Dust: (Part I: Sandstorms) Page 4

  We walked along corridors of polished stone, glass divides and open spaces interspersed by brash art works, gargantuan sculptures, fountains, staircases and overhanging balconies. The arcing lines of the building swept us along. It must have been a corporate office at some point, an oil company no doubt given the expense and the location.

  It managed, simultaneously, to suggest lavish expenditure and restraint, there was nothing corpulent, no artistry behind anything; the extravagance went only so far as was necessary to prove the point - that the people who built this had money.

  The dust here was thinner, the surplus energy evidently ran some sort of ventilation. This then was their hub, where they congregated, this disused headquarters of a provincial headquarters of a long obsolete oil company.

  Despite the grandeur and the executive minimalism of the building I was still taken aback when we entered the atrium. I had thought we were on ground level but now, as we came into this space, I saw we were several floors up.

  The atrium formed a negative space inside the building. The building was at least ten stories high and an outer wall of glass stretched up in front of us protecting the space from the storm outside. On each floor a balcony, such as the one we stood on, overlooked a reception area on the ground floor below. This created a column of clear air several hundred metres high.

  I could not remember the last time I had seen such a huge expanse of clear space. There was barely any dust here and looking over the balcony I saw splashes of green. Could it be possible that there were plants alive down there?

  In my momentary shock my other senses had stalled as my eyes greedily drank in this clear expanse. Now, as I adjusted to the space, the echoing sound reverberated in me. A large crowd of people filled the reception foyer. They heaved to and fro in waves, a festive, drunken mood floating up to us several floors above. Shouts and music leapt upward.

  We shared a worried look. The energy they must be using, to keep this air clean alone, could run a small village. The people looked like ants, so far below, but there was every possibility they hid something far more dangerous.

  Winding our way down the stairs we entered the foyer through automatic double doors. Everyone was dressed casually and held a glass in their hand. They ignored us talking loudly in small groups.

  We pushed a path through the revellers. The music thumped and it felt as if there was no centre. We stopped to question several groups - who was in charge? Was this the main settlement? Was there some event they were celebrating or commemorating?

  The answers we got were fragmented, nonsensical, but they pointed deeper into the crowd so we got the sense there was someone, somewhere that was responsible for this gathering. Bit by bit we reached an entourage surrounding a raised area, like a small stage.

  This area had been roughly cordoned off and was less crowded than the surrounding thronging crush. At the centre of the stage was a seating area with comfortable looking armchairs where a withered old woman sat half hidden in the voluptuous cushions.

  After some words were exchanged we were ushered in front of her.

  ‘We are looking for information,’ he said this levelly, ready to hold his ground. He mentioned Abel’s name. I saw the old woman’s eyes narrow. She shifted in her seat like a shrivelled spider eyeing a fly, fluttering close to its web.

  ‘What would you give for this information?’

  ‘We…’ the leader began.

  ‘I want to speak to the girl.’ She spoke to me directly. She saw I was in charge.

  At a sign from the old woman a burly guard stepped forward and effortlessly scooped her scrawny body up in his arms. She motioned my estrwhile captor to leave and for me to follow behind her. The leader hesitated for a moment unsure whether to let me go, but he must have caught some look in my eye for after a moment he stepped back, symbolically clearing the way for me and the old crone.

  We passed through a series of doors, away from the scream and crush of the crowd, until we were in a quiet place. The room, I presumed it had once been an executive’s office, had been decorated, furnished comfortably with a plush bed, rugs, sofas, a table with some food.

  ‘Now tell me what you want with us.’

  ‘As he said we are looking for some…people. We believe they are to the north.’

  ‘Mercenaries?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would I know anything about that?’

  She had not sat down, instead hovering next to the table.

  ‘We are here to find out what you do know.’

  ‘And why would you want to find this group, I think to myself?’

  ‘We believe this group are amassing weapons.’

  ‘That’s not so unusual. Anyone with a brain would be amassing weapons. You think they have money?’

  ‘I know the man who leads them.’ I felt I had to choose my words carefully. ‘He may be dangerous.’

  ‘Perhaps they have some more religious aim?’

  She evidently knew of Abel, even if she did not know the location of his camp. It was odd that she would use the word religious to describe a group of soldiers. I pictured Abel, messianic, in front of his followers.

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘There are people who believe this dust is a consequence of blind accidents or a curse.’ She approached my seat and put her hand on my shoulder. Her skin was thin and papery, dried out. I could see the veins on the side of her head, keeping her alive. ‘And then there are others who believe it is a sign, a signal from a higher intelligence.’

  ‘And what do you believe?’

  ‘I’m too old to believe any such things.’

  ‘But you don’t believe in that.’

  ‘There is always an explanation and there is always intelligence and neither satisfies me, that is all I know. ’

  ‘He told you that? He believes that?’

  ‘Who?’

  Her eyes betrayed her. It was clear that Abel had been here in this town. Perhaps quite recently. Whatever he was building up to was more than a simple land grab, a tussle for land or power with the established states. He clearly had far reaching plans, plans that reached to the source of the dust.

