Yellowcake Summer Read online

  Glass House Books

  Yellowcake Summer

  Guy Salvidge is a high school English teacher and writer living in rural Western Australia. His first novel, The Kingdom of Four Rivers, was published in 2009 and his second, Yellowcake Springs, won the IP Picks Award for Best Fiction in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Norma K. Hemming Award in 2012. In 2013, Guy was awarded an Emerging Writer-in-Residence position at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, where he started working on a ‘literary noir’ novel, Dan: A Cautionary Tale. He has written extensively on the novels of Philip K. Dick and these essays are collected in SF Commentary 83. His short fiction recently appeared in Tincture Journal and Alien Sky. In 2013 he will be co-editing The Tobacco-Stained Sky: An Anthology of Post-Apocalyptic Noir from Another Sky Press.

  Glass House Books

  Brisbane

  Yellowcake Summer:

  A Novel

  Guy Salvidge

  Glass House Books

  Brisbane

  Glass House Books

  an imprint of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)

  Treetop Studio • 9 Kuhler Court

  Carindale, Queensland, Australia 4152

  [email protected]

  ipoz.biz/GHB/GHB.htm

  First published by IP in 2013

  © Guy Salvidge, 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Printed in 11 pt Book Antiqua on 14 pt Book Antiqua.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Salvidge, Guy, 1981- author.

  Title: Yellowcake summer : a novel / Guy Salvidge.

  ISBN: 9781922120632 (eBk)

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  This one is for my wife, Georgina Critchlow,

  for seeing the potential in a shy, gawky, pimply fifteen year-old

  and then putting up with that person for the next sixteen years.

  You’ve been there alongside me every step of the way.

  Acknowledgments

  Cover Image: szefel

  Jacket Design: David P Reiter

  Author Photo: Georgina Critchlow

  Several people have helped in various ways to bring Yellowcake Summer to life. My wife, Georgina Critchlow, has always been there for me and my writing and this time around was no exception. My mother, Diane Drury, is my first and best reader and my most enthusiastic fan (and an expert typo-hunter). Western Australian fantasy author Juliet Marillier provided tremendous insight into the novel’s opening chapters. Another WA writer, Daniel King, provided expert advice on the novel as a whole at a critical stage of the manuscript’s development. Leanne Irvine, Kyle Lister, Margaret Henderson and Nadya Salvidge kindly offered to read the novel and provide feedback. Thanks also to Graeme Butler, Karen Langham, Naomi Mondello and Kay Weaver of the Avon Valley Writers’ Group for their ongoing friendship and support, and to Dr David Reiter, Lauren Daniels and Joseph Townsend of IP for supporting this work. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, edited by Svetlana Alexievich. This collection of survivor accounts of the Chernobyl disaster sparked the initial idea which led me to write both Yellowcake Springs and Yellowcake Summer.

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Prologue: The God of East Hills

  1. Sensory Capture Array

  2. The Grind

  3. The First Domino

  4. The Blues

  5. Director of Security

  6. Purifier

  7. Return to East Hills

  8. The Scimitar

  9. Job Hunting

  10. The Rusty Swan

  11. The Virtual Panopticon

  12. The Big Q

  13. Lydia

  14. Security Measures

  15. Dreaming

  16. Reprisal

  17. Given

  18. Misanthropos

  PART TWO

  Prologue: The Bitterest Pill

  1. Agenda Items

  2. Ley Farm

  3. The Cause

  4. Yew

  5. Dreams of Waking

  6. The Yew Boys

  7. Loose Ends

  8. The Terms

  9. The Prisoner

  10. Heatwave

  11. Nonviolence

  12. Plan B

  13. Authority Figure

  14. The Web

  15. Are You Sure You Want to Exit?

  16. The Barracks

  17. Fall Guy

  18. The Deal

  PART ONE

  November 2061

  Prologue: The God of East Hills

  As a child, standing up here on the hillside overlooking the town, Lydia had imagined herself the God of East Hills. A limited god perhaps, her universe a dusty farming town of just seven thousand inhabitants, but a god nonetheless. From the car park strewn with broken bottles, used condoms and fast food wrappers, she had watched the movements of the people below with what seemed to her then as supreme clarity. Should she wish it, she could have caused their cars to crash into one another in the street. Arguments could have broken out and ended on her command, but hers was an attitude of benevolence. She would shield the town and those within it from disaster; from bushfire and drought, from drunkenness and hatred. The town was a bowl, its rim the hills on every side, and it was her home for all her days. Somehow she had known it then, but she knew it better now: East Hills was the place she would die.

  Half a century later and here she was again, except that she hadn’t come by choice this time. Callum and his thugs had tied her to a post up here this morning for some perceived slight. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and her wrists were bleeding from where she’d tried and failed to wrench herself free. She hadn’t had a drink since before dawn and now it was late afternoon. But they hadn’t hurt her. No need to manhandle poor, elderly Lydia. She had gone quietly with the men, saying goodbye to her grotto at the old power substation and all the things she had accumulated there over the decades. All lost now. All consigned to the whims of brutal, illiterate men who had no more use for a dictionary than they would a bag of fertiliser. They were children, even when fully grown, and like petulant youngsters everywhere they took whatever they wanted, the thought never entering their minds to apologise for the theft. Lydia had had only words with which to defend herself. Sly words, deceitful words at times, but in the end words and words only. They hadn’t been enough.

