some in military uniform, some in T-shirts, some with government-issue sidearms, some with war-era AKMs, yawning, pulled out of bed in the early hours.

  The crawler was taking up three lanes of traffic, drawing a horde of honking AfriCars behind it like a bridal train. Despite the horns, the crawler was probably not moving much slower than the cars would have done – the expressway was still a mass of blast craters.

  “I can’t believe this,” said Mativi, hugely affronted. “How can they think they can haul a million-tonne object across town without me noticing?”

  Ngoyi stared. “You think that thing’s got – things on it?”

  Mativi nodded. “One of the things is on board – one of the containers. They’re taking it across town because they can’t bear to lose it…I wonder why.” He winked at Ngoyi. “Maybe they’re in the pay of the office of sanitation?” The car plunged into yet another black void unilluminated by its headlights. “Jesus, I wish those streetlights were working.” He blinked as the car bonnet surged up again into the light.

  Then he realized. Not only were there no streetlights, there were also no lights in the city around the road.

  “That’s it, isn’t it.”

  “What?”

  “They’re going to the power company. You dumb fucks have been plugging power into it as well. haven’t you.”

  Ngoyi hesitated, then gave up the game and nodded. “It started out as a
theoretical weapons project in the last days of the war. But,” he insisted defiantly, “it was a peaceful use we put it to! One of our office juniors, a very clever young man, a PhD from CalTech, suggested that if we aimed an infrared laser beam at the event horizon at a certain angle, it would come out as a gamma-ray beam, which we used to heat a tank of mercury…we tried water first, but it flash evaporated and fused the rock around the tank to glass.” He licked his lips nervously. “The hardest part was designing a turbine system that would work with evaporating mercury. We lost a lot of men to heavy metal poisoning…”

  Realisation dawned on Mativi. “You were one of the researchers in lissouba’s government.”

  “You think I could have got away with living in the old People’s Democratic Republic with a physics degree without being a weapons researcher?” Ngoyi laughed hollowly. “Dream on, brother. But this is peacetime now. The technology is being used to power the houses of five million people – ”

  “Uh-uh. There’s no sidestepping the laws of Thermodynamics. You only get out less than what you put in. You’re only getting power out because you’re sapping the angular momentum of what’s inside the container. I’ll lay a bet that what’s inside the container was created illegally using the lubumba Collider that President lissouba convinced the UN to build to ‘rejuvenate the Congolese economy’.”

  Ngoyi squirmed. “He also said scientify the Congolese economy. He actually used the word ‘scientify’.”

  Mativi nodded. “In any case, that angular momentum was put into the container by gigawatts of energy pumped into the Collider from the city power grid. Effectively all you’re doing is using up energy someone stole and stored fifteen years ago. It’s no more a power source than a clockwork doll is, Jean-Baptiste. You have to wind it up to watch it go. And all you’ll be left with, in the end, is a non-rotating very heavy lump of extremely bad shit.”

  “Well, I must admit,” admitted Ngoyi ruefully, “the amount of juice we can squeeze out of it is getting smaller every year.”

  The tractor in front suddenly rumbled to a halt in a cloud of dust big enough to conceal a herd of rhinos. A wall of immobile metal barred the carriageway, and three lanes of drivers performed the peculiarly Congolese manoeuvre of stepping on their brakes and leaning on their horns simultaneously. One of them shrieked suddenly in dismay when a length of caterpillar track resembling a chain of house façades clipped together with traffic bollards slammed down onto his bonnet and crushed it flat, before slapping his saloon into a cabriolet. Paint flakes flew everywhere. The car was a steel one, too

  – an old Proton model produced under licence in Afghanistan. Mativi hoped the driver had survived.

  Troops poured out of the four-by-fours, ignoring the barrage of horns. They were staring at the side of the tractor. Some good Catholics were even crossing themselves.

  Mativi put the handbrake on and left his car. Someone hooted at him. He ignored them. One whole side of the tractor had collapsed into the asphalt. The torsion bars of the vehicle’s suspension, each one a man’s waist thick

  and made of substances far, far stronger than steel, had snapped like seaside rock. The load on top of the tractor had slumped sideways underneath its canvas blanket.

  Now that he was outside the car, he was aware of a hissing sound. The sound was coming from a hole punched in the canvas cover.

  Some of the troopers were walking up towards the load. Mativi danced out onto the grass verge, waving his arms like an isangoma. “No! Non! Get away! Trés dangereux!”

