
            Geoffrey A. Landis: Winter Fire
            First appeared in Asimov&#8217;s Science Fiction, August 1997. Nominated 
            for Best Short Story.



             
            I am nothing and nobody; atoms that have learned to look at 
            themselves; dirt that has learned to see the awe and the majesty of 
            the universe.
            The day the hover-transports arrived in the refugee camps, huge 
            windowless shells of titanium floating on electrostatic cushions, 
            the day faceless men took the ragged little girl that was me away 
            from the narrow, blasted valley that had once been Salzburg to begin 
            a new life on another continent: that is the true beginning of my 
            life. What came before then is almost irrelevant, a sequence of 
            memories etched as with acid into my brain, but with no meaning to 
            real life.
            Sometimes I almost think that I can remember my parents. I remember 
            them not by what was, but by the shape of the absence they left 
            behind. I remember yearning for my mother&#8217;s voice, singing to me 
            softly in Japanese. I cannot remember her voice, or what songs she 
            might have sung, but I remember so vividly the missing of it, the 
            hole that she left behind.
            My father I remember as the loss of something large and warm and 
            infinitely strong, smelling of&#8211;of what? I don&#8217;t remember. Again, it 
            is the loss that remains in my memory, not the man. I remember 
            remembering him as more solid than mountains, something eternal; but 
            in the end he was not eternal, he was not even as strong as a very 
            small war.
            I lived in the city of music, in Salzburg, but I remember little 
            from before the siege. I do remember cafs (seen from below, with 
            huge tables and the legs of waiters and faces looming down to ask me 
            if I would like a sweet). I&#8217;m sure my parents must have been there, 
            but that I do not remember.
            And I remember music. I had my little violin (although it seemed so 
            large to me then), and music was not my second language but my 
            first. I thought in music before ever I learned words. Even now, 
            decades later, when I forget myself in mathematics I cease to think 
            in words, but think directly in concepts clear and perfectly 
            harmonic, so that a mathematical proof is no more than the 
            inevitable majesty of a crescendo leading to a final, resolving 
            chord.
            I have long since forgotten anything I knew about the violin. I have 
            not played since the day, when I was nine, I took from the rubble of 
            our apartment the shattered cherry-wood scroll. I kept that 
            meaningless piece of polished wood for years, slept with it clutched 
            in my hand every night until, much later, it was taken away by a 
            soldier intent on rape. Probably I would have let him, had he not 
            been so ignorant as to think my one meager possession might be a 
            weapon. Coitus is nothing more than the natural act of the animal. 
            From songbirds to porpoises, any male animal will rape an available 
            female when given a chance. The action is of no significance except, 
            perhaps, as a chance to contemplate the impersonal majesty of the 
            chain of life and the meaninglessness of any individual&#8217;s will 
            within it.
            When I was finally taken away from the city of music, three years 
            later and a century older, I owned nothing and wanted nothing. There 
            was nothing of the city left. As the hoverjet took me away, just one 
            more in a seemingly endless line of ragged survivors, only the 
            mountains remained, hardly scarred by the bomb craters and the 
            detritus that marked where the castle had stood, mountains looking 
            down on humanity with the gaze of eternity.
            My real parents, I have been told, were rousted out of our apartment 
            with a tossed stick of dynamite, and shot as infidels as they ran 
            through the door, on the very first night of the war. It was 
            probably fanatics of the New Orthodox Resurgence that did it, in 
            their first round of ethnic cleansing, although nobody seemed to 
            know for sure.
            In the beginning, despite the dissolution of Austria and the fall of 
            the federation of free European states, despite the hate-talk spread 
            by the disciples of Dragan Vukadinovic, the violent cleansing of 
            the Orthodox church, and the rising of the Pan-Slavic unity 
            movement, all the events that covered the news-nets all through 
            2081, few people believed there would be a war, and those that did 
            thought that it might last a few months. The dissolution of Austria 
            and eastern Europe into a federation of free states was viewed by 
            intellectuals of the time as a good thing, a recognition of the 
            impending irrelevance of governments in the post-technological 
            society with its burgeoning sky-cities and prospering free-trade 
            zones. Everyone talked of civil war, but as a distant thing; it was 
            an awful mythical monster of ancient times, one that had been 
            thought dead, a thing that ate people&#8217;s hearts and turned them into 
            inhuman gargoyles of stone. It would not come here.