  Soon the burning sun would dip between the hills and bring her relief, if not water. If only it would rain, then she would drink again and steal a few more hours of life. But it was a forlorn hope at this time of year. Those streaks of white cloud held nothing but the regrets of generations of farmers who’d seen their croplands shrivel to dust. Throughout the day, her thirst had been building to a crescendo that had now seemingly passed, as though she was entering a realm where metaphysics itself would provide for her.

  Looking down over the town, the hot spring sun leaving its mark on her withered hide, she felt strangely at peace. Maybe she hadn’t succeeded in protecting the town from disaster, but something of the place endured. Like Lydia herself, East Hills had long since sunken into decrepitude. The only electricity did not flow democratically through the town’s power lines but stingily from the generators of the fortunate few. The only commerce was derived from the local militia’s murderous sorties into rival territories. She herself had profite
d from this lawlessness, in the sense that she had continued to draw breath and to fill her belly with meagre rations for each of her fifty-six years. But now it seemed she’d outstayed her welcome.

  The sun touched the hills, bathing her and all creation in a sharp, yellow light. She averted her eyes, closed them, but could not escape the persistent rays. Her last and only hope was that someone would come and untie her, or at least give her water. Someone who owed her a favour and had the nerve to stand up to a band of sullen and starving young men and their assault rifles. Such a person did not exist. The only one who might have made a stand for her was young Rion, but then he’d been gone for more than three years now. No one came up the road.

  Hours must have passed as now night had fallen and the sky was cloudless and full of stars. Moonlight reflecting off of something to her right caught her fading attention, so she swivelled around as best she could to see what it was. It was a television dish. Delirium lay further along. First she couldn’t think straight, but at least she knew she wasn’t thinking straight, and then she even forgot that. There were no words to explain what she felt now, but it wasn’t pain. It wasn’t thirst. Her life wasn’t flashing before her eyes. Was it getting lighter? Was someone trying to untie her? She didn’t know. Please help me, she tried to say, but she knew she wasn’t making words and maybe not even noises at all. She could see lights, but she’d given up trying to interpret what it all meant. She supposed it could be heaven after all. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a heaven and that they’d let her in in spite of her resolute atheism? But she wouldn’t repent. She’d done what she’d done and that was that. If they wanted an apology, then they’d be waiting a long time.

  Now it was all light. It didn’t seem to matter whether she opened or closed her eyes. Maybe she didn’t have eyes to open or close any more. No one knew what this was like until they knew what it was like, and by then it was too late to tell anyone. At least it didn’t hurt; nothing hurt any more. She supposed it was nearly over.

  The God of East Hills was dying.

  1. Sensory Capture Array

  Sylvia Baron was imprisoned, not that she particularly minded. She’d been held for almost three and a half years at Symonston Correctional Facility in Canberra without being convicted of a crime or even facing trial. For most of that time she’d had a room of her own, without needing to worry about money, work, or the needs of other people. It was a strange form of punishment. Her life was tensionless, a great empty. She had been sick; she was ready to admit that. But her ailment had been twenty-first century civilisation itself. Work had been her enemy. Colleagues had been her nemeses. Leisure had been her Achilles’ heel.

  But now she was cured, or so she imagined.

  She didn’t spend all her time in this space, of course. She was allowed an hour outside every day, in a walled quadrangle with a patch of grass and a park bench. The occasional bird came to meet her. And she spent an hour in the gym each morning, mostly running but also lifting weights. She hadn’t had as much as a mouthful of wine in more than a thousand days, and she was down under sixty kilos for the first time since she’d met David, her ex-husband. There was every likelihood that he would eventually be executed for his crimes, especially now that his co-conspirators, Clyde Owen and Patrick Crews, had testified against him. Her own crimes had mostly been apathy and cowardice. That was what she called it. They called it ‘Conspiracy to Commit a Terrorist Act’.

  She was lying on her bed thinking about this phrase when her cell door opened and prison guards came into the room. “The Governor wants to see you,” one of the guards said.

  And so she went quietly. She had long since discovered that passivity was the key to a quiet life here. Even the slightest display of aggression was acted upon swiftly, and so for her there were no such outbursts. The guards, perhaps sensing her calm, did not clutch at her the way they sometimes did other inmates. She allowed herself to be led along corridors and into the Governor’s office. The air-conditioning was better in here. The stout, grey-haired woman behind the desk was Governor Marley and the others were her underlings and flunkies. Sylvia recognised one of the men as her advocate; she could never remember his name. She sat down where they told her to sit like a perfectly behaved automaton or slave. She had practised a serene expression in the mirror in preparation for this day or for days like these.

