Amatka Read online

  “Anyone can go in here when they need to,” Nina said, and nodded at the door closest to them. “Some come every day. Most people come about once a week or every other week.”

  “Does it help?” Vanja squinted at the patients. Most were reading books or deep in conversation.

  “It does. Most of the time. And don’t forget we have coffee, too.” Nina winked at Vanja. “But I suppose we’re all a little melancholy, even those of us who aren’t ill.”

  —

  Nina left Vanja in the clinic’s storeroom and went to take care of some administrative task or other. Vanja busied herself making an inventory of the hygiene products stacked on the shelves: soap, rubbing alcohol, cream, lubricant, disinfectant. The unease that the stench permeating the corridors had stirred up in her chest slowly dissipated. It crept back when the door opened and Nina came back in.

  “How are you doing?”

  Vanja frowned at her list. “Not sure any of this is useful. You only use the commune’s products. Are there things you don’t stock? Things you might need?”

  Nina sucked her front teeth. “Don’t think so.”

  Vanja put a bottle of lotion back on the shelf. “I’m done. Let’s move on.”

  “There are only a few more units left to see. This way.”

  They went down a set of stairs and into yet another white corridor, where a pair of double doors were marked DOORS TO FERTILITY UNIT. Nina pushed the doors open, releasing a fresh puff of disinfectant smell. The stink crept into Vanja’s nostrils and down into her stomach, sending it into a new spasm. Nina paused with a hand on the right door and looked over her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Vanja shook her head. “We don’t need to go in there,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “How about we just say we’re done.”

  Nina gazed at Vanja and then at the sign on the door. “All right.”

  She turned back and headed in the opposite direction. Vanja followed her. They were alone in the corridor; the sound of Nina’s shoes echoed against the walls.

  “Do you have children, Vanja?” Nina’s voice was low.

  “No.” The word sounded harsh.

  Nina’s voice softened further. “You’ve been to that kind of unit quite recently, haven’t you?”

  Vanja glanced sideways. Nina’s face didn’t have the expression of sickly pity that her sister’s and Marja’s had had. On the contrary, she looked a little weary. Vanja nodded and squeezed her lips shut so they wouldn’t quiver. Her eyes stung.

  Nina sighed and ran the back of her hand down Vanja’s arm. “It’s hard.”

  “Yes.” Vanja pulled away.

  “I’m sure they did everything they could for you. Sometimes that’s just how it is. It happens more often than people think.”

  Vanja hummed and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I should warn you, our children are visiting this weekend,” Nina said as they reached the end of the corridor. “If that’s too difficult, then…we could find some other solution.”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Uh.” Vanja’s face was warm and tingly. The words wouldn’t quite get into sequence. She breathed in and out a few times. “It’s not that. I don’t care about your children. It’s…I don’t care about them.”

  Nina stood still, studying her with a deep frown.

  “I’ll be going now. Thank you,” said Vanja. “I can find my way to the dressing room.”

  Nina nodded slowly. The frown didn’t disappear. “You’re welcome.”

  Vanja walked back the way they had come, fighting the impulse to run. As she walked past a set of double doors, they opened to let through an orderly pushing a wheelchair. The woman in the wheelchair was dressed in a paper gown. Her temples were shaved and scabbed over. She stared blindly into the air. The orderly gave Vanja a sharp glance and moved past her.

  The woman had been taken care of, like Lars had been taken care of, like everyone who spoke out of turn were taken care of. There was no death penalty in the colonies. Dissidents had to be stopped from endangering the community, however. The procedure that destroyed the brain’s speech center was an elegant solution. Vanja ran the last few steps to the exit.

  The cold air in the street rinsed the clinic’s stench out of Vanja’s nostrils. Few people were out at this time of day, but she still felt claustrophobic. The whole colony and its buildings crowded her. She went home to pack her satchel.

  —

  Vanja followed the fat water conduit eastward. To her right and left the plant houses marked Amatka’s perimeter. Beyond the plant houses there was only the tundra and a narrow path along the irrigation pipeline. The lake was visible as a broad gray band on the horizon. It separated ground and sky, made them two distinct units.

