Work books were produced, along with supplementary texts and interactive learning material, everything necessary was done, audio material was compiled and illustrations added to the text to form a single, gleaming package. It was very well received in schools. Over fifty thousand schoolchildren have had to read extracts from The History of K, or at least look at the pictures or take part in the activities.
And so I have never had to introduce myself further because people simply know who I am. They wouldn’t know my name in any case, because the publisher thought it wise, for reasons of layout and marketing, not to print the author’s name on the front cover or in any advertising, and eventually it was omitted altogether.
It doesn’t bother me. It isn’t lying.
You had to do something, there was no way of finding work in a foreign country. There are no benefits here for defectors from neighbouring countries. Neither should there be. Some get by and some don’t, and those who don’t only have themselves to blame.
When I first arrived here, if you managed to get across the border – back then the checkpoints were still heavily guarded and the borders were secure – you were locked up in a special centres for the duration of your interrogation and background checks. In my case this took only three months, as I had been in such a high position previously. I had to turn every stone the authorities thought of. No matter, interrogation doesn’t bother me. Everyone has a job to do and is simply stationed where they are told.
During these investigations we were given food and one set of clothes: a pair of straight trousers, a flannel shirt, underwear and brown walking shoes. In the first few years I used them rather a lot, as I was collecting material for the history book and had to live from hand to mouth with the savings I’d brought when I left.
When I started putting the history together, at first I began very far back in time. That’s the way to write a history, if it’s done well that is, building up piece by piece from the foundations right to the top, the way people used to build strong brick houses back in the olden days.
Writing about events a very long time ago simply isn’t very interesting, I was advised when I showed the publisher my first version of the manuscript – no more than a synopsis in fact. No, I said and immediately tore out almost ten thousand years from the beginning.
I concentrated instead on what I myself knew and what I had experienced in my own life and what I felt was otherwise important. This made sitting around in archives a far easier task, as familiar decades, names and images were already in some sort of mental order and there was no need to double check everything or qualify information with footnotes or references.
Many excellent photographs still existed from those decades. All the most important events had been documented impeccably. Back then every photography studio and agency had had plenty of resources and enthusiasm. In retrospect, even the landscape looks slightly more lush. Buildings were smaller and there was no need for thoroughfares as wide as a runway, not even on the main roads coming into the capital. There were charming little parks and long, empty beaches for which the State of K was renowned abroad. Tourists still flocked there, and there was no need to restrict people’s coming and going due to any exceptional circumstances.
That was perhaps the golden era. It was as though the country had grown year upon year, the number of people and factories and almost everything else besides increased steadily, the State became richer, its power around the world grew and as a nation it grew from the inside until finally it was worthy of its name. Why shouldn’t I have concentrated more on those golden years?
The publisher only wished to leave this period in the manuscript by way of contrast, so that previous times could serve as something of a colourful background to the bleakness of later events. We have to shepherd the younger generation very carefully indeed; a disaster or an attack of this scale is not at all possible here, but it is a healthy and chilling reminder to see it happen as close to home as in our neighbouring country – perhaps this can be an important lesson for our youngsters today, I was told at a meeting of a committee whose function it was to unify teaching material as I was presenting the outline of my book.
By way of contrast all the good of those years was condensed into five minutes and three double page spreads after which, without any explanation of the various factors leading up to the events which followed, that whole peaceful era of growth and development was cut short with a documentary report:
‘Thus far there is no more specific information about the chain of events in the north-eastern reactor zone. A crisis group, established alongside the research committee, does not rule out any possible explanation. The fusion silos may have been the target of a large-scale enemy strike or a contained attack. Technical protective structures around the reactors may have collapsed. The accident may have been triggered by the sudden destruction of data in the operating systems. At worst this may be a case of an uncontrolled release of accumulated gas inside the fusion reactors themselves, otherwise known as helium cancer. The State news service stresses that citizens have no need to fear for their lives or their health. The accident is localised and has been contained entirely within the north-eastern reactor zone.’
I was probably the best person to write The History of K, or at least the sections dealing with these particular stages in its history, as I watched events unfold both inside and outside the north-eastern zone. When the accident occurred – or the attack or whatever they eventually decided to call it – I was working as a journalist for channel two and had just come back from the reactor zone. I had been carrying out a series of interviews for an item about farming entitled Pure Food.
A number of farmers had been relocated in sectors within a given radius of each of the seven fusion reactors in order to put the waste land to use and to capitalise on the excess heat given off. People were so sceptical about the food originating from these farms – over 70 in number – that details of the origin of any produce had to be changed before it was distributed to the shops.
When people at channel two started asking for volunteers to investigate the accident at the reactor, I simply felt I was the most suitable to go. I had just returned from the zone, I knew my way around and had many contacts there. In the last few years visas were seldom granted, and permanent residents were not permitted to travel outside the zone.
