The war that created their siege began so easily: the movements of the Invaders reliably disrupted and then destroyed anything electromagnetic, so it would have been difficult, except on a very small, local scale, to tell what was happening; people would have had to sneak in and out of the city, and as the Setback continued, that would have grown progressively difficult.
Don’t get attached, I tell myself, but…
No one was coming for you, my brave writer. I am so sorry. No one was coming, ever.
There: two years. That accurately dates it to the year. And one year before the end of the Setback.
The repeated mention of the statues. The others won’t believe me. No one’s got any proof that these… these new things, these statues that began springing up, ever did anything except remind the conquered peoples that they had indeed been conquered, just as had been happening throughout history. Vain, vain conquerors, everywhere you went. Their faces slapped onto generic bodies, welded onto generic horses.
The fact that they all had certain similarities, though not resembling anything Earthly, helped with that theory. After all, if you invade someplace, you want some consistency in your monuments. But there is indeed mention of it. Again and again. The statues move. They come alive at night.
Based on the drone photos, we chose a flat, intact square to drop our research pod, which turned out to be about fifty yards from one of those statues. A small one, slightly taller than me if you took it off its plinth. Ugly, blank-eyed, verdigrised the same colour as the leaves. I’ve taken a hundred photos of it since we arrived. Tell me your secrets, I demand of it. Tell me.
Of course, what I really mean is: Don’t tell me. Don’t move.
The writer and the companion note the weather. It occurs to me that they would have no way of knowing that the dropped nukes did in fact change the climate temporarily. Not the nuclear winter their ancestors feared but the Long Spring that halved the numbers of the surviving Setbackers, already so minimal from the pre-Setback days. When ninety-nine percent of the population is dead or missing, ninety-nine point five percent might tip a species into extinction.
The Five, my writer would not have known about those. No TV, no phones, no internet, no radio. Electricity seemed to run (from our best estimates) anywhere from fifteen minutes to twenty-eight hours after the Invasion, but the Five didn’t begin to fall until after that. They definitely had no idea that Taurus Gray fell practically in their backyard. I’ve seen no mention so far of fallout, radiation sickness, anything like that. They just wonder, idly, about the local weather.
And it turned out you couldn’t nuke Them anyway.
That polite, academic fight with Darian back at campus, in Dr. Aaron’s office. “Well where did They come from? Why can’t I say extradimensional? They didn’t come from space. We would have seen it. They weren’t from Earth. Everything had been mapped at that point. They came from somewhere else, and They’d been here before, and They resented that They ever had to leave. That’s our best theory, goddammit.”
“When you say it like that, you make it sound like magic. Maybe you should quit reading fantasy novels for five minutes!”
He doesn’t hate me. I don’t think it’s that. He doesn’t even, I think, hate girls in general. But he didn’t want me to come on this research trip, and even after I told him I’d applied I think he thought I’d never get funding.
The others are his kind of scientist. Numbers, tables. Winnie with her bone shards, and Victor the dedicated biologist. People who would publish papers that he’d actually read. Darian’s never made it a secret that he thinks the only good that could ever come out of my research is publishing a ton of pop-sci books written in ‘layman’s language,’ which he hates so much, and the only good would be me funding my own research and not tagging along with the ‘real’ scientists. He won’t say it to my face. But I’ve heard enough.
Still. There’s more than one way of knowing. I’ll never convince them of it, but it’s true.
May 18
I don’t know why but it struck me as funny that V. came over this morning with a lead pipe. Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough, but I had to sit down on the steps and laugh. He stood there indignant, leaning on it.
Where did you get that, I finally wheezed.
Oh, come on, he said. There are exposed pipes everywhere, Eva.
I think I hurt his pride. Just when you think a man is different, it turns out he’s just like all the rest. But I told him I had a stitch and he helped me off the steps, and even found me a pipe of my own, plain iron. Such chivalry!
Still, we argued as we walked, swinging our pipes. He wanted to go to the modern art gallery, I to the war museum or maybe the space memorial. We could do both, I said. There should be enough daylight.
Why bother? he cried. We need to preserve what is beautiful and good, not what only looks backward towards a past that we will never have again.
What, war? I shouted. You can’t be serious. The past? It isn’t even past yet. What do you think this is?
When this is all over, they won’t call this a war, he said. A war implies that we fought back.
What makes you think anyone will be alive to call it anything? Anyway, I don’t care, I said. And the crap in the modern art gallery can wait another day. You know They won’t target it. There isn’t enough metal in there, it’s all… carbon-fibre and crap (I confess I may have said ‘carbohydrate fibre’ in my frustration).
I wanted him to understand that this place, our little city, has been destroyed again and again, despite being so small, so unimportant, nothing essential about us except that in the old days we were in the corridor between one big city and another, and then later that we had both the railway and the lake. In WWII they bombed us into a smear in the ground, and we rebuilt and rebuilt for years. Look at the state of our walls! We owe it to those people to protect the memory of their work. To throw it away is a slap in the face.
On we went, bickering, in the cold, light spring rain. Grateful it wasn’t heavier (I hate how you can’t hear anything approaching in heavy rain). In the muddy streets, fresh footprints, square or round or cloven, or disquieting traces of centipede, pillbug, octopus, snake. Slippery as hell. I regret not noticing that till later.
We darted into the museum, ignoring the smashed facade, using a side door. The glass splintered quietly under my pipe. I thought it was safety glass, I said. What if a child had run into that?
Why would someone be so cruel as to take their child here? he sneered.
Inside, we barricaded the broken door with chairs and desks, and trotted back and forth on the squeaky parquet floor, binding the statues with canvas and rope, padding exhibits with cotton baling and crumpled paper, till everything was unrecognizable. We took paintings and even tapestries off the wall and boxed them in the basement; out of habit, as the door swung open on the darkness, V. flicked the light switch. We both laughed. The desire for electricity does not die quickly or easily. I suppose in ten years, if either of us are still alive, we’ll still be scrabbling for a light switch in dark places. We sandbagged a few of the huge monuments that were too heavy to move.
The museum staff made all these sandbags, V. panted. How did they ever find time?