            Salzburg had had a large population of Asians, once themselves 
            refugees from the economic and political turmoil of the twenty-first 
            century, but now prosperous citizens who had lived in the city for 
            over a century. Nobody thought about religion in the Salzburg of 
            that lost age; nobody cared that a person whose family once came 
            from the Orient might be a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Confucian. My 
            own family, as far as I know, had no religious feelings at all, but 
            that made little difference to the fanatics. My mother, suspecting 
            possible trouble that night, had sent me over to sleep with an old 
            German couple who lived in a building next door. I don&#8217;t remember 
            whether I said good-bye.
            Johann Achtenberg became my foster father, a stocky old man, bearded 
            and forever smelling of cigar smoke. "We will stay," my foster 
            father would often say, over and over. "It is our city; the 
            barbarians cannot drive us out." Later in the siege, in a grimmer 
            mood, he might add, "They can kill us, but they will never drive us 
            out."
            The next few months were full of turmoil, as the Orthodox Resurgence 
            tried, and failed, to take Salzburg. They were still disorganized, 
            more a mob than an army, still evolving toward the killing machine 
            that they would eventually become. Eventually they were driven out 
            of the city, dynamiting buildings behind them, to join up with the 
            Pan-Slavic army rolling in from the devastation of Graz. The roads 
            in and out of the city were barricaded, and the siege began.
            For that summer of 2082, the first summer of the siege, the life of 
            the city hardly changed. I was ten years old. There was still 
            electricity, and water, and stocks of food. The cafs stayed open, 
            although coffee became hard to obtain, and impossibly expensive when 
            it was available, and at times they had nothing to serve but water. 
            I would watch the pretty girls, dressed in colorful Italian suede 
            and wearing ornately carved Ladakhi jewelry, strolling down the 
            streets in the evenings, stopping to chat with T-shirted boys, and I 
            would wonder if I would ever grow up to be as elegant and poised as 
            they. The shelling was still mostly far away, and everybody believed 
            that the tide of world opinion would soon stop the war. The 
            occasional shell that was targeted toward the city caused great 
            commotion, people screaming and diving under tables even for a bird 
            that hit many blocks away. Later, when civilians had become targets, 
            we all learned to tell the caliber and the trajectory of a shell by 
            the sound of the song it made as it fell.
            After an explosion, there is silence for an instant, then a hubbub 
            of crashing glass and debris as shattered walls collapse, and people 
            gingerly touch each other, just to verify that they are alive. The 
            dust would hang in the air for hours.
            Toward September, when it became obvious that the world powers were 
            stalemated, and would not intervene, the shelling of the city began 
            in earnest. Tanks, even modern ones with electrostatic hover and 
            thin coilguns instead of heavy cannons, could not maneuver into the 
            narrow alleys of the old city and were stymied by the steep-sided 
            mountain valleys. But the outer suburbs and the hilltops were 
            invaded, crushed flat, and left abandoned.
            I did not realize it at the time, for a child sees little, but with 
            antiquated equipment and patched-together artillery, my besieged 
            city clumsily and painfully fought back. For every fifty shells that 
            came in, one was fired back at the attackers.
            There was an international blockade against selling weapons to the 
            Resurgence, but that seemed to make no difference. Their weapons may 
            not have had the most modern of technology, but they were far better 
            than ours. They had superconducting coilguns for artillery, weapons 
            that fired aerodynamically-shaped slugs&#8211;we called them birds&#8211;that 
            maneuvered on twisted arcs as they moved. The birds were small, 
            barely larger than my hand, but the metastable atomic hydrogen that 
            filled them held an incredible amount of explosive power.
            Our defenders had to rely on ancient weapons, guns that ignited 
            chemical explosives to propel metal shells. These were quickly 
            disassembled and removed from their position after each shot, 
            because the enemy&#8217;s computers could backtrail the trajectory of our 
            shells, which had only crude aeromaneuvering, to direct a deadly 
            rain of birds at the guessed position. Since we were cut off from 
            regular supply lines, each shell was precious. We were supplied by 
            ammunition carried on mules whose trails would weave through the 
            enemy&#8217;s wooded territory by night and by shells carried one by one 
            across dangerous territory in backpacks.
            But still, miraculously, the city held. Over our heads, the 
            continuous shower of steel eroded the skyline. Our beautiful castle 
            Hohensalzburg was sandpapered to a hill of bare rock; the cathedral 
            towers fell and the debris by slow degrees was pounded into gravel. 
            Bells rang in sympathy with explosions until at last the bells were 
            silenced. Slowly, erosion softened the profiles of buildings that 
            once defined the city&#8217;s horizon.
            Even without looking for the craters, we learned to tell from 
            looking at the trees which neighborhoods had had explosions in them. 
            Near a blast, the city&#8217;s trees had no leaves. They were all shaken 
            off by the shock waves. But none of the trees lasted the winter 
            anyway. 
