The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“That’s true. It was a good feeling.” He shrugged. “But what should we do? Give up on this, because it’s harder?”

He took the truck down the slope, then supervised the students as they attached the wisps of polymer to the specialized winch they’d built. Hassan and Rashid were in their 20s, but they could easily have passed for adolescents. After the war, the dictator and his former backers in the west had found it mutually expedient to have a generation of Iraqi children grow up malnourished and without medical care, if they grew up at all. More than a million people had died under the sanctions. My own sick joke of a nation had sent part of its navy to join the blockade, while the rest stayed home to fend off boatloads of refugees from this, and other, atrocities. General Moustache was long dead, but his comrades-in-genocide with more salubrious addresses were all still at large: doing lecture tours, running think tanks, lobbying for the Nobel peace prize.

As the strands of polymer wound around a core inside the winch’s protective barrel, the alpha count rose steadily. It was a good sign: the fine particles of uranium oxide trapped by the Wall had remained bound to the polymer during dehydration, and the reeling in of the net. The radiation from the few grams of U-238 we’d collected was far too low to be a hazard in itself; the thing to avoid was ingesting the dust, and even then the unpleasant effects were as much chemical as radiological. Hopefully, the polymer had also bound its other targets: the organic carcinogens that had been strewn across Kuwait and southern Iraq by the apocalyptic oil well fires. There was no way to determine that until we did a full chemical analysis.

We were all in high spirits on the ride back. What we’d plucked from the wind in the last six weeks wouldn’t spare a single person from leukaemia, but it now seemed possible that over the years, over the decades, the technology would make a real difference.

I missed the connection in Singapore for a direct flight home to Sydney, so I had to go via Perth. There was a four-hour wait in Perth; I paced the transit lounge, restless and impatient. I hadn’t set eyes on Francine since she’d left Basra three months earlier; she didn’t approve of clogging up the limited bandwidth into Iraq with decadent video. When I’d called her from Singapore she’d been busy, and now I couldn’t decide whether or not to try again.

Just when I’d resolved to call her, an e-mail came through on my notepad, saying that she’d received my message and would meet me at the airport.

In Sydney, I stood by the baggage carousel, searching the crowd. When I finally saw Francine approaching, she was looking straight at me, smiling. I left the carousel and walked towards her; she stopped and let me close the gap, keeping her eyes fixed on mine. There was a mischievousness to her expression, as if she’d arranged some kind of prank, but I couldn’t guess what it might be.

When I was almost in front of her, she turned slightly, and spread her arms. “Ta-da!”

I froze, speechless. Why hadn’t she told me?

I walked up to her and embraced her, but she’d read my expression. “Don’t be angry, Ben. I was afraid you’d come home early if you knew.”

“You’re right, I would have.” My thoughts were piling up on top of each other; I had three months’ worth of reactions to get through in 15 seconds. We hadn’t planned this. We couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t ready.

Suddenly I started weeping, too shocked to be self-conscious in the crowd. The knot of panic and confusion inside me dissolved. I held her more tightly, and felt the swelling in her body against my hip.

“Are you happy?” Francine asked.

I laughed and nodded, choking out the words: “This is wonderful!”

I meant it. I was still afraid, but it was an exuberant fear. Another ocean had opened up before us. We would find our bearings. We would cross it together.

It took me several days to come down to Earth. We didn’t have a real chance to talk until the weekend; Francine had a teaching position at UNSW, and though she could have set her own research aside for a couple of days, marking could wait for no one. There were a thousand things to plan; the six-month UNESCO fellowship that had paid for me to take part in the project in Basra had expired, and I’d need to start earning money again soon, but the fact that I’d made no commitments yet gave me some welcome flexibility.

On Monday, alone in the flat again, I started catching up on all the journals I’d neglected. In Iraq I’d been obsessively single-minded, instructing my knowledge miner to keep me informed of work relevant to the Wall, to the exclusion of everything else.