I finally convinced the channel’s director and my superiors. I signed a voluntary consent form and a confidentiality agreement, checked a car out of the depot, took an array of broadcasting equipment and set off through the State towards the north-east.
There was very little traffic. The closer I came to the zone the fewer cars I passed, while travelling in my direction there was no traffic at all. At the beginning of August, when I had first gone there to interview the farmers, I had passed a steady flow of lorries from the aluminium and steel factories near the border. Now even service stations were shut, though luckily I had taken a full canister of fuel with me.
Not once did I have to go through routine inspections on the north-eastern motorway. On the slip road there were only a handful of deserted checkpoints with security cameras hidden in black boxes high up on the lamp-posts.
It had been a week and a day since the events in the reactor zone. Problems in energy distribution had begun to emerge, power cuts and heating failures. At the darkest time of night people said they could see a faint glow on the horizon in the north and the north-east, like a cold, gossamer fire. If fire can be cold, that is; I remember pondering this question whilst on the road.
Autumn seemed to have arrived sooner than normal. It was as if there were more brown leaves on the trees than the previous year, and fewer yellow ones. Who can say which leaves are right and which are wrong? The grass is still growing but winter will come eventually. Snow claims the grass, and it is no more. But then grass reclaims the snow, and winter is no more. Or is it? I remember thinking like this as I drove onwards. Of course, with many years of hindsight all
this seems like an omen of what was to come, but back then they were nothing but scattered fragments of thoughts, and it felt somewhat overwhelming to see the forests and verges turn more autumnal by the hour.
Someone so much bigger than man can’t hide his handiwork, Father would say when things happened which were utterly beyond anyone’s control. Just like in April every year when the stream would flood the garden. My younger sister and I would take the red plastic sledges left by the front steps and try to row across to the flagpole at the other end of the garden. Above the yard the water was always the greyish colour of clay, its surface speckled with shining colourful patches where naphtha and petrol for the aggregate unit had spilled from their tanks during the winter.
Bigger than you and me, Father used to say about his cancer and went on to live with it for another ten years, at least; he was always moving the deadline forward slightly. First it was when Eeva started school, then when Eeva had turned twelve so that Mother wouldn’t have to take on such a burden. Then when I had finished school, though he didn’t quite make it that far.
I drove along the motorway lost in thought. Everywhere around me dusk began to fall, even though according to the given sunset time it should have been light for a good few hours yet. A thin mist had formed across the sky but the sun could still be seen clearly through it, a dim orange glimmer nowhere near the horizon.
The sky was not darkening, it was becoming dusky. As if a matt gauze had been drawn before the sunlight.
I could heard a distant humming, and above the horizon there appeared a pale, shimmering patch of light, a glow. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it no longer dispersed in the north-east.
A lorry with a trailer sped past back towards the cities. Its cab was concealed with a darkened windscreen and on its left side all the lettering and paintwork seemed to have been burnt off, leaving the metal plating scarred and rusted.
Soon after this I was forced to slam on the brakes. The road appeared to be blocked. An enormous pile of scrap metal was spread across both carriageways. I tried to drive around it and along the embankment. An electrical current ran through the body of the car. Outside there was a crackling sound and the smell of burning.
I drove past without stopping. A delivery van had fallen on its side. It seemed to have been caught inside an electric field. Sparks flew forth and struck the road. Nothing but a heap of metal, charred and burnt,fire-damaged pieces of platform and cargo, and probably several bodies too.
When I switched on the radio I heard a crisis council bulletin on the news claiming that human casualities had been avoided altogether in the reactor zone, collateral damage was minimal, and life within the immediate proximity of the so-called accident site had gone back to normal. The so-called accident site, said the newsreader. I was puzzled by that expression. By now I was so close to the zone border that there was no mistaking the dimmed sky and the strange gusting wind; it was clear that across the border something on a very large scale had taken place, something irreversible. And as for the lorry with its side burnt off and the delivery van lying across the road, they weren’t simply ‘nothing’.
Throughout the rest of the journey I had to drive through those electric fields, the car motor kept choking and cutting out, but it would always start again. Once I had arrived at the edge of the zone I stepped out of the car and tried to listen for any sounds beyond the ridge.
A high ridge surrounded the entire reactor zone. Before construction of the reactors had begun, an additional protective layer had been built on top of this ridge. Evidence of trucks transporting earth could still be seen – a clear line cutting through the terrain below – though these churned patches of soil already nurtured a covering of small plants and bushes. Above the shifted soil the colour of the ground was different too: lighter stone and gravel, as if the coast of the Yoldia Sea had been moved and transplanted into the middle of the forest. On either side of the north-eastern motorway stunted forest plants covered the ground until about ten or so metres from the ridge.
There at the top you could look down into the zone. For I long time I stood on the spot, unable to do anything but stare, as I hadn’t prepared myself for such widespread devastation.