  It was a longer walk down to the bay than Nina had said. A slight breeze blew across the tundra, and Amatka’s sounds gradually faded behind her. The silence made her ears ring.

  —

  She had been outside a colony once before, beyond the protective shell of civilization or a vehicle. Leaving the colony wasn’t forbidden as such, but straying outside the narrow safe zone was intensely discouraged. Good citizens kept inside the plant-house ring. Only eccentrics ventured farther out willingly.

  East of Essre, out on the steppe, there was a place about which everyone knew, but of which it was inappropriate to speak. Lars had spoken about it sometimes, only to Vanja and in whispers, when Vanja and Ärna came for their weekend visits.

  —

  When the pioneers arrived, Lars said, they discovered they weren’t the first. Out on the steppe, east of what would become Essre, they came across a cluster of empty buildings. Whoever had once lived there had left no other trace. The architecture was alien, the proportions inhuman: huge, lumbering houses with odd angles. And despite the fact that the buildings lacked anything resembling markings or letters, they were completely solid. The place was off-limits, but everyone knew that this was where they put criminals: far away from everyone else, in a place they couldn’t ruin. One wonders who the builders were, Lars would breathe, and why we can’t go there. Nobody knows where we are. But we’re not allowed to speak of it.

  Then Vanja came home on a weekend visit, and Britta told her that Lars had been taken away. He was disloyal and had to be contained. Vanja knew where they had taken him. She snuck out of the house and ran out onto the steppe. She walked for what felt like hours before Essre’s lights finally faded behind her. The sky had begun to brighten into gray when she reached the top of a low hill. Ahead of her, the ground sloped down into a flat valley. And there they were, the strange buildings. She approached not completely knowing what she would find.

  —

  Now beneath Amatka’s silence, there was the gentle surging of waves lapping against the rocky shore. A gentle breeze brought with it the scent of something wet and somehow bright; it must be what lakes smell like. A little ways to the south along the beach rose an angular and broken silhouette: the first Amatka, the one that was never finished.

  Vanja found a large, flat rock by the water’s edge. She dropped her satchel on the ground and took out two blankets; she spread one of them over the rock, then wrapped herself in the other and sat down to watch the fading of the light.

  The process was so quick she could see it happen. A whiteness appeared at the water’s edge, and spread like a web across the lake with a crackling noise. The water underneath was dark at first, then grew cloudy as if fogging over. After an hour or so, the ice had cleared into a pure, bottomless black.

  Vanja left her blankets and satchel behind and tested the ice with her foot. The surface was uneven and firm. Getting traction was easy; the ice received Vanja’s footsteps with a blunt, scraping sound. The sky above her had darkened, but the glow it reflected from Amatka’s lights reached all the way to the lake. Vanja took a few more steps out onto the ice and looked back over her should
er. Far away, the plant-house bubbles shone in yellow and white. She turned toward the lake again, Amatka’s light warm against her back. No civilization this way, no human life; just the ice and the tundra and the devouring darkness. For a moment, she thought she saw a flickering reflection from across the lake, so faint it might as well have been one of those flashes the eye creates in darkness.

  Vanja rubbed her eyes with her mittens and returned to the beach. The darkness pulled at her back. She packed her blankets into the satchel as quickly as she could and walked, almost ran, toward the warm glow of the plant houses.

  SIXDAY

  The next morning, not quite as early, it was Ivar who knocked on Vanja’s door. The coffee he’d made was even stronger than yesterday’s. Nina had already left for work. “Have you been to the mushroom chambers before?” Ivar asked as they sat down for breakfast.

  “Never.”

  “You’ll see,” Ivar said. “I think you might find it interesting.”

  —

  The entrance to the mushroom chambers lay to the southwest, in the middle of the third quadrant. The low building aboveground housed a canteen, changing rooms, and offices. Ivar showed Vanja into a room lined with shelves. He picked out overalls, rubber boots, gloves, and hats for both of them.