  ‘What is he building?’

  She studied me, curiously. I felt a tremendous wave of antipathy towards her. A violent need to obliterate her face, suck out all the knowledge she had locked in her shrivelled skull, all the answers she was withholding, the uncertainty and fear I had felt these last years.

  ‘You know him so well?’ Her eyes shone greedily. I had made a mistake, given away more than I should have. ‘He is related to you?’

  Had he warned her that I would be coming? Why would she say something like that? The violence swelled up in me. A dark unhappy welt of emotion. I looked at her, decrepit, failing, a weakened mechanism from a time that had long passed, a time that should by all rights be buried long ago. What right did she have to exist. What did she know about Abel? What damage could she do?

  She laid her book on the table.

  ‘This dust has made us all tired,’ she said.

  I left her on the bed. I was out in the corridors again. I met them, waiting, a respectful distance from her room. I looked down at my hands, they were trembling.

  ‘You got the information?’ His kind face was earnest, sympathetic.

  ‘I know the way.’ I could barely speak, could barely suck in a breath. I felt an urgent need to leave that place, get back in the vehicles and travel far, far away.

  He put his arm around me and guided me down the corridor. I saw the deputies exchanging worried glances as they looked over their shoulders. Their glaze flicking to the fresh spots of blood on my clothes. Our pace quickened as we turned corner after corner, leaving behind the fresh oxygenated air, the solid walls and glass.

  ‘What else did she say?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t want to talk. The world was a silent place for those moments. She had not said anything new. I had heard of the cults
before. I did not believe that Abel could be leading one.

  The cults had arrived as soon as the dust had. In fact many of them had been there before, they simply incorporated the dust into their vision. A sign, a signal from their chosen deity. A punishment sent down to test the faithful.

  There had been endless debates between the believers and the more scientifically minded. Neither were able to explain anything that happened but both remained adamant in their belief that they understood the causes.

  At the time I watched the debates with interest, laughing at the arguments of the fundamentalists. Now I am simply amazed at the speed with which any phenomena is taken on, subsumed by humans into their everyday understanding of the world. An inexplicable smothering of dust, circling the globe was so entirely new, so alien to everyone that it is little surprise that everyone claimed they understood it - every theory was just as plausible and just as ridiculous as the next.

  To the establishment it was only an aberration, something that would be understood, broken down and tackled given systematic investment in research and infrastructure. The primary causes were not fully quantified they agreed but it was nevertheless a natural progression. The dust followed blue skies as naturally as night followed day. The seeds of this ingress undoubtedly lay in the previous state of affairs. Once the experts had discovered the causes, the seeds that created this disorder, the solution would readily be found. The entire process could be explained through rational enquiry and method. Calls to increase funding for laboratories and research units were met only too gladly by politicians.

  Huge facilities were built and great precedence was given to the acquisition of any data related to the dust. Even as ordinary people were crushed by its encroachment the gleaming follies of the world’s governments remained polished and clean.

  On the other side of the argument the voices were equally strong, equally clear in their assertions that the answer was at hand. At the time I did not listen. I could not. I was employed in one of those shining facilities favoured by the establishment. I was a crucial cog in the machine of discovery. A vital part of their research machine.

  To our ears the believers were defeatists. They claimed the dust was a sign that mankind had sinned, that the corrupt ways of the few had brought calamity on everybody’s head. They called for asceticism. The solution, they said, was simple - to repent, to accept the divine order, to punish those that transgressed and to learn to live true to ancient scriptures. Their talk about divine retribution, a balancing, punishment from on high, seemed only like excuses to give up.

  We laughed at their arguments. They were manipulating the gullible while we were battling to find the answers. We were actually doing something, making a difference, while they advocated lamb-like sacrifice. The research institutes were insulated, well-funded, outside the main metropolitan areas. A great deal of our budget was spent combating their pernicious message, sending our own representatives to refute them in television studios and talk shows.

  About the time the dust first started invading the homes in cities there were several well publicised mass suicides. At the time we seized upon this news as evidence of the weak-mindedness of these people but I wonder now if it was not in fact our own lack of results that drove these people to kill themselves.

  The suicides increased around the globe and our job changed subtely. The funding continued to flow in but there was an atmosphere of blame. The results we were getting showed nothing conclusive. Every experiment, every test we conducted only deepened the mystery over the source of the dust.

  We spent less and less time on our research. It became impossible to gather data, the results we generated were increasingly meaningless as all the variables shifted under our feet. Instead we were instructed to preach salvation. The answers were just around the corner. We did not have the definitive results as yet but the measurements were expected soon. Even as it became obvious that we were not getting any actionable results we were expected to shout louder about what we could deliver.

  The worst part was that we believed we were doing something entirely new, something that had never been thought of before. We had an awesome arrogance that the same questions had not been considered a thousand times before, a misplaced belief that we were fundamentally better than the generations that had come before us and asked variations of the same question with no resolution, that we were somehow privileged not only to see the right path but blessed with the intelligence to follow it. If the dust has taught us one thing it is that there are no paths anymore except the ones we make ourselves.