            My foster father made a stove by pounding with a hammer on the 
            fenders and door panels of a wrecked automobile, with a pipe made of 
            copper from rooftops and innumerable soft-drink cans. Floorboards 
            and furniture were broken to bits to make fuel for us to keep warm. 
            All through the city, stovepipes suddenly bristled through exterior 
            walls and through windows. The fiberglass sides of modern housing 
            blocks, never designed for such crude heating, became decorated with 
            black smoke trails like unreadable graffiti, and the city parks 
            became weirdly empty lots crossed by winding sidewalks that 
            meandered past the craters where the trees had been.
            Johann&#8217;s wife, my foster mother, a thin, quiet woman, died by being 
            in the wrong building at the wrong time. She had been visiting a 
            friend across the city to exchange chat and a pinch of hoarded tea. 
            It might just as easily have been the building I was in where the 
            bird decided to build its deadly nest. It took some of the solidity 
            out of Johann. "Do not fall in love, little Leah," he told me, many 
            months later, when our lives had returned to a fragile stability. 
            "It hurts too much."
            In addition to the nearly full-time job of bargaining for those 
            necessities that could be bargained for, substituting or improvising 
            those that could not, and hamstering away in basements and shelters 
            any storable food that could be found, my foster father Johann had 
            another job, or perhaps an obsession. I only learned this slowly. He 
            would disappear, sometimes for days. One time I followed him as far 
            as an entrance to the ancient catacombs beneath the bird-pecked 
            ruins of the beautiful castle Hohensalzburg. When he disappeared 
            into the darkness, I dared not follow.
            When he returned, I asked him about it. He was strangely reluctant 
            to speak. When he did, he did not explain, but only said that he was 
            working on the molecular still, and refused to say anything further, 
            or to let me mention it to anyone else.
            As a child, I spoke a hodgepodge of languages; the English of the 
            foreigners, the French of the European Union, the Japanese that my 
            parents had spoken at home, the book-German of the schools, and the 
            Austrian German that was the dominant tongue of the culture I lived 
            in. At home, we spoke mostly German, and in German, "Still" is a 
            word which means quietude. Over the weeks and months that followed, 
            the idea of a molecular still grew in my imagination into a 
            wonderful thing, a place that is quiet even on the molecular level, 
            far different from the booming sounds of war. In my imagination, 
            knowing my foster father was a gentle man who wanted nothing but 
            peace, I thought of it as a reverse secret weapon, something that 
            would bring this wonderful stillness to the world. When he 
            disappeared to the wonderful molecular still, each time I would 
            wonder whether this would be the time that the still would be ready, 
            and peace would come.
            And the city held. "Salzburg is an idea, little Leah," my foster 
            father Johann would tell me, "and all the birds in the world could 
            never peck it away, for it lives in our minds and in our souls. 
            Salzburg will stand for as long as any one of us lives. And, if we 
            ever abandon the city, then Salzburg has fallen, even if the city 
            itself still stands."
            In the outside world, the world I knew nothing of, nations quarreled 
            and were stalemated with indecision over what to do. Our city had 
            been fragilely connected to the western half of Europe by precarious 
            roads, with a series of tunnels through the Alps and long arcing 
            bridges across narrow mountain valleys. In their terror that the 
            chaos might spread westward, they dynamited the bridges, they 
            collapsed the tunnels. Not nations, but individuals, did it. They 
            cut us off from civilization, and left us to survive, or die, on our 
            own.
            Governments had become increasingly unimportant in the era following 
            the opening of the resources of space by the free-trade zones of the 
            new prosperity, but the trading consortia that now ruled America and 
            the far east in the place of governments had gained their influence 
            only by assiduously signing away the capacity to make war, and 
            although the covenants that had secured their formation had eroded, 
            that one prohibition still held. Only governments could help us, and 
            the governments tried negotiation and diplomacy as Dragan 
            Vukadinovic made promises for the New Orthodox Resurgence and broke 
            them.
            High above, the owners of the sky-cities did the only thing that 
            they could, which was to deny access to space to either side. This 
            kept the war on the ground, but hurt us more than it hurt the armies 
            surrounding us. They, after all, had no need for satellites to find 
            out where we were.
            To the east, the Pan-Slavic army and the New Orthodox Resurgence 
            were pounding against the rock of the Tenth Crusade; further south 
            they were skirmishing over borders with the Islamic Federation. 