  One of the men looked at Mativi as if he were an idiot and took another step forward. His sleeve began to rustle and flap in the direction of the hole in the canvas. Then his hand slapped down onto the canvas cover, and he began to scream, beating on his hand, trying to free it. His comrades began to laugh, looking back towards Mativi, enjoying the joke their friend was having at the crazy man’s expense.

  Then he vanished.

  Not quite vanished – Mativi and the troops both heard the bones in his hand snap, saw the hand crumple into the canvas like a handkerchief into a magician’s glove, followed by his arm, followed by his shoulder, followed by his head. They saw the flare of crimson his body turned into as skin, bone, blood vessels, all the frail materials meant to hold a body together, degenerated into carmine mulch and were sucked up by the structure. A crimson blot of blood a man wide sprayed onto the canvas – out of which, weirdly, runnels of blood began trailing inward toward the hole, against and at angles to gravity.

  The police troops turned and looked at Mativi, then looked back at the tractor.

  “alors, chef,” one of them said to him, “qu’est-ce qu’on fait maintenant?”

  “It’s loose,” said Ngoyi, his eyes glazed, seeing the ends of worlds. “It’s loose, and I am responsible.”

  Mativi shook his head. “It’s not loose. Not yet. We can still tell exactly where it is, just by feeding it more policemen. But its casing’s corroded. It’s sucking in stuff from outside.”

  “Not corroded.” Ngoyi shook his head. “It won’t corrode. It’s made of nickel alloy, very strong, very heavy. It’s one of the cases we bored a hole in deliberately, in order to shine in the infrared beam. There’ll be another hole in the casing on the far side. Where the gamma comes out.”

  Mativi nodded. One of the machines the demons live in.

  Ngoyi still seemed to be wary of even looking at the container. “Could it topple over?”

  “No. If it begins to topple, it’ll right itself immediately. It’s probably scrunched itself down into the top of the tractor doing that already. Remember, it’s a small thing rotating, rotating fast, and it weighs over a thousand tonnes. The gyroscopic stability of an object like that doesn’t bear thinking about – ”

  “CETAWAYO BRIAN MATIVI! I AM HEREBY BY THE ORDER OF THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCES OF THE CONGO PlACING YOU UNDER ARREST.”

  Mativi turned. The voice had come from a senior police officer. The amount of shiny regalia on the uniform confused matters, but he was almost certain the man was a lieutenant.

  Mativi sighed. “lieutenant – ” he began.

  “Major,” corrected the Major.

  “ – Major, I am engaged in preventing a public disaster of proportions bigger than anything that might possibly be prevented by arresting me. Do you know what will happen if that load falls off that wagon?”

  The Major shrugged. “Do you know what will happen if I see you and don’t drag you down to the cells? I will lose my job, and my wife and children will go hungry.”

  Mativi began to back away.

  “Hey!” The Major began to pointedly unbutton his revolver.

  “I know what will happen to you if you don’t bring me in. And you forgot to mention that there’ll be no power in the city either, and that as a consequence a great number of wives and children will go hungry,” said Mativi, circling around the danger area of bowed, permanently windblown grass near the tractor’s payload. He waved his arms in the direction of the dark horizon. “You can see the evidence of this already. The device on this tractor has been uncoupled from the grid, and immediately there is no power for refrigeration, no power for cooking, or for emergency machinery in hospitals. I know all that.” Slowly, he put his hands up to indicate he was no threat. Then, with one hand, he swung himself up onto the side of the tractor, with the payload between himself and the Major. “But you truly cannot begin to comprehend what will happen to those wives and children if I allow this load to continue on to Djelo-Binza, sir. You see, I understand at a very deep level what is in this container. You do not.”

  “I must warn you not to attempt to escape custody,” said the Major, raising his pistol. “I am empowered to shoot.”

  “How can I be trying to escape custody?” said Mativi, looking down the barrel of the pistol as if his life depended on it, and sinking in his stance, causing the Major to lower the pistol by a couple of centimetres, still training it on his heart. “I’m climbing on b
oard a police vehicle.”

  “Get down off that police vehicle, now,” said the Major. “Or I will shoot.”

  Mativi licked his lips, looking up a pistol barrel for the second time that day, but this time attempting to perform complex orbital calculations in his head as he did so. have I factored in relativity properly? It needs to travel dead over the hole –

  “Shan’t.”

  The gun fired. It made quite a satisfactory boom. There was a red flash in mid-air, and Mativi was still there.

  The Major stared at Mativi.

  “As I said,” said Mativi, “I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?”

  The Major’s eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.

  “You do,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

  The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies – fortunately living ones

  – in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, providing the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.

  The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing v22 VTOl transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used latrine White.

  Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions – or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UxB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a hundred and twenty millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout, but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area–