Карин Тидбек - Amatka

“Sometimes! It’s wonderful how you only make mistakes sometimes, isn’t it! Big and strong and healthy and two children and saving lives every day, but sometimes things go a little awry. It must be nice to go and have a nice little confession, then, so you can go home and feel pleased about being such a good girl.”

Nina had clapped a hand over her mouth. She took a couple of steps back, frowning. Vanja realized that she might have been yelling. It didn’t matter.

Vanja tapped her own chest. “But what about me. I’m nothing but wrong. I’m supposed to go inside and be sorry about it?” Vanja shook her head. “Go inside and do some confessing if it makes you feel better. I’m done.”

Nina was quiet for a long moment. “I understand.” Her voice was small. “So. Are you going home?”

Vanja was silent.

Nina swallowed and blinked several times. “I’ll leave you alone.”

She turned and walked back toward the leisure center. Shouts and cries poured into the street when she opened the doors and stepped inside.

Vanja set off westward. She slowed down when she passed Leisure Center Three. Two couriers in gray overalls were exiting, holding a woman who seemed to be struggling to break free.

“But we were supposed to tell!” she said, despair in her voice. “It was supposed to be good for us!” Her eyes locked on Vanja’s. “Hey, you! Can’t you see what they’re doing?”

The couriers halted and turned toward Vanja. “Go home,” one of them said. “Now.”

Vanja kept walking, her eyes on the ground in front of her. The arrested woman called after her until her voice was suddenly cut off.

Vanja stayed close to the walls, forcing herself to walk at a normal pace. She slipped into a side street whenever she spotted other pedestrians. Once, she encountered another pair of couriers escorting a citizen between them. Vanja walked over to a nearby residential building and pretended to be busy scraping dirt off her shoes.

When she finally reached the plant-house ring, it was deserted. The plant-house lamps were lit, but no night growers cast shadows on the walls. The first pipe loomed about fifty meters beyond the plant houses, faintly illuminated by the domes. Its angled top end cut a sharp silhouette against the dark gray of the night sky. Vanja halted by the outer edge of the plant-house ring. Snatches of song drifted through the streets behind her, along with cries of anger, drunkenness, or fear. The breeze coming in from the tundra smelled of wet grass and old vehicles. The sight of the impossibly huge pipes made it hard to breathe, hard to take the first step. Instinct shrieked at her to run before it was too late, run and go to ground, hide in a faraway corner, under a bed, in Nina’s arms, be quiet and invisible until the pipes moved elsewhere. But there were no safe places anymore. The only way was onward. She forced her feet forward, step by step, toward the pipe that led down to the machine.

When she finally found the right spot, she had come out on the other side of fear. Her skin felt stretched and prickly, her legs soft and unsteady, but it was like looking out a window. She was inside, her body and the tundra outside. The low opening was still there. The ladder was still attached to the inside. Resting her hand on the edge, she realized she hadn’t brought a flashlight. She would have to do this in the dark. Terror came creeping back.

“It’s only my body doing this,” Vanja whispered to herself. “It’s not me. It’s only my body.” She swung a leg over the rim.

The weak light from above faded almost immediately. When she finally set her foot on firm ground, the darkness was complete, aside from the colorful trails and blotches her brain created to fill the absence of light. The vibration was stronger here, the noise clear and suddenly complex; it wasn’t a single buzzing, but the sound of many small parts working in unison. She wasn’t alone in the tunnel. Something else was in there with her. Vanja stood still, waiting while bile rose in her throat. Nothing happened. There was only the awareness of a vast presence. She walked slowly toward the sound, sticking closely to the rough wall.

Her left foot hit the door with a crash that made her crouch against the wall and shield her head with her arms. In the echo that followed, she thought she could hear small, quick footsteps down the tunnel. She reached up and fumbled for the handle. It allowed itself to be pushed down. She slunk in through the opening and closed the door as quickly as she could without making a racket.

On the other side, the greenish-white lichen that dotted the ceiling beat the darkness into retreat and illuminated the staircase. Vanja sat on the steps until she no longer had to struggle to breathe, then continued down, to the door that waited at the bottom. When she opened it, the noise suddenly swelled to a deafening roar.

The air was damp and heavy with a stench of salt and sewage that stuck to the roof of her mouth. The machine working in the middle of the room seemed to have grown. The wheel had cut a deep furrow in the chamber’s ceiling. Shards and chipped stone littered the ground around the engine, which looked more rounded somehow. Someone was standing in front of the machine, watching Vanja.

Vanja’s eyes slipped when she tried to focus on whoever it was. It was a person, but what features or coloring or shape they had was impossible to tell. It was neither, indeterminate, not entirely there. Vanja had to avert her eyes. At the edge of her vision, she could see the shape approach. Looking indirectly seemed fruitful: she could make out an eye, hands that weren’t entirely hands, skin, but everything kept flowing and shifting. She knew who it had to be and took a deep and shaky breath.

“Are you Berols’ Anna?”

The figure paused. “Are you Berols’ Anna?” Its voice vibrated through Vanja’s chest. “Are you?”

“Are you?”

Laughter. “Are you are you?”

It came closer. Heat radiated from its mass. Something soft touched Vanja’s cheek, tracing the contours of her face. “Are you?” It no longer sounded like mimicry. A short pause. “Yes. Also.”

“Did you build the machine? And the tunnels? And the pipes? What does the machine do?” Vanja asked.

“Everyone built. We and you. The machine is ours.” The thing caressing Vanja’s face suddenly pinched her cheek. “You thought it. We thought it.”

Vanja tried to focus on Berols’ Anna’s shape again, only to be rewarded with a twinge of pain between her eyes. “Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you a happy commune?”

Berols’ Anna laughed again. “The word… the language. Is too small. Yes. We are everything. But you”—a soft touch against her cheek again—“you are not.”

“Happy? Or too small?”

Warmth twined itself around Vanja’s body. A heavy scent of something like blood crowded out the stench of sewage. The heat made her fear dissipate. “Yes,” Berols’ Anna murmured above her. “Wan-ja. Your shell is too small.”

Vanja grasped what felt like an arm. It was solid, yet not. It buzzed with restrained energy. “Can you come and save us? In Amatka?”

“Let us in,” Berols’ Anna crooned.

“But how?”

“Remove the names. Set the words free. Just a little more. Burn a little more.”

“Like the library.”

“Yes. A little more.”

“Then you’ll come?”

“Then we’ll come. You’ll be everything. You’ll all be everything.”

Berols’ Anna grazed Vanja’s cheek and raised her chin. Vanja opened her eyes and looked into Berols’ Anna’s face, and it suddenly snapped into focus.

The night after Lars had told her about the lights in the sky above the old world, Vanja had had a dream. The gray veil that enshrouded the sky had cracked and blown away. Against a deep black background, gigantic spheres, glowing in colors Vanja had never seen before, slowly moved through the heavens with a sound that shook the earth. The ground fell away beneath her. She hung suspended in the void, inconceivably small amid the glory of the spheres.