A cascade, yes, Malenfant thought. A chain reaction.
“And the water? What’s that for?”
“The emission of the Breath is associated with great heat — which is the point of the Engine. Water flows through the hillside, through the engine. The water is a cooling agent, which carries off this heat before any damage is done to the Engine. And the heat, of course, turns the water to steam, which in turn is harnessed to drive Mtesa’s various toy devices and fripperies…” Malenfant heard how de Bonneville’s voice slowed as he said that, as if some new idea was coming to him.
To Malenfant, it all made sense.
Twentieth-century nuclear-fission piles had been simple devices. They were just heaps of a radioactive material, such as uranium, into which reaction-controlling moderators, for example carbon rods, were thrust. Technical complexity only came if you cared about human safety: shields, robot devices to control the moderators, a waste-extraction process, and so forth. If you
With a little instruction, a tribe of Neandertals could operate a nuclear reactor. A bunch of children could.
“It’s the Breath that makes you ill,” he said.
“Indeed.”
“Why not others? Why not Mtesa himself?”
“The Breath is contained by the hundreds of meters of rock within which the Engine is housed. But, though it is not spoken of, there is much illness among the general population; and there are elaborate taboos about associating too closely with products of the Engine — you shouldn’t drink the water that has circulated through the yellow-cake, for instance.”
Malenfant remembered how Nemoto had warned him against inserting his hands in Mtesa’s fountains. He felt, now, a renewed itching in his own damaged skin.
Shit, he thought. I must have taken a dose myself.
De Bonneville waved his gnarled hands. “The Engine is clearly very ancient, Malenfant. The Waganda’s legend says it was constructed by an old king, seventeen generations before our own glorious Mtesa. It seems to me the Waganda have learned how to control their crude device, not by proceeding from a body of established knowledge as
“You screwed the king’s favorite wife. You asshole, de Bonneville.”
“I tried to put her aside, when I left Rubaga to meet you. But when I returned, full of
He was found out. Mtesa’s fury had been incandescent. De Bonneville was expelled from his position in court — dragged, by a rope around his neck, by Mtesa’s enthusiastic Lords of the Cord, and subjected to fifty blows with a stick, a punishment severe enough to lame him — and then banished to the lowliest position of Rubaga society: to work in the yellow-cake Engines, buried deep within the hillside.
De Bonneville grasped Malenfant’s arm with his ruined, clawlike hands. “It was all a trap, Malenfant. One accumulates enemies so easily in such a place as this! And I… I was always impetuous rather than careful… I was led into a trap, and I have been destroyed! Seeing you now, a traveler, makes me understand anew how much has been robbed from me by these savages of the future. But—”
“Yes?”
His blue eyes gleamed in his blackened ruin of a face. “But de Bonneville shall have his revenge, Malenfant. Oh, yes! His determination is sweet and pure…”
He confronted Nemoto.
“Nemoto, you know what the Engine is, don’t you? It’s a nuclear pile. A fucking nuclear pile.”
Nemoto shrugged. “It’s just a heap. Maybe a hundred tons of ‘yellow-cake’ — which is a uranium ore — with burned tree stumps used as graphite moderators. It was a geological accident: yellow-cake seams inside this hollow mountain, and some natural water stream running over the pile, cooling it…”
Natural nuclear reactors had formed in various places around the planet, where the geological conditions had been right. What was needed was a concentration of uranium ore, and then some kind of moderator. The function of the moderator was to slow down the neutrons, the heavy particles emitted by decaying uranium atoms. A slowed-down neutron would impact with another atomic nucleus and make
Under Rubaga’s mountain, the action of water, over billions of years, had washed uranium ore from the rock and caused it to collect in seams at the bottom of a shallow sea. The uranium had then been overlaid by inert sand, and the rocks compressed and uplifted by tectonic forces, the uranium further concentrated by the slow rusting of surrounding rocks in the air. Thus had been created seams of uranium, great lenticular deposits, two or three meters thick and perhaps ten times as wide, under their feet, right here.
At first there had been no chain reaction. But then water and organic matter, seeping into cracks in the uranium seams, had served as primitive moderators, slowing the neutrons down sufficiently for the reaction process to start.
“The reaction probably started as a series of scattered fires in concentrations of the uranium ore,” Nemoto whispered. “Then it spread to less rich areas nearby. It was self-controlling; as the water was boiled by the reaction’s heat it would be forced out of the rock — and the reaction would be dampened, until more water seeped back from the surface layers above, and the reaction could begin again.” She smiled thinly. “And that is what the Neandertal community here discovered. It took them a couple of centuries, but they learned to tinker with the process, inserting burned wood — graphite — as secondary moderators…”
The workers in the pile maintained it with their bare hands. At times the workers had to haul heaps of yellow-cake from one part of the pile to another; or they mixed the yellow-cake, by hand, with other moderator compounds; or they cleared out the coolant-water pipes — the small fingers of children were well adapted for that particular chore. And as well as the regular operation of the pile, they had to cope with accidents, types of which Nemoto listed in the local language:
“Why did the Neandertals need to do this?”
“Because of us:
“Yes.”
“So it was with the Neandertals… except
“So Mtesa supplies human slaves to the Neandertals. To maintain the pile.”
“Essentially. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Malenfant? If only the
Malenfant frowned. “It doesn’t sound too stable. A nuclear pile isn’t much of a weapon… You’d think that Mtesa’s soldiers could overwhelm the Neandertals, take what they wanted, drive them out. And the radioactivity — we’re all living on top of a raw nuke pile, here. Even those who don’t have to go work in that hole in the ground are going to suffer contamination.”
Nemoto grimaced. “You are not living in Clear Lake now, Malenfant. These people accept things we wouldn’t have. The Waganda have built a stable social arrangement around their Engine. They keep their bloodlines reasonably pure by stigmatizing any individual showing signs of mutation or radiation sickness. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The Waganda use the Engine’s energy. But the Engine maintains itself by poisoning a proportion of the Waganda population. Mostly they use Uprights and habilines anyhow; among the humans, only Mtesa’s victims finish up in the Engine.”
Malenfant said, “Those toys of Mtesa’s — the fountains and the Caesar’s Palace trick throne — can’t absorb more than a few percent of the pile’s energy… The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn’t it, Nemoto? And
“I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don’t know anything.” She looked away from him. “Now leave me alone.”
Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.
He’d glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hillside. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.
He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.
I don’t want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself
A way to fulfill whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.
I can’t do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don’t
But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.
Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.
Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit:
He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.
The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?
Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, that erupted in a gout of fire over the rooftops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.
That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately — from the well of Kimera, from the pit of that monstrous Engine.
The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.
All of Rubaga’s populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans, and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital’s surrounding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside’s green darkness.
Malenfant set off through the capital toward the center of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.
By the time he’d reached the dead heart of the hilltop, even the great grass palace of Mtesa was alight.
Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.
The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga’s burning huts. Christ, he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here,
He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat. His hands were burned and tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn’t see how he could