            Occasionally the shelling would stop for a while, and it would be 
            safe to bring hoarded solar panels out into the sunlight to charge 
            our batteries&#8211;the electric grid had gone long ago, of course&#8211;and 
            huddle around an antique solar-powered television set watching the 
            distant negotiating teams talk about our fate. Everybody knew that 
            the war would be over shortly; it was impossible that the world 
            would not act.
            The world did not act.
            I remember taking batteries from wrecked cars to use a headlight, if 
            one happened to survive unbroken, or a taillight, to allow us to 
            stay up past sunset. There was a concoction of boiled leaves that we 
            called "tea," although we had no milk or sugar to put in it. We 
            would sit together, enjoying the miracle of light, sipping our 
            "tea," perhaps reading, perhaps just sitting in silence.
            With the destruction of the bridges, Salzburg had become two cities, 
            connected only by narrow-beam microwave radio and the occasional 
            foray by individuals walking across the dangerous series of beams 
            stretched across the rubble of the Old Stone Bridge. The two 
            Salzburgs were distinct in population, with mostly immigrant 
            populations isolated in the modern buildings on the east side of the 
            river, and the old Austrians on the west.
            It is impossible to describe the Salzburg feeling, the aura of a 
            sophisticated ancient city, wrapped in a glisteningly pure blanket 
            of snow, under siege, faced with the daily onslaught of an unseen 
            army that seemed to have an unlimited supply of coilguns and 
            metastable hydrogen. We were never out of range. The Salzburg stride 
            was relaxed only when protected by the cover of buildings or 
            specially constructed barricades, breaking into a jagged sprint over 
            a stretch of open ground, a cobbled forecourt of crossroads open to 
            the rifles of snipers on distant hills firing hypersonic needles 
            randomly into the city. From the deadly steel birds, there was no 
            protection. They could fly in anywhere, with no warning. By the time 
            you heard their high-pitched song, you were already dead, or, 
            miraculously, still alive.
            Not even the nights were still. It is an incredible sight to see a 
            city cloaked in darkness suddenly illuminated with the blue dawn of 
            a flare sent up from the hilltops, dimming the stars and suffusing 
            coruscating light across the glittering snow. There is a curious, 
            ominous interval of quiet: the buildings of the city dragged 
            blinking out of their darkness and displayed in a fairy glow, naked 
            before the invisible gunners on their distant hilltops. Within 
            thirty seconds, the birds would begin to sing. They might land a 
            good few blocks away, the echo of their demise ringing up and down 
            the valley, or they might land in the street below, the explosion 
            sending people diving under tables, windows caving in across the 
            room.
            They could, I believe, have destroyed the city at any time, but that 
            did not serve their purposes. Salzburg was a prize. Whether the 
            buildings were whole or in parts seemed irrelevant, but the city was 
            not to be simply obliterated.
            In April, as buds started to bloom from beneath the rubble, the city 
            woke up, and we discovered that we had survived the winter. The 
            diplomats proposed partitioning the city between the Slavs and the 
            Germans&#8211;Asians and other ethnic groups, like me, being conveniently 
            ignored&#8211;and the terms were set, but nothing came of it except a 
            cease-fire that was violated before the day was over.
            The second summer of the siege was a summer of hope. Every week we 
            thought that this might be the last week of the siege; that peace 
            might yet be declared on terms that we could accept, that would let 
            us keep our city. The defense of the city had opened a corridor to 
            the outside world, allowing in humanitarian aid, black-market goods, 
            and refugees from other parts of the war. Some of the people who had 
            fled before the siege returned, although many of the population who 
            had survived the winter used the opportunity to flee to the west. My 
            foster father, though, swore that he would stay in Salzburg until 
            death. It is civilization, and if it is destroyed, nothing is 
            worthwhile.
            Christians of the Tenth Crusade and Turks of the Islamic Federation 
            fought side by side with the official troops of the Mayor&#8217;s Brigade, 
            sharing ammunition but not command, to defend the city. High above, 
            cities in the sky looked down on us, but, like angels who see 
            everything, they did nothing.
            Cafs opened again, even those that, without black-market 
            connections, could only serve water, and in the evenings there were 
            night-clubs, the music booming even louder than the distant gunfire. 
            My foster father, of course, would never let me stay up late enough 
            to find out what went on in these, but once, when he was away 
            tending his molecular still, I waited for darkness and then crept 
            through the streets to see.
            One bar was entirely Islamic Federation Turks, wearing green turbans 
            and uniforms of dark maroon denim, with spindly railgun-launchers 
            slung across their backs and knives and swords strung on leather 
            straps across their bodies. Each one had in front of him a tiny cup 
            of dark coffee and a clear glass of whisky. I thought I was 
            invisible in the doorway, but one of the Turks, a tall man with a 
            pocked face and a dark moustache that drooped down the side of his 
            mouth, looked up, and without smiling, said, "Hoy, little girl, I 
            think that you are in the wrong place."