  When they’d changed into their protective clothing, and Ivar had made sure Vanja’s pants and sleeves were properly tucked into her boots and gloves, he opened a door at the other end of the room. A wide, dimly lit set of stairs zigzagged downward.

  At the bottom, they stopped in front of a heavy door, which Ivar pulled open. Sconces spread a mild light across the white walls of the corridor beyond. The sharp smell of detergent stung Vanja’s nostrils. When Ivar pushed open the door at the other end of the corridor, a damp chill rushed over them from the gloom beyond the threshold.

  The gradual dimming of the light had made it easier to adapt to the semidarkness. The vaulted tunnel stretched as far as Vanja could see; broad shelves ran along both sides of it. Every surface was covered in a layer of soil. Out of the soil sprung white, round mushrooms. “It’s not as dark as this everywhere,” Ivar said behind her. “This is just the section for photosensitive mushrooms.”

  Vanja nodded. “I understand,” she added when she realized Ivar might not have been able to see the gesture.

  Under the layers of damp, soil, and detergent there was a whiff of something sickly that stuck at the back of Vanja’s throat. “Ugh,” she said. “The smell.”

  Ivar came up next to her and prodded at the shelf closest to them. “It’s the fertilizer. The mushrooms are grown in composted feces.”

  They moved on along the shelves. Eventually the light grew stronger, and they entered a hall where the mushrooms on the shelves were taller and plumper, with broad caps. Disk-shaped growths covered the walls. A couple of technicians on narrow ladders were busy carefully prying the lumps off a wall. “Polypores?” Vanja asked.

  Ivar nodded. “Exactly. Those are pale polypores—they’re ground down for porridge and custard. It’s the same kind of porridge we had this morning.”

  “Can you use them for other things, too?”

  “Not really. They’re very tough and stringy, so it’s the only way you can make them edible.”

  They came to a fork in the tunnel. New fungi appeared on the shelves: brown agarics with low, wide caps; yellow tangled clavaria that grew in tall clusters; and small, black funnel chanterelles. There were also mushrooms she didn’t recognize: thick-stalked mushrooms with tiny caps, mushrooms sheathed in slimy membranes, mushrooms spread flat across a wall. Ivar named each one and described their uses. Enormous polypores covered one of the tunnels from floor to ceiling, the smallest ones the size of dinner plates. Mycopaper base, Ivar explained. “There are other sections,” he said, “for medicinal use. We don’t allow visitors in there, though. Some of the fungi are poisonous.”

  “How big is this structure?” Vanja asked.

  “About as big as Amatka.”

  The next door opened into a large, brightly lit chamber taken up almost completely by the four shiny cylinders in the middle of the room. Ivar pointed. “This is where we grow the mycoprotein.”

  He guided Vanja up a small ladder leaning against the side of the cylinder closest to them and opened a small hatch. Through a thick window, Vanja could see a brown mass that covered the inside of the cylinder. “It doesn’t look very tasty right now, does it?” Ivar said. “It gets better once it’s processed.”

  They left the chamber through a door on the other side of the chamber and emerged in the part of the tunnel they’d first set out from. Vanja paused to let her eyes readjust to the sudden darkness. The white mushroom clusters slowly reappeared in front of her.

  When they came back up to the surface, they went back into the changing room, and Ivar took Vanja’s protective clothing and put it down a hatch together with his own. They washed all parts of themselves that hadn’t been protected by an unbroken stretch of fabric: wrists, ankles, heads, hair.

  The canteen served a stew of root vegetables and mycoprotein, ladled into large bowls. The farmers ate like they worked, in slow silence. Vanja and Ivar sat down by one of the long tables. Vanja found herself lowering her voice to a near-whisper.

  “What is your situation with hygiene products?”

  “Right. That’s the reason why I really wanted you to visit.” Ivar jerked his head toward the other guests in the canteen. “Look at their hands and necks.”