From the bottom of the ridge farming plains stretched out towards the first three of the reactor’s silos – or what was left of them. The outer walls of the silos had all collapsed. The enormous external pipes of the spiral-shaped cooling system had been ripped apart and the water cisterns and deuterium tanks lay in piles of shredded and twisted steel, aluminium and titanium. A dirty mist hung in the air, everywhere except directly above the defunct silos, which still glowed like bright orange furnaces. The light was so bright that you couldn’t look at it directly.
Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life. Both the roads leading to the reactors and those to the farms were empty and everything on the surrounding plains was quiet and motionless.
Something like this had never been predicted. Risk analysis and calculations based on theoretical scenarios had consistently shown almost negligible probability of any accident. In all the material I found whilst sifting through piles of literature and archive sources for my history book, I never once came across a statement to the contrary. Presumably other ways of handling the same data did exist, but only select statistics were ever made public.
Standing at the top of the ridge, looking down on the destruction below, I was a different person from the one I am now, it was so long ago. Now I understand more – or so it seems – but back then I thought I knew exactly what was right and what task then awaited me.
I was the first reporter allowed access to the zone after the events of the previous week and I had the necessary equipment in the car to broadcast reports. Because all official communication was striving to downgrade the scale of the damage to keep the public calm, I felt it was my duty to tell the truth, the whole unvarnished truth.
I continued on my way deeper into the zone. I got back in the car and drove down the ridge to the checkpoint on the north-eastern motorway. On my previous visit in August the checkpoint had been fully manned, complete with security police and stringent border control. Now the entire station was deserted, the gate had been left open and all the steel latches unlocked. The security cameras on the walls of the building looked broken and their lenses had all been turned upwards to face the sky.
I drove to the transport and maintenance centre where either a great gust of wind or a pressure wave had smashed the windows and toppled waste bins. There was no one in sight, not even bodies. Across from the centre stood the zone’s one and only school; it too stood empty, like on those deserted evenings during a public holiday. All manner of paper, plastic rubbish and chaff blew about the yard driven by the wind. Veils of smog had darkened the daylight into a premature evening and the raging fires above the fusion silos could now be seen more clearly blazing against the sky.
It was from there that I immediately sent the first of my live broadcasts from the scene of the accident. Reception figures soon reached a level unprecedented on channel two. Because of this widespread support I was allowed to continue my broadcasts almost every day, even though there had been plans afoot amongst the board of directors to put an end to them altogether. There was a great deal of pressure from above, because the State communication strategy was based firmly on keeping a low profile, and it had been decided to keep the situation in the reactor zone as quiet as possible, so as not to cause mass panic. Of course nowadays I realise that this is one way of going about things, but at the time I had only one option and so I worked tirelessly to make public as much news from the zone as I could. Given the situation, anything less wouldn’t have felt right.
The worst of it was that the hundreds of people who lived in the reactor zone had, perhaps even deliberately, been forgotten about altogether. From my previous correspondence in the area I knew that, beneath all the central buildings and cellars, a variety of bunkers had been dug out and equipped to be used in th
e event of an accident or heavy radiation. I went out in search of anyone hidden there, despite the fact that the channel had told me not to go any further into the zone and I was informed by the office of the Secretary General himself that any weakening of State security with images of corpses or the serious wounded was expressly forbidden.
I couldn’t understand such an edict and I did not uphold it; it was only due to the mass support for my live broadcasts that the channel and the State communication office allowed me to continue reporting at all.
Within a matter of days I had become renowned throughout the State of K and I realised at once the opportunities this presented for me. I made the kind of programmes I thought were just and right, and I began calling them The Truth Show. I started and finished every broadcast with the words: ‘This is A.C. Hahl for The Truth.’
I could no longer be sidelined or kept quiet. I made sure the fate of the reactor zone remained current news, and once the problems in energy distribution grew and the effects of the reactors, all the while blazing and churning out radiation, began to be felt elsewhere throughout the State my words had increasingly more clout.
From the north-east everything will spread elsewhere. It’s like a cancer. It can be quiet for a long time then flare up all at once. I’ve seen the signs up close. Sometimes the wind whips up, then blows on past and is forgotten. But it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s bigger than you or me. Through my broadcasts I tried to tell people that the seeds of devastation were already spread throughout the State, you no longer needed to travel out to the reactor zone to see it.
I managed to implement so many changes and improvements that I can no longer remember them all. Few people in their lives can ever raise an entire mountain range, but I did. Using earth brought from elsewhere the protective ridge around the reactor zone was built hundreds of metres higher. That was my doing. As a result of this someone on a debate programme at channel two suggested that the new mountain range be named the Hahl Mountains after me, because they would never have been built higher if I hadn’t used The Truth Show every day to demand it and to show people that the collapsed silos and blazing reactors must be shut off in their own stone box behind the mountains. Protecting the rest of the State cannot be dependent upon the sum of a mere few dozen billion.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Page 21