            In the next club, mercenaries wearing cowboy hats, with black 
            uniforms and fingerless leather gloves, had parked their guns 
            against the walls before settling in to pound down whisky in a bar 
            where the music was so loud that the beat reverberated across half 
            the city. The one closest to the door had a shaven head, with a 
            spiderweb tattooed up his neck, and daggers and weird heraldic 
            symbols tattooed across his arms. When he looked up at me, standing 
            in the doorway, he smiled, and I realized that he had been watching 
            me for some time, probably ever since I had appeared. His smile was 
            far more frightening than the impassive face of the Turk. I ran all 
            the way home.
            In the daytime, the snap of a sniper&#8217;s rifle might prompt an 
            exchange of heavy machine-gun fire, a wild, rattling sound that 
            echoed crazily from the hills. Small-arms fire would sound, tak, 
            tak, tak, answered by the singing of small railguns, tee, tee. You 
            can&#8217;t tell the source of rifle fire in an urban environment; it 
            seems to come from all around. All you can do is duck, and run. 
            Later that summer, the first of the omniblasters showed up, firing a 
            beam of pure energy with a silence so loud that tiny hairs all over 
            my body would stand up in fright.
            Cosmetics, baby milk, and whisky were the most prized commodities on 
            the black market.
            I had no idea what the war was about. Nobody was able to explain it 
            in terms that an eleven-year-old could understand; few even bothered 
            to try. All I knew was that evil people on hilltops were trying to 
            destroy everything I loved, and good men like my foster father were 
            trying to stop them.
            I slowly learned that my foster father was, apparently, quite 
            important to the defense. He never talked about what he did, but I 
            overheard other men refer to him with terms like "vital" and 
            "indispensable," and these words made me proud. At first I simply 
            thought that they merely meant that the existence of men like him, 
            proud of the city and vowing never to leave, were the core of what 
            made the defense worthwhile. But later I realized that it must be 
            more than this. There were thousands of men who loved the city.
            Toward the end of the summer, the siege closed around the city 
            again. The army of the Tenth Crusade arrived and took over the 
            ridgetops just one valley to the west; the Pan-Slavic army and the 
            Orthodox Resurgence held the ridges next to the city and the 
            territory to the east. All that autumn the shells of the Tenth 
            Crusade arced over our heads toward the Pan-Slavs, and beams of 
            purple fire from pop-up robots with omniblasters would fire back. It 
            was a good autumn; mostly only stray fire hit the civilians. But we 
            were locked in place, and there was no way out.
            There was no place to go outside; no place that was safe. The sky 
            had become our enemy. My friends were books. I had loved storybooks 
            when I had been younger, in the part of my childhood before the 
            siege that even then I barely remembered. But Johann had no 
            storybooks; his vast collection of books were all forbidding things, 
            full of thick blocks of dense text and incomprehensible diagrams 
            that were no picture of anything I could recognize. I taught myself 
            algebra, with some help from Johann, and started working on 
            calculus. It was easier when I realized that the mathematics in the 
            books was just an odd form of music, written in a strange language. 
            Candles were precious, and so in order to keep on reading at night, 
            Johann made an oil lamp for me, which would burn vegetable oil. This 
            was nearly as precious as candles, but not so precious as my need to 
            read.
            A still, I had learned from my reading&#8211;and from the black market&#8211;was 
            a device for making alcohol, or at least for separating alcohol from 
            water. Did a molecular still make molecules?
            "That&#8217;s silly," Johann told me. "Everything is made of molecules. 
            Your bed, the air you breathe, even you yourself, nothing but 
            molecules."
            In November, the zoo&#8217;s last stubborn elephant died. The predators, 
            the lions, the tigers, even the wolves, were already gone, felled by 
            simple lack of meat. The zebras and antelopes had gone quickly, some 
            from starvation-induced illness, some killed and butchered by 
            poachers. The elephant, surprisingly, had been the last to go, a 
            skeletal apparition stubbornly surviving on scraps of grass and bits 
            of trash, protected against ravenous poachers by a continuous guard 
            of armed watchmen. The watchmen proved unable, however, to guard 
            against starvation. Some people claim that kangaroos and emus still 
            survived, freed from their hutches by the shelling, and could be 
            seen wandering free in the city late at night. Sometimes I wonder if 
            they survive still, awkward birds and bounding marsupials, hiding in 
            the foothills of the Austrian Alps, the last survivors of the siege 
            of Salzburg.
