For a second, I contemplated leaving the highway and taking a small detour to see the house up close, but I knew that Bamobah would refuse. Most metallurgists behaved just as she did: considered their residuals as strangers and kept them as far away as possible from their fortune, privacy, and friends. It was the simplest and most reliable way to avoid trouble surrounding the return, the realliance shock and the psychological paradox of coinciding memories.
When we lay on a beach later that evening under the starry sky and listened to the waves and the eerie song of the desert wind, Bamobah said into the darkness: “We’ll take a different route back.”
“Is it the house? You don’t want to see it?”
“I don’t want you to see it. Not now. Perhaps when I come back.”
Something clenched inside me and the stars became millions of eyes staring at me from the dark heights. Bamobah was rolling grains of sand on my belly pensively.
“You have no idea how bad I wish … when this is over … when I come back … for us to…” she was struggling for words, but there were none for what she was attempting to say.
“For us to still be friends?” I suggested.
“For us to still be friends,” she echoed.
Friends? I had always thought we could be something more. I believed it.
We took a different route to the town the following day.
* * *
Another evening, a month or two earlier, I was returning the same way from an errand in the north. It was still cold and got dark early. With the coming night, cold swept over Piraka and lifted a veil of salty mist from the sea. Dusk sucked all colors and sounds from the town; I remember cars noiselessly creeping through the roads like night predators sweeping their territory with cold halogen lights. The red glow of their back lights stung my eyes. In my imagination, they became narrow slits through which you could glimpse the red-hot metal beings living inside.
I was hurrying to Bamobah, tired and looking forward to seeing her. I turned off the autopilot to drive faster. With every car I passed, my heart skipped a beat. I prolonged each green light in the way I needed. I thought I was a good driver. I knew the way by heart. And then my world was eclipsed by the side of a truck that emerged from another street, and I couldn’t stop despite slamming the brakes down, despite the scream coming from my mouth.
I had to close my eyes.
I won’t ever forget what I saw when I opened them again. The first foam blisters bloomed in the car’s hood around the site of impact. More and more were stemming from it like a slow-motion avalanche, like bubbles in boiling water. The structural memory of the metal woke up, disturbed from many years’ sleep by the energy of the impact. Hundreds of millions of high-angle grain boundaries oriented so that adjacent grains could slide the right way at the right time. Hundreds of millions of gas molecules trapped in interstitial places and Schottky’s grid defects, prepared to desorb into the budding pores. Hundreds of millions of antiphase boundaries of intermetallic ordering, capable of instant annihilation and pumping kilojoules and kilojoules of structural entropy into the material. Hundreds of millions of dislocations prepared to run along slip planes. Each microsecond a billion microstructural events so complex that I could barely imagine them. If I had driven a car whose deformation zones weren’t made of material modified by an in-situ metallurgist, I would have most likely been dead. Someone had spent weeks and weeks in the ingot to prepare the complex nanoarchitecture of defects and gradients. By lending its primary personality to the searing metal, someone had saved my life today. Someone like her.
I felt a strange relief, as if Bamobah was beside me suddenly, as if she embraced and stroked me. Instead, safety belts shifting their structure similarly to the car’s hood were holding me. When I unfastened the belts, and stumbled outside, dazed with adrenaline, I was smiling and tears streamed from my eyes. My hands shook when I was dialing the police and then the insurance company, but I didn’t stop smiling into the mist.
The real Bamobah did not embrace me when I finally got home two or three hours later. She sat with her knees pulled to her chin, staring at the phone before her. Only then I realized with horror that I hadn’t let her know. I started apologizing and explaining what had happened. Bamobah listened in silence, reserved and graceful like only she could master, and then said: “I was afraid I’d lose you.”
Perhaps at that moment, I realized how much I’d feared losing her.
* * *
Some alloys can kill. Death may lurk inside the Guinier-Preston zones, and if not death, then at least transformation precluding return. Metallurgists know of these places and avoid them, surround them with walls of precipitates, concentration gradients and nanostructured boundaries. But, in a strange dual logic, even the most cautious ways through the ingot often lead them alluringly close to these places. There is a thin line between fear and temptation.
This is what the residual personalities fear most: that their primaries would willingly give up the option to become a human being again and decide to stay in the ingot until quenching. That they would cut their humanity off like when a tow plane cuts off a glider high in the clouds and leaves it to the whims of the wind. A metallurgist is a microstructural entity, it’s not human or animal, its consciousness isn’t necessarily bound to its physical integrity. It may still be present in the alloy when diamond saws bite hungrily into the ingot, it may live and sense under the fiery touch of milling cutters, in the racket of rolling mills, under the pounding of power forging hammers, within the crushing embrace of