  Once we found our way back to the safety of the cars we packed hastily. I was bundled back into the cabin. Before he closed the door on me I caught the leaders arm.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Before you go.’

  ‘I have to. You understand,’ his soft, kind eyes twinkled at me falsely. ‘How would it look if you travelled up front?’

  There was a timbre in his voice, a crack. A crack I could slip between.

  ‘Wait,’ I let my hand linger on his arm. His hairs were hard, bristly. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘John,’ he said. ‘John.’

  I thought for a moment he would stay, say something more, but he turned stepping down through the door.

  ‘We need to get moving,’ he said as he disappeared into the storm. ‘It will not be long before they discover the old woman.’

  I nodded and he closed the door, sealing me in, sealing me safely away inside. How long had she lived there, I wondered. She must have been alive well before the dust first came.

  Petroleum

  At one point, so they said, oil made the world go round - petroleum, shale gas, naptha, Liquefied Petroleum Gas, crude oil, anthracite, bituminous and lignite coal. People fought and died over the stuff. It was well documented. People got up every morning and devoted their day to trading, barter or killing to get to this fuel.

  The people living in Bonmont were a bubble left over from that time, an anachronism. The energy they relied on was still useful, no doubt about that, but the oil, the source had lost its meaning. There were no longer markets, the skills to maintain the industry were fading, the infrastructure slipping into the sand. Soon the few that knew how to run the rigs in Bonmont would die or be killed, the machinery would be destroyed.

  The environmentalists had predicted a global meltdown, global warming, boiling seas, withered crops and crying starved children. The final days, the apocalypse, it was seemingly an image that mankind was enamoured with, an image that resonated with some primeval part of us. Why did writers spend countless hours imagining the end of days? What possible use was that to anyone?

  The petrol that those environmentalists had cursed was disappearing long before the dust. People still needed energy but other sources, other markets sprang up. The dead plankton that had not been taken remained in place.

  The word petroleum derived from the ancient Greek petra for rocks and elaion for oil. It was of such importance that they taught how it was formed in every school. The remains of Plankton and algae that had lived in the world’s oceans millions of year before us settled to the sea bed, layer upon layer compacting into sediment, building up intense pressure.

  Slowly the dead cells of these organisms were coerced to change, organic matter restructured, denatured, turned first into a waxy substance known as kerogen and then with more heat formed hydrocarbons. This pressured fluid filled the cracks in the rocks beneath our planet. It lay there, the final grave for countless tiny lives, unrecognized as a fuel source, unrecognized as anything until the first humans arrived.

  Gregrius Agricola first measured the oil but how many centuries before the later generations took up the race to exploit it, price it, capitalize it, realise its market value. For years the hydrocarbon lay unwanted, a dirty chemical, of interest only to engineers.

  As a source of energy it was exorbitant, difficult to procure, it lay deep underground, a greasy residue from an inferior life. There were attem
pts to use it as a source of light but the plentiful supply of tallow from animal fat meant it was a fool who lit their house with oil. It was easier in fact to hunt the world’s remotest oceans for the sperm whale, to procure its spermecetti oil, at great cost of human life, than attempt to extract petroleum from the ground.

  It was not until the science of drilling matured sufficiently, that barrel upon barrel of oil could be easily sucked up from a single well, that people truly started to realise the value of that oily pitch beneath the surface of the earth.

  The hydrocarbon was studied, deconstructed, its structure held up to the light of science. Hydrogen and Carbon – two of the basic building blocks of life – bound together, covalent strings, benzene rings, ionic power. Tiny energy traps. Tiny sources of fire in the undead remains of our protozoaic ancestors. They must have marvelled at the power it wielded. The fuel that drove the engines of the world. The fuel that shrank distances and sped up time. Suddenly the lands were opened.

  How quickly everyone got used to it. Until the dust came I cannot remember a time when our right to fuel was not taken for granted. Perhaps that is nothing to do with fuel, it is simply our state in relation to the world, to take things for granted. It is easier after all to accept the world as it is than to try and change it.

  Already the dust is nothing new. Dust has always been there. There is just more of it now. People forget what life was like before, not because it is painful or difficult, although those may be true, and not because they have difficulty with their memory but simply because they are programmed to accept things, want to accept things, are inherently distrustful of any above and beyond when they have something solid in their hand.

  Leaving Town

  She came back to me white as a sheet. A crumpled sheet. It was obvious we had to leave. I chose not to ask questions. It was not important in any case. I feel for this little slip of a girl. What she went through to get those answers. What she must be carrying inside her. She will help us, I am sure, but at what cost? Before we encountered her she was simply a blip, a co-ordinate that we had to track. A stepping stone. Now what has she become? We are bound on her course. Much as we might pretend that we are holding her for our own benefit it is her that is leading this crazy chase.