Well, who knew. He wasn’t going anywhere. She had things to do, and it would be easy enough to come back.
“I’m going to go,” she told him. “I’ll come back. I’ll see what I can learn, and talk to your lawyer. Have you got one?”
He shook his head. “They assigned one to me.”
He looked completely hopeless.
She sighed and stood. One of the guards came over.
“Leaving?” the guard asked.
“Yes.”
She was the one in power now. Briefly she touched him on the shoulder, almost as he had first touched her on Hochstrasse. She was partly there for revenge, she felt that now. He was warm through his shirt, hot; feverish, it felt like. He shrugged her off like a horse shivering away a fly.
51
The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.
Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. They went through the motions, always in a state of suspended dread, always aware of their wounded status, wondering what massive stroke would fall next, and how they would manage to ignore that one too, when it was already such a huge effort to ignore the ones that had happened so far, a string of them going all the way back to 2020. Certainly the Indian heat wave stayed a big part of it. They could neither face it nor forget it, they couldn’t think about it but they couldn’t not think about it, not without a huge subconscious effort. The images. The sheer numbers. These recalled the Holocaust, which had left a huge hole in civilization’s sense of itself; that was six million people, but an old story, and of Jewish people killed by Germans, it was a German thing. The Palestinians’ Nakba, the partition of India; on and on these bad stories went, the numbers always unimaginable; but always before it had been certain groups of people who were responsible, people from an earlier more barbaric time, or so they told themselves. And always these thoughts obtruded in an attempt to stave off the heat wave, which was now said to have killed twenty million. As many people, in other words, as soldiers had died in World War One, a death toll which had taken four years of intensely purposeful killing; and the heat wave had taken only two weeks. It somewhat resembled the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920, they said; but not. Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.
And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one. Profits still were added up in a way that led to shareholder dividends. And so on.
Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. Repression of course followed, it was all too Freudian, but Freud’s model for the mind was the steam engine, meaning containment, pressure, and release. Repression thus built up internal pressure, then the return of the repressed was a release of that pressure. It could be vented or it could simply blow up the engine. How then people in the thirties? A hiss or a bang? The whistle of vented pressure doing useful work, as in some functioning engine? Or boom? No one could say, and so they staggered on day to day, and the pressure kept building.
So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives.
Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines. The drones had mostly been destroyed, and their manufacturers and fliers have never been conclusively tracked. Quite a few terrorist groups took credit for the action in the immediate aftermath, and demanded various things, but it has never been clear that any of them really had anything to do with it. That multiple groups would claim responsibility for such a crime just added to the horror felt at the time. What kind of world were they in?
One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were.
It was noticed that none of the experimental battery-powered planes had been brought down, and no biofuel-powered planes, also no blimps, dirigibles, or hot-air balloons; no airships of any kind. But in that period there were so few of these, it was hard to tell at the time if they had been given a pass or not. It looked like they had, it seemed to make sense, and the surge in airship manufacture, which