            It was a hard winter. We learned to conserve the slightest bit of 
            heat, so as to stretch a few sticks of firewood out over a whole 
            night. Typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia killed more than the 
            shelling, which had resumed in force with the onset of winter. Just 
            after New Year, a fever attacked me, and there was no medicine to be 
            had at any price. Johann wrapped me in blankets and fed me hot water 
            mixed with salt and a pinch of precious sugar. I shivered and 
            burned, hallucinating strange things, now seeing kangaroos and emus 
            outside my little room, now imagining myself on the surface of Mars, 
            strangling in the thin air, and then instantly on Venus, choking in 
            heat and darkness, and then floating in interstellar space, my body 
            growing alternately larger than galaxies, then smaller than atoms, 
            floating so far away from anything else that it would take eons for 
            any signal from me to ever reach the world where I had been born.
            Eventually the fever broke, and I was merely back in my room, 
            shivering with cold, wrapped in sheets that were stinking with 
            sweat, in a city slowly being pounded into rubble by distant 
            soldiers whose faces I had never seen, fighting for an ideology that 
            I could never understand.
            It was after this, at my constant pleading, that Johann finally took 
            me to see his molecular still. It was a dangerous walk across the 
            city, illuminated by the glow of the Marionette Theater, set afire 
            by incendiary bombs two days before. The still was hidden below the 
            city, farther down even than the bomb shelters, in catacombs that 
            had been carved out of rock over two thousand years ago. There were 
            two men there, a man my foster father&#8217;s age with a white moustache, 
            and an even older Vietnamese-German man with one leg, who said 
            nothing the whole time.
            The older man looked at me and said in French, which perhaps he 
            thought I wouldn&#8217;t understand, "This is no place to bring a little 
            one."
            Johann replied in German. "She asks many questions." He shrugged, 
            and said, "I wanted to show her."
            The other said, still in French, "She couldn&#8217;t understand." Right 
            then I resolved that I would make myself understand, whatever it was 
            that they thought I could not. The man looked at me critically, 
            taking in, no doubt, my straight black hair and almond eyes. "She&#8217;s 
            not yours, anyway. What is she to you?"
            "She is my daughter," Johann said.
            The molecular still was nothing to look at. It was a room filled 
            with curtains of black velvet, doubled back and forth, thousands and 
            thousands of meters of blackness. "Here it is," Johann said. "Look 
            well, little Leah, for in all the world, you will never see such 
            another."
            Somewhere there was a fan that pushed air past the curtains; I could 
            feel it on my face, cool, damp air moving sluggishly past. The floor 
            of the room was covered with white dust, glistening in the darkness. 
            I reached down to touch it, and Johann reached out to still my hand. 
            "Not to touch," he said.
            "What is it?" I asked in wonder.
            "Can&#8217;t you smell it?"
            And I could smell it, in fact, I had been nearly holding my breath 
            to avoid smelling it. The smell was thick, pungent, almost choking. 
            It made my eyes water. "Ammonia," I said.
            Johann nodded, smiling. His eyes were bright. "Ammonium nitrate," he 
            said.
            I was silent most of the way back to the fortified basement we 
            shared with two other families. There must have been bombs, for 
            there were always the birds, but I do not recall them. At last, just 
            before we came to the river, I asked, "Why?"
            "Oh, my little Leah, think. We are cut off here. Do we have 
            electrical generators to run coilguns like the barbarians that 
            surround us? We do not. What can we do, how can we defend ourselves? 
            The molecular still sorts molecules out of the air. Nitrogen, 
            oxygen, water; this is all that is needed to make explosives, if 
            only we can combine them correctly. My molecular still takes the 
            nitrogen out of the air, makes out of it ammonium nitrate, which we 
            use to fire our cannons, to hold the barbarians away from our city."
            I thought about this. I knew about molecules by then, knew about 
            nitrogen and oxygen, although not about explosives. Finally 
            something occurred to me, and I asked, "But what about the energy? 
            Where does the energy come from?"
            Johann smiled, his face almost glowing with delight. "Ah, my little 
            Leah, you know the right questions already. Yes, the energy. We have 
            designed our still to work by using a series of reactions, each one 
            using no more than a gnat&#8217;s whisker of energy. Nevertheless, you are 
            right, we must needs steal energy from somewhere. We draw the 
            thermal energy of the air. But old man entropy, he cannot be cheated 
            so easily. To do this we need a heat sink."
            I didn&#8217;t know then enough to follow his words, so I merely repeated 
            his words dumbly: "A heat sink?"