  “Inmate Baron,” the Governor said, “the time has come for the terms of your release to be explained to you.”

  “I’m being released?” Sylvia said.

  The woman nodded slowly but she did not smile. “I’m afraid that our time together may be coming to an end far sooner than either of us could have anticipated. Ms Rose?”

  One of the grey-clad wraiths cleared her throat. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, about Sylvia’s age. “I’m Superintendent Lyncoln Rose of the Australian Federal Police,” the woman said. “I’ve been authorised to rescind all of the charges against you, providing that you agree to a suite of probationary conditions. Most of these are fairly routine. You won’t be able to obtain a passport or to leave the country for two years. You’ll be barred from certain occupations. And for obvious reasons you’ll be barred from the CIQ Sinocorp Protectorate at Yellowcake Springs.”

  “All right,” Sylvia said. She didn’t ever want to go back to Yellowcake Springs.

  “One of the conditions of the charges being dropped is that you will fully assist the AFP in the continuing investigation into the criminal conduct of your ex-husband, David Baron, as well as that of his followers.”

  “I’ve told you people everything. More than once,” Sylvia said.

  “And your depositions have been most helpful,” Lyncoln Rose said, “but the AFP feels you could further aid our investigation by providing further information regarding the plans of the illegal organisation known as Misanthropos.”

  “There is no Misanthropos beyond David and those two backstabbers,” Sylvia said. “I’ve told you people that a hundred times.”

  “I’m not referring to Misanthropos members active in 2058. I’m referring to Misanthropos members active now.”

  “It’s news to me.”

  “Well,” Lyncoln Rose said, clasping her hands together. “Let’s just say that if there wasn’t a widespread organisation by the name of Misanthropos in 2058, then undoubtedly there is one today. Your role will be to infiltrate this organisation.”

  “I’m not interested,” Sylvia said.

  “These are our conditions,” Lyncoln Rose said. “You will be interested, and you will attend any and all Misanthropos meetings you are invited to attend.”

  “You want me to spy for you?”

  “We want you to provide information to assist us in our investigation, yes, but you’ll never need to set foot into a police station again, at least not regarding this matter.”

  “You want to tag me somehow. An implant.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little more than an ordinary implant, Ms Baron.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh. The device is a state of the art sensory capture array, or SCA. It will do more than chart your movements: it will capture each word you hear or speak, as well as everything you touch, taste or smell. Your entire sensory experience will be recorded and transmitted in real-time to the AFP.”

  “What about my thoughts?”

  “No, not your thoughts, but that’s the only privacy you’ll have.”

  “And it’s on all the time? Even when I’m in the toilet or shower?”

  The Superintendent smiled. “Correct.”

  “Where does this sensory capture thing go?”

  “Inside your skull. The SCA is very small, not much bigger than an ordinary implant.”

  “And if I try to have it removed you’ll know anyway.”

  “Precisely, so don’t try. It’s very expensive.”

  “What if I say no?” Sylvia said. “I could stay in prison.”

  Lyncoln Rose smiled faintly. “Governor?”
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br />   “We can make things very difficult for you here at Symonston if we want to, Inmate Baron,” the Governor said. “That space you call your cell can easily be modified to accommodate a further three inmates. We’ve got some nasty pieces of work due here within the next few weeks, and I’m pushed for somewhere to put them.”

  Sylvia turned to her advocate. He was picking at his fingers. “Can she do that?”

  He looked up, distracted. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something for me?”

  “I advocate on your behalf. Here I am, advocating.”

  Sylvia sighed and turned back to her jailers. “Fine, I’ll do it,” she said. “But what if the Misanthropos people suspect I’m working for you?”

  “Then you’ll have to allay their fears,” Lyncoln Rose said. “You’re an intelligent woman; develop a persona. Be a Misanthropos agent. We won’t stand in your way, at least not initially.”

  “Not until you spring your trap. Then what?”

  “Then you’ll be free. The SCA will be removed.”

  “You promise, Ms Rose?”

  “I give you my personal guarantee.”

  “Then I guess I’m doomed,” Sylvia said.

  2. The Grind

  Rion’s eyes started itching the moment they opened, and he sat up rubbing them. Damn hayfever: he’d have to steal another packet of antihistamines from the hospital. “I’m up,” he said to the alarm and it desisted. The readout read 05:30 Tues Nov 8 2061: a work day like any other. His eyes were already bloodshot, particularly his left one. The face in the dirty bedside mirror looked hostile. If he saw himself on the street, he wouldn’t mess with him.

  Standing at the tiny window, he looked down over the city. His knees were sore and his back sorer. The city didn’t look peaceful at this time of the morning, but it looked more peaceful than it did during the rest of the day. Thirty-one storeys high. He’d think about jumping, but the windows didn’t open in Prince Towers. It would have been bad for business. You could always break the window if you were really desperate, but you’d have a hard time squeezing through that narrow gap. People had managed nonetheless.