  More than half of the farmers had sizable red blotches on their necks and around their wrists. In some cases the rash had developed into full-blown eczema, scaly and wet-looking. “It’s the laundry detergent and the soap,” Ivar said. “We have to kill off any spores and microorganisms so they don’t spread outside the farms. Some of the species are very aggressive. But the fungicides are so strong. People get rashes.”

  “What happens if the spores get out?” Vanja asked.

  “There are some species that tend to invade buildings,” Ivar replied. “It’s a sort of dry rot. Breaks down structural integrity.”

  “You haven’t complained about the fungicides to the committee?” Vanja reminded herself to spoon some of the stew into her mouth.

  “Of course we have. But nothing’s happening.” Ivar scowled.

  Vanja nodded. “I’ll report back to the company.”

  She glanced at Ivar. He’d been calm, almost cheerful, in the mushroom chambers. Back in the canteen, his frown was now back.

  “Why did you start working in the chambers, Ivar?”

  Ivar shrugged a little. “I like growing things.” He filled his spoon. “And the quiet.”

  “But it’s dark.”

  “I’ve tried to transfer to the plant houses. But the committee won’t let me.”

  Vanja’s spoon clattered against the bowl. “The committee, again.”

  “Don’t know if there’s any point trying again. I’m in line already. It’ll happen when it happens, I guess.” Ivar put his spoon down and got to his feet. “I have to go back downstairs. You know the way out, right?”

  Vanja nodded. She stayed for a while after Ivar had left. The mushroom farmers moved like they were still in the chambers, slowly and methodically. A low murmur of scattered conversation billowed along the floor. When Vanja returned to the street, the outside noises grated on her ears.

  Vanja came home to find Nina and Ulla at the kitchen table. Two girls in red children’s house overalls were seated across from them. They turned their heads in unison to look at Vanja as she entered. Both of them had inherited Nina’s loose curls, the older girl in Ivar’s rich shade of brownish black, the younger in the metallic red Nina must have had as a child. They watched Vanja intently.

  “This is Tora and Ida,” Nina said. “And this is Vanja, the one I told you about. Say hello to Vanja now, girls. Up you get.”

  The girls immediately stood up. They each stuck out their right hand. “Ninivs’ Tora Four,” said the eldest. “N
inivs’ Ida Four,” said the youngest, lisping through the gap of a missing front tooth.

  “Brilars’ Vanja Essre Two.” Vanja shook hands with each of them.

  Tora and Ida studied her with solemn eyes and then returned to the table.

  “Tora and Ida just told me what they’ve learned this week.” Nina fetched a cup from the kitchen cabinet and poured Vanja coffee.

  Vanja sat down at the head of the table and sipped from her cup. The girls’ eyes were fixed on her, brown and green.

  Nina smiled at them. “What else have you learned?”

  “We’ve memorized mushrooms,” Tora offered. “And the shape of the world,” Ida added.

  “They learn everything by rote these days.” Nina took a sip of her own coffee. “Apparently they’re not supposed to have books anymore. The teachers claim the children learn quicker without them.”

  “Quit using books?” Vanja frowned.

  “Go upstairs to Ulla’s room and do some marking,” Nina told the children. “If that’s all right, Ulla?”

  Ulla shrugged. “If it gives them something to do.”

  Tora and Ida left the table without a word.

  “Something’s going on with the good paper,” Nina said. “It’s the same thing over at the clinic. We get less and less good paper, so we have to start committing things like schedules and routines to memory. We’ve even had to start using mycopaper for the medical records.”

  “But that won’t work.”

  “No. We’ve had to bring more people in just to retype the records before the old ones reach their scrap-by date.”

  Vanja glanced at Nina. “But why? Do you think we’re running out?”

  “They say the good paper is needed elsewhere.”

  “And you haven’t thought to ask why?” Ulla said.

  Nina waved her hand dismissively. “I’m sure they’ll tell us if it’s important. Until then, we probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “But it’s good paper, it’s okay. It’s not mycopaper,” Vanja said. “We can talk about good paper as much as we like.”