            He waved his arm, encompassing the river, flowing dark beneath a 
            thin sheet of ice. "And what a heat sink! The barbarians know we are 
            manufacturing arms; we fire the proof of that back at them every 
            day, but they do not know where! And here it is, right before them, 
            the motive power for the greatest arms factory of all of Austria, 
            and they cannot see it."
            Molecular still or not, the siege went on. The Pan-Slavics drove 
            back the Tenth Crusade, and resumed their attack on the city. In 
            February the armies entered the city twice, and twice the ragged 
            defenders drove them back. In April, once more, the flowers bloomed, 
            and once more, we had survived another winter.
            It had been months since I had had a bath; there was no heat to 
            waste on mere water, and in any case, there was no soap. Now, at 
            last, we could wash, in water drawn directly from the Salzach, 
            scrubbing and digging to get rid of the lice of winter.
            We stood in line for hours waiting for a day&#8217;s ration of macaroni, 
            the humanitarian aid that had been air-dropped into the city, and 
            hauled enormous drums across the city to replenish our stockpile of 
            drinking water.
            Summer rain fell, and we hoarded the water from rain gutters for 
            later use. All that summer the smell of charred stone hung in the 
            air. Bullet-riddled cars, glittering shards of glass, and fragments 
            of concrete and cobblestone covered the streets. Stone heads and 
            gargoyles from blasted buildings would look up at you from odd 
            corners of the city.
            Basements and tunnels under the city were filled out with mattresses 
            and camp beds as makeshift living quarters for refugees, which 
            became sweaty and smelly during summer, for all that they had been 
            icy cold in winter. Above us, the ground would shake as the birds 
            flew in, and plaster dust fell from the ceiling.
            I was growing up. I had read about sex, and knew it was a natural 
            part of the pattern of life, the urging of chromosomes to divide and 
            conquer the world. I tried to imagine it with everybody I saw, from 
            Johann to passing soldiers, but couldn&#8217;t ever make my imagination 
            actually believe in it. There was enough sex going on around me&#8211;we 
            were packed together tightly, and humans under stress copulate out 
            of desperation, out of boredom, and out of pure instinct to survive. 
            There was enough to see, but I couldn&#8217;t apply anything of what I saw 
            to myself.
            I think, when I was very young, I had some belief that human beings 
            were special, something more than just meat that thought. The siege, 
            an unrelenting tutor, taught me otherwise. A woman I had been with 
            on one day, cuddled in her lap and talking nonsense, the next day 
            was out in the street, bisected by shrapnel, reduced to a lesson in 
            anatomy. If there was a soul it was something intangible, something 
            so fragile that it could not stand up to the gentlest kiss of steel.
            People stayed alive by eating leaves, acorns, and, when the 
            humanitarian aid from the sky failed, by grinding down the hard 
            centers of corn cobs to make cakes with the powder.
            There were developments in the war, although I did not know them. 
            The Pan-Slavic Army, flying their standard of a two-headed dragon, 
            turned against the triple cross of the New Orthodox Resurgence, and 
            to the east thousands of square kilometers of pacified countryside 
            turned in a day into flaming ruin, as the former allies savaged each 
            other. We could see the smoke in the distance, a huge pillar of 
            black rising kilometers into the sky.
            It made no difference to the siege. On the hilltops, the Pan-Slavic 
            Army drove off the New Orthodox Resurgence, and when they were done, 
            the guns turned back on the city. By the autumn, the siege had not 
            lifted, and we knew we would have to face another winter.
            Far over our heads, through the ever-present smoke, we could see the 
            lights of freedom, the glimmering of distant cities in the sky, 
            remote from all of the trouble of Earth. "They have no culture," 
            Johann said. "They have power, yes, but they have no souls, or they 
            would be helping us. Aluminum and rock, what do they have? Life, and 
            nothing else. When they have another thousand years, they will still 
            not have a third of the reality of our city. Freedom, hah! Why don&#8217;t 
            they help us, eh?"
            The winter was slow frozen starvation. One by one, the artillery 
            pieces that defended our city failed, for we no longer had the 
            machine shops to keep them in repair, nor the tools to make shells. 
            One by one the vicious birds fired from distant hilltops found the 
            homes of our guns and ripped them apart. By the middle of February, 
            we were undefended.
            And the birds continued to fall.
            Sometimes I accompanied Johann to the molecular still. Over the long 
            months of siege, they had modified it so that it now distilled from 
            air and water not merely nitrate, but finished explosive ready for 
            the guns, tons per hour. But what good was it now, when there were 
            no guns left for it to feed? Of the eight men who had given it 
            birth, only two still survived to tend it, old one-legged Nguyen, 
            and Johann.
            One day Nguyen stopped coming. The place he lived had been hit, or 
            he had been struck in transit. There was no way I would ever find 
            out.
            There was nothing left of the city to defend, and almost nobody able 
            to defend it. Even those who were willing were starved too weak to 
            hold a weapon.
            All through February, all through March, the shelling continued, 
            despite the lack of return fire from the city. They must have known 
            that the resistance was over. Perhaps, Johann said, they had 
            forgotten that there was a city here at all, they were shelling the 
            city now for no other reason than that it had become a habit. 
            Perhaps they were shelling us as a punishment for having dared to 
            defy them.
            Through April, the shelling continued. There was no food, no heat, 
            no clean water, no medicine to treat the wounded.
            When Johann died, it took me four hours to remove the rubble from 
            his body, pulling stones away as birds falling around me demolished 
            a building standing a block to the east, one two blocks north. I was 
            surprised at how light he was, little more than a feather pillow. 
            There was no place to bury him; the graveyards were all full. I 
            placed him back where he had lain, crossed his hands, and left him 
            buried in the rubble of the basement where we had spent our lives 
            entwined.
            I moved to a new shelter, a tunnel cut out of the solid rock below 
            the Mnchsberg, an artificial cavern where a hundred families 
            huddled in the dark, waiting for an end to existence. It had once 
            been a parking garage. The moisture from three hundred lungs 
            condensed on the stone ceiling and dripped down on us.
            At last, at the end of April, the shelling stopped. For a day there 
            was quiet, and then the victorious army came in. There were no 
            alleys to baffle their tanks now. They came dressed in plastic 
            armor, faceless soldiers with railguns and omniblasters thrown 
            casually across their backs; they came flying the awful standard of 
            the Pan-Slavic Army, the two-headed dragon on a field of blue 
            crosses. One of them must have been Dragan Vukadinovic, Dragan the 
            Cleanser, the Scorpion of Bratislava, but in their armor I could not 
            know which one. With them were the diplomats, explaining to all who 
            would listen that peace had been negotiated, the war was over, and 
            our part of it was that we would agree to leave our city and move 
            into camps to be resettled elsewhere.
            Would the victors write the history, I wondered? What would they 
            say, to justify their deeds? Or would they, too, be left behind by 
            history, a minor faction in a minor event forgotten against the 
            drama of a destiny working itself out far away?
            It was a living tide of ragged humans that met them, dragging the 
            crippled and wounded on improvised sledges. I found it hard to 
            believe that there could be so many left. Nobody noticed a dirty 
            twelve-year-old girl, small for her age, slip away. Or if they did 
            notice, where could she go?
            The molecular still was still running. The darkness, the smell of 
            it, hidden beneath a ruined, deserted Salzburg, was a comfort to me. 
            It alone had been steadfast. In the end, the humans who tended it 
            had turned out to be too fragile, but it had run on, alone in the 
            dark, producing explosives that nobody would ever use, filling the 
            caverns and the dungeons beneath a castle that had once been the 
            proud symbol of a proud city. Filling it by the ton, by the 
            thousands of tons, perhaps even tens of thousands of tons.
            I brought with me an alarm clock, and a battery, and I sat for a 
            long time in the dark, remembering the city.
            And in the darkness, I could not bring myself to become the angel of 
            destruction, to call down the cleansing fire I had so dreamed of 
            seeing brought upon my enemies. In order to survive, you must become 
            tough, Johann had once told me; you must become hard. But I could 
            not become hard enough. I could not become like them.
            And so I destroyed the molecular still, and fed the pieces into the 
            Salzach. For all its beauty and power, it was fragile, and when I 
            had done, there was nothing left by which someone could reconstruct 
            it, or even understand what it had been. I left the alarm clock and 
            the battery, and ten thousand tons of explosives, behind me in the 
            catacombs.
            Perhaps they are there still.
            It was, I am told, the most beautiful, the most civilized, city in 
            the world. The many people who told me that are all dead now, and I 
            remember it only through the eyes of a child, looking up from below 
            and understanding little.
            Nothing of that little girl remains. Like my civilization, I have 
            remade myself anew. I live in a world of peace, a world of 
            mathematics and sky-cities, the opening of the new renaissance. But, 
            like the first renaissance, this one was birthed in fire and war.
            I will never tell this to anybody. To people who were not there, the 
            story is only words, and they could never understand. And to those 
            who were there, we who lived through the long siege of Salzburg and 
            somehow came out alive, there is no need to speak.
            In a very long lifetime, we could never forget.
     